Balm

Balm
Balm being unleashed in The Lost Age
Element	Mercury
Battle Effect	Each current downed ally has a 70% chance to be revived and restored up to 60% max HP
Set Bonuses
HP	+ 13
PP	+ 4
Locations
The Lost Age	Mars Lighthouse (battled)

This Djinni appears as an enemy that can be battled.

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 70% 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

Balm, and subsequently the following rooms of the dungeon, are properly accessible only after moving the upper left statue left from the entrance to the upper right.

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. See here for enemy statistics.

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 70% 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 70% 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 Origin

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