Before we get to anything else, let’s talk about the best parry in games: the tennis return.

Check out this return by Roger Federer. In it we see the essential elements of what makes a good videogame parry — there’s the anticipation of the ball, a quick wind up, then the launch of the ball far into the distance. This is accompanied by the signature POMP of the impact and reverberation of both the sound and the energy of the ball through the racket. There’s an arc to it. And within that moment there’s another arc.

When the ball hits the racket, it isn’t simply reflected or pushed away. It bends the material of the racket and the ball itself, deforming for a moment before springing away. For a split second the ball is held in place, enacting its force upon the racket, before having that energy redirected in the opposite direction. The elasticity is what defines the tennis return.

That elasticity can be replicated in more than the simple feeling of attacking. Like tennis, a good parry asks you to move towards attacks. It combines aggressive and defensive moves. It makes you more aware of the space you’re in, and has you reassess it.

Take Treasure’s Sin and Punishment series, for instance. They’re a series of rail shooters (think Starfox) that involve a mix of shooting and sword combat. While you can get through most of the game by simply aiming and dodging well, learning to reflect missiles and bombs will allow you to play more aggressively and change your relationship with the space.

courtesy of longplays.org

Let’s look at this scene for example. In it one of the protagonists is fighting a large aircraft while dodging through lanes of laser fire. While you could time your dodges to move between pillars of laser fire and dodge the missiles, reflecting them back instead causes serious damage and finishes the battle much faster. (Check the enemy health at the bottom to get an idea of the difference in damage dealt between the gun and the missiles). Instead of the spaces occupied by the missiles being threats, they become opportunities that you intentionally move to intercept. While it doesn’t quite have the same elasticity and feedback of the act of the tennis return, it does have a similar arc and ask you to move within spaces in a similar way.

Not every game needs to imitate tennis, either. By looking at other sports — baseball, racquetball, badminton — we can get ideas of the different types of kinetic textures and arcs each of them bring. Think of the windup and CRA~ACK of hitting a baseball pitch, or the tension in the height and wide arc of badminton. Each of these are games within their own right, and the materials and feeling of each of them have been refined for decades, if not centuries. It’s no surprise that they’ve been imitated since games began.