Swords versus Guns

Ok, after a long hiatus, I've decided to actually try posting here a little more frequently again. We'll see how it goes. A warning for this post, spoiler alert! Particularly if you haven't yet seen Transformers 3 and would like to be surprised, read no further.

So, after watching Transformers 3, I noticed something strange in the battle choices. These are giant robots with huge, powerful guns, right? And we all know that guns ended the reign of swords as weapons on the battlefield, right? So why is the first battle between Optimus Prime and Shockwave waged with Optimus dual wielding swords, and the final battle between Optimus and Sentinel with sword and shield? If we wish to go back further, think of the Matrix. Neo can morph the matrix in whatever way he can conceive, and yet in the end still resorts to physically martial arting everyone to death. Hell, we could even look back at Star Wars, where any storm trooper or bounty hunter in the galaxy can use a gun, but only the highly trained Jedi get the cool swords.

Now, I've come to expect that sort of thing with RPGs. After all, isn't the hero of just about any fantasy game expected to have a sword, even and perhaps especially if all of the armies for and against the hero are holding guns? You need only look back to Final Fantasy XIII for examples of the futility of guns in RPGs. Sure, Lightning has a gun built into her sword, but mostly she uses the sword part instead. Sazh, the only gun wielder, is the weakest character in both magic and physical attack throughout the game. Yet look at the sanctum troops and the numbers of guns. Only the most advanced troops have melee weapons. Looking back further to Chrono Trigger, hero has a sword and the most consistent powerful attack, while Luca has a very inconsistent and usually weaker gun.

I've come up with a couple of thoughts as to why there seems to be this emphasis on climactic swordplay. For one, sword fights can be longer (there's generally no blocking of bullets or energy blasts). Guns are too fast, one shot and it's over. Sword fights also generally look cooler. I mean, unless you're going to do a slow motion shot of the bullet, you're not going to see it, and doing extended slowmo is just ridiculous. However, if that was the end all, we wouldn't have all of the modern guns-only action movies. I've come to the conclusion that it's because of the impersonal nature of guns. You can shoot someone from far away where they can't even see you, or even shoot so many that they become a faceless horde. But you can't do that with a sword. A sword is one-at-a-time, face-to-face action. Rather than blasting Sentinel from half-way across the city, Optimus has to stand right in front of his enemy. There's almost a sense of honor that you have to be out in the open to finish the battle. No snipers, no surprises, just man against man (or robot against robot) action. It makes one wonder about the general state of things, no? About humanity in the modern age and the importance of personal contact with others?