Parrying is so cool that it short-circuits people’s higher brain function, leading them to slam it into everything, and allow it to beat absolutely everything. Parrying in single player games is an EXTREMELY DANGEROUS thing to add to your game, and it should be done with utmost caution, at risk of destroying your entire game’s design.
So first up, what exactly is a parry? A parry is a timed button press with a narrow window that will completely nullify almost any attack headed at you, and sometimes will leave the opponent in a state to be punished, or sometimes outright deal a massive amount of damage to your opponent. A parry is different than a block, because blocking can be held continuously for a variable length of time, and there are frequently penalties to blocking, or blocking too many attacks. A parry is different than dodging, because your character will not move, and will absorb the incoming attack rather than ignoring it. This can mean playing a paired animation, or taking some hitstop and parry-stun. For the sake of this article, if the first few frames of blocking will nullify an attack and negate all damage you take, I’ll be including it as a parry.
In a multiplayer context, parries tend to be relatively balanced, because a human can recognize the timing patterns of another player, and their guessing patterns, and choose to either bait the parry animation, or hit in the uncovered parry zone (doing a low attack instead of a mid, or vice versa), or throw the person (Unless it’s Soul Calibur 6….).
In a single player context, enemies need to serve you fair attack patterns, meaning reactable ones. This means that a good player can always react to anything an enemy does, and their decisionmaking determines how difficult the skill tests they face are, and the payoffs for each skill test. This means, if a parry can beat every single attack in your game, then there is no point in ever doing anything but parry. Is this difficult? Yes, but it is also simple. This means that a player with good timing and reaction skills can avoid making any decisions for the entire duration of a game.
I’ll repeat that for emphasis: If you allow parries to counter every single attack in your game, then your most skilled players will have the most boring experience of your game.
Dodges operate in a very similar way to parries in most games, because they typically have invincibility frames. The difference between parries and dodges is that dodges ask you to pick a direction to move. This means you can dodge through an attack, but into another one. Or you might dodge into an AOE damage zone, or into a crowd of enemies, and be served many more attacks. In a good game, your combat options mutate the game state, and serve a diverse array of new challenges to players. In a game where parries beat everything, players can stand still and ignore everything except timing.
Examples
I have played a massive number of games with this issue. Gwyn is viewed by many to be a massive anti-climax in Dark Souls 1 because he can be so easily exploited this way, and no humanoid boss was ever given this exploit again for the rest of the series.
Unsighted is another game where most boss fights fold to simply waiting for the parry, as well as any encounter with the Shadow Creatures, the toughest common enemy on the map.
Sekiro is an entire game brought low by this mistake. It is FAR better to Deflect or Mikiri Counter attacks than to dodge them, jump over them, run away from them, or otherwise engage in a defensive system that isn’t the thing that strictly counters the move the boss is using.
God Hand is a notable example of a game with a parry-like mechanic that isn’t completely subsumed by parrying. The weave dodge lets you briefly make your upper torso completely invincible, and you can mash it to keep it invincible for as long as you like. The sidestep and backflip dodges each have some total invincibility, and move you away from an incoming attack. This means you can dodge many attacks with the weave dodge, but you still need to pay attention to what type of attacks enemies are using, and ultimately make decisions. There is unfortunately another type of cheese present in the game (the high side kick lets you do a wall infinite), but even the best players can’t just ignore everything the enemies do in favor of one defensive option that solves everything.
Another good solution to Parries is Nioh, which has parry skills on multiple weapons, but usually a parry will only grant a situational advantage, like getting behind an enemy to their vulnerable back, rather than outright rewarding you with a massive amount of damage, not to mention that many enemies have claw and fist attacks that can’t be parried. You can commit to parrying in the weapon-less stance, but it won’t beat everything, and you still need to engage with the rest of the game.
In the future, I think parries in single player games should offer different rewards than massive damage, and should do more to change the state and position of characters. And developers wanting to incorporate parries should be careful to make sure that every enemy always has a selection of moves that can’t be parried.
I know it’s tempting and cool to put in your game: “I precisely counter your move. The third eye is open. I see your whole future and it is DEATH.” Please reconsider. Do not give into the mindkiller.
Celia Wagar's CritPoints 
“In a single player context, enemies need to serve you fair attack patterns, meaning reactable ones.”
This is far from true — entire genres of great games (such as arcade belt-scrollers) are built around the idea of having to space yourself around unreactable attacks from enemies.
