Slicing Up Starfield Enemies With Katanas Is A Blast

Starfield has a bunch of weapons for you to build out the perfect character to suit your style. Maybe you want to be a gunslinger who focuses on pistols, or a sharpshooter who specializes in snipers. Or maybe, like me, you want to get up close and very personal with a katana. Thankfully, Bethesda’s latest RPG has quite a few curved blades to find and—with the right skills—deal hella damage.

Like the Mark I Spacesuit and Razorleaf spaceship, Starfield’s katana, the Wakizashi, is a unique piece of equipment you can’t loot off an enemy’s corpse. Instead, the Wakizashi can be found in a variety of galaxies and in a range of rarities, some providing perks like lacerate to randomly apply bleed damage, or anti-personnel to deal increased damage against humans. For this reason, a Wakizashi is well worth having in your arsenal.

Where to find Starfield’s katana, the Wakizashi

There are a couple ways to get the Wakizashi, but you’re going to need to travel to the luminescent city Neon on Volii Alpha, in the Volii star system. It’s not hard to miss; just two gravjumps southeast of the Alpha Centauri galaxy, the starting location where the capital city New Atlantis is found, and you can go to Neon right after finishing the first couple of main quests. Once on Neon, you’re looking for the Ebbside district, which is next to the Volii Hotel.

From there, you’re hunting for Frankie’s Grab + Go, a quaint little shop that has a secret entrance to the hideout of the Seokguh Syndicate, an underground gang of sorts. You can convince the shop owner Franchesca Moore to open the door to the foxhole for you, but pickpocketing her keycard is an easier option here. Either way, once you’re inside the hideout, it’s then just about roaming the labyrinthine building until you find a yellow weapon case on a table. Loot that, and the Syndicate Enforcer, an epic Wakizashi, will be all yours. Easy pickings.

While that’s the easiest and quickest way to get the Wakizashi, there is another method that involves a side-narrative in which you join a lowly Neon gang. That’s right, we’re still on the Blade Runner-esque planet, but instead of stealing from the Seokguh Syndicate, we’re looking for the Strikers. They’re a downtrodden clique that used to be feared all across Neon until rival gang the Disciples stepped in. I won’t spoil what happens, but before finishing the entire set of Strikers missions, and after doing a quick job for gang leader Briggs, you’ll talk to the arms dealer Hatchet. Hatchet will have a few weapons for sale, and a common Wakizashi is among them.

Starfield’s katana is seriously OP with the right skills

It’s not enough to just have a katana in hand. No, you still have to select and upgrade the right attributes to make full use of an OP melee build. While there are a variety of skills that can assist in fleshing out such a build, like Fitness to increase the amount of oxygen (stamina) you have, or Gymnastics to combat slide and reduce fall damage, I recommend you pick up and max out the following character attributes to become a true cyber ronin:

Combat Tree

• Crippling: Humans have an increased chance of entering a downed state and, when maxed out, that status effect applies to all enemy types
• Dueling: melee weapons deal more damage, you take less damage when wielding a melee weapon, and, when maxed out, melee kills health you up

Physical Tree

• Martial Arts: increases the critical hit chance with a melee weapon, gives you a chance to disarm enemies with power attacks, lets you take less damage, and, when maxed out, lets you reflect damage back when blocking with a melee weapon
• Pain Tolerance: reduces physical damage and, when maxed out, gives you a chance to just straight ignore physical attacks when your health is low
• Rejuvenation: regenerates your health outside of combat and, when maxed out, lets you also regain health while in combat
• Wellness: increases your maximum health

With these skills, you’ll cut an unstoppably bloody path across the stars. I’ve entered many firefights in my 30-something hours with Starfield. While my primary weapon is a pistol, if I really want to fuck shit up, I unsheathe my Wakizashi and slash through everyone and everything. Sometimes I’m killing those bullet sponges in two hits. Other times, a single strike is enough to cut enemies down. Although bosses have more health and resistances, they’re still no match for my katana build, and this is true for alien, human, and machine goons. Literally no one in the vast black galaxy has been able to withstand my blade thus far. In this way, I’m straight up giving Vicious from Cowboy Bebop, and I love it.

You should check out Kotaku’s Starfield landing page, which houses all of our coverage of the game, including a vast number of tips and tricks we’ve compiled so far. You might even learn something the game never, ever bothers to tell you, such as how to reset vendor credits, or how to land anywhere on a planet.

See You, Space Samurai.

Image Credit: Bethesda, Xbox