Ninja Sandals

Ninja Sandals
In-Game Description
"Boots: Raises Defense & Evade" [sic] (TLA) "Feet: Boots (Boosts Defense & criticals)" (DD)
Trade Info
Item class	Boots
Buy value	2000
Sell value	1500
Artifact?	Yes
Equip/Use Effect
Defense Boost	5 (TLA) 19 (DD)
Special Equip Effect	Unleash rate +15%
Acquisition
• N/A; dummied item (TLA) • Complete Grandmother's Gift sidequest that starts at Kaocho earlier in the game (DD)

The Ninja Sandals (シノビのわらじ, Shinobi no waraji^?, lit. Shinobi's Straw Sandals) are Boots officially introduced in Golden Sun: Dark Dawn. A weaker version of this item is coded into Golden Sun: The Lost Age as an inaccessible item that has been dummied out.

In Golden Sun: Dark Dawn

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. 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.

In order to get the Ninja Sandals, players must first acquire the Grandmother's Gift from a woman in Kaocho (during the Ei-Jei arc of the game) and deliver it to her granddaughter in Tonfon late in the game. This means the reward will be permanently missed if the player has departed Ei-Jei for the Clouds of Passaj without picking up the Grandmother's Gift. The granddaughter will give players the Granddaughter's Gift in exchange. Upon returning to the late-game version of Kaocho, place the gift next to the grandmother for a cutscene, then inspect the gift for the Ninja Sandals.

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.