Karis is a playable character of Golden Sun: Dark Dawn. She is a Jupiter Adept, and daughter of Ivan. She was first revealed for the game alongside her party members Matthew and Tyrell.
As a playable character[]
Karis is the first Adept to join Matthew's party in Dark Dawn, and has a significant role in the story. Like her father and fellow Jupiter Adept Sheba, Karis's base class is the Wind Seer class series. However, the class itself has been altered by replacing the Ray Psynergy series with the Fresh Breeze Psynergy series, the first Jupiter-based mass healing spell. Like Ivan, Karis can equip Light Blades and Staffs. She can also equip the newly introduced Bows. Her defensive equipment consists of standard Mage equipment, such as Robes, Circlets, and Bracelets.
She has inherited Ivan's powers of observation (where she notices that the Alchemy Forge has been disconnected), but unlike him, she cannot read minds (she mentions in the Teppe Ruins that her father finds this power a "double-edged sword"), and is somewhat more energetic than her father.
Just like Ivan, Karis is one of the more defensively frail characters, with generally low HP offset by offensive Psynergy that are oftentimes better for group damage than what warrior Adepts like Matthew, Tyrell, or Eoleo have available (this, of course, would mainly apply if Karis is kept in her default character Wind Seer class series like the others are kept in theirs). This causes players to tend to use any discovered HP-boosting Power Bread items on her. Even though she can learn efficiently useful spells in the Whirlwind Psynergy series and Plasma Psynergy series in her default class series, as the game goes on it becomes apparent that she does not have as much instantly identifiable potential as a damage dealer like Matthew, Tyrell, Amiti, or Eoleo. Instead, Karis is more of a general supporter, softening up opponents with wide-ranged Psynergies, as well as useful buffs and minor healing abilities.
Karis will join Matthew's party at level 1 and will have a Wooden Stick, One-Piece Dress, Padded Gloves, and Leather Cap as starting equipment.
Stastical Comparison[]
In terms of battle statistics and equipment, Karis is essentially a clone of Ivan from the original Golden Sun. She gains a newly introduced healing-type psynergy line of the Jupiter element, which she learns in place of the Ray Psynergy series. While Ivan had the lowest defense, HP, and attack in the previous Golden Sun games, Karis is only the second most fragile. Instead, Himi gains this distinction. However, Karis does inherit her father's agility and the same luck rating of four with him, Jenna, and Amiti.
Compared to her fellow Jupiter Adept Sveta, Karis has one more luck point than Sveta, more PP and agility, but much less HP and attack.
Biography[]
Karis' appearance in the E3 2009 poster.
Karis was born to Ivan and an unknown mother roughly fourteen-to-fifteen years after the Golden Sun event. She was raised in the town of Kalay, where her father and others among the survivors from Vale live. Karis inherited Ivan's cleverness and gentle personality, which she is often cherished for, but is also considered a strong-willed and reliable individual. However, despite being a Jupiter Adept like her father, she failed to inherit his Psynergy-ability to read minds. Karis came to be convinced that this was not necessarily a loss, though; quite frankly, it was a relief, for individuals in Weyard who had the ability to read the minds and the darkest secrets of everyone around them often found that their lives were worse off because of it.
Karis came to be friends with the sons of Ivan's own longtime friends, Isaac and Garet: Matthew and Tyrell. From time to time, she would visit the two boys and their fathers in Isaac's cabin in Goma Plateau overlooking the remains of the lands around Mt. Aleph, bringing things made by Ivan. While she had a deep respect and admiration for the cool-headed and few-worded Matthew, she would often clash with the hot-headed and brash Tyrell, and oftentimes she would have to restrain both his temper and her own. Despite this, her visits continued.
Thirty years after the Golden Sun event, Karis travels north from Kalay to the Lookout Cabin to deliver an invention of Ivan's, a hang glider-like device called a Soarwing. It is kept aloft not so much by the wind, but by a skilled Adept's own Psynergy, and a critical component in its construction is the feather of a mammoth bird roosting in northeast Angara called the Mountain Roc. Isaac and Garet previously went on a quest with other old companions of theirs to retrieve this feather, for they had decided that they need the Soarwing in order to fly and maintain a watch over both the uncrossable terrain around Mt. Aleph and elsewhere to study anomalous phenomena named Psynergy Vortexes. Karis has had experience flying a Soarwing already, and has come to both deliver the Soarwing to them and to give flying lessons.
However, by the time Isaac and Matthew return from a stop at nearby Patcher's Place, Tyrell suddenly takes and puts on the Soarwing for himself, immaturely reasoning that he wants to take the device out for a ride even though he had not received lessons from Karis yet. When Karis and the adults get angry at him, he retorts that nobody has any faith or respect in him and jumps off, and soon enough, he finds that he is unable to keep aloft. Isaac has him fly toward the Abandoned Mine in the distance and wait for the everyone else to catch up to and fetch him, and has both Matthew and Karis accompany himself and Garet on the dangerous trip through Tanglewood Forest; while Garet believes the two young Adepts would only amount to a burden and would be put through an unnecessary amount of danger, Isaac explains that the adults, as the Warriors of Vale who originally brought the Golden Sun to Weyard, have been training their children so that they may one day take on the responsibility of watching over the world. Matthew and Karis are not opposed to the idea.
