How lazy can you be and still beat Persona 5 on Hard?

COMPLETE GAME SPOILERS AHEAD

 

THIS IS ONLY FOR VANILLA PERSONA 5, NOT ROYAL

 

THERE ARE ROYAL SPOILERS THOUGH

 

ALSO A FINAL FANTASY 4 SPOILER, WHY NOT

 

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Tl;dr: It is possible to beat Persona 5 on Hard even if, at every possible opportunity, you ignore your Confidants, don't complete Mementos requests, don't level up your social stats, don't train for extra HP / SP, don't make infiltration tools, and spend the least amount of time in every Palace possible (In some cases, clearing the entire thing in one visit). Essentially, this is the universe where Joker just goes to sleep at all opportunities. It took me 117 hours (I did watch all the cutscenes).

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When you play Persona 5, the most important aspect of the game, as the game routinely tells you, is to spend time with your Confidants in order to expand your abilities and surmount the difficulty of the game, especially on Hard. However, what would happen if you decided to be the laziest piece of shit ever and ignore their advice and warnings? What if you also decided that if you absolutely have to do something, it had better take the least amount of time possible so you could go back to bed? This is the story of my attempt at undertaking such a playthrough. Exactly how lazy could you be as Joker in Persona 5 and still beat it, even while playing on Hard difficulty?

 

First, we need to set the ground rules of what it exactly means to be as lazy as possible. The rules all boil down to one basic tenet:

 

If the action you are about to take advances the day (That is, from After School or Afternoon to Evening, or from Evening to the next day), that action is forbidden unless it is absolutely necessary or forced.

 

Of course, this will eliminate a massive amount of actions, such as:

 

Spending time with Confidants

Training your social stats (Studying, going to the diner, eating burgers, etc.)

Making tools at your workbench

Reading books *

Washing clothes

Batting cages

Training for HP / SP increases

 

The above is the list of actions that are never allowed, meaning you should go through this playthrough without doing any of these things. *Except if you happen to have a book on the train and you can grab a seat. As this action has no bearing on the day otherwise, reading during this time is allowed. Of course, there is pretty much no value to this, as books only provide social stats or hangout spots, both of which are completely useless since you are not talking with Confidants.

 

Now, of course, there are two important (!) things missing from this list: Going into Palaces, and going into Mementos.

 

For Mementos, it mostly falls under the same restrictions of the larger list of forbidden actions, but you are forced to enter Mementos once after Kamoshida, and then, obviously, at the end of the game.

 

As for Palaces, if you barred yourself from going into Palaces, then, well, that's the end of the challenge. Thanks for playing!

 

So, you must go into Palaces, but how can we tweak this so that the spirit of the challenge is maintained even for Palaces? The answer is simple:

 

Once you enter a Palace, you are not allowed to leave it until you have completed the entire thing or the game forces you to leave (a la Madarame's laser wall or Sae's High Limit floor).

 

Herein lies the crux of the challenge: How can you beat the Palaces if you can't leave to regain SP, and how should you be expected to beat the Palace rulers if you don't rank up your Confidants?

 

It may seem crazy (It is), but there are stepping stones throughout the game that allow you to actually complete each Palace even though your resources are so limited. I'm going to go over the strategies and ideas I found as I went through the entire game.

 

STARTING THE GAME

 

It should be noted that this was the second time I played through Persona 5. Yes, I know, that's fucking crazy, why the hell would I play Persona 5 for the second time under a ruleset like this? The answer is, I'm nuts. I'm a person who also took on the Final Fantasy 1 low level challenge and got to the Ice Path before the save was lost (Yes, I did the slider puzzle 160 times and beat Lich, I'm sad the file is gone). I bring this all up so it's understood that I chose to rewatch the cutscenes and dialog again to catch all of the little foreshadowings and nuances that pop up throughout the game. This bloated my playtime significantly, to the point where, by the time I had actually reached the “beginning” of Kamoshida's Palace (Right after you get Ann and it says “Mission Started”), my file was already up to 5 hours. Of course, if you speed through the dialog, it should only take about 30 minutes.

 

However, under this ruleset, you might also find that you must take advantage of the brief stints you have in Kamoshida's Palace before the real game begins when you only have Morgana and then Ryuji. You can grind in these spots just a bit extra since you have so much extra SP to spare. The general MO of this run is to make sure that, not only do you beat the Palace in as few trips as possible, but that you only leave once you have exhausted your resources (This mostly just means your SP) so that you have grinded as much as physically possible.

 

One last thing to mention was that I placed a “last resort” save file at the time I got Ann and would next go into Kamoshida's Palace to complete it in one trip. This is something I recommend as you go through the game so you have a good place to bail out to if something horrible happens in your run. This is, naturally, assuming you do this run yourself. Don't be a fool. Don't do what I did, lest you go insane.

 

But all that being said, let's begin with...

 

KAMOSHIDA'S PALACE

 

So the first Palace of the game. This should be a good warmup and one of the easies-

 

NO!

 

First Palace of the game, and immediately this challenge says “GET FUCKED”.

 

This will be the hardest Palace until Shido, hands down. That's not to say Kamoshida is the hardest Palace ruler boss fight (Even though he's ALSO fucking hard), but this Palace will utterly test your resolve to stretch yourself thin.

 

However, there are a few things you can and must do, not only to get through this Palace, but the entire game. First, get to know your best friends in the game:

 

SODAS

 

Arginade and Water of Rebirth. Both of these items restore 5 SP while out of combat, and these will be essential for early game and one fight WAY later, so get in the habit of picking these up.

 

You can buy these sodas from certain vending machines in the game once per week (They restock on Monday, that is, you have to buy them by Sunday or you'll have wasted that week's sodas) You start the game with only a few vending machines available: the one outside of LeBlanc (4 sodas, 100 yen each), the red one in the school courtyard (2 sodas, 300 yen each), and one inside of the arcade in Shibuya (2 sodas, 300 yen each). Personally, I actually misunderstood where I was supposed to look for the Shibuya one and ended up never finding it. That would be one point of improvement if I did this again, as well as this: Money may seem tight to be dropping 300 yen per soda, but you must make this a priority. You're going to desperately need these sodas for early game. I didn't think it was worth it, so I skipped many sodas, and thereby made the early game harder.

 

As for the rest of the vending machines, they will become available when you can travel to Shinjuku (Kaneshiro timeframe), and Akibahara (Post Futaba), which respectively have 4 sodas for 1200 total and 6 sodas for 1000 total, as well as train fares.

 

The next part I want to talk about here is...

 

EQUIPMENT AND ITEMS

 

You'll be given some extra money from Ryuji and be told to buy some guns from Iwai. Do yourself a favor, do not care about guns. Throughout this game, prioritize your purchases like this:

 

1. Protector for Joker

2. Protectors for everyone

3. Weapon for Joker

4. Weapons for attackers (Ryuji, Yusuke)

5. Weapons for everyone else

6. Accessories

 

On that last note, accessories are not going to be very helpful in this run except for SP chokers. The value of these should be apparent. Even a tiny bit of extra SP will go a long way. However, the two you can buy from Iwai are going to be expensive for you for a long time, so don't get them unless you have a ton of money. By the way, you won't have a ton of money until Okumura, no matter how far ahead you think you are. It is sometimes best to skip a tier of equipment for a character since you can't sell that equipment back for much. You'd make more return just waiting for the next tier.

 

You'll have to balance your purchases from Iwai with the ones from Takemi. Items in the early game from Takemi are SUPER important, especially resurrection items and IVs. Even the 100 HP healing item can be a huge deal with Kamoshida. You'll need to decide when you have to hold off on equipment to buy items. Of course, Takemi's stock will never change, so most of these items will stop being useful after some time.

 

But Takemi isn't the only one selling recovery items. If you go to the school entrance to the bread store on Friday, they will sell Yakisoba Pan for a small price that heals 50 HP. You won't have these for Kamoshida, and they can't be used out of combat, but they can help in Madarame's Palace somewhat. Better than that though is the bakery in the Ginza Line station. Every Saturday in the summer, they sell Melon Pan, which is a resurrection and full HP item. Get them! As well, they sell a 200 HP item on rainy days for 2000 yen. That is steep, and may not be worth your money in all cases, but keep it in mind. 200 HP can do wonders nearly the entire game.

 

Another thing to be spending your money on are the Sunday shopping channel items. Just buy whatever they sell as it will probably help you. They aren't Royal broken, but they'll help. The most important items they sell are going to be the early healing items, the freeze sprays (Side note: ANY damage dealing item is going to be vital, get them wherever possible), and the Mystery Stews. That last one is going to be huge, do not forget to buy them on 11/13, they will be GODSENDS against Shido.

 

Speaking of godsends, I found out about this next thing after I had already beaten the game. It should be noted that I chose not to research things for the sake of acting like a player who was playing for the first time who did not care about the mechanics of the game, who just wanted to get it done as fast as possible. However, had I bothered to go look up SP healing items in the game, I would have discovered:

POTATOES

 

Starting 10/9, a sweet potato vendor appears on non-rainy days in Yongen and sells you a sweet potato that heals 10 SP. Starting after 11/25 (The beginning of Shido's Palace) you can buy another kind of potato that heals 50 SP. This, obviously, would be a great help in having extra SP healing mid-dungeon and also have more mid-battle SP restoration. I did not know about this, so the rest of this guide will not mention them. However, do yourself a favor and get these.

 

There's another thing, or rather, person, that I want to address before we go too far:

MORGANA

 

I know it's a common meta that Morgana does not make most people's team after the beginning of the game. You're going to find that completely changes in this run. Honestly, Morgana is THE staple character since he is the only teammate that levels Confidant ranks by story. This makes him unbelievably valuable in the end game, as he gets the one saving throw Joker will have, he can Harisen Recovery which can come in amazingly clutch, and he'll be the only other character (Besides Ann) to have Baton Pass. Considering he also gets the crit punch abilities, his Baton Pass is exceedingly useful. As well, you'll get the free Hold Ups with his follow up hit and the Kitty Talk perk to get you out of bad negotiation situations. It's not hard to see why you'd want him in your party at all times, besides the fact that he will have the best healing for nearly the whole game, and honestly you'll probably need Makoto and Morgana both.

 

Finally, as a general rule of thumb, get in the habit of creating multiple save files that act as backups in the case of catastrophic problems. For instance, create a save right before entering Kamoshida's Palace, and leave it there until you beat Kamoshida. If you get walled in the middle of the dungeon, better to have a last resort backup save than having to start over or rely on the ingame time reversal. Do this throughout your run: Keep saves that act as backups before points of no return, such as when you're going to leave the Palace and would fight the ruler next, or if you find a great grinding spot and find out, a Palace later, you aren't strong enough and need to revert to that grinding spot (A word of reassurance, I didn't have to revert to a save that far back).

 

Now to Kamoshida's Palace, here's the basic idea of how to tackle a dungeon: Avoid the shit out of everything. Do everything in your power not to fight anything*. It may seem like you'd want to fight everything because you need XP (Which you do), but you risk ending your run immediately because of the fact that this hellhole dungeon does not force you out until you locate the treasure, and there are two minibosses.

 

(*Something to get out of the way early is a recommendation to catch as many Personas as possible. This flies in the face of what I just said about avoiding enemies, but in the cases where you can't avoid enemies, or you are able to grind, capture every Persona you can because this will greatly reduce Registry fees with the Twins, and more importantly, you will very likely need the Treasure Demons from every Palace from Madarame on. Since you can't get those again until Mementos, it will be very important to catch them as you go through.)

 

Strictly by death count, the first miniboss, Archangel, was the hardest opponent in the entire game for me. As it is on Hard, there's actually not a lot you can really do. If Joker is not guarding when he goes to use his charged Cleave, I found that he will just pick and kill Joker. Also if he uses Vajra Blast, you just lose, so just hope he doesn't. As for hitting him, I find that gambling by attacking him instead of guarding before his charged attack seemed to edge his HP just enough to take him down before you're worn out too much. Don't get me wrong, the gambles will probably go badly and you'll lose characters, and you do not have the resurrection items (Referred to as resses from now on) to get them up. Eventually, you'll beat him and... have to carry on through the rest of the Palace, all the way until the second miniboss.

