93

I always read that Vega vs Blanka example and I understand what changes due to parry because of it (Blanka walking forward loses charge and then it shifts greatly to Vega’s favor from that alone, parry potentially eliminates the severity of Blanka losing the charge in that scenario). I don’t think that makes the “concept” of parry bad, just different and it’s interesting to me.

HF players complained about Supers in ST, not surprised ST players complained about something in 3S, not surprised 3S players complained about something in SF4, and so on and so forth.

94

there’s really no use trying to discuss something with people who want to argue and have facts to support their argument.
facts being “i read what viscant said a years ago and now i too hate parry”

it doesn’t have to be about winning. people can just talk about something even if they don’t prefer it.

95

well, I’m discussing it and completely cool with the fact that some people like it… soo… yeah… I don’t know if that was directed at me…

Anyway, think it all comes down to what you prefer. Do you prefer to have to think ahead about stuff, set up situations/avoid them? Or do you prefer to fight in the ‘now’? I think parries mean a game becomes more of the latter.

96

i’m just going to double post because whatever i can do that.

i can understand the perspective that parry as implemented in 3S destroys some of what makes street fighter what it is. fair enough.
as i think of it, that may likely be because previously, especially in sf2, fireballs were extremely extremely important to the pacing and flow of the game.

so when you change the impact of fireballs, you obviously also affect the whole flow of the game. but that wasn’t accidental. it’s not the fault of parry itself.
you can find videos of vanao just beating people with hadouken and ex hadou and some pokes. like from maybe 2 months ago.

the real changes around that style of gameplay were done on a per character basis. ryu can’t lock people down with hadous because in 3S the designers simply did not want him to do that. it has nothing to do with parry specifically. remy CAN do that through the use of projectiles

as far as the character styles and archetypes. i can also understand that perspective. again, i don’t think that’s because of parry, it’s because the designers simply wanted a game where each character had a variety of options. as opposed to sf2 style where it is a lot more strictly defined. i mean look at alex, the guy has charge moves, qcf moves, 360, hcb, weird anti air and anti standing (ddt) moves.

but to say that character archetypes don’t exist, or that matchups don’t matter and the uniqueness in gameplay is missing is just 100% incorrect. i’m not sure who can honestly think that and then watch and play with strong players and still think that.

so yeah i can completely appreciate people who think the way the game plays isn’t very fun for them, or it isn’t their idea of street fighter. and that character types are less varied. but the important thing here is that is not due to parry. those differences are due to the decisions of the designers. ryu could have had a ridiculous hadouken if they wanted to give it to him. but they didn’t because i guess they wanted to create a different style of game.

it definitely puts more value on the moment at hand in my opinion. of course every fighting game values that, but i think there are more moments to react to in 3S than in other fighting games. where you may see something coming but have no actual choice to make. in 3S you can, even while blocking you can make a choice to try and red parry. so that changes things around a bit.

97

Okay, so, I think you are saying you basically understand that what ‘parry haters’ are saying, and agree with them in terms of what parries do to a game, but your conclusion is that isn’t not a problem. Agreed?

This is why this conversation always goes around in circles.

98

yeah basically.

well it goes around in circles because its the internet and people argue, they don’t discuss.
it isn’t objectively a problem I don’t think. I can’t even think of a way to say it is really. it’s a preference and if someone feels parry screws with the gameplay in a negative way, fair enough. i would tell them to speak to the best players they can about it to gain some insight since i doubt they play the game much.

but like i said i think people do a bit too much of equating parry with 3S. when really parry is just a part of 3S and there’s a lot of other stuff that creates the style of gameplay they might not find very interesting. parry just gets all the heat because it’s the most easy to distinguish factor comparing 3S to other SF titles (i think).

99

When you say ‘the style of gameplay they don’t find interesting’… exactly what mechanics/gameplay style do you mean?

