Weapon Guide: Sword, Staff & Nunchaku

Weapons in Super Stick Hero are picked up on the ground during a stage. Walk over a dropped weapon to equip it, or press R to swap when one is available. Pressing R while you are already armed drops your current weapon — a deliberate choice you make when the range you are holding does not fit the fight in front of you. Going back to bare fists is often the correct call, and dropping is the only way to do it.

When you equip a weapon it overwrites all four attack buttons. Your Q (left punch), W (right punch), A (left kick) and S (right kick) all gain weapon-specific moves with new reach, speed and damage profiles. Your defensive and system options do not change: Shift still holds Block, E still charges Ki, and every Ki special — ↓→Q Ki Blast at 25% and the rest — remains available while armed. Universal tools like the Sweep (→A), Launcher (↑W), Throw (Q+A) and Guard Break (W+S) still exist, but their properties are reshaped by the weapon you are holding.

Weapon Comparison at a Glance

Sword

The Sword is the balanced pick and the easiest weapon to win with if you are unsure. It gives you high reach with medium speed, so your buttons come out a hair slower than bare-handed jabs but connect from noticeably farther away and hit harder. Where fists ask you to step into the pocket, the Sword lets you threaten damage from just outside your opponent's punch range, which quietly wins a lot of neutral exchanges.

The standout tools are the overhead chop and the gap-closing thrust. The overhead is a downward swing that pressures anyone sitting on Block: because it comes down from above and crashes through a defensive stance, a turtling Brute that would normally eat your pokes all day is forced to either take chip and commit, or drop guard and get opened up. Mix the overhead with a low kick and the Brute has no clean answer. The thrust closes distance while dealing damage, so you can convert a whiffed enemy attack into a full punish from farther than usual.

Against Scouts and small swarms the Sword's reach lets you check dashes on reaction — poke as they rush in and their fragile health bars melt. Against bosses the Sword shines because its damage-per-hit is high enough to make short punish windows count: when a boss recovers from a signature move you often only get one or two hits, and you want those hits to be Sword hits, not weak jabs. Cap punishes with a Launcher (↑W) into a short juggle for extra damage and Score.

Weaknesses: the Sword is beaten in pure reach by the Staff, so a dedicated zoner can hold you out if you get greedy — you have to walk in behind blocks rather than trading pokes. Its medium speed also means a well-timed fast enemy can interrupt you between swings, so avoid throwing lazy buttons at point-blank range where the Nunchaku or bare fists would be safer.

Staff

The Staff has the best reach of the three and correspondingly the lowest damage per hit. It is a spacing and control weapon, not a damage weapon. Its buttons produce spinning attacks, multi-hit pokes and knockback sweeps that keep opponents at the tip of your range where they can do nothing back. You will not delete health bars quickly, but you will rarely get touched.

The Staff is the answer to being outnumbered. On swarm stages where three or four enemies close in at once, the Staff's spinning and sweeping attacks hit a wide arc and apply knockback, resetting the whole group to a distance you control. Instead of getting surrounded and mashed, you tap them all back, walk forward behind your poke, and repeat. This is by far the safest way to handle a room full of Berserkers who otherwise pressure you relentlessly the moment you touch a button.

Against a slow Brute, keepout is trivial: your range simply exceeds theirs, so you chip and back away, chip and back away, and they never get in. The Staff is also strong in mirror spacing wars — if the enemy is trying to zone you, your longer reach and multi-hit pokes win the range battle outright. Against linear projectiles, remember you can also step into depth with ↑/↓ to sidestep, then re-establish your poke.

Weaknesses: the low per-hit damage makes the Staff a slow closer against bosses with large health pools — you win the spacing but the round drags, and any single mistake at your low damage output costs you a lot of relative progress. Fast Scouts that get inside your tip range can be awkward because your long swings have gaps up close; if a Scout gets under your poke, either sweep to reset spacing or consider dropping the Staff (R) for faster point-blank tools. The Staff rewards patience and punishes button mashing.

Nunchaku

The Nunchaku is the specialist. It has the shortest reach but the fastest cadence of any weapon, producing whippy multi-hit strings that rack up hits — and therefore Score via the combo multiplier — faster than anything else in the game. Individual hits are light, but because the strings chain so quickly, sustained damage in the pocket is very high.

