Bosses

Almost nothing in Solistia kills you outright. The bosses that stop a run are the ones that quietly confiscate something first, and only then start swinging. One seals the job skills you built your party around. One heals the parts you spent four turns destroying. One shaves your maximum health down every round until the timer, not the damage, is what finishes you.

That is a more useful way to sort these fights than by chapter number. Weaknesses you can look up in thirty seconds; knowing which resource a boss is coming for is what decides whether you walk in with a healer, a Merchant, a spare set of Soulstones or nothing at all. The twelve bosses on our wiki are grouped below by the thing they take, with the full detail in each linked guide.

The twelve fights at a glance

Every boss we cover, with the story slot it sits in and the one sentence that matters most before you walk in.

Bosses that take your party

The cruellest opening move in the game is not damage. It is being told that two of the four characters you brought are not participating this round.

Scourge of the Sea is the purest example, and it does it from the first turn. Starboard Straight benches two travellers for two turns and Swallow Prey benches three, and the monster gets stronger the more of your side it has removed. That reverses the usual advice about pacing yourself: this is a fight you win by front-loading everything, because a slow, careful approach hands the boss exactly what it feeds on. It is also an optional fight, sitting in a whirlpool out east of Tropu'hopu Harbor, which means it is a boss you meet with a ship rather than a story beat.

Tera pulls the same trick more sparingly. Once you break the second shield he wraps himself in magma and banishes two of your travellers, so the party you finish with is not the party you started with. Because he is also the fight where Ochette captures him at the end, losing the wrong character mid-way is worse than losing health.

And then there is Pirro, who takes your party before the fight begins. Throne's first chapter ends in a one-on-one duel for the succession, with no allies to swap to and nobody to heal you. Five Shield Points is not much, but with a single character and a single health bar the arithmetic is unforgiving, which is why our guide tells you to walk in with Healing Grape stocked and HP Thief bought first.

Bosses that take your turns

A turn you spent is a turn you cannot spend again, and two bosses in the game are built entirely around wasting them.

Garnet steals turn order outright. Roque's hound digs, buffs itself, summons Mysterious Bones and eventually runs wild, at which point it simply acts three times to your one. Everything about the fight is physical, so stacking physical defence is worth more here than in any other encounter, and Ochette's Leghold Trap earns its place by pushing the boss back down the order so your shield-breaking actually lands before the next flurry.

Steam Tank Obsidian takes your turns retroactively, which is worse. The machine carries 40 Shield Points over 70,000 HP, and its three components are separate targets: the Cannon at 4 shields and 24,000 HP, the Smokestack at 5 and 22,000, the Glacis Plate at 6 and 20,000. Destroy them and the tank repairs them, undoing several turns of work in one action. Every component answers to a different set of weaknesses too, so the fight punishes a narrow party twice over.

Bosses that take your weaknesses

This is the largest group, and the one that catches people who prepared properly. You look up the weakness list, build a party around it, then discover that the boss can close the doors you were planning to walk through.

La'mani does it through his Troupe. Dancers are vulnerable to weapons and Musicians to elements, and whichever kind is on the stage locks the matching half of the boss's own vulnerabilities. That makes the minions a decision rather than a chore: if your party is thin on elemental damage, leaving the Dancers alive keeps his physical weaknesses open for you. He only has four Shield Points once you get at them.

Vados closes two of his four weaknesses at exactly the moment you most want them, the purple-aura chanting phase before his ultimate. Seven Shield Points sounds like a lot until you realise he also takes heavy damage during that window, so the phase is an opening and a trap at the same time. His Red and Black Wisps have their own weakness lists, which is the argument for bringing Osvald rather than a second healer.

Tera is the blunt version: break his shields and he raises them from two to six, and the Dagger weakness disappears with them. Professor Harvey is the elegant one. Osvald's final opponent changes state partway through, and the Polearm, Axe, Fire, Ice and Lightning list you arrived with is replaced by Daggers, Light and Dark. Bring a party that can cover both halves and the state change becomes a second opening; bring a party built for the first list and you spend the second half of the fight poking.

