Doom Dragon

The Doom Dragon is the final boss in Golden Sun: The Lost Age, fought on the aerie of the game's final storyline dungeon, Mars Lighthouse. It is powerful and very durable, and a longer-lasting battle than any other, with several potentially very troublesome abilities in the later stages, making it very difficult to unprepared players. It is the final obstacle to defeat in The Lost Age, and defeating it leads the player to the game's ending.

As a boss
The Doom Dragon boss encounter takes place at the end of the final storyline dungeon in The Lost Age, Mars Lighthouse, and is treated as the game's final boss in that after it is defeated, the remaining material of the game is cutscene material leading up to the ending. The scripted encounter, with an appropriately lengthy procession of story-intensive cutscenes prior to the battle, triggers when after you use the Teleport Psynergy to warp your party to the top of Mars Lighthouse, you approach the area where the well for the Mars Star is.

The Doom Dragon is a unique encounter in that it technically counts as three enemies, one fought right after the other in the same battle, with each representing a different "form" of the beast (presented as the three-headed dragon steadily losing heads over the course of the battle). All three forms are at level 48, and the three forms taken together give the Doom Dragon a grand total of 13,200 HP, which is only beaten out by the HP rating of the optional boss Dullahan (16,000 HP). Furthermore, because the Hard Mode multiplies each individual form's HP by 1.5, the three forms taken together give the Hard Mode version of the Doom Dragon a grand total of 19800 HP (which actually breaches the 16383 HP limit imposed on single enemies, which Dullahan and Valukar are the only enemies to meet). However, at no point in the battle does the Doom Dragon's Attack rating ever come into play, because all of its abilities are either attacks operating on base damage values or special effects.



First stage (Three heads)
This first form is arguably very easy to handle despite the high HP because most of its abilities are hardly damaging at all except for its Blast Breath, and it does not have certain highly dangerous abilities from the later two phases. Furthermore, while this form acts four times a turn, on many turns at least one of the boss' four actions will be nothing, and the battle text will read "Doom Dragon can't move!". This usually occurs after a Blast Breath. However, it has a small chance to use Djinn Blast to severely weaken a single Adept for a fair amount of turns, which starts becoming a concern when the more damaging later phases arrive.

The first stage of Doom Dragon has the following statistics:

The first form of the Doom Dragon uses the following abilities:



Second stage (Two heads)
The second stage of the Doom Dragon battle adds the enormously damaging Cruel Ruin attack to its repertoire. It shares qualities with a higher-end Summon sequence in that it has both a high base damage rating and hits the center target for extra damage equal to 40% of their total HP, and hits the entire party. While this means that one of your four party members will be brought down to particularly low health even if at high health, the rest of the party will take fairly significantly lower amounts of damage because of a middle-of-the-road damage distribution formula that is below that of a typical offensive Psynergy. Having a party member repeatedly use Cool Aura or Wish Well/Pure Wish should make Cruel Ruin assaults manageable, though party members that that get hit by Djinn Blast and reduced to much lower class stages are more at risk of being downed by Cruel Ruin and requiring reviving. In the meantime, the Doom Dragon's other weaker abilities are now somewhat more consistent in their damage, and the Doom Dragon has the capacity to render itself mostly invincible for a given turn with Guard Aura.

The second stage of Doom Dragon has the following statistics:

The second form of the Doom Dragon uses the following abilities:



Third stage (One head)
The third stage of the Doom Dragon battle is easily the most likely to wipe out the party for fairly simple reasons: not only is it more likely to cast Cruel Ruin on a given turn, but its Djinn Blast is replaced with the incredibly crippling Djinn Storm, which spreads the same effect across the entire frontal party. By removing the frontal party's Djinn for a large number of turns, the current battlers are at much greater risk of getting downed by Cruel Ruin, and the Revive Psynergy is mostly exclusive to classes that only have it when multiple Djinn are Set (though an Adept equipped with the Tomegathericon to be a Dark Mage is an exception, and a Venus Adept that enters the Swordsman class once a Mercury Djinni is Set back onto him also regains early access to Revive). Not only that, the few other offensive area-of-effect attacks it now has access to are consistently in the neighborhood of high-tier Psynergy attacks, including Darksol Gasp, and it is more likely to use Guard Aura on a turn.

