You are able to parry an incoming attack in Final Fantasy XVI. To see how you can properly perform this counterattack, you can take a look at this tutorial from Seeking Tech.
What are the benefits of parrying?
By performing a successful parry, time will temporarily slowdown while your target will be left open to your attacks.
How to parry in Final Fantasy 16
In order to parry you should first make sure that you remove the Ring of Timely Focus and Ring of Timely Evasion.
The Ring of Timely Focus will slow down time when an enemy is about to attack. This accessory will let you evade but not parry.
The Ring of Timely Evasion makes it so that your character will automatically dodge any incoming attacks. As a result, you won’t be able to parry.
To remove these rights, press the Options button while playing Final Fantasy 16 in order to open the Main Menu. From there, use the L2 and R2 buttons to navigate over to Gear & Eikons. In the Gear section, press the Triangle button to remove these rings from your equipment.
For the uninformed, the Ring of Timely Focus and Ring of Timely Evasion are already included in your inventory if you switch over to the Story Focused difficulty at any point. You can check out this comparison to see what the two difficultly modes are for the JRPG.
In order to perform a parry, you need to time your attack in order to interrupt an incoming attack. To attack, you have to press the Square button if you are using the Type A or Type C controller layout. If you are using the Type B controller layout, then you have to press the R1 button.
In terms of timing, the parry window is pretty small. You won’t be able to parry at the very last second. If you attack too early, then you may not be able to parry the enemy’s incoming attack as well.
Since each enemy type has different attack animation, it may take some time to learn the parry windows for each of them. Not to mention that parrying may not work with some enemy attacks.
If you need a short video guide on parrying, then you need to press the Options button to open the Main Menu. Next, use the L2 and R2 buttons to head over to the System menu. From there, select Tutorial Messages from the System Settings tab. Finally, you should be able to find the Parry tutorial from the Battle section of the Tutorial Messages menu.