Chain

Chain (チェイン Chain) is a Venus Djinni found in Golden Sun: Dark Dawn.

Chain is the twelfth Venus Djinni in Dark Dawn.

Basic description
When Set, Chain increases its Adept's base HP by 8, base Psynergy Points by 4, and base Attack by 3.

When Chain is unleashed in battle, each non-downed party member currently participating in the battle deals a Venus-aligned physical attack with their weapon equal to their normal physical attack, with each hit scoring its own damage result that is shown on screen. Each of the participating party members' respective Attack ratings and Venus power ratings apply. This does not "use up" any of the action turns of the other Adepts besides the user, so if any of the other Adepts have been ordered to, say, perform a normal physical attack on the target on the same turn the holder of Chain makes use of Chain, the other Adept would appear to execute two attacks on that turn. (Of course, the normal attack that the other Adept was selected to use this turn is subject to Critical and Unleash chances, unlike the attack that was spurred on by Chain.) However, if the target dies over the course of the flurry of hits, the remaining hits will not re-target to other enemies and will be negated.

In Dark Dawn, Chain's unleash animation visually resembles the 3D model of Chain appearing above the target and floating around and off the screen briefly as a very long, thin, dark-gray metal chain coils around the target from behind the camera, until the target is covered in several loops. The wrapped enemy visually shrinks and briefly pulsates in size twice to simulate a "squeeze", and just as that happens, your first party member performs a normal physical attack, and the other three party members perform their normal physical attacks in order, each one starting their attack animation while the previous party member's attack animation is in the midst of being carried out. Naturally, downed party members do not contribute to the chain. The chain disappears once the fourth party member's hit passes by.

Damage calculation
Elemental physical attacks from offensive Djinn typically use the damage dealt by the attacker's standard physical attack as the base damage to be later modified. The total amount of damage dealt by a normal physical attack is half the difference between the attacker's Attack statistic and the target's Defense statistic, as this equation shows:


 * ''base damage = (Attacker's Attack - Target's Defense) / 2

Chain basically has all four of the party members do that at once. For each party member, the following equation is used to turn the above base damage into a final damage value:


 * ''final damage = base damage * (1 + (Attacker's Venus Power - Target's Venus Resistance) / 400)

To word this in prose, each Adept participating in Chain has the base damage of the user's normal physical attack modified by how much higher or lower the user's Venus Power is than the target's Venus Resistance, and the four separate hits are effectively the total damage of the move. The difference between each user's Venus Power and the target's Venus Resistance is divided by 400, then 1 is added to this, resulting in what can be called the "elemental damage multiplier" for that Adept's attack.

The following example of Chain's damage mechanics concerns a party that is fighting a Death Scuttler in the Apollo Ascent at the end of the game. This enemy has around 220 Defense and 100 Venus Resistance. If your front-row party is comprised of Matthew with around 550 Attack and 180 Venus Power, Karis with around 370 Attack and 80 Venus Power, Tyrell with around 500 Attack and 75 Venus Power, and Amiti with around 390 Attack and 80 Venus Power,


 * Matthew's damage = ((Attack - Defense) / 2 ) * (1 + (Power - Resistance) / 400)
 * Matthew's damage = ((550 - 220) / 2 ) * (1 + (180 - 100) / 400)
 * Matthew's damage = ( / 2) * (1 + / 400
 * Matthew's damage = * (1 + )
 * Matthew's damage = 198


 * Karis' damage = ((Attack - Defense) / 2 ) * (1 + (Power - Resistance) / 400)
 * Karis' damage = ((370 - 220) / 2 ) * (1 + (80 - 100) / 400)
 * Karis' damage = ( / 2) * (1 + / 400
 * Karis' damage = * (1 + )
 * Karis' damage = 71


 * Tyrell's damage = ((Attack - Defense) / 2 ) * (1 + (Power - Resistance) / 400)
 * Tyrell's damage = ((500 - 220) / 2 ) * (1 + (75 - 100) / 400)
 * Tyrell's damage = ( / 2) * (1 + / 400
 * Tyrell's damage = * (1 + )
 * Tyrell's damage = 131


 * Amiti's damage = ((Attack - Defense) / 2 ) * (1 + (Power - Resistance) / 400)
 * Amiti's damage = ((390 - 220) / 2 ) * (1 + (80 - 100) / 400)
 * Amiti's damage = ( / 2) * (1 + / 400
 * Amiti's damage = * (1 + )
 * Amiti's damage = 80

These four separate attacks from the party would amount to 198, 71, 131, and 80 damage. These add up to a grand total of approximately 480 damage.

