Balm

Balm (タラソ Tarasso) is a Mercury Djinni found in Golden Sun: The Lost Age.

Balm is the tenth Mercury Djinni in Golden Sun: The Lost Age. The separate Djinn list viewable with the Select button from the status screen lists Balm 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, Balm is the seventeenth Mercury Djinni in the GBA series, rather than the tenth.

Basic description

 * "Revive all downed allies."

When Set, Balm increases its Adept's base HP by 13 and base PP by 4.

When Balm is unleashed in battle, each of the three allies other than the user which happen to be Downed have a 60% chance to be revived, and their HP restored to 60% of their maximum HP.

In The Lost Age, Balm's unleash animation visually resembles the user summoning a glowing blue image of a Mercury Djinni that floats above the party while the party is encased within the diameter of a rotating pillar of thin blue lines, and blue feathers flutter down from the top and spread out across the party.

Location
Golden Sun: The Lost Age: Balm is located in Mars Lighthouse, in a large room with a slippery ice floor that you would have to go through on the first half of the dungeon on your way to the Flame Dragon boss battle. From where you enter the room, before stepping on the ice cast Move on the dragon statue to the immediate left and slide it to the left remotely. Then slide down, left, down, left, up, right, up, left, down, left, and down to place yourself just to the right of Balm. Battle it and earn it, then slide up to get to where you can get the Teleport Lapis.

As an opponent (The Lost Age)
Statistically, Balm has 940 HP, 88 PP, 300 Attack, 94 Defense, 261 Agility, and 30 Luck. Like all other Mercury Djinn that are fought, in terms of resistance, it has a Mercury Resistance rating of 193, Venus and Jupiter Resistance ratings of 100 each, and a Mars Resistance rating of 25, and in regards to its abilities it uses its available Mercury-based attacks with a Mercury power rating of 125.

Balm can use the following battle commands:
 * Freeze Prism: Used 53 out of 256 times, this is a Psynergy spell that summons a massive storm of huge chunks of ice that shatters into the opposition, dealing a Mercury-based attack with a power rating of 190 and a range of 5. This ability consumes 31 of its user's PP.
 * Megacool: Used 47 out of 256 times, this is a Psynergy spell that summons large rows of ice spiking out from the ground at the opposition, dealing a Mercury-based attack with a power rating of 180 and a range of 7. This ability consumes 33 of its user's PP.
 * Ice Missile: Used 41 out of 256 times, this is a Psynergy spell that shoots a mass of ice spikes down onto multiple Adepts, dealing a Mercury-based attack with a power rating of 160 and a range of 3. This ability consumes 23 of its user's PP.
 * Froth Spiral: Used 35 out of 256 times, this is a Psynergy spell that projects a large array of watery spheres that arc into the party, dealing a Mercury-based attack with a power rating of 150 and a range of 5. This ability consumes 31 of its user's PP.
 * Deluge: Used 29 out of 256 times, this is a Psynergy spell that rains down an array of watery spheres on the party, dealing a Mercury-based attack with a power rating of 120 and a range of 5. This ability consumes 20 of its user's PP.
 * Attack: Used 28 out of 256 times, this is this monster's standard physical attack, but for this monster it is counted as a Mercury-based attack rather than a non-elemental attack.
 * Flee: Used 23 out of 256 times, this enemy has the ability to attempt to Flee the battle, thereby ending the battle if successful without rewarding you with the associated EXP, Coins, and the Djinni itself.

When felled, Balm yields 1112 EXP and 720 coins and the Balm Djinni is added to your party's Djinn collection. If you fell it with an offensive Mars Djinni like Fury, its rewards increase to 1445 EXP and 936 Coins.

As a Djinni acquirable at the final dungeon of the game, your 8-member party would have to find it very easy to defeat Balm and add it to your collection. Note that Balm's battle abilities are exactly the same as the abilities of the Mercury Djinni Eddy.

Analysis
General: Balm is a unique spin on the concept of a Djinni that is used to revive - it is the only reviving Djinni that can affect multiple allies at a time. If two or even all three of the user's allies are Downed, Balm may be used to attempt to bring multiple allies back to life in some form. This would already make Balm a highly situational Djinni in concept - the Adept that Balm happens to be Set on would have to be the only one alive while two, preferably all three, of the other Adepts in the current party are Downed. This is generally hard to set up - the most realistic way to put the Balm user in a position to revive three other Adepts is by having the user be in the back row of Adepts, and wait until all but one of the front row of Adepts has been downed, usually by a big boss. Then Switch out the one surviving Adept for the Balm user.

The big flaw to Balm, more so than that it only revives up to 60% of maximum HP, is that there is only a 60% chance to affect each Downed party member. This means chances are very likely that there will be failures to revive all three party members at once. If Balm only succeeds in reviving one Adept, that can generally be considered a failed case, because it would have been far better to use one of the other Djinn that revive single targets to higher percentages of HP more accurately, including the Mercury Djinni Dew. Balm is essentially a gamble that one may try to take in a very specific sort of desperate situation.

By game
Golden Sun: The Lost Age: Balm can be viewed as a direct upgrade of a different sort on the Mars Djinni Spark, which also involves a 60% chance to revive up to 60% max HP; rather than being better than Spark both in accuracy and HP-restoration terms, it is like Spark as it would apply to all downed party members in the currently battling party at once. In a game where you have fully accurate and fully powerful reviving measures in the form of the Revive Psynergy and Water of Life consumable items, and the Mars Djinni Tinder duplicates that effect exactly while all other reviving Djinn have strings attached, Balm becomes the only reviving Djinni in the game that has the potential to meaningfully differentiate itself from the others, but only in specific circumstances.

Name Orgin
A balm is an oil or lotion meant to soothe the body, hence why the Djinni Balm has a powerful healing effect.