I am angry. Angry about telegraphing.
The main problem here is that there's no consistency in enemy wind-up animations actually telling you anything about the properties of the incoming attack itself. The animation can say one thing, but from it I cannot reliably gauge the timing required to deflect, the range of the attack, whether the attack inflicts knockback on block, whether the attack tracks you, whether the enemy has poise on this attack, whether the enemy is doing some iaito move where he near-instantly lunges at you outside regular melee range with next to no wind-up, whether the enemy will follow up with a combo, and so on. There's the separate red kanji which signifies perilous attacks, yes, but even then it doesn't tell you what type of perilous attack in particular you are dealing with. The only way is to tell by the enemy animations, of which there are many. While thrust/grab/sweep wind-up animations are similar, the actual stances can be rather ambiguous to tell apart at first glance given how fast the wind-up for attacks can be, ultimately meaning you have to figure out through trial and error what each enemy animation even means. Not to speak of non-human enemies with their own special wonky-ass hitboxes.
For regular enemies it's not too difficult to figure out their attack patterns, but for the huge amount of (mini-)bosses in the game those rules are constantly thrown out of the window, as they pelt you with atypical attack patterns and animations solely designed to throw you off which you simply have to learn by dying. The mini-bosses often feel innately annoying to deal with because you feel less like you're applying and adapting your fundamental skills you have polished throughout the game, but more like you have to throw all that shit out of the window and start over. From what I've read here it's the most fundamentals-focused bosses and the downright gimmicky ones which are everyone's favourite, while those inbetween tend to be assholes because they have another GOTCHA! trick up their sleeve, whereas you know with the downright gimmicky ones that standard rules won't apply at all. Add having to sneak kill all minion adds around a mini-boss each time you die instead of being able to instantly retry that guy on death and you have a recipe for frustration.
I'm not saying it's too hard, it's just that the learning process for dealing with each (mini-)boss is needlessly obtuse by obscuring the properties of incoming attacks. Take a game like Furi. In that game you face a bunch of different bosses, but it's tolerable to learn because you always know in advance what you are dealing with because of the telegraphing. In that game, each enemy melee strike has an universally constant timing required to parry it and an universally constant visual and aural telegraph. You only need to learn one abstract animation timing throughout the game. Because each strike has the exact same parry timing, you know that if you got hit it's because you fucked up the timing, less so because you couldn't tell that the enemy was actually starting an uninterruptible 5-hit combo.
Because there's only one telegraphing effect, parrying a string of attacks comes down to pressing the one parry button at the right times, which might give one the impression it's just a quick string of QTEs and feels lame as a result. Here's an unpleasant thought: it's the exact same for every game where you can i-frame dodge outta the way or parry everything while standing in one place. That includes Bayonetta and most Platinum games, the new Ys games, the Souls games, and god knows what else. If I only have to press one button to dodge/parry and I don't have to worry about positioning or whether I need to dodge left or right, then the defensive play is the same shit (at least against single enemies). Perhaps dodging enemy attacks in those games feels less like a QTE because you aren't told the precise timing of the attack or because there's some fancy animation involved, but the idea behind dodging them is the same: memorize the animation and timing in order to dodge them consistently. Except that shit can vary wildly between enemies and bosses and just involves more memorization. It's almost telling how the only way DaS2 could create additional challenge was to have bosses feint more often in order to trick you into dodging. Which you die to a few times and then have memorized for the rest of the fight.
Keeping this in mind: would you rather have a single constant universal timing for melee attacks, or that there's a godzillion different timings with their own unique attack animations? When you come down to it both will revolve around the same thing, it's just that the former takes less time to learn. If you want to make the former more flexible, just have enemies attack on the count of three, which can be a really fast onetwothree or a drawn out one... two... three..., so that either way you always know when the attack comes. I certainly wouldn't be opposed to be given more information about the strikes I have to deal with. I mean, why can't a kanji of a different color appear for each type of perilous attack? Why not add separate audiovisual telegraph for attacks which inflict huge knockback, add two or multiple sound cues or visual flashes when an enemy is about to launch a combo, add a visual effect on the enemy when he's poised, have a charge aura appear around enemies in an iaito pose, have the part of the ground be highlighted to display the hitbox when a beast is about to do a ground pound. When an enemy does a leaping attack the camera always pans upwards to make the type of attack more obvious so you are more likely to reflexively dodge it or stand still and reflect it; why not apply that same line of thought to the rest of the game?
What is gained from obscuring enemy attack properties other than increasing the time it takes to get to know them? I'm not even complaining about the difficulty execution of the response necessary against enemy attacks. Once I learned the enemy attack patterns, the flow of the boss fights became a lot more enjoyable. Once I did.
you have to deflect his follow up attack after you do mikiri
