Samurai vs Knightly Armor Tested to Their Limits | Which Wins?

Hey, Sir Gaines. I just really wanted to say thanks for letting me have this armor for the archery video last time. So about that, I'm going to need that back, like, uh, immediately. Why? You already have armor. Besides, this is better for archers overall, and honestly, I think it's just better armor. Easy, slow your roleplay, that's, that's saying a lot. No, I'm serious. Mobility, range of motion, it's all superior. Okay, okay, sure. Tell that, tell that's your cooking apron. Listen, it's not an apron. It's called a kazoo, kazoo, kazoo, kazoo, kazoo, kazoo, kazoo, kazoo, kazoo, kazoo, kazoo. Yeah, you, you totally said that right. Okay. If you're so sure, let's, let's put it to the test. Full gamut, range of motion, dexterity, flexibility, weapons used, and all that good stuff. If I win, I get the armor back. If you win, you get to pay me full price for the armor plus 25% of the rental fee for time used. That hardly seems fair. Okay, awesome. So glad, so glad we agree. Let's do this thing. Hey, you armored women. Don't you need some kind of unarmored base test? Ugh, fine. Trollo, you hiss. You can come too. Excellent. Welcome back. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, nerd and nerdettes. Now today, we are going to be putting some armor through the paces. More specifically, east versus west when it comes to armor, samurai armor versus man-at-arms or knightly armor, let's say. So we're going to be putting it through the paces, and the goal for this is we're going to be checking dexterity, mobility, range of motion, speed, and also the different weapons of the time that were attributed to those armor types, testing those as well as far as range of motion, how they work, how they cut, how they slice, and even pitting the armors against each other in a couple fun tests, deciding once and for all the best armor in history. Dude, I already told you, you can't just like say those kind of things. You're going to annoy a lot of people. Yep, best armor in history. Great. This one's going to make everyone angry. So for the armor I am using, this is going to be the armor set I got from Romance of Men. It's based off of armor from the Sengoku period. It's more thickness and the style of it is going to be more common to the Edo period, so it's a little thinner, definitely lighter, but I think as far as range of motion, everything as with the bow test, it'll be a good example of what you can do when wearing this type of armor regardless of the weight. From the weapons, we're going to be using this katana here from them as well, which looks pretty solid, pretty awesome, and a kanabo for the heavier one. So it's going to be lighter, faster weapons, and then heavier weapons as well. And for my part, I'm going to be wearing a very mismatched suit of armor, very man's at arm-ish. Basically, this is all the stuff that I've gotten off of Ventures who didn't need it anymore. So I have that all here. I have the padded gambeson, the brigandine, the arm pauldrons. I'm not going to wear gauntlets probably just because they're a little broken, unfortunately. I have the legs, and that is my suit, and for my weapons I'm going to be using a broad sword and an overly-sized mace by the name of Grand. And I will be doing the test as God intended warriors to be, shirtless, with muscles, and a fair amount of chest hair. Now, the first thing we are going to do is check the weight of an unarmored warrior or a manly warrior, and I'm coming in at 193.2 pounds. Now for the weight. So decked out in this full suit of armor here, I am putting on the scale at 224 pounds. So a bit heavier, about 30-something pounds of additional armor here. I'm just holding the helmet for now. So a little bit of extra weight, but it doesn't feel heavy. It's very well distributed as far as just wearing it and moving in it. Now for the weight of this armor, including the helmet, we are sitting at a nice and sizable 250 pounds. So quite a bit extra in protection and weight there. This is on the heavier end. And then as any good warrior knows, no one can be a good warrior without speed. And to set a base test without armor, that will be me and then the women will try it with the armor. So 40 meters, or 131 feet. So that puts me at a somewhat slow 5.3 seconds. All right, not bad for someone who's turning 41 in just a couple days. Definitely a lot slower than you used to be. You see the gray in this hair? I'm an old man now. Give me a break. Plus, I tripped at the beginning, kind of fell a bit. And with that old man out of the way, it is my turn. So I'd say that was a moderately respectable 7 seconds. Definitely a little bit of time. The biggest obstruction was these things here. They kind of get overlaid and caught with the skirt part here. And so it kind of interrupts my step a little bit because they're so flowing that it actually makes