Personally I’d have preferred if Expedition 33 didn’t have parry
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.






