Can You Beat Shin Megami Tensei V Without Demons ?

in shin megami 10 c5 you fight with demons but today i will be playing the game without using any in combat before we start i will bring you up to speed when it comes to the rules i will follow for this challenge the number one rule is that i cannot deploy demons on the field which means that all the battles must be done with narubino only there is one exception to this rule and it's for grinding to level up quickly i have to get golf balls from these mitamas but there is a problem their weakness is always random if i use a spyglass to learn what the weakness is it ends my turn and they have a high chance to run away to make the process less annoying i will be allowed to have one demon in my active body only during grinding that way i can check your weakness pass with the demon and let najobino get the kill the second rule is that i must respect the level cap the maximum level cup i can be at for a boss encounter is 5 levels above them so if i'm finding a level 15 boss the highest i can go is 20. this is a rule i will always follow unless a boss i'm forced to face is at a higher level than anything that comes after it if that ever happens i will not be penalized for being over leveled next the game must be played on the highest difficulty which is hard in this case and lastly in order for this challenge to be completed i also need to obtain all the four endings available in the game and during this challenge i will be using the exp metamod dlc to speed up the grinding process that's it for the rules so can you beat megami 10 c5 without demons let's find out i boot up the game pick hard for the difficulty and we are ready to go in the opening cutscene we meet the main cast while listening to weird voices telling us how the world we know we soon changed forever and after that i go to join high school for our first day i wanted to watch a youtube video but sadly i couldn't and now i have to choose my name i had something in mind at first but i decided to go with hi-ho apparently the city is not safe and we are told to go back to the dorm in groups i try to ask students in the classroom but clearly no one gives a damn wow we leave the classroom and then meet three students yuzuru his sister miyazu and tao yuzuru proposes that we work with them and since i have no friends i joined them we pass through the shinagawa station but the path is blocked off now yuzuru and tower are missing so we decide to go look out for them in the tunnel there we meet wannabe vlogger ichiro dazai who is looking for monsters we join him inside and reunite with uzuru but before we can even do anything the ground starts to shake and we get crushed by the ceiling after getting isik height into another world dazai gets kidnapped by an angel and we are attacked by some demons luckily we are saved by jarvis and we fuse with him to become iron man and now we are ready for the tutorial fight the demon fight is fairly simple it's weak to a leg which is the main element we use hit the thing three times with zeo and it will be gone in no time i then get my first level up of the run and this is where i must choose if i'm going strength or magic for this specific challenge i will go with magic because it's the most consistent way to get press turns by hitting an enemy's weakness i will gain one additional action per turn which means that i can have up to two actions don't get me wrong though strength is really good but to get press turns it relies on landing critical hits and that's really not consistent enough for me after the fight we learned that the man we fused with is the proto-finned origami whatever that means the place we are in used to be tokyo but now it's a land infested by demons alchemy wants to reach tokyo tower and since we have nothing else to do we decide to do just that further we find our first leyland fount and we are introduced to gustav the shopkeeper his employees the meeman are skipping workday and we are asked to bring them back to him we bring back the first meeman and we get rewarded with the demon's essence we can't do much with that just yet but it will soon become extremely important after that we encounter a pixie and that's where the game teaches you how to recruit demons i will keep this pixie around solely for the purpose of mitama grinding and also because it's nice to have a companion it kinda reminds me of a certain someone [Music] after almost getting killed by the first enemies i take my time to root all the chests in this area i get the useful bretta essence and a bunch of items ahead we noticed a demon was about to get eaten by ah what the hell guys can you not wear pants looks like they didn't like that and now we gotta fight them this encounter serves as a tutorial on magatsui when activated omagatoki critical will guarantee a crit so long as the attack lands and isn't nullified so while they may not look like a scary bunch if you allow them to use their crits they can become annoying fortunately they don't have a lot of hp so we can kill them before they get to do their thing the demon in kimono thanks us and oh you want some but yeah she's kinda crazy so we decide to ignore her and move on ahead we get sucked into a found by a mysterious figure it's sophia and she is the she can perform essence fusion for us remember with demon essences we collected well here we can use them to teach skills to now bino this is very important because it's the only way we have to learn skills and we will need those if we want to complete this challenge i used it on meraki essence to learn agi and now i'm ready to go i then make my way forward and stumble upon an abscess these things are demon nests and they act as a mini boss fight that we can clear to unlock hidden powers our coming is scared and wants us to use demons but clearly we are not here to do that i completely disregard his advice and engage the enemy the first abscess fight has three mandrakes now this fight can go really well or really bad the mantras can spam zeo or use physical attacks what we want to see is for them to spam zeo because we nullify that and we make them lose their turns thing is if they are smart and spam physical attacks instead yeah that's gg my second attempt goes much better the ai decides to use 0 over and over instead of clicking the win button i do miss some moves but fortunately they kept using zeo and with that i'm able to defeat them we clear the abscess and obtain miracles these are permanent perks that we unlock when destroying an abscess and we can purchase them by using glory up ahead we meet yuzuru who survived because let's face it is the main character we tell him what happened to darzai and we agreed to keep looking for a way to find that angel i do a bit of exploring to grab all the loot and then we reach the shiva font and now young man wait hey i finally give up and take her with me her name is amano zako and she is essentially our navigator when exploring the map she can find useful items or spawn a random encounter that gets the first turn and then proceeds to destroy you yeah thanks very cool while traveling i found two glory apples and now that i have more glory i can buy miracles i will need i grab art of essence one because it lets me learn more skills from a demon essence i then get divine proficiency 1 to unlock one more skill slot for now bino and now i'm looking into the elemental mastery skills to increase my skill potential by the way that number is the potential boosting that number will increase the damage i deal with my skills and also reduce their mp cost i don't have enough glory to get all of them just yet so for now i will settle with fire and knives because these two are very useful for the first two bosses in the game and with that done it's time to level up i do a bit of grinding to reach level 15 and then we are ready to face the next abscess the mermaid can deal a lot of damage to you but that's not the main issue she also really loves to spam marin karine which is a spell that can charm you if you get charmed you have a chance to ignore orders and do pretty much nothing she can just rob you of your turns and destroy you when it's her turn thankfully i got some level ups before and it helped make this fight less annoying this absence in particular is easily the most important one for this challenge because it unlocks the miracle divine amalgamation this miracle allows you to inherit affinities from demon essences so instead of using an essence for its skills we can copy its affinities to change our own i buy the miracle and resume my journey to tokyo tower before doing that though i go inside this cave near the leyland found in there i find the demon essence which has no dark and resists fire and these two things are gonna come in handy for a boss we will face very soon past this bridge i find some ice gems and these are the first sources of heavy damage i can get my hands on following this we arrive at tokyo tower where we get a flashback in which we see what happened here 18 years ago the forces of lore and chaos are about to enter massive combat but everything stops when lucifer appears and delivers one of my favorite lines in the entire game the god you cravenly revere is dead man what a chad after this we get back to our senses but before we can fully process what happened we come face to face with the first real boss of this run the hydra the hydra has a nice weakness and that's exactly what i will abuse i start the fight by activating omagatoki critical and using my ice gems these items can create with magatsui and those gems are some of the strongest tools i have so far to make the most out of them i will only use them during my magatsui phase after dealing a lot of damage hydra's first turn is scripted it goes through an attack and then gathers magatsui whenever it has magazui it will always use toxic breath which is a dark move thanks to the demon essence we block completed that attack since we have an old dock and it ends its turn from there the goal is to use bufo and heal when needed dropping its hp below 50 will trigger the start of the second phase in that one hydra gets access to a new physical attack called frenzy my game plan here is still the same and i focus on landing