Sekiro – Parry Everything

Rethinking ‘Health’ as Game Mechanic: Sekiro’s Verisimilitude

Talking about Sekiro again. Sekiro is a ninja action game by FromSoftware, that involves a lot of sneaking around and backstabbing, but nearly as much sword-to-sword clashing and front-stabbing as well!

A ninja in a red coat and scarf attacks a spearman in an old-japanese-style interior. The ninja is stabbed, but blocks the followup attack, breaking his opponent's guard before stabbing him through. — That beautiful yellow bar there, that’s the posture bar. Love that thing. We’ll get to that.

Verisimilitude! A big word, and one of my favorite ‘game-designerisms’. What exactly does it mean? So if realism is invocation of the real, of reality upon your fiction, verisimilitude in the context of game design is the invocation of what seems real, or rather feels right to give the impression of reality. That distinction might seem fuzzy, but it’s very important. What makes a game realistic is an adherence to the facts of the subject you are simulating, from an objective standpoint. What gives a game strong verisimilitude is a respect for the experience of what you’re trying to depict. In the latter case, it is more important that the gameplay feels right than it is for the game to be objectively close to reality. A horse’s hooves are expected to make a certain sound in television and movies, but this sound is often expected to be the sound of clapping coconut shells, instilled in audiences after many years of the sound effect’s prominence in television and movies. As you can see, creating a fulfilling sense of verisimilitude involves a complex balance of player expectations and affordances. This becomes even more complex, as these things tend to be, when you involve the dimension of interactivity. In Sekiro, I want to talk specifically about the verisimilitude of the game’s sword fighting.

I think one of the things I respect most about Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is the design’s willingness to reevaluate even the most fundamental assumptions of action games. The health bar, for one, is ubiquitous in such games. But, if you think about it, ‘health’ as a gameplay mechanic is a little weird, right? There is an arbitrary number representing your opponent’s closeness to death. Maybe the enemy will pull out some stronger ‘desperation moves’ when their health gets low, but so long as it isn’t zero, they can fight as well as they ever have. When that last HP or ‘hit point’ is depleted though, POOF! Their body’s ability to sustain its own weight goes up in smoke and they crumple like their bones have suddenly turned to sawdust. The HP mechanic exists for a reason, it works well. The suspension of disbelief needed to accept this abstraction of how fighting capability works is easy enough to achieve such that most players will not question it, in return for the fun gameplay that HP pools provide. Sekiro wants to go a step further though, and bring the abstraction of their combat closer to a cinematic realization of an idealized sword fight.

A ninja slashes a flurry of blows at a spearman in a old-japanese-style interior. The ninja steps on an oncoming spear attack, knocking it out of the way, then breaks the spearman's guard with a final blow, before stabbing him to death. — The enemy’s posture indicated by a yellow bar above them (the red bar is HP). As the posture bar fills, the enemy is closer to loses their stance.

In reality, a sword fight does not involve two guys hitting each other back and forth until one guy runs out of hit points and collapses. Really, it’s closer to the first guy to land a clean hit… has probably just killed his opponent. So Sekiro has created a system that abstracts this reality – Sekiro is not generally a game about cutting opponents over and over again until you’ve punched out all of their blood, but rather, you strike at opponents as they deflect your blows until you can land a clean hit, killing them instantly. This makes a lot of sense. In a real fight, wearing down your opponents’ defenses, finding ways around their guard, is paramount. Most opponents are not going to just stand there and let you stab them with a sword. The idea Sekiro proposes is that ‘hit points’ are secondary to ‘posture’, or the strength of one’s defenses.

Two ninja duel in a Japanese manor courtyard, one garbed in grey and a mask, one garbed in a red coat and scarf. The masked ninja strikes at the other several times, each time deflected in a flurry of sparks, after the fourth strike, the masked ninja loses his stance, and the red-coat ninja quickly stabs him to death. — clang, clang clang, CLANG. And its over. The nature of the posture system creates a ‘correct’ sense of lethality and back-and-forth in combat.

