What makes a greatsword great?

polygon.com:

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,