In a sense of 'can the game be completed at all'? no. Rather, the character choice you go with is going to influence what kinds of stat boosts you're going to be looking for from shrines, what tomes you'll want to take, what weapons will compliment your run and so on.

The game has achievements for every character winning tier 3, so the expectation set by the game is that a player can win with any character. I am not going in depth on character choices for this, I just wanted to throw up a guide that has some bare minimum information for people to reference for the final boss fight.

Items are the kind of thing in this game that you are going to have a hard time building a run around. The merchants give you a random selection from three (with a general guide of their hat color giving you a good idea of what their minimium rarity items are), and the stone heads are just bro's that give you one of two or three items of wildly random variety.

That said, turning off items you know you aren't going to want for the boss run will help you. It can only help you so much, because, at the time of the writing, you can't turn off the baseline items for any particular rarity.

Additionally, some items are just always good to get. Like the scarf and it's damage boost while you're in mid air. You and jumping should have an intimate relationship in this game. Not on again off again, kiss the sky as much as possible. If your character has bad jumping numbers, then the feather is helpful, if you're playing the space man, you don't need more jumping power, you need extra jumps to help with where you're going to land. And extra jumps come from shrines as far as I'm aware.

Some items are always going to help you though. The Demon Knife, for example, gives you a way of healing from critical hits (25% for it on a crit). Crits are important for inflating your damage anyway, so even if you don't take the tome for it, you'll want to grab items and shrine rewards for upping that crit rate to a reasonably high amount (like using a microwave to burn other commons to make sus fluid so you can get 30% more crit rate from having 3 more of them).

The stinky cheese is, actually, always useful to have. Even if you are one shotting the regular enemies, the things that should be the main problem for you are going to be the big beef slabs of hp. Poison helps a lot with those. In combination with the poison gloves, and the gas mask, and the poison barrel, it can get really really nice. But getting all of them is kind of up to the whim of rng.

Because of the microwaves of various rarities, every item is useful to you. Even if only as fodder to make more copies of something you actually want.

For the final boss fight, items that are going to help you, other than ones that just give raw damage output, are going to be:
Turbo Socks (multiple copies so you can run around the attacks and boss and it's adds)
Medkit (if you only have healing from hitting enemies, there are times in the boss fight that you won't be able to heal off that. And taking the regeneration tome is a waste of tome space for the boss fight, so med kits are super handy for filling that gap)
Slippery Ring (15% evasion is good, though as you get more evasion, each contributor contributes less. That said, if you can get 40% or more evasion without breaking your back, it helps a lot)
Feathers (not useful for some characters, like the moon man, but incredibly helpful for anyone bad at jumping)
Coward's Cloak (syncs well with turbo socks because taking a single hit can let you skeedadle away from situations you might not otherwise be able to escape)
Phantom Shroud (this can synergize very nicely with the slippery ring(s), but if your evasion is crap, you can burn it in a blue microwave at worst)
Demonic Blood/Demonic Soul- You need to get these early enough in the run for them to matter. If you get them at the end of the third stage, you won't have enough kills racked up after having gotten them for them to matter.
Ghost is very handy for the start of any run, in the final fight you won't really have anything to pop to activate it though. So if you have the right kind of microwave, try to trade them in for other things.
Bob- Unlike Ghost, it's activated by you running around. Since you should always be running and jumping, this is one that is going to keep helping you for the entire run.

Mirror- The Mirror can save you, but it has a cool down between protections, so you need to make sure that after it activates, you are getting away from being hit more. This can trigger all kinds of other items though, as can Evasion. So using this to intentionally take a hit can activate the toxic barrel, the coward's cloak and anything else that goes off on you taking a hit (including hitting the enemy with thorns damage).

Legendary items:
Big Bonk- by the end of your run, you should have plenty of attacks going out to dump dps into things anyway, so that 2% chance at x20 damage goes from 'oh, that's a very rare sometimes thing' to 'wow, this is going off all the time because I'm machine gunning out attacks because the projectile count tome is cracked'.

Anvil & Joe's Dagger- These two are best as early into the run as possible so they have time to stack up. Anvil can make your weapon upgrades better by adding an extra thing to the upgrade option, and Joe's dagger increases your damage when you get an execute with it.

Giant Fork: you probably want a good or very high critical hit rate, and the giant fork rewards that.

Speed Boi: Just as the Mirror is good for your survival, the Speed Boi is Better. I'm not sure what the cooldowns are for comparison between them, but since they have different trigger conditions, having both is best. Very importantly, the Speed Boy is slowing time down (not stopping it), and doesn't break like the Za Warudo does. And you get double damage while time is slowed. I have found it to be much more useful than Za Warudo.