Posture in Sekiro can be reduced by striking an opponent’s guard to rattle their stance, deflecting their attacks with a well-timed parry, or participating in a number of other contextual maneuvers such as the mikiri counter, a special counter against thrusting attacks, or jumping over enemy sweeping attacks. Posture naturally regenerates over time, and the player or enemy combatants can quickly restore it by holding their position and guard. When posture is completely gone, enemies become vulnerable to a deathblow, which will kill them instantly, while the player becomes stunned if their posture is gone, forcing them to dodge or take a hit. The idea of becoming too tired or psyched-out to defend myself in a tense situation due to relentless pressure from my opponent is much more relatable to me than suddenly exploding into red mist and collectible coins because I was punched one too many times. I am able to, through this system, put a bit of myself in the battle. Feeling my defenses wear down is something I have really experienced, in real life, so that feeling of the real draws me further into the game through Sekiro‘s clever abstraction of the concept.

Deathblows becomes the real hinging point of combat in Sekiro. As I said, whenever an enemy’s posture is depleted, they become vulnerable to the instant-killing deathblow. I say instant-killing, but some enemies can endure two or even three deathblows before really dying. Sekiro takes places in a fictionalized and fantasy-tinged realization of 16th century japan, with inhuman warriors, monsters, and demons, so the idea that a giant ogre-man can survive two ‘clean hits’ before he goes down for good does nothing to hurt the verisimilitude in my estimation. It’s not realistic, but it still feels right. The thought that even the strongest demigod opponents you face can be brought down by just two or three true strikes really grounds the world in a sense of grit and lethality. The illusion is given that life in Sekiro is nearly as fragile as it is in reality, even with divine powers. These ‘deathblow counters’ work brilliantly with Sekiro‘s stealth mechanics as well, as one needs only sneak up on an opponent to get a free deathblow, no risky one-on-one fighting required. The two systems work so well together that I feel I could write an entire article just about that, so I’ll move on for now.

A giant white, headless gorilla charges a ninja in a red coat and scarf in a knee-high spring in a valley. The gorilla, wielding a giant sword and its own severed head, swipes at the ninja. The ninja manages to block, being pushed back by meters with each p;arry. — The verisimilitude of the combat mechanics highlights and heightens the impact of the supernatural elements. So it still works when a beast keeps fighting after decapitation.

Now hit points still exist in Sekiro, but their role has been shifted somewhat. Enemies will still die if their HP reaches zero, though this is much less likely to occur than their posture reaching zero. That’s not to say wearing down your opponent’s HP is pointless. The lower a combatant’s HP is, the slower their posture can regenerate. Now if HP is still meant to represent ‘health’, then this makes a lot of sense. A clean hit is likely to just kill someone in a sword fight, but a series of glancing blows are very likely to make someone less able to defend themselves. Cuts, bruises, a broken finger or two, such things would definitely add up to a poorer and poorer defense, and so this adds to the overall sense of internal consistency in Sekiro‘s combat. No matter the true reality, fighting in Sekiro creates an experience that meets the player’s imagination of how being a sword-fighting ninja would actually work. This level of gradient to the effects of losing HP, where the more injured a combatant, the worse they can defend themselves, addresses much of the inherent weirdness of HP I mentioned earlier, and it does it in such a simple, smart fashion.

Verisimilitude is all well and good, but I wanted to quickly go over some other practical advantages of this system. Since posture is an ever-shifting and renewable resource, it creates a very dynamic tension that can shift back and forth freely as the situation demands. Empowering reversals of fortune on the part of the player are common, as posture greatly rewards consistent performance, making a win when you’re on the ropes a lot more feasible than you might expect. Posture also allows many little tweaks and knobs for the designers to create a great variety of enemy fighting styles based on their posture stats alone. Maybe one boss restores their posture absurdly quickly, but doesn’t have huge stores of it, meaning this boss must only be parried a few times, but they cannot be given the downtime to recover. Maybe another boss has huge stores of posture, but recovers it very slowly. Some enemies might recover posture quickly, but lose this advantage if they’re even a little injured. Etc. There are a huge number of possible variations of these, and Sekiro implements pretty much all of them.