buffoons by using medicines to heal the damage i take i eventually run out of mp but at this point hydra is really low and i have some ice shards i can use so i activate my magatsui and with these two eye shards the hydra finally bites the dust with the boss gone we can move forward i grab a glory apple and make my way past tokyo tower while passing by we meet the badass monk goku he gives us the return pillar and then tells us where we can find the angels i find some meeman grab the loot and then we reach kamiyacho the next abscess boss is ipon d'attara for some reason i forgot he was in week 2 eyes and kinda hurts i then remember his light weakness and use a light shower which insta kills him yeah light and dark elements have a chance to insta-kill when you hit the weakness thank god for that by the way is it is it just me or ippondera sounds like what what is this after clearing that abscess i went around and broke all the chests i could find you get a bunch of nice essences here but the one i was truly after is the sudama essence up ahead we learned from an angel where dazai was brought and we make our way to the diet building the angels there refuse to let us enter unless we slay some demons for them so we will have to do that but first i have to prepare i finally have enough glory and now i can get my hands on magatsui wellspring this miracle lets me recover some hp and mp at the start of the turn if my magatsui gauge is full it's an amazing miracle that will let us sustain ourselves in tough fights i also purchased out of essence 2 electric mastery 1 for the next boss and recovery master we won to improve our healing spells after that i decided to equip the sudama's essence for its force immunity and we are good to go i made my way to the hill and now we have to defeat allegor and his backup dancers this encounter is rough elego mostly uses physical and fire skills his scariest move by far is ground slice an attack with an increased chance to land a critical hit heligore is by far the biggest threat on the field and i really need to take him out first things do get scary when one of the andras gets secreted on me but fortunately the second one went for zen they keep using zen and that allows me to finish off allegor from there it's just a matter of not messing up and killing the hoot hoot to seize the victory we go back to reports of the angels but they are nowhere to be found the path is open though so we can now go and explore the dire building there is this very useful npc here who will mark the miemann location on the map for you if you pay him i'm gonna need to find all 200 of them and this is gonna help me a lot then i grab the glory apple and find the jack o lantern's essence it has aguila which is the first medium spell damage we get access to and i will gladly take it i finished setting up my skills enter inside the diet building and it's time to face nua this fight is a bit different you don't have to kill her to win instead the fight ends when she reaches 50 percent of her hp nua can use mazio but she will mostly use zanma the thing with nua is that normally she is pretty tall for how early you fight her in the game but there is actually an easy way to deal with her all you have to do is equip the sudama essence after charging magazui on the next turn she will go for a unique skill sacrifice of clay which is a strong force attack this could be scary but i have a force immunity so she doesn't get to deal damage at that point i decided to turn the auto battle on until i got enough mp to use my spells again it takes a bit but more auto battling later we reach to 50 threshold and take the victory the fight then gets interrupted by shoei yakuma with nua's auto half and we also learned that there is a device we can use to return back to tokyo further within we finally found dazai yuzuru joins us and we are now ready to use the transportation device we get back home but things get dicey when archangel abdul finds us luckily tao jumps in and manages to de-escalate the situation we join her in the meeting room and it's there that the truth is revealed to us we learned that the real tokyo became the netherworld we also meet koshimizu the director of bethel japan who forces us to work for him um guys is no one going to comment on how it looks like our gummy no anybody after everything is said and done we are asked to go back to school in there we witnessed a girl getting bullied her name is sauri and while she laments about our situation it looks like something is talking to her we then go to the classroom for a boring lecture yeah i signed up for slaying demons not slaying grades sorry not sorry the next day we get a call from yuzuru telling us that demons are invading tokyo and we must go to josoji temple to defend the place this fight isn't too bad the answers are weak to win while the lamias are weak to ice we keep eating their weaknesses and they drop dead but that's not the end though because there is still one more folk to deal with and that's the demon lamu this fight happens right after the first one and that might make it look scary but lamu in his current state is really weak he only has one prestern and spam's moodle so as long as you don't have a dark weakness you should be fine sadly he manages to escape and now we must go back to the school which is the next target of the demons it turns out that lamo was the voice how he was hearing and he wants to join with her they then disappear and now we get to explore the school upstairs we meet with uzuru and his dog they are searching the area for students and we must do the same somewhere else then i find that jack frost was running away from a non-consensual relationship guys guys remember if she breathes she is a we help him out and from now on is going to heal us for free oh thank you lila buddy we then take care of an ambush and we finally find sauri she straight up murders her bullies and they flee yet again through a portal we agree to take tower with us and we follow lamu in the netherworld during our exploration we come across yusuru who informs us that demons have kidnapped some students and we need to find them we find the four students and shortly after our gummy detects a new reading which seems to be a student being moved by a demon and that's gonna be our next objective we reach the location but the reading has moved and we must keep pushing forward i grabbed some chests on the way and then i reach the next font where i can start looking for demon essence yeah there is a specific essence i'm after right now and it comes from the oni it has resist physical as one of its affinities and that's huge you see the next two bosses are very heavy on physical skills and there is no way i will survive in my current state unless i have that passive skill what's great about it is that on top of reducing the damage you will take from physical attacks it also makes you immune to critical hits outside of omagatoki critical it takes a bit for my brain to start working but eventually i find out how to reach the chest and the essence is finally secured ahead we found dazai simping for abdil and we finally reached the next checkpoint i equipped the oni essence go in cadavers hollow to buy some items i will need and we are now ready if you go on the left here there's a partner spot with guaranteed physical dampeners and these things are about to become pretty useful very soon a little further we find the student we were looking for but we get interrupted by jean-pierre le lugarhu and now we have to fight him the lugarufi is so sweaty oh my god he hits you hard with his physical skills and likes to use critical aura to guarantee a crit on his next turn this is exactly why i wanted to grab the onion essence but even with that i'm still not out of trouble though damascus clone axel claw has his two multi-hits attacks and they hurt so bad much like the bosses we faced before his makatsui phase is scripted and he will go for souffle declare this is a good opportunity for me to showcase the dampeners actually these items can nullify damage from an element once and that's exactly how we avoid getting hit i make sure to attack and heal whenever possible but it's getting quite tough to survive he keeps using the multi-hit moves and i reach a point where i cannot recover from and now it's time for the salty run back during my previous battles i noticed that after using critical aura it would always follow up with damascus and axel claw wombo combos knowing that it's coming i try guarding to see how much damage i can reduce and i'm already in the red what the fortunately i managed to heal and from now on i'm planning to use physical dampeners for the turn after he uses critical aura if i can prevent him from using that combo on me it should give me more breathing room i managed to drop it in the red and i know that it's almost over since he looks pretty low right now i finally used my critical and to my surprise he still lives somehow at this point healing will not save me from his attacks so i have to win right here right now i go for the buufu and with that i'm able to take the w or at least that's what i thought as i was writing the script for this video this is the exact moment i realized that my recording froze it literally froze right before i got the win and had no longer saved at this point in the game quite frankly i was tempted to leave it at that and explain what happened but this would affect the quality of the video instead what i decided to do was to replay through the entire game again up until that point and record the lugaru fight yet again and that's exactly what you are about to see right now redoing this fight made me want to die and it also made me realize how rng heavy this fight actually is my last physical dampener blocks this attack and this time at last lugaru falls for good i purchased divide proficiency 2 to get another skill slot and i also want to grab the recovery mastery 2 but i'm broke so i go pick up a glory apple and now i can purchase that upgrade during my exploration i found the origami type 4 essence and that one is perfect we get diorama which is a stronger healing spell and a really good alex spell roonus thunder i also grabbed zama from the incubus essence and i