Finally, we’ve left our hometown and taken our first steps into the wider world! Welcome to the world map, and now that we’re on it we can hit the L button to take a look at the continent of Angara where we will be spending most of the game traversing. Vale and Mt. Aleph are in its western region, and if you look closely you might notice that Angara bears a loose resemblance to the Eurasian landmass. In fact, as we’ll be seeing both later in the game and especially in the sequel, Weyard as a whole is a very literal and deliberate take on the Fantasy Counterpart Culture trope. The structure’s fairly open but still linear for the most part - there are enough “roads” on the ground and geographic chokepoints to direct you from place to place which does have the unfortunate effect of constricting freedom and exploration a bit. But fortunately that’s much less of a problem in the second game and it prevents a Final Fantasy II situation from occurring where you leave Town A and inadvertently head west in the direction of Town O and get turned to a red paste by the Lv. 50 monsters lurking in the vicinity.
Before we get fully underway though we may notice that there’s an odd flickering light floating around on the map nearby. Approaching it causes it to resolve into a brown frog-like creature called Flint. Flint claims that he’s one of the Djinn that were mentioned in the last update, and he wants to tag along with us so that we can reunite him with all of his friends who were scattered by the eruption. Elemental Djinn allow us access to three new aspects of the battle system; the Djinn themselves, classes, and summoning:
Let’s start with classes. Every Adept actually belongs to a class; Isaac for example is a Squire while Garet’s a Guard (Jenna was a Flame User FYI). When a Djinni joins us we can “set” it to a party member to give them a stat boost (Flint provides eight additional HP, four PP, and three Attack points), and if you have enough of a complementary element on an Adept, like stacking Venus Djinn on Isaac, he’ll eventually promote to a new class in the line and even gain new Psynergy. Sticking a Djinni of a differing element will change them to a new class entirely and while it will may look like a downgrade at first stacking on more Djinn of the same type will eventually power them up as well. To illustrate, putting Flint on Garet instead of Isaac will change his class to Brute, which focuses on both Fire and Earth Psynergy, and he’ll lose Flare and have it replaced with Growth, an Earth spell that can also be used outside of battle to make vines grow in order to provide a means to scale cliff faces and the like. You can see what Psynergy and stats you’re losing or gaining by equipping Djinn on their new section on the menu. I have to admit though, I’ve never really tinkered around with the class system that much, as it’s perfectly practical to just stick with each character’s base class line.
After explaining that Flint puts us into a tutorial battle to show us how unleashing Djinn and summoning work. When a Djinni is set to a character they have to option to unleash them during battle; each Djinni has a different effect, and they run the gamut from damaging enemies, buffing us or debuffing enemies, restoring HP, and so forth. Flint’s effect is pretty basic, dealing Earth damage to one enemy. Something the game doesn’t tell you is that if you defeat an enemy with a Djinni of the element that they’re weak to, they’ll flash colors when dying and at the end of battle you’ll gain roughly 33% more money and EXP than you would otherwise, plus the chance of them dropping an item if they have one are much greater. It’s borderline-mandatory to take advantage of this when looking for specific weapon drops in the late-and-endgame, as some of them have ridiculously low odds of showing up on their own.
Now when you unleash a Djinni it goes into a standby phase. While on standby they do not confer any of their stat bonuses nor can they be unleashed again, so if you unleash one at an inopportune time you may find yourself at a disadvantage. A character can use their turn to immediately set their equipped standby Djinni again, but in this state we can also use their power to summon powerful entities to damage enemies further. Each element has four levels of Summon, each one costing a number of Djinn that correspond to each level. Since we only have a single Djinni at the moment, all we can summon is Venus, the embodiment of Earth. The first-tier of summons merely consist of a Djinni apparition buffeting the enemies with dirt/flames/waves of water/wind, but later ones are a fair bit more elaborate in appearance, and are pretty visually striking to boot. A Summon’s damage calculation is partially based on the enemies’ max HP value, so while they may appear to do less damage to mooks than they do to bosses, proportionally it’s the same. Finally, a Summon will also increase the summoner’s elemental affinity by a certain amount for the remainder of the battle but that’ll only happen once for each element, so no trying to pump Isaac’s affinity with Earth up to insane levels by summoning Venus over and over again (and it’s not like the enemies are gonna survive that long anyway). Once a Summon is unleashed the Djinn used will go into recovery mode for a few turns during which time they will be completely inaccessible. Once they’ve fully recovered (some Djinni will take longer than others) they’ll automatically set themselves to their Adept again and can be used once more.
