Postby t̷s͢uk̕a͡t͜ư » 2009.09.14 (03:02)
I'll ask the same question I ask every time one of these questions come up:
Are we talking about legendary knights and samurai, or actual knights and samurai?
If we're talking about actual, historical knights and samurai, then it'd go to samurai hands-down. Historically, knights were bullshit. There was no style whatsoever to how they fought. They literally just walked onto the field and clonked each other across the breastplate with claymores until one of them fell over from exhaustion. After falling from their horses, they'd survive a few minutes, tops, before they collapsed from under the weight of their armor and weapons, and only survived because people mistook their utter inability to get back on their feet for them being dead. Samurai needed fucking skills to survive, and they had those aplenty. They were also used to killing armored opponents, so knights would be exactly the sort of opponents they are trained to fight.
Plus, we live in America, where the popular opinion is that anything that Wapan (not a typo) does is infinitely superior to its Western equivalent.
If we're talking about knights and samurai from legend, then we have something like a Goku vs Superman fight. Samurai of Legend battled entire armies by themselves, and even battled abstract nouns at times, whereas the power of a knight scaled up to whatever he was fighting. So a legendary samurai is immensely powerful and can conquer death (because he stole the chrysanthemum from the jade dragon empress in the lilypond of wisdom, or whatever bullshit he did), whereas a legendary knight would be wearing the Holy Grail in one of those beer hats, besides being capable of killing multiple dragons in a given outing. Neither can die, and neither tires. I suppose it might come to whoever has more trump cards... the knight would win if he has a larger set of motivating factors like princesses to be rescued or to win the affections of, whereas the samurai's would be focused on preserving his honor, his father's or other ancestor's honor, or recovering the same.
If the setting is an anime, the knight is fucked.
[spoiler="you know i always joked that it would be scary as hell to run into DMX in a dark ally, but secretly when i say 'DMX' i really mean 'Tsukatu'." -kai]"... and when i say 'scary as hell' i really mean 'tight pink shirt'." -kai[/spoiler][/i]