Let's Play Golden Sun: Chapter 4
OKAY!!
Hamma is a psychic lady who expected us and tells us stuff about our psychic powers. The point is Ivan needs to learn Reveal from her so we can find oases in the desert to save us from the Real-Time Heat Physics. Some other girl comes in and talks about some stuff I'm not sure of because I skipped IVAN LEARNED REVEAL. Except now we have to rescue Hsu or something? Man.
We go to a crossing of some sort and use Reveal, which makes everything that's not a sprite depressingly gray and reveals this hole. We go to the other side and Hsu is stuck under a boulder, ha ha. We Lift it and the two girls have immense trouble pulling Hsu out, get it, he's fat.
Also they act like we're actually exerting ourselves to keep the rock lifted but we're really just chillin'.
We go back to the temple and there's some embarrassed JRPG talk about how they didn't actually ask us to help them and how Hamma somehow knows Ivan and Ivan sort of thinks he knows her. Calling it right now that she's his mother.
Look at those (barely visible in a static screenshot) shimmering effects! Truly, we cannot walk on hot sand without hot sand boots, and yet we do. When we walk on the hot sand we fill our Real-Time Heat Meter. And every time it hits one/two/three-fourths filled, someone in our party complains about it. Geez, wimps.
And here's an oasis, surrounded by obvious rocks. And you just walk over it when you're not using Reveal even though it's supposed to just be a mirage. Yeah, whatever, Golden Sun. In fact, after you're done enjoying the water as expressed through a heart emoticon, AAAAD just hops directly up and you go out of Reveal mode and you land on... forget it.
This desert is kind of a jerk because not all rock circles mean an oasis. Some mean a treasure chest that's worthless to me and others mean quicksand pits with antlions in them. (If I didn't have savestates you'd be hearing a lot more from me about those. They're in practically every other one.) However, if you do fill your meter, you just take a bunch of damage and it empties, but still.
So there's two rock circles right next to each other here, so I thought "man, how jerky is that, they definitely won't both be oases." So I used Reveal here and thought, "wait, neither of them are?"
Then I realized I couldn't move and had appeared directly on top of a Djinn. Huh!
After running around forever we finally get to look behind a sand waterfall with Reveal. Well, okay.
And then two freakin' seconds later there's ALREADY a jerk paralleling the antlions. Except this one is a boss. But still, jerks.
Not sure if this says more about Ivan or the amount of time they expected you'd spend in that desert. We end up in Kalay and talk with guards about stuff that happened a billion chapters ago when we first met Ivan. We go inside and talk to Master Hammet's wife or something and we have to save him. I swear, since this conversation is so long, that there's something else, but... no, I don't really think so.
Wait, he wasn't kidding? How does he know, anyway? But anyway we have to go to Lunpa and get Hammet back from Dodonpachi.
Oh, you.
Now that we have Frost we can freeze this convenient puddle to push the gate up. Science! And also magic, I mean, psychic powers.
Not with those guards. Those guys are thinking the secret passage to everyone!
When I couldn't stealthily get past some guards I consulted the experts and realized I had to do a whole different section first to get the psychic power that let me do that. It's your fault for making that conversation so long and boring and centered on going to Lunpa, lady. And by lady I mean Golden Sun's writers.
Okay, let me explain this. First, we have to go to Kalay, which is okay, since that's where the long talk with Hammet's wife or something was. Then we have to go into the Inn. Okay, people who don't have infinite HP would probably logically do that. But THEN we have to talk to some random tourist guy. Then suddenly when we leave the Inn there's a long pointless scene that's basically just screaming "GO TO THE COLOSSO WE'VE GOT FUN AND GAMES" at me.
And THEN we can take the ship to get the item to get the psychic powers to save Hammet. Screw you, tourist guys.
There's something about there being sea monsters and this guy being suspicious. The old guy who I THINK is the captain is all like "WE HAVE A LUCKY ANCHOR WE'LL BE FINE." Then he realizes it's gone and is all like "ABANDOND SHIP (that hasn't set sail yet)", but we find it in the crow's nest and give it to him.
Which is weird, because I found it there before he realized it was gone, but I never saw the suspicious guy go up there, and especially not before I got it. Um? Anyway we finally get to the inevitable conclusion that yes, we have to fight the monsters. And then Ivan was a kraken.
