You don't need 3 thousand defensive mechanics to have fun defense in a fighting game

With the recent announcement from riot's fighting game there are lot's of conversations about how the genre works. One that I find especially interesting is defense. Mostly because I feel like people believe in order to have an interactive defense, you need to have a ton of defensive mechanics. Which usually and logically leads to unintuitive and overwhelming scenarios for people who are new to the genre.

When this conversation comes, I don't think you need a ton of mechanics but a well built game. Which I think strive does well for example. It doesn't have a million defensive mechanics but a well built system.

Strive has stuff such as:

- Fast and short range grabs that can be used to punish lots of offensive attempts on reaction/prediction

-backdashes that leaves you airborned for few frames so you can avoid grabs and lots of lows.

-barrier which gives you additional defensive properties in exchange for bar

-deflect shield which is not insanely strong, I mean, there are lots of tournament matches where people don't even use it once.

The point is that if you see, lots of the things that I named are not exclusively defensive mechanics but normal fighting game elements with properties that make them good for defense. Which I personally enjoy more than having retreating guard, pushblock, parry, universal reversal, etc, and you must study where to use all of them. And even as a viewer is better because when I wasn't a strive player (I started playing late season 3 after slayer abba came and I've never touched a gg before that), I used to watch strive's top 8 and easily understand what was happening all the time.

To summarize, I feel that lots approach this concept like "defending in fighting games is oppressive, not fun, and to make it interactive you NEED a really heavy system loaded with defensive mechanics which makes the game overwhelming for new players. I personally really disagree with this concept. And I feel there are plenty of games that show my point, not just strive