Monster Hunter Wilds revived a play style I fell in love with almost 10 years ago, and now it's one of my favorite ways to play all over again

You never forget your first Monster Hunter. I can thank 2015's Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate, which I inadvisedly played for over 500 hours in under four months after graduating college, for pile-driving me into this now-lifelong obsession. Charge blade ruled the roost back then and insect glaive was close behind, but a third weapon also defined my MH4U binge: the iconic and almighty great sword.

There were several monsters I couldn't imagine fighting with anything but the greatest of swords – Rajang, Tigrex, Zinogre, Fatalis, Brachydios, Najarala – and that list only grew as I got better with the weapon. Yet for many years, in both Monster Hunter Rise and Monster Hunter World, I've barely touched the great sword. In fact, I actively hated it. To my horror, I became a great sword boomer. Back in my day we didn't have no stinkin' True Charged Slash that ate up 90% of the weapon's power budget and completely dominated its play style. Look how they massacred my boy, etc.

To my utter delight, Monster Hunter Wilds has flipped the script entirely. It was worth becoming a set-in-my-ways great sword snob because now I get to bask in sweet vindication. Great sword, as I know and love it, is so back. Wilds has revived the old-school quick sheathe, crit draw, punishing draw play style where you flip a hunk of metal that's two feet taller than you as easily as you would a spatula. It's absolutely ridiculous and I love it so much that it's competing with lance, which I've mained since World, for my favorite weapon.

They don't call it the good sword

In the Mesozoic era of the mid 2010s, great sword was an agile hit-and-run weapon that excelled in sniping weak points and then retreating to reposition for the next charged attack. You'd pull out the sword, flex in place for a few seconds just to send a message (and power up your swing), clock a monster in the dome, and sheathe your oversized weapon like it's a mere pocket knife. If the monster ever staggered, you could squeeze in an uncharged slap, with the skill punishing draw racking up KO power if you hit the monster's head. Meanwhile, crit draw would guarantee a critical hit on every opening attack. It was beautiful. No notes. Chef's kiss.

This play style technically never disappeared. The armor skills that enabled it didn't go anywhere. You control the buttons you press, and so on. But playing great sword this way was so inefficient in the past few games that I just couldn't stomach it. I am, in my marrow, meta trash, and this felt like bringing a knife to a gun fight. See, Monster Hunter World introduced a great sword tackle that lets you hyper armor through attacks while upping your charge level, all with the ultimate goal of cranking out a True Charged Slash (TCS) with a damage motion value that absolutely dwarfs a normal charged swing. Monster Hunter Rise, dammit all, doubled down on this with a new wirebug art that let great sword parry attacks and instantly chain into a TCS, warping the weapon even further and propelling it to the top bracket of the speedrun charts.

Great sword was good in World and Rise, but it was also pigeonholed into spamming one move as much as possible, and this is hands-down the fastest way to make me drop a weapon in any Monster Hunter game. Inevitably, I gravitate toward weapons with a well-rounded move set that feels dynamic and reactive in a hunt. Everything is going to have one standout attack, but as long as your bread-and-butter hits are also worth using, I'm happy.

But Austin, I hear you say, weren't you spamming one move with great sword in MH4U? Yes, reader I just invented to prove a point, I was, but consider this: it was the only move the great sword had. Technically you had a charge and a strong charge, but they were almost the same thing. See, it's not about repetition for me. It's about – and let me put my snob hat back on for this – elegance. There's a difference between a weapon that is explicitly built to do one thing well, and a weapon where it's demonstrably suboptimal to use anything other than one of several options. This is the same reason I didn't like charge blade in World: spamming phials gets old and just makes me miss the axe combos of 4U. Hey, I said I'm a boomer.

Monster Hunter World's great sword was designed in a way that obviated everything other than the TCS, which always seemed inelegant to me. Why have the other moves at all? I liked Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate's Brave-style great sword because it just made charges faster, and besides, that whole game was anime nonsense. We had a great thing going and World screwed it all up with a third charge that blew away the competition. There we were, happily taking a humble two-horse carriage to work, and Capcom released a Ford F150.

Monster Hunter Wilds is the solution to this problem (which, I recognize, I have created in my mind for myself). The TCS is still powerful, but the motion values between all three great sword charges have been normalized. This makes the standard draw attack competitive, and that means crit draw and punishing draw are on the menu. The ol' spatula strategy is back, baby.

With the new instant-block and offset attacks available to great sword in Wilds, the hit-and-run style isn't optimal on its own, but I've found it to be a fabulous foundation. Open with a draw charge, assess what the monster's doing, and see about weaving in other attacks, including the occasional TCS during a big opening or a cheeky slap during a small one. The TCS is a cool attack! And now it's not over-tuned. In other words, the Wilds great sword is a dynamic weapon with a well-rounded move set that supports multiple play styles, including my favorite one. Music to my boomer ears.

These are the best Monster Hunter Wilds weapons.