Sword Master Reacts to Elden Ring Weapons

this is david rawlings he is a master of swordsmanship and weapon arts with over 25 years experience and is the founder of the london longsword academy today he's looking at some of the weapons and fighting styles from from software's newest epic elden ring you use a hammer like this i'd suggest that you're probably not going to have an intact back to make it up the stairs i highly recommend checking out the london long sword academy all their links and information will be in the description but without further ado let's see what a swordmaster makes of eldon ring so the broadsword and here we have a little bit of heresy if you notice the grip in there it's quite long so this is what i would call an arming sword and sometimes this gets abroad called the broadsword but sometimes a long sword or a sword in two hands also gets called broadsword so it's a little bit of a throwaway term it doesn't really mean very much so for me if i'm fencing if i'm holding a sword in one hand then explain utility is one hand really it's going to be a sword in one hand that's as simple as it goes and that could be a rapier it could be a douck it could be as i say an army sword if the sword has enough room for me to put two hands on it now i can use this like a long sword and because of having the sword in my two hands my body structure has to change slightly to adapt to it so effectively i would use the techniques that i would use with long sword and then really what we have is a debate between the difference of length of my blade and that of my opponent so it's a little bit of a broad subject for a badly named sword so broadsword in the game a little bit of a throwaway term you can use these things in two hands and that's really what we would call a long sword you can hold in one hand it would be an arming sword or depending on the blade type potentially a rapier or potentially a side sword and usually with those things we're really discussing the hilt more than we are the blade okay one thing that i will draw attention to is there's um if you if you like me and you play elden ring you might have these points where you kind of like you huddle behind your shield and then you do an attack now i want you to think kind of how illogical this is if you're doing a block and then you get to do an attack that means your opponent can either carry on attacking by just going well you're blocked now i'm going to do another attack or they have time to react again in some other form so really you will very often actually take the blow on the sword or deflect with the sword rather than using the shield so these sort of like hide behind the shields do something not not the best use to be honest nice little slips rearranging your space take the blow and attack at the same time take the blow quite often cut the leg because people will naturally cover their face which will expose the leg this sort of thing is more the sort of thing you want to see in sword and shield combat one thing that elder ring does get really really historically accurate is the art of sneaking up to someone while wearing full plate or full chain and just shanking them from behind because you can't fault that genuinely whenever i see the dark souls drawing of the sword the ido style move and the leaping forwards for some reason i think that dead cells has got it so much better than eldon ricky it's really really cool it's just this nip across the screen and you just take out everything inside so one of the things i really like about the uh the animation of the japanese swords is that there's this very very often this very good commitment strike that there is an intention to strike and cut and cleave all the way through and this is something that you should have with european swords as well there is this idea that you're really cutting your opponent as if they're not there and this forces them to go on the defensive because then they have to deal with something which is fully intentioned now obviously in dealing that blow that you intend to take all the way to the floor if necessary and still remain balanced which is one of the things i like about the way they show the japanese swordsmanship you do your big cleaving cut but you're behind the sword you settle in a comfortable position that you can then move on from so if we were doing this in lit to now tradition what we would try and do is make sure that our opponent has to focus their energy on defending themselves which means that they can't re-attack and then while they're doing that at the same time we mutate our attack into another attack or we continue that same attack although one thing does have to be pointed out the use of edged weapons against armor particularly full encasing armor is is not good that's kind of what is designed to stop so the idea that you go riding past people oh well look that metal that you're wearing doesn't seem to have any substantial qualities that's something that could be addressed [Music] so the uh the flail of unreasonable ball size this is this is an interesting thing you really really would not want to swing such enormous balls having such pendulous balls would be an absolute problem in real life they're really going to be nothing more than hindrance how can you actually move and recover and recovery is a really really important thing when you're on foot and you're fighting because if you miss so much of fencing comes down to what happens if it goes wrong so having such large and pendulous balls is really really not a good idea on a weapon now here we have a historical something that you would use and this is actually used very very very similar to one of these swords that you can probably see behind me these are montantes so all of the things that you do are going to be about controlling the