think i'm ready now while traversing the area we get ambushed by i fion mccool shall test your strength you know i'm really thankful that voice acting is a thing because i had a very different pronunciation of his name in mind and i think you and i both know what i'm talking about here anyways now we're gonna fight theon with another physical heavy boss what makes this fight so scary is that on top of anything hard he can buff his attack with taurukaja and debuff your defense with piercing armor his bread and butter combo his taro kaja into piercing armor and then his unique skill on the following turn i do take a lot of damage from that but now that i have diamond at least i can recover most of what he dealt to me another thing to keep in mind is that it will use malaragion on his manga suit face and that's when you want to use your fire dampeners when fion gets low enough he will swap piercing armor with dark sword and that's really bad dark sword has a chance to inflict seal which prevents me from using skills and it sucks at this point in the fight i don't have any gems left and i'm really low on mp if i get sealed i cannot use my healing spells anymore i try to survive as long as i can but he ends up finishing me with buffula at this point i think it's pretty clear now that the real issue with this fight is when i get sealed with that in mind i decided to change my strategy i have one physical dampener and one attack mirror with these two items i'm about to buy some time and increase my odds of recovering from the status whenever i get sealed let's see how it goes i bring him down to about 30 percent hp and as expected he does seal me after two turns i managed to recover from the seal but then it seals me again what he is now in the red and i need to finish this before you start sealing me again and that's when i got an idea i used my magazine to land a crit with my spirit drain jam it allows me to steal mp while getting another action and with that i'm able to heal and with 24 mp i have more than enough for 2 renu's thunder the first one drops him even lower but it's not enough to kill i have no other choice the next windows thunder must kill so i decide to trust in myself and let it rip we clear out the misunderstanding with yon and we learned that the students is saved are being taken cared of in the fairy village and that's gonna be our next destination after that i follow theon's instructions slide down the tunnel find the forest down below and just like that we reach the fairy village the fairies there have been helping the humans but they are running low on medicines to help with that we are told to collect three gold apples from eden they are marked on the maps where i can find them pretty quickly we bring them to oberon in titania and all is well that ends well or at least that's what i fought until dazai comes to the village wounded it tells us where sauria and lamo are and i make my way there to deal with them once and for all if you thought everything was fine until now well it's about to change because lamu is the first major roadblock of the run the lambo fight has two phases that you have to do back to back the gimmick of the first phase is that it has six tentacles and you need to destroy all of them before you can damage the main body after two turns lamu will use babylon curse it's an almighty attack which deals damage and fully heals the tentacles so if you aren't able to destroy them before it does babylon curse you gotta start from square one again but wait it gets worse babylon curse has a chance to inflict mud on you the mod status removes one of your press turns before you get to act and since i only have one turn yeah it means that i don't get to play the game at all the only way to remove it is to wait for mod to wear off and pray to god that it doesn't proc multiple times in a row this phase is a dps check where you have a short window to destroy the tentacles and if you get unlucky with mud it will destroy you in most of my attempts it got the mud on me and i wasn't able to recover in time before it killed me after that i took a break then i went back to the drawing board to come up with a plan let me show you what i found i learned many things while getting destroyed by lamu its main elements are ice dark and elect i cannot feasibly block all of them so i have to choose which one to prioritize here i don't like getting cheese with yonga before i can move so i will go with the portal against essence to get knowledge lag that one also blocks confusion and this is gonna be irrelevant for the second part of the fight as for the other two elements i have to get some skills to resist them i grab resist dark from yakshini and resist eyes from farth i also make sure to get light mastery 1 and 2 and now it's time to say hi to lamu again my game plan now is to use magatsui to give myself the burst damage i need to destroy the tentacles before babylon curse comes out the first mod status is the worst one i have no other choice than just sitting there and hoping it goes away quickly fortunately for me it doesn't last more than one turn and now i can play the game again if i avoid the mustache i can then use my crit to take down another one of his tentacles it takes a while but after 16 minutes of poking lamu eventually i might need to destroy the last tentacle with a bit of luck and better planning i got out of phase one alive but it's far from over because now we must defeat lammu's final form and lamu's second form is actually so much easier than the first one babylon curse gets replaced with sales of ruin which is an almighty move capable of dropping my accuracy and evasion it can also inflict confusion with enteral food but i came prepared the only thing i can really screw me over now is missing at the bad time because of the accuracy drop and i have to watch out for that i have a good amount of fire gems and since they are stronger than aguilar i will be using them whenever i want to deal good damage with my omgatoki critical the strike proves to be solid and in no time lamu goes down for good at last salary is saved and now it's time to return home and have some fun you're mine oh and now we're dead so tao also dies but her plot alma refuses to let that happen and she offers a life to save our own we give sauri a nice and warm hug and thank god it's over we then go back to hq and report what happened after receiving some exposition on the meaning of najobino we go chill on the roof before the day is over the next day hq has a mission for us and it's time to take down the demon king we fast travel to the diet building take the passageway beneath the place and shortly after we make it to shioda where the angels and demons are fighting by the way i have a game for you take a shot each time someone mentions the word chaos chaos chaos chaos you know what no actually don't do that i unlocked dark mastery one and two and now i gotta start destroying abscesses again nagaraja goes down without much trouble and it unlocks divine proficiency tree meaning that now i can get another skill slot past that abscess we get a glimpse of cert who is one of the bosses we'll have to face in this area i used my newfound glory to get some mastery skills divine proficiency 3 the performant essence i found in shinagawa is gonna be very useful here a couple of key boss fights are weak to dark so i grab mudone and dark aroma to boost the dark damage we reach awa jicho but there's a gigantic flame barrier blocking the path one of the angels went to search for a way to deal with the barrier but they never came back and we have to find them now south from there we find the angel in question and it tells us where we can find the item we will need to destroy the barrier ahead i reach akihabara and i attempt to traverse the bridge but yakumur gets in my way edgy as ever he pulls out his nipple still and it's time to duel okay this shouldn't be too bad you owe me die alright i forgot something yakumu's physical attacks hurt way too much so i decided to get rid of this physical from the black ooze i also learned tarunda from apsara's essence and now i'm ready to start the fight again my damage is good so as long as i can keep attacking healing and debuffing him i should stay alive missing my attack is really what scares me because i really need to hit the weakness to get a press turn what also makes this fight tough is that yakumo is a certified smt player and he knows that buffing is the way to go tired of having no mp i decide to use one of my chakra part and that should last me for the rest of the fight and it is at this point that yakumu starts using his most dangerous move galvanic slash i managed to drop him in the red but then he goes for miss rush and lands mirage on me that airman decreases my accuracy by a lot and as long as i have that i can't really risk attacking at all i go for the hill and finally a mirage goes away i do manage to decrease his attack and during his turn he just goes for tarou kajal again and lands a galvanic slash at plus one if he was fully above right there it would have been over for sure i go for the hill and yakuma gets her turn to buff for free but now he is right where i want him there is no reason to use tarunda anymore so i go for two criticals and the last one sells the deal after the fight they leave and i can resume my journey oh look amano zako is back but then she lives prematurely i guess she's being stalked or something anyways we reached the leyland found and now the shrine should be just past this bridge wait did you hear that oh god it's the anzu death squad i hate this guy so much they have like truck size hitboxes and then there's that sound they make i managed to reach the shrine and i find the kunitsukami since they don't like their demon neighbors they accept to help us and we obtain a talisman with fire protection with our new charm we are able to go through the firewall and it's time to face the fiery giant i sirte reduce you to ash along with everything else [Applause] the thing with cert is that he is easy until he's not he has like 10 billion fire attacks that you can simply block with a fire no i did change my affinities for this fight and normally it should be fine but as usual there is a problem