Viruses off the port bow!
Oh no, not yellow octopuses!
These guys literally just jump onto the ship and run into that door because they just KNOW the guys rowing are down there. (We fight them. They're "Man o' War"s. I still think Golden Sun must have had colorblind artists or something.)
An oarsman gets hurt and we have to pick a passenger to replace them and then we get attacked by bats. SEA bats!
Then the same happens with a "Virago," which looks kind of like Lugia outside of battle and a really weird birdman in battle.
Then the ship starts shaking and we fight Kraken on the deck. Called it. Unfortunately no one died dramatically to it, so we're not very good pirates.
It is his business.
There's some stuff about the missing Babby and we go to the Altimeter Cave to find him.
In one of the cooler effects in this game, the further you go into the cave, the darker the area around AAAAD gets, and the circle manages to not look terrible. It's probably kinda annoying on an actual non-backlit GBA, but -
WHAT THE HELL IS THIS
Nope. After the first room, Golden Sun would rather give us bad-looking circles of light around the torches and make us use Reveal if we really want to see a large area. Thanks a million.
We find an invisible guy with connected eyebrows and a gold tooth who's surprised we can see him, but he's honestly easier to see than anything in this cave. He wants us to get some draught. Okay? He tells us about a rock puzzle and the order is BLUE GREEN WHITE YELLOW RED. Oh man I totally just spoiled the whole game for you guys.
Log cylinder-rolling puzzle with a frostpuddle! Ingenious.
Hey guys, remember that order? I hope you wrote it down, or else I won't be able to get it from you and you'll cause a time paradox that makes this page end here.
Ha ha kidding. Anyway it turns out that what you're supposed to do is turn the left and right rocks to make a roulette wheel appear and turn the rock of the color it says. But you can use Reveal to show their colors. So being told that order was useless, since it just describes what they are from left to right. What the hell. BUT ANYWAY I solved the puzzle and got the draught.
Hey, it's that man! Babby's the name, draught's his game (apparently?). He thinks we're Lemurians but he's wrong (or is he) and he mentions he knows Kraden oh god not Kraden. Guards suddenly come in and make the cave light with their presence (and natural incandescence).
Babby leaves but since he's a cool guy he tells us we can participate in THE COLOSSO even though we didn't do the trials. Good thing, I would have totally failed the Test of Love.
This would have been funnier if I had known about this in advance, because one of the guards was like "YOU SHOULDN'T BE IN THE COLOSSO, YOU'RE JUST A KID." Oh well, telling you is good enough. Anyway only AAAAD can enter for some reason. Even if he's obviously the coolest person in the party (though Mind Read is kickin' rad), that's slightly jerkish of Babby.
Then there's a part which would be pretty cool if I wasn't the most destructive force in the universe where you race to get equipment to use in THE COLOSSO.
This guy is capable of creating yellow silhouette people with his mind while explaining things. That's far more useful than anything AAAAD has.
Anyway we get to assign a party member to each obstacle course so they can, before the race, use their psychic powers to make it faster to get through. Since I'm lazy, the only one in which I could do anything was the log-pushing one, but I still got to the end way before the other guy.
SO VICTORIOUS
We have two more matches like this but for the sake of this LP they're not interesting even though they kind of are. After the last one we pass out but we still won. Um, okay?
Babby reveals all and tells us that he was from Lemuria and got his draught there and it makes him live longer but now he's running out so he'll probably die. However Babby CANNOT FIND Lemuria so he's screwed. Unless we find it. And we all know how preposterous an area of the world we're told about we WON'T go to is. Also we finally get the Cloak Ball, gosh.
Even though absolutely EVERYTHING suggests going to Venus Lighthouse, the experts say we need to rescue Hammet now. Man, seriously, if I didn't know the Cloak Ball was what I needed to do that I would be stuck forever. I didn't even skip through that cutscene too much and I still thought I was going to Venus Lighthouse.
MINUTE-LATER EDIT: Upon actually trying to go to Venus Lighthouse I realize there's a desert in the way with tornados you can't get past. But it doesn't tell you to go rescue Hammet to get the psychic powers you need to get past them so yeah.
YES. Finally, guys! Can you feel it? We're finally going to rescue Master Hammet! I'm just going to step in this door and