You might be asking yourself “what does this have to do with parries? Surely parries would be useless in a game with unreactable attacks?” Well, aside from obvious option-select setups, not every attack has to be unreactable. A game like this, where parries add a *lot* once you’re comfortable with the game, is Fight’n Rage — like most belt scrollers, the vast majority of attacks are unreactably fast. However, the game has some reactable attacks, many of which can be baited out either by being at a certain position relative to an enemy, or triggered in some other way (for instance, Dobermen will always use their “rocket punch” in reaction to any jump at certain ranges, meaning you can bait that out with an empty vertical jump from certain ranges with the intent of parrying it to punish). In this way, the parry actually adds depth, rather than removing it — at lower levels, it rewards awareness of spacing against enemies that you might not be focusing on to be ready for a parryable attack from them, at higher levels it adds more options for dealing with enemies by baiting specific actions out. Sure, a player with a 1f reaction time could theoretically parry their way through nearly the whole game (every enemy attack is parryable except for a few grabs), but that doesn’t happen in practice even though nearly every attack is “parryable”.
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There’s certainly an exception to every rule.
When I was consulting on Desync, I mentioned that the hammer enemies had unreactable swings, and the developer pointed out, it’s automatic within a certain range, so you can guarantee a dodge.
While these attacks might technically have unreactable animations, they occur under predictable, reactable, circumstances. So in practice, you can react to avoid damage, unlike say, a hitscan enemy in a modern FPS game.
And this still matches the broader point that parry isn’t the best solution to every problem, and you need to use other means of defense to play the game effectively.
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I have to disagree with the overall thesis here, that in games where you can parry most attacks the most skilled players will have the most boring experience. I think you’re making way to many assumptions here to the point that your thesis is inherently flawed
A) You come into this with the inherent assumption that the most-skill or most-optimal play is to wait for an enemy to attack, parry, then counter attack. Firstly, you don’t define what “skilled play” really means here outside of being able to enact a parry without taking into account any other factor that could exist that would play into being “skilled”. For example, the video you chose to bolster you point for Sekiro has multiple instances of the player choosing strategies that forgo waiting for parries entirely (Illusory Monk and Guardian Ape first phase), dodging instead of parrying in order to ultimately get more posture damage (all three Owl boss fights), or just generally using more tools at their disposal than just parrying (Ninja Tools being used in virtually every boss fight).
B) You assume that the amount of decisions a player makes is always or almost always inversely proportional to how boring it is. This necessarily asserts that there is one universal experience when playing a game, and that the most enjoyable games are ones with the most amount of choices the player can make. You’re inherently presupposing that everyone who plays a game with a near universal parry will invariably get bored of it, as if it’s unthinkable that anyone could find parry mechanics enjoyable.
Your thesis strips video games of their arthood. That there is a way that games should be made because otherwise it’s just boring. It seems to me that you’re personal taste towards this mechanic is pushing you more towards viewing games strictly as a product that ought to do X because that’s just how things should be, rather than actually treating them as an artform wherein some works will have qualities that you won’t personally resonate with.
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I’m not defining optimal play in the essay, but I think skilled play is clear. A skilled player is one who can mechanically time a button press consistently, amongst other things. The players with the greatest skills are going to have the mechanical skill to parry almost or every single hit. That’s what it means to be skilled, to have skills.
Sure, it can be optimal to use other things than parry in Sekiro, because you’ll get more damage faster that way, but nothing stops you from parrying every parry-able hit, or mikiri countering them, and with a few exceptions that you noted, parrying is still the best way to defend the majority of the time. There isn’t a strong trade-off most of the time.
Yes, I do have a certain prescription for how I think games should be designed. I believe that games should be deep, meaning that they create a wide variety of situations for players, and challenge players to find unique solutions to those situations, which themselves create a wide variety of situations. This is a quality that I find in many well-regarded games, like Tetris, Minecraft, Super Monkey Ball, any fighting game, any RTS game, and most stylish action games.
I don’t think this prescription “strips games of their arthood,” because not every game can be about everything, different games need to make choices on what they emphasize, both because they are constrained by budget and time, and because including more and more things dilutes and overshadows the things you have.
But yes, I am saying that some types of design are worse than others. I’d hope that we can both agree that an idle game or clicker game is worse than something like Sekiro. If we can’t agree on that, then I don’t think we have a starting point.
I don’t think it’s unthinkable that anyone could find parry mechanics enjoyable. The first line of the essay is basically saying, “Parries are so enjoyable on a raw aesthetic level, that people don’t really stop to consider that they can lead to an unenjoyable way to play”
Plus, I allude to Soul Calibur 6, a game that put off many people for making the parry mistake that many single-player games do. The universal parry is a large part of why Soul Calibur 6 is no longer widely played at tournaments, because people didn’t find it fun.