After Karis helps Matthew suit up, the two leave the cabin and join Isaac and Garet on their expedition from Goma Plateau through the monster-infested darkness of Tanglewood. Through this, Karis and Matthew receive their first critical experience in fighting and slaying wild monsters with weapons, Psynergy, and Djinn, and in the Abandoned Mine itself, they even defeat an enormous plant monstrosity and save Tyrell from a nearby Psynergy Vortex. But while everyone is glad that he is safe, Tyrell had shattered the Soarwing when he crash landed into the mine.
Back at the cabin the next afternoon, Isaac suddenly gives Matthew and Tyrell the following quest: to leave immediately and travel across Angara to find the Mountain Roc and obtain another Mountain Roc feather so that a new Soarwing can be created. Isaac hands this down both as a critical rite of passage for the boys to undertake as Adepts and to get Tyrell's behavior and sense of responsibility straightened out; even though it was her father's Soarwing that was destroyed, Karis is concerned that Isaac is forcing such a big quest on her friends so suddenly, but Isaac explains that that is the point because his own quest thirty years before began just as suddenly. Karis willingly volunteers to accompany Matthew and Tyrell on their journey, and the three young Adepts are soon off on their new adventure.
Shortly after leaving Isaac's cabin, Karis and her two friends stop by Patcher's Place, and her frustrations with Tyrell seemingly come to a head. When she is told that Tyrell nearly burned Patcher's Place down with his Mars Psynergy on a previous visit, Tyrell is frustrated that Patcher never forgets these sorts of things even though nothing bad had happened in the end, and starts to let loose some of his fire Psynergy; to prevent him from a second chance at burning down the store, she shoves him to the floor and angrily berates him. Within a moment, Karis breaks down and starts crying in apology, and lectures that it is their responsibility as Adepts to make sure they never use Psynergy in public or hurt people, since their fathers are concerned about people viewing Psynergy and the Adepts that use it as helpful rather than hurtful. Tyrell eventually agrees not to use Psynergy in front of strangers, and recognizes and appreciates that his friends are always looking out for him. Tyrell and Karis' companionship improves from that point onward.
For the rest of Dark Dawn, Karis consistently accompanies Matthew's group of Adepts as their journey progresses through the continent of Angara. She is a voice of reason and insight just like her father even though she is nowhere near as mild-mannered as Ivan, but despite her spirited nature she does her part to keep the party's emotions under control. Her abilities as a Jupiter Adept are critical to her group's ability to bypass various obstacles that impede them from exploring whichever dungeon their journey takes them into.
When Matthew's party gets forced into the southern Ei-Jei region by operatives of the mysterious Tuaparang empire, its field commander, the warlike Blados, specifically takes note of Karis as the daughter of Ivan and sneers that that only means that Karis might be a worthy adversary for Blados to fight some on some far-off day. Over the course of the building party's quest for the Roc feather, which they eventually obtain, Karis makes many deductions about the circumstances they happen across; in one instance, the hotheaded Sanan prince, Ryu Kou, seems to betray the party in a way that the promise the Adepts had previously made to Laurel would be broken; unlike the rest of her friends, Karis is willing to suspect that Ryu Kou is actually trying to help them in his own way by preventing them from being the ones to break their own promise, though Ryu Kou angrily denies this.
Though Karis makes several critical deductions about what their adversaries in Tuaparang apparently intend for them as a traveling group of Adepts, it does not make the party capable or prepared enough to avoid essentially being manipulated by Blados and his ilk into achieving every one of their goals for them, which includes the trigger of the Grave Eclipse and the setting up of an ancient superweapon designed to destroy the Eclipse, the Apollo Lens. When Blados and Chalis make their final move and attempt to take the Lens for themselves, however, Karis joins Matthew's party in fighting the duo in two drawn-out, harrowing battles, and they miraculously manage to defeat the field commanders through their own fighting ability and defeat their plans for the weapon. They proceed to end the Grave Eclipse with it.
Following the end of the events at the Apollo Lens, Karis makes the long journey back to the Lookout Cabin with Matthew and Tyrell as the rest of the Adepts that had joined their group over the course of the journey part ways to return to their own kingdoms. Upon returning to the cabin, however, the three of them see that a giant Psynergy Vortex has appeared within the airspace very near the cabin.
Etymology[]
The name Karis comes from the Greek word χάρις (charis) meaning "graceful". It is the same word used to convey the word "grace" in the Bible. This is a fitting name for Karis, as she is graceful and never loses control of her emotions.
Trivia[]
- Because Ivan is a descendant of the Anemos and Karis is Ivan's daughter, it is safe to assume that she is an Anemos as well.
- It is unknown how Karis has green hair. The first half of the group has inherited the same hair colour as one of their parents (Matthew-Isaac, Tyrell-Garet, Rief-Mia). It is possible that Karis inherited her green hair from her mother, who has yet to be introduced.
- It is also believed in fandom that Karis' mother could be the girl carrying water in Xian, since she is the only NPC to date with green hair in the games. Also, because Xian is where Hammet bought silk, thus making possible that Ivan met her.
- Karis is the only playable Jupiter Adept that has no Psynergy to read minds.
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