The Golden Sun franchise's class system is one of the things that's widely liked about the games, but I think it could be tighter and more interesting. While the djinn are the means by which the player manipulates the party's classes (and thus their spells and stats), it is largely optional to utilize them fully.
Personally, I prefer unleashing djinn to using Psynergy, but only in the case of optional bosses are you really required to use djinn unleashes and summons. Sentinel in The Lost Age is the main example here, since he's 100% immune to Psynergy and can only be damaged by weapons, djinn, and summons. I suppose that, with enough patience, you could just sit there and whack him with melee attacks and cast some Wish or Aura spell every turn, but I doubt that's fun for anyone.
Indeed, it strikes me as odd that immunities don't really feature in the game at all. Outside of Sentinel's Psynergy immunity and the usual JRPG nonsense of giving you a stack of status effects to play with and barely any bosses that are susceptible to them, you can just stand there in your little line and just keep throwing spells until the EXP text shows up in the feed. This is usually aided by a psynergy stone appearing partway through a dungeon.*
Furthermore, djinn affect very few things outside of combat. The need to manipulate djinn lineups to cast Growth in the GBA duology was eliminated in Dark Dawn by giving Matthew permanent access to the spell. Aside from this one quirk of the djinn system for two games, utility spells fall into just a few categories:
Required for game completion; granted by default class or permanently usable by a character. (e.g. Move, Frost)
Required for game completion; granted by equippable item. (e.g. Carry, Tremor)
Required for game completion; granted by event to a specific character. (e.g. Reveal, Parch)
Not required for game completion, but usable in optional situations; granted by equippable item (Cloak, Halt, Catch)
You even get some redundancy in the form of the Frost Jewel. Even if you completely reorganize Mia's djinn, you're guaranteed to have a Frost user in the party.
Let's reimagine this. I don't mind psynergy-granting items, but what if a specific djinni could grant a spell, in addition to a boost to one or more stats?
Mist is a Mercury djinni whose unleash action is a melee attack accompanied by a chance to inflict delusion, increasing the target's chance to miss. Mist is also a spray of fine droplets (found, for example, at the bottom of a waterfall) which scatter light and thereby obscure vision. What if Mist granted its possessor a utility spell that obscured vision in a small area, dissipating after a short time?
The description of Flint's unleash is "Strike a blow that can cleave stone". What if possessing Flint granted a spell called Cleave, which allows a character to break stone obstacles (up to a certain size, anyway), or, in combat, deal extra damage against enemies whose name or visual appearance alludes to stone (e.g. Earth Golem, Living Statue)?
A Golden Sun game that allows you to spread the party members across a room for more turn-based tactics combat and more complex puzzles would be made more interesting by moving abilities around. The only time this matters in the existing games is for Colosso, where optimally solving the shortcut puzzles requires assigning specific items to specific characters (and even configuring Mia's djinn for Growth); in all other cases, spreading psynergy-granting items throughout the party is only necessitated by the 15-item limit in each character's inventory and the fact that some characters in some classes have too little PP to be spell mules.
If we keep the OG class system on top of this concept, and then we also design dungeons that require different combinations of abilities to be spread out in different areas, the player will, at times, be forced to fight with some of their characters in different classes. Here's an example, using Nowell and Takeru from my previous post on the subject.
Task: Shut Down the Broken Steam Engine for Repairs
The dungeon takes the form of a giant steam engine. Psynergetic flame constantly keeps feedwater (from perhaps a river or an Alchemical point source) boiling, and through a series of tubes and pistons, this is turned into a mechanical action. The problem is that one set of the pistons is broken and isn't driving anything, but approaching the broken piston causes the players to be damaged by leaking steam.
There is a guardian statue, akin to those of Mercury Lighthouse, which pours out water for as long as anyone casts Ply on it, but the statue and the channel into which it pours water are blocked by a collapsed stone wall. At the other end of this channel, and across it, there is a pump and a nozzle that can be used to project water into the fire to extinguish it. When water is flowing through the channel, the channel cannot be crossed.
Nowell, as a member of the Mercury Clan (and, we'll assume, a Water Seer like Mia and Rief), shall be granted Ply regardless of her class.** She trades her djinni Meltwater, which grants the spell Restore, for Takeru's djinni Knap, which grants the spell Cleave. Nowell crosses the empty channel while Takeru remains by the pump. Nowell casts Cleave to clear the collapsed wall and Ply the guardian statue for water. Takeru directs the pump and nozzle into the fire.
Monsters made of soot and boiler sludge enter the area from the extinguished fire. Combat begins with Nowell in the two element Seer (Mercury) class because she possesses at least one Venus djinni. She cannot return to her original class until she is close enough to trade djinn with Takeru again. As it is no longer necessary to cast Ply on the statue, the channel becomes passable again.
At this point I'm basically just designing puzzles for an eventual Golden Sun tabletop campaign, but I hope you see what I'm getting at.
* I tend to end a game with a lot of psy crystals because I use djinn for a vast majority of combat encounters, and I'm almost never low on PP. What little PP is strictly necessary to complete a dungeon's puzzles is easily recovered through these stones or simply by not running everywhere.
** This is not how the games handle Ply, but it ought to be, and that's a design change I would want here.
germansingergirl
snowghoul
yousharknotpass
vaporwave
discoholicmusic