So, Djinn, They’re very useful buggers. There are twenty-eight of them in the game total, and while it’s not mandatory that you collect all of them, there’s a little something in the sequel if you do...
So, with that out of the way I did a little bit of grinding on the world map to boost Isaac and Garet up to Lv. 4 each where they both learn new moves (Isaac learns Earthquake, the upgraded version of Quake while Garet learns a new Fire spell named, er, Fire), using Cure and running back to Vale for its giant PP-restoring Psynergy Stone when necessary. If we head east we’ll soon come across the second town of the game, Vault, however before we can enter it a scene plays out on where Isaac and Garet watch a wagon caravan roll out of town. The leader, a mustachioed man named Hammet, declares that they must leave the area at once and return to Kalay, however they soon discover that a bridge leading further south has been destroyed and now they’re stuck. When they step out to inspect this break one of the guys in the caravan voices concern about leaving someone named Ivan behind, but Hammet says something about it being Ivan’s fault that the “rod” was stolen so now it’s his responsibility to look for it and besides, he has “strange powers” that’ll aid him. Hmm... Anyway, this point Mt. Aleph gives out another ominous rumble and a spooked Hammet declares that they’ll instead head north, even if that ends up taking them in the vicinity of a place called Lunpa. The other guy’s not very wild about this destination but the caravan thunders on nonetheless, heading up north past the watch Adepts, who then walk on into town.
Vault is a much, much smaller town than Vale was, being in its entirely barely larger than the size of Vale’s plaza. According to the villagers we can talk to the place has been seeing a lot of activity ever since the eruption; there was Hammet’s caravan that we saw just now, a group of kinda shifty-looking guys who came to stay recently, and apparently the other day Saturos and Menardi’s group came through, with one of the villager’s blithely noting that the girl and old man with them “didn’t look like they were happy to be there.” Plus the eruption seems to be scattering Psynergy Stones all over the continent going by the one some guy’s got stashed in his house, and there’s even been a rash of thievery recently. So it’s been an exciting week for the residents of Vault. There’s a guard tower that we can climb and even ring its bell, which serves a purpose in spooking a Venus Djinni that’s hiding in a nearby tree, causing it to jump onto a ledge that we can’t reach. That’s something for a fair bit later. Also, examining some of the loose barrels and such unearths a Mint, one of several items that permanently increases one of a character’s stats by three points. Mints boost Agility, so that goes to Garet. Usually I just feed these sorts of items to whoever it is who’s weakest in the appropriate stat.
Like Vale Vault and every other town going forward has a sanctum of its own, staffed by a guy identical to the Great Healer (they’re like Nurse Joy in that regard). Sanctums exist to revive party members and cure lingering status ailments (for a fee of course) since sleeping at an inn will only restore an active party member’s HP and PP. If you happen to get a game over, you’ll automatically be sent back to the sanctum of the last town you’ve visited, with everyone KO’d but Isaac. The status ailments that can be treated here are as follows:
- Poison - Poisoned party members lose HP at the end of every turn, and the “badly poisoned” variant damages the character a lot more. Unlike the Megami Tensei games I’ve liveblogged, poison actually can kill you here.
- Curse - This is caused by a character wearing a cursed piece of equipment (we’ll see those a fair bit later). A cursed character cannot remove the offending gear, and may be unable to act in battle.
- Haunt - Characters haunted by evil spirits have a chance of being damaged at the end of their turns.
And as for the ailments that don’t linger:
- Delusion - Greatly lowers the accuracy of a character’s physical attack.
- Paralysis - A paralyzed character may be unable to act on their turn.
- Sleep - A sleeping character cannot act until they wake up.
- Seal - Prevents the use of Psynergy.
