When you run around at 100mph in Doom firing rockets from the hip you feel good, you look good, you're moisturised, you're nourished, and you are present in an experience that simply cannot be approached in anything remotely resembling real life. We jump higher, move faster, and are altogether more important when we’re piloting our virtual avatar than when we pilot our sad, vulnerable flesh.
We’re empowered, and we’re rocking out, and that’s videogames baby.
We can also fail harder, and in increasingly fun and implausible ways. For me, the best games are the one that present the player with an obscene number of embarrassing ways to fuck up in the pursuit of cool. I will always be a cheerleader for points systems and grading systems that explicitly tell you that your success was on a scale, but I’ll also take a big fuckin bail from a skateboard or a huge slow motion car crash or even a deeply awkward slide down a climable surface made slick with sudden rain.
Failure - catastrophic, unmitigated, player-directed failure - is just as important to an empowering experience as a success for having a dang ol fun time, and right now we have never been more hungry for failure. If you want to fail hard in games you are in the exact right era for it; the days of cutscenes and QTEs are gone, replaced by the abusable i-frame and the high-skill epic gamer parry.
And that’s where we have our problem.
The scrapped title for this blog was 'Parry-appa The Rapper'
The Case Against The Parry
I’m a bit sick of parrying in complex combat games.
Glad I’ve said that, case closed, we beat the parry good job everyone.
I’m a bit sick of it because the loathsome, perfidious mechanic has pressed its huge, calloused gaming thumb on the scale and tilted the experience too far towards pure empowerment.
This isn’t so much about the actual challenge itself: parrying a million times in Jedi Survivor or Stellar Blade, Lies of P, Wukong etc. is still miles harder than most eras of game releases, demanding a level of attentiveness and reaction that evokes the same sweaty-handed feeling as your 15th go at the Battletoads bike level. No, what has been lost in our embrace of the parry system is the feeling of challenge, the smallness of failure, the desperation of barely squeaking by.
When you parry a move in a game you are facing your challenges head on, deflecting them with perfect timing, strength, and control. Parrying being the primary (or most obviously rewarding) means to defend means that you naturally maintain a huge level of presence within the game itself. Imagine being able to parry in Shadow of The Colossus, how much smaller the colossi would seem.
When your character can parry everything, we’re introduced to a vision of difficulty where challenge is overcome with aura rather than grit. You are supposed to move through these fights perfectly, and your character traversing the dour aftermath as if it wasn’t a big deal reflects this. Good job: you’ve achieved the expected result in the expected way, you parried all 40 hits of God’s level 3 super and now you can stride towards the next challenge, dying embarrassingly a couple of times to some regular enemies whose patterns you forgot.
The parry has robbed us of our ability to struggle, and forced us into a dynamic where we can either be perfect or dead. It is a false prophet; a reduction of an emotional combat ballet into the simple tricks of a rhythm game and should be banished (or, alternatively, games should start to rely on it less frequently).
But without the parry, what could we possibly rely on as our primary defensive mechanic? What should we do? Doushio?
Dw bro this attack isn't actually that hard to deal with once you get the timing down
Tumbling Down, Tumbling Down, Tumbling Down
The humble roll is the truly pure and good video game difficulty mechanic precisely because it is everything the parry isn’t - rolling makes you smaller, weaker, more evasive, less able to stand up for yourself (because you’re rolling!). Rolling away from strikes and patterns that could squash you like a bug isn’t particularly impressive looking, but you know what’s infinitely worse?
Failing to roll away, getting the timing wrong and leaving yourself deliciously, helplessly fucked as the Great Guardian Toad’s mighty hammer turns you into pâté because you misread the windup.
The player is strong, handsome, and important by default. When you roll desperately out of the way, or take a block that chips away at your health and leaves you in enough blockstun to only barely react to the next hit, we start to become that much more human, closer to real life, closer to a sense of genuine failure.
We can beat the boss, we can beat the challenge, we can progress forwards, but the first time might look obscenely bad. Str-ugly-ing through is great - it’s the pure essence of Good Videogame Shit and when we look too strong and feel too strong we lose the raw, emotive sense of it all.
What point is there in being able to swagger through a fight if we haven’t crawled through it first? What do we gain from graceful perfection if it’s dictated? Isn’t it better to be able to go back and choose to strive for that perfect or near-perfect clear than it is to make that the way that success looks by default?
In Devil May Cry or Bayonetta we’re granted superhuman swagger, but we’re graded to the exacting standards of a superhuman. Success with a D-rank doesn’t feel like success at all, it’s the first step in understanding that you can do more than squeak by. In Skate we’re asked to slide our foot to the back of the board and quickly flick forwards, a wobbly, off-balance ollie a resounding victory for a skater who doesn’t want to ragdoll into the side of a kerb anymore. We can build towards a Pure Platinum rank later, right now you just need to keep your balance and fight through the next challenge.
Scales of success, from not getting hit to not using items to beating the boss in a certain amount of time to using a certain weapon, lets us experience the fullness of difficulty a game has to offer (and beyond, if we use the space to create our own challenges). Parrying as the now-ubiquitous means to engineer difficulty and dictate a pass/fail creates a funnel for our player experience, transforming our struggle (and our success) into something that is inevitable and singular in shape.
This isn’t to say that the parry is Bad, far from it. I’m just sick of the parry feeling like the only. We’ve taken so many steps forwards with regards to games and difficulty since 2008 so why does it feel like we’ve regressed back to pressing triangle at the right time to Arkham Asylum slam a thug into a wall. The difficulty has gotten harder, the timing has gotten tighter, but we’re still engaging in a repetitive fantasy of seemingly effortless martial power.
Plus I’m unsure why you would focus on parrying in this post-MGR renaissance. You’re not gonna be as satisfyingly difficult and varied as Sekiro, and you almost certainly lose the aura-off against MGR. You’re not Him, nano-bro (kill me, shoot me in the head, throw my body to the ants and let their industrious little colonies disappear my sins).
