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It’s a really cheap but satisfying mechanic for fast paced games. Don’t know the lower two games but the upper two games would have not nearly been as good without their parry mechanic, i would argue. Some other comment mentioned crafting though and oh boy do i think that mechanic is useless in a lot of games. But maybe that is just personal taste, i enjoy a game with good parry mechanics if well implemented. Makes you feel like a badass pretty quickly, that and paired with rhythm and you can get that lovely ‘flow’ feeling sometimes.
But obviously is parrying as a mechanic is not really well implemented, i don’t care much for it
I don’t remember where I saw this, but I heard someone set up one of those reductive-but-fun dichotomies by saying “every action game is a dodge game or a parry game”. I had just finished Silksong at the time and had picked up Nine Sols to try and get some more Metroidvania with difficult combat, but as it turns out, I really like dodge games and dont like parry games.
Because I like it a and that is the only reason obliviously
“I parried a blow and I liked it! Won’t dodge no more, it’s just frightening!”
Sorry. So sorry. But it was there and I couldn’t stop myself.
I’m fine with parries. Nearly all action games have some kind of parry.
Building a game around parries is boring AF though.
One of my favorite parrying mechanics is the Moon of Mahaa-Kalaa in Bayonetta. You don’t even need it to beat the game on Normal difficulty, but holy shit is it good and fun AF to parry Gracious/Glorious and take them in the air for a combo.
Game has a bunch of cool tools, so you don’t have to fish for the parry all time and the game doesn’t force to use it. It encourages you to risk trying to parry opponents for a bigger reward, but it doesn’t mandate it.
Same can probably be said for Royal Guard in DMC.
Building a game around parries is boring AF though.
Counterpoint: Sekiro is a great example of a game where parrying is a central, necessary-to-learn mechanic but that does it quite well, in my opinion.
This is exactly what I had in mind. I found Sekiro so boring, but then it’s not an action game, so there’s a lot of RPG/exploration you need to do to squeeze all the juice out of the combat, and I never enjoy this loop in games anyway.
Give me a proper moveset and let me loose on a bunch of enemies is all I want, haha.
I love Bayonetta, especially its Dodge Offset mechanic. Never got on with the parries, but only due to lack of practice on my part.
Because it’s something fans of Dark Souls seem to like, and Dark Souls is pretty popular so of course everyone else is gonna wanna get in on that success. Same for why so many games are also adopting similar dodge mechanics, obscuring info conveyed to the player, and being weird for the sake of being weird. Dark Souls did it and was a massive hit.
The annoying part about it is that far too many titles that do these things don’t actually understand why it works for Fromsoft.
These comments reminded me of Minecraft. It’s the same story there. Crafting became popular because of Minecraft and now every game seems to have crafting mechanics whether they’re fun or not
It resembles a parry, but it’s actually a different system. A famous example is Street Fighter III’s “blocking” mechanic.
Was this article translated? In the English version of SF3, it is Parry, because the existing mechanic that Japan calls Guarding, we call that Blocking instead.
It might be, the game designer is Japanese.
Personally I’d have preferred if Expedition 33 didn’t have parry
Isn’t that pretty much the whole game?
I think the Expedition 33-style use of parry is more down to people wanting to appeal to the Souls-like demo. It was fine in E33, but it’s massively overused.
I wouldn’t say it was fine in E33. It was too strong compared to other mechanics, to the point you can pratically ignore making your characters stronger as long as you can parry perfectly.
I feel like E33 did a great job with the parry mechanic and that it absolutely belongs as a core mechanic. It made the entire game feel like a mix of rhythm game and pattern memorization.
You’d get cozy with parrying the attacks of certain enemy types only for the next to come around with an increasingly complex barrage of attacks, some of which were cleverly designed confuse or misdirect as to what pattern was coming about next.
Could be that I just wasn’t very good at it, but over the course of the main story I never reached a point where it felt breezy for the rest of the game.
But see, that’s the issue that I’m talking about. You say the game felt as a mix of rhythm game and pattern memorization. There’s no mention of the RPG mechanics there, because the parrying overshadowed it.
For 90% of gamers parrying perfectly is a pipe dream. I liked this about E33.
It’s a pretty cheap, if unimaginative, way to add depth to a 3D action game’s combat system. Your evasion options in descending order of the size of movement and time taken are basically run, a quick pulse-dodge (maybe a roll with i-frames), and standing deflect/reversal. It feels real good to be pull off the timing.
Bingo: they know how to implement it, players know how to use, and it can be sick AF with some bells and whistles.
