• Zero Punctuation- Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice
    8 replies, posted
https://www.escapistmagazine.com/v2/2019/04/10/sekiro-shadows-die-twice/
One of his points is that Sekiro favors parrying to evading, and he liked Dark Souls better because he liked evading into backstabs instead. From what little I've played of a Dark Souls demo I tended to prefer parrying to evading, but I got killed all the time so I couldn't tell if I was doing something wrong. Can you play through Dark Souls using parries, or should I have favored evading instead?
Not every DS enemy could be parried I don't think, so you couldn't rely entirely on it. That being said, parrying is still stupid strong if you can get enemy timing down pat
Eh it would have been nice if he had a bit more to say on the game itself rather than it being a From Soft game And he talks about his preferred Dark souls tactic being evade around an enemy like its not something almost all other players do
I never bothered with parrying. It seemed it the time it would take to get back to the enemy after failing and dying, I'd have lost any "feel" for the timing I would have gotten.
From what I've seen, parrying seems a bit more FAIR than it is in Dark Souls? In the first game it could be hard enough with the timing of enemy attacks, but at least THERE it was pretty snappy to execute and enemies were slower in general, so you can generally block and evade until you find an attack that's ripe for a parry. Dark Souls 3 though, made the parrying delay a lot longer, and the enemies are WAY faster. I'm in a playthrough right now, and my ability to parry is sometimes on point and otherwise inconsistent, and I'll find myself actively TRYING to parry an enemy instead of the option to parry simply opening up as the best available strategy. But BECAUSE the enemies are so fast, seeing that OPENING isn't enough time to EXECUTE on that opening, because you basically have to hit the button in the middle of their windup. And that's not to even factor in that DS3 enemies are tuned to do fakeout attacks with unexpected delays just to fuck with Souls veterans who are used to the usual static timings. As such, parrying becomes this arcane skill only truly mastered from HOURS upon HOURS upon HOURS of focusing INTENTLY on that skill. And no, not hours of playing, again, hours dedicating yourself to that skill. In fact, I think you almost have to bonfire back and practice on every single enemy in the game worth using it on to get their pattern down, like we all had to do to get past the Silver Knights once upon a time, to the point that parrying THEM is second nature. Because by the law of Dominant Strategy... you do NOT need to learn parrying to beat ANY Souls game, it's just a nice 1337 $k177 to have in your back pocket... so almost nobody does. I think they TRIED to force that with enemies like Pontiff as non-optional bosses, but I think more people summoned two phantoms to gank him or outright took him on solo the badass way before they'd actually parry him. In the same way that Bloodborne seemed like From basically going, "It's souls, but you can ONLY fight aggressively and two-handed roll-evade everything; git gud," Sekiro with its almost zero invincibility frames and deflection-based combat seems to be going, "We're tried of everyone ignoring the parrying skill, so now you HAVE to learn the parrying skill; git gud." It's funny too, because I swore it crossed as a nightmare scenario that From would one day make a game where parrying was the main defensive mechanic... and before god, I never actually thought they'd DO IT...
You can parry, evade or block in Dark Souls. Parrying is risky cause it's difficult to time properly and not everything can be parried. It definitely lets you take enemies down quick if you can do it consistently though.
Sekiro's parrying skill is VASTLY different and more forgiving than Souls. Parrying is absolutely instant and if you parry too early, you don't take the damage with a 1.5x multiplier, you just block the attack. Also, parrying doesn't leave you open because it is literally a block that you can drop as soon as you put it up. I would go as far as to say parrying in Sekiro is not even comparable, not even a little bit, to Souls parrying, to the point that Sekiro doesn't even call it a parry, they call it "deflect". The only people that call if parry are fans, but calling it that is honestly completely misleading for fans of the Souls series because the two mechanics have almost nothing in common.
Sekiro's parry mechanics are entirely different from Dark Souls', and more like Metal Gear Rising. Instead of depleting stamina, blocking increases a Posture bar that, when full, staggers you. Pressing the designated block button right before an enemy attack hits will increase your Posture bar very little and increase the enemy's Posture bar in return. You're expected to parry basically every attack to efficiently beat enemies, and only a certain few attacks can't be parried at all.
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