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Mini-rant time, because I'm annoyed today.
I say dodgeball, because that's still essentially what the game feels like at high level because of the parry system. You "catch" attacks to win. The only other versus game I can think of where this is reality is dodgeball. And while catching an attack in dodgeball certainly has a sense of finality to things, its very different than a sword fight.
The thing is, it wasn't always like this. In your alphas I know you had the blue attack/parry system that essentially created an unblockable attack after parries that had to be parried back if you were going to avoid it. You also had the fourth attack direction which was cancer and needed to be gotten rid of, but the parry system should have stayed. Disengage options also would been welcomed there. Not only is that more accurate to how a real weapon fight would feel, it involves both players more and keeps the action flowing. There's not even a question of whether or not the system works, Soul Calibur has been doing it for years with Guard Impact. Hell, it's how the sport of fencing is done in real life. It's fast and it's fun and its how a fight FEELS. A video game should NEVER have less functionality than its real life counter-part, it should have MORE.
This game didn't need to speed everything up the way it did throughout its life. It didn't need to introduce a boat load of hyper armor and unreactable unblockables and nigh-300ms delayed lights to make it function. It just needed its core parry system to make it feel like an actual weapon fight and not punish you for having the AUDACITY to hit a button. Attack, parry, riposte, counter-parry, and so on. It would have made the combat more involved without relying on unreactable gimmicks and it would have made the spectator portion of the fight more fun to watch because more stuff would be happening. I cannot for the life of me understand why it was dumbed down from sword fighting to dodgeball. Why. Just why.
And before the console-only players come in here saying the game is super offensive and parries are a reward for good defense, obviously I'm well aware that version is more offensive because of bad OS input delay and low frame rate. But you know, things wouldn't be unreactable for that version if they hadn't sped everything up in the first place to get around dodgeball. It's fine to feel either way about it, since that version is more playable, but you have that to consider too.
Okay, rant done. Have at it.
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