A twelve-foot-tall woman in a skull mask and large monk robes swings a naginata polearm in wide arcs at a ninja in a red coat and scarf, atop a bridge in the mountains, covered in snow and autumn leaves. The ninja is able to deflect several strikes, then steps on the naginata to block it, The ninja cuts the monk twice, then blocks two more strikes, before leaping over a sweeping attack and stomping her shin, breaking her stance, and stabbing her. — The versatility of the posture system can create endurance battles of attrition, or deadly quick-draw duels, depending on context.

Obviously glowing praise is my default position for much of Sekiro‘s systems, but it’s worth mentioning some drawbacks. Sekiro‘s posture system works specifically because of how intense a game it is. It demands constant, focused attention of players in a way that may not be appropriate for every game experience. It’s very much ‘Sekiro‘ but every action game may not benefit from such high levels of gameplay intensity so consistently, and so the posture system isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution that can be injected into every action game without adaptation considerations or consequences. I would like to see more systems like the posture system see popularity, but it is a very delicately balanced system that would demand a lot of care in the implementation. Just plain old HP is much simpler, and it’s been the de facto way to represent combat in so many games for so long for a reason. As I’ve said before, the level of abstraction it creates can be an acceptable tradeoff if it’s supported by a strong combat system, and the simplicity of it fits your game. Another aspect of Sekiro‘s posture system is not only the gameplay intensity, but the intensity on the player’s hand in controlling the thing. The system demands a lot of very rapid and often repetitive inputs that may not be suited for all players. It’s an obvious drawback, perhaps not inherent to a posture system, but correlated to how it’s implemented, and so the system would likely need some fundamental changes and re-tuning to map to a more inclusive suite of control options.

I think the posture system is a great look at how we can rethink the traditionally established rules of how games need to be. Creating new and exciting interactive experiences means being willing to accept that no one game mechanic can be sacred, even if it is ubiquitous. HP bars are so universally standard that any deviation from that mold feels almost alien. The posture system picks apart what HP is meant to represent and repackages it in a way that is extremely conducive to the kind of ninja-action experience Sekiro aims to create, in a way that is evocative of the real, even if it is still very abstract. Sekiro‘s posture system isn’t purely realistic, it’s not what sword combat actually looks like, but it feels very real to experience. It feels like pitched life-or-death battle with high stakes, and real tension.

A ninja man in a red coat and scarf clashes swords with an old woman ninja dual wielding kunai. She jumps from a hidden wire connected to the walls of a crypt-like cellar. Her attacks are deflected repeatedly by the red-coat ninja before losing her stance and being stabbed.

My Lord, I Have Come For You. This… Will Only Take A Moment…

FromSoft and The Taxonomy of a Parry

I love parrying things in video games. You might have already guessed that. I’m always looking for how and why things work or don’t work in games, so I have a particular interest in one of my favorite gameplay mechanics, the parry. So what is a parry? In the context of an action game, I’d define it as a maneuver the player can execute on the fly to nullify incoming damage and disarm enemy defenses, which requires an acute execution of timing to succeed. Commonly, it’s a button press that initiates a short window of animation during which, if an enemy attack connects with the player character, the parry activates. After considering how to approach the design of this gameplay mechanic, I’ve decided there are three pillars of a good parry mechanic: usability, versatility, and impact.

Usability describes the practicality, from the player’s perspective, of actually using the parry at all. How restrictively difficult is the timing necessary to succeed in using one? Is the risk of using the parry worth the reward? How necessary is the use of this parry to succeeding within the game? Are there other specific considerations like spacing that make the parry more or less practical?

