How to parry using your melee weapons in Tears of the Kingdom

As you undoubtedly already know, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom lets you parry enemy attacks as an alternative to the flurry rush technique. Normally, you can only perform a parry by taking out your shield first. But through some experimentation, it turns out that you can actually execute a parry with one of your melee weapons as well. At this point, you might wonder what method you use to do this and what applications it might have.

What to do to parry with your melee weapon

You may have suspected this already, but Tears of the Kingdom makes parrying with your melee weapons possible thanks to the Fuse ability. Specifically, by fusing a shield to your weapon, you can parry without using a shield from your inventory by holding ZL and pressing A just like normal. Keep in mind, though, that if you have both a shield and a one-handed weapon equipped separately, you can only parry with the shield. This means you have to unequip the shield so that the game can allow you to parry with a shield-fused one-handed weapon instead.

Ultimately, though, when it comes to parrying, you can’t really do anything with a one-handed weapon that you can’t already do with a shield by itself. Where things get interesting is with the two-handed weapons and spears. Normally, you can’t parry while using either of these weapon types at the same time, meaning you have to put your weapon away with either X or B depending on your control setup before doing so.

Fusing a shield to these weapons, however, completely sidesteps this issue, allowing you to switch between attacking and parrying seamlessly. Although you don’t need this trick at any point in the game, it can come in handy if you have trouble juggling between your two-handed weapons for offense and shields for defense.

Screenshot via PC Invasion