Ideally, when you make a decision in a video game, it should mutate the state in some way. You should gain or lose velocity, move to a different position, gain or lose a resource, enter or leave a particular state. Ideally, game state should mutate over time and change the players’ incentives, like losing stamina as you block in Dark Souls, or dodging and ending up in a corner, or surrounded by enemies. Parry is all-upside a lot of the time. Heck, the best example you could cite against it was that it wasn’t the absolute best thing in certain circumstances.
This article is intended to motivate people to design parry systems with trade-offs. To consider how a parry should occupy a unique role in a game, rather than the one tool that beats everything. Do you think that it is a waste of time to encourage people to consider mechanics more thoughtfully and to build mechanics that encourage players to engage more fully with the game? What’s your actual angle here? Should games just be tests of timing skills and nothing else? Are you just against discussion of mechanics entirely, since presumably you think every mechanic is as good as every other one? Are we discussing and critiquing art, or are you just narrowly shutting down my viewpoint in particular?
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We both absolutely have a disconnect on what it means for games to be works of art. Art is expression and is used to convey an experience to somebody else. Why are we trying to apply an objective quality modifier as expression. Creating a box that all games must conform to or else they are a lesser work is antithetical to treating games as an artform. You would be called crazy if you said a landscape painting was objectively better art compared to an abstract one, or vice-versa. Why should we say that any genre of game is objectively better? I prefer Sekiro to, say, Cookie Clicker but who am I, or anybody for that matter, to say whether one is objectively better than the other? What about people who prefer Cookie Clicker to Sekiro? Do they have a wrong opinion? Does the fact that Cookie Clicker resonated with them not matter as much? This line of thought leaves you one step removed from ranking games on a scale of 1 to 10 like we’re IGN.
My angle here that I think you should fundamentally consider how you view games as an artform and how you analyze them. Of course people should talk about game mechanics, they’re part of the artistry. I believe that if we seriously want to engage with video games as an artform, the discussion around mechanics and all other game design choices should revolve around what they do for the game’s experience, what feeling at the devs trying to impart on the player beyond just “it’s fun”.
I find this this article fails to really get at that, and seems uninterested in discussing the reason these mechanics are implemented in the first place, for each individual game. Surely you don’t think the every instance of a parry mechanic is added just because it makes the player feel cool. Why do you think Fromsoft built Sekiro’s combat around parrying and have other mechanics bend around it? What feeling and experience is Fromsoft trying to impart on the players? What does Royal Guard do for the Devil May Cry experience? What did the Mario developers want you to feel when you came up to a Hammer Bro? Why do blocks fall faster in Tetris the longer you play? This is the type of discussing that is actually worthwhile, that treats games as a mature artful. At least that’s what I believe. Otherwise, when we’re saying X mechanic is bad or that Y is better, we’re just treating games as a product to be consumed.
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Art is an expression that could be used to convey a lot of things to someone else, not necessarily just an experience. Not all art is experiential. Not all art has a message. There is more to the art of games than just this idea of what developers want you to feel. Art and games exist outside of just their authors, and can be subject to the interpretations of the audience as well.
The thing I’m pointing out here is basically that for a lot of these games with parries, the author may intend for the games to be these fairly complex combat systems, where players engage with many parts of them, but parries can easily undermine that intention if developers are not careful. Parries can make these interesting and versatile movesets into something fairly rote and formulaic.
For example, at the beginning of Unsighted, there is a supposed-to-lose boss fight. The boss has a whole moveset, and fighting against them is tricky, because you have to worry about how to evade and punish their various attacks. But instead of engaging with that, you can just stand close to them and parry them for a big damage punish a few times, and you win.
I understand the developer intention, that the parry is meant to be this kind of secret weapon that is mastered over the course of the game. I’m capable of engaging with these games on this level, but in practice, it never works out this way. It’s more like, “Okay, I could spend time learning this boss’s moveset, the different ranges of their attacks, and how to move around their arena, or I could stand in front of them and play a simpler version of DDR for a little bit and win quickly without really having to learn or master much at all”. Do you think that’s what the developers actually wanted people to feel?
Do you actually engage with artists much? Have you drawn things and asked people for critique? Have you practiced drawing from reference and developed a skill for reliably reproducing things you’ve seen, and being able to reinterpret them into new depictions? What I’m doing here isn’t very different than that. Of course not every work of visual art needs to be anatomically accurate, or strictly follow perspective, and there is a lot of value in abstract and weird art, the same way there is a lot of value in abstract and weird games. I don’t believe that games are some progression from worse to better. Different games emphasize different things, and that’s absolutely a part of the art of games. I don’t want Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy to have a billion other mechanics in the name of making it a sheerly more complex game. However I still have a value system for what I consider to be good and bad art (And hey, yeah, I do assign scores. Deal with it.)
