LogFAQs > #930702730

#21: The Keeper of Light (Dullahan, Golden Sun: The Lost Age)

If you want the sun's power, show me your own.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83qpGTPWlL0

In middle school, my close circle of friends were fiends for the Golden Sun series. It was a full-fledged RPG "kinda like Final Fantasy" that we could play on our shiny Game Boy Advance SPs that we were so proud of. My friend Andrew even made a guide right here on GameFAQs -- or at least that's what I remember, but I couldn't find it on the Golden Sun TLA walkthrough/guide page. In any case, GS:TLA is the game that first brought me to GameFAQs, so it gets a shout-out here no matter what.

Golden Sun did something that was unprecedented at the time (and I'm not sure if it's even been done in the modern era) -- it let you import your data from Golden Sun to TLA, but you don't get your old party until midway through the game because you're playing as the "B team" in the first parts of TLA. 12-year-old me thought this was mind-blowing, and by the time we were approaching endgame, naturally Andrew had run numbers and calculations to give us a guide to optimal gear for each character, how to get them, and how to game the RNG in a certain area to guarantee rare drops. A decade later, Andrew would be the one who convinced me to attend the college I got my bachelor's in. Andrew's fucking awesome, is what I'm saying.

GS's story was "fine" in hindsight but not much to write home about. On the other hand, the combat system, where certain elemental spirits could equip to each party member and change both their stats and psynergy, was kickass, and the puzzles were really fun! I don't even like puzzles, usually. However, the coolest parts to us were the hidden super-bosses: Deadbeard from the original game, a nightmare of a ghost pirate, and then three more in the open world of TLA: Valukar, Sentinel, and the Star Magician. Valukar and Sentinel were way too easy for the hype, but Star Magician was a hell of a tactical fight that I thought would be the best in the series.

No, Andrew told me. There's one more, but even to access its dungeon, I needed every single djinn from both games. GS has a TON of Points of No Return, so I needed to do an entirely new play-through of both games to get into the Anemos Inner Sanctum. What followed was a brutal and thrilling dungeon that would have made my Top Dungeons list had it been selected in my poll. Is it nostalgia? Probably, but hell, I was 12 and this was the first time I'd ever gotten into a game this hard.

The reason I put so much setup is to demonstrate why Dullahan means so much to me. This was my first ever "endgame superboss," and he lived up to the name. Three actions per round, brutal melee hits, the ability to use a summon (no other enemy in any game can summon besides the PCs), and the ability to shred your stat buffs at a glance. Said summon had a decent chance of auto-killing a character, and he had a single-target spell that did the same. But the most brutal part was clearly the Djinn Storm. Not only does putting all your Djinn on Standby ruin any Summon plans you might have, it also shreds your stat and class boosts, making you lose HP, PP, and even a lot of your psynergy if you were mixing djinn. Mix in some insane HP regeneration and his inability to go OOM, and it was a long grind as I tried gimmick after gimmick.

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E come vivo? Vivo!