One of the best feelings games provide us is the one where you stand your ground against countless enemies with nothing more than a sword and your skills to back you up as you decimate all your enemies with your abilities. In some cases, the weapons and skills can vary, of course, but the feeling stays more or less the same in these types of games.

Still, we all know this is fantasy and are aware of such tropes, like carrying a weapon twice the size of your character or blocking arrows with your blade. Still, some of these fantastic changes are a bit more nuanced and can go over the head if you're not aware of how combat works. Thus, let's talk about some of them.

A common feature in RPGs is having stats, one usually related to your strength, brawn, might, or whatever the game calls it, and another about agility, speed, dexterity, or similar. These games usually make you focus on one and dump the other, making you either a powerful, heavy-weapon-wielding monster or a tank, while the other will make you a fast archer or a nimble dual-wielder.

However, in real combat, you must be strong and fast to be a good fighter. While you'll be better at one, that doesn't mean dumping the other. Without speed, your attacks won't pack any real punch; without strength, your punches will be nothing more than a nuisance (and your arms can be easily grabbed).

There's some truth to the developers' logic, though, as wielding a weapon can compensate for a lack of strength. Even if you're weak, getting a hammer and swinging it at full speed on someone's face will hurt. While that will work in quite a few scenarios, if you're fighting someone with the experience and gear to take weapon attacks — like someone with armor, shield, or another weapon — then your lack of strength would be a problem here. They could easily disarm you, or you could drop the weapon and lose your whole body's balance when hitting them simply because you're not strong enough to take the attack's recoil.

We're not done with this topic yet because another common misconception is that you don't need to be strong to wield a bow. While that applies to modern compound bows, the same can't be said about medieval ones.

The pull weight of bows can be quite heavy, with some around 80 lbs (36kg) and, in extreme cases, exceeding the 120 lbs (54kg) mark. Something similar happened to crossbows; you don't need to be strong to shoot a bolt with one, but you need a lot of strength to reload it (though it was still a lot easier than bows).

Returning to the brute characters who wield greatswords or similar, some games exaggerate how slow their attacks are. While extreme differences still apply — yes, a knife is faster than a greatsword — most heavy weapons are relatively fast.

There are two main reasons as to why they're actually fast. First, they're not that heavy because otherwise, they'd be slow and make you vulnerable — if you take seconds before swinging your weapon, someone will attack you. Lastly, there's the fact that you're using both of your hands on the weapon, which means you're applying more force than you would on a one-handed weapon. They're also more precise because of that.

Another common trope is that characters in heavy armor are slow or clumsy. Not every game focuses on your gear's weight, but these characters are often slow in combat, especially when combining this trope with the one above.

A plate armor can weigh around 50 lbs (22kgs), which would, at best, be cumbersome to carry, especially due to the shape of its pieces. Still, the weight will be spread across your body when wearing it, so you can easily run and perform all kinds of acrobatics with this armor.

This misconception likely started with jousting armor, which can be significantly heavy—around 110 lbs (50kgs). Still, it wasn't used for fighting but for, well, jousting.

Wielding two weapons in combat is something that has happened, and there are a few combat styles around it, from having a companion knife as a side weapon in places like Europe to wielding a shorter blade in Japan — Ghost of Yotei is a good example.

However, that wasn't nearly as common as games and cinema make it out to be. Having a side weapon for emergencies did happen, but to masterfully wield two weapons at the same time required too much practice, and even then, someone with a long weapon and a shield could easily overpower a master dual-wielder. Too much work for little return.

One of the most important things in weapon combat is your weapon's reach. If you can kill your enemy from a safe distance, you can do so without getting a scratch. Then you can keep fighting with a lower risk of dying.

If you get a sword and wield it with a reverse grip, you're annulling the reach advantage the weapon is giving you. You can still adjust your grip between attacks to adapt to the situation, but constantly wielding a weapon in a reverse grip is detrimental.

That said, a reverse grip helps carry the weapon without hitting the floor.

When designing a game with many weapons and armor, the developers want to ensure that they're all viable options and that a player who chooses to play with a legendary knife on each hand and light armor for fast movement is just as powerful as the player who prefers a legendary plate armor with a mighty warhammer.

In real life, however, weapons are not balanced — they're made to overpower one another. If you're the guy wielding the best knife in the world and your opponent is wearing plate armor, wielding a shield, and carrying a spear, your best tactic here is to run away.

In certain scenarios, some weapons are particularly better than others, such as how hammers can hurt someone in plate armor better than any blade, but overall, not every weapon is treated equally. There's a reason guns took over warfare, after all.

We mentioned at the beginning that most people are aware that weapons aren't as big as games make them out to be — we all know Cloud's sword is exaggerated, for instance. However, we're so used to extremely absurd cases that we don't always notice the slightly absurd cases.

For instance, most swords tend to get thinner as the blade goes and only have a small tip at the end. Another common misconception is hammers; the metal area that you'll use to hit your target is actually small — something like Thor's hammer from Marvel games or the MCU is too much.

While the hammer also has the issue of improper balancing, both cases here are trying to do the same thing; they're making the point of impact as small as possible so all the force of your attack will concentrate on the same place in your target. For the hammer, this will make it hurt more; for the sword, it'll increase the chance of piercing through the target.