this post was submitted on 27 May 2025
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After giving it some thought I kinda agree with the author. Not in the hyperbolic sense that it's the worst thing ever, nor in the sense that I don't like parrying because I suck at it, but I agree on the point where he's talking about fencing.
There's so much more creative freedom and depth in actual martial arts, HEMA, fencing etc. that is just completely missing from most games. You don't get the contact feel of your opponent, you can't physically feel what your opponent will do. You can't really gauge how far your attack will reach or, more importantly, how much range your opponents have. You can't choose your angle of attack and, again more importantly especially in the context of parrying, choose how you defend. Your attacks are generally just a button click at which point the character does whatever attack has been programmed. Your defense is just a button click that generally blocks all attacks in front of you. Your parry is also just a button click that if timed right just parries (and sometimes automatically ripostes as well). All the nuance of melee combat is simplified to "one button for blocking/parrying and one button for attacking".
So yeah, parrying does suck until we can turn it into something more engaging than just timing a button press.
Gameplay has been so on the decline nowadays, that just having an actual reactive counterplay element like a parry is a major positive, even if it's a huge simplification of defense. So, more engaging defense mechanics would be nice, sure, and there's certainly huge underexplored territory on "offensive" actions with non-universal parry type defensive properties to make fighting more interesting, but that doesn't mean what little we do have becomes a negative or less engaging.
It was tragic that the current Soul Calibur dumbed their deflect down to a single simple action instead of the series standard of at least needing to match low/high height zones (mids could be deflected with either, which was a nicely subtle drawback), but it's still better than not having it at all.
Parrying is good. More interesting parrying/defense is better, but that's a level of player and dev effort/investment that's rarely on the table.
There are games like Half Sword, Hellish Quart and Blade Symphony (and maybe to an extent Exanima) that are built around "realistic"/physica-based sword/melee combat (idk about Half Sword as that's basically QWOP Knights, but there can still be plenty of skill involved).
While it's become long in the tooth and populated now by only the super try-hards, check out Mordhau. Blocks, ripostes, parries, chambers; all attack angle swings and stabs. Really the best that it's been done, by far.
For Honor has, to this day, the best melee combat I have ever experienced in any game. The biggest problem that game has is that it's a fighting game in medieval disguise, if it was more adventure/rpg, I'd bet people would be all over it. I do like the fighting game part of it though, but fighting games are ROUGH to get into, sweatiest player base around.
Tried half sword?
Games that have a good Merle combat system might be something for you. I would think of mordhau, which has a quite complex and challenging fighting system. However, its quite hard to get into it, since its almost dead.
I haven't played Mordhau but based on what I've seen of gameplay it has a different issue I have with first person melee, which is that you have no perception of reach. If you can't identify how far you or your opponents can attack then the gameplay turns into sticking your face in your opponents face and I find that pretty annoying. I guess I'm kinda picky about my melee combat.
You can learn to judge reach in Mordhau, though what you're describing is a fundamental problem in video games. Unfortunately, like Chivalry before it, Mordhau devolved into ultra-high skill cap animation manipulation. Still, it has the best, highest fidelity melee combat ever, making games like for honor look and feel like trash. It's almost impossible to enjoy any other melee combat games/RPGs after experiencing Mordhau.