User:Erik the Appreciator/My Dark Dawn Challenge

Erik the Appreciator's Limited-Djinn Challenge:

Unlike other games where self-imposed challenges involve imposing arbitrary psychological restraints that just might drive you batty (like "single-character challenges" where you're supposed to kill off all of the rest of your party as soon as possible so that only one fights all battles), Golden Sun: Dark Dawn is easy enough that a self-imposed challenge is frankly recommended to get the best value from it as an RPG title. Not only that, it is very easy to set up said challenge without having to put much thought into maintaining it throughout the game, because what makes you do so much damage to enemies, and what makes enemies do so little damage to you, is when you're in high classes by having lots of Djinn set. All you have to do to make Dark Dawn a rather well-balanced challenge is keep your Djinn On Standby and don't use them for summoning, and I think I've come up with a way to make the game's many battling options viable and interesting in the process. So, here's what I've done as one of my playthroughs, and what I'd recommend you try out sometime:

At all times up until a certain point in the game, each character in your party can only have a maximum of one Djinni Set. Now, because there is some scaling of boss difficulty that occurs later on in the game, extend the set-Djinni-limit to 3 per character just before the battle with the Mountain Roc, and extend the set-Djinni-limit to 5 per character when the game allows you to prepare for the final boss. You may collect all 72 Djinn in the game; you may have the Djinn arranged across your party members any way you like; any of the Djinn that are present on a given character can be the one, three, or five Djinn that are Set onto that character, regardless of what element the Djinn are; the Djinn that are Set on your character may be unleashed by that character during battle; and if all Djinn present on a character are on Standby, then you can set any one of that Character's Djinn as his or her one active Djinni as one of the character's turns in a battle.

Whenever you get a new Djinni and it is automatically set onto a character that already has a Djinni Set onto them, you must immediately go to the character's Djinn inventory and put On Standby one of them so that only one Djinni is Set. All summoning is disallowed (you may allow it in the boss battle with Dullahan, however, and use all 72 Djinn for this purpose). Other than this, everything else about the game is fair to use, such as equipment, consumable items, stat-boosting items, and Psynergy spells.

This challenge effectively lowers all statistics of all the characters down so that they are much more appropriate to the statistics and abilities of the monsters they fight. Grinding and weapon-mastering will be much more important, and so will employing the various abilities of the Djinn themselves. By nature of this challenge, you may choose to have all eight of your characters have a Venus Djinni set onto them, or two Venus Djinn set later on, so that they are all in Venus-related classes.