since i changed my essence i don't have a physical resistance anymore and that protected me from crits cert has a lot of fire attacks but he also has some physical skills and whenever he does use them he has a chance to crit me so if he lands a single crit on me he gets to attack me three times instead of two and with that high attack stat if he creates me there is no way around it i die now you might be wondering why is he bringing this up so much well it's because what happens next is extremely silly not only did he kill me with a crate in the first fight but then this same thing happened again and again and again and again can you believe this can you really believe this i died five times in a row to random ass crits like how what and like his attacks don't even have any christian secret or anything it just creeps me like this on my sixth attempt it doesn't get a crate on me and finally with this last buffula i'm able to get out of this mess hallelujah after the fight i meet does i will steal something for abdul i live in me and i find a dick arabia who is willing to give me some info on the next boss if i pay him in case you didn't know you don't even have to pay him you can refuse twice and he will give you the information for free yeah yeah i got scammed on my first playthrough ishtar is the next boss and we need to nerf her by destroying the source of her power if you don't destroy the devices take the easy way out and destroy all her devices one by one with that done i make my way up north dodged the onto death squad and now i can destroy the last abscess in this area i really hate your hunger and that's because it's one of the few enemies capable of healing themselves yeah dr rahan and whenever he uses that move he will recover all of his hp okay i will admit this fight made me salty but there is a good way to deal with it the snake is weak to seal and you can use that to prevent him from using any of his abilities including the healing nonsense i use my gems to seal him a couple of times and i can finally put this fight behind me with the last abscess gone i can go back to the tokyo station and bully ishtar and so in the name of i'm sorry but i'm sorry but i really can't take you seriously when you sound like that like why did they do that where i proved this just like yakumo she has a dark weakness and after destroying the devices she becomes a joke i just clicked modune over and over until she couldn't speak with that silly high-pitched voice anymore ishtar goes down and now we can enter inside the demon king castle i make my way to the second stratum and before i can go any further i have to face the dark god tranobog uh what he has four press turns if you've been paying attention you probably realize that most bosses we faced so far only had two preston icons for whatever reason chernobyl gets four of them and that's a big issue the pressure he is able to apply simply by attacking four times is insane but it gets worse when you look at his moveset with fang breaker piercing armor and blinding strike he is able to fully debuff me while still attacking at that point in the game i don't have access to any good ways to remove debuffs and even if i did he could very easily debuff me again and if somehow you're still not dead by then it will start using toxic that attack is the cherry on top of the rotten cheesecake it inflicts poison while dropping your defense and if he hits you with it you are now in a bind you can choose to remove the poison and die because you didn't heal or you can heal and get killed anyways because the poison damage you take is massive no matter what i tried the result was always the same chernobyl would just keep killing me over and over and over now you might be wondering what about the dampeners well there are two issues the first one is that i cannot buy physical dampeners so my supply is limited and the second issue is that blocking only takes away two press turns meaning that it would still have two more attacks for me and if i'm low it's a death sentence i'm afraid to say it but right now i'm completely world after realizing that i had no chance to win like this i stopped and started thinking about what i could do i spent what felt like hours looking at my essences to see if there was something i could use something that could save me and then it hit me i have access to tetracorn tetracon is a skill that repairs the physical attack back at default and this is massive nullifying only takes away two actions while draining or repelling that move completely stops the enemy phase yes you heard that right with this i could finally have a shot at surviving and with everything ready i head to the second stratum and decide to challenge the boss once more tetracon does exactly what i expected but here i actually learned something very interesting if you repair an attack with a debuff effect the 4 will get debuffed by that attack it's hilarious because now i get to debuff channelbox with chernobyl himself with this new strike the goal is to attack and then use my second action to cast tetra corn he goes for fang breaker twice and since that gets repelled he is now at -2 attack in that state i should be able to survive comfortably whatever he does so i go for a mountain and use my soma to fully restore my hp and mp he then gathers magatsui and i couldn't have asked for a better turn than this with enough mp and more tetracorn the nightmare is finally over and i managed to successfully defeat chernobog after getting pinballed by the wind puzzles on the third stratum i make it to the last floor of the castle and reach the main target of this whole operation aryak the demon king aryok starts the fight by summoning two decarabbias they can hit you pretty hard with argidane and megidola or use masuku kaja to raise the invasion and accuracy of the entire party aryak himself has a mix of physical and nice moves and one attack he likes to use a lot is mighty cleave it's a strong move with a fifty percent chance to miss but if it lands it's a guaranteed crit thanks to ice now i don't have to fear buffoodine or mabufu dying and with resist fire the decarabbi has become less threatening reynolds thunder at plus seven deals a lot of damage to aryak and i soon reached a threshold for his magatsui phase and now ladies and gentlemen this is where the fern starts you see when arya gets low enough his brain goes unga bunga mode and he only knows how to spam physical attacks meaning that it just keeps walking into my tetra card his de carabias can't even do anything now because aryak always goes first and ends the turn by hitting himself i could kill him with an attack but that wouldn't satisfy me i want to style on him to show him who's the man so i dropped him low enough use tetracorn and then ariox proceeds to kill himself [Music] aryok proved to be a giant puss and now that the raid on this castle is over we can get back to hq the demon king may be gone but our tokyo is now fading away we also learned that soon a summit with the international branches of bethel will be held to decide what to do moving forward the next day we make our way to the diet building and just there you can feel the tension rising already we get to the conference hall where we meet the leaders of the four other branches of bethel and this is easily my favorite cutscene in the game abdel who is now mad realizes that we don't fit with our narrative and she wants us gone for that this is where i started using profaneland and i really wish i did it sooner it's a heavy dark attack with a chance to poison and it's perfect for this fight as long as you aren't weak to anything she does it's a straightforward encounter and eventually abdul will be forced to submit having witnessed my true power the other gods cut their ties with bethel and started looking for ways to become nagobino themselves the war for the throne of creation is about to begin back in tokyo a mysterious voice tells us to go to the roof and it's tau her soul was reborn as a goddess and she has the power to bring us where we must go next we accept our offer and she brings us to taito the fourth area that leads to the throne of god there are three keys that we must obtain in order to open the path to the imperium aka the front of god and each of these keys is guarded by one of the gods we saw at the summit as for the abscesses around in total there are six of them that we need to destroy to get the late game miracles and it's time to work on that we unlock really good miracles from this one and that's gonna be it for the abscesses now i see this but there is still one last abscess that i didn't clear yet don't worry in due time i will get back to it but for now let's just say that it's a special one as i'm making my way to the next leyland fount i meet dazai who conquered his inner demons and now he's oh [Laughter] i came with this guy dude i have a ton of glory now and it's time to go grocery shopping i get out of essence 3 to unlock all the skills i can learn from demon essences then i fully max the macerated miracles for recovery support ice and force i can't purchase anything else yet because i'm broke but don't worry once i get my next glory paycheck i will take care of that for now i will leave it at that and start preparing for the boss fight in taito zeus odin and vasuki all of them have something in common and i think soon you will realize why i say that i grabbed zombarian from amman ozako and i'm ready to face zeus with punta spana it drops my attack and defense and i do take a lot more damage when i'm debuffed like that he also hits kinda hard with my zerodyne and brave blade which has an increased chance to crit if you don't have a physical resistance zeus has like two things you need to watch out for technically only one the first is kieronos a strong elect piercing move but he never goes for it in this fight i'm not sure what's to deal with it and the second one is madness glint and that's where the issue comes from madness glint is simply maddening it does a lot of damage and it has a chance to seal or confuse you yes confusion because we all love that don't we and that's not the only thing you have to worry about because right after using madness glint he will go for empowered animals and