Verdant Sword

A Verdant Sword is a Light Blade-class weapon Artifact available in Golden Sun: Dark Dawn. It is one of the items randomly created by bringing Quality Zol to the blacksmith in Champa, and resembles a kind of short sword with its blade split in two light-green twin-blades.

Basic Description
Verdant Swords increase the wielder's attack by 165 points. Once acquired, Verdant Swords can be sold 13500 coins, and can be bought for 18000 coins. This Light Blade is a pure Jupiter element based weapon, meaning standard attacks with the sword are based on the wielder's Jupiter element power, and the resulting damage depends on the enemies' resistance to this element. The Verdant Sword can be equipped by Matthew, Tyrell, Karis, Amiti, Eoleo, and Himi.

The Verdant Sword has four potential unleashes, all Jupiter-based: Gale Force, Vorpal Slash, Mad Zephyr, and Emerald Blitz. Coincidentally, Vorpal Slash and Mad Zephyr are also the signature unleashes for the two best known Jupiter-based pure-element weapons from the first two games: the Elven Rapier and the Sylph Rapier. Gale Force resembles a vertical slash accompanied by wind gusts and multiplies damage by 1.3. The Vorpal Slash attack causes a green-colored flash of energy to carve horizontally across the screen adding 16 points to the total damage as well as hitting 3 targets at once. Mad Zephyr which shoots beams of concentrated wind energy at its target; it adds 40 points of damage to the total and has a chance to inflict double the damage. In the case the damage doubles, the beams increase in number and hit frequency. The final Unleash, Emerald Blitz, causes the blade to extend to a huge laser saber and the target gets slashed several times with a chance to seal the target's Psynergy; the resulting damage from the Unleash is always multiplied by 2.

Analysis
While weaker that the Tisiphone Edge, as far as attack increases go, the Verdant Sword is arguably the more practical weapon for much of the game. In Dark Dawn, the Tisiphone Edge can only be acquired as a rare drop from Great Dragons in Crossbone Isle, a bonus dungeon that can only be entered once the final boss is defeated. On the other hand, the Verdant Sword can potentially be available as soon as the ship is acquired, with multiple copies being easily available.

The Verdant Sword's status as a Jupiter-based pure-element weapon makes Karis the best candidate, though the Sword would do well in the hands of any Adept who had Jupiter Djinn set. Emerald Blitz's guaranteed damage multiplier makes it the most devastating unleash the Verdant Sword has. Mad Zephyr is weaker, but it also has a chance to do double damage. While Vorpal Slash only has 16 points of damage added, its ability to hit 3 targets makes it useful for random encounters, which often come in groups of 2 or 3. Gale Force, while possessing a guaranteed damage multiplier of 1.3, will likely be outperformed by Mad Zephyr and Emerald Slash. Overall, the Verdant Sword is a solid weapon that will be of great use until the player can explore the bonus dungeons for the stronger weapons.