Congratulations to everyone that survived Pandemonium and got to the lower stratum, enduring the crimes against humanity this dungeon dishes out is no small feat. Sadly, it doesn't get much better for us, as it becomes even more dire with the final boss/encounter. If you continue reading this, consider this a last warning (obviously) as I will go through strategies and sleepers I found best equipped to deal with the final encounter and this will spoil strategies/mechanics for you. After this section, i will start referring to final boss Shinki by their in-game name. This guide was created based on what worked for me, and what consistently beat the boss with a mix of sleepers ranging from level from 86-94 with both Physical and Magical Sumireko builds

However, there might be better or unique strategies yet that I have not considered, and I welcome anyone with those ideas to fill in the blanks and I am more than happy to add and expand this if you are happy to contribute or collaborate

Before we get into this, a huge shoutout to Marsh and his video which lead me to this gem and I hope this will be the case for many others to come.


I also wanted to highlight the impressive all in one compendium and Guide that Mistiry Shak has been working on here. Teddy has also posted a list of every Sleeper location, reward and item/money drop that is here. These are both very handy late game, when you simply need to jog your memory on where you saw that one sleeper for your database. These also help if you are trying to 100% the compendium, which nets a nifty 90% discount on summons. This discount is something I will touch on a bit more below as they relate to Exp/Money grinding

I will also note the incredible WIP guide from Shak is still missing spell information and is incomplete, so if anyone wanted to chip in to the incredible work he's doing, you can use the link above. Now without further ado, lets get this guide started

The fight against Shinki is brutal and simply having higher stats does not give you a meaninful advantage. She will abuse Paradise lost and she will make you suffer. My first 5 attempts were me misunderstanding how the fight fundamentally worked, leading to a beatdown where I spent 24 turns baffled as to why none of my attacks worked. Playing blind, I was starting to think Shinki had no weaknesses and I needed to elapse an arbitrary number of turns before I could attack, however even when you figure out whats going on, Shinki will beat you down and turn this fight into a grueling endurance contest

Paradise Lost is her bread and butter, which is possibly the strongest spell in the game. How it works for starters is not immediately obvious. Lets quickly summarize how Shinki will attack, debuff and look at the mechanics of this final battle:

• Shinki gets 3 actions per turn, where she uses Focus/Charge every 2-3 turns
  
• Shinki will always use a Physical/Magical attack and its AOE version after Charge/Focus
  
• Shinki will remove her debuffs or player stat buffs every 2-3 turns
  
• Shinki will always have 25, 000 HP and 90, 000 MP with base 60 stats across the board
  
• Shinki will retain base weaknesses on Turn 1 (Gun and Lightning)
  
• Shinki will always cast Paradise Lost Turn 2
  
• Shinki will then continue to recast Paradise Lost every 6 turns afterwards
  
• Paradise Lost will lower player party stats to the lowest, whilst buffing user stats to max
  
• Paradise Lost will always grant full immunity to elements and shuffle a singular weakness
  
• Paradise Lost induced immunity can be negated with "Pierce Command" and "Yuddha-Samira"

This might seem very difficult to overcome, because it is. From turn 2 Shiki has immunity to all forms of attacks bar a single weakness that shuffles at random. By now everyone should have the "Affinity display" upgrade purchased from the terminal. Throughout the fight, cycling your moves is the quickest way to figure out Shinki's new weakness, by looking for the "!" sign over her sprite. This removes the need to analyse her, saving precious SP

For the rest of the confrontation now, Shinki will absorb attacks and shuffle her singular weakness every 6 turns. This renders spells like Hiphani-Kopa/Jala completely irrelevant, which was my first attempt of cheesing her. Trying to reflect or selecting the wrong attack will punish you by replenishing 400-800hp of her health, and like me if you tend to mis-click a few times, you may want to consider changing "Battle speed" from "Fast" to "Normal" from the configuration settings for this fight. This is the only fight where the game tells you to get better instead of absorbing or deflecting attacks

However, as any long time SMT fan will know, Gods and Demi-gods are overrated and its time to take this god down. Before we do that, lets get the money and exp grinding spots out of the way

