Can You Beat Persona 5 Royal Using Only Gun Damage? (Attempt 1: The Prequel)

persona 5 in general might be one of my favorite jrpgs of all time so it was only natural that i wanted to do a challenge run of the game eventually my biggest issue though was finding some kind of challenge that has yet to be attempted if you look up youtube literally everything has been tried at this point i just couldn't come up with any idea until it hit me out of nowhere one day guns only great idea i thought let's give this one a shot so as always let's go through the rules before we get going because we actually have quite a few this time around the difficulty we'll be playing on is hard hard in my opinion is harder than merciless no pun intended we will be working with technical damage a lot so merciless would make this much easier and we don't actually want that only gun type damage is allowed this includes damage from the actual gun all skills that are classified as gun attacks as well as showtime attacks where the main focus is on guns during the animation now i know that showtime attacks are technically considered almighty damage but some of the animations fit the theme and we need something to get passed by gun immunity so we let this one count especially since we ban all out attacks also note that this rule won't come into play until after the allegory boss fight since you don't really have any opportunities to grind gun skills up to that point skills and items are allowed as long as they don't deal damage to the enemy no repel chasing so no use of mirrors or the tetra card and macarcon skills both network fusion and dlc persona are not allowed either and as always last but not least no new game plus since most of you probably know pretty much every detail of the story at this point i'll try to keep it to the relevant parts that are actually useful for the challenge and just skip out on the rest with that being said let's get right to it we start the game set the difficulty go through the opening cutscenes and get to name choker with the appropriate name of called magnum because well guns we jump forward to april the 12th where we added the castle for the second time and first get access to the gun at this point we don't have any gun skills available yet so we need to work with the couple of shots that we have this actually works decently well for the most part that is until we run into aligor ryuji awakens to his persona and we get the first actual boss fight unfortunately though gun only and this one is pretty much impossible like i just mentioned we don't have access to gun skills yet and grinding isn't possible yet either the bit of gun damage we do to aligor is nowhere near enough since it also resists gun attacks because of that we have no other choice but to finish the fight off casually once everybody got rid of all their bullets and continue on from this moment on we can't technically grind enemies so that means gun damage only from here on out we returned to the castle three days later on the 15th in order to rescue on now again with belfagour we would have a similar issue as with aligor earlier where the gun damage is nowhere near enough to get us through the fight luckily on the way to the safe room you pass a room with 3 enemies in it those enemies just happen to respawn when you reload your save file so by beating the enemies going back to the safe room saving and reloading the file we can make those enemies respawn now you may ask why is this useful well it just so happens to be that arsene learns dream needle on level 5 which is a gun skill and therefore a lot of this challenge it took me about 30 minutes of grinding which was honestly not as much as i first expected until our zen hit level 5 and learned dream needle with that skill in possession we are off to rescue on just like with ryuji on awakens to her persona and we get into the next boss fight with everyone's favorite toilet demon belfagour there isn't really much to say about this fight in general turn 1 everyone uses their gun bullets which already got belficore close to half of his health the following turns joker uses the newly learned dream needle while morgana and ahn keep the party alive by using dia and defending on turns where there is no healing needed only a couple of attacks later balfigor is already down and we're done in the castle for today we meet dr lax for the first time and use the money we've gotten so far in order to upgrade our equipment luckily grinding our center level 5 also gave us some money to work with so we can upgrade everyone's guns unfortunately at this point we don't really have any money left anymore so we're back into the palace the next day to secure the treasure out we go through a mandatory fusion tutorial where we unfortunately have to sacrifice our ascent without being able to register it first luckily agathion can inherit gun attacks so we can carry over the dream needle from our sin secunda is a nice bonus but not really that important progressing through the palace is actually not that hard for the most part thanks to the upgraded guns we can take out the majority of encounters within a single turn unless it's something that resists gun damage like a gaffion if something is still alive after the initial ambush joker usually finishes it off with a dream needle on turn 2. once we hit level 7 we go back to the velvet room to fuse a gembu in order to gain access to rakunda as well as carry over dream needle once again with that we continue making our way through the palace the occasional sleep proc and dream needle is rather nice since sleep is one of the few status elements that lets you hit a technical with gun attacks onstar mina's spell is very useful for that situation