that one grant his next attack a damage boost on top of the ability to pierce after animus on the next turn it will go from my zeodine into a physical attack i can leave the piercing mazodine but there is no way i can survive the following attack and that's what i need to change getting clapped by zeus reminded me that i have wronged as essence and that one has physical repel so i changed my affinities equipped knowledge and with that i can deal with these two main elements now on paper that sounds great but there is an issue with my setup right now if they cannot hit you late game bosses will start spamming almighty moves over and over and this becomes very apparent when you have a physical repel and knowledge because zeus just starts spamming madness glint so much more now the damage i take i can deal with that the confusion chance on the other hand on my fourth attempt he does get the confusion but for the first time in years i don't hate myself while madness glint is still annoying as long as i don't get unlucky i can make sure that i survive the turn after he goes for empower animus zeus gets in his low animation pose and that's when i get an interesting idea now that i have physical repel you might know where this is going i bring zeus low enough and it's time to watch what happens how about this zeus is down and with this victory we obtain the key of benevolence after that i head over to nordic territory do some platforming on these cool looking cubes and at the top i come face to face with the old father odin and this fight is kind of a big joke if you block physical and elect odin cannot hate you he will try whatever he can and fail miserably while you flex on him with your affinities the only instance where he can damage me is after he charges with magatsui because that's exclusively when it goes for mabufudain so long as you use the ice dampener though there is nothing he can do to tickle you the funniest thing is that he has a piercing move gun here is signature attack yeah that thing is a physical piercing move but for whatever reason his ai never goes for it i go for a final zambarian and now it's time to start guarding [Music] we get the key of harmony and odin is no more and with that done only one god stands in our way i grabbed akibarian and now it's time to fight vasuki vasuki is one of the few bosses with four press turns in this game and his main thing is that he likes to use inflict status effects on you his combo of choice is to poison you and then use venom chaser a skill that doubles in power when you are poisoned unfortunately for him venom chaser is physical and i just so happen to repel that type of damage all in all vasuki isn't that big of a deal the poison hurts sure but it doesn't get to follow it up with anything that could put me in danger noticing how low he is i stop attacking and you already know what time it is vasuki goes down and with that we get the last key we needed the key of austerity and with that done we fast travel to taito go past the bridge and now we must go through the last dungeon of the game the temple of eternity the temple is a little confusing with all the branching paths but it's not too bad the main gimmick of this dungeon is that if you go through these doors time will stop when time is frozen you can't open doors you can't loot chests or fight enemies and you have to go through a specific door for time to start again i don't dislike that gimmick but it mostly feels like it doesn't do anything i recommend exploring this area because you can find a lot of high level demon essences in here after reaching the end of the dungeon we come face to face with another trial he who speaks on behalf of the lord metatron this is one of the bosses i was worried to fight and that's because metatron has no weakness we can exploit he resists almost everything outside of physical and dark as you can imagine that's pretty bad for our magic build i can only guess press turns against him whenever i have makatsui now the first part of the fight is pretty simple it goes for attacks i can easily deal with his physical attack gets repelled and whenever it does a light move it gets blocked based on just seeing this you would think that i got this in the bag right well if it looks like i'm okay it's because he was holding back when he starts using fire of sinai things get really tall in a second phase metatron will now focus on using almighty attacks and he can buff himself with taro kaja eventually it gets low enough for me to see his animation change but things get much more difficult from there when he gets this low he starts using megidoleon and spamming debilitate on you the ability decreases all my stat at once by one stage and that's extremely dangerous now i'm really struggling to deal damage to him and i'm just buying time until my magazine bar is full again it finally happens but then he stacks two debilitates on me buffs himself with tarkarja and goes for a fire of cyanide i cannot survive now it was pretty clear to me that the longer the fight took the harder it would be to win so i decided to change my approach i got dark aroma to increase my dark damage and challenge metatron again this time i know how the fight works and i'm going all out and this is where i noticed how good doctor roman was that passive skill grants you a 20 damage boost and honestly it makes a bigger difference than our father would with this i'm about to bring metatron in the red really fast he starts using megiddolian and debilitate and that's a reminder that i have to finish him off right here right now there is no point healing so i keep attacking he procks my enduring soul and fully debuffs me with debilitate i use a dispel charm to remove the debuffs and he does use the ability again to put me at -1 but now my magatsui bar is finally full the risk is there but i take my chance and with this last omagatoki critical i send meditron back to his creator where is your guard where is your guard now i go back to the top throw the temple and with the three keys in my possession i can now open the door that leads to the empyrion after that we meet the different parties we want to reach the throne and we hear about their ideologies the mysterious voice asks us to choose a path and now comes the point of no return where we need to choose an ending like i said back in the intro i will go for all the endings and first i will uphold god's order which is the law one the real voice tells us that it awaits our arrival and after going through the mirror on the other side lies the pillar imperial further ahead we meet daza in abdial who ask us to take down tsukuyomi wait did he just do that now i can get back to exploring this area and let me tell you it's full of goodies you can grab very useful essences here like sandalphon vishnu and basibo as well as some good healing items koshimizu and uzuru finally fuse and proceed to completely destroy daza in abdia it is now up to us to uphold god's order and to do so we must defeat the moon god to kuyomi this fight is a very unique one tsukuyomi can use shadow clone due to and he has two versions of that technique a false and the true one the fourth replication creates a clone that cannot fight back but blocks any attack before added after the clone disappears he will then use true replication to create a copy of himself capable of attacking you and the amount of clones he can create will increase as he gets weaker but by far his most devastating move is his signature piercing attack moonlight frost as far as i know there is no real way to tell which one is the real tsukuyomi whenever he has clones i don't want to gamble with a single target skill and that's why i prefer using an aoe fire spell like ragnarok for this with ragnarok at the very least i'm sure to hit the real one most of the time from here on out my strike is clear i make sure to stay at full hp whenever the piercing move is coming and i use ragnarok to bring him lower and lower i do manage to weaken him enough and at this point i'm pretty confident in my stride does your luck wax wait wait a minute he healed okay this one is actually bs like look at this moveset drama is nowhere to be seen and somehow it can use an attack that i don't even know about the hill makes the fight drag longer but it doesn't do much in the long run he then gets ready to use moonlight frost and this is what happens next there's no dodging this i then go for my omagatoki critical and give him a taste of my ragnarok tsukuyomi falls and with that we successfully got rid of our boss and our friend this is a certified smt moment the path is clear and i make it straight to the throne i reach the throne room and i find my good body goku in here but we are not alone new one yakuma make it in time and now we must face their nahu bino form nua is also an interesting fight just like tsukiomi she is weak to fire and ragnarok is perfect for the job for the most part she tries to hurt me with the obarion and maziodine but all she is really doing is healing me here for free her unique mechanic is that she can use electrify to activate the thunder bits you see around her after activating them she will then use her piercing move rising storm dragon and this attack gets stronger the more beats she has so the goal here is to describe his beats to weaken the damage of her ultimate attack what can make this fight difficult is that she likes to use slumber vortex to put you to sleep while she is charging your lightning bits belzebob's essence is perfect for this fight and all you need to do is to slap on null force to completely shut her down poor noah tries her best but she is completely hardcounted by my setup and before long the rising dragon goes down forever with new one yakuma gone now truly no one stands in our way to reach the throne goku reveals his true identity and with the help of the goddess i make my way to the throne where i choose to preserve the order of god and i get interrupted by none other than lucy for himself he tells us that what we are about to do is pointless and in typical lucifer fashion he refuses to elaborate further and we must go to his house to learn the truth i accept his invitation and make my way to the realm beyond earth and heaven there he shows me his