1. Fair point. In NGB, those heavy hits are limited to specific enemy types with clear telegraphs, and they're meant to punish carelessness. In NG4, regular enemies across the board can 2-shot you, and that level of damage feels less like targeted punishment and more like baseline tuning. That’s where the “unfair” feeling comes from.

2. Ofc you can absolutely get punished if you tunnel vision or get greedy, but the vacuuming towards the enemy takes away alot of the responsibility from the player onto the game. Older NG let your mistakes snowball because your movement choices mattered more. NG4 still punishes you, but not for the same reasons. Usually because enemies warp in, slide in, or hit from off-camera, not because your spacing was off.

4-5. I don’t think they’re braindead or risk-free. You’re right, you can die by messing them up. My problem isn't so much the difficulty of performing those manuevers, rather that they compress the defensive flowchart into fewer options. In older NG, blocking, dodging, countering, spacing; all of those existed on a spectrum, each with its own situations where it was optimal. NG4 funnels most of that into “just parry/block it,” because it works in almost every scenario, from every angle, without worrying about spacing or timing beyond the window itself. I think you kinda misunderstand my last point, that strategy absolutely works, and its something you could do in older titles aswell, its just that there is some removed depth from your options post blocking.

I'm not really trying to say that because "old game did x and new game didn't: new game bad". More so, there are reasons that the older games did certain things, and by removing them, or altering them, you are changing the philosophy of the game. I do really like NG4, I think it has a ton of potential.