Ninja Sandals

The Ninja Sandals are Boots introduced in Golden Sun: Dark Dawn.

Basic Description
The Ninja Sandals increase the wearer's Defense by 19 and increase the chance that a weapon will Unleash by 15%, making them the Dark Dawn successor of the Hyper Boots. As an Artifact, The Ninja Sandals can be sold for 1500 coins, and subsequently rebought for 2000 coins.

In Dark Dawn, the Ninja Sandals are acquired in Kaocho during the Grave Eclipse as part of a trading side-quest. Like most Boots, they can be equipped by any party member.

Acquiring the Ninja Sandals
In order to get the Ninja Sandals, players must first acquire the Grandmother's Gift from a woman in Kaocho and deliver it to her granddaughter in Tonfon. The granddaughter will give players the Granddaughter's Gift in exchange. Upon returning to Kaocho, players will discover that the grandmother was a casualty of the Grave Eclipse. Placing the gift next to her will allow the grandmother's spirit to respond and enter the afterlife. Afterwards, examine the package to discover a letter which instructs the Grandmother to give the player the Ninja Sandals as a thank you.

It should be noted that, due to the Grave Eclipse, players cannot acquire the Grandmother's Gift after crossing the Clouds of Passaj. As a result, it is possible to lose the Ninja Sandals forever.

Analysis
The Ninja Sandals can be considered a rather heavily upgraded version of the Hyper Boots from previous games. While they possess an excellent defensive boost among the Boots, the Ninja Sandals are valued more for their ability to increase the chance that a standard physical attack will produce an Unleash from the Adept's equipped weapon. An increase in Unleash chance translates in practice into an increase in offensive output, so they are often given to one of the "warrior-style" Adepts — Matthew, Tyrell, or Eoleo — to increase the viability of performing standard attacks with them.

Any of these three Adepts can additionally equip the Valkyrie Mail, Aegis Shield, Warrior's Helm, and Lord Sun's Ring together to produce a default Unleash rate that reaches 100% probability, but Matthew is usually seen as the best recipient of the Ninja Sandals for the purposes of this setup because of his exclusive access to the game's strongest weapon with the strongest Unleashes, the Sol Blade. While the game's revisions to the Unleash system means that the Sol Blade can now randomly choose one of three weaker Unleashes to produce in place of Megiddo, any increase to the weapon's default Unleash rate technically equates to an increase in the chance that Megiddo in particular will be produced regardless.

It should also be noted, however, that Dark Dawn's limited and lopsided selection of Boot-class items makes the Ninja Sandals and the Leather Boots literally the only two boots in the game that can be worn by each of the other five Adepts: Karis, Rief, Amiti, Sveta, and Himi. Were it possible to get multiple copies of the Ninja Sandals, all five of them would be wearing this item by default at the end of a perfect playthrough. The sole pair of Ninja Sandals available to the player therefore offers a niche consideration in that it provides any one of these other five Adepts a particularly significant boost that is essentially exclusive to itself. Sveta can be a strong candidate in particular because she is as oriented toward physical strikes as the three warriors, though keep in mind that Sveta cannot perform Unleashes while in Beastform.

Trivia

 * Although they weren't officially introduced until Dark Dawn, the Ninja Sandals were coded into Golden Sun: The Lost Age, although they couldn't be accessed without a hacking device. It is plausible that the Ninja Sandals, along with the Knight's Greave and the Silver Greave, were meant to be new prizes at the Lucky Wheels minigame, but were removed in favor of the first game's prizes.
 * In The Lost Age, the Ninja Sandals only offered a Defense increase of 5, in addition to the Unleash rate boost. Despite this, they were superior in every way to the Hyper Boots, which, ironically, cost more than the Ninja Sandals.
 * Out of the boots that were officially introduced in Dark Dawn, the Ninja Sandals are the only ones that are not limited to warrior-style Adepts.