Soul Brand

The Soul Brand is a Long Sword-class weapon Artifact available in Golden Sun: The Lost Age.

Analysis
The Soul Brand is a weapon the wielder's base Attack rating by 141 points. It can be bought for 11600 coins and sold for 8700 coins.

It is initially found as a rusty sword out in the Great Western Sea while sailing, at the southern of the two shallow spots west of Atteka surrounded by a ring of rocks that requires the ship to have the Wings of Anemos attached so it can fly over into it. To gain the proper Soul Brand, the rusty sword must be reforged by Sunshine, Yallam's blacksmith; the player must then buy the Soul Brand from him. Being a Long Sword-class weapon, the Soul Brand can be equipped on all four warrior-style Adepts, namely Felix, Piers, Isaac, and Garet.

Its Unleash effect is Soul Shatter, with the standard base activation rate of 35%, which is a physical attack with an additional 50 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 restore the user's own PP meter by an amount equal to 10% of the damage done to the target. Visually, Soul Shatter resembles a large white-reddish image of a sword piercing out of the ground at the target's feet with an explosion to impale the target, and a lot of orbs are siphoned out of the sword into the user.

Analysis
The Soul Brand is the best rusty weapon in the game, though it is not exactly a weapon that would appear in the inventory of an "ultimate party" at the end of the game because it lacks deadly power. It is not even as powerful as some of the weapons Felix's party will have amassed by the time Isaac's party joins up late in the game, like Hestia Blades and the Phaeton's Blade. What makes the weapon quite noteworthy is its Unleash effect: It is one of four weapons in the overall series whose Unleash effects have a chance to restore the wielder's PP meter, with the other three being the Psynergy Rod, Meditation Rod, and Nebula Wand. Of these weapons, the Soul Brand is the only weapon with this effect that can be equipped by a warrior Adept. This makes it interestingly useful to an Adept that uses PP-consuming Psynergy attacks like Odyssey and Liquifier, and is therefore quite a solid weapon to equip on Garet once he has joined Felix's party. However, even this advantage may be lost in the eyes of players that prefer more reliable equipment like Crowns of Glory or the Lucky Cap, which restore a fixed amount of PP each turn rather than having to rely on a chancey (though potentially more profitable) Unleash.