space between you and your opponent cutting at them being able to recover being able to thrust being able to move around any potential defense that they make and being able to recover again to defend any potential attack or re-attack that they make now obviously when you're using a flail there's a lot more need to keep the momentum going so you're really you're keeping going you're keeping going and as soon as anything goes wrong you need to then find another way to get the whole thing moving again because as soon as obviously the inertia has gone out the balls then you have a bit of an issue so certainly the flail exists as a historical weapon but big pendulous balls on your flail not good something usable that you can recover with but the only other thing i'd say about the flail is obviously if you have something that has a half and it has a chain on it and it has something to swing again very very similar to what i was saying before about the doosan this can still be trained it with in a one-handed manner there's no reason you couldn't use it it's whether it's the best tool for you to use there are better tools so yes certainly you could use it as an improvised weapon certainly you could flail with it it's going to be able to get around shields it's going to be able to do this kind of thing you could certainly use it one hand if you could certainly use it two-handed it's whether it is the best tool for you to do so properly so the shotel um i don't know very much about the show tell and up until last week i had never actually handled one what i would say is i don't want to comment on the use of this and i would suggest that you get hold of damon stith and ask him because he's an absolute expert in african martial arts and i'd really really like to see his take on this what we're seeing which is consistent with the uh the benefits of the weapon is uh these descending strikes so from what we know about shotel fighting that it was very favorable from these high high guard positions coming down striking over and around the shield you know even if you were to like parry it with another sword or another weapon uh the blade would would would uh still manage to get around that weapon so i'm glad to see those descending blows which would have been very common uh for that weapon one thing that that's typically you know in conjunction with the shotel is going to be the uh the goshanda shield which helps to uh eliminate some of the defensive issues with the weapon stuff very strong sweeping blows uh the shotel is are typically double-edged but the examples that i've seen are typically sharp on both sides and so there is a precedence for using the sword in both configurations the grip is rounded so it allows you to index the blade to be used either as a extremely curved sham sheer style sword or like the sickle so it's good to see that it looks like a couple of times he's he rotates the blade to use the convex edge of the shotel and then rotates it back so that's a really good um nod to both sides being functional and the ability to be able to switch between the two all right so now he's fighting the guy with his shield this is interesting the awkwardness of this the weirdness of the design is meant to get around shields this is one of the one of the theories it it would be nice to see some of that action i mean it's probably difficult to kind of portray that you know on the game but it would be a really cool um addition to this character to be able to have movements that would allow him to get around the shield even to like hook hook and pull shields down um with that weapon with how did he step on with the shot ah rapiers the idea that arabia is entirely to thrust is ludicrous and ill-informed very often people really look at radios and what they're doing is they're looking at the hill it must have an ornate hill to some kind so therefore it's a rapier and they don't look at the capacity of the blade so certain blades are made for cutting certain blades are made for thrusting and really you should be looking at the capacity of each sword to do both so really quite often if we're dealing with if you want to look at something as being a rapier as being a rogue sword again one of these arming swords i'll show you well that's as robe as you can get you hang around in your monkey robes and we have a manual where people are fighting with these things that's a cut and thrust weapon how good a cup comes down to the quality and the purpose of the weapon you build so what i'm going to do is i'm actually going to show you a couple of small swords because these are even more considered to be thrusting weapons but the same choices are being made so here is a small sword and you could do exactly the same thing with rapier as i said which is really just designed for thrusting but that's because somebody has made the blade in that particular style and i'm going to show you another small sword this is not a spadrone it's a small sword but it is absolutely sharp on both sides and you could cleave with this because it has weight and is designed to cut and then it has a nice slightly bold tip for the stabbing of you so what's happened is people have got a budget and they choose what to do with that budget i want it primarily to thrust because that's how i think my advantage in fighting lies i wanted to be able to cut and thrust because that's where my advantage in fencing lies so the idea that a rapid rapio is a thrusting weapon is completely completely freaking wrong it is a cut and thrust weapon depending on the quality of the blade you don't have an edge on it you can't cut with it in the same way as if you don't have a point with it you can't thrust with it simple as that however this rapier is not a rapier it's kind of a sword in two hands which goes back to my original point that