What makes a greatsword great?

I’m a Big Sword Guy. When I roll a new character in a game that gives me the option to swing a big sword, I will do whatever it takes to get that big sword right away, no matter the cost.

In Elden Ring, that means sprinting — woefully underleveled — into the hellish, blighted wastes of Caelid and sneaking past mobs of rotting zombies and gigantic mutant dogs to plunder the caravan that holds the greatsword.

The greatsword in Elden Ring is impractical. It is taller than your character. It swings in painfully slow arcs, draining huge chunks of your stamina bar. It requires a whopping 31 points of strength to wield properly. Carrying its weight means making sacrifices, like unequipping shields and armor.

It is a weapon for fighters who are single-mindedly, obstinately determined to hit as hard as they possibly can, consequences be damned. Just like the sword it’s based on! The big iron swords in every FromSoftware fantasy game pay tribute to the Dragon Slayer — the improbable weapon carried by the protagonist of Berserk. As mangaka Kentaro Miura describes it, the Dragon Slayer “was too big to be called a sword. Massive, thick, heavy, and far too rough. Indeed, it was a heap of raw 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 twirling it one-handed before sheathing it on his back. It looks cool, but it never feels BIG.

But in Berserk, the weight of the sword is constantly emphasized. Its blacksmith was ridiculed for making such a vulgar, unwieldy weapon. The Dragon Slayer sat in a storage shed awaiting a Guts: the one man who is strong, angry, and stubborn enough to swing it. It’s not easy for him, though. He trains tirelessly and develops a combat style that both accounts for and relies on the weapon’s impossible bigness.

Good video games with greatswords find clever ways to suggest this impracticality. Yes, it would be physically impossible to pick this sword up, let alone swing it… but if you could, you’d have to do it like this. In FromSoftware’s games like Elden Ring, you see this consideration in the animation and effects.

Each attack starts with a deliberate wind-up. Your character plants their feet, and you see the effort move upward from the ground through their body as they twist their knees, hips, spine, and then shoulders, until they’ve finally generated enough torque to get the massive blade moving.

After it sweeps its 270-degree arc, it crashes back into the earth and sends dust and rocks flying. Swinging it back the other direction takes the same monumental effort. At the end of a combo, your character methodically hefts the blade back onto their shoulder.

The weapon makes up for its glacial pace with massive 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.

Great greatsword.

Anyone looking for a greater greatsword needs to hop over to Monster Hunter. As the name implies, it’s a franchise about hunting monsters, and its cartoonish logic dictates that bigger targets require bigger weapons.

In the very first entry of the Monster Hunter series, Capcom established an uncompromising precedent of heaviness for the flagship weapon. Even when your hunter is standing still, you sense the weight of the greatsword in their hands. They brace their legs in a wide stance, and you can see their back straining to stay upright. It’s an ergonomically disastrous way to hold a big sword, but it sells the effort of brandishing it.

When you attack, your hunter steps back with their lead leg and lets the sword fall onto the ground behind them, before they heave and hoist it into a massive overhead swing. The wind-up of each slash lasts a full second, and the blade stays lodged in the earth for another second afterwards. Two seconds doesn’t sound like a huge time commitment, but in a video game where your targets are in constant motion, it feels like a lifetime.

The weapon’s most iconic maneuver was added in the second generation. If you can believe it, wielding it was even slower. Charged slashes deal way more damage, but they require your hunter to plant their feet and stand motionless for 3-4 seconds. The power amassing in the attack is illustrated with a glowing aura that flashes brighter with each successive second, until it reaches its maximum.

Here, Capcom establishes the maddeningly rewarding metagame of Monster Hunter’s Great Sword. Your foes are large but highly mobile monsters who will not wait politely until you charge up. To get the most out of your greatsword, you need to position yourself not where the monster is, but where you predict they’ll be in 3 seconds.

You’re going to whiff a lot.

But you’ll also have a lot of fun. Every single attack feels like a big wager, and when you get it right, it feels great. The game rewards you with massive damage, and the monsters will flinch and reel away like they’ve been sucker-punched by someone their own size.

The greatsword would evolve over subsequent releases. In Monster Hunter: Generations, Capcom would add an “adept” fighting style that would increase weapons mobility, and a “valor” style that would allow the hunter to absorb a monster’s attack while charging their own, further increasing their damage output.

But the greatsword wouldn’t achieve the pinnacle of its bigness until Monster Hunter World. It introduced the “True Charged Slash,” a technique that can only be accessed after two charge slashes in a row (or through a few other combinations of maneuvers). That’s a total windup of around 9 seconds. But they make it worth the wait.

The animation really feels like the developers taking the greatsword to its logical extreme. After the already massive commitment of the first two attacks, the hunter pivots on their foot and hoists the sword over their shoulder.

Their body glows with power and bounces in their stance to indicate they’re ready to explode into motion. Once the blade is in motion, the hunter holds on for dear life, and the sword swings them.

The hunter follows the weight of the first slash in a cartwheel and immediately raises the sword for the climactic impact. At the moment it connects, the Monster Hunter deploys a bull salvo of feel-good effects. A lengthy hit pause, a burst of blood, a screen-splitting slash effect, camera shake, and a thunderous sound.

Because of the ponderous setup, you’re going to miss more true charged slashes than you hit. But I think that is a part of the big sword fantasy. It’s a power fantasy, but at its very best, it’s also an effort fantasy. Yeah, we want the strength to swing the big sword, but we also want the determination and grit to do the difficult thing. To struggle with the impossible sword day after day, knowing we will get better at it, but it will never, ever, ever be easy.

That’s why I love a big sword.