too on level 8 we return to the velvet room yet again to fuse our gambu into an oberyn this one is important for two reasons first of all a baryon has access to the snap skill from the get-go which is a straight upgrade in terms of damage compared to dream needle it is also the first persona to be resistant to physical attacks which is going to come in very handy for the kamoshita boss fight before getting there though we have to go through the mini boss in arch angel first this one was actually easier than i thought it would be after debuffing his defense with rakunda the guns do a good amount of damage and the charged attacks for the most part can be mitigated by guarding with the other party members i did get a little bit unlucky towards the end when snap missed twice in a row but luckily arch angel's charged attack missed as well and we were able to finish it off without further problems the rest of the palace isn't really worth mentioning for the most part as it's pretty much the same procedure as before throw out all gun attacks and finish off with joker stronger encounters like arch angels or the two forced allegor fights are easily mitigated with sleep spells and the technical hit from snap afterwards after securing the treasure route i also decided to take a shot at the gatekeeper of the last wheel seat and slime this one is rather tough as it resists gun attacks but again we can put it to sleep in order to mitigate the incoming damage as well as getting a technical hit on it with the help of tarukaja from ryuji as well as a rakunda debuff joker actually did somewhat decent damage with snap and we were able to finish the mini boss off and grab the last wheel seat the resulting crystal of lust accessory is pretty useful since it gives the owner access to diorama we put that onto ryuji in order to have a healing spell on every party member before leaving the palace though we grind the entire party to level 11. on level 11 morgana learns media and on learns tyrunda both are extremely useful skills that i really wanted to have available for the upcoming boss fight with that being done we leave the palace and set the calling card shortly afterwards kamoshida is not a fan of us trying to steal his crown and the first actual big boss fight of the game starts after debuffing kamoshida and buffing joker we start dealing damage but only with choker in the beginning snap does a good amount of damage to kamashita and the incoming damage is very manageable for the most part with on de-buffing and the party guarding and healing after 4 turns we already triggered the next phase of the fight well we now have to get rid of the trophy to prevent kamushi from healing luckily after putting raccoons on the trophy three snaps are just enough to destroy it and advance the fight further we guard the first spike which surprisingly does much less damage than i thought it would with trigoshiho in order to get rid of her you can either beat her or deal 300 damage to kamoshida i decided to go with the ladder since you can easily knock down shio and use the baton pass to deal good amounts of damage to kamashita with snap afterwards once yiu is gone you can try to knock off the crown off his head this is actually where the problem started with only joker doing attacks i wasn't able to deal the necessary amount of damage needed to advance and the party members got caught before they could do anything i did try this three different times twice with ryuji and once with morgana but it failed every single time because i wasn't able to get the damage needed in in time after three failed attempts i just stopped trying because at this point kamoshita was almost done anyways so i decided to just normally continue on and finish the fight once the boss is down we get our reward get out of the palace and are done with dungeon number one since we do have a bit of time to kill now before we're entering the next palace we can do a couple of things first of all we're trying to get our social stats up quite a bit especially guts since our main focus is on guns hawaii the gun shop owner is one of the most important confidence in the challenge in order to get started with him though you need guts at rank 4 so we're reading books and watching dvds to get those up ranking up tai at the clinic also has a nice side effect that we're getting additional points and guts as well while also expanding the items we can buy there we also start up ranking up our party members for the benefits in combat especially ryuji is going to be very important since his rank 7 insta kill ability will make grinding much more comfortable eventually while we're trying to sell off the metal to ui we also have to sneak out a bag for him which contains a gun that we're allowed to keep this one gives choker the ability to shock enemies which just so happens to trigger a technical hit when following up with a gun attack afterwards generally gun ailments won't be possible until we get y up to rank 3 so this is the only way we can apply shock for now we also go out to eat and celebrate our victory and get to name our group with the very fitting name off well you can see it on the video i don't think that needs further explanation the party also goes down mementos for the first time though there isn't much to do at this point yet other than completing the first request and meeting jose on the way out we also meet marauki for the first time who technically is one of only two required confidence we need to finish in order to get the true royal ending luckily we got way more than enough time to do that also of course a playthrough of this game is not valid unless you bought national morgana shortly afterwards we meet yusuke and madarame and are basically