What I’m saying here is that a common trope of our media tends to undermine the things we’re trying to accomplish, rather than emphasize the values we actually want to emphasize. We want parries to make games more complex and skillful, but frequently they are doing the opposite.
This isn’t very different than the discussions around the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope, about how instead of making a girl that is depicted as incredibly interesting the protagonist of her story, her role in the story is actually to inspire a reserved male protagonist to be a more fulfilled person. This is a common process of artistic critique that happens across mediums. “The thing we’re all doing has problems, and we could be doing it better.”
I think there’s a layer of artistic meaning in games that you’re not entirely engaging with by presenting my critique as irrelevant to the art of games. I don’t think you’re treating games as a mature artform if you’re preoccupied with what the game developers wanted you to feel. There’s more to art than that; and more to games as an artform.
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Some points of contention here:
-You define depth as breadth of options, but having many options can make a game less deep if they aren’t meaningful options.
Build variety in Soulslikes often feels superficial because of how punishing the games are towards experimentation-in a first playthru, l often converge towards maxxing stunlock so l can engage with combat minimally.
-Parries are not primarily an aesthetic pleasure. They are primarily a mechanical pleasure. No matter how good a parry animation looks it will not feel good if the timing and reward aren’t tuned correctly. It is the pleasure of a rhythm game, and I feel that you misunderstand the appeal and thus devalue it. Parries aren’t a secret hidden option that take over a game due to aesthetic appeal—they are a core mechanic of a game like Sekiro, the fundamental way you interact with the game and core to its meaning.
In Sekiro, you do have meaningful choices not in spite of, but because of, limited build variety. Your few choices have more meaning. Whether you dodge or parry situationally. You do have to parry because it is core mechanic. But this is tied to the core armature of the game: hesitation is death. The game asks you to steel yourself, advance forward, and hit the timing checks like a finely tuned dance. It is a pleasure like no other, and its depth would be diluted with a breadth of meaningless options.
Sekiro is not about using repositioning or about mutating your battle state to increase your options. Like when Aang is training with Toph in ATLA. At some point he must accept that he can’t learn earthbending with an airbending mindset. He can’t face the rolling boulder if he’s thinking of mutating his options or repositioning. He needs to face the thing head on.
Authorial intent is important to the meaning of a game or any work of art. It’s not the final arbiter, of course, in a post-Barthes world. But we don’t play games to endlessly mutate options. Games aren’t option machines whose artistic value depends on them giving you lots of options. They are an interactive medium whose artistic merit hinges on meaningful choices. Sometimes, depth and meaning come from limitation and discipline.
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– I don’t define depth as a breadth of options. I define it as a breadth of meaningful options. gamedesignskills.com/game-design/game-depth/
One of my favorite games is Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy. There are no builds in GOI. There is only one mechanic, moving your hammer. This game has an incredible amount of depth in that singular mechanic because there are so many possible ways you can move it, and ways it can interact with the environment.
I don’t judge Dark Souls to be deep because of build variety at all, that’s icing on the cake. I judge it to be deep because it makes you care about your range from enemies and the relative timing of your attacks and enemy attacks. It has gradations of success and failure, and your choices affect future scenarios, so you can’t simply watch enemies and do one thing over and over again. It’s not perfect at this, Nioh is a lot better, but it is solidly competent.
– If we are to say that parries are a mechanical pleasure, then you’re basically saying that pressing a button with good timing is a mechanical pleasure. If we accept your rhythm game framing, Sekiro is a bad rhythm game. Here is a review from a rhythm game player judging the game as if it were a rhythm game: https://hotpockethpe.neocities.org/reviews/sekirofunny/
Unlike Rhythm games, Sekiro has an extremely lax and forgiving window, and it only has one standard of timing. There is no gradation of success and failure, there is one binary window.
That and Rhythm games aren’t incredibly deep to begin with.
I think it’s weird that you argue that it’s a mechanical pleasure and then list off all this flowery language about hesitation is death and “a pleasure unlike any other”. On a mechanical level, parrying isn’t very different from a dodge with generous i-frames. I’ve played games which demanded a LOT more of you, with a much thinner margin of error than Sekiro. I play 3rd strike competitively and parries are not only harder in that game, you need to parry in the correct direction. Parries are also harder in Devil May Cry 3-5. Sekiro is not an especially demanding game here.