100

[media=youtube]WiUT8qb62WQ[/media]

i’m not entirely sure what ‘style’ it is. i don’t even know if anyone can give a good answer to that. certainly i couldn’t give an answer about ST or SSF4 like that. i can’t say ST is a certain style of game or anything like that.

i don’t think 3S is superior objectively. i just like the game more than other stuff. that includes the art, characters, music, gameplay, everything. maybe style was the wrong kind of word. but i would say that every fighting game has a different ‘style’ because there isn’t a much better word that encapsulates every aspect of how a game feels.

sorry everything is off topicish louie.

101

Slightly off topic.
In DMC3 (Devil May Cry 3), the main character Dante had a style known as “Royal Guard” where the player can execute a “parry,” giving Dante a small invincibility window while timing his guard. This one of the most deadliest styles in the game if the player known what he/she is doing.

On topic:
Parries are arguably the reason why a lot of people play 3S. While this game is certainly not balanced, people can utilize the parry so that they carefully counter act the opponent. It is a matter of reading the opponent well and making the correct choices. This requires a huge amount of patience, but it is very easy to have fun with something such as this.

102

I honestly believe 3S is the only game that plays to Bruce Lee’s philosophy of Jeet Kune Do. Intercepting an attack with an attack. I think anyone who practices Martial Arts witnesses what is possible in 3S can respect it for it’s depth.

103

viscant is fucking horrible at 3rd strike. ive played him a lot on separate occasions. he doesnt even understand the game at all. it would be like me going into the mvc3 section and talking about how xfactor ruins the game. i dont even fucking play that game so why should my opinion even matter.

without parry, characters like Q and hugo would be 10000 times worse.

104

lol the reason a bunch of people hate parrying is exactly because you can intercept an attack with something that isn’t an attack. ie. using a universal non-attack mechanic instead of an attack that is part of the character’s toolset. ie. what you just said makes no sense

thanks for the wikipedia excerpt it really sheds a lot of light onto the subject

105

I don’t use Wikipedia.

106

Okay, I was content with just reading this thread, but then you brought up MB’s Shield system, which is nothing like 3s’s parry.

MB’s “parry” not only takes a shit ton of recovery time, it also costs meter.

Secondly, you never ever see anyone shield in MB, why? Because blocking is more than 70% of the time a better option, because of projectiles and other moves that leave the person you parried in HEAVY frame advantage.

Unlike 3S’s parry, which the game was kind of built around, Melty Blood’s shield feels like an extra defensive option.

(If I’m wrong about anything involving 3s, please correct me, I don’t know that much of 3s.)

(I also apologize in advance if you weren’t implying there were the same)

107

The Parry System is one of the finest mechanics ever added to a fighting game, IMO. Whilst I can appreciate that it’s not to everyone’s taste, I find it an absolutely fantastic example of a system design in a fighting game. The actual execution of a parry is so simple, just tap down or forwards, but to master the mechanic, one must not only be able to anticipate when an attack is coming, but must weigh up the pro and cons of even attempting it in the first place. Thus it’s a fantastic example of a mechanic that is simple to perform, but that can take years to master.

Parrying adds so much to the metagame behind 3rd Strike. Quite simply, if you are predictable in 3S, you are toast. You must continually evolve and adapt your playstyle to adjust to your opponent’s strategy and tactics, whilst at the same time they must do the same against you. Thus matchups are never static, instead they are fluid, dynamic and ever-changing. As a result, playing 3S sometimes feels a little like playing music. Each individual has their own style and their own expression of their interpretation of the system and the character they use.

Parrying also allows for so much creativity and imagination. There are countless ways to setup situations for an option parry and countless other ways to blow up players that try to use parry-bait strategies and techniques. There are also many times I can recall when playing or watching others play where you can see a player think up a parry strategy on the fly and utilise it in a clutch moment. Things such as jumping straight up and immediately parrying forwards to counter a wake-up reversal, or Kuroda’s anti cross-up technique of jumping backwards and parrying, or walking straight up to an opponent and parrying down at exactly the same time they go for a cr.MK. It’s waht makes playing and watching 3S so fun.

Instead of going on and on about why the mechanic is so good, and why 3S is such a great game as a result, I’m going to promote my own blog post on the subject, but in a nutshell - parrying is a brilliant mechanic.

108

Actually doing a single tapped Shield costs no meter, only continuing to hold Shield will drain your bar. Recovery is still horrible.

