The 14 Best Parrying Mechanics in Video Games

While parrying has been a part of action games for decades, it arguably truly entered the mainstream with the release of FromSoftware’s Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. Ever since this masterpiece, games where parrying is front-and-center have been sprouting like mushrooms after a rain.

While Not all of these games are third-person soulslikes, many of them are. That said, there’s plenty of variety within the settings and style of combat to suit a variety of tastes. Here are some of the best ones.

1

DOOM: The Dark Ages

DOOM: The Dark Ages is an entirely different beast from Doom Eternal. Instead of a fighter jet, you feel more like a tank. A tank with a wicked shield with which you can parry any green-tinted attack.

The result is the opposite of what most shooters do: a game where you run toward the enemies to earn the right to hear that sweet sound of a successful parry. The perfect parry window in the latest DOOM is quite lenient, allowing me to recommend the game to everyone who wants to enjoy pulling off perfect parries without having to put up with ridiculously tight timings.

Parry veterans, however, can freely adjust many difficulty-related variables, including the generousness, or avarice, of the parrying window.

2

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is the breakout hit of 2025 and a terrific JRPG. The game flips the turn-based combat formula to its head with QTEs that can augment your attacks with a nice damage bonus, and with a parry mechanic capable of turning the playable characters into impervious superhumans.

Of course, the price to pay for getting there is kind of steep because the perfect parry window is actually tighter than in Sekiro.

But after it all clicks, the game turns into an addictive battle rodeo where you quickly forget that you can dodge instead of parry. At least that happened to me some 15 hours into the game, and I’m not someone with excellent reflexes.

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3

En Garde!

If you aren’t a parry veteran and don’t want to jump right into the deep end with games such as Clair Obscur, Sekiro, or Nine Sols, En Garde! is a perfect training course for up-and-coming parry enthusiasts.

The parry window is generous and consistent, and enemy attacks are lit with a super-bright parry indicator that’s extremely hard to miss. The game also includes a stagger meter that presents a payoff for your parrying consistency, motivating you to get better and to carry your newly developed expertise to other, harder parry-focused games.

The game also includes a dedicated kick button, and a lot of kickable objects you can use to defeat enemies from afar.

Better yet, you can get away with mashing buttons in most fights if you lose patience for the timing-heavy combat. The game doesn’t include massive difficulty spikes, instead providing a satisfyingly consistent experience that doesn’t test your patience.

4

Jedi: Fallen Order (or Jedi: Survivor)

The Jedi series from Respawn is another great learning course for prospective parry enthusiasts. Jedi: Fallen Order is, subjectively, a bit more challenging parry-wise, but the game’s difficulty is still a far cry from games such as Lies of P or Sekiro.

Jedi: Survivor is a bit more lenient and enjoyable, allowing you to easily master the parry mechanic and quickly start pulling off counters consistently. I recommend them both because the story is worth following and because they’re some of the best Star Wars games of the last decade.

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5

The Batman Arkham Trilogy

The Batman Arkham trilogy is a perfect example of a game where you can enjoy the combat without learning to perfectly parry incoming attacks, but that turns into so much more if you do. Its fast-paced, fluid combat doesn’t break if you decide to dodge instead of parry everything, but it does become much better and addictive once you learn how to perfectly counter enemies.

That feeling where you dance around the Gotham trash mobs, dropping them one after another like flies, with a crescendo of knocking out the last dude with a perfect parry counter (accompanied by an almost comically amplified sound of the final punch) just never gets old.

Marvel Spider-Man games emulate the Batman Arkham combat, including the parrying mechanic, pretty well. But if you haven’t played either and want to learn how to perfectly counter enemy attacks, I’d recommend Batman over Spider-Man any day of the week.

6

Ghost of Tsushima

While Ghost of Tsushima is a great game in more than a few ways, constantly parrying enemy attacks might get tiring if you play the game on any difficulty that isn’t Lethal.

The catch is that enemies are annoying damage sponges on higher difficulties, but the game is trivial on easy. The solution, at least if you want to experience the game as parry-galore, is to crank the difficulty up to Lethal and then have every set piece a lethal dance where you and your enemies fall after a single strike.

This might be frustrating at first, but if you persevere, you will experience one of the best parrying mechanics in any game to date. One that’s not super hard to pull off, with the payoff being one-hitting enemies one after another. It doesn’t get much better than that.

Long before Sekiro showed up, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance was the game you ended up loving or hating, depending on whether you mastered its parrying mechanic.

The parrying mechanic seems simple, but it includes some small print that made plenty of gamers back in the day pull their hair out due to its apparent inconsistency. The first trick is to not parry attacks while in Ninja mode (holding RT/R2). The second is not to hold the thumbstick in the direction of enemies, but to let it go and only flick it in their direction before hitting the X/Square button to pull off the counter.

With this knowledge, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance becomes one of the best action games ever, after some practice, of course.

8

Grime

Here’s a game where parrying is literally life. In Grime, a soulslike Metroidvania, pulling off perfect parries fills your health regen meter, meaning you must deflect and counter enemy attacks to be able to heal. This is a clever yet flawed carrot on a stick.

You’ll either master the parry mechanic and heal whenever you need to, or you won’t, and the game will turn into a frustratingly unfair challenge. Now, you reading this probably means you like parrying and want to experience more games where this mechanic is important, and there’s no better game than Grime to test your parrying prowess.

If you decide to check it out, remember to focus on upgrading healing-related traits and search for optional bosses, since defeating them gives you breath (healing meter) upgrades that make the difficulty more manageable.

9

Nine Sols

If you want to play the ultimate parry-heavy Metroidvania, look no further than Nine Sols. This is the 2D game for masters of the “parry and counter” mechanic. The difficulty can be brutal, especially during boss battles, but the enjoyment from overcoming the challenge is priceless.

You will get stuck for hours on certain bosses, but this is the level of challenge Sekiro veterans yearn for. In other words, Nine Sols isn’t for the faint of heart of newcomers.

If you’d like something a bit easier but still fairly challenging, with 2D visuals and a classic Metroidvania design blueprint, Blasphemous and its sequel are perfect surrogates.

10

Nioh 2

Nioh 2 turned parrying into a science. You can parry with most weapons in the game, but you have to unlock counter moves in their respective skill trees. There’s a bunch of parry-like and counter moves you can pull off with different weapons and enemies, and learning and mastering them takes a fair amount of time.

There are special enemy moves you can counter, which includes learning their respective mechanics and situations where you can parry or not. While Nioh 2 isn’t a parry-centric game, learning how and when to parry and against which enemies can be a jolly good time if you’re into that.

If you’re not and are looking for a parry-centric game from Team Ninja, just go play Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty.