I remember playing the first Golden Sun very close to its release thanks to emulation. But my rom was bugged so the game crashed when the final boss used his ultimate attack. At the time I didn't know I could transfer my .sav file from one rom to another, and that it would probably work if the roms are from the same game/region. I was just a teenager. 😅

The second game I played on cartridge and the wait was very painful because, contrary to what's costumary nowadays, Golden Sun The Lost Age released on the west a few months after its japanese release date. The japanese rom was floating around the web, with some very preliminary stopgap fan-translations, but it was not a good experience and most people chose to wait.