- Death Curse - This is basically Final Fantasy’s Doom; a character with a death curse on them will be downed in seven turns.
Naturally, status ailments tend to work better on you than on enemies.
Next, shops. Vale had ‘em too, but this is the first time I’m actually doing some shopping. There are three kinds of shops in Golden Sun: an item shop that sells consumables, a weapon store, and an armor store. Weapons are split up into five different categories: light blades, long swords, axes, staves, and maces. Not every character can wield every single type of weapon, but that’s largely a non-issue for Isaac and Garet since they can wield everything but staves. Armor, headgear, shields, gloves, robes, boots, and accessories round out the types of wearable equipment, though boots are barely present in the games. Everyone can wear at least one piece of equipment per body part, though some of it’s segregated by gender or build. I only have five-hundred-thirty-five coins at the moment, so I mainly focused on upgraded Isaac and Garet’s armor (Padded Gloves to Wooden Shields, Cotton Shirts to Travel Vests and so forth) and got Garet a Long Sword to replace his Short Sword since his Attack lags a fair bit behind Isaac since he (Isaac) has Flint equipped. Whenever you buy a weapon or piece of armor you have the option of immediately selling the previous piece you had equipped for 75% of its original value, and if you spend enough money you’re given a free Game Ticket item that we might wanna hold on to for now.
There’s another section in each shop called “Artifacts” but...we’ll save that for another time.
So for now continuing on with the plot requires us to visit the mayor’s house where the guy’s asking anyone who talks to him to lend Ivan a hand so that he can go home. Young Ivan is standing a little ways away, and talking to him has him immediately use the Mind Read Psynergy to read Isaac’s mind and is startled to learn of his nature as an Adept. He asks for our help in retrieving his stolen rod, and when we say yes he introduces himself and then instead of simply asking Isaac and Garet for their names he mind reads it out of them. His trigger-happiness with that ability seems to give them the willies, so Ivan figures that it’s not fair if only he gets to read minds, so he takes Isaac’s hand, allowing the two of them to read Garet’s mind together (who’s thinking along the lines of “Stop reading my mind!”). Ivan promises not to read their minds anymore and suggests that they use his ability to discover who the thieves are, since normal people can’t see Psynergy at all.
And so Ivan joins the party at Lv. 4. He’s a Wind Seer, so the two spells he can use other than Mind Read are obviously Wind-elemental. With his low HP, Attack, and Defense stats coupled with high PP he’s obviously supposed to be the spell-slinger of the party. He’ll also always be the fastest of the party. Gear-wise his armor’s up to date and because he’s the youngest of the party he can’t equip the heavy-duty armor-type equipment that Isaac and Garet can. Like he wears bracelets and circlets and hoods rather than shields and helmets. He can only wield light blades and staves, and in fact he comes equipped with a Wooden Stick, the weakest staff, just like Jenna did, and I quickly exchanged it for the Short Sword that Garet used to have. His Mind Read Psynergy that he brings to the table is quite an exploitable asset, since now we can use it to see what people are thinking in addition to what they’re saying, often revealing interesting nuggets of information that they’d otherwise keep to themselves or just amusing little asides. You can even use it on animals too! It’s probably the most entertaining thing you can do in these games, but unfortunately it can get a little PP-intensive if you try using it on absolutely everyone you find (like me, heh heh).