 

Mara Slime is not as difficult to deal with as Archangel, but he may end your entire run. Because of the fact that the game is really expecting you leave once or twice to heal your SP, going through this entire dungeon without doing so is going to crush your SP, to the point where you will probably have nothing left on most of your characters. You must go in with full HP on this fight though, and you have to have some SP on Morgana to heal. Slam him with physical hits and hope you can pull through.

 

There is one more aspect of Kamoshida's Palace that is very pertinent to this run. As I stated already, making tools is forbidden. However, the game absolutely forces you to make one lockpick. I did try to decline, but Morgana will not let you continue until you make it, so you get one single lockpick for the whole game. Where should you use it? Well you don't have to wait long. When you find the second locked chest in Kamoshida's Palace, open it for a Chewing Soul (100 SP to one), and a Bead (Full HP to one). As well, one of the unlocked chests in Kamoshida's Palace contains a Snuff Soul (50 SP), so obviously get that.

 

Now, I know what you might be thinking. You're hard up to get to the end of this Palace in one trip because of SP running out. Why not use the two SP items?

 

Do not. Exercise the most intense restraint of your life and do not use either of those items. Pretend you don't have them because you are going to DESPERATELY need them later. Way later.

 

This is why the sodas are important. Before you enter Kamoshida's Palace, you can buy up to 8 sodas for 1600 yen. Absolutely do this, and combined with avoiding every enemy you possibly can, you will beat Mara Slime with practically no resources left and be able to finish the dungeon.

 

So now you can finally leave...

 

At least, I did, at that point. It was time to face Kamoshida, who I discovered was so ungodly difficult to beat and requires a ton of luck to go well. I had this same difficulty on a regular playthrough on Hard because of the same thing. I went into the fight against him at levels 8-9. It will be crushing, and again, SP will start running out and you'll desperately want to use those two SP healing items in the battle. I had considered Kamoshida to be the hardest boss fight until Wakaba.

 

The way his fight goes, you must damage him as quickly as possible to make him drink from the chalice, then you have to kill the chalice. After that, you get the option to send one of your friends to get his crown (It will always be Ryuji), during which time you must do, from what I can tell, about 150 damage in 3 rounds to make progress. As well, you'll need to guard against his Gold Medal Shot, which is going to knock you to low HP every time, and heal to not die to his other attacks. You have to do all this while Morgana has Dia and there's no way to make him do less damage. You'll have precious few res items to get dead characters up (I only had 2 and used them both). It all came down to Kamoshida getting 1 out of 3 hits on his multi hit volleyball attack, not attacking the low HP character before Morgana could heal them, and somehow fitting in the damage to make him lose his crown. I did it, but it was unreal the luck I got to pull it off.

 

Well, what if you could grind, say, up to level 11? That would be amazing. You would get Tarunda (ATK down 1 enemy) on Ann, Media (Low HP heal all allies) on Morgana, and Headbutt (Medium dmg) on Ryuji. You would utterly decimate Kamoshida like that, but how the hell are you supposed to grind in the same Palace trip where you just barely defeated Mara Slime? You have no more SP to use to beat enemies easily, and you can't come back in just to grind. You surely don't want to try doing the grind on the same day as fighting Kamoshida, since beating enemies when security is high almost always causes a new one to spawn and spot you immediately.

 

I considered it impossible to grind anymore. Under a normal playthrough you could come back before sending the calling card and do that grinding over the course of a day or two, but obviously that's not allowed here since we really want to go to bed as soon as possible.

 

What if I told you, you could do that grind, on the same day you full clear the Palace, and you don't even need to regain SP at all? Well, I was shown the way after I beat Kamoshida.

 

My brother decided to start a playthrough of Persona 5 on Hard as well, but instead, he wanted to do a 100% from scratch run, because he was getting sad seeing me playing the game when I had to skip all the fun stuff. However, he liked the idea of completing every Palace in one trip like I was, because that would give him that many more days to rank up Confidants and do social stats. You know, the fun part of the game...

 

So he came up to the same situation as me. He got to the end of Kamoshida's Palace at about level 8, no resources left. However, he discovered something very important. If you go back to the first safe room you found, near the one “break room” with the three guards that you pass through in the tutorial trips, the enemies here consist of Pixie, Jack o Lantern, Mandrake, and Incubus. Each of these enemies come in packs of no more than 2. He found that he could regular attack 4 times and kill all of these enemies except for Incubus, for which he would use HP abilities to kill them. Eventually, he would also run out of HP on Joker and Ryuji, so it boiled down to starting fights with 1 HP. However, he could still beat the enemies besides Incubus without taking any hits, and he could kill Incubus and only potentially lose one character (Besides Joker), who would then get up with 1 HP after the fight. As such, though it seemed utterly crazy, he spent 3 HOURS and got to level 11 with everyone. He mopped the floor with Kamoshida, and now you know how you can too. As well, you will gain a large amount of money that will greatly help you for the next parts of the game.

 

So now you've seen how a Palace goes, and what kind of preparations go into it. However, besides the SP starvation, Kamoshida's Palace is fairly mechanically straightforward. Enemies are usually weak to your elements and somewhat easy to kill, as well as the fact that status ailments, stat changes, and complex elemental affinities were pretty rare. The game is going to get much harder from here on.

 

You've defeated Kamoshida, so now it's time to relax... for 3 weeks. Yeah, you might be wondering about the fact that we beat Kamoshida so soon. Why beat him at the beginning of the time limit rather than the end? I considered it in the spirit of the challenge to beat Kamoshida as soon as possible as if Joker hates having to do things. When something comes up, he rushes to get it done so he can spend more time with this true best friend, Bed-chan.

 

It will be painful, but resist the urge to do anything like a normal playthrough. Don't talk to your friends, don't try to improve yourself. Just sleep.

 

However, after Kamoshida confesses his crimes, you'll be able to do one very important early game action: Entering Mementos.

 

You'll get the first request from Mishima. Morgana will insist that you enter Mementos and complete the request. Believe me, I tried to leave, as is the spirit of the challenge, but you will be forced to do it, so it's time to take advantage of it.

 

Take in Mementos while you can, you won't see this place again until 12/24. First thing's first, go beat the request shadow. It shouldn't be a very difficult fight with full strength, but now it's time to grind again. If you did the level 11 grind from Kamoshida's Palace, you may be okay to skip this, but this is how my playthrough went, so I will describe what I did. After you beat the request shadow, you can go down to floor 2, where the door to continue on in Mementos is located. Don't walk up to that door yet. Instead, walk back up to floor 1 and you'll find the entire floor has been rerolled with new enemies and new loot. Start killing all of the enemies you can and try doing so without taking very much damage if possible. Pick up all of the loot and hope you come across some sellable items and even some armor in the treasure chests. Bear in mind, you are not able to go back to the Mementos entrance to save. If you die while grinding here, you will lose all of your progress. So, be very cautious about fighting enemies once your resources start running out. Near the end, it may be worth to reroll the first floor simply to get loot to spawn right next to the platform at the end of the floor without any enemies. Do this for as long as you feel comfortable, hopefully you can walk out of Mementos with about 30,000 yen and around level 11 if you weren't already. If you decided to do both Kamoshida's grind and this one, then you'll be well stocked and leveled to handle...

 

MADARAME'S PALACE

 

Here is the goal to beat Madarame: Rampage on Ryuji (Level 17), Vicious Strike on Yusuke (Level 18), and, if you're able, Rampage on Joker (Shiisaa* level 18). Do this and Madarame will be a walk. Don't do this, and I don't know how you can reasonably beat this guy.

 

(*Speaking of Shiisaa, I technically lied about how spending time with Confidants is forbidden. There is one Confidant that you can and REALLY should rank up. In fact, you'll find out later on this is non-negotiable. Go into the Velvet Room when you start Madarame's Palace and get the first request from...

 

THE TWINS

 

Yes, you should definitely do the Twins' requests, because doing so does not advance the day. This will allow you to make the 3+ Persona fusions and also give you the Lockup, which gives your Personas new elemental affinity abilities. They start off as Dodge Element or Null Status Ailment, but if you do the first 8 requests, the Lockup will start giving Null Elements. However, sadly, you won't be able to finish the Twins. Request 9 is for Bugs. Bugs is not a fusion you can do unless you do a Mementos request. As our rules state, you can't do that since it takes time.

 

Don't think of this as something extra. This is going to be required. Get level 8 on the Twins as soon as possible. This will probably happen in Sae's Palace, and you should definitely begin using the powered up Lockup to seal up weaknesses on your Personas. A tip on the Lockup, before you put a Persona in Lockup, save your game. Then put them in the Lockup, and speed forward two days, since you're almost always going to be doing these sessions between Palaces. After two days, get them out. If they don't get an ability that's useful to you, reset the game, and try again. You cannot savescum the ability the day of, it rolls essentially when they are confined.)

 

In any case, you will definitely need to grind, because Ryuji is definitely not level 17 yet, and Yusuke enters your party at level 15. The good thing is, this Palace is one of the ones that you cannot beat in one trip. Once you reach the laser barrier section, you'll have to leave the dungeon. This means you're perfectly fine to eat up all of your SP before doing so in order to grind as much as possible.

 

But before you try grinding on regular enemies, let me introduce a piece of tech that I found to be incredibly valuable for the first few Palaces: Treasure Demon baiting.

 

When you clear the laser grid room with the golden vase, you'll fight the Treasure Demon Regent. Make sure you have Psi or Nuke when you fight him so you can easily knock him down and recruit him. He will net you a huge amount of experience and allow you to fuse him and get any elemental magic you want.

 

However, that's just where the fun begins. You know those loot containers around the Palace? From the moment you enter Madarame's Palace proper (That is, you drop down from the skylight), do not break any of them. The ones outside are okay to take. You need to save the rest for when you have encountered Regent and hit the safe room. Now comes the trick. If you raise the security level of the Palace to about 70% or higher, then you have a very good chance of spawning a Treasure Demon from many of the loot containers. In essence, you can savescum the containers in an area until they spawn a Treasure Demon, which will yield much better experience than the other enemies, as well as a ton of money. Plus, you can keep fusing them with other Personas to impart otherwise difficult to find skills, such as group magic of any element, as is the case with Regent first. Just remember to have Psi or Nuke for Regent and you can easily knock him down and kill him with one all out attack.

 

Additionally, you can fight enemies under high security, and they will have a chance to extend their fight with a Treasure Demon. This is a risky method because of the spawned enemy afterwards that immediately spots you. However, keep this method in mind because it will become VERY useful later on.

 

Lastly, to raise security easily in Madarame's Palace, you simply run into the laser barriers over and over, which generates 5% security with each touch. No need to get spotted yet. Just bear in mind if you ramp security too high, then get spotted at 85% or higher, that it essentially counts as a game over, since you'd have to reenter the Palace.

 

So, as stated before, once you reach the laser barrier, you'll need to leave the Palace. However, don't rush out until you've eaten every bit of your SP. You need Ryuji to reach level 17, and getting a Shiisaa to level 18 will get you Rampage on Joker as well. Also, Treasure Demons or not, make sure you've picked up every single loot container. Many of them respawn when you come back in next time. Finally, once you've grinded enough, leave the Palace.

 

The next day, you'll immediately come back into the Palace to fight as Joker and Ryuji. This fight sucks like a regular playthrough, but just try several times. Then, you'll meet up with Yusuke and be forced into his awakening fight. This fight is crazy hard for no reason. Okay one reason: sledgehammer. Just don't get hit as Joker lol. What's stupid about this fight is that Morgana can get kicked out and so you have practically no healing. Just Tarunda the boss, Bufu the adds, and hope.

 

But now you'll be able to return to the Palace again and many of the loot containers will be restored. Again, leave them until you reach the end of the Palace, then bait Treasure Demons to make sure Yusuke gets to level 18.

 

For the remainder of the Palace, you may start to feel the effects of low SP. Use the sodas here if you must, there isn't really another way around it. Just don't get into this habit because you will really need to stock sodas throughout the game, and spending them in Palaces is very wasteful. There will be ways coming up to restore SP without drinking the sodas.

 

The rest of the Palace didn't have any sticking points for me. Just avoid enemies like always. The hardest part is probably in the last room wrapping around the treasure. You won't be able to easily avoid enemies here, so it's probably best killing them if possible.