true form and now it's time to face the final boss of my path lucifer pretty much knows or released everything outside of dark so he won't be able to get press turns outside of omagatoki critical his coverage is also really good and you definitely don't want to be weak to anything he can do the main thing he does is that he can summon one of two stars brimstone or cockitus when he summons brimstone he gains a fire weakness and the star itself is weak to ice once his kokaitos it's the other way around he gains a nice weakness while the star is weak to fire if you fail to destroy one of those on the next turn he will go for falling star and let's just say that you really don't want to get hit by that as the fight goes on i managed to get him in a loop he goes for magillion and then summons the star i destroy the star and on the following turn it goes from tentara foo which gets blocked and i get to use my critical to deal good damage this works great for me but then my worst fear becomes reality my glacial blast fails to hit the star and i get obliterated in the next turn it's a shame but now that i have the info i need i can prepare accordingly i use vishnu's essence to learn mudobarion and high dark aroma with this i should be able to deal more damage to him the most important thing i need to do is to make sure i can destroy the stars as such i grab bufo baryon from vasuki and aggie baryon from adramelec i also take ice and fire pleromonas to maximize my chances to one shot the stars after that i use the stat boosting items i found during my journey and i go to say hi to the lord of chaos once more with these changes my damage is a lot better thanks to play roma's i can go for lucifer first because i know that on my second action i will be able to one shot the stars and with baseball's essence protecting me from confusion it makes the fight less self-inducing when lucifer gets low enough he starts among the two stars at once with my old build this would be a problem but now i can destroy them in one shot and i can avoid getting buddied by the fallen star he did put up a good fight but with my final moodle barrion i managed to make the lord of chaos fall before me [Music] i consumed lucifer's knowledge met dazzle in abdia for the last time and with that i got the law ending but that's not the end though i still have more endings to get so i use my powers to rerun time back to the big choice and this time i will go for the chaos path in this timeline we sided with koshimi's when usual and they ask us to defeat dazai and abdel because the plot demands it they don't fuse and our two bodies get destroyed by abdel's now beanie form pretty early in the fight she will summon her wing and her arm he also starts using her piercing skill purgatorium and that's the one we gotta watch out for the arm attacks and uses masukugaja while the wing goes for makara khan to cover abdel's weakness getting rid of the wing is a priority here because it prevents you from dealing damage i only had glacial blast so that proved to be a bit difficult as long as the wing casts makara corn i can't really hit abdul so i'm mostly waiting for her to do a fire attack i can drain that and since it ends the turn the wing doesn't get to cast the spell again it's kinda hard to land all my attacks because of the evasion boost but i do manage to destroy the arm and the wing eventually she doesn't summon them again and from there the fight is pretty straightforward deal enough damage and she will enter a second phase where she starts using impedance a move that won't hit you if you have a physical immunity she tried her best but it wasn't good enough and with one more glacial blast i managed to take the wind with dasa and abdulgon we make it to the throne room where new one yakumu await us once more this fight is identical to the one in the lapa the strat we used back then still works here so i keep hitting her with ragnarok until noah is forced to submit and now with the power of the throne we can recreate the world without anyone getting in our way hello there of course you would show up here too it's time to dance with lucy once again unfortunately for him we already know all of his tricks he tries to intimidate me with his two big balls but i won't be fooled my real target is right between the balls and now that he became weak to fire i can seal the deal with one last aggie baron lucifer goes down we meet koshimizu and uzuru for the last time and with that we got the chaos ending so we know what happens for law and chaos but what about the neutral one what about destroying the throne well if you decide to destroy the throne abdullah gets bodied then you face tokyo in the throne room and he also gets bodied after these two are no more you destroy the throne and the game ends really like what where did lucifer go what is this if the neutral ending feels incomplete to you it's because it is there is actually a secret ending tied to that one and to unlock it you need to do a bunch of side quests in total there are four quests that you need to do before choosing the neutral ending three of those are tied to specific demons amano zako kansu and theon once that's done there is one final thing that we must do but first i need to prepare i find the last mii mine i was missing and report back to gustav to get my rewards for finding the last meeman you get the set of four bombs which are stat boosting items for the narubino once that's done i grind to level 99 and make my way back to taito do you remember that one abscess i left alone well it's time to see what's in there and this is the biggest meme in the entire game all these low tier demons are level 99 and they get an insane amount of press turns if you weren't convinced that levels mattered a lot in this game this is the fight that teaches you that the hard way one of the scariest enemies here is actually the slime because it can inflict poison on you oh what's that you wonder why i'm so scared of the poison allow me to show you [Music] what now if you have the right setup you don't need to be that high level i just didn't need to clear this thing until right now once you take care of the meme abscess you get some brand new miracles skillful conversation decreases the amount of magatsu he consumed when you use magatsui skill the bar doesn't get emptied totally and it makes getting back to full a lot easier the next interesting one is dread which lowers the random stat of the enemies at the start of the fight with these two things in my possession i go to asakusa and make my way to the portal where vasuki was standing [Music] i am the destroyer [Applause] in order to get the true neutral ending the final obstacle in our way is none other than the hindu god of destruction shiva where do i even start the word heart is not enough to describe how insanely ridiculously challenging shiva actually is allow me to explain what makes him so difficult shiva will always start the first turn the same way by using his unique skill tandava and then summoning his allies tandava is an almighty skill with a guaranteed chance to drop your defense to the max yup it doesn't matter if you are buffed or not tandava will bring you to -2 defense all the time the two enemies shiva will always summon first are ganesha and kali ganesha goes for matarunda and hits you with critical wave while kali focuses on masakunda and fogna and right from the start things are already not looking good with all the debuffs going your way you get crippled really hard regarding shiva's cronies here it's actually better to let them alive if you are immune to their attacks you can let them work into your blocks to quickly end the enemy phase they are pretty much paid actors especially ganesha he is the real mvp if you do kill them then shiva can summon his other servants dakini and parvati dakini will boost the attack while parvati raises the defense personally i would rather deal with debuff than buffs and for that very reason i think this right is to keep ganesha and cali around the fight at first seems manageable because shiva keeps attacking into your immunities but once you deal enough damage to him shiva's ferdari literally opens and he will no longer fall for that instead what he will do is spam magdolian and end his turn with impala animus that buff grants the piercing effect whatever move he decides to do next and your affinities mean pretty much nothing to him from that point very soon after you get to that phase he will start summoning an hunter and if you see that snake you need to kill it asap you can afford to let the others live but ananta must be taken down why rather than explaining it to you i will just show you this clip and this right here is why the snake has to go once ananta is introduced this fight becomes even more difficult to deal with whenever it's alive you have to keep attacking it but if you do that it means that you don't deal damage to shiva and while all of that is happening your attack is getting debuffed by ganesha and at -1 or -2 you will hardly be able to kill an anta before it gets your turn to move and all of that is assuming that shiva didn't kill you already with his impeller animus boosted attacks no matter what i did i couldn't see a way to win this i start throwing myself against the wall and started thinking about an actual strategy to defeat shiva let me share with you what i noticed during the enemy phase shiva gets two actions while his servants only get one speaking of shiva in total he has five allies but all of them cannot be on the field because there are only four slots one of them is taken by shiva himself the other one is taken by ananta and the two remaining slots are for two of his servants between these four out of them ganesha and kali are the best for me because i would rather deal with the debuffs than the buffs now if i want to find solutions i need to understand what the problems are and in total i highlighted three problems the debuffs my affinities and my stats the first major problem is getting debuff shiva himself and his allies are able to fully debuff me if i let them do it and that's something i cannot allow to happen simply removing the debuffs wouldn't be enough and that's why i thought about using luster candy luster