The new Onimusha has won parrying, now give it a rest

Parrying is gaming's best and raddest adoption - a decisive and effortlessly stylish retort that serves instant, embarrassing karma to threats as diverse as lightning bolts, chainsaws, and freight trains. Press R1 to pay absolutely no respect. It's also a cheap trick that shrinks gods and monsters to the tiny space where your blades meet, reducing the shadows of colossi to whimpering bunny silhouettes. At their best, nailing a string of parries and ripostes feels like performing Swan Lake while winning a rap battle against god. At their worst, they're the design equivalent of blending a bag of spinach into sugary pasta sauce so fussy toddlers don't realise they're eating quicktime event. 

I recently discovered my least favourite parry ever in Marvel's Spider-Man 2. Fights in Insomniac's Spidey games fizzle with fistly pyrotechnics so ill-suited to requiring you to anticipate incoming hands that Spidey's glowing head halo does it for you. In Spider-Man the first, you don't even have to consider danger until the same second you respond to it. This lets you focus your entire brain on what matters: doing stuff that makes you nod and go: "Oh yes. That's some shit Spider-Man would do".

But in the sequel, just knowing that a wiley thugoon might spring a parry-only punch forces a shift in priorities from "I want to do this" to "I don't want that to happen" which messes with the cadence something awful. It's so ill-fitting it feels like it emerged from a focus group, run by and consisting entirely of suits, each of them focused on suit-dazzling the other suits with the suitiest suggestions possible.

This is how so much of parrying feels to me now. It's Chris Pratt. It's Timbly Charmander. It's 20g of added bison protein in an 18g Chocolate Hobnob. I used to crackle with glee at clinching a "not today, fucko" against Ray's clanging mechasnout in Metal Gear Rising. Now I long for a game brave enough to snap my sword in half forever if I'm stupid enough to think I can deflect even a swerving bumper butt from a medium-velocity rat ambulance. 

Onimusha: Way Of The Sword is not that game. It has five different varieties of not-today-fuckos you can use during a day in the life of true Edo period geezer Miyamoto Musashi, and something like four extra fucko-be-gones. You can block, dodge, super dodge, parry, and deflect, which is basically a parry with extra steps. Dodging fills an execution gauge, and parrying fills a gauge that engulfs your sword in crackling anti-fucko energy.