 

Finally, it's time for the calling card and heist. However, I recommend not immediately going for Madarame. Instead, go back through the Palace and pick up any easy to get loot containers. The extra money will always be helpful, and naturally, with 99% security, Treasure Demon baiting becomes very likely. Just be careful, because like I said, after beating opponents with security this high, they will probably spawn another that spots you immediately. Fun fact: On the day you steal the treasure, you can't reduce security below 70%.

 

Everything up until the fight with Madarame is easy. For Madarame himself, if you've reached the levels I prescribed, you'll be fine. For party makeup, you'll want everyone but Ann.

 

The strategy is pretty easy. Hit him. First use your multi hit attacks and kill every piece but the mouth, which is healing from physical. From there whittle down the mouth and be healing when necessary. Keep in mind the beginning of the fight has a chance to go south if he uses bad moves on the wrong characters. This can happen each time he reforms from being revealed, as well as each time this Baigan* motherfucker regenerates pieces.

 

(*Final Fantasy 4 has a boss named Baigan that operates with this same multi part philosophy. His two arms regenerate after you kill them until the body dies. I have held a deep hatred for Baigan and any opponent, like Madarame, who acts like him)

 

I found that it took me four cycles to kill Madarame. I didn't bother with the black paint, I just tried killing him. It may be possible with 3 cycles if you get good Rampage luck, but you can last 4.

 

That's Madarame, so two Palaces down. However, this is when the strategies get a lot harder and boss fights don't have a simple solution anymore. The good thing is, there are also ways to essentially grind infinitely, so you could, if you're very dedicated, go way beyond the levels I was and perhaps make the boss fights way easier.

 

So now it's time to move on to no one's favorite Palace or boss:

 

KANESHIRO'S PALACE

 

After spending weeks in bed, Joker has to deal with Makoto's shit, so he breaks into a bank.

 

Then Makoto stops being a shitty character and joins you.

 

Then you regret it because her awakening fight is FUCKED.

 

First, before she awakens, you have to fight two rounds of two of the red devil bastards with no weaknesses. If possible, do what you can to get Mudo or items that do Curse instadeath. You can also go for brainwash and sleep if you have that on hand, though I didn't / didn't try it.

 

Of course, heal to max before you head to the exit. Next is Makoto's actual fight, which can easily kick your ass as, yet AGAIN, they take out your only good healer unless Joker has some healing. Use Mudo / Brainwash Sleep to take out the adds and Nuke the boss. This fight will probably take you many tries.

 

Now you are done with that horrible fight. Next comes a real brick wall of a challenge. Unlike Kamoshida's Palace, which gave you one safe room for free, and Madarame's Palace, which forced you to split the Palace into two trips, this time, you have to do Kaneshiro's Palace from start to finish. Under our rules, you can't leave until you reach the center of the vault, so get ready to avoid enemies like crazy.

 

This is easier said than done of course. Many enemies are in narrow hallways and getting past them will basically be impossible. I don't recommend running past them in the open since getting guards off of your tail is really hard in a lot of places here. I also don't recommend trying to run in fights since the luck to run quickly could cost you a lot of resources. If you fight, it's probably better just to ambush them and finish quickly.

 

This might be where you think it's time to guzzle sodas, which is what I did at one point of this Palace, but that's not necessary. There's a better way that uses none of your resources.

 

SLEEP

 

I think it's fitting that one of the clutch strategies I used in this run was not only having Joker sleep in real life, but also having him fall asleep in battle. As you probably know, falling asleep in battle causes you to lose your turn and take Technicals from physical hits. However, it restores some HP and SP per turn you're asleep. The problem with that is, there's no way to put yourself to sleep that doesn't involve a reflect, which is probably too hard. But you'll be very happy to know, there's a perfect enemy group for this.

 

High Pixies.

 

In the side hallway with the safe room next to the big area with the vault door, many of the normal shadows will spawn a group of 3 High Pixies which use the move Dormina to put you to sleep. They don't use physical moves so you won't take Technicals from them. They can cast wind attacks, but they will also heal themselves, so you can punch them to make them heal in case they're being too aggressive. So the strategy is simple: save your game, find High Pixies, punch them with the characters that desperately need SP, and guard with the ones that don't. Eventually, the Pixies will put the punching characters to sleep while being generally unable to do so to the guarding characters. Let the sleeping characters gain back as much SP as you feel like is necessary, then beat the Pixies. This is a completely free method of regaining SP and is the first of our infinite grinding strategies. From now on, each dungeon has an infinite grinding strategy as long as you know how to set it up.

 

So with that, the length of the Palace should no longer be an issue. Simply run through the Palace and clear the puzzles as necessary. It would still be a good idea to avoid enemies so you don't have to grind SP on Pixies, since it is a random and tedious method. Also, leave those loot containers alone for Treasure Demon baiting. Queen's Necklace here is weak to bullets, so also save some of those.

 

The only other part of this Palace traversal to talk about are the minibosses. The first couple are not too difficult. Make sure, for the next two, you have Psi since the miniboss before the elevator and the first one in the main vault are weak to it. The one in the vault has two more of those damn Oni with him, so employ the same tactics as before.

 

Other than that, you should be good to go. Now you have a sense of the scale of a full-clear of these Palaces. You'll have to do this again for the next two Palaces in a row.

 

However, boring ass Kaneshiro is next. For this fight, I ended up using Morgana, Yusuke, and Makoto. I also made sure I got a Matador with Swift Strike by this point on Joker. Matador does great damage even if the accuracy of Swift Strike is garbage. Also, a source of Tarunda will be very important, as lowering his attack will be way easier than buffing your defense right now. The boss fight is probably the most forgettable in this run, though it is really annoying that Kaneshiro gets to be a double HP bar fight. The first phase is basically beat him as quickly as possible and hope that fear does not stick too often. The lower his HP gets in this phase, the more he does group magic. Unfortunately, unless you grinded absolutely crazily, you won't have Mediarama with Morgana yet, so group damage is very dangerous.

 

Once he gets into the Piggy Bank, you need to reduce his attack right away, as he leads with the flop attack to your party, then does the ocular attack that I found likes to target Joker. No I'm not mad I died right at the start of the second phase, not at all.

 

So yeah, Tarunda him, and start getting in the habit of counting turns for buffs and debuffs. It will be very critical for the rest of the game. Once he gets out to attempt to run you over with the pig, you can damage him to cancel the attack. Use this time to hit both targets if possible. Swift Strike is very useful here, as well as Yusuke's Mind Slice. Of course, since it is one of those “Block this or die” (BTOD) attacks, either go hard to knock Kaneshiro off or prepare. You get one turn to heal and defense up, after which he starts spinning faster, which is the turn to guard.

 

When he decides to come around to the second spin and every spin after that, you can bait him with expensive items. I found you shouldn't have to do this unless he put you into a bad position just before. On what ended up being the last spin he would try to do in my successful fight, I was not in the position to knock him down or win, so I had to throw away a Magic Ointment. That was unfortunate, but don't be afraid to do it. Once you bait him, he loses several turns, letting you get in heavy damage.

 

As long as stupid things didn't happen, you'll win and be done with Kaneshiro's Palace. Go sleep for 3 weeks again, and get ready to enter...

 

FUTABA'S PALACE

 

Medjed wants to fight, so enter an Egyptian pyramid and face a completely fucking unfair sphinx bitch.

 

This is the Palace you're going to squirm through with the greatest difficulty, and there's not a lot you can do to enemies here. Enemies here are going to be extremely strong and way higher level than you, which would be the case in a normal run. However, Thoth and Anubis are going to be huge issues, so avoid everything you possibly can, especially if the enemies are red.

 

This dungeon is, once again, one you do not get a forced reprieve from. You'll have to go from the bottom of the pyramid to the very top in one trip. You're only forced to leave to change Futaba's cognition to open the final door, which only serves as the calling card day anyway.

 

So, a couple things. Once you enter the Palace, the first thing you have to do is avoid two shadows and face Garuda. He's a pain to deal with, but if you have Matador (Of course you do), he can't kill Joker. He's weak to bullets, so keep Matador on Joker to null the wind damage, have Morgana to resist it, and shoot him and all out attack. He should not be able to do very much to you.

 

Save your game, then enter the pyramid and fall down into the pit. At this point you must try hard not to fight anything. It will take some time to reach the entrance to save again, and your infinite grinding strategy in this Palace is not as good as last time. It will be much better to abstain from all fights until you get back to the top. Also, of course, do not fight the coffin boss Mot that you pass by. Make sure you climb to the top of the stairs and save first.

 

Now comes the (first) fight with Mot. This guy is a major pain, and it's funny that he only appears for you in the level 70s (I didn't see him appear in the fusions until I was in Mementos Depths). He's weak to wind, and his Lamia adds are weak to ice, so bring Morgana and Yusuke. This is when the lack of baton passes is going to starting sucking, but just make sure Joker has wind and ice attacks himself and use Morgana's baton pass as much as possible to power up your all out attack. This fight is going to gulp your SP, which will make you gulp your sodas, you may believe, but it's time to talk about the infinite grind strategy in this dungeon. It is the same as Kaneshiro, but it uses Sandman instead (The crescent moon guys).

 

The strategy with Sandmen is the same as High Pixie, except that I found he's a lot more aggressive with attacking, and a bigger coward. He tends to run sooner than you'd expect, which can be difficult to deal with. Again, ramping security is fine for baiting Stone of Scone here, but it can be easy to make mistakes and then get booted out, resulting in a reset. It is perfectly possible to regain your SP off of Sandmen, but just make sure you save between each encounter with them, as their fights are very luck dependent.

 

Now comes the pyramid proper, which will be nearly all enemy evasion. In a lot of situations, it may appear you must fight enemies, especially if there's no cover in the room you're in with them. However, as long as it's not a narrow hallway, they don't have the greatest sight, and you can sidestep them and do some crazy moves.

 

Some things to keep in mind: This is a Palace I would recommend not ramping security until you've done the entire thing, because it will be easier to avoid being spotted when security is 0. Also, take advantage of the fact that enemies can neither see you on different elevations (The sarcophagi and ledges, etc.) nor can they chase you onto them if they spot you. If one does spot you, try to find a place to jump up or climb down, and those enemies won't be able to get you.

 

Once you get to the only safe room in the middle of a wing (Placed there with mercy), you'll go into the second fight against Mot. It is pretty much the same as the first except he starts with adds. This doesn't change much, but it can start badly if you don't take out the adds early. Again, you will eat SP like crazy. Try to grind Sandmen to start the fight with a lot of SP, and do it again to keep up your SP afterwards.

 

That is mostly all there is to say about the initial Palace venture. As it stands, this dungeon is probably the most fight averse in the game. I ended up getting the fewest levels from here because the grinding was awful.

 

But now it's time to talk about the hardest fight in the game until Akechi, a fight that will teach you to keep track of debuff timers.

 

WAKABA

 

Before you can even get to Wakaba, you have to go through an extra room that has a lot of difficult to dodge enemies. Unfortunately, by the glowing red enemy across the room is a Balm of Life, a full ress item. You'll want to get that if nothing else. Once you get the items in the room and reach the top, you'll get to face Wakaba.

 

This fight is horrible. This is when the game forces you to learn about, as I call them, defensive (and by extension offensive) differentials. A defensive differential is a rating of how well defended you are against an opponent, determined by your defense stat buffs and the opponent's attack stat buffs (Offensive differential is the same thing but opposite stats for player and opponent). For example, having a DD of +1 means you have either increased defense, or your opponent has lowered attack. +2 means both are active. Obviously having a +2 and guarding will prevent the most damage, and not surprisingly, doing so with full HP means you will survive any single attack in the game. If you don't, well you're in super-fucked ville.

 

So what does this mean for Wakaba? Up until now surviving a BTOD attack was simply a matter of having full HP and guarding. That will not work here. Wakaba will easily kill you from full HP. You must have a differential, which means, besides having Makoto in this fight, you must get a Persona with Rakukaja on Joker. Other than Makoto, use Morgana, and then anyone BUT Ryuji. He will totally scuttle this fight for you since he's weak to wind. Ann could be good to use to Tarunda Wakaba but I went with Yusuke for more damage.

