Why Are Modern Games Obsessed With Parrying?

Why Are Modern Games Obsessed With Parrying?
Basics
Length	9:29
Date	2025-05-29
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Parrying is the games industry's favorite mechanic right now.

Transcript

I am a man who loves to complain, as you know, including about the fact that people say I complain too much. And I wonder—not for the first time—if there's any mileage in complaining about a game mechanic or feature that there's nothing particularly wrong with, but is getting overused.

So what? Falling back on a formula that's established to work frees up headspace so you can focus on things like plot and presentation. It's like complaining that porn overuses sex scenes. But with the recent one-two punch of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and Doom The Dark Ages, I think it's far past time we started asking what is it with video games and parrying these days. Parrying meaning the ability to deflect an enemy attack to gain advantage in combat, which—yes—has existed in one form or another for a very long time.

What was the very first game with parrying, do we think? And let's not let this turn into one of those 'what actually constitutes an RPG' arguments. "Ooh, Yahtzee, technically, Pong is nothing but parrying!" No. Shut up. I'm going to be strict in my definitions here. If you can press a button just as an enemy attack hits you to nope out of receiving damage from the attack, that is a parry, as long as your character doesn't move. If they move out of the way of the attack, that is a dodge. If you can follow up the parry with a response attack, either automatically or organically, that is a riposte. It is only the cancel of the incoming attack that constitutes a parry. Yes, I imagine the word parry is going to start sounding weird by the end of this.

So, again, what was the first game with parrying as we now understand it? The first one I can think of is the original Prince of Persia. I had an alarming moment recently when I mentioned "the original Prince of Persia" to someone (mentioning no names—[coughs] Nick) and they assumed I meant The Sands of Time No! Original original Prince of Persia, come on! MS-DOS, Jordan Mechner, turquoise walls, seamless cream-colored pajamas, you remember. In the course of the—for its time—surprisingly well-put-together swordfighting system, you could press up to parry incoming strikes and it was the secret technique for winning every fight, besides pushing them back onto the wobbly floors. I think parrying has been a thing in fighting games for a very long time too, which isn't my genre, so I can't speak authoritatively. Mainly, I'm going off that one famous pro Street Fighter video where the one dude playing Ken parries all of Chun-Li's kicks and wins the match and the audience completely pisses itself.

Let's move on to the question of why parrying is so endemic now. I mean, I think it would be quicker to list the games in the last few years that focused on close-range combat and didn't have a parry mechanic. It's part of the standard template: light attack, heavy attack, dodge, block, and parry if you block at the moment of impact. Dark Souls probably did a lot to crystallise that formula. There's been no end of debate over what specific elements make up a soulslike, but that's distracting from the fact that Dark Souls' success mainly comes down to having a really bloody good core combat system. And while parrying was only one part of it, there is a certain emphasis. Famously, the final boss of Dark Souls—Lord Gwyn—is essentially a final exam to determine if you figured out how to parry yet. And then, of course, there's Sekiro, which was saying "Hey, we noticed some of you didn't take the hint with the Lord Gwyn thing, so here's an entire game you can only win by parrying a whole bunch."

But yes, I see some of you yelling at the screen. If we're going to portion the blame and/or credit for making parrying popular, a big heap of it needs to be shoveled onto the doorstep of Batman: Arkham Asylum. In contrast to Dark Souls including parrying as part of a solid showcase of varied combat mechanics, Batman: Arkham combat holds it up first and foremost as the beating heart of proceedings (no pun intended). It makes parrying very easy to grasp with generous windows and obvious icons, which did the job of making the combat very accessible, but it also doesn't feel like it's doing all the work for you. It's still an engaging challenge; it's satisfying to pull off a big combo of hits flowing from attacker to attacker, and the focus on parrying is a big part of creating that sense of flow. Arkham combat took off because it demonstrated how parrying is the fast track to creating a thrilling sense of mastering a combat system, and it's largely thanks to flow.

