Nightmare state of affairs: Your good friend tells you in regards to the cool new sport everyone seems to be enjoying. It’s turn-based fight. Oh hell yeah, you like turn-based fight! You rush to purchase the sport on stated good friend’s advice. You interact in fight for the very first time. You press a button to parry an att- wait. What the hell? Why is there a PARRY BUTTON in my TURN-BASED VIDEOGAME? Was my good friend ever actually my good friend? Why else would they commit such an abhorrent act of betrayal?
Much like how each videogame as soon as shoved a minimum of one pointless QTE section into itself, or contorted itself into being open-world even when it made no sense, or how I as soon as insisted on dragging half my hair throughout one eye in an try and go full MySpace—developments (for higher or worse) seep their method into our lives.
Parrying is one thing I do not recall having a lot presence within the video games I grew up with. Granted I used to be principally squirreled away in my Mum’s conservatory enjoying some hundred-hour JRPG, however nonetheless. Games that required you to parry assaults stayed firmly in their very own little nook, and I in mine.
That’s positively modified within the final decade or so. Thanks to video games like Dark Souls and Sekiro, one factor is evident: the individuals like to parry. Except, erm. I’m not individuals. I hate to say it, however I’m deeply anti-parrying. It’s by far one in all my least favorite mechanics to make its method into videogames, and its rising saturation and infiltration of the genres I really like is making me really feel like I’m going insane.
Parried away
Listen, I get why individuals do like parrying! It requires a degree of thoughtfulness and ability to execute. You cannot simply go barrelling in willy-nilly, slashing away at an enemy earlier than they even get an opportunity to retaliate. A well-implemented parry mechanic can remodel battles from a relentless onslaught right into a fantastically choreographed piece, participant and laptop dancing round one another as they nimbly deflect and dodge round assaults earlier than responding in variety.
But one thing about my mind merely won’t let me benefit from the fundamentals of parrying. Call it a ability subject—it most likely is—however one thing about having to be overtly conscious of assault patterns or miniscule timing windows makes me absolutely seize up. Sometimes I just wanna switch my brain off and let loose on a glorified striking dummy, y’know? But the second I see those goddamn wind-up attack animations—seriously, who is wiggling around a sword mid-air for that long?!—I can’t help but roll my eyes a little as any capabilities I had evaporate before my very eyes.
And even when I am the sickest, best-skilled parrying monster around… I dunno. I feel nothing. No satisfaction, no sense of accomplishment. Simply a bit bothered that I even have to do it in the first place. It’s one of those trends that brings me next to no joy, which is very annoying when it’s a mechanic that is present in just about everything these days.
I’ve always been the type of gamer who mostly prefers the thrill of proactive strategy rather than reactivity. Like carefully setting up a chess board and then watching all of my hard work play out in a rehearsed manner, each piece slowly devouring my foe’s own before I emerge victorious. That’s not to say I detest reactive gameplay in its entirety.
I’m a fighting game player for one, which is like, half being able to read your opponent and half being able to react to their bullshit (and also was one of the original genres to implement parries, a la Evo Moment 37.) I literally spend most of my free time spending far too much money to play rhythm games at arcades, where I take some sort of sick pleasure in sightreading difficult charts and seeing how well I can score on them in my first try. But planning has always been my forte.
That’s why I can’t help but feel a tiny bit peeved at the fact that parrying has begun to seep its way into just about everything I play. Sometimes it feels like its presence is only there to instill some artificial sense of challenge that the game couldn’t well conjure up otherwise. There are more creative ways to keep players on their toes, y’all! Sometimes I just want to play a turn-based game and simply have the joys of what that genre has to offer shine through.
Sometimes I think it’s okay to have a videogame where you’re forced to take a hit or disengage entirely. Take a moment to breathe, recuperate, and dive straight back into the action. Sometimes I don’t want to see some bozo looking like he’s trying to stifle a sneeze as a warning sign for an incoming parry opportunity. Parrying has been the flavour-of-the-month mechanic to squeeze into videogames for a hot sec, but I’ll admit I’m looking forward to when developers finally decide to give it a rest for a bit.