 

There is something to be said for getting a Persona like Shiki-Ouji (The paper looking metal guy from Madarame's Palace), who is immune to physical, to better survive as Joker, but the second phase of the fight relies on you having partners who will need to be kept alive. However, if you were so bold as to grind like crazy and get a Persona like Arahabaki (Remember that name), you could turn this fight into a walk if you get just a slight bit lucky. Arahabaki reflects physical, and you could have Wakaba kill herself for you. Almost all of her attacks are physical, INCLUDING the dive attack. Unfortunately you can't kill her in the first phase, and the second phase makes you have to dodge Despair which, if it lands on solo Joker, you lose, so it's a bit of a gamble. Let's assume you didn't grind like this, though now you know the strategy if you wanted to.

 

The first part of the fight is simply a matter of surviving hits from Wakaba until she flies into the sky. There's no reason to attack, and you also don't want to use the defense up yet, as she goes into the sky for 3 turns. What you want to do is, when she flies up, use Makoto and Joker to defense up everyone for the first two turns, then guard on the last turn. You'll survive the attack and the phase will end. You'll get a full heal before the next phase by the way.

 

Now you'll have to give up a party member to start shooting down Wakaba. The first couple of times you do this, they'll shoot in two rounds, but as you do it more, they start taking four rounds. Each time you shoot her down you have to pile on the damage (Use only physical attacks, they do way more damage when she's down), as going beyond 3 or 4 knock downs is going to be very difficult. The longer you go, the more time she has to decide to hit Joker twice in a round and kill him. Putting defense back up is not going to work well in this phase, though you may decide to right before she stands up from a knock down. She'll go down for three full rounds, but after the third round, she will immediately attack, so be ready and healed.

 

Something else you should have on hand (I nearly lost because of this) is Relax Gels from Takemi. She will try to Despair you as the fight wears on, and if it lands on Joker you must heal it, obviously. Makoto should have Energy Shower as well, but if it hits her, you'd better have the gels to fix her. You might also get Alert Capsules, because her group wind attack can cause dizziness, and if Joker becomes dizzy, you will not be able to command someone to fire the ballista. This can cause you to lose entire rounds to her slamming you, so you may choose to give Joker an anti-dizzy accessory for this fight.

 

I won't lie, this fight felt like pure luck, like I was riding a unicycle on a tightrope and I just barely managed to get through. It will be devastating and demoralizing, but you can eventually do it.

 

Be happy once you finally do win, then go make like a Futaba and sleep for a month (Stopping to buy a shit ton of sodas and Melon Pan of course, you are going to pass a ton of weeks).

 

Of course now comes the angst, but if you're speeding through it, it won't feel that bad. Just rush through all the crap (No, the Mementos trip for Morgana has no enemies or other Mementos things).

 

But now comes the titanic proportions of...

 

OKUMURA'S PALACE

 

This place is fucking huge, and the enemies are brutal here.

 

When I got to this point, I had believed I had reached the end of the challenge. Without the ability to reliably fight enemies to gain experience (Normally made better by Mishima), I felt defeat creeping up on me when I saw the first enemies in Okumura's Palace were already red. It seemed like there would be no way I could grind enough to make it through.

 

This was before I realized my chances were even worse. I had thought you would come into the Palace with Haru and fight her fiance cognition, then be forced out of the dungeon, meaning you could deplete quite a bit of your SP, face the miniboss, then get kicked out and restore your SP. This is not the case. Once you enter the Palace with Haru, you have to do the ENTIRE thing.

 

However, it's time to shout out the two biggest MVPs of this run, the literal saviors of the entire challenge:

 

DECARABIA AND ARAHABAKI

 

If you take a look at the enemies around the beginning of the Palace, you'll find heavy resistance. Black Slimes are going to be an SP sink, and you'll see Arahabaki here for the first time as an enemy. For me, he was 4 levels higher than I was, and his Repel Physical ability makes him a drain. However, there is a single enemy on this first floor that saved this run: Decarabia, the starfish.

 

Why? Well, Staryu here has only one weakness, but thanks to this weakness, you can literally grind to 99 on him alone, in this trip.

 

Weak to Physical.

 

This can't be overstated, the importance of this enemy being here at this time is mammoth. This will allow you to gain as many levels as you possibly want simply because every single character in your lineup can punch them, knock them down, and all out attack them, all without spending any HP or SP at all. You only get 250 experience and about 600 yen per battle, but this can be repeated infinitely.

 

But it gets better. Remember when I mentioned the Treasure Demon baiting strategy could also be done by killing enemies while security is high, and a Treasure Demon may appear before the battle ends? I said earlier that this is dangerous because, once the fight is over, you can get immediately spotted by a new enemy, which can lead to unexpected ambushes while you're trying to escape.

 

It all lies in the way the starfish shadow (Which looks like a floating ball) moves when you enter this floor from the entrance. As soon as he turns away and walks towards the wall, you can ambush him, defeat him, and end the fight so that you're facing the wall and are standing pretty close to it. This prevents the enemies from spawning after the battle, even if the security is really high. I was able to do this nearly without fail (It happened only once that I was too far from the wall). By the way, unlike the other enemies on this floor, this ball shadow can only be Decarabia, so this is all completely consistent.

 

So indeed, get the attention of the shadow in the first room, raise the security to about 80-90%, then fight Decarabia. Every so often, Koh-i-noor appears, and as long as you have Morgana and Joker with a Lucky Punch, you'll have a very good chance of catching / killing him for 1500 XP and 15000 yen. This is an extremely unique grinding spot, and I heavily recommend taking advantage of this. Personally, I knew that I was going to need a crapload of money and XP for what was coming up. I grinded to 500,000 yen.

 

Yes, it was a fucking tedious pain, but trust me, that paid off so much later on, and honestly going to a million was probably still worth it. However, what was even more worth it was the level gain, because let's turn our attention back to the other enemy on this very floor.

 

Arahabaki. Let me make this very clear. Repel Physical saved this run. It made this run. Get up to level 35 and get Arahabaki, then train him (Or sacrifice one of your many Koh-i-noors) to get him to level 37 and get Spirit Drain.

 

Congratulations. The entire Palace can now be completed without a single worry about SP. If you have a Persona with Invigorate 1 (Regain 3 SP while it's Joker's turn), you'll be even better as Spirit Drain only costs 3 SP to drain 10 SP from the enemy. This is going to be your workhorse from now until Mementos Depths. Whenever you are starting to run low on SP, go find an enemy that punches primarily, use only Joker, then regain 7 SP per round while they punch themselves to death (10 SP if you move Invigorate 1 to Arahabaki). Also, in case there's any doubt, do not get rid of Arahabaki. His importance is going to multiply in the future.

 

At this point, this only allows Joker's SP to be refilled, but if you continue to avoid battles, you'll find that Joker's SP runs out a lot faster in most fights than the others. Your friends will usually have some left before you reach the end of the Palace.

 

Now for the first miniboss, Haru's fiance. This fight should go well as long as the game allows you to bring Ann and Morgana. I say that the game has to allow you, because I have never figured out if the characters in some or all of the awakening fights are chosen for you or if you have control. I have found that earlier fights just don't let you have Morgana. Apparently though, you can get this lineup for Haru's. It will be good too, as Morgana and Ann can hit the weaknesses of the adds while Haru and Joker can use Psi to hit the boss. This fight can go wrong, but if you grinded like above, you should be able to go through these guys pretty easily. Keep this party in mind, by the way, you'll be using them again in a while.

 

Now you get into the colossal marathon that is Okumura's Palace, and boy is it tiring and scary. First, redouble your efforts to avoid fights, especially in the second section in the factory. Enemies here are wickedly powerful and the safe rooms are placed so sparingly that dying could cause you to lose half an hour or more of progress.

 

The first section, the hallways, are very slow if you avoid enemies, but fairly easy. The problem comes from the 3 mini bosses and the tedium that comes from backtracking to the safe room after each one. By the way, do save between every miniboss here. For some inexplicable fucking reason, these minibosses act like regular enemies. If you die on them (Which I did, once each), they kick you back to your last safe room.

 

The issue with the minibosses comes from their adds, actually. The small robots who are weak to fire and wind sometimes just go first in the fight, use Triple Down, and Joker will most likely die. The bosses can also just do dumbass things like use one Swift Strike and kill you. Now of course, Arahabaki will utterly reverse this, but you'll also have to contend with the adds using Recarmdra, fully healing the others and reducing their own HP to 1. These fights aren't hard, but they can go really wrong really fast.

 

Once you've made it through all the minibosses in this section, go back to the previous area and head to the outside. Eventually you will reach the factory. Like I said before, the enemies here are insane, and the safe rooms are really far apart. This place is going to put a lot of pressure on you.

 

The worst parts of these rooms are the timed runs when you shut off the presses. You'll have 30 seconds to carefully reach the presses to cross them. It will be nerve-wracking, but take your time and start the timer when the enemies have mostly gotten out of your way. Bear in mind, sprinting is not advised here. Sprinting very easily alerts the enemies from farther away, and if they are looking at you when you start sprinting, they immediately spot you. If you only run and you alert them, they stop and look around for a moment, then walk towards the place you alerted them. This can make them walk in a completely unrelated direction where they won't spot you.

 

At the end of all of this comes a hellish miniboss, which will be especially punishing if you don't have enough SP to make it through. The Corporobos are a massive pain. They come in 3 waves of 5 and debuff your stats constantly. They are weak to Ice and Psi, so use Yusuke and Haru in this fight. Unfortunately, unless you grinded for an exceptionally long time (Level 40), you'll only have Mabufu, and of course no way to Baton Pass with Yusuke. It will come down to luck that Yusuke's ice attack hits most of the enemies but not all, allowing you to One More them, maybe even a couple times. At this point you may have Makoto's Dekunda to undo your debuffs, but you'll still have to get lucky that they don't take over.

 

Then comes the last part of the Palace, the flying through space and tubes part. There are no more minibosses, but the enemies here are very hard on their own, and dodging them takes a lot of luck and good timing. I don't really have tips on how to do the puzzle. On this playthrough I seemed to bumble into the solution the first time through, though one thing I can say: Don't go back to the earlier safe room after clearing the first area. Go on to the next area and use the safe room there. If you go back, the first area resets and you have to do it again. I made that mistake so you don't have to.

 

Then you'll reach the final area of the Palace and have your route. At this point you're free to grind and capture Personas until you see fit to leave. Now prepare for a fight most heinous.

 

The Okumura boss fight, infamously, has a time limit, and you'd better believe that it's going to be a problem in this challenge. Even before the boss fight is the section running up to him with a time limit. This one wasn't so bad, there are only two enemies on the way and if you dodge both of them you'll have plenty of time. The fight itself though will be ridiculous, what with your lack of Baton Passes available. As such, it is highly advised to use Morgana and Ann since they both have Baton Passes. I used Haru in this battle as well, which in hindsight may not be very useful, but she had Mapsio whereas the others didn't have level 2 group magic yet. Hers, also, tends to hit a lot of the shadows' weaknesses. Additionally, make absolutely sure Joker has strong group magic of every element available. It is going to be supremely important to have the ability to hit groups and knock them down. To aid in this, I hope you found and saved damage items throughout the game. They will we very important.

 

But no matter who you use, Okumura is a horrible fight. The waves are honestly worse than the Execurobo main opponent at the end of the fight, but it's the time limit that will be your biggest enemy. The enemy names in this fight are so confusing, that I will just refer to them by their weaknesses. The first wave is WindFire, which can go down easily. You'll want enemies to spend as little time on the field as possible, as they can debuff and disrupt you badly. You should be able to kill the WindFires with ease. After two waves of just them, they will appear with IcePsis. Haru and Joker will have to take care of these guys, though you won't be able to Baton Pass for these. Still they shouldn't be able to survive for very long. Just remember that downed enemies take more damage, so double hit them with their weaknesses. This is also the time for Ann and Morgana to use the damage items to get in very important Baton Passes.

 

After IcePsi comes ElecNuke. This is when the fight gets messy. Since only Joker can hit their weaknesses, they are going to start piling up. Again, use the electric damage items if you have them, preferably on Ann or Morgana so you can pass to Joker. By the way, I'm pretty sure the four “uncommon” elements don't appear as items anywhere but Mementos, because I had none of them, or nearly none, throughout the Palaces (You get insta death ones but those don't count).

 

The ElecNuke bots are the crux of why the waves are worse than the final bot, because you will eventually get them mixed in with the next level, BlessWind. When these appear, Okumura will start using Sacrifice Order, which will make one of the bots self destruct. If that happens, you'll die almost guaranteed. A couple things to keep in mind. If you clear a whole wave before Okumura can replenish them, he will not do a sac order. However, if he takes a turn otherwise, he can do the sac order, and you have until his next turn to kill the one he sacrificed. This gets especially bad when he can sac two at once, and you won't have the ability to hit their weaknesses, or hit them hard enough. With BlessWind, you can have Morgana pass to Joker to kill ElecNuke more, but it will be hard to keep up. You must be lucky that Okumura doesn't sac a nearly full HP bot.

 

That's unfortunately not it either. He finally ends with CursePsi, which lets Haru get back into the battle, but again, juggling the sacrificed bots and trying not to die to their attacks otherwise, all while basically not doing anything in terms of buffing or debuffing, is going to make this fight harrowing. Of course, the clock is ticking.

 

Once you finally kill the other bots, you'll come up to the last opponent, the Execurobo. This is when you need to start doing DDs again for Big Bang Challenge. His other attacks won't be so difficult to deal with, but BBC is too strong to just guard. However, there is a trick you can use for this move, one I didn't even know about until I had just won. If a character is inflicted with hunger and gets hit by the BBC, they will full heal instead of taking damage. This is very nice because it leaves those characters free to do whatever they want the turn before the BBC hits. This will greatly help you get people healed or defended, and you should definitely not be shy about hitting him before it comes out, even if you do reduced damage. I found the Freeze Sprays (50 ice damage to one foe) were really clutch because it will do 50 damage regardless, so the hunger does not matter.

 

If this battle seems insurmountable, trust me that it IS possible. I did win this fight, and I only died once, in the waves. But let me be perfectly clear, you need to move fast. Here's some tips about how to deal with the time limit. Going into the Persona menu on Joker does not pause the timer, so switch Persona's quickly. However, if you hit the Home button on your PS3 / 4 controller, you will open the Home menu which does completely stop the game. So if you need to stop and think, use the Home button. Lastly, when Execurobo goes down, smash through the text boxes and hit Rush (The Options / Start button) to pound Okumura as fast as possible. If you think that may be overdoing it, then know that I had 42 (!!!!!) seconds left when I won. 30 minutes down to less than 1. If you come down to the last 2 minutes against Execurobo and he starts going for a BBC, it's probably time to lay in one more burst of damage instead of guarding. You do NOT have the time to let him fire that off and do the damage after you recover. I had to gamble this, and I thankfully got him just before it came down.

 

Revel in your victory, go sleep and buy sodas. What will be nice is that you're going to get a reprieve from the difficulty, once you enter...

 

SAE'S PALACE

 

Here we go, the big part of the game, with all of the intense plot elements and tying all of the loose ends together. You may find this hard to believe, but this is the easiest Palace in the run and a pretty easy boss too. Still have Arahabaki? Get ready to love him even more. First, you'll enter the Palace, do Akechi's “awakening” fight, which is really easy, and then get kicked out. However, when you return, this first floor has 3 enemies. One of them is Power, an angel, who won't work so well with this, but the other two are Unicorn and Ose. All these two do is physically attack. Set Joker by himself with Arahabaki in front of these enemies, and they will kill themselves. They can never hurt Joker. On top of that, they give a great amount of XP for this point in the game. Couple this with Arahabaki having Spirit Drain, and you have infinite XP, money, and SP (On Joker). That's not even all! If you get Futaba to level 49, she learns Subrecover SP, where all non-active party members get 1% of their SP back each fight. If you notice how you're grinding right now, that means everyone! Getting this ability is the final ingredient of the perfect grinding strategy and a surefire way to clear the remaining Palaces. Once everyone gets tired, go off with Joker to fight enemies on his own, and everyone will regain their SP. Granted, it would take 100 fights, but it's both useful, and later, required (No I'm not kidding, just wait until Shido's Palace).

 

This gives you a ton of breathing room in this Palace. As if that wasn't good enough, when you reach the High Limit floor, you'll be forced to leave, meaning you can eat up the rest of your SP and do Treasure Demon baiting to your heart's content. The lack of pressure in this Palace is a nice change of pace, but keep in mind that this doesn't mean it's optional to grind. You are going to absolutely need levels for what's coming later, so grind like crazy using this method. One thing you'll need is something you need to make by the end of this dungeon: Rangda. He's the enemy in the second wave of the battle arena on the High Limit floor, and he also has Repel Phys. On top of that, he's immune to fire and curse. By grinding in Sae's Palace, you are also going to have reached the level where the Twins will reach rank 8. Get this immediately as well. You're going to need to use the Lockup in the bunch of days before facing Sae. Keep in mind there is not a break after Sae's boss fight. You go straight to Shido after her fight.

 

But that's getting ahead of ourselves, how do you actually beat this Palace? Well like before, dodge enemies where possible, though it is somewhat easier here than other Palaces. There are several narrow hallways to get through like before, but for the most part you'll have little trouble getting by them. Also, use Akechi in this dungeon all the time. In this run he is essentially a second Morgana you get for one dungeon. He will be invaluable this time, the fucking bastard.

 

There's something to mention that you probably don't need to be told. On the member's floor, one of the other items to purchase is a Soma. Buy that. It restores your party's HP and SP to max. Buy that. Save it for a while.

 

The minibosses are pretty all over the place in this Palace. The one guarding the Dice Game controls is probably the hardest one. It can cause brainwash on your party and the fight can end in the blink of an eye. Bring Akechi, Makoto, and Morgana. Use Akechi and Morgana to hit its weaknesses of light and wind, and Makoto to hopefully not get brainwashed so she can use Energy Shower if the others do. Another thing, try very hard to keep everyone alive when you win the fight, because for some reason this miniboss gives more experience than practically every other enemy for the rest of the game (Yes, including fucking Akechi and Shido!) You will really want that boost.

 

The other minibosses that make use of a full party are not very dangerous. The only other battles to worry about are the Joker only fights in the battle arena. However, if you have Rangda and Arahabaki, you're going to find it pretty easy. If you use Rangda with an electric move, you'll blast the first two opponents with ease. Ganesha is going to try to punch you, so he dies. The Rangdas will only be able to use physical and curse, so your own Rangda is completely protected. Finally, Thor will be where you change to Arahabaki to avoid a weakness to electric. However if he tries to use Megaton Raid, he'll kill himself. Done, it's time to move on to Sae.

 

But of course, this time around, the day you fight Sae isn't right away. It will be the last day of break you have, so in the meantime, get Rangda's weaknesses nullified, as well as with whichever Personas you like using. Having a physically reflective Persona with no weaknesses is going to be immensely nice for the rest of this game.

 

With the calling card sent, the battle with Sae begins. Again, Akechi, Morgana, and Makoto were my teammates. The battle starts with the scripted first roulette spins. Pick low risk bet for HP, since you will always take that hit. Make sure to tell Morgana you saw what she did right away, then advance the script to the real part of the fight.

 

The real boss fight with Sae is not that bad, but, you can lose simply because RNG hates you. Maintain a DD of +1 or better and Sae won't be that threatening. What will be threatening is when the roulette spins again. Remember, do not attack Sae during the roulette spin or you will go down to 1 HP. As for the spin itself, I found that, for some reason, Red won a lot more often than Black. Not sure why, but 9 times out of 10 (Literally in my case), it landed on Red. You will obviously need luck that, 1. The stake is not bad for you either way, and if it is, 2. That you win. The most critical one in this fight is SP. If the stake is SP, you need to win it. If you don't, you just lose. It sucks to redo the slow first phase, but you cannot be spending SP healing on this fight when it could give you a free 100 SP per character. Getting that to happen (As it did in my winning fight), will assure victory.

 

That is, as long as you don't fuck up the BTOD attack timing. As soon as she gets pissed and does desperation, you need to block. Better hope you have a DD of +1 at least before you block this attack. If you don't, you'll probably die. However, if roulette was kind to you in this battle, after surviving this hit you should have little difficulty beating her.

 

So that ends Sae's Palace, except for one small detail. On the way out to the 1.5 hours of cutscenes, you'll be greeted with one Moloch. I got no concrete information about this, but I almost died during my first playthrough of this game to this guy, and I have no idea what the game would do with you if you die. I was very scared in this run that dying here would force me to fight Sae again. To avoid that problem, make sure you have an Ice move to use on Moloch and that your Persona isn't weak to Psi (Rangda for me).

 

Okay, sit through 1.5 hours of dialog or speed through, and eventually, after enough talk to fill a movie, it's finally time to enter...

 

SHIDO'S PALACE

 

It's finally time to talk about the hardest part of the game, bar none. This is the Palace I knew would give me the most trouble, and really make or break the challenge. Prepare to spend quite a few hours grinding, sneaking, fighting miniboss after miniboss, and painstakingly getting the value out of Futaba's Subrecover SP.

 

First thing's first, you'll be entering the Palace and find enemies are already available. However, you will be kicked out very soon. The only thing to deal with is the Cerberus miniboss, but if you use Joker by himself with Rangda, he is completely unable to hurt you.

 

It may seem like you should spend the time to grind since your SP will be restored, but it won't be necessary. The grinding strategy in this Palace won't use any SP, and can be done infinitely. So, do the first bit outside the main assembly's doors and leave.

 

For the most part throughout the run, I haven't been very specific on equipment you should buy, but this time around, it is going to be CRITICAL you buy Frenzy Dagger for Joker. If you don't have it, the grinding strategy will become incredibly annoying and take a LOT more time.

 

The first thing you need to know is how the infinite grind works. If you possess Rangda and Frenzy Dagger and use only Joker, all of the enemies in the first room cannot harm you. What's more, if you hit them with Frenzy Dagger, you will most likely enrage them, which causes them to pull an Ose and smash into you, killing themselves instantly. The reason you need this dagger as well is because of Sarasvati, the one with the sitar. She only shows up occasionally with Cerberus, but when she does, she will basically never die. Your punches and their own reflected attacks won't be enough because they Mediarama all of the time. Without the dagger, you will practically get softlocked on this fight because you will constantly be stuck damaging them only enough for them to heal themselves. However, if you can enrage them, they're done. This makes the grinding in this entrance hall actually viable, and it will be very important in this dungeon.

 

If you want to regain Joker's SP, either use Arahabaki and avoid the dog shadows (Cerberus can use fire to hurt Arahabaki), or move Spirit Drain to Rangda.

 

Now, what about every other room in the Palace besides the first? Start with the restaurant, follow the requirements to get the member's card and enter, then face the first miniboss.

 

The politician becomes Yamata-no-Orochi, who is weak to Psi. He will spend his turns buffing his attack and concentrating, then debuffing you. If you use Haru, Morgana, and Ann, you'll be able to hit his weaknesses and all out attack frequently. His only attack is Bufudyne, and since he Rakundas, he telegraphs who he plans to hit. He will absorb the ice if you reflect it back to him by the way. This fight, in the end, shouldn't give you a lot of trouble, except of course for its SP cost.

 

Now that you have the first of five letters, it's time to enter...

 

THE HELLWAYS

 

I hate this Palace. This is the scariest place to traverse, especially under the conditions of this challenge, and it's all because of the hallway segments, or as I call them, Hellways.

 

Each Hellway features the shitty rat ailment, so that you can't ambush enemies, hide, open doors, or do anything in battle. Naturally, avoid all enemies even harder than usual. There are only a select few enemies that you'll be pretty much forced to face. Just hope you can knock them down easily, then ask them for money so they go away. The puzzles are annoying in their own right, but having to do entire Hellways without dying in THIS challenge is exhausting and nerve-wracking.

 

Something about Hellway 1 that you need to know though, is that you need to find the treasure chests in it. One of them contains a Soul Food, which fully heals one character's SP. Do I even need to tell you to get this?

 

Finally, after Hellway 1, which is a pretty simple puzzle, you'll reach the pool. While here, you'll have to carefully avoid patrolling guards around the pool in order to talk to people to advance to the second miniboss.

 

The noble, Forneus, is weak to electric, so bring Ryuji and slam this guy. This opponent was pretty easy and didn't give me very much difficulty at all, so I don't have a lot to mention about him. What I do have to mention here is that, by the time I beat this second miniboss, I was already running low on SP. Whatever you do, do NOT use sodas. You need to go back to the entrance hall and get SP back using the methods I outlined. You are going to need those sodas desperately in a little while. For now, the entrance hall grind is free, safe SP, even though it can be slow. I found it was enough to max Joker's SP using Spirit Drain and get other characters up to about half.