getting started with palace number two the first visit doesn't really have anything worth mentioning for the most part we make our way through the palace just like before unfortunately choka's level is still too low to get some of the better personas here so we continue with a barian for now after a failed attempt to get on out of her clothes they discover mother ami's secret in the meantime joker and ryuji continue on in the palace by themselves with the next mini boss new way coming up this one is pretty much a pushover after applying rokunda to the enemy and taro kaja onto joker the normal gun already takes off half of its total hp two snaps later the fight is already over again on and use gate both end up in the palace use gay awakens towards persona and we're already off into the next battle which is literally the only time yusuke will ever get used again we buff joker and debuff the enemy on puts one of the copper tangos to sleep so we can get a knock down and the baton pass the joker unfortunately that didn't quite work out like i wanted to but it wasn't really a big deal because joker just created ipandatra and did big damage with snap anyways once e pundatori is down we clear up the remaining kappa tangos until the last one of them is down as well and the fight is completed before we return to the palace though we still spend a couple of days in the real world in order to get ryuji's confidence to rank 7. like i mentioned earlier this unlocks his insta kill ability which i thought to be very useful for grinding levels later on ryuji's rank 7 is also special in the sense of that it can only trigger during night time on certain dates so i wanted to make sure to get him up high enough until then to be sure to get it in time once that is completed we go back to the gun shop one more time to upgrade every once but joker's weapons before finally returning back to madarami's museum since we also just got to level 15 we've used our obarian into a shisa since it's the first persona with decent stats that can actually inherit gun skills oberyn at this point was falling off rapidly so this was actually pretty convenient timing progressing through the palace was rather difficult at times there were several enemies on the way that straight up null gun damage like inugami makami and also the red shadow shikiuchi so getting experience and money was difficult at times since we literally had no means of dealing damage here luckily in royal the mini boss here got changed from shii kiwichi to karamatengu who does not null or resist guns so getting through this one luckily was not a big issue again we are working with onstar mina's sleep skill in order to hit technicals on the mini boss as well as getting an occasional baton pass when the enemy gets knocked down other than that there isn't much worth mentioning here and the enemies go down rather quickly the rest of the dungeon was mostly the same with the main issue being enemies that are gun immune becoming more and more of a problem to where i had to run for more encounters than i could fight this all became even worse though when we ran into the second mini boss if you want to call it that way that being three makamis remember earlier when i sat makami's null gun damage those do too and they are mandatory to fight at this point i actually thought the challenge was dead already my way out of gun immunity was showtime attacks which i haven't unlocked yet so here i was standing thinking there is no way of getting through this luckily i did find a little loophole though remember the rules said items are allowed as long as they don't deal damage and i just so happen to have a couple of straddles in my inventory which have a decent chance to instantly kill an enemy since those don't deal any actual damage they are technically allowed judging by the run's rules now i am very much aware that i am kinda stretching the rules here quite a bit but at this point of the game i literally had no other way to get through this fight i wasn't very happy with the solution either but since there was no other choice we went with it in order to continue the run before we finish securing the treasure out though i wanted to give the wheel seat gatekeeper a shot this version of our hobba key is actually not immune to gun damage but does still resist it meaning we barely do any damage and to make things even worse arohabaki likes to spam status ailments and follow those up with psychic attacks in order to hit technicals on the party and while it is possible to put our habbaki to sleep it's not really that good of an option considering the amount of hp regenerates during sleep is often higher than the amount of damage i can inflict to it in turn since i wanted to grind a couple of levels anyways i decided to stop trying for our habakkuk for now and come back later once joker hits level 18 we're back to the velvet room in order to fuse the shikiuchi not only does it have pretty good stats it also fully nulls physical and gun attacks and due to it being a chariot arcana additionally also gets a big experience boost from ryuji's confident and if that wasn't enough already it also knows doubleshot from the start which is another upgrade to our gun skill inventory so all in all a great upgrade i was not fully done at this point though as i decided to grind the party all the way to level 20. i wasn't sure how big of a problem madarama might become so i wanted to make sure to have a couple of levels just in case things go wrong i also gave arohabaki another shot and after getting decimated 2 more times i actually found a decent strategy to work with sleep wasn't really an option so i went with confusion from morgana this hit relatively consistent and even though i couldn't