The third stage of Doom Dragon has the following statistics:

The third form of the Doom Dragon uses the following abilities:

Strategies
First of all, this being the literal final battle of a given game and one where you're not allowed to save after winning it (other than Clear Data after the epilogue, of course), players who typically conserve hard-to-get healing items like Psy Crystals and Water of Lifes for later use are strongly encouraged to distribute them evenly among all the Adepts, and use them whenever they would be helpful.

An important thing to note about the Doom Dragon before attempting to battle it seriously is that it does not count as one enemy with 13200 HP, but rather three enemies in a row, each having between 4000 and 5000 HP. Therefore, a straight-forward "summon-rushing" approach will do nowhere near as much damage against a Doom Dragon form as, say, the single-encounter 16,000-HP boss Dullahan, since summon spells increase their damage in proportion to the maximum HP meters of enemies. Thus, what would do over 3000 damage against Dullahan would do only over 1000 damage against Doom Dragon, so Doom Dragon essentially has to be battled at length in order to ensure you survive its attacks in between.

If you're planning on using strong Summon sequences against Doom Dragon regardless, you should decide which form of Doom Dragon you want to use it on. The first form has abilities that are quite weak for the most part, and clearing away its 5000 HP can be done without much difficulty, but summons may be used here to cut down the time spent until the next form is battle. On the other hand, the more-dangerous second form may be considered for using summons against because cutting down on the boss' HP decreases the length of this part of the battle and increases the chance the party will win without casualties. The two things that make this a riskier approach is that the Doom Dragon's Cruel Ruin attacks have a greater risk of downing an Adept that is in a lower-stage class with fewer HP, and there is always a chance in the second and third phases that Doom Dragon may decide to use Guard Aura to negate almost all damage it would take for the entire turn, from summons or otherwise. If you have several Adepts-worth of summons prepared, you may want to refrain from using them all in one turn and risk all of them getting blocked off by Guard Aura, instead opting to use summons on separate turns.

Having party members with access to Cool Aura and Wish Well (or far more preferably, Pure Wish) is greatly helpful for healing the damage from the usages of Cruel Ruin in the later two phases, and Jenna can become a particularly strong mass-party healer if she is equipped with Big Bang Gloves, which quite literally adds 80 points of base healing to Cool Aura. But because of how the Doom Dragon in its third form can use Djinn Storm to put all of your current battling Adepts' Djinn in Recovery, thus severely weakening them, denying them their ability to summon effectively, and even denying them their aforementioned group-healing spells like Cool Aura and Pure Wish, it is imperative that all of your party members have at least been leveled up relatively thoroughly. Being at higher levels can make a big difference when a party of drained Adepts tries to keep itself alive until more Djinn have Set themselves back onto them, so it is highly recommended to repeatedly fight the Experience-rich Wonder Birds at Islet Cave, both to gain more statistics and to attain Pure Wish. Finally, the party is allowed to stock up on Mist Potions sold at Prox to allow any Adept to heal 300 HP to all current battling Adepts when the situation calls for it, though this is expensive.

The Doom Dragon battle is an ideal example of a boss battle where a particular equipment setup for one of your Venus Adepts will help out immensely. The game's best weapon is the Sol Blade because of the immense, multiplicative power of its Megiddo unleash effect, which works wonders against Doom Dragon despite it having near-maximum Venus resistance. However, the Sol Blade, like most other weapon Artifacts, only has a 35% chance to Unleash its effect when the equipped Adept performs a straight physical attack. But the Unleash chance can be increased all the way to 99% if the equipped Venus Adept is also equipped with the Valkyrie Mail (which adds 20% to the Adept's Unleash rate), Riot Gloves (which adds another 20%), a Mythril Helm (which adds 12% more), and Hyper Boots (which adds 12% more). The Valkyrie Mail is found easily in a chest earlier in Mars Lighthouse, and Hyper Boots are pretty easy to win from Lucky Wheels at Contigo, but a Mythril Helm is randomly forged from the Mythril Silver material, while Riot Gloves are a very rare drop from a Minos Knight in Yampi Desert Cave (if you don't abuse the game's Random Number Generator, of course). If you can't get these last two items, the somewhat weaker Aegis Shield (+10% to Unleash rate) and the previous game's Warrior's Helm if it was transferred (+10% to Unleash rate) can be used to at least get the warrior's Unleash rate up to 87%. At any rate, having one of your Venus Adepts being able to unleash a Megiddo essentially every turn makes an impressive difference in how fast the Doom Dragon battle goes by. (And of course, it goes without saying that the battle will also be made easier if the other Adepts are equipped with weapons like Excalibur, Tisiphone Edge, and Masamune, and also if a Darksword-equipped Adept in the Ronin class uses Quick Strike every turn.)