Reading the villagers’ minds will reveal that a few of them suspect the three shifty-looking newcomers as the thieves and sure enough if you mind read one of them who’s hanging around outside we learn that he thinks they should clear out of Vault before they get caught. The other two are on the second floor of the inn, but as soon as they see Ivan they freak out and run away from us so that we can’t get close enough to do our thing. Ivan figures that they should instead surround one of them, so what follows is a minigame of sorts where Ivan wanders around the room on his own while Garet blocks off the exit and we have to position Isaac so that one of the thieves will get pinned in a corner (despite the fact that these guys should by all rights be able to just break through, being grown adults and all). After Ivan reads one of their minds he confirms that they are indeed the thieves, not just of the rod but also of everything else in town that’s been stolen. They’re apparently hiding it inside the inn somehow, but we’re gonna have to find their stash ourselves because they’re too spooked to let Ivan anywhere near them now. Well, if we go outside we can see that an NPC has disappeared, allowing us to climb up onto the inn’s roof via ladder and enter its attic via a hole punched in it by debris from the eruption. Inside we find the treasure chests containing their ill-gotten loot, as well as the missing NPC, bound and gagged. Freeing him the man says that he was knocked out when he stumbled in here while trying to fix the roof, and sure enough the three thieves immediately dart into the loft...only instead of trying to immediately rub us out, they try to weasel their way out by claiming that there’s no reason to come after them since Hammet’s already been captured by a worse bunch of thieves in Lunpa. What follows is a quick, albeit awkwardly-passed infodump on how the city of Lunpa was founded by a righteous thief of the same name, but its current leader, his grandson Dodonpa, is anything but. The lesser of two evils aside, a crime’s a crime, so it’s time for our first boss battle of the game!
Bandit and Thief x2
HP
- 244 (Bandit), 110 each (Thief)
- Weak to Earth, Fire, Wind, and Water
- Slice - Deals Wind damage to one target; power may be doubled.
- Smoke Bomb - Attempts to delude one target.
- Herb - Restores 50 HP to one ally.
- Herb - Restores 50 HP to one ally.
Standard battle theme: Warm-Up Boss. Unless Bandit decides to spam Slice and get lucky with its secondary effect, these guys barely pose a threat other than drawing things out with their use of Herbs. You can just spend the majority of the battle spamming Psynergy, though Ivan’s the best for it since he has nearly twice the amount of the other two. Occasionally they’ll even waste an action glowering or trembling, giving you a free turn. Also, non-Adept human enemies are weak to all four elements, though it’s downplayed a bit here what with them having such low HP.
Winning earns us 66 EXP, 110 coins, and a Bandit’s Sword.
After the battle the three hapless thieves are down for the count and Garet taunts them with how evil will never prevail in a rather sugary manner while the man goes to fetch the mayor. Ivan says that once he has the Shaman’s Rod back he’ll head towards Lunpa to save Hammet and then mind reads Isaac again to learn all about his quest. They don’t get any chance to talk about it though for the guy returns with the mayor and a whole host of angry villagers, and they quickly tie up the thieves and march them away. The mayor thanks the young trio for their help and also sadly confirms the thieves’ claims that Hammet has been kidnapped. Ivan repeats his plan to go save his master, but unfortunately that won’t be possible: once its gates are closed, Lunpa is an impenetrable fortress. But the mayor’s confident that he’s still alive since Dodonpa can use him to extort a ransom from Kalay, so for the time being they can only sit and wait. In the meantime, Vault’s stolen treasures are recovered, and the mayor tells us to see him later for a reward. Recognition!
Once they’re alone again Garet tries to cheer the depressed Ivan up, and the kid’s still bent on saving Hammet even after everything he’s heard about Lunpa. He turns down Isaac and Garet’s offer of help since they still have a very important quest of their own, retrieves the Shaman’s Rod from the pile, and bids Isaac and Garet farewell, saying that he will never forget our help and the town’s hospitality.
So with that our two heroes are alone again. The thieves have been locked away inside the village jail (visiting them shows the thugs to be poor losers since they’re already trying to plan their revenge) and visiting the mayor has his award us a Water of Life as thanks for our good deeds. Waters of Life revive downed characters, and this single one will be our only means of revival whilst in the field for the next couple of hours. It’s best to save it for only the most dire of emergencies until we’re able to buy them. The mayor also suggests that since the bridge south is broken we should head north instead where there’s a cave that’ll allow us to pass through the Goma mountain range and reach the town of Bilibin beyond. That sounds like a destination so it’s time to hit the road again. Perhaps we’ll be running into Ivan once more...?
Soundtrack
- The Angarian Journey
- Out of the four world map themes in the series, this one's my favorite.
- Having Fun
- This track makes a bit of an Early-Bird Cameo for the Djinni tutorial, as it's nominally the minigame BGM ('cause what sort of RPG would this be without minigames?).
- A Little Friendship
- Ivan's actually the only party member in the whole series to get a non-battle theme leitmotif like this.