But while we’re on the subject of similar mechanics to parry, Akatsuki Blitzkampf’s Reflector is more akin to parry than MB’s Shielding. You can only do it once, no holding the button, it doesn’t cost meter and you can do it multiple times by tapping the button in succession AFAIK what you can’t do in MB, although you don’t have to Reflect multiple hits with a timing, you can just sorta mash Reflect and it’ll work. The differances are that your character auto attacks after a succesful Reflect if the move was a physical move eg. a normal, Reflecting fireballs won’t cause the auto counter. But if I remember right you can cancel into a super or special move after Reflect thus bypassing the counter. Other down side is that like Shielding, it has a recovery period if it whiffs.

109

That was a very interesting post/thread. If Viscant hadn’t been so condescending/aggressive, he probably would have convinced more people. He almost convinced me anyway. But he didn’t quite do it…

I am not sure whether I will reach a high enough level in 3S/get the opportunity to play enough top quality offline matches to fully understand parrying the way I’d like to (although watching the Nuki “bouncing up and down” video combined with playing a long, fruitful set against DaRage the other night, who was constantly doing “the bounce” after whiffed low mk etc. and rocking my face when he got a parry, has helped me see part of where I should go from here).

I also don’t know nearly enough about ST or any other extremely match-up focused, “simple” 2D game… but of course, as has been said before, the hardcore WW/CE/HF players had a lot of issues with supers in ST… and for understandable reasons. They claim that the power of supers and the emphasis on landing them took away from the other elements of the game. Hard to argue against that. But the supers also added a new element that some people found/still find exciting. For the most part, I am all for super/ultra type moves, as long as they are balanced and well-implemented. Similarly, parrying also adds a different element to the game that de-emphasizes certain elements while adding/emphasizing others. So far, after years of playing the SF2 series, MK, and SF4, I love what parrying brings to the table. I prefer a focus on reactions and timing and guessing over a focus on character/match-up knowledge.

I liked how someone (Viscant?) mentioned how high level SF2-style gaming is like “solving a puzzle” whereas 3S is not. I see the appeal in the “solving the puzzle” style of game… that is one type of “perfection” that can be pursued in a fighting game - solving the match-up puzzles, figuring out every possible counter between your character and all of the others… but as has also been said often, parrying allows for another kind of “perfection,” which is playing the perfect game where you predict, successfully parry, and successfully (max) punish every single thing your opponent does. Again, to me this seems more appealing and worth the trade off of not having as much of certain character archetypes (I never liked most of those archetypes all that much anyway… even in 1994. I’d be fine if the the game just had a few shotos, a couple of “pixies,” and maybe a grappler or two).

110

I’m actually enjoying the "parry they introduced in SC5. It really brings HIGH risk, high reward to a game that was previously crippled by that kind of defense. Just guard timing in SC5 is a bit more strict than a 3S parry but it adds a lot of benefits and it’s built into the system really well. Though, they could’ve removed guard impact in the game though…

111

tbh, i preffer how the parry mechanic was done on battle fantasia than on 3s

depth comes from having different options avaible, where all of them have a weight when it come to define the player strategy
this options can come from character tools, sub systems of the game and new stuff that you find through pushing the game limits
im not gonna say if parries add or take depth from the games were they are present, but the have a weight (more in some games than others) on how those games are played

112

Yeah- he definitely hit confirmed it because the super didn’t come out instantly.

IMO 3s is the perfect fighting game because of the depth of thinking that is involved in high level play. The parry system doesn’t allow you to mash jab to get out of a situation, or continuously poke someone because you have frame advantage. It allows the player to counter any situation that they are put in no matter which character they selected.

Some people might complain about the system when they realize that every attack they attempt gets parried, and they give up on the game when they should be thinking of what needs to be done to be less predictable. There are so many options available when it’s known that the opponent is going to try to parry an attack, and character tiers become less relevant because no single move can be abused.

The beauty of 3s is that it’s up to the player to think of creative ways to counter the strategy of the opponent. That is why even though this game is over 10 years old, there are new aspects of the game still being discovered.

Long live 3s.