Buckle

Buckle is a Venus Djinni found in Golden Sun: Dark Dawn.

Buckle is the thirteenth Venus Djinni in Dark Dawn.

Basic description
When Set, Buckle increases its Adept's base HP by 11, base Defense by 2, base Agility by 3, and base Luck by 2.

When Buckle is unleashed in battle, all currently active and alive Adepts get buffed with a 25% temporary increase to their respective defense ratings. This is twice as strong as Protect/Protector. All defense-boosting effects come in the form of 12.5% "stages", so therefore Buckle boosts each Adept's defense rating by two stages, and the maximum amount of stages an Adept's defense can be boosted to is four, at +50%.

In Dark Dawn, Buckle's unleash animation visually resembles the user summoning the 3D model of Buckle, which hovers around briefly as each Adept has sixteen tiny gray squares arrange to form a four-by-four tiled square in front of him/her in order. A moment later, each Adept has a small yellow circular field climb up through their legs to indicate a statistical boost.

Location
Golden Sun: Dark Dawn: Buckle is automatically acquired in a cutscene late in the game. In the palace in Yamata City, when you approach the sleeping Himi while the Third Eye item from Warrior's Hill is in your inventory, story-relevant cutscenes transpire that result in Himi permanently joining your party. She brings with her this Djinni along with five other Djinn - Geode, Clover, Magnet, Pepper, and Swift.

Analysis
General: The mass-defense-boosting effect that Buckle and other identical Djinn provide is a highly effective buffing effect in any of the games because many enemies' attacks are physically based and will be lowered a large amount, justifying the turn an Adept takes to cast it. However, the additional defense works bests against enemies without many offensive Psynergy or monster skills that are based on elemental power rather than elemental physical attacks.

By game
Golden Sun: Dark Dawn: Buckle is theoretically a very valuable battle effect because it is two stacks of the Protect Psynergy in one maneuver, causing what physical attacks enemies have to be critically lowered. This is not to mention that the Djinni is put on Standby after this, so it can perform a Venus-aligned Summon in a subsequent turn. Buckle is, however, critically undermined for two reasons: it and its identical counterpart the Mercury Djinni Shell, found in the same late segment of the game, have much less opportunity to prove themselves useful than yet another identical counterpart, the Venus Djinni Brick, which is found much earlier in the game. Buckle therefore counts as a late-game copy to Brick that the party may decide to additionally use. The other reason Buckle and similar Djinn are not as useful in practice as in concept is how enemies generally do not inflict as much damage and are defeated more easily than in previous games. Some sort of self-imposed challenge would have to be in place in order for the enhanced defense to be about as useful as upgrading the party's attacking statistics.