Am I the only one that also listens to the sound the enemy attack makes, and not just the animation?
Like when the charge up sound is almost at its’ highest pitch I press parry.
Seems to work most of the time for me anyway.
Hope this helps as an extra aid in getting parries down.
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One of the things that makes parrying difficult (at least for me) is the exaggerated animations.
The movement animations are heavily stylized, which is great for artistic flair, but terrible for predicting where an enemy will be and when.
Enemies with leaping attacks, for instance, seem to defy strength constraints and gravity, hurling themselves across the battlefield in full plate armour, or hanging in midair for fractions of a second where gravity would otherwise accelerate them downwards.
Either the animations need to be pared down and made a bit more realistic, or the parry windows need to be widened.
I think the parrying mechanic itself is fine, but it is not consistent with the animations.
- the timing window is OK
- the animations are good looking and have nice variety (in principle good)
but - the timing is not communicated clearly
Every enemy and every attack appears to has its own timing. Unfortunately i cannot see when the parry should happen. For one enemy it is a little before they draw the weapon, for others immediately when they start to move, others require waiting until the animation already hits me. I dont see any logic in this.
So i die, respawn, rinse and repeat… and test out the timings by heart.
The moment i know, how the timing has to be, for each animation for each enemy, i can parry without issues and it is really fun.
But this approach takes away immersion and can be frustrating.
When i remember correctly, in ori there were subtile visual glow effects for some timing things. Imho this would be the perfect solution here. Just a tiny visual hint on when to press the button. Subtile but noticable. (this would also help with evasion btw.)
And for the “git gud” pokemons: This does not make it easier, it makes it fair, clean and consistent.
man, i found the parry to be the oppsite… way too easy; i guess that is my souls experience giving me an easier time though. still, keep at it, thats my best tip; the more you try the better you will get at it and once you figure it out nobody can stop you, and you will be better at parrying in every game
My 2 cents for what they’re worth is there are two things making parrying feel difficult-
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A lot of games have you anticipate incoming attacks. NRFTW parries appear to work by pressing the button as you get hit, not before. Takes adjusting to get used to it if you’re used to parrries with a windup like a lot of Soulslikes have.
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A lot of enemy attacks have weird delays in them that throw off the perceived timing for parries.
Best enemy I can think of to illustrate it is one of the Risen with a rapier and buckler- try fighting one and just notice how often they raise their sword into attacking position, wait half a second, and then attack. Don’t know about anyone else, but that delay is causing me to constantly whiff parries by pressing the button too early.
I think those delays are done on purpose to offset you and make you miss the hit.
The hard parries are the ones:
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done by the super fast attacks where its very hard to get the timing.
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done by enemies that when they actually attack, they attack short and so even if you just stand still they wouldn’t hit you, but by parrying you screw your timing on the next one
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parries on those monster that hit with the hammer 3 times because in order for you to parry and not get hit u need to parry all 3 of them
Yea, i think this is the key word here.
“anticipate”
not “guessing”
not “by-heart-memorizing”