How to Beat Shadow Madarame in Persona 5
Second Palace Boss Guide for Persona 5
The second Palace in Persona 5 is the Museum of Vanity. It’s the mind and heart of Ichiryusai Madarame, a famous artist who is not what he seems. It turns out that he is not the great artist people think he is. He felt he deserved fame and fortune so he took advantage of young, impressionable painters and stole their work. When they were no longer useful to him he would kick them to the street leaving them confused and depressed, one even driven to suicide. He believes the life he built for himself is a work of art and those he used were naught but tools of the artist’s trade.
Naturally, when you finally confront his Shadow within the Palace he reveals a nightmarish form that consists of four paintings – two eyes, a nose, and a mouth. This form alternates with his true form, Shadow Madarame draped in golden robes, with makeup to bring out his “beauty.” To be honest, the fight looks simple, but it’s a bit complicated. There are two repeating phases, though their nature changes after the first. To prepare you’ll want to be strong, we suggest fighting him at at least level 16 and you may want to bring abilities that increase resistance to elemental damage. Also, SP management is very important in this fight. Bring any SP recovery items and make sure those in your party have physical attacks that can hit entire groups. Ryuji and Yusuke are very good for this, so you may want to keep them around. I kept Morgana in as a healer as well, as he’ll know Media which can heal the whole party at once. Also, his physical attacks will help during part of phase one, and all of phase 2.
The paintings are the most critical part of this fight, so you’ll need to pay attention to those. The Right Eye uses elemental attacks like Lightning, Fire, and Ice. The Left Eye uses Debuffs, so it will focus on lowering your defense and lowering your attack power. Both eyes seem to focus on single targets. The Mouth uses powerful physical attacks with no setup, so always stay as healed as possible. The Nose uses Wind attacks and if it starts twitching it will use a group Wind attack that does a lot of damage. There’s more to these parts than just their damaging methods, though.
The mouth can only be damaged by elemental attacks. Hitting it with anything else will cause it to heal. The other parts can only be damaged by physical attacks, either from your weapon or Persona, anything else will cause those to heal. A good strategy during the first phase is to take out the Right Eye and Nose first, then take out the Left Eye followed by the mouth. More often than not the two elemental offenders will exploit a weakness of yours and that just leads to a trail of misery.
After defeating the paintings, Madarame’s true form will come out. It takes the same amount of damage from just about everything, so just use your regular physical attacks. You won’t knock him down, and he’ll automatically switch back to a painting once a third of his health is gone. This is when this Persona 5 boss fight gets interesting.
The paintings will have the same weaknesses and attacks. However, if you take down one, the others will restore that piece meaning you have to take them out in groups. Each living part can only restore one dead part per turn, and you can use that to your advantage. Ignore the mouth completely and use group physical attacks to attack every body part at once. If you have Morgana on auto-pilot, take him off for these phases so he doesn’t single out one enemy and mess things up. Just use the group attacks. The Mouth won’t take any damage, but after about three attacks total (depending on your level), both Eyes and the Nose will die at the same time.
The Mouth won’t immediately restore one of the pieces for some reason, but that’s okay. Start using your elemental abilities on the Mouth. It will restore one of the pieces eventually, but not at full health. Low enough that one character can take it out with a single attack (two at most). So just keep it going until you face real Shadow Madarame again and take off another third of his health.
You may have noticed that during phase two the paintings used a new attack, one that slathered one of your party members with black paint and made them weak to literally everything. Of course Joker, and Morgana, notice and that brings up a new Special Order. Send one person, I sent Yusuke, to toss the paint on the paintings. You need to survive for three turns in order for him to be successful, so just focus on staying alive. After they’re covered in paint you will do a lot of damage no matter what kind of attack you use, speeding things up. Now just take out Shadow Madarame’s form one more time using basic attacks and you’re all set. Watch as he sputters and cries as Yusuke decides his fate. You’ll also learn the truth behind the famous “Sayuri” painting, but we won’t spoil that for you.
For more on Persona 5, check out our wiki.
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