Isaac was born in the secluded town of Vale at the base of the dormant volcano Mt. Aleph, and for his first fourteen years he lived a tranquil life there with his parents Kyle and Dora and his friends Garet, Jenna, and Felix. Like his parents, Isaac is a Venus Adept, and all the townspeople of Vale are Adepts to varying degrees because they live their lives under the influence of a giant Psynergy Stone formation near the town's entrance. Isaac was very reliable and was well-liked by the populace; as an individual, he is virtuous and caring yet not to a fault, and Dora describes him as being so much like his father at his age, including his stubbornness. Isaac used to visit the cottage of the scholar Kraden a lot as well before the elderly alchemist was kidnapped during Saturos' second raid on Sol Sanctum. Having lived at Vale his entire life, at a mountainous area not close enough to the Great Western Sea, Isaac has never seen an ocean before, like his friends at that point. He, Garet, Ivan, and Mia first see an ocean at the end of the original Golden Sun before setting sail in the Lemurian Ship given to them by Lord Babi.
The lives of Isaac and many others were changed forever when he was fourteen, when the Mt. Aleph Boulder incident happened at Vale: Mt. Aleph and Vale were beset upon by a terrible thunderstorm, and a giant boulder located somewhere on Mt. Aleph became dislodged and descended upon Vale, crashing through Jenna's house and pier - where Kyle, Felix, and Felix and Jenna's parents at the time were located. All four of of them seemed to disappear right before the eyes of Isaac, Garet, Jenna, and Dora. Lost and confused, Isaac wandered off on his own into the night and Garet followed him. The two boys were soon accosted by a duo of menacing strangers, Saturos and Menardi, who used their powerful Mars Psynergy to knock Isaac and Garet out cold so they would forget their memories of the duo, and the pair of Mars Adepts immediately left the area.
It goes without saying that the period of time following the disaster was very trying for Isaac and those he knew. Isaac and Dora were devastated by the apparent death of Kyle, but the trauma Jenna underwent eclipsed that, for she seemingly lost her entire family. Isaac felt that if he had been better at Psynergy, he could have saved his father; thus, he and Garet resolved to study the art of Psynergy hard over the next three years, with Kraden guiding their toils as a scholar of Alchemy himself, to become stronger both for themselves and for everyone else.
