Gameplay has been so on the decline nowadays, that just having an actual reactive counterplay element like a parry is a major positive, even if it’s a huge simplification of defense. So, more engaging defense mechanics would be nice, sure, and there’s certainly huge underexplored territory on “offensive” actions with non-universal parry type defensive properties to make fighting more interesting, but that doesn’t mean what little we do have becomes a negative or less engaging.

It was tragic that the current Soul Calibur dumbed their deflect down to a single simple action instead of the series standard of at least needing to match low/high height zones (mids could be deflected with either, which was a nicely subtle drawback), but it’s still better than not having it at all.

Parrying is good. More interesting parrying/defense is better, but that’s a level of player and dev effort/investment that’s rarely on the table.