Xian

Xian is located directly along the player's route through southeastern Angara, coming in east from the south exit of Mogall Forest.

Xian (シーアン村 Xian Village) is a village featured in-game in Golden Sun, located in the southeast region of the continent of Angara. Visiting it is technically optional, but the player will unavoidably pass right by it when they follow the route from the south exit of Mogall Forest while proceeding clockwise through Angara's main landmass. It functions as a useful stop for stocking on gear and items before heading further northwest into the mountain village of Altin and its connected dungeon Altin Peak. A Mercury Djinni can be reached in Xian as soon as it is entered.

In-universe, Xian's distinct culture and geographical location directly parallel real-world medieval China. It features East Asian concepts such as the premise of Chi, the martial art of Kung Fu, and the production and export of silk along the "Silk Road" that runs from Xian all the way west through Kalay and toward Tolbi. All of its residents are shown speaking with a stunted style of grammar, invoking a stereotype of less-practiced Chinese speakers of English.

Isaac and his party of Adepts make a stop at Xian and learn from watching a spat between Master Feh of the town's dojo and his daughter Feizhi that the important Alpine Crossing allowing passage further west has been blocked off by an avalanche of rocks. The group therefore must detour to Altin to find an alternate route to the other side of the pass through Altin's mine network. Afterward, they may help out at Alpine Crossing to allow a local from Xian, Hsu, to return to the village safely, leading to an extra reward for Felix in Golden Sun: The Lost Age.

The village has entirely disappeared by the events of Golden Sun: Dark Dawn 30 years later, and there is no mention of it in gossip or historical reference materials in-game despite the game being mostly set on Angara. The southeastern region of Angara plays host to a new nation, Sana, founded during the timeskip by a warmongering emperor to contest and conquer rival nations.

In Golden Sun

For all NPC gossip, see Side Scripts.

Once your party steps out of the south exit of Mogall Forest back out into the overworld (immediately after the Killer Ape boss battle), you will have crossed a kind of temporary "point of no return" in that you cannot progress back north through the final screen of the dungeon to return to the northeast part of Angara. You will end up "trapped" within the continent's southeast quadrant, with Xian located a short ways northwest from the south exit of Mogall Forest and Alpine Crossing located further to its west. A rockslide that will have recently taken place at the Crossing currently prevents you from taking its west exit into the small region containing Lama Temple and the entrance to the Lamakan Desert "dungeon".

Your goal in southeastern Angara, therefore, is to take Alpine Crossing's north fork to the town of Altin and solve the connected multi-floored "dungeon" of Altin Peak. This will grant the party access to an exit at the bottom floor leading back outside to the enclosed area of the overworld on the other side of Alpine Crossing, where Lamakan Desert can be progressed through in order to return to the main explorable landmass of Angara. None of this technically requires the party to enter Xian along the way to Alpine Crossing, even though the village mainly exists to give the player in-universe context of the situation that prevents the party from heading west toward the desert for some time.

Mist can be collected by talking to a woman in pink so that she will drop her bucket of water at the exact spot pictured, which can then be turned into an ice pillar with Frost.

The most beneficial gameplay feature of Xian is a Mercury Djinni that can be seen looking down from a ledge at the east end of the town. Reaching it involves talking to the young woman in a pink dress walking between the tiny pier under a waterfall and the pot north of the Djinni, which will cause her to create a puddle on the tile of ground she was walking over the moment she was interacted with. You need to time your talk with her when she has walked all the way to her right and is just about to turn upward to walk one tile to the pot; if you made her drop the water anywhere else, you will have to enter one of the nearby doors and exit to make the puddle disappear and make it possible for the girl to drop her water again. Creating the puddle one tile south and west from the pot lets you turn it into an ice pillar with the Frost Psynergy so that you can hop onto it from above and hop right to reach and collect the Mercury Djinni Mist.

The shops at the northwest corner of Xian introduce the common items Battle Mace, Battle Rapier, Iron Shield, Silk Robe, and Silver Circlet, and the unique China Dress is sold in the Artifacts menu of the armor vendor. You can pick up a Lucky Medal in the pot in the southwest corner of the mulberry orchard at the south end of town. Finally, in the overworld, you can follow along with the narrow stretch of land directly north of Xian and cross a bridge onto a round island, where you can repeatedly engage in random battles until you can get the collectable Mars Djinni Corona to appear.