it difficult to get a good stride. So my stride kept getting interrupted as I was running. Overall though, felt good, felt light. If it wasn't for these little things in the front here, I think it would have been way faster and smoother for me. So it's the part that I'm not excited about. This is running and cardio for the 40-yard dash. Oh my God, 9.4 seconds. A little bit slower, but you know, at least I'd probably still be alive when I got there. Oh God. So now we have an obstacle course, which is key for warriors, of course, lateral movement, things like that. The way that it works is you're going to start on your back. From there, you get up as quick as possible, 10 pushups, lateral zigzag, side to side, front roll, side roll, then run back and jump over the archery target, which is kind of high. Now as you can see, a man does all of these with no issue whatsoever. Oh, sure, sure. Why don't you tell that to the arrow in your guts? Because that's what you tell yourself to try to deal with the shame you see in your children's eyes as they look upon you and realize you want to weave. Wow. So you really just like turned it up to 11 there, didn't you? Either way, I'm going to embarrass you right now, old man. So yeah, I definitely mentally bailed on that one before I even did it. I think it's a little too sketchy. I feel like I'm going to hurt myself. So I feel like I don't have enough vertical to really get that high with this armor. It just takes off just enough to where I can't get that full mobility. So stopping there. But the rest of it went very smooth. I just got to say, you look adorable doing that obstacle like you were trying to impress a booth girl at a convention while she was just secretly praying that you would leave. But it's her job, so she has to smile and pretend like she's interested to your samurai outfit. That's like weirdly specific. Yeah, I know. I've heard stories about stuff like that happening. You know, I'm going to level with you, man. This is like way more cardio specific than I originally envisioned this being. Gosh dang it. I'm so tired. Oh my God. I can't breathe, guys. I can't breathe. Your patheticness has actually made me physically ill. You know, you always could just admit defeat. Give me like 10 minutes. Jokes aside, guys. This is the last one. I am genuinely tired. So now onto the weapons testing portion. I think that if you're like me, you've seen enough YouTube videos or know enough about swords to realize, hey, they're actually pretty sharp. So it gets a little monotonous just watching things get cut over and over. So the big thing for me on this is checking range of motion, if it's going to obstruct my movements when I go for the slices overhand and then a side. And so I'm just going to try those out with this full decked on and see how that feels and if that's any different than just being unarmored. So while this is not a sword review video, I will definitely say that was incredibly sharp. Very well balanced. It just feels super clean. The movements felt good. I did feel a little bit of restriction in the torso when I was going from the side. Just something about that felt a little funky, but nothing enough to really be overly disruptive because really you don't want big movements. Obviously you want to try and be in close so you're not really overexposing yourself. So you know, as long as you have a strong front, that's going to be just fine. So movement, mobility felt good overall, feels good over the head. Also it's not hitting, getting in the way of the helmet if I'm coming up or to the side or cutting. So really good mobility. Wow. Just, just wow. That was, that was amazing. I felt like I would have, I would have felt none of those strikes. You better save your judgment, man, because it is time for the Kanabo. Check your history. I'm pretty sure it's called a smashy stick. You can't honestly believe it's called, you know what? Nevermind. I'm not going to argue with you. So quick history lesson before we start. If you're not familiar with the Kanabo, it is a large wooden club with spiked studs on it that are made of metal. Sometimes it was reinforced with metal all the way down. It was a sword breaker. I tried that in the past, but the spring steel and steels now are much more flexible and malleable than they would be back there. So I can definitely see that. And it would be great against plates. So this is going to be similar types of swings. I just want to see with the extra weight, if it's basically causing a disruption, I'm going to smash a clay pot and then smack one of these things as hard as I can to see how that feels. It'll probably hurt my hands. So realistically, that might be a top 10 contender of the coolest slow-mo videos I've ever had. I didn't expect that wood to do that. It's definitely dry rotted, but hey, it doesn't change the fact it looked super cool. Now, even moving up in weight