I don’t think you understand what I meant by mutation. I mean that when you do something, it leaves you in a different place than where you started. When you jump on a Goomba’s head in Mario, you bounce off. When you hit an enemy in Dark Souls, you step forward, they get knocked back, and you lose some stamina. When you parry in Sekiro, what did you spend? What did you lose? Where did you move? How are things any different than they were before you parried?
– Making a game entirely about parries is a crappy intent, because *Parries lack meaningful choices* which is the ENTIRE POINT OF THIS ARTICLE.
I am not arguing for a version of games filled with mechanics and build variety, I am arguing for games where you make meaningful choices, and parries as they are commonly implemented undercut that completely.
I don’t understand how you read the article, read this entire comment chain, had access to my blog overall, where my About and Best Posts says:
And you somehow come to the conclusion that I’m overlooking meaningful choices, or that this isn’t the fundamental basis of the article you’re responding to.
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Pressing a button with good timing IS a mechanical pleasure. It should also be said that you can’t simply press the same button—there are attacks in Sekiro that cannot be parried or have way stricter timings that would require or heavily reward jumping, or grabs that cannot be parried. Although the pleasure is similar to a rhythm game, Sekiro is not a rhythm game—it’s an action game that borrows the mechanical pleasure from a rhythm game of hitting the right button with the right timing.
Although the initial parry window is lenient, it gets tighter if you miss parries.
There are gradations of success with the Sekiro parry that carry on to future encounters. If you’re sloppy and get by on attrition of the enemy’s health rather than consistent mastery of overwhelming the enemy’s poise, you’ll take more hits and have less health in future encounters.
When you parry, you stagger the enemy’s attack patterns to relieve the pressure on yourself. When you attack, this also happens. It is a dynamic combo of attacking and parrying that pressures the enemy attack pattern into something predictable like a dance. If you simply wait and watch you will get more difficult attack patterns. If you simply spam parry you reduce your parry window. If you keep attacking too much you risk over-committing and losing your flow.
The armature of “hesitation is death” demands a combination of attacking and parrying to keep yourself in the right flow of overwhelming the enemy’s posture bar. If you’re standing there and waiting and then complaining that the gameplay feels shallow, it’s because you’re playing it in a shallow way.
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There are PLENTY of games where you press a button with good timing. Why is parrying in particular a good version of that? That’s the argument you need to establish. Why is parrying good or preferable to dodging, when both of them are just pressing a button with good timing? Where is the interesting choice?
Yes, there are unblockable attacks in Sekiro, which you handle with the Mikiri Counter, which is ANOTHER type of parry. There are also grabs and lightning strike attacks, which each require a specific response. All of these are just a form of call-and-response, rather than an interesting choice. There is a clear best option, and either you do that, or you don’t. Dark Souls falls into a bit of this hurdle too, because the iframes on the dodge are so generous.
You’re not describing a gradation of success. In DDR, when I try to hit a note, I can get Miss, OK, Boo, Almost, Good, Great, Perfect, and Marvelous. This is a gradient. You are describing a binary of hit or miss, then trying to tell me it’s a gradient. Yes, there is a punishment if you press the button with the incorrect timing. But if you press the button with the correct timing, you always win. There is no situation in which you don’t want to press the button with the correct timing, unlike other games where there are additional factors to worry about besides just timing presses correctly. The parry window stays lenient as long as you parry correctly. So if you are good enough to parry correctly, then you don’t have to worry about anything else. Which is the whole problem.
Fundamentally, the optimal strategy is call-and-response. That’s the issue. If you just wait and watch, then do the thing the game asks you to do, you will always be better off than if you try anything else.
Yes, there are points in patterns where you can slash your sword to get in damage, BUT unlike the other souls games, you’re allowed to cancel the startup frames of your attack into defensive actions, both parry and dodge, so there isn’t a cost to slashing. You don’t need to commit or read the enemy’s pattern. You can throw out slashes, and most of the time there isn’t a choice being made.
Sekiro’s combat isn’t fundamentally that different from Batman Arkham Asylum, or Assassin’s Creed 1. Those are not games with good combat systems. Sekiro has tighter windows than those two games, making it more difficult, but it fundamentally asks for very similar skills.
Please tell me what you value in a combat system. What is a good or bad game to you? Is potentially anything good as long as it accomplishes the author’s intent? As long as it’s polished?
I think that good gameplay is that which makes you think and make choices, not simply one that challenges you. There are plenty of far more challenging rhythm games out there, and there are plenty of far more challenging 3d action games, like God Hand, Ninja Gaiden, Nioh, God of War. All of these games induce a flow state (because all hard games induce a flow state). You need to argue for a value beyond flow, beyond challenge, because Sekiro comes up short when compared to other games on those fronts.