The cutscenes presenting Xian's main sub-plot are optional and are not even possible to trigger if you did not collect the Orb of Force from the optional Fuchin Falls Cave at Fuchin Temple before progressing south through Mogall Forest. In the dojo at the northeast corner of the village, the student near the wooden post will only let you see Master Feh if you use "Chi" from the white line on the ground to remotely knock it over as instructed. This is your cue to cast the Force Psynergy (which Master Nyunpa previously labeled "Ki" at Fuchin Temple) from as far south of the post as possible, and you will need to do it a second time when requested by Master Feh to initiate another cutscene. (Casting Force on the post from any closer than the white line will not count, and neither will physically pushing the post to topple it over in any cardinal direction.)

An argument between Feizhi and her father Feh at the northeast dojo is only shown if Isaac knocks down the post from the pictured position using the Force Psynergy.

The cutscene introducing Feh and his daughter Feizhi establishes that her friend from the village, Hsu, is late from his visit to Lama Temple and that her power of prediction, which has also informed her that Altin has been flooded, indicates that he is in danger. She will park herself at Xian's front entrance before setting out to find him on her own, and she will indicate her plans to go west and hope that your party of strong warriors will do the same. When you depart west from Xian and enter Alpine Crossing, she will appear from behind you and exclaim that boulders are now blocking "Silk Road" (the in-universe trading route stretching between Xian at the east end and Tolbi far to the west, with Kalay in the center) like she had predicted, and she will call for Hsu but be unable to hear an answer.

None of the above cutscenes have any mechanical relevance to the gameplay, and you are free to head north from Alpine Crossing and complete the episode at Altin and the connected Altin Peak dungeon. After defeating the Hydros Statue boss at the bottom of the dungeon and receiving the Lifting Gem, you must cast your newfound Lift Psynergy on a boulder near the bottom of the dungeon and follow the route beyond it back into the overworld. Once you have received the Reveal Psynergy for Ivan at Lama Temple, your next mandatory course is west through Lamakan Desert, but you have the option of entering Alpine Crossing from the west end and using both Reveal and Lift to free Hsu from the boulder pinning him.

Freeing Hsu permanently updates the spoken and mentally expressed gossip of the NPCs in Xian, and he will be with Feizhi and Feh in the dojo for the rest of the game. This also causes the boulders blocking the pass to be cleared away by the villagers, allowing for easy travel between Lama Temple and Xian's respective regions of the overworld. For the most part, this is irrelevant to the player because there is no particular reason for them to revisit the southeastern swath of Angara if they had gotten everything important from their first pass through the region. If the player did miss an optional duty or collectible, they can return to the southeast swath either by traveling east back through Lamakan Desert or south again through Mogall Forest (though the only way back out will be to once again travel west through the desert).

Whether you have Lifted the boulder off of Hsu will be reflected in the Clear Data Save File you can save at the end of Golden Sun and will unlock a bonus reward for the player's party in Golden Sun: The Lost Age if the data transfer system is used. In this case, when Felix's party first steps into Champa at the south coast of Angara (incidentally not far from where Xian would have been located, in an area separated from southeastern Angara only by a river), Feizhi will appear and momentarily mistake Felix for Isaac, and she will give Felix the Golden Ring as a token of her gratitude to Isaac.

Vendors

The village's Inn service is provided in the lower-right building of village at a rate of 10 coins per party member. (Instead of featuring the word "Inn" in Roman letters, the sign on this building displays the logographic Chinese character for "lodging", 宿, which has different pronunciations among the Chinese languages. If read as a Japanese kanji as a stand-alone word using its kun reading, this would be pronounced yado, whereas its on reading as part of multi-kanji compounds would be shuku.)