Location
Golden Sun: Dark Dawn: Chain is found in the southwest corner of the exterior screen of the dungeon Warrior's Hill, the first dungeon generally traversed once the game's late oceanic segment begins. Chain can only be reached later in the exploration - first, Harun Channel must have been visited, and its flow of water must have been let loose to start the rotation process of inactive watermills in Warrior's Hill. Then, a puzzle must be solved based on the newly rotating cogs and mechanisms to get the second, upper left of the dungeon's three turquoise towers to rise out of the ground and allow you to walk out of its front door. Once outside this upper-left tower, climb the tree to the left of it and hop left and travel down to where Chain is "hiding". It must be fought in order to be earned. See here for enemy statistics.

Analysis
General: Chain is far and away the most powerful attack Djinni in the Golden Sun series, simply because in place of enhancing the user's single attack with either a large amount of set bonus damage or a damage multiplier, it is quite literally four separate Adepts-worth of physical attacks in one move. Of course, it is a very occasional limiter to Chain's damage output that a portion of its damage will be missing if there are any Adepts in the battling party that are currently Downed. But otherwise, even if not all of the Adepts in question have particularly high attack ratings, the damage Chain will cause will most likely still be significantly higher than, say, if the strongest attacking Djinni otherwise, Geode, is unleashed by whomever is the highest-attack Adept you have.

The mechanics of Chain essentially mean that Chain's massively-damaging attack can be dramatically raised by having all four of the currently-battling Adepts sporting the highest raw attack statistics you can give them, whether by optimizing them with classes and weapons with naturally high attack ratings to begin with, and/or by casting attack-boosting Psynergy like High Impact and Weapon Grace or Djinn like Forge and Stoke. Also, the nature of Chain's mechanics makes it irrelevant which Adept is actually unleashing the Djinni; the overall damage will be the same whether unleashed by an Adept with naturally high attack or one of the lower-attack Adepts in the same group. And finally, this does nothing to "interrupt" or "replace" any of the battle maneuvers the user's allies have been selected to perform on the same turn.

Chain does damage to a single enemy comparable to a multi-Djinn summon, and its ease of use (as easily as an individual Djinni's battle effect can be used, at any rate) makes it one of the most abnormally useful "inexpensive" effects in any Golden Sun game. Because the only limiter to the number of times Chain can be repeatedly used in a given battle is the fact it is the Unleash effect of a Djinni, Chain can be unleashed once every other turn if the Adept holding it manually resets Chain every turn in between. (If the Adept instead uses the Venus Djinni Chain On Standby for the basic Venus summon, Chain can be unleashed at most once every three turns.)

By game
Golden Sun: Dark Dawn: Chain becomes one of the party's most powerful and useful weapons when it is collected early in the last third of the game. Because it does not matter which of the battling Adepts it happens to be Set on, it would actually be prudent to put it on a low-attack "caster-style" Adept, so that high-attack "warrior-style" Adepts may be free to perform their own powerful maneuvers in addition. It is relatively near-sighted to label Chain a Djinni that "obsoletes" any of the other Djinn, because it is the only "Chain"-style effect that exists in the game, and is therefore available to only one Adept at a time. Other attacking Djinn, like the massive x1.9 damage multiplier of the Venus Djinni Geode, remain useful on other party members who have the capacity to unleash it on the same turn another Adept unleashes Chain, and in cases like these the other offensive Djinn are best Set on high-attack Adepts that do not also have Chain set onto them.

In addition to the Psynergies and Djinn effects that can be used to maximize the party's Attack ratings for when a Chain unleash is executed, a particularly strong boost to Chain's overall damage output will be achieved if one of the current Adepts in the battle is Sveta having used the Beastform Psynergy to temporarily achieve a colossal Attack rating (Obviously, you would not want Chain to be on Sveta herself because she cannot Unleash Djinn in that state). While Sveta is in Beastform, her extremely high Attack rating can basically be put to use twice in the same turn - by one of her own special attacks and by a Chain unleash by another Adept.