candy boosts all your stats by one stage and if i keep using it at the right time i can buff myself to match their debuffs up until now you probably wondered why i didn't use buff that much it's simply because of how long they last a buff is actually for only 3 turns including the turn you set it up and i cannot get the press turn while buffing if i buff my turn ends so turn one is already wasted turn two i get to attack and then turn three i already have to worry about buffing again if i don't want the effect to go away fortunately for me in the end game there is a skill called boon boost and it increases the duration of buffs and debuffs by one turn there is also an ex version of that skill and it adds two turns to the duration if i use one of those two skills i might be able to fix the primary issue with buffing in a solo run boom boost ex is only available on bells above and shiva's essence percept is inside the imperium and that's your problem because i need to beat shiva before i enter in there in order to get the true ending so i cannot get that as for the second essence yeah i am not getting that one the next issue comes from my affinities i don't have repair or drain skills that i can equip on narupino simply blocking only takes away two press turns and i often found myself in a situation where they still had one more press turn to do something to me i need to make sure the ads with their turn on me whenever they attack while also doing the same thing with shiva so i looked at the skills they used and listed their types mirage physical fire and elec if i want to block mirage the best i can do is to use a demon essence that nullifies it repel and drain physical are the most important one for this fight and these skills can only be obtained from new one fallen appdeal these two demons only become available in new game plus after finishing the game with all of this in mind now i have to pick the most interesting essence i did some research and two demon essences stuck out to me bell zebob and xao gongen belzeba blocks mirage and also comes with drainer leg which saves me your skill slot the other one is daogongen much like belzerbob it can also block mirage but what makes it really interesting is the amount of status elements it blocks it's immune to sleep charm confusion and mirage and all of these make it synergize really well with one specific item in this game the muscle drink the muscle drink is an item that restores hp beyond the max but it comes at the price it has a chance to inflict charm confusion or mirage on you i think you know where i'm going with this without going against essence i can use the muscle drink without worrying about any side effects this gives me a way to have more speed than normal whenever i need to tank attacks from shiva and the last problem i had was with my stats i need to increase them but now that i am at level 99 there is no way for me to level up anymore there is a way to increase your stats without leveling up and that's with the bombs the stat boosting items for najobino here is the catch though there is no really good way to farm them i started collecting data and these were the best sources of bombs i could find some of the rewards you get for completing the meeman side quest are bombs and you get them at specific breakpoints 105 145 and 200. the dlc quests also give you bombs for completing them you can get a good amount of those from the artemis cleopatra and mephisto quests and defeating the finns will also reward you with a bomb at the end of the fight and the last guaranteed way to get some comes from specific partners parts some partner sports have fixed reward the first time you pick them the mega 10 speed running discord made a very useful resource sheet for the game and thanks to that i know where to find the right partner spots for the bombs so if we review everything i need more stat boosting items i need demon essences that i can only get past shiva and i also need to go to new game plans to unlock exclusive demons for their essences what i had to do became clear to have a shot at defeating shiva i had to go to new game plus there was no way around it with my determination at an all-time high i finished the game unlocked nua and fallen appdeal as a result and i was ready to pick my new game plus option i picked reborn to carry over everything and speedrun my way through the game to reach shiva i found all the me man again to get the bomb prices and then i bought the dlc quest and finished them to get my rewards i also fought the fiends for the loot and went to other partner spots that i knew had a bomb in them once i had done all of that i needed to get new one abdiel for their essences the thing is to get those demons you have to do a lot of fusion and that's something i never did during my whole run so i had to recruit a bunch of demons and fuse them together until i had what was required to make nua's second form and fallen up there after that i had to level them up until i got an essence from them it took longer than i expected but eventually i got the essences i wanted i used nua's essence to learn drain physical and challenge shiva once more i know that shiva won't start using impala animals right away so i use the first couple of turns to set up and deal as much damage as i can not too long after that they start calling ananta and now the real fight begins once i reach the hp threshold shiva gathers magatsui for the next turn he will always go for megiddo leon after that and since it's an almighty attack i cannot negate the damage i will have to tank it so i attack shiva and use the luster candy to buff myself and decrease the damage i'm about to take shiva goes for megidoleon and right after that ganesha goes for critical wave which gets drained it ends the magatsui phase and here you can see why i wanted to get drained physical so badly as long as shiva goes for megiddolion i'm able to stay alive but as soon as he goes for tandava again my stride breaks apart it puts me back to -2 and then ends his turn with empowered animus once again i'm in a situation where i have to choose between healing or removing the debuff tandava dealt a lot of damage to me so there is no way i can set that amount of hp but fortunately this is where the muscle drink comes in handy with that item i can recover more than my maximum hp and it helps me surviving the turn when it goes for the empower animus boosted attack or at least that's what i thought until this happened and after shiva did this it all went downhill from there in the next attempt i missed another twice and shiva killed me with a crit i tried to fight again and it was going okay until shiva landed two crits on me back to back this broke me i was trying so hard to make it happen but nothing was working even at plus two accuracy i could still miss my attacks and get wildly screwed and because this fight is so long there are so many opportunities for luck to get involved the changes i made were good ones but shiva was still dealing too much damage to me and this is where it dawned on me i came really far and got three out of the four endings for the game but without the fourth ending this challenge will not be completed and to get that forth ending i must defeat shiva who happens to be the hardest boss in the entire game and i need to do that without using demons all by myself [Music] i'm truly sorry guys it pains me to say this but i'm afraid to say i really don't see a way to win this no i refused to give up now that i was calm and collected i decided to look at what i had learned while fighting shiva in new game plus so what went wrong the hardest segment of the fight was specifically when shiva would tandava and end the turn with impala animus whenever that happens he puts me in a situation where i'm forced to heal meaning that i would have to tank his upcoming attack at -2 defense after empower animus shiva can do one of four things mazil baryon maragi baron hades blast and akashic heart out of these four akashic heart is the hardest hitting move and that's the attack that gets me killed 99 percent of the time on average this attack hits me for one thousand 1290 damage so i started thinking the muscle drink has an overhealing effect which increases your max hp by 30 and with the bombs i'm able to raise my hp stat up to 999. if i use a muscle drink with 999 hp i can reach 1298 this would increase my odds of surviving and if i'm going to do another new game plus cycle to get health bombs i will also get vitality bombs to reduce the damage i take if i can achieve these two things then i might be able to survive the boosted akashic heart but by far the most interesting thing i found was about shiva's ai if i blocked physical fired and elect it would spam megydollyon and empower animus all the time but if i only block physical and elect while resisting fire shiva would use maraghibarian more often megidolion is an almighty attack and outside of increasing my defense i have no way to reduce its damage but if i were to use meraki baron more often it would go straight into my resistance and i would take even less damage this is very convenient because the sour gungan essence has a natural fire resistance then i had to think about what i would put in my 8 skill slots and this is what i came up with i only need 2 offensive skills one to hit shiva and one for ananta for that purpose i will be using bufarian and zombarion i will also use luster candy because it's mandatory for countering the debuffs this is all i will use in combat so the five remaining slots can be filled with passive skills boon boost eggs is needed to delay as much as possible the moment where i will need to buff again so i grab that i also get drain physical which is a must to end the enemy phase whenever a physical attack is used in order to consistently two-shot an anti-wall buff i will also need high force pleroma and the last skill i will use is high restore gaining 20 mp each time i hit a weakness is amazing for conserving my resources especially when coupled with magazine wellspring i spent a lot of time thinking about this but there is no way i can fit a healing move or enduring soul for this fight at the very least i will still have the widowed goat and that will be useful