My complaint is that the optimal way to play the game, the way where you take the least amount of damage and kill enemies the fastest, is shallow. The game is shallow when you master it, which isn’t especially hard. There are harder action games, there are harder rhythm games.
I could do a no-deflect run, and that would be a less shallow version of the game that has me engage with more mechanics and make more complex decisions, but I am trying to judge the game as it is intended to be played, the version of the game that everyone else is playing, which is Sekiro with deflects.
Additionally, deflects do not stagger enemy attacks. That’s just factually incorrect. Deflects don’t interact with enemy attack animations. Enemies will attack with the same timings whether you deflect or dodge.
Enemies won’t behave differently based on whether you deflect, dodge, or slash. They follow their own pattern that doesn’t care a lot about what you do, except for movement. Enemies care about how far away you are and will choose different attacks or to move based on that, but if you stand still and deflect all of their attacks, that won’t cause them to stagger, or cause them to behave differently.
But really, I need you to tell me, what does Sekiro do that a rhythm game doesn’t? Because if you can beat the whole game just by pressing the buttons at the right time, without needing to consider anything else but the timing, like your position, your commitment, your stamina, then why play this instead of a rhythm game, except for the aesthetics? If this is a *mechanical* pleasure, then what elevates it *mechanically*?
Notice that you keep using flowery language again and again to try to justify what you are positing to be a purely mechanical argument. If this is a purely mechanical argument, then you’re going to need to talk strictly about game states and button presses.
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Parrying does not have to a better option than the rest for it to be a good option. In the context of Sekiro, parrying allows you to maintain offensive pressure, which is what the game is about.
If you’re going to call the mikiri counter a parry, then dodging is a parry. Quick time events are a parry. Mario timing a jump to reach the next platform is a parry. Ok.
You can’t cancel the slash past a certain point–it is committal past the startup.
Alternating between slashing to build up posture and parrying to build up posture is fun. I’m not saying it is difficult, or that difficulty is good. I don’t get why you’re so focused on difficulty if not just to get ahead of people lobbing the skill issue dismissal at you, which no one has.
Deflects do stagger enemies, as does hitting them. Butterfly granny is susceptible to the latter. Mobs are susceptible to the former. You are simply incorrect. Some enemies are particularly stancy, which is annoying, but you always have a visual indicator for how long you have to lock in to stagger them, like with the oddly named long-armed giraffes.
You do need to consider position–you can’t parry from across the map. You need to consider your commitment–you can’t cancel slashing past the startup, which you need to do to keep enemies in an optimal attack pattern (you can see this particularly with Butterfly Granny, Genichiro). You can argue that the stancier enemies like Sword Saint or Owl Father are less well-designed in this regard, but they have huge endlag moves with big punish windows that make them feel like more traditional Souls-like enemies. The extreme of this is the Demon of Hatred fight, which I actually dislike for this reason.
“What does Sekiro do that a rhythm game doesn’t”– uh, tell a story about an immortal ninja out to [spoiler, spoiler, spoiler]?” Feature a whole action rpg, interlocking world design navigation, etc, etc, etc?
Armature is not “flowery”–it is a way to say core of a game, where thesis or theme either too precise or not precise enough.
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Hi there, I found this article on bluesky, and thought I’d offer a perspective I haven’t really seen represented here. I say this as a Rhythm Game Enjoyer and a World’s #1 Sekiro Fan.
I feel like this article misses an entire possible motivation for playing games, and that is to achieve and maintain a specific kind of flow state. There are a lot of definitions of “flow state”, in this case what I mean is a style of play where my busy mind shuts off and my brain drops down into a lower gear, almost like getting in touch with the primordial lizard brain. Parrying is great for this specifically because it’s challenging but not TOO challenging, it’s predictable in a way that lets your baser instinct take over. Of course you still want it to be hard (nobody will tell you that Sword Saint Isshin is easy), but the fact that it’s reliable to master is kind of the whole point, you’re supposed to be able to trust your body to take the reigns. These kinds of games feel deeply therapeutic for me to play, they’re like an act of meditation that help me feel more in touch with my body and disconnect from overthinking. By playing them I feel a specific kind of relief, like aloe on a burn.