See, it should always be at least theoretically possible to get through combat without taking damage. Mandatory damage is one of the two buttocks of the bum-faced god of shit game design (the other buttock, I leave as an exercise for the viewers). But without parrying, avoiding all damage comes down to dodging or just not being in the way of the attacks. And the thing about dodging is that it's an interruption; a mini disengagement, so you can rally when the enemy next exposes themselves. The advantage of the parry is that it allows damage avoidance while staying in the flow of the fight. Not to mention the fact that a parry and riposte is very gratifying from a contextual perspective: Someone tried to hurt you, but you turned it around and hurt them, instead. It's instant karma. So, that summarises why parrying became popular and why it's a good thing to have in a combat system.

To bring things back to the start, is there any reason to object to its presence, other than the fact that it's overused? Well, one commenter on my Clair Obscur review had one, which ended up sparking this whole video, if I'm honest. They stated that they hated that the combat in Clair Obscur basically necessitates parrying and dodging to win because they were someone who enjoyed turn-based combat and were kind of hoping this game ostensibly featuring turn-based combat would be about turn-based combat, i.e. thoughtfulness; preparation; and strategy, rather than a bunch of timing and reflex puzzles. And I hadn't thought of that. I'm a living-in-the-moment kind of guy, as you know, so I've always liked that Mario RPG-style reaction-hit thing in turn-based combat, but I guess not everyone wants every single game to turn into timed reaction challenges like it's fucking Guitar Hero. Some people want to exercise other skills, and while parrying does create a sense of being a skillful combatant, that's not always something consistent with the desired tone. It wouldn't suit, say, a survival horror game where you're ostensibly a clueless everyman trapped by horror. Just look at Silent Hill: Homecoming, where they felt the need to—open quotes—"improve" the combat, so you had your traumatised everyman protagonist fuckin' dodge-rolling all over the place and doing little spinny flourishes with his knife attacks, and it all came across a bit silly. Digressing a moment, did they add a parry mechanic to the Silent Hill 2 remake? It says something for the ubiquity of parrying and the impact that game had on me that I'm genuinely not certain.

Secondly, the problem with parries I've often observed in the less tightly-designed combat systems is that it makes the game completely reactive. I've been replaying Assassin's Creed: Black Flag on and off lately, and much like many games of its era that cribed off Arkham counter-based combat, all you have to do in that game is wait for the enemy to attack, counter, then win. It really does just reduce things to Guitar Hero. I'd say Arkham itself avoided that with the combo system: If you stop to wait for incoming attacks, your combo resets and you go back to doing shit damage. But as is so often the case, the imitators rip off the more visible element without understanding all the lesser ingredients that make it work. As in many fighting games and the Silent Hill example, a combat style is part of a character's visual personality, and it can create a tonal clash if it differs from how the narrative presents them. I'm thinking of Kay from Star Wars Outlaws, presented by the story as a helpless schmol bean tossed by the vagaries of fate, but can somehow effortlessly one-shot Imperial soldiers in combat.

So, when everyone's got a parry, everyone's got the same personality: Parryperson, the Instant Karma Avenger. Maybe you'd rather characterise your hero as more proactive; someone who'd rather wade in and throw the first punch; maintain control of the battlefield. There's another way such a person might be able to avoid damage: stunlocking. See an attack coming, focus damage on that attacker to knock them off-balance. Something more like the Fights/Knights in Tight Spaces approach, where your main focus is keeping every potential threat under control for at least the present moment. Just a thought. Just a little brainstorming session to help get you parrying-obsessed game designers back into innovation mode.

Long story short, there's nothing particularly wrong with parrying, just as there's nothing particularly wrong with Cadbury's Creme Eggs, but I'd still object if you replaced every single item in my cutlery drawer with one. Well, eventually. A few hours later, when I'm looking for a fork to get the bits of foil out of my beard.