Money: Personally, I found the Shinning Needle Castle the best spot to farm yen. For starters, equip the "Negotiation" grimoire to avoid having to waste time with minigames. The sleepers there are level 60 or so, meaning they cant touch/damage you at all. Here you look for Seija and recruit her as well if you haven't already. Keep her in the back of your mind, as she will play a vital role very soon. Seija hands out a generous 2990¥ for her hijack, which is the highest I have seen. Due to level differences, initiating hijack should have a 90% capture rate off the rip, where you can defend to quickly regain SP and capture the other sleeper she usually begins the encounter with

Endgame and pandemonium sleepers only reward the player with 2000¥ or so, making the castle an excellent spot to farm 6,000 yen with low risk. This leads to an easy 100,000 yen in half an hour or so with a bit of luck and few Seija encounters

Exp: To quickly level up, you have two options:

• First you may choose to farm the sleepers in Pandemonium like Sariel, Shinki, Kikuri; who hand out 18-22 thousand experience points when sacrificed. This can be rough since they need to take some damage, before the hijack rates meaningfully increase to 80% or so
  
  
• Or two you take the said money you were grinding prior to buy Shinki, Sariel, and Pandemonium sleepers to quickly level up. For this to work, you need 75% or 100% database completion at a minimum. A 100% database completion gives you a lofty 90% discount on any Sleeper summons, making it very easy to level up any new party members. Otherwise its the longer option of fighting and going on a hijack spree in Pandemonium then heading back to Terminals

Now lets take Shinki down for good. Up to this point, you might have used sleepers that looked cool or you generally liked yourself. However, we may need to bench them, as we want sleepers with a high Agility stat against Shinki. It feels terrible when you bring Shinki down to 2000-4000 health to only lose to bad paralysis or slow sleepers that give free attack opportunities. My poor Zanmu, a staple on my team had to be switched out due to her pitiful 15 Agility. Slow sleepers often lead to run-ending hax after chipping Shinki down to low health, as her status inducing moves can lead to bad turns or you missing key recovery spells. Trust me, you dont want a run ending like that

Now you really want to focus on Agility, followed by STR and MAG. Even though Shinki has an Agility stat of 60, her Luck stat pushes that closer to 66, therefore having Sleepers with a minimum of 67 Ag of higher is highly recommended. She has an Arsenal of devastating attacks, including AOE Physical and Special attacks of every type. She loves spamming attacks that induce secondary effects such as Poison, Blindness or Paralysis that can be devastating.



Sumireko: Now lets assemble our team and take this wannabe god down for good. Here you have an important choice of deciding what role Sumireko plays in this fight. This can really be anything, which is further explained in "Alternate play-styles" section, but for starters I recommend having HP and MP spring on Sumireko and every sleeper on your party. Lets use a STR build for the purposes of this guide, which also happens to be my favourite. I also recommend making her a semi-support tank and having Hideluo and Dai-atma. With Sumireko being very fast, she can always reliably heal and remove the negative stat changes of Paradise Lost before the team is taking or dishing out damage. For your attempts you may consider a MAG Sumireko build which might be better in this fight. But nothing is more satisfying than literally punching and then shooting down gods to the proverbial ground (I always end up with Physical builds in SMT/Dungeon crawlers). In terms of other stat points, you can dump the rest into INT and VIT for longevity alongside the healing/utility spells mentioned prior. I also highly recommend changing her affinity to neutral for every attack, which can be done using Toyohime. The last thing you want is Focus/Charge boosted attack to dish out 400 damage by hitting a weakness which will end your run almost instantly




To easily transfer on the HP and MP spring on all 4 of your sleepers you can sacrifice Lily White which I had fused earlier with all buff and debuff abilities. Lily can become a cheap summon as she is only level 32 and effectively pass on utility spells to your other party members without breaking the bank




Social Distortion: Now arguably the most important component when it comes to beating Shinki is this ability right here. As far as i know only Seija has access to this, which is also a non-transferable skill. You can only transfer this skill via fusion and I'll be frank, I have tried a lot of fringe strategies, and nothing has worked consistently without social distortion. Shinki simply wins the war of endurance with 90,000MP where she overwhelms you as you try to regain mp/heal your team, and fall into a loop of healing and not dishing out enough damage without the -3 defence drop on Shinki