But this play style is very different than the design goals you’re pursuing here in your writing. If anything, these types of games actively avoid asking the player to make lots of meaningful decisions that could constantly alter the game state, because that would be more likely to bring the thinking mind into the equation, which would disrupt this lower-level flow. And like, I don’t see that as a design defect at all. I see it as an intentional choice to be a specific type of game and achieve a specific type of effect. I can’t speak for what the developers of these games intend, but given that a game like Sekiro activates such a powerfully meditative effect in me, it’s hard for me not to assume that this is in fact the exact experience they intended. If a game were expressly designed for me to feel this specific way, rather than to be a complex web of meaningful and impactful choices, I would still see this design direction as very worthwhile.
To be clear, I would not want all games to be this way. When I want to really use my brain to make lots of meaningful decisions, I play Slay The Spire or Into The Breach or Spelunky, and I adore them. But games like Sekiro and DDR offer me something that those games can’t. I completely understand your frustration at action games that fail at the design goals you’ve stated here (I’m certain that many developers add parrying to their game purely because it’s in vogue and don’t actually understand the design ramifications of it, and yes in those cases it’s certainly a design failure), but I wanted to suggest that perhaps in some cases they’re actually succeeding at being a completely different type of game, one which makes a player like me feel deeply at home.
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I get at some of this in the subthread with Slime, but to say that Sekiro is brought low by its reliance on parrying is like saying a refrigerator is brought low by its reliance on making your food cold.
Sekiro is THE game about parrying, as a fundamental mechanic in applying and keeping on the offensive pressure to surmount an enemy. The entire game is tuned around the parry mechanic. The game lets you get away with being sloppy about parrying up to a certain point where there is a boss who hard checks your parrying ability. This may mislead some players to think that the game isn’t about parrying.
I get that in games where the parry is an afterthought, its power as an option or particular aspects of its design can undercut the intent behind other parts of its design. But Sekiro is built around parrying, and not a good case example of the criticism you are making here.
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Okay, if someone is going to make an entire game about doing easy parries, why wouldn’t I just play IIDX or Guitar Hero or DDR? All of these games ask a lot more of you, and are a lot harder to master than Sekiro.
I think it was a bad decision to make an entire game about parrying. I think it makes for a shallow game that is easy to master, and doesn’t require much thought or decision-making, because I don’t need to be good at any skills except timing.
I think it’s incredibly hazardous to the state of game design that more games are choosing to revolve around parry. There’s already some footage of people beating bosses in Doom The Dark Ages by standing completely still and parrying: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYKk7jcWs0M
Parries can be good game mechanics in single player games, but parries need to have actual trade-offs, downside, and counterplay. Parries need to have pay-offs that aren’t nullifying all damage and dealing damage/poise damage back, but instead ones which create unique situations that you can capitalize on with the other mechanics.
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Saying that Sekiro is meant to be a game about “easy parries” sounds like bait to me, especially since it seems like you didn’t pay particularly close attention to enemy design or combat design if you merely waited. The presence of unblockables, enemy crowds, environmental elements, status, etc, make this untenable, and it makes me doubt how much of the game you’ve played. Surely if you found it so easy you must have cleared the game? It’s ok if you didn’t like the game design, bounced off, never got to the part where you felt and answered what the design asked of you. As I write this, I realize that Sekiro is more than its core of parrying, as it requires also a rhythm of attacking that it doesn’t outright tutorialize, and is more something you learn through trial and error.
I agree that parries can be hazardous to the state of game design, but you have to look at the rest of the combat design to evaluate whether that is true. It is not true of Sekiro. You would have to misunderstand what Sekiro is about and what makes its combat design pleasurable to arrive at the conclusion that parries are to its detriment. As Daveycakess says in their comment, it’s a flow state tunnel rather than a decision tree. We can disagree about whether we find that “deep,” but it is intentional and rewarding if you respond the way the design asks rather than demanding the combat design be something that it isn’t.
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They’re 12 frame parries. DMC parries are 6 frames, which is half of that. 3rd strike is 10 frames, and 3 frames for red parries. The slashback window in Guilty Gear AC+R is 2 frames, and 6 if you’re successful. Perfect Parry window in Street Fighter 6 is 2 frames. Sekiro has easy parries compared to other games. If you think Sekiro parrying is so cool, why aren’t you doing royal guard runs of DMC? Wouldn’t that be an even better flow state tunnel?
Enemy crowds are like bunched-up notes in a rhythm game. Again, if you land the parry, there is no recovery window to parrying again. There is no risk in a successful parry. There is no drawback to a successful parry.
I have finished every Soulsborne game there is, except Sekiro because I got bored after clearing about half of the game. It’s the least interesting From Software game. I’ve beaten Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls 1-3, Bloodborne, Elden Ring, Nioh, God Hand, DMC 1-5, Ninja Gaiden, Bayonetta, God of War 1, 2, and 4, Metal Gear Rising, Nier Automata. I have a very wide experience with Action games.