class with a heavier, like nine pound Kanabo, again, you don't really feel too much disruption with it. You feel really loose. Your ability to move with it is good if you're changing hands, swinging, moving. So there's not too much of a problem with it overall. It still feels like you're really not wearing much of anything. And now for my turn, we have this sword here. This is a broader at the base. This is going to be something that's made more for chain mail as it tapers down to the point, 13th, 14th century, if memory serves correctly. So it's going to be a good slashing sword, so it's going to have some decent weight, especially as it flares out in the back there. But we'll give a few chops with this thing and see how that feels. Range of motion. Wow. So you're looking a little stiff there, champ. Still at your skirt. I'm confused. Don't you want to win? Listen, if I wanted to hear a woman bickering, I would have gone to the salon with my wife and gotten a pedicure. What an incredibly odd thing to say. So for this range of motion felt good. Only problem is these things, if I don't have someone to help me put them on, they don't fit up quite perfectly. They tend to slide as well. So you can see it's coming out of place a little bit. So that does hinder that range of motion. But if I pop it back in as far as for moving and slicing, I really don't have any issues with that at all. Range of motion is good. Helmets visibility is fine. It's a visor barbuta, which is like kind of a mishmash of different helmets that was kind of popular in the Renaissance. But either way, you have limited visibility, but still enough to see just fine. So now it's time for Grond. Now, if you're not familiar with Grond, it's an oversized fantasy style mace. It is big, about seven pounds. So almost as much as the Kanabo. Named Grond, not after battering ram in Lord of the Rings, but rather the hammer of the underworld by Morgoth slash Melkor in the Cimmerillion. He wielded a giant hammer. Some people interpret it as a mace, but that's why I named it this. So we're going to take some power swings with this bad boy here after I get these all fixed back up and see how that works. So takeaways from that, I do feel like you still get really good articulation if the plates are, the armor's placed well. You have extra weight, so you're going to slow you down a little bit more. But if you're taking, you know, battlefield strikes, let's say that aren't really large and sweeping, you don't have to worry about it as much because again, if you're in a battle or pitch battle, you're not going to be swinging for the fences where the articulation is going to matter a ton. In a duel, sure, but on a battlefield, you really are going to have quick cuts and you want to try and get quick stabs and not overexert or overextend yourself. So for the function that it is, it makes perfect sense, you know, good stuff. So what's my overall honest conclusion? Well, one thing I did want to do, but I decided against it was testing the weapons against the armor types, the Brigandine versus the Katana and the Kanabo and the sword and the mace versus the samurai armor. But the one thing I just want to be completely transparent with you guys is I don't feel with like 0.8 cold rolled steel, it's going to be good enough to give a clear historical replica of what the armor would be. Now, sure, it would be great for the clicks and everything, but I'd rather try and present something I believe in than try and fabricate something or give you something that's inaccurate. But at the end of the day, much like modern body armor, it's not meant to make you invincible. It's to give you an extra life, let's say, for example. So you get one extra hit, you know, if you take a full power swing in armor, it's not meant to stop everything. It's really meant just to give it so you can absorb damage that would normally end you. So I will say though, for the course of this video for agility, range of motion, dexterity, the samurai armor I wore was, of course, going to be superior to what I'm wearing here. Knee articulation for sure, as soon as you have knee plates, it's going to limit articulation and movement and that will change it. So I'll be happy if you can see this in ranger. You can have that for the low, low price of, I don't know, $10,000, but it's 25%. So $50,000. Yeah. Okay. Sure. I'll get right on that. You just got to catch me first. I like guys. I don't actually like lute enough to try and chase someone. If you enjoyed this video and want to see how the samurai armor did with the ranger son over there with the 130 pound war boat, check out the video up ahead. That was a fun one. I will see you guys the next one. Special thanks again to romance of men for equipping me with the armor and of course the samurai sword, the Katana. That was incredibly cool. Really great sword. And I'm excited to work that into the arsenal.