if it's in two hands it's kind of like it's a long sword so it's being used as a long sword would be if you were primarily just working working on hanging points which are just thrusty thrusty thrusty thrust wind wind white it's not really very rape here the fittings are kind of fantasy long sword but again i say fantasy with a little bit of tongue and cheek because historically we have made some incredibly florid designs on our hilts so fantasy is just our willingness to buy gordy things unfortunately so no it's not a good representation of either the argument of what a rapier is nor necessarily of the form of rapier so as far as move sets for the rapier is concerned when it's held in one hand i don't dislike it it's very very simple you start with the point facing the opponent and you bring the point to them fairly directly and that will be either done with your point hanging down or your point hanging up or your point hanging down from this side so it's actually a pretty good set of movements but i would say it's not necessarily restricted to those of a rapier whatever arabia is oh the incredibly bad use of the of the two-handed the great sword or the spy handler or the beaden handler or the smedoni so obviously i have some very very large swords and i can use them all like a long sword because i practice with them and there's information in the treaties that kind of suggest that you should be now those things will be little hints like it's a sword so therefore we should use it like swords so i would however say that swinging around one-handed is again not your best use of something which has got an awful lot of mass use the two hands on the two-handed swords and the truth of the matter is is if you're holding in two hands unless the thing is completely completely rid of balance you can use in a very very similar way you know there's this point where you're just going like hold down the y button for god's sake just put it in two hands it's meant to be held in two hands what the band's there for now dual welding two freaking big swords definitely i mean i'm i'm completely against the holding one two-handed sword in one hand but when you got two two-handed swords in two hands then i think they probably just balance out two things i've really enjoyed in elven ring are riding riding riding riding more and those are all parts abcde of 0.1 i'd like to point out because riding is subsets of the joy of riding and then part two is creeping up on people using an increasingly unlikely set of noisy things that i can wear and wave around and stealth them great aha so the ridiculously big hammer for all of those fans of strontium dog so if you use a hammer like this i'd suggest that you're probably not going to have an intact back to make it up the stairs so you certainly have weapons which have got a lot of mass where there's actually genuinely advice of hit them with this really big hammer on a stick make sure you don't miss and the reason being is because you're probably going to get one go to do this and then what you're going to do is a little bit too heavy to use i would suggest that the really really big hammer unless you have balloons supporting it to counteract some of the weight is a bad choice in real life as far as i'm away you can get turtle turtle shields so i'm obviously this is not something you should be doing you can get perfectly fine synthetic shields that you don't need and you can get metal you also get things like rhino skin shields and things like this and you get leather shield so the idea of using animal products to make something defensive is is not outside the realms of possibility at all the things i really love about elden ring is obviously exploring the world is absolutely incredible i spend ages like i say just riding and riding and riding and i don't fight nearly as much as potentially i'm supposed to so i really love that aspect i love how much attention to detail there is on so many of the weapons and i kind of wish that some of them had a little bit more access to historical replicas or historical pieces rather i don't mind there being fantasy weapons i really enjoy that i also want to have the overpower thing and frankly i spend most of my time being a wizard because it's easier my name is david rollings and i run the london longsword academy and despite the name we actually deal with an awful lot of different systems of fencing and different types of weaponry all kinds of things we're very very accessible we are very lvgt friendly we have a excellent excellent community and some very very good new instructors coming through the works i've been teaching this for 20 odd years so i really really know my business very very well we have a very very long established school in london you can find us online as well and we are absolutely bloody amazing if you'd like to see more of david as well as other martial and medieval style episodes make sure to like the video and let us know in the comments and i hope you'll join me in thanking david the london longsword academy and damon stiff for collaborating with us on this video you can check out some of their videos as well as their other information in the description below thanks for watching [Music] [Applause] you

Channel: GameSpot

Views: 704,487

Keywords: Elden Ring, Expert Reacts, Sword Master, Sword Master Reacts To Elden Ring, Elden Ring Weapons, GameSpot Expert Reacts, Longsword Academy, David Rawlings, breakdown, sword expert reacts, Elden Ring Expert, Elden Ring Sword Expert, Elden Ring Sword Master, elden ring sword master, experts react, react to elden ring, elden ring gameplay, elden ring best weapon, elden ring swords, sword expert, gamespot expert, elden ring breakdown, sword master break down

Id: nw-aBjRIvVg

Length: 17min 24sec (1044 seconds)

Published: Sun May 08 2022