 

Now it's time to do Hellway 2. Again, avoid battles more than ever before. The puzzles are more difficult than the first Hellway, but take it slow and consult the map often. The Hellway isn't apt to screw you over, as long as you don't get into fights.

 

Half way done, you'll arrive at the other pool after seeing the gunner shadows. However, before you enter the casino, the Cleaner shows up and sics Baphomets on you. These fights honestly drained me more than the minibosses. They have practically every element to use and systematically hit your party's weaknesses. They are only weak to light, so it will be annoying to hit them effectively. Get used to these guys, you'll see them two more times.

 

Once they're done, you'll reach the casino. Enter and find the TV president, who will become Hanuman with Garuda adds. Ice is good on him, and electric is good on the adds. Again, I didn't find this fight particularly hard. If you have Rangda with Null Elec, he can't hurt Joker, and his adds will die easily.

 

Time to move on to Hellway 3. Again, the puzzle here is really painful. To make matters worse, you are going to REALLY want the treasure chests in this area. One of them, out of the way, contains the Spirit Choker, which gives you +50 SP. You are going to need this immensely on Joker. Other than this, do what you've done already, avoid enemies and get out of any battles you get in as quickly as possible.

 

Now you'll reach the side deck, at which point, after the safe room thank god, you'll be forced to face three Baphomets from the Cleaner again. This is the same fight, just more likely to kill you or drain your energy. If you have to, go back and heal SP and go all out on these guys.

 

With the Cleaner's bastards down a second time, the game will now force you to immediately do Hellway 4. Thankfully, this is the easiest of the four, and it's the last one. Run through it quickly and reach the restaurant from earlier. Go back to the safe room on the side deck.

 

By the way, you see that single shadow between the safe room and the rest of the Palace? He's a real asshole. He's going to be a pain to get past, and you really would rather not fight things and need to heal more again. He has the potential to be something easy to knock down, but he can also be more Baphomets, which is a drain on Joker. It is possible to slip by him, but he will always notice you getting close. Don't sprint, and he should usually not chase you.

 

Now, go up the ship to reach the fourth miniboss. The IT boss turns into Oberon with Titania adds. This fight sucked for me, as he's weak to Nuke and the Titanias are weak to Psi, while they are immune to the opposite. I didn't use Haru here since I prioritized more healing, so I had Makoto and Morgana. I probably used Ryuji, but since Oberon casts wind, you're better off using Ann here. The adds keep getting summoned by Oberon, so you'll really need to focus on him. This fight has a tendency to drag on and use a lot of SP, so if you need, go back and heal more SP if you can't win. I know this is tedious, and it's going to be even more tedious in a minute.

 

Eventually you'll beat this guy, and now you'll need to go back... past the one shadow that you carefully dodged before. This is why I hate this guy. He can easily fuck you over and you'll have to do the whole Oberon fight again. This didn't happen to me, but just be aware and try very hard to avoid him. I would say fight him and knock him down quickly, but that's a crapshoot if he ends up being difficult enemies to knock down.

 

But now, it's time for the last part of the Palace, and one of the hardest sequences in this challenge. Go back to the entrance hall, and do the grinding strategy. Make sure your party has full SP. Yes, FULL! I know that's 100 battles at most. Do it, no joke. It will be necessary.

 

There's one more thing that needs to be brought up now. I HEAVILY recommend that you take the time now to create Seth. You will have had to rank the Twins Confidant only once to get Seth, which, if you haven't done so, I don't even know how you got this far. I will say this: I did not make Seth for the upcoming section on purpose. Having him was pure accident. However, it was because of Seth that I was able to complete this section without having to start over the entire thing on the third fight. I'm not a Persona 5 speedrunner or even an aficionado. I was trying this from memory and feeling out the strategies on my way through. I only got Seth out of my disappointment from being unable to complete the Twins requests (Thanks Bugs...). In any case, the goal of this strategy is to have something either with Repel Fire or Repel Curse. It must be Repel, not Null or Resist. It will be good if the other element is a Resist or Null (Or hell, Repel as well, it would be incredible). Seth fits this bill by Repeling fire and Resisting curse. Another thing I did by this point was create Horus the Phoenix who had Endure. Make sure you have something with Endure, which will be your last second “Holy shit” saving throw. I got it on Seth as well.

 

Now it's time to return to the side deck, dodge that same dickhead shadow AGAIN, and go into the engine room. You'll first have to face the last round of Baphomets, 4 of them! This fight is already hard as fuck. Use as much attack power as possible, then heal HP (Not SP yet), and head into the Cleaner fight.

 

This fight annoyed me. He has no weaknesses, and he blasts you with big damage group magic or instant death. He can swing with physical attacks that will hit a lot of times, so having Rangda on Joker can keep him safe from most of the things he throws. It's very hard to keep people alive in this fight, but do your best and he'll eventually go down. Use your SP as much as you want here. As you probably know, you aren't going to be allowed to leave to a safe room or healing spot. In that case, it's time to break out the sodas.

 

I went into the Cleaner fight using Ryuji, Morgana, and Ann, but I changed Ryuji out for Makoto after this, and I healed their SP. I went into the Cleaner fight with 198 sodas (99 of each, all I could hold). After I was done guzzling sodas after him, I had 20 left. This is why you must save them all for this moment. You must go into the next fight with full SP, no exceptions. I'm probably unaware of a place where you may be able to grind out Soul Drops, which would greatly reduce the need to use Futaba's Subrecover SP, but this was what I found.

 

Once you are at max, you all know who it's time for.

 

FUCKING AKECHI

 

It's time to beat down pancake boy, but oh boy, you're going to have a hell of a time doing it. This fight is unbelievable, and is going to utterly decimate your SP restoring items. Do not be shy, it is time to use them (All except for the Soma, it's better if you still save that).

 

Now begins this 3 part hell. Like I said, I chose to use Morgana, Ann, and Makoto. This was to make sure I could hold a +2 DD as easily as possible. However, this ends up being a costly fight since you don't have a great amount of strength. The first part is against two psychotic shadows. They aren't that difficult to deal with. Using Rangda can reflect some physical hits if they go to Joker, but that can be tricky to pull off. The enemies will constantly use Desperation, and will reuse it once it wears off, letting you pick out times to reapply buffs as needed.

 

Next comes fucking Akechi, who will be using most of the moves you remember him having, bless, curse, Megaton Raid, and then also Megidolaon. He throws this around after he goes to half HP. Rangda with his weaknesses nullified is going to be your saving grace here. You can potentially repel a ton of damage into him if he throws Megaton Raid at Joker, and he won't be able to hurt Joker with his move set except for almighty. However, damaging him is going to pile up the SP costs. Joker can't really risk being off of full defense, and you're really going to want Ann to keep Akechi's attack down. Makoto is going to need to keep putting up defense, and Morgana is going to keep healing (More than likely Makoto won't have Mediarahan, Morgana is going to desperately need it). So what did I end up doing?

 

Punching him with normal hits, and letting him do the work himself.

 

Akechi will use Charge after Megidolaon, then Megaton Raid, usually at Joker. If you have Rangda up, this is going to reflect into him for a shitload (700+). This is going to be key to winning here.

 

Trust me, this is agonizingly slow, but turtling against him was what I found could beat him pretty consistently. I know there's probably a lot more you can do, but SP was a huge issue in this fight for me, so I was too nervous to spend SP on magic attacks that may only do two times the damage of the punch. You could probably get Trumpeter if you got to level 59 (I got to level 64 for Shido, so it was within my ability, but I wasn't aware), which you could then put in the electric chair for Debilitate, which would be highly useful, but that's going to cost Joker 30 SP a shot and may not make the fight a whole lot easier. You will need to use a lot of items. I found that I could get Snuff Souls (50 SP) off of some rare confusion drops. You'll have the Chewing Soul and the Sakura item like it (100 SP). You'll have the Soul Food and the Mystery Stews, but I really recommend saving those for Shido. However, you could use a couple Mystery Stews right when Akechi has a sliver of HP left, then beat him before he capitalizes on your debuffs. You really want to go into the next phase with some SP to start off.

 

But after enough agony, you'll bring down Akechi's normal form, and thankfully, losing on the next form will only make you restart from this form. You won't have to redo the first part of Akechi.

 

But good god, this is it. The fight when I believed it was all over unless I grinded for 100 hours in the slow entrance hall. You'll wonder how the hell you're supposed to get through this fight when you have no SP remaining.

 

It starts out in a way that makes you think you'll have a chance. Akechi begins by casting Tetrakarn to reflect physical, then usually doing Brave Blade for a ton of damage. If you use Joker with Rangda to punch him, his Tetrakarn will get used up without hurting Joker. It will also get rid of it for you if Joker reflects Akechi's Brave Blade. The first phase makes you believe you're supposed to use magic on him and avoid physical, but you cannot afford to fight like that. Instead, you need to punch his Tetrakarn off while buffing yourself, debuffing him, healing, and, when possible, punching him. He casts Tetrakarn onto himself every 2 turns. On the turns between Tetrakarns, you need to hope he throws a physical attack at Joker so it bounces and does a ton of damage back to him.

 

However, my hope that this fight was going to be winnable died when he changed his script about one-third of his HP in. He then changes to casting Makarakarn on himself, and then casts Eigaon. After this, he will cast Maragion and Maeiga, which will torch your team. After this, his next actions will depend on if his Makarakarn is still up. If it isn't, he'll cast Makarakarn again. If it's still there, he casts Megidolaon. This will hurt.

 

It was at this point, after a few rounds of this, that I thought it was over. There was no way I could spend SP to knock down his Makarakarn myself while also healing and buffing / debuffing. I found myself trying to go through the last half of his HP with just Joker while using every single healing item, which would more than likely brick my progress even if I won. Even with Rangda being immune to Akechi's fire and curse, the almighty was taking more than half my HP, and there was no room to cast debuffs or buffs anymore.

 

But then came the realization. I looked at my Personas to figure out what the hell I could do. That's when I noticed Seth had Repel Fire. Remember how I said Akechi could knock down his own Tetrakarn if I bounced his physical attack? The same thing happens with Makarakarn. If you have Seth out when he does his cast of fire and curse group magic, the fire will bounce off and clear his Makarakarn. This changes the battle completely. Healing the damage from Maragion and Maeiga and a single Eigaon is doable, especially since Joker, with Seth, was resistant to curse, so the double group magic volley would do little to Joker. With this in mind, I let the fight be lost and restarted.

 

While Morgana kept healing, the rest of my party would painstakingly punch Akechi down, as I plowed through most of my SP items. After some time, I realized I needed to accelerate the process. Makoto couldn't keep using Marakukaja and Morgana couldn't keep healing for much longer. I realized I would need to knock down Akechi's Makarakarns myself. Joker could use fire with Seth to hit the Makarakarn while taking no reflected damage, and then Akechi's own reflected fire could do 200+, better than what I could do with anything on Joker.

 

This would continue until Akechi entered the last phase, where he glares at Joker. You need to guard with Joker and heal him. Akechi is going to hit him with Laevateinn, which can't be deflected. However, after this, switching back to Rangda is recommended. He is going to cast Makarakarn and Tetrakarn on himself sporadically. It is still best to knock those down, especially Tetrakarn. This is where you can end the fight in spectacular fashion. He's going to glare at Joker again, meaning it's time to get out Rangda and guard. He's isn't guaranteed to use Laevateinn again. Instead, he has a good chance to bounce a physical attack off of Joker and deal 700+ damage to himself again, and in my case, end the fight.

 

Winning this fight was unbelievable. By the end my SP was in single digits on nearly everyone. As well, this fight took me 2 hours, mostly from being paralyzed with fear, thinking through every action. The war of attrition was over.

 

But...

 

This isn't the hardest fight in this run. Not even close. It's time to move on.

 

Before I fearfully took on Shido, I grinded to level 64 for Thor. I itemized him to give Ryuji his best weapon Mjolnir, then bought Thor back as an extra powerful Persona. I still had Seth and Rangda as my main Personas. By this point, I had used most of my good SP healing items. I had perhaps 2 or 3 Snuff Souls left, the Soul Food, the Mystery Stews, and the Soma. I had no idea whether the Soma would be necessary in this fight, but I was prepared to use it.

 

Finally, this is it. Let's talk about the hardest fight in this run.

