After passing through the barricade Kolima lies a short distance to the west. All the homes and buildings here are built out of giant tree stumps, and Isaac, Garet, and Ivan quickly find that the entire population of the town has been transfigured to match. What’s more there’s a bunch of odd, sparkling particles scattered around the ground here and there, but before our heroes can investigate they’re all suddenly paralyzed by some sort of psychic attack. More of the particles, spores, what-have-you begin to rain from the sky, and our heroes frantically realize that these must be responsible for the townspeople turning to trees. But fortunately a premature ending is avert by some sort of energy barrier appearing around their bodies, harmlessly turning the sparkles aside. Once the shower stops the group realizes that they can move again, and Ivan theorizes that those barriers were actually their Psynergy, and that some abilities simply activate only when they need to. Uh huh. So, does this barrier power jive with how Psynergy has been presented so far? Not really. Is this concept ever mentioned again? No. Garet tries to rationalize this by pressing up against the fourth wall and bringing gameplay mechanics into this by likening it to scoring a critical hit in battle. Whatever, that doesn’t really change the deus ex machina feel to this scene.
Anyway, another shower of sparkles starts up again and once again these barriers protect the trio from treeification. This time an angry voice rumbles, wondering why we aren’t turning to trees. The mugshot shows an enraged face, and then another voice speaks up, this one feminine. The feminine voice, belonging to an entity named Laurel, explains that the curse on Kolima was cast by the king of Kolima Forest, the angry fellow who just addressed us, named Tret. Tret rumbles that since Kolima took their axes to him, he shall take his to them, and Laurel continues on, telling us that the forest is actually dying, and when it and Tret go, so will the transformed people. That’s something we can’t have, so Laurel explains that in order to save the people, we must reawaken Tret’s kindly side, which sounds easier said than done, especially since Tret in his current state has no qualms about letting the village die with him. Again, the party doesn’t really have any clue how they’re going to accomplish this, but at the very least they can’t just leave things as they stand now that they’ve seen what’s become of Kolima.
Since everyone’s a tree we can use any of the usual shops and services, but we can read everyones’ minds still. Amusingly enough, most of the townspeople are pretty nonplussed regarding their fate, treating being transformed more as a mild inconvenience than a fate worse than death, and a few even enjoy their new statuses. My favorite is one of the equipment shopkeepers, who’s grumbling that he can’t even make the best of things by growing into a tall tree because he’s stuck indoors. We can also see that some guy’s got a Venus Djinni locked up in a pen outside his house that it looks like we can only access from the underground. If we actually walk behind the house and head “down”, we can find a secret passage that’ll allow us to emerge out in the pen and snag that Djinni. It’s called Granite and its effect is that it’ll halve the damage the party will take for one turn. Very nice, and it has priority too so it’ll always activate at the start of a turn. Also, since this is our second Venus Djinni we can now summon the Lv. 2 Venus summon, Ramses. The summoning sequence depicts an Egyptian-themed statue appearing (it actually kinda resembles the Golem enemies found in the Megaman Zero games), triggering a rockslide by pounding its fists on the ground, then following up with a Rocket Punch. Incidentally, its named in the Japanese version is Amun-Ra, a fancier way of referring to Ra, the Egyptian god of the sun. Finally, Kolima also has an Apple, the Attack-boosting item, within a stray pot.
After exhausting what little there is to do in Kolima we have to backtrack northwest a few steps in order to enter Kolima Forest. Kolima Forest’s gimmick as a dungeon becomes clear once you take a few steps past the entrance and see a chaotic spread of stumps and fallen logs from cut down trees. All the puzzles here simply involve rolling logs around within the confines of the stumps in order to open up a path for us to continue down on. This culminates in one involving a floodgate that we have to use to manipulate a pond’s water level so that we can roll the logs around to provide a way across once the pond is refilled. The base puzzle’s very easy as it only involves pushing one log a little to the left, but if we spend a little more time rolling stuff around we can get to an optional treasure chest that contains a Fur Coat, a good piece of armor for Ivan since it also lessens Water damage, the element he’s weak to. Monster-wise, the two most notable new enemies in my eyes are Rats and Trolls. Rats, despite being to all appearances regular ol’ rats without any special moves, seem to have surprisingly high defense, taking little damage from anything they’re not weak to. Trolls are really slow as you can expect, but they are quite strong physically, and have a special move called Brute Force that can really put the hurt on whoever they target. Plus, they recover 10 HP a turn. As a dungeon Kolima Forest is not very strenuous all things considered, but since our last opportunity to visit an inn and stock up on supplies was back in Bilibin, it can be harsh if you’re underleveled or lacking in restorative items otherwise. Trolls can drop Nuts though, so there’s that.
Past the floodgate puzzle is the heart of the forest where Tret and Laurel reside, and we can see that they’re literally faces set right into the trunk of enormous trees, Grandmother Willow-style. Laurel does not appear to recognize us as being the same party she communicated with in the village as she simply tells us to leave before Tret dies, but reading her mind does reveal a method for restoring Tret to health - namely by using something called Hermes Water, which could only be found at the fountain of Mercury Lighthouse ages ago. Mercury Lighthouse...sounds like a place we need to be yesterday. Tret, however, will say absolutely nothing other than his angry mugshot popping up to tell us that “he” (good Tret) will not speak with us (so he has a split personality now?). This area looks like a dead end at first, but there are actually some vines hanging around that enable us to climb up into a hollow above Tret’s face, letting us enter the tree itself for the second half of the dungeon.
