Monster Hunter Wilds’ Long Sword Has Taken Over My Life
It’s Time To Study The Blade

Of the many things that define the Monster Hunter series, one of the most iconic is its large arsenal of weapon types; there are 14 to choose from, each with entirely different movesets iterated and built upon over the last 20 years. There’s the poster child Great Sword, a hulking blade with slow strikes that deal massive damage. Or there’s its polar opposite, the Dual Blades, a pair of fast-hitting daggers that let you slice, dice, and spin like a Titan-slaying top. The Charge Blade is a complex bit of engineering that switches between Sword and Axe modes, requiring its user to manage resources while deftly making use of both configurations. The list goes on and on: the Hunting Horn has you doubling as a bard and a bruiser, the Insect Glaive sports a beetle sidekick and vertical moveset, and that’s not even to mention the variety of ranged weapons, such as the Heavy Bowgun, which is essentially like bringing an M60 to a monster fight. Among these many complicated devices, there’s also the Hammer, where you sort of just bonk guys on the head.
In Monster Hunter Wilds, all of these weapons are interesting, complex, and at least a little weird, so distinct from each other that the one you pick probably says a lot about what kind of action games you like. As for what I chose, my evaluation came back with a single word: Weeb. While each of these armaments has its own allure, it only took a few minutes of swinging around the Long Sword to know that I would spend most of my immediate future doing my best Seven Samurai impression with this fast, graceful, and ridiculously over-the-top weapon.
If the name didn’t give it away, the Long Sword lives up to its title, an oversized katana that’s surprisingly quick despite its bulk. You can perform overhead slashes with the Y button (on an Xbox controller), stabs with the B button, and more damaging slashes with RT, but what makes it unique is its combination of counter-focused swordplay and the Spirit Gauge, which lets you access stronger moves and a powered-up state. The Spirit Gauge takes a bit to wrap your head around (and the game’s lackluster tutorial doesn’t help), but basically it’s made up of two parts: the inner gauge, which fills up as you land regular attacks, and the outer gauge, which is a colored outline around the bar that increases as you land the Spirit Slash attack or successfully perform a counter. Spirit Slashes cannot be done outright and can only be accessed after performing a lengthy combo that spends meter, performing a slow charge animation, or after timing a counter correctly.
As you land Spirit Slashes and counters, the outer gauge goes from colorless to white, to yellow, to red, and when you finally hit red, you enter a powered-up state where you gain additional moves and attacks deal more damage. While you can only stay in red gauge for a limited time, you can elongate the timer by landing Spirit Slashes and counters, which is important because the goal with this weapon is to be in this mode as much as possible; there’s very much a learning curve to managing both the inner and outer gauge while trying to avoid becoming monster food. And even after getting a grip on how everything works, it still takes a lot of practice to get used to your two counters, the Foresight Slash, where you spin backward before dashing in, and the Iai Spirit Slash, where you sheathe your sword and slice through an incoming strike. On top of learning the timing, both of these can’t be performed outright because you need to perform your own attack before activating them.