Versatility describes the frequency of general use cases for the parry. Can the parry be used to deflect any attack encountered in the game, or is it limited in some way? Can even large and powerful enemies be parried? Do you need a specific weapon or in-game skill to use the parry? Is the parry’s reward worth forgoing a more straightforwardly offensive approach?

Impact is at the center of what makes me want to use a parry. A parry can be powerful, but ultimately I am motivated to use it by how fun it is. What’s the audio-visual feedback of a successful parry like? Do I get a rush from disarming my opponent, or is the reward for parrying barely noticeable? Does it make me feel powerful? Does it make me feel skilled?

FromSoftware or FromSoft is a Japanese game developer well known for their popular action games, all of which in recent memory include a parry of some kind. I want to run through three of their flagship titles, the original Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, and analyze their respective parry mechanics through this lens I’ve come up with to see how it can be applied to specific cases.

The parry mechanic in Dark Souls is an interesting beast. A favorite of the game’s more hardcore fans but, in my experience, one that new and even many veteran players ignore completely. It’s powerful, and it’s fun to use once you get the hang of it, but that’s kind of the problem, it’s not very fun to learn to use, and many players will not bother with it, as it is far from essential to completing the game. I’ve found most friends I’ve introduced to the game simply ignore the utility of parrying, or try it once and discard it in favor of the game’s more developed mechanics.

Though powerful, the parry in *Dark Souls* is stiff, restrictive, and difficult to master

The parry in Dark Souls suffers severely from a lack of usability and versatility. Usability, as I explained, is my concept of how practical it is for a player to actually execute your parry maneuver consistently and successfully. Firstly, this parry is not universally available – the player must be wielding a small or medium sized shield in their off-hand. Given the wide and varied options of character customization in this game, it’s possible a player won’t be using a shield at all. I think the greatest source of dissuasion for using this mechanic, though, is how difficult it is to succeed with it. Dark Souls has a very specific and narrow window of time at which a parry will succeed. An enemy’s attack must connect with the player character during this 6 frame window – that’s one fifth of a second. Needless to say, it is a difficult mark to hit. Now, with practice one can hone in on Dark Souls‘ very consistent and reproducible rhythm. Not every enemy attacks with the same timing, but they all share a fairly general pattern of wind-up, swing, and follow-through. Once you get it, you’ll find parrying a pretty consistent tool.

Failing to parry can result in incurring massive damage, and its timing is excessively strict

However, the skill floor to reaching this point of consistency is restrictive, even by this game’s standards. Given how great the risk is of failing a parry in this game, and how the game itself trains players to be extremely risk-averse with enemies that deal massive amounts of damage when interrupting player actions, players are naturally disinclined to even take those risks. Thus, they’ll not learn the parry timing. What’s more, most enemies can be thoroughly dispatched, with far lesser risk, by simply striking them down with your favorite weapon or spell when the foe’s defenses are down, between their attacks. I conclude that the parry in Dark Souls is not entirely practical, or usable without a great deal of personal investment, time, and effort most players will find better spent in learning the nuances of movement, dodging, and attacking. These options are far more practical, realistically, even if the parry becomes very powerful once one masters it.

The impact of this parry is intense, and intensely reward, so it’s a shame it’s so hard to use

This would be enough turn off most players from the mechanic on its own, but the move also struggles in the versatility department, meaning the frequency of its general use cases. Dark Souls is filled with enemies that can be parried – essentially any enemy that can suffer a backstab. I’d always say that any enemy with an obvious spine that your player character can reach can probably be backstabbed and parried, as a general rule of thumb. Not every enemy matches this criteria though, and nearly none of the game’s 25 boss encounters do either. Boss encounters are a major part of this game, and something players will be spending a lot of time on. They’re also notoriously among the game’s most difficult and high-intensity segments. Since parrying is useless in those encounters, it further disincentivizes paying the mechanic any time or energy. If you can’t use a move for a game’s greatest challenges, what worth is it? Any real world skill building towards parry mastery is, objectively, better spent on other things, if finishing the game is your goal.