as for the healing this means that i have to rely on items and the amount i have needs to be enough for the entire fight i looked specifically for the full heal items i could use and this is what i will have for this fight 10 muscle drink 10 bead 5 b chain and 5 soma for a grand total of 30 healing items and now the last thing i had to do was to run through the game again to gather more bombs with this new found hope i defeated lucifer picked reborn and replayed through it as fast as i could to reach shiva again this time as well i finished the meeman questline destroyed the fiends for the bombs and inspected all the guaranteed partner spots i could find with all of that done it was time to start boosting my stats after what felt like hours of spamming a my hp style was maxed my stats were as high as i could bring them and my skills were ready once again i entered the portal and challenged the god of destruction shiva i start the fire attacking and buffing right away with this i take less damage from tondava and get to start buffing before shiva's goons are here i drop his hp lower and now comes the tough part shiva goes for tandava draws my defense to -2 and ends to turn with impeller animus with the muscle drink i'm able to survive his miragibarian with enough hp and this allows me to use a dispel charm to remove the defense debuff i can afford to do that because i know i have enough hp to survive whatever shiva does on the next turn the snake shows up and with my current setup ananta gets too short and i can resume buffing again i'm not scared of the magatsui phase anymore because right after shiva's attack ganesha will end the turn for me this time around i'm playing more aggressively with my obagatoki critical and i use it whenever it makes sense to improve my dps i see shiva going for moragi baryon a lot more than usual and this confirms what i thought about manipulating his ai soon after shiva goes for tandava and as the enemy turn ends my buffs are about to run out i make sure to kill ananta and use luster candy to refresh the timer and with that i'm able to successfully survive the enemy phase now i'm still at -1 defense but i have a decent amount of hp i use an ambrosia to preserve my healing items but shiva goes for akashiguard and a -1 defense it procs my goat this was a big mistake and now i have nothing to protect me if i ever mess up the fight goes on and here you can really see the importance of the defense boost reducing the damage i take means that i can delay the moment i need to ill which allows me to save my items for when i truly need them another thing that plays into this is that i get healed by ganesha whenever he attacks me and i also recover 60 hp at the start of my turn with magatsui wall spring when you add all of these things together instead of having to heal a return i only need to heal every 3 turns and when i only have a limited amount of healing items it makes a big difference while observing what the enemies did i noticed that they all followed a sequence and by that i mean that they did specific things in a particular order in shiva's case he has a main phase where it goes for magdalen and empower animals boosted attacks and when you reach a certain threshold he will end that sequence with tondava into empowered animus and repeat the whole process again this also applies to his servants and i can use that to my advantage to get rid of ananta before it gets a chance to attack whenever it gets summoned by ganesha kali goes for fogginer and since i get blocked out with my essence shiva doesn't get to do his second action after that i get to attack an hunter ganesha goes for critical wave ending the enemy phase and then i can attack the snake again to finish it off there is one more useful thing to note about ananta and it has to do with how often it gets summoned on the field with my current strategy whenever an attack goes down it doesn't get summoned during the following turn so long as i stick to the plan i get a turn where i can freely attack shiva without having to worry about the snake and while all of this is happening i also get to sneak in some hits on shiva here and there as long as i follow the script and keep myself buffed i am able to keep this fight under control and eventually when i saw this i couldn't believe it shiva who was standing tall and pummeling me this entire time was finally in the red i attacked an enter and used the dispersed charm to remove the defense debuff without debuff gone i was able to tank megiddolion and ganesha ended the turn while i did manage to come this far i needed to remain really cautious shiva still had more scripted tandavas i needed to survive and the fight was far from over by using luster candy at the right time and healing only when i needed to i was pushing shiva lower and lower each time i brought him below a threshold i had to tank one tandava after another and each time that happened i then had to survive his empower animus boosted attack at -2 defense based on my estimation shiva still had one more tandava in store for me and as expected he went for it i thanked tandava and prepared myself for the most important turn of the fight shiva was boosted with empowered animals and my defend was at -2 i attacked used my muscle drink and braced myself it went for meraki baryon and fortunately that's one of the attacks i can survive for sure from now on there will be no more tandava and i must not miss ananta i'm about to remove the debuff with my dispel charm and a non-tag goes down the snake comes back again but i make sure to take it out with two zambarion and now i am finally in the good position with nothing standing in my way i can finally go for my omagatoki critical [Music] and david that was the most stressful fight i had to deal with hands down it took 55 minutes of intense combat but at last shiva had been defeated with all the quests completed i defeated metatron chose the neutral path and faced abdiel sadly for her i became extremely overpowered while training with shiva and took abdiel down without breaking the sweat once abdill and dazzler are gone nua shows up and reveals that their real plan was to use the throne to create a world without gods and demons she then leaves and this confirms that all the requirements have been met for the true ending in the throne room i made tsukuyomi and he gets his ass handed to him and this is where we get the choice to use the throne to achieve our new goal i pick my choice and lucy shows up this time he invites me for dinner and i kindly accept his offer we meet at his house but the plan has changed and now we must trade blows this part of the fight is the same as the one we did before and this time i can survive the falling star as per usual i destroyed the stars hit lucifa with dark and soon after [Music] yup in the true neutral ending lucifer has a new phase if the first phase could be described as defense mode this one is all about offense lucy focuses on physical attacks and can buff himself to deal even more damage now he also gains a weakness in this one a weakness to light the drain physical i got for the shiva fight is also amazing here and protects me completely from deadly fury with hot dark matter lucy can buff his attack into the max and that's threatening whenever he goes for contempts of god on the next turn he will increase his action count from 2 to 4. that would be scary if he didn't go for a basic attack for some reason in this phase fry kugel and magma axes are the moves i need to worry about because they don't care about my resistances and if lucy is at max attack they will hurt a lot it does bring me low but thanks to my buffs it's not enough and i get to use my glacial blast to deplete this hp bar [Music] lucy doesn't want to let me go and now we enter phase 3 of the fight it's similar to phase one but with some changes here and there all of his elemental attacks are now severe aoes and he trait is two falling stars for a more powerful one called the morning star the morning star does look scary but it shares the same weaknesses as lucy with ragnarok i get to deal damage to both of them and quickly get rid of the star after that there is no weakness for me to hit here so i mostly focus on buffing and healing until my magatsui bar is full eventually lucy gets annoyed with my boss when low he starts to use debilitate and will summon the star once again i do end up destroying the star but the old man is very stubborn and brings it back again sadly for lucy i don't need to target the star anymore it was a long journey but with the last bit of my mp i go for ragnarok and lucifer falls for good with lucy gone i part with my good friend our gummy and proceed to create the word void of gods and demons and there you have it folks i can confirm that it is possible to beat chile megami tensei 5 and all of its endings without demons smt 5 is a game i have enjoyed immensely and to me this video is a love letter to a series i discovered recently and fell in love with i wanted to use this opportunity to say thank you to the mega 10 speedrunning discord server for making a detailed resource sheet for this game the info i found there helped me tremendously during the run i also want to say thank you to the peeps from the smt modding discord server without their help i wouldn't have been able to make this video as good as i wanted it to be and i'm truly thankful for that and lastly i want to say thank you to you the viewer will watch this video happy new year take care and have yourself a good one nice to meet you

Channel: Deus

Views: 187,666

Keywords: #speedrun, #challenge, #challenge run, #SMT, #SMTV, #Shin Megami Tensei V, #Persona, #Nocturne, #megami tensei, #megaten, #persona, #Nahobino, #Shin Megami Tensei

Id: zWa640hEWLw

Length: 78min 48sec (4728 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 26 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/Sonne-chan]

Nice! I love to see challenge videos becoming more common :D

[u/toxoxoxo]

You're insane to have done this and i bow to your godhood

[u/Faded_Sun]

If SJ can be beaten solo, I'm sure SMT V can.

[u/ruminaui]

Did he did it on hard?. Fuck he actually did. He kind of skipped grind with DLC, but he restricted the levels, so it can be done