@Don: That makes Jedi sound like wizards rather than knights. Anybody have a favourite magic battle from film?

Musashi-kensei’s most impressive fights were usually when he surprisingly beat people to death with a club of some sort instead of fighting “normally”. Once in his life, in about a half-century of fighting, he did some crazy ninja stuff like in the movies (this, when he fought Matashichiro). And even that much is only quasi-historical.

Film itself is a lie though, so it doesn’t surprise me that it also lies in this particular. Still, I like the aesthetic that Don describes.

But really they are using the Force to anticipate their opponent’s moves and to plan their own best moves. They would also be, largely invisibly, using the Force to try to directly attack their opponent, move stuff in the environment against them, and counter their opponent’s attempts to do the same. Mostly these invisible Force actions would cancel each other out so we wouldn’t see much.

Then, after a while of this, one of them will foresee an opening and the other will foresee their own defeat, and the one strikes down the other.

So it should look a lot like Obi-wan vs Vader in A New Hope.