Persona 5: The Phantom X – How to defeat the Matador mini-bosses

For a boss fight to be difficult, it doesn’t need the most powerful attacks or the biggest health bar; it just needs to have a really, really annoying gimmick, and that’s what P5X’s Matador bosses provide. While exploring Floor 3 of Mementos, you’ll encounter four different encounters with Matador mini-bosses that will have you tearing your hair out as they are guaranteed to evade certain kinds of attacks, making them a frustrating encounter.

We’ll explain how to defeat these bosses by explaining their different gimmicks and giving you our recommended party setup for these encounters.

Recommended party for P5X Matador fights

You’ll encounter the Matadors at Level 38, so we recommend you have your party at least Level 30 before tackling them, but ideally higher than that, at about Level 40, as the Matador can unleash some powerful attacks against your entire party.

For this encounter, we recommend the following party setup:

• Wonder with your strongest Lightning Persona and a Persona with a party-wide healing skill
• Skull
• Closer
• Panther
• Puppet (Support)

As the Matadors are weak to Lightning, that is the attack type we want to focus on. Unfortunately, you can’t daze these enemies, even when hitting them with their weakness, making them immune to All-Out Attacks. However, exploiting their weakness will still yield the greatest damage.

If you don’t have all of these characters unlocked yet, then there are alternatives. While Skull/Ryuji is ideal, you can substitute him with Mona if you have them unlocked instead, as Windswept is a useful status effect to inflict – the same goes for the Burn Panther or Cattle can inflict.

Puppet is by far the best support, as their defensive abilities will help you survive the Matador’s strong attacks, as they can really cripple you if you’re not prepared to tank the hits, which is why you should also bring a strong healing Persona with Wonder to keep the party going.

How to defeat the Matador mini-bosses in P5X

Each of the Matador fights is slightly different, but they all center around the same gimmick: evading attacks.

First Matador

The first fight is a lone Matador. At the start of the fight, they will activate an ability that gives them a 100% chance to evade two of melee, ranged, and skill attacks, and every time you successfully strike it, it will randomly change which two types of attack it can evade.

Your job is to strike whichever type of attack it currently can’t evade, with the idea being to wait until it can be hit by Persona skills and strike with a powerful Lightning attack that exploits its weakness. That said, you shouldn’t waste time and attack every turn if you can, as the Matador hits hard, and you don’t want to be taking too many shots from it. From there, it’s simply a war of attrition as you whittle them down.

Second Matador

At first, this battle may seem impossible, as it has a 100% chance to evade all attacks. However, when it first acts, it will summon an ally. If you defeat this ally, the Matador will become vulnerable, unable to evade or attack for one round, during which time you can pummel it.

When it recovers, it will summon a new ally, and the cycle will begin again. Just make sure you’re guarding on the turns where you’re waiting for the ally to spawn.

Third Matador

The third Matador appears with a Bicorn as its ally. For the first round, you can attack both of them freely, but after the Matador and Bicorn get their first turn, things change. The Matador will become immune to one type of attack, which will change every turn, but more importantly, you need to stop attacking the Bicorn. If you attack the Bicorn too much, it will start giving buffs to the Matador, so you actually need to keep focusing on the Matador and take them out before finishing off the Bicorn.

Fourth Matador

For the final miniboss, you’ll be taking on two Matadors at once, which is as annoying as it sounds. Like the first Matador, they will become immune to two types of attacks at once, although they will only switch on their turn, rather than whenever struck. In general, you should try to focus on one of the Matadors at a time to quickly halve the damage you’re taking; however, if either of them leaves themselves vulnerable to Persona skills, you should spend that round focusing on that one, as it will give you the highest damage potential.