Story
After the activation of Jupiter Lighthouse, Isaac's party joins forces with Felix's party, and the combined party of Adepts travels north to Mars Lighthouse with the intention to activate it with the Mars Star, knowing that the world would eventually physically wither if Alchemy is not released in time. The entity responsible for originally pitting Isaac's group against Felix's quest to restore alchemy, the Wise One and the guardian of Alchemy's seal, thus decides to lure the parents of Felix and Isaac's father Kyle away from the nearby town of Prox towards Mars Lighthouse and uses his god-like powers to transform the three adults together into a colossal and powerful but mindless and bestial three-headed dragon.

When the Adepts arrive at the tower's top, they have their fateful encounter with the Wise One, who berates Isaac for disobeying his command and warns that releasing the great power of Alchemy would allow those evil among Weyard's populace to abuse it and cause wars and strife. When the Adepts are not dissuaded, the Wise One then summons his creation for the Adepts to battle in order to earn the right to light Mars Lighthouse. Isaac quickly realizes in secret the truth behind the dragon's true nature, but he makes the decision to place the fate of the world above the fate of their own parents and charges into battle with the rest of the unwitting Adepts. After an epic and harrowing fight, the beast is slain, and reverts to the dead forms of their parents. The rest of the horrified Adepts are driven to grief over the realization of the cruel trick the Wise One committed, but Isaac explains that he knew what he was doing and explains why he made the decision to go through with his fight, and everyone else agrees this was the price necessary to save Weyard. The Mars Lighthouse is subsequently lit, releasing Alchemy.

When the Mars Beacon is set alight, the elemental power it exudes miraculously revives the parents, and the Adepts bring the adults back out of the lighthouse and return to Prox, where the parents are nursed back to health by the people of Prox. Isaac later ponders why everything happened at Mars Lighthouse the way they did: The Wise One had turned the parents into a dragon that Isaac and the others were forced to fight and pretty much kill, yet the way the parents were revived back by the beacon's light suggests the Wise One had to have known that would happen in advance. Kraden hazards a guess with wild implications: The Wise One's actions were all part of his grand scheme to test Isaac and his companions as individuals capable of the great responsibility of ensuring that throughout the world, Alchemy is not abused and used for evil. In slaying the dragon knowing full well that he would be killing the ones he hoped to be reunited with, but placing the welfare of the world over the more personal elements which he holds dear to his heart, Isaac has demonstrated the emotional fortitude needed to make the tough but right choices.

Thirty years after the Golden Sun event, the battle between the Warriors of Vale and the Doom Dragon has become fairly well-known. Some Vale refugees memorialize the battle in the Psynergy Training Grounds, a theme park-style retelling of the Warriors' journey, via a mechanical contraption known as the Dim Dragon. The Dim Dragon will battle any Adept that encounters it, and possesses watered-down versions of the Doom Dragon's attacks. However, the revelation that the Doom Dragon was actually created by the transformation of Isaac's father and Jenna and Felix's parents is left out.

Trivia

 * The colors of the heads on the Doom Dragon match up with the elements of the Adepts the Wise One used and transformed to create the monster - 2 orange heads representing the two Venus Adepts (Kyle and Felix's father), and 1 red head representing Jenna's mother, a Mars Adept. If the way the adepts are laid out on the ground is any indicator, then Kyle represented the first orange head to be cut off, and Felix's father was the central head that is battled through to the final round of the boss fight.
 * During its final phase, the Doom Dragon somehow becomes heavily Venus-based and loses its ability to utilize Mars-based Psynergy. One possible reason for this could be because the head that is cut off in the second phase is the red head (Jenna's Mother, a Mars Adept) and therefore severs its link to wielding Mars Psynergy.
 * Oddly enough, the in-game sprite for the Doom Dragon has the red head on its left, but the battle sprite has it switched to its right.
 * The Doom Dragon battle is the only battle in the Golden Sun series that progresses with the boss assuming different stages and forms over time.
 * The unique final boss music heard in the battle with Doom Dragon is remixed and used alongside a remix of Felix's battle theme together as one song in Super Smash Bros. Brawl. The track is playable on the "Norfair" multiplayer stage.