The boss that takes your skills

Claude deserves his own heading because Chained Pride is unlike anything else in the game. It seals the primary job skills of every party member, and the only way to get them back is to break him. Everything you learned on Throne's climb through the Blacksnakes stops working, and what is left is whatever secondary job you happened to equip.

That turns a boss fight into a verdict on your secondary job choices. A party whose sub-jobs are all flavour has nothing to do; a party whose sub-jobs cover healing and a second damage type carries on more or less normally. Throne's Axe attacks keep working either way, which is the intended escape route, and A Tempest Howls dropping the whole party's SP to zero makes items rather than skills your fallback.

Bosses that take your resources

BP and SP are the two currencies you cannot buy mid-fight, and the late-game bosses know it.

Enshrouded King runs the most aggressive drain in the game across 98,000 HP and 10 Shield Points, taking BP and SP from the entire party while dealing four-figure damage with Diabolical Spear, Brimstone Arrow and Eternal Suffering. Rending Slash even takes a point of BP along with roughly 800 health. This is the fight that makes a Merchant non-negotiable: Partitio donating BP straight into Hikari is the engine, and a party of three is a party that has already lost.

Trousseau drains the same two currencies quickly enough that our guide recommends walking in with Revitalizing Jam and Inspiriting Plum Basket rather than relying on skills. Professor Harvey is the third, and the reason Castti's concoctions and Partitio's Hired Help both appear in the recommended party.

The boss with a clock

Trousseau is the only fight in Solistia where waiting is a losing move on its own terms. The purple rain on the roof of Timberain Castle cuts 75 points off your maximum HP to begin with and 150 later, so a cautious, defensive approach loses by attrition even if you never drop a character. Castti's story ends with the single clearest instruction in the game: stay on the offensive.

The rest of the fight cooperates with that, oddly enough. Trousseau grows stronger in the middle rounds and takes on more Shield Points, but his vulnerabilities widen at the same time, so the window where he is most dangerous is also the window where Hikari's heaviest sword work lands hardest. Castti's Cleansing is what keeps the party in the fight while it happens.

The one that takes nothing

Veronica brings no minions, seals nothing and changes nothing. She simply has 60,000 HP, six Shield Points and three physical attacks, one of which hits the whole party for 700 or more. That makes her the honest test in the middle of Agnea's story: no gimmick to solve, just whether your four travellers can cover five weaknesses between them and keep the pressure on.

Our guide's advice is to rotate through the whole party rather than leaning on two characters, which is exactly what a boss with no trick rewards. She withdraws rather than dies, and leaves an Inspiriting Plum Basket behind.

What the big fights actually pay

Five of the twelve bosses have their drops recorded on our wiki, and the spread is wide enough to be worth knowing before you decide which optional fight to take on next.

Tera pays in equipment rather than currency, handing over the Guardian's Great Axe, and Veronica's Inspiriting Plum Basket restores 45 SP to the whole party or sells for 216 leaves. If you are hunting money rather than progress, the rare encounters pay better per fight than most of this list.

Bringing the right four

Read across the table at the top and a short list of recurring answers falls out. Partitio appears in more recommended parties than anyone else, because donating BP and Hired Help both counter the resource drains. Hikari is the default heavy hitter, and the fight against the Enshrouded King is designed around feeding him. Ochette's Leghold Trap is the specific answer to turn theft, and Castti or Temenos is what keeps a party alive through the ailment-heavy late chapters.

If a fight is going badly, the fix is more often a different fourth traveller than a higher level. Our party composition guide covers the pairings in detail, the classes guide explains what each job brings when you slot it in as a sub-job, and the EX Skills page lists the character-specific moves that several of these bosses are balanced around.