Everything can be a flow state tunnel. Flow state is just being challenged instead of frustrated. Look up the theory. I’ve written about the theory! It’s in my article about depth on GameDesignSkills.com
You need to advocate for better values than, “it’s a challenging game.” There are more challenging games. Games should be more than just challenging. They should have meaningful choices, and Sekiro lacks meaningful choices.
If you agree that parries can be hazardous to a game’s design, then when exactly is that the case? What is a bad parry in your book, if not a parry that nullifies the enemy’s attack with no downside or commitment?
My problem with Sekiro is also that it DOESN’T require you to time your attacks, because unlike all the other Soulsborne games, you can cancel your attacks into defense.
The game is boring, unless I go out of my way to ignore what you yourself have called the game’s fundamental mechanic!
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I think all of those flow state tunnels are cool, actually. Not that they help support your argument. Your argument is that badly implemented parry = bad. Then you go on to name a bunch of games with parries that feel good.
Yeah, to a successful parry. If you fail the parry attempt, there’s a punishment, isn’t there? There’s no risk to a successful gamble. There’s a 100% chance of success if you win the lottery.
You can win Nier Automata battles by just spamming dodge and nickel and diming enemy health. You can’t do that with Sekiro. The game demands more precision, more than superficial window parry timing. You have to alternate attacking with parrying, watching for your position relative to enemy attacks (land later if you’re further away), watching for alternate moves you have to do if a parry won’t (deathblow animations, etc).
You keep mentioning difficulty to get ahead of the Souls’ community’s annoying bad faith “git gud” rejoinders. I haven’t mentioned difficulty. Difficulty is an emergent experience, you clearly want to appear as someone who finds the game trivially easy, which I find hard to believe since you misunderstand core aspects of its design and enemy behavior.
If you cancel your attacks into defense, your attacks don’t land. If you keep holding block, your posture meter gets overwhelmed, and then you lose. You’re not thinking the way is asking you to think. You’re asking the game to be something it’s not in order to satisfy what you think combat should be. That’s fine to do–I’m not some kind of souls elitist who will say you’re not good enough. You simply can’t ascribe that to a flaw of the game’s core mechanic when you misunderstand it.
I would criticize Sekiro for its grindier mechanics, for gating skills behind xp. I think it should just give you the skills up front, many of which make battles actually enjoyable. The front half of Sekiro is not very enjoyable for this reason, without the meta-knowledge to get around skills and capacities that you are missing for later. These are problems of the game’s RPG progression, though, not with the parry system.
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This is one of my favorite articles of yours. Poorly thought out parry mechanics are like an epidemic in games these days. A designer on Patreon that I read has an article about how certain types of skill expression can actually undermine the skill ceiling of the game, due to the “skill opportunity cost” – by achieving a certain level of skill in one mechanic or area of the game, you can ignore other aspects altogether. Sekiro parries are a textbook example of this, since mastering parry timing invalidates other key aspects of the core beat em up gameplay.
I actually came back to this article today because of Bloodborne. I think that the Souls games have a really poorly implemented parry system, but that they are saved by the inability to parry most bosses and many enemies, and also the fact that you can get a pretty full, comprehensive experience of the game with a non-parrying playstyle, unlike Sekiro where the entire system is centered on parry mechanics. Bloodborne is actually even better, I think – parries are more important there than in the Souls games, but also simultaneously more balanced. I think the first reason is the variable spacing that the parries have, where there can be a delay between executing the parry and actually getting the visceral follow up, which sometimes can’t even be done in time at all. This is complemented nicely by the second reason, which is the number of enemoes and their aggressiveness. Combat is so chaotic that setting up parries on one guy can actually be too much of a risk, incentivizing a more careful, spacing based approach complemented by well timed gunshot interrupts. Bloodborne is the only singleplayer game where I really love parrying, since most of the time it doesn’t trivialize the encounters or feel cheap.
I am also going to echo what a previous poster said – unreactable attacks can be fair, so long as they are handled carefully, and I think unreactability itself is something that complements the parry mechanic quite nicely. Part of why they work so well in 3s is that they can’t usually be done reactively – you have to predict or OS the opponent to land them, which creates deep counterplay. But I’ve never seen them handled well in games with unreactable attacks(i.e. belt scrollers). Even in Fight N’ Rage, they really just boil down to being a counter to specific telegraphed attacks, usually enemy stinger/charge type moves. All the other beat em ups that use parries always have reactable attacks, like the new game Absolum, for example.
Oh well. Great article. I would love to know if you have played any other singleplayer games with well implemented parries.
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