Alex's Profile and Golden Sun Class Compositing

[XitSign]

Just something I wanted to talk about since Alex's profile somewhat bugs me.

For Golden Sun, we assume on some level that classes are a Game Mechanic and that the main cast should be able to have access to a lot of their powers in a normal situation, they have their Djinn, their gear, and their Psynergy and we go from there.

But Alex is an interesting case. He never gets into a fight (despite fans REALLY wanting to fight him). Alex schemes and has everyone else do everything for him. So much so that we actually don't see him use the full extent of Psynergy like the rest of the cast does.

He's an adept, so in THEORY he can use every single power the other Adepts can (doubly so since he's directly related to Mia), but since we restricted the boss characters like Saturos or Karst to just what we know they have in their arsenal, shouldn't we do the same for Alex?

If that's the case, we need to trim a lot of fat from Alex's profile, especially abilities related to Venus, Mars, and Jupiter because if I remember correctly, he only every makes use of his natural Mercury abilities.

 

[DarkDragonMedeus]

Yeah, as the one who made Alex's profile, I can agree that are far too many assumptions. It can easily be assumed is the strongest character in the verse besides the Wise One. And it's especially being empowered by 3/4ths of the Golden Sun's power. The Golden Sun's power bestowal does imply he's basically the Kefka Palazzo of Golden Sun. Having every alchemy ability in existence seems pretty legit, but I don't think he should only be given abilities he's shown. But the lore implies he would have much more than Mercury adept stuff. His resistances could go however.

 

[XitSign]

I certainly don't take issue with his rating, there's no reason he should be any weaker than the playable characters, and the 3/4ths if the series' mcguffin of power pretty much speaks for itself.

And I don't even disagree that the possibility is there that he could be able to fully use alchemy. If Mia can do it, Alex probably should too. They're related, trained similarly, and have the same element, if Alex was ever playable he'd probably be a 'mage' style adept too and have almost all her abilities note-for-note.

I just take issue putting it on his page if he's never done any of it, just because in theory the same assumptions could be made for the other human (using that term loosely here) adepts in the series. Saturos, Menardi, Karst, and Agatio are adepts and by similar lore standards should be just as capable of branching out into more elements than we see them use, or have access to more of their psynergy. Ex. Karst doesn't have Magma Manipulation because she never uses it...but we know Mars Adepts can use Magma attacks regularly.

We could argue that the Golden Sun very likely empowers him, sure, but we have the issue that Alex misses out on the energy of the Mars section, so Mars related powers might be even iffier.

I suppose my biggest issue here isn't that the assumptions are reasonable, because even I agree in theory, it's that how we apply the assumptions doesn't seem 100% consistant. Some fat still needs trimmed for Alex, but with that in mind we might need to discuss how we assume what people can and can't do, and possible make more removeales from Alex's page or some minor additions to other pages based on what they should, for the same lore reasons, be able to use.

 

[DarkDragonMedeus]

I suppose that seems fair, but the Prox tribe are mostly portrayed as being really strong warriors rather than diverse adepts. And they don't have Golden Sun nor Djinn enhancements. Alex has kind of became a god of alchemy upon the GS 2 ending.

That being said, the bosses due have relatively simplistic profiles, and don't quite resist some of the abilities on their profile save the fire ones. And I don't mind if Alex's resistances got removed as well. Dullahan is probably the best qualified enemy profile.

 

[XitSign]

That's why I mentioned that Alex having the Golden Sun could be argued as a special situation, but that doesn't completely ignore a few missed abilities, like the Prox users that doesn't have a 'volcano' attack in gameplay missing Magma Manipulation, even though a Magma Manipulation attack should be pretty easy for them since it's a standard attack for pure Mars users. Just a minor thing that I think the same Lore rules should apply to if we're assuming Alex should be able to weild everything the Golden Sun empowers.

Honestly I am just being nitpicky about something that doesn't matter a lot, but I'm just glad I was able to get it at least talked about a little bit.

Those seem like generally fair touchups and cleanups then.