Its defining strength is juggle extension. After you pop an enemy into the air with a Launcher (↑W), the Nunchaku's rapid strings keep the target airborne longer than fists or the heavier weapons can, letting you tack extra hits onto the end of a juggle before they fall. If you care about maximizing the combo multiplier (which scales from 1.0x up to 3.0x and multiplies your Score), the Nunchaku is the tool: Launcher, then whip out a long string while they hang, and watch the counter climb. This is the best weapon for high-Score runs and for finishing wobbling enemies before they recover.

Because it thrives inside, the Nunchaku is excellent against fragile Scouts — get on top of one and its light health bar disappears under a single string before it can escape. It is also strong against a lone boss once you have learned the punish timings: you have to get in, but once you are in, your damage-over-time in the pocket is punishing, and juggle extension turns each opening into a long, high-Score sequence.

Weaknesses: reach. Getting in is the whole problem. Against a zoner with a Staff or a projectile-heavy boss, you will eat pokes and blasts every time you try to approach, and you have no answer at range. Swarms are dangerous too — the short reach means you cannot control multiple enemies at once, so you can get collapsed on. Use dodges, depth movement against linear projectiles, and Block to weather the approach, and do not commit to strings unless you are certain you are safe. When the matchup is pure keepout, this is often the weapon to drop.

When to Swap or Drop

Every weapon is a trade of range, speed and damage, and no single one is correct for every fight. The pickup you find on the floor is a suggestion, not an obligation. Ask what the fight in front of you demands, then match the tool to it.

• Outnumbered or facing a swarm? Prefer the Staff for its wide, knockback-heavy arcs. If you only have a Nunchaku, its short reach will get you surrounded — dropping it for fists can even be an upgrade in a crowd.
• Facing a turtling Brute? The Sword's overhead crushes a held Block. Against the same Brute the Staff will chip forever without opening it; the Sword closes the fight faster.
• Chasing a high Score or a big juggle? The Nunchaku's fast strings and juggle extension after ↑W build the combo multiplier fastest.
• Getting zoned out? If a Staff or projectile boss holds you at range and you are stuck on the Nunchaku, that short reach is a liability. Press R to drop it and fight at the range your bare fists give you, or grab a longer weapon if one is on the floor.
• Unsure? The Sword is the safest default. It has no glaring hole, threatens blockers, and converts punishes into real damage.

Going unarmed is a legitimate choice, not a failure state. Bare-handed, Q is your fastest, lowest-damage jab, W is mid filler, A is a low poke and S is the heaviest, slowest kick — a clean, predictable kit that beats a mismatched weapon in the wrong situation. If the weapon you are holding actively hurts you (short reach in a crowd, slow damage in a race), drop it with R and trust the fundamentals.

General Weapon Tips

• Learn each weapon's tip range. Winning with a weapon is mostly about standing at the exact distance where your button reaches and theirs does not, then poking from there.
• Your Ki specials never leave while armed. If a matchup goes badly at your current range, a Ki Blast (↓→Q, 25% gauge) or another special can still open the fight — keep E charging in downtime.
• Block (Shift hold) is the same 70% reduction with any weapon, and chip still applies. Use it to survive the approach with a short-range weapon, then punish on the enemy's recovery.
• Against linear projectiles, step into depth with ↑/↓ to sidestep, then re-close with your weapon's gap-closer (the Sword thrust) or re-establish poke range (the Staff).
• Do not marry a weapon. The R drop exists precisely so you can shed a bad matchup — treat range as something you actively manage every stage, not something the last pickup decided for you.
• End damage with system tools: cap a Sword or Nunchaku sequence with a Launcher (↑W) juggle, use the Sweep (→A) for a hard knockdown to reset spacing, and save the Guard Break (W+S) for enemies who will not stop blocking.

Weapons sit on top of the core combat system, so learning them pays off most once the basics are second nature. See the full command list on the Moves page, study multi-hit sequences and juggle routes on the Combos page, and read up on which foes you will be pointing these weapons at — Scouts, Brutes, Berserkers and bosses — on the Enemies page.