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Listen, I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a little biased towards parry-based action games. Sekiro will forever be my favourite FromSoftware game because of just how excellently it captured the back-and-forth feeling of swordplay, not only with its timed deflection mechanic, but its mandate to have you keep the pressure on.
But I appreciate that, for some, parry fatigue might be setting in. My fellow writer Mollie Taylor’s sick of it, for instance—and I do understand. I think there are some games which use it as a bit of a crutch, and even the ones that don’t can wear out their welcome.
Take Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, for instance. I liked it, but I wouldn’t want every turn-based RPG I play to have a timed block in it. Still, it’s fun to have the occasional one where stats can be overcome with deft enough bumper hands.
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But to paint every parry-based system with the same brush seems short-sighted to me, because this deceptively simple mechanic has a ton of juice still left inside it: no other game proves this more than Onimusha: Way of the Sword, which, as far as I’m concerned, has broken new ground in terms of what parries can do.
Onimusha has one parry button, or at least, it has one parry button on the surface: your block, which when timed just as a blow is coming in, will send a series of sparks flying. The trick that Onimusha pulls—and most good parry-based games will do this—is in actually giving you several parry buttons. Onimusha is parries all the way down. You’ve got:
- The parry. Hit the block button at the right time and see sparks fly.
- Your deflect, an advanced version of the basic parry that requires you to hit another button while blocking.
- The Issin counter, a parry for people with huge cajones with massive risk and massive reward.
This is the trick to making a parry-based action system feel good, like finely-chopping veggies so you don’t notice them in your soup. Not only do each of these parry-like mechanics have a unique attack they counter, they also serve different purposes, giving you a toolbox of ripostes to your enemy’s assault.
The basic parry builds up a meter, the Blazing State, which increases your damage and stagger—naturally graduating you to the more demanding deflect ability as time goes on once it’s full. Deflecting also counters unavoidable attacks.
The genius here is in the back-and-forth minigame between parrying and deflecting, since your Blazing State depletes over time, and refreshing it is easier than building it up from scratch. Meaning that even when your sword’s on fire and you’re deflecting, you still want to throw in the odd parry to keep your weapon ignited.
Then there’s the Issin counter, my beloved. The extremely tight window for using this thing seems too punishing at first, but Onimusha throws in highly-telegraphed attacks for you as a treat—these are Issin bait. Slow, ponderous swings with clean windows that’ll have you salivating the moment you see their wind-up.
It’s often said that Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is a rhythm game in disguise, and the same is true with Onimusha. And just like DDR has multiple directional arrows to keep things interesting, so too do these games grant you a broad toolkit, one that both locks you into an engaging and fatal game of rock, paper scissors.
There’s also that sliding scale of risk, too, the progression from parrying, to deflecting to Issin counters encourages you to make more daring plays. The easiest defensive option gives the smallest reward, whereas an Issin counter shears off a huge chunk of health and stamina from your foe. And even then, both Issin and the deflect are riskier for different reasons! Deflecting has a more complicated set of button presses, like trying to throw out a dragon punch in a fighting game, whereas Issin has strict timing requirements.
Onimusha’s at the forefront of parry experimentation, but it’s not the only one. My favourite non-standard parry, outside of Onimusha, is in Nine Sols’ Unbounded Counter. You hold a different block button, are vulnerable for a short-wind up, and then are given a short window whereupon releasing the button creates a parry. Hold it for too long, and you’ll whiff, opening yourself up with another window of vulnerability. It requires you to know an attack’s coming three business days in advance, which is why it feels so good to pull off.
Point being, I think the parry gets a bad reputation because it’s viewed as an overly simple solution to engaging action combat—fie, I say! I bite my thumb at thee! Parries, like any other game mechanic, can be ham-fisted in their implementation. But they can also be very, very clever.
The reason I don’t want parries to go anywhere isn’t just because I like them, but because I think there are genuinely so many interesting potential versions of them we’re yet to see from inventive devs. I want more games like Onimusha to surprise and delight me, and I want to see what ways a humble defensive button press can be altered to send me to action combat heaven.
