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This Space For Rent

Vale offers the Vale Cave behind Kraden's house if you have obtained the Lift Psynergy. This earns you the Halt Gem and Kite, the former of which is needed to complete certain optional puzzles, but has no effect on the critical path. Put differently, most of the backtracking in this series is of a "hey, do you remember that one chest you couldn't get to in that dungeon from five hours ago?" nature, and it's especially disappointing when your other explorations or blacksmith trips have earned you equipment that surpasses the optional treasure anyway. Coins are nice in the early game, but the player's earning potential scales much faster than the game offers money sinks to absorb it, so getting a boost of a few thousand coins from some junk sword isn't all that appealing.

The Lost Age's Shrine of the Sea God is actually the best example of backtracking in the game. On your first visit, you're there to rescue a couple of missing kids from Daila. If you visit Shrine of the Sea God before the Kandorean Temple, you'll find that you can't rescue the boys without something to help with the rope. The Kandorean Temple provides Lash, using which one can rescue the boys and reach a Jupiter Djinni deeper in the cave, but no further progress can be made.

Later, Piers's presence in the party unlocks the second half of Shrine of the Sea God, allowing the player to obtain the first of three prongs of the Trident of Ankohl. This dungeon, despite being among the simplest in the entire series, serves multiple purposes. It even shows us non-antagonist NPCs interacting with it.

A future Golden Sun game needs more dungeons like Shrine of the Sea God, where the need to revisit is developed naturally by the story, or where the exploration of a previously inaccessible area does something to extend the story, rather than simply offering a minor sidequest for some loot.

This Psynergy-based gating could also be made more interesting. It's rare that a puzzle will use more than two kinds of Psynergy, and what objects are allowed to be affected by a particular kind of Psynergy is usually pretty arbitrary. You can Move rectangular boxes, tall stone pillars, or the occasional stump, but you can't move a Frost pillar that's roughly the same size and shape as the stone pillars. You can freeze a puddle into a column of ice, but you can't conjure an ice stepping stone in a pool of water. You can tunnel through sand, but you can't Grind stone into sand to tunnel through. The puzzles start to get pretty samey in the latter portions of each game, where the only complexity is how many times you have to cast the spell. In a normal playthrough where you're leveling up regularly from random encounters, running out of Psynergy is almost never an issue, so choices in combat have no material consequences on one's ability to complete a dungeon.

Let's try something better. A common motif in Golden Sun puzzle design is redirecting the flow of something—water or fire in Mercury and Mars Lighthouse pipes, the Psynergy channels in the Great Gabomba and Venus Lighthouse, etc. I discussed an exploration-oriented Golden Sun 4 where the party would be tasked with learning about the changes to the landscape and what was unearthed in the process. Dark Dawn has its Alchemy Machines (Forge, Well, Dynamo) linked, but each is an altogether separate dungeon. For this hypothetical Golden Sun 4, I imagine a massive Alchemy Machine as sort of the centerpiece for this exploration, where it has interlocking sections and requires a variety of Psynergy to fully turn on, but individual sections must be started in order to observe them or access an area beyond them.

We'll call this the Alchemy Engine, specifically because engines need a bit of help getting started, but are subsequently able to operate continuously. Imagine, in one portion of this dungeon, a room with channels in the floor that lead to different ledges, over which some fluid should fall and turn wheels below, each of which operate different things. If we're imagining this with Nowell and Takeru as our starter Pokémon, Nowell could cast Douse on one of the wheels to get it to do something useful, like raise a piston out of the floor to hop across.

On the wall opposite the cascade points to the water wheels, there is a sealed area. Someone with an explosive Psynergy could blow it open, but Nowell and Takeru lack this ability. They can operate the wheels a little bit, one at a time. Perhaps with the backing of more Djinn could Nowell produce more water with Douse and turn all the wheels from the channels in the floor, but there still remains the limit of her Psynergy reserves. This is, after all, an engine, and engines only really do their thing when they're able to be operated continuously.

Later on, though, they join forces with a Mars Adept who can cast Burst, and they blow the wall open, and water flows out, filling all the channels and thereby turning all the wheels. This part of the engine now gets to do something it couldn't before, and if the party needs to stop the engine, the water can be stopped again with Frost. Perhaps it would even be possible to stop one of the channels with ice, but leave the others freely flowing, providing a means to switch the engine between eight (2³) different states.