hit a technical from that status it worked well enough that we actually got our havoc down and the last wheel seat in order to obtain the crystal of vanity this one actually erases the elemental weakness of the party member wearing it so we put it on morgana to make sure he can safely heal when needed and not be afraid of getting hit by a weakness attack before sending the calling card we go back to the clinic to stack up on healing atoms i wasn't sure how hard modorami was going to hit so i wanted to make sure to have stuff available just in case once that is done we sent the calling card and are off for boss fight number 2 the next day madarame again comes in two phases in phase one you need to take down all the different portrait parts luckily shikiyuchi knows maracunda so we can debuff the entire enemy within a single turn shikiuchi is also strong enough to take a piece out with a single attack so it's more a matter of keeping the party alive than anything else unfortunately though the mouth drains physical and gun attacks so we can't damage it at the beginning we make sure to take out all the other parts though when they are regenerating until the next part of the fight triggers after several turns you get the option to pour paint over malarami which makes him weak to literally everything in the game including gun skills that it drained before once that happens we can easily take out the remaining pieces with sheikh yuji and transition into phase 2. in this phase matarami summons a couple of copies into battle now the game definitely expects you to make use of the elemental weaknesses here and deal damage via baton passes unfortunately this is not an option for us so we just completely ignore them and focus on madorami himself luckily the copies don't deal a lot of damage and the party guarding the attacks also prevent a lot of potential weakness attacks this is also where morgana's new exacery from aurohaba comes in real handy he can heal when needed without being afraid of getting hit by weakness the following turn joker in the meantime continues dealing damage to madarama with doubleshot this is pretty much everything that is to that boss fight and even though it took quite a while madarame went down eventually and palace number two is completed back in the real world we continue on our social stats and confidence in the meantime we also get to kichioji for the first time which is going to be pretty important later on in order to raise our technical and baton pass ranks with the amount of technical hits we are working with getting the ranks and therefore damage up is a huge boost since we also racked up 4 requests in the meantime we head back into mementos again thanks to ryuji's insta-kill ability we can run over quite some enemies which makes progressing a lot easier we grab all the stamps on the way and also complete the open quests that we have at this point there honestly isn't much worth mentioning here for the most part the strategy is pretty much the same every time buff debuff put the enemies to sleep and try to get technical and critically hits in once we are done with everything the party is already level 24. we meet pancake kun for the first time i thought i heard something about delicious pancakes and raise our technical rank playing billiard to level 3. we also finally hit guts rank 4 which lets us unlock the confident with hawaii before being able to rank him up though we already get into the next story part with makoto's awakening the onlys you have to fight here are rather annoying since they resist gun attacks but again the combination of sleep plus technical hit is doing rather good damage so we get through that fight without bigger issues after makoto awakens to her persona though she replaces on in the following fight which makes hitting a technical hit rather tricky since we don't have access to sleep anymore the most important thing here is to take out the fuki first mabufu actually hurts quite a bit you so you want to make sure to get rid of it quickly once that is done the fight is basically free the onis only use physical attacks with shikiuchi nulls so there is no way they can beat joker at this point the rest of the party can still go down rather easily but that doesn't really matter at this point with that being done we could already complete the palace but i wanted to make sure to get ui to rank 3 before that in order to unlock gun customization having gun ailments on every party member is a huge upgrade especially now that we ranked our technical rank up twice too this means we should be dealing technical damage much more often and consistently with those upgrades we are off into palace number three kaneshiro's bank in the very first fight we also finally get our introduction to showtime attacks like mentioned in the rules even though those do almighty damage we allow those where the animation focuses on guns luckily the first one with morgana and on perfectly fulfills those requirements so this is our number one way to deal with gun immunity now the dungeon again for the most part follows the same pattern as the previous ones in the early part of the dungeon there are pretty much no enemies with gun immunity so progressing is rather smooth for the most part before we reach the basement we run into another mini boss this time it's the combination of fuki suiki and kinky fuki and tsuiki are no problem but kinky null's gun attacks so we need to force a showtime trigger in order to damage it one possible way to trigger showtime attacks is hitting critical and technical hits which pretty much perfectly falls into place since that is our main means of damage anyways so as always we hit technicals on the other two guys but tom pass over to morgana