Robber's Blade

The Robber's Blade is a Long Sword-class Artifact weapon available in Golden Sun: The Lost Age.

Basic Description
The Robber's Blade increases the wielder's base Attack rating by 101 points. It can be bought for 7600 coins and sold for 5700 coins.

The Robber's Blade is initially found as a rusty sword in a treasure chest in Aqua Rock. To gain the proper Robber's Blade, the rusty sword must be reforged by the blacksmith in Yallam, and bought from him. Being a Long Sword-class weapon, the Robber's Blade can be equipped on warrior-style Adepts, namely Felix and Piers, as well Isaac and Garet when they join up late in The Lost Age.

Its Unleash effect is Shred, with the standard base activation rate of 35%, which is a physical attack with an additional 33 points of damage added, and then the resulting damage is either increased or decreased based on how the user's Mars power measures against the target's Mars resistance. The Unleash may also decrease the target's total Defense rating by 25% (the maximum amount any character or enemy in the game can have its Defense rating decreased or increased is up to 50% from the norm, so this side effect can successfully occur twice profitably). Visually, Shred is rather spectacular, appearing as beams of bright orange energy gathering into an orange sphere that forms and grows at the target's position, and then explodes largely. Then the orange image of a shield forms and shatters at the damaged enemy's position to signify the "defense down effect" regardless of whether or not the Unleash actually has lowered the target's defense.

Analysis
The Robber's Blade can effectively be viewed as very similar to a Shamshir, with the one main difference being that the Robber's Blade's Unleash lowers defense rather than attack. However, several things hurt this weapon's practical usability: The Shamshir in The Lost Age can be bought and equipped as soon as the player starts exploring the Great Eastern Sea, and even that weapon is not necessarily so great to buy and equip because the default Mars Adept you have, Jenna, cannot equip long swords to capitalize on the weapon's Mars unleash (although if you have Felix or Piers equipped with Mars Djinn, they can capitalize on it), and you can find many strong weapon artifacts pretty quickly. The Robber's Blade, in addition to having these issues for itself, is found sometime later than the Shamshir at the end of the Aqua Rock dungeon, and its general power is lower than another weapon artifact you can find in the same dungeon, the very useful Mist Sabre (although the Sabre is aligned with Mercury, not Mars).