This contains major spoilers for basically the entire Golden Sun series.
Welcome to Building Character! If the title wasn’t enough for you, we’re here to talk about Felix for a minute. I should point out first that my experience with the Golden Sun series is a bit backward. I played them out of order, starting with The Lost Age before moving on to the original Golden Sun. So rather than coming to know Felix as the traitor, I came to know him as the determined quiet one who wanted to save the world. He’s not a character who had to go asking someone else what to do. He knew what needed to be done. The only help he needed was to find out how to get there.
At the start of Golden Sun a terrible storm is raging around Mt. Aleph, and the small town of Vale. Because of the storm, Felix has fallen into the river, barely able to hang on for dear life. Before he can be pulled out of the river disaster strikes, and the boulder that the townsfolk were trying to hold back breaks free. It crashes through the city, taking not just Felix, but his Mother and Father with it. Everyone thought they were dead. Luckily for us though, they were saved by a pair called Saturos and Menardi (the ones who accidentally triggered the storm) and brought to the duo’s home town of Prox.
It was during his time in Prox that Felix learned exactly why Saturos and Menardi attempted to raid Mt. Aleph. Prox was on the edge of the world, and getting closer and closer to doom every minute. Because the power of Alchemy had been sealed away, the world itself was starting to fall apart. The edge of the sea was eroding, getting closer and closer to swallowing the town of Prox (and eventually the entire world) and all its inhabitants. The only thing that could save the town was to reignite the Elemental Lighthouses, restoring Alchemy to the world, thus stopping the decay.
That’s why he was with Saturos and Menardi when they launched a second assault on Mt. Aleph. During the attack, he was reunited with his sister Jenna, as well as the scholar Kraden. After retrieving the Elemental Stars, their group escaped Sol Sanctum and Felix joined Saturos and Menardi on a journey around Weyard. With Kraden and Jenna in tow, they began their quest to reignite the Elemental Lighthouses.
So while his friends fought to stop them, Felix helped Saturos and Menardi on their quest, though he didn’t really agree with their methods. Particularly hard on him was the decision to kidnap Sheba. When Isaac and his team defeated Saturos and Menardi at the Venus lighthouse Felix realized he was no match for them, so he ran. Before he got to safety, a massive earthquake struck and knocked Sheba from the lighthouse. Felix dives after her, and the game ends with the two of them falling to an apparent demise.
Cut to the second game. Felix washes ashore with Sheba, and wakes to find the her, along with Jenna and Kraden, unconscious on the shore. The island they were on had crashed in to a new continent after a massive tidal wave struck it, and they had to figure out where to go on this new continent. This shifted perspective, taking Felix out from the villainous role, shoving him straight in to the role of the protagonist. His powerful captors/allies now dead, it was up to him and his team to travel across the entire world to re-light the two remaining Lighthouses. Isaac and team never stopped hunting Felix and his team, but over the course of the game Felix was, through strength of will, finally able to convince Isaac that they needed to work together. There was no way to reverse what had been done, and the only way to save the world was to once again unleash Alchemy upon it.
Felix never once wanted to fight his friends. He took on a quest that he believed in not because he was forced into it, but because he recognized the dangers if he didn’t. It was a fight against the clock to save the world from certain doom by unleashing a slightly less certain doom; there was essentially no way for him to win. If he’d defied Saturos and Menardi, the world would have slowly died and crumbled away. If he’d abandoned the job halfway through, the imbalance of Alchemical powers would have destroyed the world. What he did wasn’t going to save the world, it just gave it a bit better chance at not dying.
And where is he now? No one knows, really. According to the encyclopedia entry from the third game in the series, Golden Sun: Dark Dawn –
“Another one of Vale’s Earth Adepts led a second party that joined up with Isaac’s group in the days before the Golden Sun. Felix’s sister, Jenna, and the scholar Kraden were others from Vale in his party. He left his homeland–and has not been seen since.“
I have no idea what this means. What I can hope for, though, is that if we ever get a sequel to Dark Dawn, we get to see Felix again. He was, for me, the most interesting character in what is quite possibly my favourite video game series of all time. In my opinion, he’s a great character not because of the great change he goes through on his journey. He’s a great character, and a hero, because of his willingness to do what he needed to do when it needed to be done. He didn’t want to be a hero, he just wanted to do what he knew was right, no matter what the cost was.