or on and hope for a showtime to occur the first showtime attack does so much damage that it almost one shots kinky completely after taking care of the other two enemies though it becomes a bit of a problem there is no way to baton pass anymore and showtime events don't really seem to trigger randomly during a turn luckily a showtime can also trigger when a party member faints and gets revived so once kinky wipes morgana we bring him back and luckily get the showtime event trigger right afterwards to finish off the fight we continue on to the basement where the palace becomes quite a bit harder almost every enemy formation at this point has at least one enemy with gun immunity in there so we barely are able to beat any shadows at this point anymore luckily there aren't any mandatory fights with gun immunity though so we can progress through the rest of the dungeon until we secure the treasure out before leaving though once again we still need to get to the last wheel seat which is protected by cerberus luckily this one is neutral to gun attacks so again sleep plus technical damage is our best friends he does counter attacks every once in a while which is annoying but not really a big issue at this point we are pretty much done with the palace but i still wanted to grind the party's level to 30. level 30 on learns lullaby which is an aoe version of dormina and can put all enemies to sleep i also fused this atanta and grinded that one to level 26. so tanta is the first persona in royal to get access to charge which greatly boosts our gun attacks and can become very useful with all that out of the way we can now send the calling card and get ready for big boss number three kaneshiro kaneshiro unsurprisingly again comes in two phases in phase one we have to beat the pikatron as always we make sure to debuff the enemy and buff choker in order to get through this charge is a huge help here as doubleshot takes away a third of his max hp after joking has gotten fully buffed kaneshiro's special attack is actually not that big of a deal either even without throwing any items to prevent it it only deals about 100 damage to each party member as long as the buffs and debuffs are all up once piggytron is down the actual interesting part of the fight starts kanashiro summons 2 guards and phase 2 begins the strategy here is to put all enemies to sleep and then deal damage to kaneshiro the only problem is kaneshiro is immune to gun damage which means we would have to bust out showtime attacks again no problem or at least that's what i thought we have seen earlier what kind of requirements need to be met in order to trigger a showtime event unfortunately though almost all of those triggers don't seem to be working on actual boss battles i have seen showtime attacks on bosses before so i knew it was possible i just didn't know how to trigger them and here is where the frustrating part started no matter what i did no matter what i tried the show time just never happened i did hundreds of baton passes i let all my party members die and brought them back again nothing worked for two straight hours i attempted to force a showtime and didn't get the trigger one single time at this point the hard truth set in slowly there is no way to get through this boss fight with the rules that are set the only actual working trigger to a showtime on a major boss fight is the one where the boss is already almost dead unfortunately we never got to that part so triggering that did not work either since we don't have access to shin yes confident at this point yet there is also no way to bypass his immunity with choker's gun either i did think about breaking the rules for this one fight and use free sprays in order to get the frozen status on him freezing bypasses gun immunity so that would in theory work but even if we get through this boss fight we would run into the very same problem later on with phase 1 of the shito boss fight and unlike kaneshiro shido is not vulnerable to freeze so that wouldn't be an option then either with that being said this is where the run unfortunately ends once i took care of the bodyguards i did get kaneshiro down far enough with auto attacks to get him into kill range and lo and behold the showtime immediately triggered once he was that close which just confirmed my suspicion that this is the only working showtime trigger on major boss fights so yeah that is it for this run unfortunately even though this challenge didn't finish i am not done with this game yet as i already planned to start a new challenge run in the near future i actually already have something in mind so be sure to subscribe to the channel and also follow me on twitch in order to see what's about to come up here soon the links are also below in the video description with that being said that is it for me this time thank you very much for watching take care and i hope i see all of you next time as well

Channel: RagnarAlvarrGaming

Views: 84,856

Keywords: persona, p5, p5r, smt, shin megami tensei, ragnar, challenge, run, hard, mode, guns, only

Id: tvd2xKY05TA

Length: 29min 46sec (1786 seconds)

Published: Mon May 16 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/thezedna]

Hey all, I thought some of you might be interested in this :)

Recently I have tried playing through Persona 5 Royal using only Gun attacks as some kind of challenge playthrough.

I made a summary video of the playthrough for Youtube now too. I will definitely plan to do more challenges like this in the future!

If you have any questions or are curious about anything in particular let me know! :)

[u/polskidankmemer]

alt title: if Persona 5 Royal was set in America

[u/HC67]

Should had worn the demonica costume if You were only using guns