Golden Sun's story follows a band of magic-attuned teenagers called Adepts on a mission to protect the world of Weyard from alchemy, a potentially destructive power that was sealed away long ago.

Golden Sun was critically and commercially successful, being the top-selling game for four months in Japan and selling more than one million units worldwide.

[4] Environments often contain puzzles, which require the player to perform actions such as creating makeshift bridges by pushing logs into rivers or shifting the track of a mine cart to gain access to new areas.

[2]: 51  Psynergy comes in four elements: Venus (rocks and plants), Mars (fire and heat), Jupiter (wind and electricity), and Mercury (water and ice).

[4][9][10] In battle, players must defeat enemies while keeping their own party alive through items and Psynergy that restore life and supplement defense.

[2] Golden Sun takes place in the fantasy world of "Weyard"—a massive, earth-like environment with several major continents and oceans.

Matter consists of any combination of the four base elements: Venus (earth), Mars (fire), Mercury (water), and Jupiter (wind).

[3]: 9 The player controls four teenaged Adepts in Golden Sun: Isaac, his close friend Garet, Ivan, and Mia.

They are assisted by the powerful and mysterious Alex, who was formerly Mia's apprentice; and Jenna's older brother, Felix, who is indebted to Saturos for saving his life.

He instructs the teens to prevent Saturos' group from casting the stars into their respective elemental lighthouses across Weyard, which will unseal alchemy's power.

The game ends as Isaac's party boards a ship to sail Weyard's open seas and continue their mission.

[16] A major goal with Golden Sun was to make the game's magic usable outside battle for puzzles, and offer players a high level of freedom in how to approach events, rather than a linear story that could only be experienced one way.

Camelot's President Hiroyuki Takahashi asserted that players would be unable to experience all story paths in a single playthrough, and that this combined with the game's multiplayer mode would add to Golden Sun's replay value.

While it was eagerly anticipated in the west, players had to make do with Japanese-language imports until the game was localized and released in North America in November, and Europe in February 2002.

[21][22] Reviews often compared it favorably to RPGs for the Super Nintendo (SNES);[5][23] Eurogamer's Ronan Jennings wrote that prior to Golden Sun, Nintendo treated the Game Boy Advance as "nothing more than a SNES emulator by its makers [...] [Golden Sun] not only compared favorably to 16-bit classics of its kind, it even surpassed the majority of them.

[19] Harris and Moulton felt the chief weakness of the story was that the game's pace lagged early on, when it was introducing the large number of characters and featured occasionally "hokey" dialogue.

[19][24][27] While Moulton considered the fights very similar to the Final Fantasy series, he thought they improved on the formula by being simpler and less annoying.

[25] Ricardo Torres, writing for GameSpot, considered the only mark against the combat that if an enemy was defeated, player characters would not automatically retarget the remaining foes.

[19][22][24] GamePro's review noted that the class system worked better in concept than reality, as mixing Djinn assignments often hurt characters more than help.

Golden Sun was re-released for the Virtual Console via the Wii U eShop in April 2014, and was released for the Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack in January 2024.