Living Statue enemy line

The Living Statue and Hydros Statue are special enemies that are battled in Golden Sun. These monsters, resembling large dragon-like statues that are self-animating, are palette swaps of each other that have differing levels of power and defense. Both variants are fought in a series of mandatory encounters, one of which is a boss.

Living Statue
A Living Statue (リビングスタチュー) is a comparatively small level 17 variant that is turquoise, with yellow wings and tail. In Golden Sun it does not appear as parts of random battles; it appears in limited quantities as scripted battles that occur throughout Altin Peak, with only one ever fought at a time.

Because what few of these enemies there are in the game are only featured as separate encounters always alone, in scripted encounters you may trigger after preparing, these enemies should never be actual threats to a party of 4 Adepts. They may take quite a few hits and their attacks generally hard hitting, but oftentimes merely having everyone physically attack is enough.

A Living Statue's statistics are as follows:

A Living Statue uses these battle commands:

Hydros Statue
The Hydros Statue (ハイドロスタチュー Hydro Statue) is a giant-sized level 18 variant that is blue, with violet wings and tail. In Golden Sun it is a mandatory boss battle that takes place at the end of the Altin Peak dungeon, in a room you uncover after a sequence involving a large rolling boulder chases after you and crashes to make a hole in the ground. The party, having already defeated the lesser Living Statues by this point, climb down into the hole, reach a tiled room, and the massive Hydros Statue advances towards them and automatically begins the battle. Following it, the characters comment about how strange it was that these statues came to life in the first place, and the existence of a tiled room below the mines, before collecting another reward from the chest behind the Hydros Statue, the Lifting Gem.

This boss encounter, though seemingly overflowing with water-based group attacks against your party, is especially manageable if by this point you collected all the possible Djinn. This includes four Mercury Djinn, which when all Set onto Mia puts her into the Cleric class, which gives her access to the extremely practical Wish Psynergy series of group-healing spells. And if the three Mars Djinn are all On Standby on Garet, he can summon Tiamat for one particularly helpful burst of massive damage, and the boost to his own Mars Power rating he gets from using a summon helps his damage output with his other Mars-based offenses for the following turns. It is worth noting that this boss only has 100 more hit points than Saturos, who was fought at least two boss battles earlier in the game, which is quite a lot earlier.

The Hydros Statue's statistics are as follows:

The Hydros Statue uses these battle commands:

Story relevance
The Living Statues originally reside in the mines of Altin and are viewed as the town's "guardian statues", but when the Mercury Lighthouse is lit, the powerful water Psynergy emanating from the beacon causes the statues to magically come to life, whereupon they take it upon themselves to use their mind-boggling water-spouting skills to flood Altin completely. When Isaac's party comes to Altin, they battle the living statues one by one, and each time they defeat one the water level of the flood zone recedes, allowing them to explore more of the mines. Eventually, all the statues are defeated and the town is dried off.

The "Hydros" in this monster's name may be interpreted as possibly representing more than the term "hydropower" (power derived from the force or energy of moving water); in Golden Sun: The Lost Age, one important NPC is named King Hydros, who is the ancient king of the Mercury-based civilization of Lemuria and apparently has been since the ancient past. The statues in Altin could possibly have a long-lost connection to Lemuria considering the Hydros Statue's name and Mercury abilities, and it can subsequently be speculated that the tiled room the statue is fought in indicates a connection between Lemuria and the modern-day area of Altin.