I think Way of the Samurai had some pretty fun sword combat. Still the only game i've played where you can use an enemy's momentum to send him hurtling over a bar stool.
But to try to answer your question, for one thing cleave is one of the few ways to balance melee with AoE and ranged based damage classes in RPGs, and since most medieval stuff is some kind of RPG...
There is also the "hollywood effect." People have no concept of real sword combat. As soon as you give them a katana and it bounces off chainmail, they will cry that their legendary japanese masterpiece is actually shit against armor and look to play something more aligned with their image of period warfare. So how did armored samurai do battle? With bows and spears, straight daggers slipped between armor plates, and wrestling (which they called Judo), like every other culture.
Swords work fine against the unarmored, but imagining medieval combat as people running around with swords attacking each other is a bit like a thousand years from now imagining today's warfare as hundreds of people firing pistols at each other...yeah, they have pistols, but it's nobody's first choice. Swords have a mystique that causes them to be more prevalent in fiction than they ever were on the battlefield. One of those cases where fiction is better than the reality so we stick with the fiction for entertainment purposes.
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