My one-word answer is "parries"
My actual answer is "accessible feats of skill", and a precise example of that is "accessible parrying". It feels sick as hell to parry an enemy attack. If a game nails it you get really satisfying visual and audio effects as feedback, if you're using a controller it's probably got some good rumble going on too. You get to watch the enemy flinch or just have their day completely ruined, and you took no damage because you are a Parry God. And it happened specifically because you performed the right input at the right time instead of doing one of the dozen other things you could have been doing. You might have intentionally held your ground and refrained from attacking just so you could bait out the perfect opportunity to parry your opponent, which makes you feel like a Strategic Genius.
But I said accessible feats of skill and accessible parrying. By that what I mean is it should be possible for most people to access this and achieve it. There are brute force ways to achieve this - add big timing windows to your parries, or make enemies' eyes glow bright red at the moment you're supposed to hit the button - and there are more subtle ways. Some games take the approach of having both "parries" and "perfect parries", which is one approach - everyone can experience the joy of a parry, while the perfect parry rewards precise technical execution.
For me the parry system is part of what I love about Bloodborne but I also sort of hate it because I am DOGSHIT at parrying in Bloodborne. The timing makes no sense but even when it makes sense I'm not good at timing it. It still feels good as hell to do though because they checked all the boxes for feedback on the parry and it opens them up for a good ol' Visceral Attack(tm)(r)
I play Punishing: Gray Raven a lot and its parries are simultaneously one of my favorite mechanics and one of my most hated mechanics, because they started out by adding parrying as a character-specific mechanic and then rethought it and added it as an enemy-specific mechanic as well. There are multiple character-specific parries and I love each one because they found good ways to create a tradeoff between "fishing for parries" and just going all-in on offense. I'm going to elaborate on parries in Punishing Gray Raven now, sorry:
-
They have a boring generic tank type named Kamui, who has a parry built-in to one of his basic moves. You spend a regenerating resource to use moves, so you can choose to hold on to Parry Orbs in order to spend them at the right moment on a parry, but this means you aren't using them to do damage. While you're in his parrying stance you can't do anything else, so there's a good set of tradeoffs there.
Unfortunately, I consider this a Shitty Parry because it doesn't neutralize incoming damage, and a good parry makes you feel like a Parry God, not Someone Who Took 75% Reduced Damage Due To Utilizing The Counterattack Skill anyway 5/10 It's Technically A Parry I guess let's continue -
They have a healer (?) archetype sniper named Wanshi, who has a parry built in to his handgun attacks (?) and this makes no sense. I appreciate that they decided to just do it anyway. Wanshi's central gimmick is that after you use any move, you have a short period of time to just Hold Down The Attack Button, and instead of performing his normal attack string like an action game character would, he just Starts Blasting. He will continue to blast until you let go of the button. What happens if you let go of the button at the Precise Right Time, you may ask? He parries any and every incoming attack at that precise moment, no matter what it is, and you get a little satisfying 'ding' noise as time slows down and he fires off a counterattack shot. The timing window on this is just generous enough that I think most people can master it.
The extra reward on top of being a Parry God is that doing this is also a reliable source of damage, so against enemies that attack frequently and predictably, you can choose to entirely focus on parrying. It's fantastic and makes me actually enjoy playing as a healer in an action game. My main complaint with this, however, is that Holding Down The Attack Button Indefinitely is not terribly fun, and you will find yourself just sitting there blasting for multiple seconds going 'when are they going to swing at me come on COME ON'.