Weapon Shop
Name	Class	Cost	Effect
Battle Mace	Mace	2600	Attack +56
Battle Rapier	Light Blade	2900	Attack +58
Broad Axe	Axe	1400	Attack +50
Broad Sword	Long Sword	1000	Attack +40

Armor Shop
Name	Class	Cost	Effect
Adept's Clothes	Clothing	850	Defense +18, Max PP +8
Armlet	Bracelet	900	Defense +17
Bronze Helm	Helm	600	Defense +14
Iron Shield	Shield	1200	Defense +20
Silk Robe	Robe	1400	Defense +20
Silver Circlet	Circlet	1300	Defense +16
Wooden Cap	Hat	400	Defense +10
Artifacts
China Dress	Robe	1600	Defense + 19, can be used to lower an enemy's Attack rating

Item Shop
Name	Class	Cost	Effect
Antidote	Consumable Item	20	Cures Poison and Venom from one Adept
Elixir	Consumable Item	30	Cures Sleep, Stun, and Delusion from one Adept
Herb	Consumable Item	10	Restores 50 HP to one Adept
Sacred Feather	Consumable Item	70	Temporary lowers monster encounter rate

Collectibles

• Mist: Reached only by talking to a pink-gowned lady pacing between a pier and a pot when she is one tile south and west from said pot, causing her to drop a puddle of water on the ground. Cast Frost on this puddle to turn it into an ice pillar that you can then jump across from above to reach the Djinni.
• Lucky Medal: Found in the jar at the upper-left corner of the mulberry orchard.
• Antidote: Found in the barrel inside the dojo, at the left side.
• Elixir: Found in the particularly tall barrel inside the small central residence, at the upper-left corner.
• Sleep Bomb: Found inside the left of the two residences embedded into the northeast cliff wall, inside the lower-left white-and-blue jar.

History

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Xian is home to Feizhi and her father Master Feh, and is the location of the latter's martial arts school. Upon arrival at this school, Isaac's party witness Feizhi falling out with her father. This argument is triggered by Feizhi's claim to have psychic powers of foresight, specifically her foreseeing of her friend, Hsu falling into danger, something which her father adamantly refuses to accept. Unwilling to send out aid, Feizhi storms out to help Hsu personally, even if she must do it alone.

Isaac and co. can then speak to Master Feh, who will explain to them the difference between Chi and Ki (the latter being simply a different name for Psynergy). Chi, he explains, is a form of energy emitted by harnessing the body's physical strength and transmitting it across distances. This is unlike Psynergy (Ki), which is generated by the mind, and not the body, and hence has far fewer limitations on its power, although this Psynergy can only be utilized by those with an Adeptness for it, unlike Chi, which can be used by all, provided they undergo enough training.

Trivia

• Xian is a direct reference to the city of Xi'an, capital of central China's Shaanxi province, both in name and in role. Like its in-game counterpart, Xi'an is located at the east end of the historical Silk Road, a trading route spanning from China to the Middle East (represented by Kalay in-game) and servicing European countries in the Mediterranean (represented by Tolbi in-game). For most of Silk Road's sixteen centuries of active use, Xi'an was named Chang'an and had only received its modern name during the Ming dynasty.
• The young woman in a pink dress who is needed to reach the Mercury Djinni is shown to have green hair, which is an outcome of the rigid palette-swapping system the game uses to save space by avoiding having every palette-swapped variation saved as a separate sprite or set of color parameters. Every sprite graphic in the game (both in the field and in battle) has at least six possible palette variations ("normal", "light green", "violet", "blue", "dark purple", "cyan") set up in the game's code, most of which go unused. Many of these palettes are not aesthetically congruent because of the base colors of the original graphic lending themselves to outlandish equivalents depending on which palette preset is applied (the unnaturally purple-skinned Thief enemy being one example used in-game). The lady in pink is the same sprite sheet as the lady in the mulberry orchard but with the game's "palette setting #3" applied to it (which applies a "violet" hue that causes dark-blue pixels, like the hair on the normal version, to "rebound" to a light green on the spectrum). This palette was likely chosen to visually differentiate the lady enough from the other NPCs that the player would talk to her out of curiosity and trigger her water-dropping event.
• While pushing against objects by pressing a direction against them will typically shift their position along the ground or roll them, the wooden post in the dojo is the only instance in either game in the GBA duology where a standing object can be made to topple over by pushing against it. It can be pushed from any cardinal direction, and the student in the dojo will immediately set it back up while asking you to strike it with a remote form of power.