Long before parrying became the topic of the day thanks to Clair Obscur, I was a firm believer in a truth many of you are just now discovering: parrying is bad, and video games should stop having it.
And look: I get that I’m known on this site for unpopular opinions about beloved mechanics, but with anti-parry sentiment at an all-time high, you might be feeling more open to my point of view. Many haters of Clair Obscur’s parry system are coming from the pro-parry camp, taking umbrage with the timing or animations compared to other games. But rather than filling your head with more parry thoughts, rather than ranking games with some unnecessary rubric, rather than playing armchair developer to Sandfall and getting into arguments on Steam forums, you could join a righteous cause (mine) and free yourself from this problem altogether.
Parrying in video games sucks. It features in many games with hand-to-hand combat, giving you the opportunity to deflect an enemy’s attack and, unlike a dodge that just keeps you from taking damage, knock an enemy off-balance or do some damage of your own. I can see why the promise of the parry is appealing, but think about the reality: It is precise and finicky, relying on an audio cue or narrow timing window to perform successfully. If you’re in a hectic combat situation, you already have enough to pay attention to.
I won’t hide the fact that my stance is informed by the fact that I am terrible at parrying. But I would argue this is not my fault. In real life, I briefly took a fencing class in college, so I understand the concept of what it is to parry, and it is an action I have pulled off with variable success in the physical world. But, whatever the boosters might say, I don’t think this action translates well to video games. In third-person games like Clair Obscur, it can be hard to understand when precisely you should parry; these kinds of games have to give you wind-ups and clues to help you know when to enter into their simulation of objects moving through space. Parrying is inherently a first-person activity; if you are seeing it in third-person it means you’re not part of the parrying situation, and as such have no need to know when someone should parry. Mind your own business!
In first-person games, like my beloved Dishonored and its betrayal via parry inclusion, the sort of calculations you’d do in the physical world are functionally impossible when ported to the virtual. In real life, you inherently sort of know how to work with the length of a sword, how fast it’s moving, how long your own sword is, and how far away you are. The oft-overlooked miracle that is moving your body through space is just what bodies do in space; when you remove the bodies and the space, the whole concept basically falls apart. Video games have to turn parrying into an animation that must be entered into correctly; they have to introduce all those clues you’re required to parse, turning the whole thing into some kind of cruel rhythm game, because there is no way to recreate actual parrying. You lose the spontaneity, the freedom, the responsiveness imparted to you as a bonus gift for having a human body. And you then use that human body to fumble through some cruel shadow of “parrying” with your fingers, cheapening not just the idea of the parry, but the full potential of your human form.
When discussing my stance with my Aftermath colleagues, the conversation quickly devolved into points about iframes and hit boxes; i.e., shit for sickos. Do you want to be a sicko? Do you want to have to not just learn about but care about ticky-tacky coder stuff when you are just a person trying to play a video game? Any mechanic that requires a fine appreciation of code is not a mechanic for the people; it is an exercise in exclusion and elitism. Are those your values? Is that the side of history you want to stand on?
You don’t need any of this shit. Even if you aren’t like me, a man who doesn’t care for the finer points of video game combat and just wants to look at cool monsters while mashing buttons, surely you must recognize that video game combat is sufficient without the addition of the hateful parry. Consider the lilies of the field and be satisfied with what you have. Acknowledge the abundance already before you. Simplify your life. Reject the parry.