Furthermore, all of this can be made more challenging by requiring minimum amounts of Psynergy to perform certain tasks, and by only expanding characters' Psynergy pools through Djinn or items, rather than a steady trickle for each level gained. A dungeon crawl becomes a resource management challenge as well, akin to Persona 5's Mementos delving, where restorative items and SP are hard to replenish on the go. You can leave and come back, but you may not get the opportunity to return for some time.

Just use a name.

If you have some kind of itch to avoid repeating a lemma in the span of a page or paragraph, it's time to get over it. At best, switching to an epithet erodes the reader's familiarity with the character. At worst, it sounds like you've suddenly introduced a new character. Unless you have a clear reason to erode that familiarity (e.g. your POV character is suffering from amnesia or some other psychological/neurological condition), just use names. Please. I am begging you.

And no, it's not repetitive. Names are as transparent as pronouns, articles, and conjunctions once their referents have been introduced in the discourse of a story.

I can understand the urge to use such constructions in situations where multiple characters use the same pronoun set. Using an epithet instead of a pronoun removes this ambiguity, but so does using a name, and it's a lot less clunky. If you're really worried that your paragraph's tangle of overloaded pronouns is too difficult to parse (because it probably is), use this strategy:

Make one character's actions the focus of a particular paragraph and use their name in the first sentence. All further references to that character in that paragraph use the appropriate pronoun. The remaining characters always use their name. Break to a new paragraph when you want to focus on someone else.

(Note: the subject of a clause/sentence/paragraph is not necessarily the POV character, and you can shift the focus of the narrative while still filtering through your POV character's perceptions. This is not an instruction to start head-hopping.)

This goes for plain old nouns too! If you're writing "orbs" instead of "eyes" to avoid sounding "repetitive", just think that your readers will be imagining glowing video game powerups embedded in the character's eye sockets, which is probably not what you want!

Novelizations and rewrites

Shipping focused almost exclusively on playable characters

Canon scenes with added detail or alternate POV

Naturally there's a smattering of porn, some drabbles, and plausible canon inserts (scenes that didn't happen in the text, but are reasonable extensions of what could have happened between major plot events). But it's uncommon to see much about the time between The Lost Age and Dark Dawn, and there's thirty years of wiggle room to write anything from follow-on adventures to the trials of childrearing.

It's also uncommon to find stories that don't concern any of the 16 playable adepts across three games. Granted, it's pretty hard to write about things going on in (e.g.) Suhalla, Apojii, or Mikasalla, considering none of those places have named characters, but places like Kalay, Lemuria, and Izumo all have three named resident NPCs. I understand that Uzume, Susa, and Kushinada perhaps don't so readily capture one's imagination once you know they're exports from Japanese mythology, but they're all wide open for exploration following the game's adaptation of this myth. Sure, Uzume dies at some point during the thirty year timeskip, but it's also perfectly fine to pretend Dark Dawn doesn't happen and just do something else.

I'm only bringing this up because it's weird to me how constrained by canon the Golden Sun fandom seems to be. I don't think it helped that Dark Dawn declared some victors in the shipping wars, but folks in other fandoms are perfectly happy to slap a couple of characters into circumstances romantic or otherwise that are so far removed from canon as to be practically contradictory. There's a contingent of the Fire Emblem: Three Houses fandom that's perfectly happy to contrive endlessly weird scenarios pairing Rhea with Edelgard, with all the romantic and geopolitical outcomes such contrivances entail.

(I mean, fuck, if you even bring up shipping Sheba with anyone in front of some people, they immediately get squicked out and say "ew no she's a teenager". Never mind the fact that there's a point between TLA and DD that she would unambiguously have to be an adult, party member ages in the GBA games are likely bullshit anyway.)

I once read a long and fascinating Golden Sun fan fiction concerning Mia and Chalis that started during the latter half of Dark Dawn's events and continued beyond what would've been the game's narrative conclusion. I can no longer find it on AO3, so I assume the author deleted it and/or their account. I loved reading it for how it explored trust as the basis of any relationship, and how it got into the depths of both Chalis and Mia. While I think the principal trait any half-awake Golden Sun fan would attribute to Mia is compassion, this author's Mia was also tempered by hardship, the tribulations of motherhood, and the tug-of-war of de facto leadership. She slips into the kind of sarcasm you'd expect after quips like "What, is there a pharmacy down there?" This author's Chalis was deeper than the villain we see in Dark Dawn, for they fleshed out the hints about the Tuaparang's society into a framing that cast Chalis as both villain and victim.