You can see https://youtu.be/CaCMV1AwnfU?t=35 for an example of him in use (this is one of the only times I've done what I would consider a "challenge run" in a video game, which shows you how much I enjoy this take on parrying.) Anyway I give him an 8/10 (it would be a 9 or 9.5 if he was a girl, especially if she had a canon girlfriend) Let's continue. -
There's another tank who can parry sort of, his name is Chrome and his gimmick is that he has a recharging shield and a sum total of Jack Shit Health Points to make up for the shield. He parries by using any of his moves at the precise right time, nullifying the incoming attack and slowing the attacker. I'm not even going to elaborate because it's too easy (just Do Anything while being attacked, and you parried! congrats!), the feedback is bad (I can never tell whether I've successfully done it or not), and the reward is bad (great, now the enemy is slower okay I guess). 7/10 It Is A Parry And It Is Accessible, I Guess moving on
-
They have a "tank" archetype called Nanami who comes in multiple variants. Two of them suck ass to play but as time went on the developers slowly became good at designing characters and they revisited her to take a third swing at making "tank but feels good to play". Their solution was to give her a GIANT MECH to ride on, with a chainsaw. This solves multiple problems at once: Riding a giant mech is automatically more fun than basic locomotion, nobody else has a giant mech, and giving a giant mech a chainsaw grants new verbs like "cut things with the chainsaw" and "parry things with the chainsaw". She adopts some of the design language from Sniper Healer Man:
At any point you can simply Hold The Attack Button Down in order to Cut Things With The Chainsaw (the game calls this "Bzzz" mode...). There is a Chainsaw Meter and it Goes Up if you hold the button down, and interesting things happen if you fill the chainsaw meter up, which gives you a good reason to not just hold it down forever - once it's full, you could be doing something else instead. Fantastic, we've improved on Sniper Healer Guy. But what if... you didn't actually even need to fill up the Chainsaw Meter all the way? Good news! Also I promise I will get to parries here
When everyone's favorite Tank But They Made Her 3 Times has a full Chainsaw Meter, you can press the Signature Move Button to enter... "Rumbling" mode... at which point she gets an Extra Special Chainsaw Meter, with a counter next to it. Your goal is now to play the world's most violent game of virtual golf and instead of filling the chainsaw meter to the top, you want to fill it just enough and release it at the precise right time. You get that satisfying ding noise from the sniper parry, because I guess they liked that sound enough to keep using it. Playing this character is now about pressing and releasing the Chainsaw Button at intervals to efficiently dish out as much damage as possible. Wasn't this about parries?
What if I told you that you have another conflicting reason to hold or NOT hold the Chainsaw Button? What if I told you that... releasing it also performs a parry? So holding it down TOO LONG can actually be a GOOD thing if it results in a parry? Well good news that's exactly how it works. At any given moment when you are chainsawing a crowd of angry robots, you can see an enemy attack coming in from 50 meters away, and think "oh, I can catch that", and hold the chainsaw button down just slightly too long, releasing it at the exact right moment to parry that incoming attack. When you do this your robot does a SICK SLIDING DASH through all the enemies in front of it, for bonus damage, and time slows down. Also it causes your inputs to be dropped during the animation lock and I hate that but anyway
9.5/10 Feel Like A Parry God, Chainsaw Parries Every Day, Also She Has A Canonical Government-Assigned Girlfriend So Really What's Not To Like (other than the animation lock. developers please fix i'm begging you)
You can see someone better at video games than me using her chainsaw parry in this video here (loud volume warning): https://youtu.be/o5edIe8XCMU?t=86 -
I mentioned that parries became an enemy-specific mechanic. Shortly before the introduction of Girl With Mech they started adding "parryable attacks" into the movesets of elite enemies and boss encounters. Typically it's a big overhead swing or a thrown projectile or something like that, with a signature sound effect or visual indicator to tell you "hey buddy here comes a parry! are you ready for it? here comes the airplane!!!!". You can parry these moves by pressing an Attack Button(tm) with the right timing to meet the attack as it comes in, and when you do the enemy staggers a bit and if you parry them enough you may knock them on their ass entirely. Cool. Parry God!!!! but
You may have noticed a problem: To parry, you have to Attack. You can't be holding the attack button either, or in the middle of an attack, you have to start one at the right time. Conceptually this is reasonable, since parrying a melee attack with a weapon would be done by swinging your weapon around in a specific way, but you may have noticed that 3 out of 4 of the character-specific parries I mentioned so far are not done by pressing the attack button. Yes, unfortunately those parries aren't This Kind Of Parry, they're another kind of parry. So any parrying skill you previously developed is not very useful here.
The designers decided that instead of allowing you to Parry Anything on specific characters, they wanted to let any character have a cool parry moment, which means now every boss's moveset is a mixture of: -
Moves that must be parried if you want to efficiently complete the fight; you may not even be able to dodge them
-
Moves that can be parried using character-specific parries
-
Moves that cannot be parried via any means
The advantage to this is that they can assume you will be able to parry, and they can add cool animations for it and even put in special cinematic parry animations. As a game designer I can understand the appeal of this. But I hate it. Instead of a generic skill you're mastering (learning how to time your button press/release against a wide variety of incoming attacks; deciding whether to go for a parry in the heat of the moment), it's now just a thing you have to do to defeat certain enemies when they use certain moves. They leveled the playing field and made parries available to everyone but now I sort of hate them.
Anyway I think I was supposed to explain why more games should have parries. I still believe that but try to make your parries good and not bad. Let everyone who plays your game feel like a Parry God please and thank you very much. Are you making a turn-based game or a tabletop game? I bet you can figure out how to do parries anyway and it'll be sick as hell.
