Goblin's Rod

The Goblin's Rod is a Staff-class Artifact weapon found in Golden Sun: The Lost Age. Visually, the Goblin's Rod resembles a rather hammer-shaped rod with a blue aura around it.

Basic Description
The Goblin's Rod increases the wielder's attack by 134 points. It can be bought for 9800 coins and sold for 7350 coins.

The Goblin's Rod is acquired by finding a Rusty Staff at a white spot in the Great Western Sea, north of Hesperia, and bringing it to Sunshine the blacksmith in Yallam, where he will reforge it into the item. It can be equipped by Jenna, Sheba, Ivan, and Mia. This staff has the Unleash effect Sargasso, which activates at a rate of 35% (which is standard) and converts the attack into a Mercury-elemental attack with 39 extra attack points added, and the effect has a chance of instantly felling the target. Sargasso visually resembles a large swirling blue mass of energy that appears and expands when the wielder strikes the foe.

Analysis
The Goblin's Rod, accessible as soon as you can enter the Great Western Sea, is one of many weapons throughout the game that is quite powerful for when it can be first acquired but may not remain in the inventory for a very long period of time because a superior weapon may be found sometime later. In terms of element and unleash effect, the Goblin's Rod is actually a nearly identical version to the Crystal Rod, but with slightly less Unleash bonus power, which is offset by nearly 30 more base attack points than the Crystal Rod. It may seem practical to use because of its Unleash effect, but the Adepts who can equip it are normally used less for physically attacking and more for casting Psynergy, so it may not see as much practical use as other weapons.

Cultural references
The name "Sargasso" may be a reference to the Sargasso Sea, a region of the North Atlantic Ocean located next to the Bermuda Triangle, a location that attained its own infamy for being the location where a number of aircraft and surface vessels have allegedly mysteriously disappeared inextricably, never to be found. Charles Hoy Fort, writer and researcher into anomalous phenomena, proposed a dimension into which lost things go named the "Super Sargasso", and proposed the idea of the spontaneous, anomalous teleportation of an object into another dimension. Apparently, the Sargasso unleash effect's ability to instantly remove an enemy from a battle should be thought of as the enemy being sent to another dimension.