Puff

Puff (バルン Balloon) is a Jupiter Djinni found in Golden Sun: Dark Dawn.

Puff is the ninth Jupiter Djinni in Dark Dawn.

Basic description
When Set, Puff increases its Adept's base HP by 11 and base Attack by 4.

When Puff is unleashed in battle, the user deals a Jupiter-based attack equal in power to the user's normal physical attack with an additional 30 damage points added to the result. This happens if the target does not get affected by Puff's side effect of instant death.

In Dark Dawn, Puff's unleash animation visually resembles the user summoning the 3D model of Puff in front of the enemy, and it holds its position for over two full seconds a short period of time. Then it disappears in a cyan-colored flash, while the enemy lifts up off the ground and physically grows in size before being launched off the screen briefly. It lands back on the ground normal-sized, and it either takes the hit or, if it is instantly felled, a brief, expanding, reddish semisphere flashes at the ground in front of the enemy as the enemy dies.

Damage calculation
Elemental physical attacks such as Puff 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

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


 * ''final damage = (base damage + 30) * (1 + (Attacker's Jupiter Power - Target's Jupiter Resistance) / 400)

To word this in prose, Puff, if it does not instantly fell the enemy, takes the base damage of the user's normal physical attack, adds 30 to it, and then this result is modified by how much higher or lower the user's Jupiter Power is than the target's Jupiter Resistance. The difference between the user's Jupiter Power and the target's Jupiter 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 Puff's damage is multiplied by.

For example, if an Adept with an Attack rating of 200 and a Jupiter Power of 150 unleashes Puff on a monster with a defense of 100 and a Jupiter Resistance of 100:


 * damage = ((Attack - Defense) / 2 + 30) * (1 + (Power - Resistance) / 400)
 * damage = ((200 - 100) / 2 + 30) * (1 + (150 - 100) / 400)
 * damage = ( / 2 + 30) * (1 + / 400
 * damage = ( + 30) * (1 + )
 * damage = *
 * damage = 90

Therefore, if Puff were to be unleashed under these circumstances and fail to instantly fell the enemy, it would deal 90 points of damage.

Location
Golden Sun: Dark Dawn: Puff is present at the penultimate screen of the dungeon-style location Talon Peak. Before you are able to get to it, you have to go through the series of cutscenes at the top screen of Talon Peak that both precede and follow the boss battle against the Mountain Roc. Once you are able to move around freely within the interior of the slain roc and go through the back exit to return outside, head to the right corner of the screen to the right of the stone wing, to where the now-cracked ledge is. Cast Crush on this to reveal a cliff slide, and slide down it to get to Puff to the lower left. Fight it and earn it now, because if you go through the last gate inside the depths of the upcoming Belinsk Ruins dungeon, Puff can be permanently missed because Talon Peak becomes no longer accessible.

Analysis
General: Puff is an odd blend of weak and strong aspects among attacking Djinn. To instantly fell a target is, in practical terms, 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. Granted, this is only a chance, and it should not be expected to work on a high-luck target like a boss, but any offensive effect that has the chance for this effect automatically becomes significantly more noteworthy because of it. On the other hand, it has a damage bonus as low as the weakest attacking Djinn in general, like Fever, meaning that the hit you deal on the chance the instant death fails to kick in will not be strong. This is not even as strong as the otherwise identical Jupiter Djinni Whorl from The Lost Age, which has 40 set bonus damage. Despite having much less base damage than the very useful Mercury Djinni Serac, it can remains a potentially interesting attack option for the Adept it is set on, granting that Serac is not on that same Adept.

By game
Golden Sun: Dark Dawn: Puff, being a Jupiter version of the Mercury Djinni Serac that is found some time later in the game and deals 40 less of a set damage bonus, adds itself to the party's Djinn collection at a point when the best attacking Jupiter Djinni the party has otherwise is Sirocco, strictly because it deals 60 bonus damage. This means Puff can be treated as a potential alternative to that for the rest of the game until the most desirable offensive Jupiter Djinni is finally found near the end of the game, Simoom. While Simoom deals a very strong 70 bonus damage and has a powerfully damaging side effect in the form of inflicting Venom, Puff can perhaps still manage to find occasional use because it's the one offensive Jupiter Djinni with an instant-death chance.

Name Origin
A puff (considering this Djinni's wind affinity) is a slightly stronger gust of wind, but a bit weaker than a squall. It might also be a possible reference to something blowing up when it is exposed to too much pressure from gaseous stuff or heat influence, hence the animation. German name: Ballon.