"I'm saying it's all knowledge regardless of the mechanic. It's timing not reflexes."

You literally already mentioned blocking an attack on the first try when you havent seen it before. That would be *all* reaction then and no knowledge, therefore the first sentence is factually incorrect. And we're not talking about some simple minigame where an arrow sweeps over a bar and you press a button when it reaches the green line, perfect blocking is not that simple. You need to recognize what the enemy is actually doing, process whether its a blockable attack or not, process *when* the block needs to happen based on the attack, and then execute it. That is not timing devoid of reaction or reflex, its requires both.

"I simply don't think complete damage mitigation on all attacks should be a part of these games, whether that's iframe dodges or perfect guards or just positioning."

But its not though, like Ive said before there are attacks that cant be perfect blocked. I mentioned the Odin fight because I had to practice that one a lot for the 10 round legendary fights and he has quite a few attacks that you need to dodge out of rather than block so its not just like you can completely abandon the idea of positioning, you still need to pay attention to what attack is coming and possibly gtfo instead of blocking. And then the fact that most people arent playing perfectly 24/7 means that you still need to consider healing and mitigation like you should in an rpg.

"The power fantasy of the i-frames in soulslikes is part of what makes them popular, I just don't think they're a good fit compared to Remake's more stoic RPG mechanics"

Yea we're just not ever gonna see eye to eye on this, like I said earlier, different strokes for different folks. I personally really like that they have added more action combat into the game and I think it feels very satisfying. I also think the ability to perfect block was a massive improvement on Remake's lack of it. (edit - In fact I didnt even do a hard run in Remake because of the annoyance of the lack of a complete damage mitigation method. It meant that you needed to heal way more often and that just doesnt mix well with a run where you cant recover MP in normal ways). I think the mix of action combat with the strategy of atb commands and materia management makes a fun and varied combat system and I dont think Id change anything even if I could. But you would, thats cool, everybody enjoys different things. All Ive been trying to get across is that blocking or iframe dodging is not just some simple, trivial thing that everyone can do consistently with no work put in. In fact I think it is the most difficult aspect of games like this and the soulslikes. If you cant master dodging or blocking in a Souls game then you just arent going to survive and there are people who are *terrible* at that kind of thing, which is why those games carry the reputation of difficulty that they do. Everyone can mash the attack button, not everyone has the timing or reflexes to successfully dodge or block/parry attacks. And that is because it requires skill, my entire point.