 

MASAYOSHI SAMAEL SHIDO

 

You read that right. This is the hardest fight in the game for these rules. How the hell is that possible? Well, it could be the second hardest fight, naturally, but with what becomes available to you after you beat Shido, I knew that this was the final barrier to beating this challenge. If I can beat Shido, then the challenge is possible.

 

But is it possible to beat Shido?

 

In this battle, I knew I couldn't play like I did against Akechi. Having Ann using Tarunda wasn't a good enough trade-off for the damage Ryuji could do. In addition, I knew I'd need defense and healing, so I brought Morgana and Makoto (By this time, Makoto was still not level 65, so I didn't have Mediarahan on her yet. Not that I would want to spend that much SP at this time, Mediarama would be fine in most cases).

 

I did make a mistake in my preparation. I decided to leave it to Joker to lower Shido's stats, but my only methods of doing so were using Marakunda and Matarunda. This was a very bad way to handle this, as I was now spending three times more SP than I should have, so be aware of what skills you bring into the battle.

 

The fight begins with Shido's beast on the ground. He repels physical in his first phase, so you're going to immediately need to gulp SP using magic to bring his HP down by one third. Getting Mjolnir for Ryuji proves its value here. Everyone will need to spam Shido with magic attacks, and meanwhile, you need to be careful about buffs and debuffs. In the first two phases of this fight (Grounded beast and flying beast), if anyone in your party has more than 1 buff, or Shido has more than 1 debuff, he will clear them. For that reason, I find it best to just have a +2 DD with no OD and just hope Futaba doesn't come in with another buff. Defense yourselves, and lower Shido's attack. He will use physical attacks right now, so put up Rangda to bounce them, which sadly won't do any damage to him. He also casts Makarakarn, so use Joker to bounce a magic attack that he can nullify. Finally, Shido will stand there and charge, then do a group physical attack that can cause Rage. You don't necessarily need to block this, but blocking it should make it unlikely to be enraged, which you really don't want to be since reflected rage hits will most likely kill you (Remember Ose?)

 

After the first third of his HP, he will change to flying beast. Now physical will work, and magic is resisted. This is where you need to be aware of the fight script. Each turn he will cast two magic attacks in the order of the element chart on the Persona screen. That is, fire, ice, electric, wind, psi, nuke, bless, and curse. Once he has gone through the whole thing, he will cast an almighty attack that hits the whole group and can cause dizzy. With my group, his first turn is not very dangerous, just make sure that Joker doesn't have a weakness to fire or ice. The next turn, though, is a brutal turn. He will cast his next element at whoever is weak to it. Starting with electric, that means he'll target Morgana. If it landed, he'll One More his wind attack at Ryuji. He'll get another One More to hit Makoto with Psi, and then One More again to cast nuke, and then take his second normal turn to cast Bless. This is why nullifying Rangda's weaknesses will be critical, because he could get all the way to curse, then start next turn with Royal Wing Beam.

 

You may find some success in using Makarakarn here on the character whose weakness is coming up. You'll also be able to avoid the One Mores by guarding. However, you don't have the greatest staying power, and you have the rest of this health bar plus TWO MORE to get through. In the end, the best thing to do is keep DD up and lay in damage as fast as possible. Something that may be valuable but I didn't do would be to get the best guns you can get for your characters before fighting Shido, since you should have ample money to spend at this point. I researched this fight a bit after the fact and found that this second phase could take a lot of damage from guns. Considering how much pressure he puts on you here, it may be best to spend your bullets now. Failing all that, use your strongest physical attacks and eventually bring him down to the last third of his HP.

 

Finally, he morphs into the pyramid. This phase is the easiest of the three since he only attacks once and stops removing excessive buffs and debuffs. On top of that, even though he does do a BTOD attack, he takes an extra round to charge it, so you have plenty of time to set up against it. However, there's some aspects of this last phase that give you a special advantage against Shido's upcoming second form. For one, the pyramid's damage output is very low compared to the previous two, so you will not have too much trouble staying alive. If you have some Exorcism Waters (Lift all debuffs for all party members), you can and SHOULD do something during this phase. Eat those Mystery Stews, then Exorcism Water. If you use one per character, then one person might get hit pretty hard, but it shouldn't be a big deal. The next round you can either use Dekunda if you have it (You really ought to but I didn't, so...), or the water, and you'll undo the stew's effects. It may be too much to ask to bring your SP back up to max before you win this phase, but you really don't want to start the next part with no SP, as I would have without this strategy.

 

The other thing to keep in mind is that, while Shido is charging his BTOD attack, his defense plummets. Blast this guy's health however much you can here. If you bring him to a sliver, you could potentially end the fight after eating one more round of stews and then kill him without removing the debuffs on yourselves. In my case, I ate the stews on the first turn he started charging. On the second turn, I gambled and attacked him with everyone, and managed to beat his first form before he fired and he would have absolutely killed me.

 

I hope you have a good amount of SP left. You're about to run through all of it and more.

 

The second phase of the battle begins with Shido using Tyrant's Fist. This attack hurts like hell with no DD, and even with +1 DD it's dangerous. It will also cause Fear sometimes, so a lot of luck is going to be needed at times. Hope for some lucky Harisen recoveries from Morgana. I would recommend not using Marakukaja with Makoto if you are already hurting for SP. Save it for later in the fight and try to have Joker reduce Shido's attack instead. This is especially smart due to the fact that he will often Dekaja you, so the defense up will be a waste. He can also cast almighty attacks and fear ailment.

 

Something you may think is a good strategy is to have Shido punch Joker with Rangda, but Shido's AI is smart in that it will nearly always avoid doing so. This goes for Makarakarns as well. However he is not foolproof. Sometimes he will just bounce his attacks, so hope for some luck in that department too.

 

I've said it a lot already, but your SP is going to be horribly low as this fight carries on. In most cases it's not a good idea to cast magic to hurt Shido. Restrict yourself to physical attacks, and even then, skills that use HP may be too risky to use. I honestly spent much of this fight punching him. It's terribly slow, but with the close calls I had in this fight, it was probably what kept me alive.

 

After he hits half health, he will start using more group attacks, and Evil Touch might come out more often. He is only attacking once per turn still, so at this point, if you think you can get away with more Mystery Stews, do it. Doing it in the final phase will be nearly impossible.

 

So here it is, the last phase, the last hurdle in the challenge. This is where it's time to pull out all of the stops. If you get to this point and your SP is dry, use the Soma. I'm not kidding. There are two reasons I'm telling you this. First, you're going to get one more Soma before the final boss. Second, I didn't use either Soma on the final boss. When I beat Shido, I believed it was critical I save that Soma for Yaldebaoth, but that ended up being unnecessary. However, it would have made Shido so much less pressured.

 

Shido will now start attacking twice, once with a physical hit and once with a group magic. He follows the same rotation strategy as the first half of Shido's fight. If he lands a weakness, he tends to follow up with an insta death attack. Rangda on Joker will keep you safe. You may also attempt to use Makarakarn and Magic Ointments on your party members to bounce back some attacks for more damage. You're going to find that keeping up damage against Shido while keeping yourself buffed and healthy is going to be hard, so if you can add to the damage with his own, do it.

 

However, you need to be aware of his HP and of your DD when he reaches one third of his health left. When he hits that threshold, he's going to send out a surprise BTOD attack (Obviously you won't be blocking this unless you're very on top of this, and even then, you can't block with everyone). When's he going to reach that point, make sure Joker is at full HP and has at least +1 DD. I was not fully prepared for this attack when it came out, and two of my party went down while Joker and Ryuji had less than 50 HP left. Full res items need to be used now, and DD needs to be +2 as often as possible. At this point, he changes his script to using only Severe magic single target attacks, so the Makarakarn strategy will be even more powerful against him. Like I said earlier though, he tends to avoid those who have it on, but he will still cast it even if you all have one, so try to fully defend everyone.

 

Eventually, after enough damage, he's going to start doing Tyrant's Glare, which means he going to use buffs and do Tyrant's Wave again. This is going to be very scary at this point, and more than likely, if you aren't defensed up or have an Endure, you'll die. With his arms raised, he's going to shoot Tyrant's Waves every 3 rounds. His buffing moves are going to cause a lot of issues here before he does, and this is going to make each Tyrant's Wave a possible game over.

 

This was what nearly happened to me. On bad luck, Shido threw a Tyrant's Wave and everyone but Joker went down with only 100 HP left. This left me with two options, neither of which I was sure of since I didn't know very well how Shido worked.

 

The first was to resurrect everyone with full res items. However, when it got to Makoto (My last turn in the round), she would have to heal Joker, leaving all of us undefended. Shido had attack up. The risk that he could mess with our attack options or kill party member's was incredibly high. There was no guarantee that getting everyone back up would get us anywhere. He could easily Tyrant's Wave us all again, whereas we would only make it a couple hundred more HP into his health.

 

Then there was the second option. The meme. Leave Joker by himself, and hope to god the script Shido had been doing didn't change. For this last segment, Shido would always follow a Tyrant's Wave with a Tyrant's Fist on his next turn. Leave Joker on an Endure Persona, and put a Physical Ointment on him. Shido would reflect a massive hit to himself, and even if he didn't die, his follow up couldn't kill Joker.

 

I agonized for over 5 minutes about if Shido would change his mind about punching Joker if he had Tetrakarn. I agonized about how getting all of my allies up was the smart and responsible thing to do, plus the fact they'd miss the experience if they stayed down. I agonized over the fact that, to this point, I had been fighting Shido for 2 AND A HALF FUCKING HOURS! (I know I'm probably the slowest person at these fights).

 

The people who know this game well already know what the correct answer was, and it was the one I chose.

 

I embraced the meme, and Shido reflected 750 damage into himself and died.

 

With that, the horrible last hurdle was overcome. There was nothing else to get in my way.

 

Those unaware of the end game options may be thinking, how the hell is that possible? Yaldebaoth is ten times more stressful and unbelievable to beat. That's what I thought too. It's how it was for me on my first (sane) playthrough, where Yaldebaoth also took me 3 hours to beat (Holy Grail included). He was horrible, and I plowed through SP items including at least 1 Soma. That was all while having maxed out Futaba, all of my friends' second awakenings, Haru's vegetables, and more.

 

So why was Yaldebaoth actually the easiest boss fight in the entire run? (!!!!!!!!!!!)

 

Three words:

 

Yoshitsune, Hassou Tobi.

 

Yeah, Persona 5 has some serious balance issues.

 

But I hear you asking, weren't you level 64? Yoshitsune requires level 79, and then he needs to be level 86 to get Hassou Tobi.

 

Yes, that's all true. Let me go ahead a bit and start talking about:

 

MEMENTOS

 

Remember this place? You haven't seen it since Kamoshida. Now you have to walk through the ENTIRE FUCKING THING today. Welcome to 12/24.

 

Mementos itself is not that threatening. For nearly the entire trek down, enemies will be afraid of you and run away. Besides that, let me clarify why Shido and his Palace was the last hurdle to pass.

 

At the top of Mementos, and the beginning of Mementos Depths, Caroline will fully heal your party. Infinitely.

 

It should be obvious. You have all of the ability to grind to level 99 now if you want. The gathering of sodas, conserving SP items, falling asleep in battle, using Spirit Drain, using Futaba's Subrecover SP.

 

It's all in the past. Caroline relieves you of those limitations. It's time to grind.

 

Something else that's great about Mementos: Even if you don't full clear each floor (Believe me, I didn't care, there are 66 floors in this fucking place), you'll come across a lot of loot items and chests with old gear. As well, Treasure Demons are just sitting around, so snap those bad boys up too. One lap through Mementos can net you between 200,000 and 400,000 yen. You're going to need to do this, perhaps a few times.

 

I want to bring up something here about Mementos. Before I got to this point, I had been operating under incorrect information that the Mementos requests you could acquire throughout the game were still here. That is not true. You cannot fight any Mementos request shadows on 12/24. This made me sad, as I had believed it would have given me the last second chance to make Bugs and to give Seth High Counter to finish the Twins' request. Alas, it was not to be.

 

Finally, you'll reach the bottom of Mementos, and pass through Iweleth to:

 

MEMENTOS DEPTHS

 

So, one final dungeon remains. This is the shortest of the dungeons, but it does have some annoying minibosses in it, along with a lot of risky opponents. Safe rooms are placed very cruelly here, where you will usually be forced to pass through an extremely scary room full of enemies and very little cover. The timing to avoid enemies entirely is tight, especially in the final room where Mara is, right before the last safe room.

