Nightmare scenario: Your friend tells you about the cool new game everyone is playing. It’s turn-based combat. Oh hell yeah, you love turn-based combat! You rush to buy the game on said friend’s recommendation. You engage in combat 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 friend ever really my friend? Why else would they commit such an abhorrent act of betrayal?
Much like how every videogame once shoved at least one pointless QTE segment into itself, or contorted itself into being open-world even when it made no sense, or how I once insisted on dragging half my hair across one eye in an attempt to go full MySpace—trends (for better or worse) seep their way into our lives.
Parrying is something I don’t recall having much presence in the games I grew up with. Granted I was mostly squirreled away in my Mum’s conservatory playing some hundred-hour JRPG, but still. Games that required you to parry attacks stayed firmly in their own little corner, and I in mine.
That’s definitely changed in the last decade or so. Thanks to games like Dark Souls and Sekiro, one thing is clear: the people love to parry. Except, erm. I’m not people. I hate to say it, but I am deeply anti-parrying. It’s by far one of my least favourite mechanics to make its way into videogames, and its increasing saturation and infiltration of the genres I love is making me feel like I’m going insane.
Parried away
Listen, I get why people do like parrying! It requires a level of thoughtfulness and skill to execute. You can’t just go barrelling in willy-nilly, slashing away at an enemy before they even get a chance to retaliate. A well-implemented parry mechanic can transform battles from a relentless onslaught into a beautifully choreographed piece, player and computer dancing around each other as they nimbly deflect and dodge around attacks before responding in kind.
But something about my brain simply will not let me enjoy the fundamentals of parrying. Call it a skill issue—it probably is—but something about having to be overtly aware of attack 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.