Summary
Many gamers enjoy war games or shooters for their realism. However, because they do not require real people to act outcrazy setpieces or impossible feats, video games have been free to be a little creative when it comes to their weapons and depictions of war. From painstakingly realistic renditions in military or historical settings to the lavishly ridiculous, there is bound to be something on the realistic-to-whacky spectrum for every type of gamer.
However, some games have weapons that, while cooler than a freeze ray, would be just about useless to a regular person in a fight. Whether they would be ineffective underthe strain of realistic physicsor just downright dangerous to the user, these awesome killing tools should probably remain sheathed should a conflict arise.
A gun and a sword combined together sound incredible in practice, and visually,Final Fantasy 8’s gunblade is a stunner and easily stands as one ofFinal Fantasy’s most iconic weapons. However, while a pistol whip might be an effective attack at short range, putting a full-sized longsword on the barrel and then removing its ranged capability makes the weapon less than ideal. In fact, their unwieldiness is the in-game explanation as to why only two characters (Squall and Seifer) are seen using them.
The trigger is supposedly pulled when the user strikes, sending a kinetic discharge through the steel and dealing extra damage to the target. However, The real damage that this weapon would inflict would be to its user’s wrists as they would have to awkwardly hold the gunblade’s bent stock grip while making swipes. Additionally, it would be all too easy to pull the trigger accidentally while swinging around that heavy slab of steel.
With one swing, Dante’s Inferno’s death scythe slices up entire swathes of monsters, enemy soldiers, or flailing zombies. In reality, a scythe modeled after a farmer’s tool with this shape would have only ever been a weapon of last resort. The scythe’s blade is only sharp on the inside, and besides its reach, medieval warriors would have been better off using a more conventional (and widely available) weapon. In fairness,many games have depicted scythes as weaponsdue to their thematic coolness, such asFinal Fantasy 14orGrim Dawn’s scythes, soDante’s Infernoisn’t the only culprit.
The awesome aesthetic likely originates from the image of the Grim Reaper and the idea that a peasant’s common farming implement could actually be a weapon of mass murder. In reality, it would simply be better to go with a polearm for the range and sweep or a war scythe (a weapon with a curved blade pointing outward and upward from the staff) or even just a baseball bat with a few nails hammered in.
Big monsters require big hunting tools to take them down. That’s likely the thinking behindMonster Hunter World’s gunlance, a gigantic firearm with a straight stock and a bayonet attached to its barrel. It is designed to be a melee weapon that can be shoved inside a monster and fired for maximum damage, although it can fire off ranged rounds as well. This preposterously large weapon, as cool as it is in concept, would be impossible for a normal person to use, with or without super strength.
It would make a little more sense if it were intended as amounted combat weaponfor riders on a steed or vehicle of some kind, but its user is expected to somehow operate it on foot. What’s worse, it is used in-game with one hand and paired with a gigantic heavy shield. How anyone would even get a single good swing out of this thing defies sense. However, on style points alone, manyMonster Huntingfans will agree that it is one of the coolest weapons ever conceived.
The Bayonetta games are hardly known for their realistic depiction of armed conflict, as the rule of cool reigns supreme. For example, Bayonetta has a pair of guns for heels strapped to her feet that she can use to shoot enemies while her hands are busy (presumably with shooting more enemies). However, one weapon, unlocked after, really stands out as truly preposterous: the Sai Fung, or “gun chucks.”
The bizarre love child of the notoriously difficult-to-use nunchaku and a revolver, this weapon fires bullets off indiscriminately as its user swings the two muzzles around at foes. Realistically, the random nature of its gunshots would mean a whole lot of self-foot shooting (or worse). If a stray bullet doesn’t hit a passerby or its sender, it would ricochet off any surface a number of times, increasing the odds of friendly fire exponentially. For anyone other thanan Umbra Witch, this weapon is best chucked far away.
TheFalloutseries is known for its wacky and wild arsenal of weaponry. For example, the wasteland has produced the “Rock-It Launcher,” a catapult that shoots garbage, the “K9000 Cyberdog Gun,” and, of course, the “Fat Man,” a mini-nuke launching machine. While being able to launch one nuke at unsuspecting enemies (from a great distance) sounds satisfying in a demonic, terrifying kind of way, there’s one weapon inFallout 3that’s a tier above even this.
The Experimental MIRV is essentially a Fat Man that fires eight mini-nukes out at once, shotgun-style. Naturally, it isthe most powerful weapon inFallout 3, and the word “overkill” would hardly do it justice. Making sure that one mini-nuke goes off at a reasonable distance is a pretty extreme life-or-death concern, but it beggars belief that someone would consider shooting eight simultaneously given the likelihood of two of them clashing and going off at close range, not to mention the surefire vaporization that even its user would experience shortly after firing.
