Boghog

Beat 'em up enemies tend to have dodges that make gameplay more dynamic & unpredictable, and give enemies a way to escape the BS you throw at them like infinite combos. They existed in the genre since pretty much the beginning.

Usually dodges are RNG-dependent because devs don't want to hard shut down player strats entirely nor create AI loops. Meaning that, sometimes, the game will decide that your attacks shouldn't work like they normally do. God Hand is no exception, but it does something interesting with its dodges that, while not fully taken advantage of, should be explored further by other games IMO.

Enter God Hand

God Hand has 4 or so types of enemy dodging (jump over, duck, dash backwards, jump out of juggle), but the one I wanna look at is the final one. When an enemy's being juggled, there's a random chance they, instead of getting hit, will break out by jumping backwards. It can be real BS cause it can make your key attacks like the axe kick follow up miss.

God Hand gives you basically 2 responses to this.

1. You can chase them down and deliver some kinda run kick before they land. If you catch them near a wall, you can launch them & wall splat. Otherwise it's the same as attacking them from neutral. This is nice since you can get a damage boost on your follow up if you're near a wall & react in time.
2. You can run forward & catch them mid-jump and deliver a kick that launches them and any other enemies nearby forward, and has a massive hitbox. The same thing you can do with any juggled eneme.y
   
   Here's a nice gif from Mike Kob's extremely useful let's play to demonstrate how #2 works.

What this interaction does is make the design double-edged. The enemy's dodge doesn't merely punish you, it's now an opportunity to preserve/build advantage for a skilled player. That's key for good enemy dodges in beat 'em ups, I think. The player already lost something when the enemy decided to dodge - I think at that point the game has a responsibility to give the player the opportunity to make up for the lost time & advantage. Provided they're skilled enough.

Issues

While my description probably sounds nice, it's not exactly how God Hand's follow up works. The enemies jump out at unpredictable times, and they do it fast. If you try to react to the dodge as it happens, you've already lost the chance to punish it. As a result you have to do the follow up preemptively and hope the game plays along. Some enemies (knife dudes) dodge so frequently that this is relatively reliable, while for others it's a crapshoot.

Furthermore, unlike most of God Hand's "prompts", this one is pretty simplistic - you just 2 viable responses (unless the dodge is negated by a wall), and one of them is better than the other. Even the kick's "aiming" isn't really a factor, since you don't have the time to dodge around the enemy.

I think beat 'em ups should take the basic concept of being able to convert an enemy's dodge into some kind of advantageous action and build on it while making it more reactive. Maybe have a small handful of different dodges going in different directions that force players to react & adapt, and several viable follow up moves with their own pros & cons (some are better for CC, some have iframes, some do more damage on a single target, some keep the enemy open for further comboing). The presence/absence of other enemies and interactions with terrain should make this interaction situational to begin with, so the extra layer of RNG should not be necessary outside of maybe boss fights.