Handheld, its going to be a game to game in bed, couch or next to the heater lol.

Docked or handheld?

Damn who can afford those things

While that's nice, I haven't purchased one.

i've always loved ross' videos. they're a great way to experience old games like this that ill never have the time to play myself 😆

I have been weirded in

No, I was not talking about the parry mechanic by itself, I was talking about how it overshadowed the other mechanics because of how strong it was.

Well, we were pretty specifically talking about the parry mechanic so that’s what my comment was about.

I also appreciated that each character had their own gameplay mechanic and that their abilities / skill tree complimented that mechanic.

Pictos and Lumina felt a fresh and entertaining way to dial in character builds.

What?

But see, that's the issue that I'm talking about. You say the game felt as a mix of rhythm game and pattern memorization. There's no mention of the RPG mechanics there, because the parrying overshadowed it.

Stupid little slop piggy was the one started with the hate and now can't take it, huh? Easy to make you look stupid, but I didn't expect you to break emotionally like that lol

It's a really cheap but satisfying mechanic for fast paced games. Don't know the lower two games but the upper two games would have not nearly been as good without their parry mechanic, i would argue. Some other comment mentioned crafting though and oh boy do i think that mechanic is useless in a lot of games. But maybe that is just personal taste, i enjoy a game with good parry mechanics if well implemented. Makes you feel like a badass pretty quickly, that and paired with rhythm and you can get that lovely 'flow' feeling sometimes.

But obviously is parrying as a mechanic is not really well implemented, i don't care much for it

These comments reminded me of Minecraft. It's the same story there. Crafting became popular because of Minecraft and now every game seems to have crafting mechanics whether they're fun or not

I feel like E33 did a great job with the parry mechanic and that it absolutely belongs as a core mechanic. It made the entire game feel like a mix of rhythm game and pattern memorization.

You’d get cozy with parrying the attacks of certain enemy types only for the next to come around with an increasingly complex barrage of attacks, some of which were cleverly designed confuse or misdirect as to what pattern was coming about next.

Could be that I just wasn’t very good at it, but over the course of the main story I never reached a point where it felt breezy for the rest of the game.

"I parried a blow and I liked it! Won't dodge no more, it's just frightening!"

Sorry. So sorry. But it was there and I couldn't stop myself.

The annoying part about it is that far too many titles that do these things don't actually understand why it works for Fromsoft.

I don't remember where I saw this, but I heard someone set up one of those reductive-but-fun dichotomies by saying "every action game is a dodge game or a parry game". I had just finished Silksong at the time and had picked up Nine Sols to try and get some more Metroidvania with difficult combat, but as it turns out, I really like dodge games and dont like parry games.

This is exactly what I had in mind. I found Sekiro so boring, but then it's not an action game, so there's a lot of RPG/exploration you need to do to squeeze all the juice out of the combat, and I never enjoy this loop in games anyway.

Give me a proper moveset and let me loose on a bunch of enemies is all I want, haha.

Isn't that pretty much the whole game?

Because I like it a and that is the only reason obliviously

I played the first one. It was good enough up until the end when they blamed everything on the main character's PTSD.

Didn't play these games, but I do remember reading magazine reviews making fun of how bad they supposedly were. This video is way more informative about how it actually plays than those reviews were.

I love Bayonetta, especially its Dodge Offset mechanic. Never got on with the parries, but only due to lack of practice on my part.

Building a game around parries is boring AF though.

Counterpoint: Sekiro is a great example of a game where parrying is a central, necessary-to-learn mechanic but that does it quite well, in my opinion.

Personally I'd have preferred if Expedition 33 didn't have parry