SegmentNextBosses
Eleven boss pages sit in this bucket and they do two completely different jobs. Six of them are the fights the story puts at the end of a Palace, which you will meet whether you want to or not. The other five are optional, and every one of them is an opportunity rather than an obstacle: something to capture, something to farm, or something to run away from until you are ready.
The six you cannot avoid
| Boss | The mechanic that decides it |
|---|---|
| Shadow Kamoshida | Destroy his healing chalice and steal the crown before you commit to damage |
| Shadow Madarame | Target the painting parts, and never hit the colour that heals him |
| Shadow Kaneshiro | Two phases, the Piggytron mech and then the man inside it |
| Wakaba Isshiki | Three phases fought partly through a ballista rather than your party |
| Shadow Okumura | A thirty-minute time limit, and waves of Corporobos that self-destruct |
| Masayoshi Shido | Five forms, ending in Samael, with debuffs required at every stage |
Read that column and the pattern is that none of these are damage checks. Kamoshida heals himself unless you break the chalice. Madarame punishes you for attacking the wrong colour. Okumura is not hard, it is timed, and the thirty-minute limit is the entire fight: a party that clears his robots slowly loses to the clock rather than to him.
Shido is the exception in that he is genuinely long as well as tricky, and five phases means five separate opportunities to run out of SP. That is where the coffee and curry from our town Confidants stops being a nicety.
One practical note on Wakaba Isshiki: our page documents a glitch with the second ballista spawn and how to work around it. If the fight seems impossible at that stage, check that first rather than re-levelling.
The one you capture instead of killing
Regent is the first Treasure Demon and it behaves unlike anything else in this bucket. It is weak to Psychic and Nuclear, it tries to flee rather than fight, and the win condition is stopping it leaving long enough to negotiate. A Treasure Trap is the tool for that.
The reward is not experience but fusion material, which puts Regent in the Velvet Room half of the game rather than the combat half. If you have been reading our fusion guide and wondering where high-value components come from, this is one of the answers, and it is the reason a fleeing enemy is worth chasing.
The three minibosses, and the one that hunts you
Heavenly Punisher and Mara both live in Kamoshida's Palace, which makes the game's first dungeon unusually dense with optional fights. Heavenly Punisher is weak to Curse and Electric and is the first encounter that punishes attacking blindly. Mara is a Tower miniboss and a much bigger ask at that point in the game.
Chivalrous Guard Oni is the ailment fight: our page's advice is to lean on debuffs and status conditions rather than trying to out-damage it, which is a useful reminder that Persona 5's support skills are not filler.
And then there is the Reaper, which is the most famous encounter in the game for a reason: it has no weakness at all. Nothing in your usual toolkit applies, since the entire combat system is built on finding a weakness and pressing the advantage. Our page's answer is Makarakarn and a party built to reflect rather than to exploit.
The Reaper turns up in Mementos when you linger too long on one floor, which makes it the one boss in the game that comes looking for you. Early on the correct response is to leave. Later it becomes one of the best experience sources available, which is the clearest example of this bucket's split: the same encounter is a wall in May and an opportunity in November.
For where all of these sit, our dungeons guide covers the seven Palaces and Mementos, and quests covers the requests that send you into the latter.