Social distortion inverts stat changes, meaning the sleeper using it maximises every stat whilst lowering Shinkis to the lowest. Now we need to get this skill onto something that has higher than 67 Agility, good attack stats, and possibly the ability to bypass type immunities with pierce...which sounds like asking for a lot? But thankfully for us, Meira fulfills all of those roles and getting her is not that difficult

We start by fusing Seija and Yugenmagan (found in pandemonium) to get Kokoro



We can then use another Pandemonium demon in Sariel to get Meira, which is what we're after with social distortion





Meira & Yuddha-Samira: Now we have Meira, our 1st sleeper that naturally learns Yuddha-Samira and becomes the crux of our strategy. You can thankfully just pass Yuddha-Sumira onto other Sleepers, which we will be using on our 2nd sleeper very shortly. This allows any sleeper to bypass type resistances /immunities whilst also making the next attack a critical hit. This is extremely useful as this not only allows for reliable damage, but the critical hits will restore SP. This is crucial on Meira as this becomes your primary way of collecting SP to cast Social distortion the next Paradise lost cycle




Yumeko/Other Sleeper: The 2nd sleeper should ideally be any sleeper that hits hard with either Magic or Physical attacks and has good longevity. Yumeko is a great candidate, as she has a strength stat of 82 alongside excellent Agility of 75. I picked a Physical Sleeper for this slot and she is excellent defensively with her Gun immunity. Hivya-atma casts +1 evasion for all allies that can almost trivialise Shinki after the -3 accuracy from social distortion. This leads to a lot of free turns as Shinki misses her attacks until she eventually cancels all the debuffs usually turns 2-3 (of the 6 turn Lost paradise cycle)

Yumeko is also capable of effectively using Yuddha-Samira after raising the teams evasion. She can afford to attack or simply cast hideluo as needed and is very consistent in conserving MP and overpowering Shinki. You also want this third sleeper to always be faster than your last sleeper, which in my case was Elis. The last MAG sleeper should always be slower than your party and Yumeko but above 67Ag




Elis/Louise: The Final member of the team needs to have a high MAG stat, above 67 AG and have access to strong magic attacks that cover all the 5 elements present in the game. You really want this, as it gives us a 5/7 chance to hit Shinki after Paradise lost and avoids dragging the fight out for eternity (where it favours Shinki and her massive MP reservoir)

Personally I find Elis to be excellent here, as she has a monstrous 91 MAG stat which translates to 280 Matk. She can also be found in Makai, meaning you really dont need to grind and can easily recruit her. The role of this sleeper is to avoid dragging on the fight for too long and ensuring consistent damage that puts a dent on Shinki. This Sleeper moving last in your party but before Shinki has multiple advantages:

• It allows you to consistently get strong hits off without needing Yuddha-Samira/Pierce
  
• If Shinki is weak to STR/Gun you can use this sleeper as support to remove any -def penalties
  
• This sleeper can prevent defence drop on turns you attack, as it will move after your 3 active party members, negating debilitating aura

This Agility allocation to react last just before Shinki is very advantageous. Elis is also bulky enough to tank -1 def hits and play a semi-defensive role well. Elis can abuse Hipuri-Atma over dai-para, which also has the benefit of giving you a +1 defence when the team heals or casts Yuddha-Samira. This is useful as your next attack cycle will ultimately lead to neutral defence, instead of -1 def from debilitating aura.

Heaven and Hell: Thanks to one of the commentators Kindotlibero, we can stick it to Shiki even faster, with 40-50% more efficiency. Turns out, Social Distortion has a better version where instead of simply inversing stat changes for a single sleeper, the buffs apply to the entire party. Meet Hecatia, a level 40 sleeper obtainable from the Sea of tranquility area with a database entry no. of 108. She does not hit hard nor is she particularly fast, but her mix of excellent VIT and INT, with decent LUK makes her a proper wall with a very special spell; Heaven and Hell. This spell will essentially trivialise the final fight in my eyes, Shinki will now miss 2/3rd of her attacks for 3 or so turns until she casts Dai-para. Due to the entire party now having +3 evasion (the enemy at -3 evasion) Shinki will flail around with drunken attacks that just dont connect. Simply slap on Hecatia, use Cover on another sleeper since she has <55 Agility, and wait for 25 thousand hit points to go down.Instead of making Hecatia a tanky healer, i just slapped elemental spells on her, and cruised to victory with MAG Sumireko and 2 hard hitters. level 85 Hecatia is fine, and I did 4-8 attempts which leveled her up to 90 without any losses to Shinki. Even though you cant pass on Heaven and Hell through Skill Transfer, it can be passed on through sleeper fusions. Thanks to @Farore'sWind17 in the comments below, we can do a quick sequence to get a Meira with Heaven and Hell that fully trivialise the fight:

• Hecatia + Yumeko -> Urumi
  
• Urumi + Elis -> Shinmyoumaru
  
• Shinmyoumaru + Shingyoku -> Kokoro
  
• Kokoro + Sariel -> Meira

If you require even quicker demolition, @Rage has listed the grimoires: Easy & Stinger which will further expedite and simplify the fight. I have not tried the Grimoire's and I also dont recommend Heaven and Hell on your first Shinki run as it removes the magic of "this is actually hard". Consider this strategy only if you want to get this over with and dont want the last achievement to be behind a gruesome battle of attrition.



Non-Stat Inversion guide: I have now beaten Shinki without social distortion/heaven and hell, with my MP in the red having to constantly debuff and buff.Without the luxury of transferring the defence drops, the fight drags on a lot longer, and other strategies seem to have a much higher opportunity cost involved as you may loose to a combination of status + low mp. However it can be done with teams at 89 or so by using Yuddha-Samira on three sleepers and dragging the fight out. Here you really need the MP and I recommend having 500Mp on every sleepers to avoid having to use Energy Drinks that give free turns to Shinki. I used MAG Sumireko, followed by the Elis and Yumeko described earlier and a tanky Zanmu that handled all the healing

Sumireko: In my primary and most consistent build, Sumireko is a physical tank and does not utilise Yuddha-Samira. However, you can slap that on and use Sumireko more offensively. A full special build is also very viable, just swap the roles of Sumireko with Elis and follow my 3rd sleeper guide to proc massive damage on Shinki. You do need to shuffle Dai-para onto a different fast sleeper but a full Magical build with solo Physical Meira at level 89 did beat Shinki consistently from my attempts

Sumireko really is as flexible as you need her to be, also consider putting her in the back for extra defence in the Shinki fight. I personally find the mixed Physical tank build to be the most consistent for my playstyle but you can really go wild with her

Shinki: There are no two ways of cutting it, she is hard, and sometimes she will simply beat you with status effects and a bit of bad luck. If your sleepers are all blinded, using a Hideluo stone to conserve MP is a smart call. Try to conserve your MP and use more items if you are having a bad time or losing when she only has a few thousand health points left. Overall, she is a very fun and a good final hurrah. I did not expect her to be this memorable. She has clearly earned the title of God, but I hope its not a Demi-urge situation, after reading her database entry

Sleepers: From my experience, fast sleepers, with 2 party members having Dai-atma and another 2 with Hideluo seems to fare really well in this final fight. Generally, slapping on Yuddha-Samira to break, and having Social distortion leads to easy wins. Full Physical and Magical builds can beat Shinki, but as i detailed earlier, having dedicated roles that do specific things very well does lead to consistent free wins

Items: You can easily abuse items, where Hideluo stones and Life chunk bundles can be used by any sleeper. Dont hesitate to use them or simply buy a ton of them. If you need cash, you can follow the money grinding guide to top up on yen. However, if you slap MP spring on every sleeper as i suggested, I think you can get away without needing to rely on them

Slow Sleepers: I am looking into all <60 Agility builds, which seem to fare much worse against Shinki. I did get the Zanmu win, which is one of my favorite sleepers in the entire game, tanking nukes with her 98/98 defences. What worked for me was leaving the healing to her, using a MAG Sumireko, Yumeko and Meira. A team of quad <60 Agility gets wiped by status and I still think its near improbable unless you spam items and get lucky (I will keep trying)

Game slaps, buy it and sub to Marsh while you're at it. And have a great time dying to Shinki before you reject one more God