Our goal inside Tret’s tree is to climb up and up, sometimes entailing us having to step outside to navigate the branches. Occasionally we’ll have to leapfrog our way across some spiderwebs by jumping over dead leaves that’ll crumble once passed over (don’t ask me how they can support our weight at all), otherwise we’ll be sent plummeting down to the floor below. Item-wise there’s a badly-needed Psynergy Stone that we can use to top ourselves off, and inside a chest there’s a Healing Ring. While we can equip this, there’s no point in doing so as it doesn’t confer any stats; instead we can use it to restore some HP to a character, but if we do that it has a chance of breaking, rendering it unusable. If an item like this breaks however, we can just take it to a weapon/armor shop and have it repaired. It’s a good way to cut back on Isaac’s PP-usage. Out on one of the branches is a Jupiter Djinni named Breeze that can buff the team’s Resistance, but it’s kind of a pain to fight since it knows Flash Bolt and Wind Slash, two second-tier Wind spells that can ruin your day this early in the game. Once I stick it on Ivan he promotes to the Magician class, gaining him the handy Impact spell, which boosts one character’s Attack. Additionally we can now summon the Lv. 2 Jupiter summon, the huntress Atalanta. She’s depicted as raining arrows down on enemies.
Once we go as high as we can inside the tree we have to manipulate the leaf-hopping puzzle in such a way that we end up falling through a little hole in the center of the trunk that’ll take us aaaaallll the way down to the deepest part of the tree, where we can see Tret’s slumbering face set into the inside wall. Talking to him has him immediately wake up snarling and calling us fools for thinking we could awake the kind Tret. He claims that now that we’re at his heart our powers won’t save us, and we’re thrust right into the first real boss battle of the game.
Tret
HP
- 710
- Weak to Fire; Resists Water
- Growth - Deals Earth damage to one enemy.
- Quake - Deals Earth damage to two/three enemies.
- Thorn - Deals moderate Earth damage to two/three enemies.
- Sleep Star - Attempts to put two/three enemies to sleep.
So apparently Tret can detach himself from a wall and fight as a disembodied head. Cool.
Tret’s definitely tougher than the Vault bandits were but he’s not too hard. During our trip through the forest Garet’s learned the next spell in the Flare line, Flare Wall, and as new one named Volcano, while Ivan’s learned the powerful new Wind spell Plasma so they’ve got some offensive muscle. I just had Isaac mainly throw out Cures and Oil Drops (one of several consumable items that deal damage; Oil Drops are Fire-elemental and could be dropped from the Gnome monsters within the tree). Thorn and Sleep Star are the only two attacks of his that are really troublesome, the first due to it being somewhat powerful, enough to knock Ivan down into the single digits in one go if he’s the main target, and the second because Tret can get lucky with it and put two-thirds of your party to sleep. The only way to cure sleep at this point short of getting attacked are with Elixirs, so hopefully you ground some out from the local monsters or stocked up in Bilibin! Other than that it’s simply a matter of keeping your guys healthy.
Now that we can summon two of the stronger summons I’ll take the opportunity to mention a strategy that a lot of players use that’s generally simply referred to as “summon rushing”. It simply consists of putting all the party’s Djinn on standby right before going into a boss battle and then spending the opening turn completely nuking the boss with them. It’s a strategy that I’ve come to dislike for how cheesy it is and I’m gonna refrain from using it because it’s more satisfying, not to mention more difficult, to build up your summons and earn your victories the normal way. There’s probably going to be one exception though...
Winning earns us 226 EXP, 700 coins, and a Potion (fully restores a character’s HP).
That battle was enough for us to successfully kick the evil out of Tret. He opens his eyes, groggy as if from a long slumber, and realizes that he lost himself in his fury and thanks us for exorcising him, as he could not bear to leave the world with so much evil in his heart. As he prepares to die Garet and Ivan frantically speak up that he still needs to restore the people of Kolima to normal, and the tree spirit agrees and attempts to do so...but instead ends up lamenting that his powers are now too weak to reach Kolima. He closes his eyes and the face vanishes, imploring the people of Kolima to forgive him.
But even though that looks and sounds like a death scene, Tret is still alive, barely. Garet says that they can’t leave things like this and Ivan and presumably Isaac agree. So looks like we’ll have to follow up on the only other clue we have: the Hermes Water. Thus, next time we will be paying Mercury Lighthouse a visit...and waiting for us is a fierce battle.
Soundtrack
- The Forest's Requiem
- Everyone remembers the usual heavy-hitters on Golden Sun's soundtrack, but the more low-key atmospheric tracks like this one do a great job of filling in the gaps between the bombast.
- Tunnel Ruins
- Look out, we've just pissed something off.
- Battle! Golden Sun Boss ver.
- Music that sounds like this makes me think of a revving motorcycle engine.