I like using the Dark Souls parry – it’s got excellent impact. A harrowing low boom sound effect accompanies its successful use. Parried enemies reel in a wide, exaggerated swooping animation, soon to be followed by a riposte that drives a weapon straight through them, gushing comical amounts of blood (if the foe has blood). It all really accentuates the player’s power and superior skill over the opponent. The totality of the audio-visual feedback here is excellent, it’s just a shame so few will ever get to actually see it. The move is simply not useful to a significant portion of the player base.

When a mechanic like this goes so underutilized by your players, the designer might ask themselves what’s causing this discrepancy, and what can be done to address it.

In Bloodborne, FromSoft wanted to shift to a more action-oriented system, less about patient and considered movements, more about reaction and aggression, as compared to Dark Souls‘ more traditional RPG inspired roots. As part of this shift, the parry in Bloodborne was made to be more of a central mechanic than in Dark Souls, something to be expected of the player regularly throughout combat encounters. So that means getting players to actually use it. First, FromSoft needed to address usability. Bloodborne‘s parry is unique in that it takes the form of a projectile. This accomplishes two things. One, it makes accounting for space exceedingly easy for players. Dark Souls was fairly strict about where player and opponent were standing for a parry to successfully work. In Bloodborne, if an enemy is shot during the tail end of its attack animation, it will be parried, no matter its distance from the player. Two, this means the player does not have to put themselves in direct danger to parry, as an enemy can be parried even if their attack is very unlikely to actually hit the player. The risk to parrying now feels much more proportional to the benefit, making it a valid alternative to just wildly attacking.

Even when incurring damage, it’s possible to parry in *Bloodborne*, the mechanic is forgiving

As the timing for Bloodborne‘s parry is now timed to the enemy‘s attack, and a moving projectile, rather than lining up the player’s parry animation with the enemy’s animation, the player really only has to track one movement, the enemy’s. Together, these elements remove a ton of cognitive blocks on actually using Bloodborne‘s parry system, so its usability is extremely effective by comparison. Bloodborne‘s parry is also extremely versatile. When looking at the 30 or so bosses in the game, about 15 of them can be parried, roughly half, making mastery of the parry a far more effective tool in way more situations than it was in Dark Souls. Bloodborne doesn’t shirk in the impact department either. The same familiar boom sound effect accompanies a success, and can be followed up with a violent and beastly visceral attack that grabs the enemy’s insides, twists them, and rips out a huge gush of blood, knocking the foe to the ground and stumbling nearby enemies. The player hunter’s sense of superiority over their prey is the focus.

Even the biggest and burliest can be parried, and at a distance too!

The Dark Souls parry had another issue I didn’t mention; if you did master it, and made it a consistent tool in your arsenal, many enemies outside of boss encounters become exceedingly easy to deal with, even if they are still fun to beat. Nevertheless, this runs the risk of the move becoming too powerful, especially if it’s easier to use. FromSoft’s solution to this was to make parry attempts a limited resources. This elegantly maintains the risk of attempting a parry, while assuaging the frustration of losing one’s own progress as a result of said risk. There’s still some risk of injury to a failed parry, but it’s much less likely than in previous games, most of the risk is the parry-centric resource of quicksilver bullets.

If Bloodborne made parrying a more central mechanic, then Sekiro made parrying a core mechanic, one of the primary action verbs of the game. Parrying is most of what you do in combat. Formally, the Sekiro move is called ‘deflection’.

To accomplish its design goals, Sekiro‘s parry is made to be even more accessible and low-risk than Bloodborne‘s. A deflection can be directly transitioned into from a block (which itself nullifies incoming damage), and a block can be transitioned to directly from a deflection. Both ‘block’ and ‘deflect’ are activated with the same button, block is simply the result of holding it. Deflections are initiated when the button is compressed, not when it is lifted, so erring on early deflections makes the maneuver even safer – deflections that fail for being used too soon simply result in a block. No damage is taken either way. The limiting resources of Bloodborne are gone here, at least for parries, so player’s will often find themselves using the deflection move even more than they attack, but this was the goal. Sekiro aims to evoke the back-and-forth clanging of cinematic sword fights, and the game is built around the interest of deflecting a series of attacks in quick succession. Any one given deflection is easy, but the difficulty can be smoothly ramped up by stringing a sequence of them together.

