Media Gamer: Golden Sun No EXP Dullahan Victory

By BlueZero
1293576117|%c|agohover

With the recent release of Golden Sun: Dark Dawn, I wanted to see if there was a way to increase the difficulty aside from battling the optional bosses. You have probably heard about Dullahan, the ultimate optional boss fight of Golden Sun: The Lost Age (GS TLA) unlocked after transferring data from the first game with all dijinn collected. It is very challenging for a level 50+ 8 person party so I was amazed when someone was able to beat it without any leveling. If you think you are a master of the earlier games, watch this video as tujudi737 defeats Dullahan with his entire party at their starting level as made possible by a cheating device. My analysis to follow after the click:

The battle actually starts at 1:33 into the video after tujudi737 shows off his party's items. Tujudi737's strategy involves maximizing agility for Sheba to start off with the Catastrophe and then ending the battle round with Lull. The second round he switches and decides to turtle with Flash and unleashes another Catastrophe summon while removing one of Dullahan's 3 turns with Petra dijinn and resetting Lull. By once again switching party members, Sheba is able to summon the 3rd Catastrophe using the same strategy from the 1st turn. At the end of the 3rd turn, Dullahan has taken about 12,000 damage and healed 600HP.

Tujudi737 has a dicey round by using the Granite (the inferior version of Flash) and Ground dijinn along with Charon (2300 damage) before losing Mia. Tujudi737 has to do about 4000 more damage since Dullahan has a reported 16,000 HP. Notice how the player is using Sheba to Summon since she was built for agility and goes before the boss. With Ulysses unleashed, Dullahan has about 3000 HP left. This is where it gets more difficult since the standby dijinn are running out. A quick double Boreas brings the HP to about 1400 not counting the healing.

At this point, it appears like tujudi737 has an inkling Dullahan is going to summon Charron and since I've heard the Element Swap move is an indication. Plus there are barely any standby dijinn. Obligatory "Dullahan stop hitting yourself" comment added here. His first party dies and now tujudi737 has to inflict about 800 damage before his party dies to fall Dullahan. With two quick Zagan summons, tujudi737 is able to beat the boss with only two party members alive. Any more turns past this point and it would have been a huge loss.

Huge props to tujudi737 for patience in developing a strategy and getting extremely lucky with Dullahan's moveset. The closest I came to this level of awesomeness was my failed low dijinn run of Golden Sun where I didn't have the stats to beat the Fusion Dragon. I was also playing through The Lost Age on Hard but didn't get around to finishing the game yet another time. I'm currently thinking of a way to challenge myself with Dark Dawn with possibly low dijinn and/or only melee attacks.