What makes a greatsword great?
I’m a big sword guy. If I roll a new character into a game where I can swing a big sword, I will do everything I can to get that big sword right away, regardless of the cost.
In Elden Ringthat means sprinting – woefully under-leveled – into the hellish, ravaged wasteland of Caelid and sneaking past packs of rotting zombies and giant mutated dogs to plunder the caravan with the great sword.
Into the greatsword Elden Ring is impractical. It’s bigger than your character. It swings in painfully slow arcs, draining large chunks of your stamina. It takes no fewer than 31 points of strength to wield properly. Carrying its weight means making sacrifices, such as equipping shields and armor.
It is a weapon for fighters who are single-mindedly and stubbornly determined to strike as hard as possible, with all the consequences that entails. Just like the sword it’s based on! The great iron swords in every FromSoftware fantasy game pay tribute to the Dragon Slayer – the unlikely weapon carried by the protagonist of Crazy. As mangaka Kentaro Miura describes it, the Dragon Slayer was “too big to be called a sword. Huge, thick, heavy and way too rough. It was indeed a lot of pig iron.”
Mass is important to me. Final fantasy 7‘s Cloud Strife also wields an iconic oversized sword, but he swings it around effortlessly – even spinning it with one hand before placing it on his back. It looks cool, but it never feels BIG.
But in Crazy, the weight of the sword is constantly emphasized. The blacksmith was ridiculed for making such a vulgar, cumbersome weapon. The Dragon Slayer was in a storage room waiting for a Guts: the only man strong, angry and stubborn enough to brandish it. Yet it is not easy for him. He trains tirelessly and develops a fighting style that takes into account and relies on the impossible greatness of the weapon.
Good video games with great swords find clever ways to suggest this impracticality. Yes, it would be physically impossible to pick up this sword, let alone swing it… but if you could beyou should do it like this this. In games from FromSoftware such as Elden Ringyou see this consideration reflected in the animation and effects.
Each attack begins with a deliberate wind-up. Your character plants his feet and you see the effort from the ground move up through his body as he twists his knees, hips, spine, and then shoulders, until he finally generates enough torque to get the huge blade moving.
After completing its 270 degree arc, it crashes back into the earth, sending dust and rocks flying. Turning back in the other direction requires the same monumental effort. At the end of a combo, your character methodically raises the blade back onto his shoulder.
The weapon makes up for its glacial pace with enormous range and damage. A single horizontal swing can easily cut through a whole crowd of smaller enemies. The even slower vertical swings can completely crush an armored target.
Awesome greatsword.
Anyone looking for a bigger greatsword should step up to Monster Hunter. As the name implies, it’s a monster-hunting franchise, and its cartoonish logic dictates that bigger goals require bigger weapons.
In the very first installment of the Monster Hunter series, Capcom set an uncompromising precedent gravity for the flagship weapon. Even if your fighter stands still, you will feel the weight of the great sword in his hands. They prop their legs up in a wide stance and you can see their back straining to stay upright. It’s an ergonomically disastrous way to hold a large sword, but it’s worth the effort to swing it.
When you attack, your fighter steps back with their lead leg and drops the sword to the ground behind them, before rising up and hoisting it above them in a huge swing. Each stroke takes a full second to wind, and the blade remains stuck in the earth for another second. Not for two seconds sound like a huge time commitment, but in a video game where your goals are constantly in flux, it feels like a lifetime.
The weapon’s most iconic maneuver was added in the second generation. If you can believe it, handling it was even slower. Charged slashes do much more damage, but they require your fighter to plant their feet and stand motionless for 3-4 seconds. The power gathered during the attack is illustrated by a glowing aura that flashes brighter with each successive second until it reaches its maximum.
Here Capcom establishes the insanely rewarding metagame of Monster Hunter’s Great Sword. Your enemies are large but highly mobile monsters that don’t politely wait for you to charge. To get the most out of your greatsword, don’t position yourself where the monster is is, but where you predict they will be in 3 seconds.
You start to smell a lot of.
But you will also have a lot of fun. Every attack feels like a big bet, and when you get it right, it feels great. The game rewards you with massive damage, and the monsters will flinch and roll away as if struck by someone their own size.
The Greatsword would evolve in subsequent releases. In Monster Hunter: GenerationsCapcom would add an ‘adept’ fighting style that would increase weapon mobility, and a ‘valor’ style that would allow the fighter to absorb a monster’s attack while attacking his own, further increasing damage.
But the greatsword would not reach its peak greatness to Monster Hunter World. It introduced the ‘True Charged Slash’, a technique that can only be accessed after two attacks in a row (or via a few other combinations of maneuvers). That’s a total winding time of about 9 seconds. But they make it worth the wait.
The animation really feels like the developers took the big sword to its logical extreme. After the already enormous effort of the first two attacks, the fighter turns on his foot and hoists the sword over his shoulder.
Their bodies glow with power and bounce in their stance to signal they are ready to get moving. Once the blade is in motion, the hunter holds it for dear life, and the sword she swings.
The fighter follows the weight of the first blow into a cartwheel and immediately raises the sword for the climactic impact. The moment it connects, the Monster Hunter activates a bull volley of feel-good effects. A long hit pause, a burst of blood, a screen splitting slash effect, camera shake and a thunderous sound.
Due to the cumbersome design, you miss more real charged slashes than you hit. But I guess this is part of the great sword fantasy. It’s a power fantasy, but at its best it’s also one effort fantasy. Yes, we want the power to swing the big sword, but we also want the determination and courage to do the hard thing. To wrestle the impossible sword day in and day out, knowing we will get better at it, but it will never, ever, ever be easy.
That’s why I like a big sword.