Sekiro conditions the player to use a series of parries as a defensive, and offensive tool

We’ve come a long way since Dark Souls, with a skill floor that is extremely approachable, without sacrificing the skill ceiling. Where the parry window of Dark Souls was only 6 frames, one fifth of a second, Sekiro‘s deflection window starts at the extremely generous, by comparison, half-second. This deflection window decays in size if the player abuses the deflect button. Deflecting rapidly and repeatedly causes the window to shrink down to only a small fraction of a second. The goal is to make any given deflection easy, but the player is encouraged to use their own powers of reaction and prediction, rather than relying on spamming the button. Even still, this window decay is also generous, as the deflection’s full capability is restored after only a half second of not using it.

All this to say, Sekiro has extremely generous usability for its deflection mechanic. It has to, as deflection is the primary tool for defeating enemies in this game. Were it as restrictive as the parry in Dark Souls or even Bloodborne, it would be an exercise in frustration. To counterbalance this, the individual reward for one Sekiro deflection is much lesser, and you need to do a lot of deflections to add up to a bigger reward.

Sekiro is a masterclass in parry versatility. The deflection maneuver is applicable to nearly every encounter in the game. It’s extremely generally useful, so much so that exceptions, attacks which cannot be deflected, are unlikely to be deflected, or require other special maneuvers to deflect, are given their own glowing red UI graphic to further make them stand out. Outside of that, if it deals damage, it can be deflected by the player’s sword, near-universally. Formalizing what can and can’t be parried in this way is also helpful for usability, as it removes guesswork on the part of the player.

When deflecting successfully, right orange sparks fly like a firework cracker was set off as a cacophony of metal sounds clang in satisfying unison. The audio-visual feedback for a successful deflection is actually kind of subtle, compared to simply blocking. It is merely a heightened, more intense version of the block visuals, just distinct enough to unambiguously be its own separate function to ensure players know when they’re succeeding, but similar enough to not be distracting. This makes sense, as players are expected to deflect a lot of attacks in any given encounter. A series of successful deflections looks and sounds like a larger-than-life battle of master swordsmen, with sparks showering about amidst the metal clanging. When an enemy has finally been deflected past the limits of their endurance, Sekiro will delight players with some of the most lavishly animated executions in video games, anything from the tried and true gut-stab, to decapitating a gorilla with a hatchet the size of a refrigerator, to gingerly extracting tears from a dragon’s occular injury. The impact of Sekiro‘s parry system is not only good, but usually proportional to each situation, even though the overall impact of any one given deflection is not super intense.

It’s clear somebody at FromSoftware loves parrying things almost as much as I do. It’s a common mechanic for a reason, giving players an area of skill to strive for mastery over, which reinforces a sense of power. Few things can make a player feel more powerful than successfully turning enemy attacks against them. Over the course of these three games, FromSoft has made parrying more and more central to the experience, to the point of it becoming the main point of focus for Sekiro. It’s clear there was an awareness of how neglected parrying was in Dark Souls among casual players, and even some veterans. They needed to find ways to make using it more attractive, without sacrificing the sense of power it imparted, the thing that makes it fun in the first place. While the Dark Souls parry has its flaws, I’m glade they persisted in iterating on it. I think Sekiro and bloodborne have two of the most consistently fun combat systems out there, and the excellence of their respective parry mechanics are a huge part of that, in Sekiro especially, which deserves its own write-up, eventually. The metrics I’ve come up with here to assess parry mechanics are just the way I look at things, though. It’s useful to look at design through a variety of lenses. So the next time you stab some zombie in the face after battering its arm away like you’re in a kung-fu movie, think about why and how that maneuver works the way it does.

Hesitation is Defeat…