Perfect Parrying ruined this game for me

[Daniel Clay]

It's a faithful remake and high-quality videogame which I, as a fan of the OG RE4, can easily recommend anyone to play. However, I firmly believe that parrying should not have been included in the game in the first place. The reason is because it does not function the way it should. Blocking almost every incoming attack is rather easy in this game: you don't even have to be that good at timing to do this. However, if you want to really punish your enemy, you should go for a perfect parry: it allows you to deflect your opponent's attack in a stylish way, stun them and then deliver you counterattack. Sounds pretty good, right? It actually does. Problem is, perfect parries in this game do not work properly.

There are many decent games where parrying is used as the base gameplay mechanic: MGR, Sekiro, DMC, if you use Royal Guard. They too have two types of parrying: normal and perfect. However, those games use various methods to help the player understand when to press the deflect button to execute a perfect parry. MGR, for instance, relies on visual effects and enemies changing the color of their bodies to give the player a signal for parrying. Sekiro and DMC do not have those, but the way one's enemies move usually make it easy to understand when their attack is about to connect. You are forced to stydy those timings. The windows you are given to press the button are small, but it is possible to memorize them by studying the behaviour of those enemies. When you've spent an hour or two learning those things, it's time for you to perfectly execute all your moves to slay you foe without getting hit once. To sum everything up, all the games mentioned above rely on the following elements to make parrying function properly: 1. There are visual cues helping you to understand when to make your move. 2. The way your enemies move and attack gives you hints about when you need to enter that damned parrying window. 3. Those windows themselves are small, but consistent: after about fifty retries you will memorize when to press the button. If at least one of these principles functioned properly in RE4R, it would become a pretty fun mechanic to use. However...all of them are broken.

In his human form, Jack Krauser has about 3 or 4 slashing attacks. They, at first, have rather obvious start-up animations, which normally would be used to tell the player when to parry his opponent. However, parrying when Krauser does his knife juggling simply does not work. You are only rewarded with regular parries. So, principle 1 and principle 2 are not working here. That's bad, but it is still possible to do everything right, if the third principle is functioning properly, right? As if... Problem is, because there are no visual cues and your opponent's movement give you no clue about when to press the button, you simply can't know when the parrying window gets open. I've literally tried to do everything I could to understand when to pull out my knife: I tried circling around the opponent, moving forward and backwards, pressing the button before, during and after the prompt appeared on the screen: literally nothing has worked. After spending three hours battling our beloved mentor in both of his forms , I pulled out my Stryker and TMP, forgot about the self-imposed no damage and knife only penalties and...killed him in less than five minutes. I should have probably spent those three times platinuming a better functioning game instead of that.

Maybe I'm doing something wrong. Maybe I haven't understood how the game functions. Maybe my reaction speed is slow, although as someone who has beaten Sekiro without too much trouble and played MGR on Hard without taking hits, I believe that I'm, well, at least slightly above average at this. If someone can help me understand how to get better at this game, I would be very grateful. Thanks for reading that useless pile of words.

[Basarab Laiota]

Daniel Clay님이 먼저 게시:

Blocking almost every incoming attack is rather easy

Except half the attacks in the game can't even be parried..? Every enemy has some kind of grab or boop or ranged attack that gets around it..