Serac

Serac (ゼロ Zero) is a Mercury Djinni found in Golden Sun: The Lost Age and Golden Sun: Dark Dawn.

Serac is the eleventh Mercury Djinni in Golden Sun: The Lost Age. The separate Djinn list viewable with the Select button from the status screen lists Serac and all other Mercury Djinn introduced in The Lost Age before the seven Mercury Djinn from the original Golden Sun, most likely because all the Djinn from the original game can be gotten all at once late in The Lost Age. However, the original Djinn are ordered before all of the Djinn introduced in The Lost Age in the Djinn inventory screen while they are allocated to characters. By this order, Serac is the eighteenth and final Mercury Djinni in the GBA series, rather than the eleveth.

Serac is the seventh Mercury Djinni in Golden Sun: Dark Dawn.

Basic description
When Set, Serac increases base HP by 12 and base Attack by 3.

When Serac is unleashed in battle, the user deals a Mercury-based attack equal in power to the user's normal physical attack with 70 damage points added to the result. This happens if the target does not get affected by Serac's side effect of instant death.

In The Lost Age, Serac's unleash animation visually resembles the user summoning the glowing blue image of a Mercury Djinni above the center of the battlefield. As the camera swivels around slowly, whitish blue energy erupts at the base of the target, and the Djinni hovers towards the target and disappears into the eruption of energy. Immediately after this, a 3D polygonal model of an iceberg juts out from the energy to encase the target inside. Finally when the camera has stopped swiveling, the user leaps forward to perform a normal attack that shatters the iceberg into into blue triangles that disappear quickly. In Dark Dawn, the enemy is encased in an icy whirlwind fueled from two opposing points off either side of the screen, and as the user rushes forward to perform an attack in slow motion, the iceberg is formed from the base of the enemy upward in segments. By the time the the iceberg has finished forming, blue energy has gathered into the user's impending strike, and the 3D model of Serac has just appeared behind the user. The user strikes down, and after a moment the iceberg turns white and shatters outward into smaller chunks while the ground the user and target are standing on are a snowy white. The Djinni disappears and the scene returns to normal as the user retakes their spot in the battling party, which also reappears at this time.

Damage calculation
Elemental physical attacks such as Serac 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

Serac's attack then takes this base damage value and uses it in the following equation:


 * ''final damage = (base damage + 70) * (1 + (Attacker's Mercury Power - Target's Mercury. Resistance) / 400)

To word this in prose, Serac takes the base damage of the user's normal physical attack, adds 70 to it, and then this result is modified by how much higher or lower the user's Mercury Power is than the target's Mercury Resistance. The difference between the user's Mercury Power and the target's Mercury Resistance is divided by 400, then 1 is added to this, resulting in what can be called the "elemental damage multiplier". This number is what Serac's damage is multiplied by.

For example, if an Adept with an Attack rating of 300 and a Mercury Power of 140 unleashes Serac on a monster with a defense of 100 and a Mercury Resistance of 90:


 * damage = ((Attack - Defense) / 2 + 70) * (1 + (Power - Resistance) / 400)
 * damage = ((300 - 100) / 2 + 70) * (1 + (140 - 90) / 400)
 * damage = ( / 2 + 70) * (1 + / 400
 * damage = ( + 70) * (1 + )
 * damage = *
 * damage = 191

Therefore, if Serac were to be unleashed under these circumstances it would deal 191 points of damage if it doesn't instantly fell the target.

Locations
Golden Sun: The Lost Age: Serac is found in the long series of hallways in the portion of Islet Cave accessibly only with the Teleport Psynergy found at the end of the game. It is hiding in an elevated statue in the second of the four narrow hallways, and can only be brought down to reachability by casting the Tremor Psynergy while facing toward the statue. The Djinni must be battled to be acquired. See here for enemy statistics.

Golden Sun: Dark Dawn: Serac is fought inside Harapa Ruins when it is explored late in the exploration of the Ei-Jei region, at the horizontally long and narrow B4 level. It can only be reached by dropping from above. As part of what the player would need to do in order to reach the ultimate goal of the ruins, the player would have to slide into the central sliding ice maze in B3 from the ice in the room to the right, and then slide up, right, down, left, up, and left. At this spot in the northwest portion of the sliding ice maze, one would either slide up, right, and up to make it to the Ice Queen boss encounter, or slide down, right, and down to end up right behind Serac on B4. Fight it and earn it, then return upstairs and follow the above steps again to get to the boss. See here for enemy statistics.

Analysis
General: Serac is one of the ideal attacking Mercury Djinn. It has a strong set-damage-bonus attack that should be quite useful for any Adept unleashing it, and it has a chance to instantly fell the target (provided it is not a high-luck target like a boss). In practical terms, the chance to instantly defeat the enemy in battle is technically better than any other status condition you can inflict on an enemy, because the point of status conditions is to help the player render an enemy dead sooner with less difficulty to begin with. The only other attacking Mercury Djinni that can match it in usefulness is one with a damage multiplier, and even in that case the party's attack ratings would have to be particularly high so that Serac's 70 bonus damage isn't as significant and there is more attack for the damage multiplier to work off of.

Ability analysis
Golden Sun: The Lost Age: Aside from other means of dealing damage to the enemy while attempting to instantly kill them, such as the Annihilation Psynergy, the Helm Splitter Psynergy series, and the Charon summon, the only other attacking Djinni that has an instant-death chance is the Jupiter Djinni Whorl. Compared to that, Serac is superior because it has 30 more damage in its set-damage bonus to offer. Serac is one of the last Djinn found in the game, and while it is useful even then, that most of the game has gone by at this point is a strike against its usability - other attacking Mercury Djinn such as Sour would have had ample opportunity to be useful. It is still a useful tool to try to eliminate enemies fast with, and it will net enhanced rewards from an enemy weak to Mercury Djinn whether it's the instant death effect that does it or not. Piers can probably make the best use of Serac against an endgame boss for its damage value in place of the Diamond Berg Psynergy because unleashing Serac will put a Mercury Djinni On Standby for summoning.

Golden Sun: Dark Dawn: In stark contrast to the previous game, Serac is found roughly a third of the way into this game. This startlingly early point for such a strong Djinni gives Serac all sorts of opportunity to prove itself very useful to the party for essentially the rest of the game - the 70 added damage is very powerful for any Adept unleashing it, and of course instantly killing the target is the best side effect one can hope for in general. Serac will be one of the best Djinn the party has for much of the game because other attacking Djinn coming up have the same strong set damage bonus or even higher, but with far inferior side-effects in several cases.

Name Origin
A serac is a block or column of ice formed by intersecting crevasses on a glacier. They are often house-sized (if not larger) but are unstable and may topple with little warning, making them dangerous to mountaineers. Even when stabilized by persistent cold weather, they can be an impediment to glacier travel. Zero comes from temperatures bellow 0° are freezing temperatures.