 

I started off without grinding yet. I went through the first areas and fought the first miniboss, 3 Melchizedeks. They are weak to wind, so slam them down with Morgana (Who, by the way, gets to have the only second awakening in the run). This fight shouldn't be too bad.

 

After this, get through some terrible rooms dodging enemies. You're going to come up to the room with the previous Palace rulers talking to you. After this cutscene, enemies are going to immediately spawn and start chasing you. It's up to you if you want to risk your progress against them. I chose to run from them, go into the next room with the three staircases, and avoid the enemies in there too until I could jump up on a ledge, where they couldn't follow anymore. This was the first awful dodging section. With it cleared, you'll reach the first safe room. Get used to this room. You're going to be here a long time soon.

 

First, though, go around the corner to the south and have Joker be alone with Rangda, or at least a Persona who is immune to physical and has Psiodyne. Abaddon is the next miniboss here, and he would be a huge issue if you couldn't cheese him. He uses moves like Gigantomachia and other devastating physical attacks. However, he only has physical, so if an immune Joker is all that he's fighting, he's useless. Psiodyne him to death and move on.

 

After getting through more puzzles and more tense dodging, you'll reach the room with the quarantine cell door. In that room will be the last miniboss fight here, against three enemies. If you use a Rangda with no weaknesses as just Joker again, you should be able to beat them fairly easily. They may brainwash you, but if you have Rangda, Joker can't help the opponents and he can't hit himself. Eventually they'll die, and you can move on.

 

The final safe room lies ahead, guarded by one last awful contingent. Three shadows patrol around some pillars, and they are brutally hard in most cases (Mara, who is luck dependent, a three shadow combo, which is very taxing and dangerous, and Yamata-no-Orochi, who is the only one who is easy). This is the scariest section to get through. Going back from the miniboss you just beat is extremely risky, but going forward is going to be just as bad. Essentially, you can safely get over to the left most pillars, but at that point you're going to have to stand up and run (NOT SPRINT) to the last puzzle area. If you alert enemies, you cannot escape to the safe room ahead (It's still blocked) so fight them before they ambush you. I did manage to time it right to avoid alerting any of them, so it is possible. Do the final puzzle, reach the final safe room, and breathe a sigh of relief. The game is won.

 

I say this, of course, if you follow what I did. I'm only giving you the rundown of what I did to win. It's pretty well known how broken Yoshitsune is, so you may get to this point and think that it would be more worth it to do something different. My response to that is, you have infinite grinding potential, and so reasonably, you could reach level 99 and probably destroy Yaldebaoth with anything. Beyond that, let's take a look at Yoshitsune's requirements again. If you were wondering about why I wouldn't go through the trouble of grinding for Yoshitsune against Shido, you cannot make Futsunushi, one of his requirements, until Morgana's Confidant is complete, which happens after Shido. However, once you can make Futsunushi, nothing else for Yoshitsune is unattainable. Yoshitsune is one of a few top-tier Personas that you can make even in this barren wasteland of a challenge, where so many of the Confidant and Mementos request Personas are locked to you. Through it all, you can still make it, so why would you arbitrarily use something else? If Yoshitsune was not available to me, then Yaldebaoth would have been the hardest fight, hands down.

 

Anyway, now comes the part no one likes to hear. How long did it take me to grind for Yoshitsune with Hassou Tobi? 12 hours. Yeah, to some that may seem horrible, but it really isn't as bad as you might think. Here's what my strategy was.

 

First, by the time I reached the last safe room, my level was still about 65 or 66. Yoshitsune's level requirement is 79, so we're really going to need to grind a lot just to make him. For this, I chose to go back to the first safe room halfway through the depths. At first I fought everything, which I found was a big pain in the ass. Moloch, Chernobog, and Dionysus are big pains to deal with. Basically, you only wanted to fight Melchizedeks, who are easy to beat and give the most experience.

 

Most, except for one: Baal. Three Mels gives 3000 XP, while Baal gives 4500. By now, I've made a Quetzalcoatl with Auto-Maraku, so I start the fight with defense, and I just use Miracle Punch with Joker and Morgana to knock down Baal and ask for an item (By the way, he has a chance to drop Snuff Souls, though as you may guess this ended up being unnecessary).

 

There's an easy way to grind here like this: Use your Third Eye and look at the two enemies outside the first safe room. If one of them is red, fight it, it's always Baal. He remains this way until you reach level 75, where he turns yellow. By the time you hit level 79, he will always be yellow, so it's easy to know when it's him. If you go out and don't see a Baal, go back in the safe room and come back. The enemies will reroll. Do this until you fight a Baal, then, if the other isn't also a Baal, then fast travel back to the beginning of Mementos Depths and come back to this room again. The two enemies will be here, making your chances for finding Baal better.

 

This was my strategy for awhile, knocking down Baal and taking his item. I thought it wasn't important to do any different, as killing him outright was demanding. However, I discovered something after awhile. I had a really bad fight against him, where no crits were landing. We kept alive and he ended up just dying. For that, 5 of my characters leveled at once. I thought, why did that happen, when no more than 1 or 2 was leveling otherwise? I found out why. Persona 5's XP system is completely unwieldy. First, the more people in your active party, the less experience the active party gets. With a party of 4, each character, instead of getting 4500 XP from negotiating with Baal, only got 1500. However, by killing him, each character got 7000!! This greatly sped up the process, even though it was tougher to kill him.

 

Finally, I reached level 79, and most of my characters had reached level 70 or so and gotten pretty much all the best abilities they'd need. With this, I spent the money to make Yoshitsune. But now, I had to get Yoshitsune up to level 86. He got no levels for his fusion due to being the Tower arcana, so it was a straight grind for 7 levels. At first, I believed I could use Hope Diamond to give Yoshitsune a level with the gallows, then register and sacrifice Yoshitsune, then buy him back so I could gallows another Hope Diamond into him. However, this plan went out the window when Hope Diamond couldn't give Yoshitsune a single level. But I found another: Mara. The dickhead (heh) gave way better experience than Hope Diamond, where it would take 7 Maras to get Hassou Tobi. However, that was still more money than I had on hand. I would have to get a lot more money to do that 7 times. I decided, to start with, to do the only sensible thing, so I went and beat

 

THE REAPER

What? You're kidding right? No, I put Debilitate and Thermopylae to go along with Charge on my new Yoshitsune and I went and battled the Reaper, something I had never done. This time, I had researched a bit, and found out about the Makarakarn strategy. First, get ambushed by the Reaper. Yeah really. If you start the fight in normal formation, he'll take two actions every turn and you can't use Thermopylae, so you'll just die. If you get ambushed, he can only take one action per turn. For the Makarakarn strategy, if you put up a magic wall on one of your characters while fighting the Reaper, he will throw out his entire attack script and instead use Concentrate and Megidolaon, at least until the character with magic wall is down. This makes him a lot more consistent to battle, although he is taxing as hell. If you start the fight with Auto-Maraku, use Makoto, Ann, and Ryuji, and concede to using one Magic Ointment and one or maybe two Snuff Souls, you can just barely beat him at these levels. To start, Makoto throws the Magic Ointment since she goes first and has nothing else to do. After this, Makoto will do nothing but use two Mediarama's between Megidolaons since that is cheaper than one Mediarahan, and it will basically get you out of danger enough. Ryuji and Ann first do their focus skill, then attack the Reaper with Agidyne / God's Hand (You really want these, anything else is either too expensive or too random). As for Joker, since you have defense already, first turn you want to cast Debilitate because he's going to immediately cast Megidolaon since he gets a Concentrate up on his ambush turn. Second turn, use Thermopylae, as Joker should go before Ann and Ryuji which means they get a +2 OD against the Reaper for their first hit. On Joker's third turn, use Charge. Then, repeat this script: Debilitate, Thermopylae, and then on that second cycle, use Brave Blade on the Reaper for big damage, then repeat the cycle ending with Charge again.

 

This will nearly get you to the end of the fight, but Joker will run out of SP before the end. Losing +2 DD is not acceptable, so Joker has to keep doing Debilitate and Thermopylae. This will torch his SP, so you have to hope for good luck with Megidolaon dodges such that Makoto can do one turn of healing (Diarahan on one person, sometimes no one needs healing), and the other turn she can give Joker a Snuff Soul. Sometimes Makoto could even use one of the 150 damage items you can find randomly in Mementos on the Reaper for extra damage.

 

If you follow this strategy and can get one Snuff Soul on Joker, then you should be able to beat the Reaper and gain a shitload of levels for your party, and two levels on Yoshitsune.

 

This was good enough for me. At this point I didn't feel like fighting the Reaper again. Instead, I chose to use my remaining money to sacrifice Mara into Yoshitsune over and over. It required me to go back through Mementos and pick up items, which netted me another 200,000 yen. With this, Yoshitsune made it to level 86 and gained Hassou Tobi. My characters had gained all of their skills. There was nothing left. Let's go humiliate a god.

 

THE HOLY GRAIL 1

 

The first encounter with the Holy Grail will look pretty funny. If you use a charged Hassou Tobi with +2 OD, you will nearly kill the Holy Grail on the first encounter. If you Debilitate him, he will do practically no damage to you. Of course, he'll heal, then the battle will stop, some cutscenes play, and the battle will start again. Do the same thing as before, using charged Hassou Tobi and hitting with others while healing as necessary. This fight will provide no challenge, and will end as scripted.

 

Watch a crapload more cutscenes and finally reach...

 

QLIPNOTH WORLD

 

Here we are, the final ascent. In your way now are some last enemies and four minibosses. None of these minibosses are a threat at all, even Michael. If you fight him with your full strategy (Debilitate, Charge, +2 OD and DD), you'll walk him. The only things to keep in mind with this area is, make sure you pick up the treasures. You'll get the second Soma, just in case something goes wildly wrong in the final battle.

 

Crush the minibosses and engage:

 

THE HOLY GRAIL 2

 

For the final battle, I used Morgana, Makoto, and Ryuji. I know that it is possible to beat the Holy Grail without cutting his supply lines. However, my own strength here made that a bit too difficult. Instead, send someone (Probably Morgana), and cut the supply lines. The problem here will be that you're going to probably do too much damage even if you don't Charge, and he'll heal once. However, you'll easily get your character to the top and cut the lines. At that point, lay into him. He will try to use a BTOD attack near the end. Your damage should be enough to beat him before he uses it.

 

So now, after a full game of suffering, pressure, and a wasteland for items and help, you're about to make an absolutely mockery of

 

YALDEBAOTH

 

The final battle was one of the most intense things I ever did in gaming when I first beat it. I found it so ridiculous that this run, of all things, made him into a joke. The same strategy applies as before, Charge, +2 DD / OD, Hassou Tobi and God's Hand, even throw in magic damage or punches from your other teammates. A full power Hassou Tobi will kill or nearly kill any of his arms outside of the sword, and do about 2400 damage to Yaldebaoth himself. Something that will happen that may throw a curveball in this fight is that, with the amount of damage you can pile on in one round, he will be taking out a new arm per round. If his Deadly Sins hit Joker, that could cause a lot of disruption. At the pace I went, he took out each arm for his first four turns, and then on his fifth turn he began charging his BTOD attack. Since he had to charge for one more turn, that gave me all of the time I needed to kill him.

 

Revel in that “Our Beginning”. If you did this challenge too, you should be proud of your perseverance. When I started this challenge, I had no idea if what I was doing was even reasonable. I had believed I would get bricked in a dungeon with no SP left, stuck behind a miniboss. It almost happened immediately in Kamoshida's Palace. Over 100 hours later, Yaldebaoth had a giant hole in his face. It was an amazing accomplishment for me, and I'm glad to have shared it with you.

 

Anticipating a question I can see coming, would I do this for Royal? No way. Couple reasons. First, I'm tired of Persona 5, I don't think I'm going to suffer through all this again. Secondly, I have never played Royal, and all of the boss fights are different and there's even more after Yaldebaoth. Because of this, I couldn't imagine doing this challenge on Royal blind, so I'd have to play it twice. Definitely don't have the interest in that. Finally, Royal is fucking easy. Everyone gets Baton Pass automatically and it's even better? Psh, this challenge would be cake.

 

That's all I have to say here. Thanks for reading!