I don't really have anything else to say about the items for the section, and at the time of writing haven't unlocked all the items anyway. This section isn't the point of the guide.

Since you generally want to lock your build in as soon as possible so that your level up options are only things you are investing in, you'll want to turn off any tomes you don't plan on using with that character for your boss run.

For example, with Amog I turned off Luck, Duration, Thorns, and Armor. I probably should have turned off Curse and Attraction tomes too, since I didn't use them. But the run worked out.

The order of the tomes does not particularly matter. Just take the ones you want the moment you see them and hope for the best. I had a lot of luck by prioritizing the experience tome until it was giving +100%, then prioritizing other things (like my poison flask weapon, other tomes, etc) and then when it was down to 'xp tome or one of the other weapons' I went xp tome again.

The reason that I didn't level up, for example, the aegis at all, or the sniper rifle or wireless knives all that much is because the boss steals your extra weapons at the start of the fight. So you have to get them down enough to earn those back during the fight.

This relates back to the tomes because you don't lose any of your tomes. So things like projectile count are insanely good investments for most weapons. Doesn't do anything for Aura, or Frost Walk, for example, but getting +20 projectiles to all your weapons adds up, especially if the weapon levels themselves also add more projectiles (but more importantly, you'll want to keep raising the base damage of your main weapon throughout the run).

Tomes to take for your boss run:
The XP Tome: I've gotten to level 90 as amog to fight the final boss without an xp tome before. But in my first winning run, I was over level 120 with amog by having and (ab)using the xp tome. The xp tome is your friend, just make sure you're not over-investing levels in it at the expense of your main weapon's ability to deal damage.

Cooldown Tome: The attack speed tome. You want this. This is your friend. This works for ALL weapons. You can make due without it, but your damage is always going to be much more ridiculous with this helping you out.

Curse Tome: You can probably skip this for making a run on the final boss. If you need to stack up difficulty, run around the map and slap the little greed totems. If you have the Ghost item, you'll even get some free kills off doing it.

Blood Tome: Healing from hits is very handy, getting the percentage up to 100 or more is a good plan for healing, but it can't be your only plan for healing. The Blood tome will make your life easier by making it easier to get up to a critical mass of lifestealing. It does not make you immortal though, so it can still only help so much (Generally try to avoid getting buried under a swarm).

Tomes that vary based on your main weapon:
Quantity Tome- Getting more projectiles helps most weapons. Not all weapons, but most of them. For the aegis, this gets hilarious because if that's a secondary weapon for you, you don't need to level it past 1 to get the most use of it, just level the projectile and cooldown tomes and you'll have a steady supply of shields to take hits for you. That they do a little damage on top is just gravy.

Attraction Tome- I like this tome, because I like increasing grab distance. But the final boss fight is going to be part dps check and part running around and jumping and platforming and not getting stuck on terrain. There is nothing for you to gather in the final boss fight itself (though if you want to fight the final swarm after, this might be handy for that. Not what I'm providing guidance on though)

Armor Tome, Thorns Tome, Evasion Tome- Each of these tomes has a right time/right place use for them. The ninja can use the evasion tome to help them stack their evasion rate up enough to make regular use of their character ability, for example. The thorns tome stacks nicely with 'totally not lady captain america'. The armor tome is good for when you expect to be getting hit often. They are situationally useful.

Hp Tome, Shield Tome- Skip the hp tome. You could theoretically stack hp tome and various items and blood magic to get massive hp and use items to stack damage from that. But you can also just get the items and use the tome slot for something else. The Shield tome is useful, but I usually ignore it. As long as you get at least one instance of shield from the shrines, that will help you with not-dying. That said, the shield tome is my mvp for the pacifist challenge.

Agility tome: I would suggest against using a tome for this. There are items and shrines that can do this Enough, save your tome slot.

Knockback and Projectile speed tomes: situationally useful, but you can generally get these numbers up enough off of shrines if you feel the need for them.

Regen tome- Good for the pacifist run, but I would skip it or banish it for a boss run.

Size Tome- funny, potentially great, but you can get enough size from shrines and weapon level ups usually.

Damage Tome- I usually skip the damage tome. If I take it, it's because I am not taking the blood tome that run and am instead playing a much more dangerous game of rocket tag. It's good, but the bonus damage it grants can usually be outdone just by taking more projectiles or cooldown or raw damage on the weapon. But take it in addition to all that? Sure.

Golden Tome, Silver Tome- skip them, you have better uses for your tome spaces for a boss run.

by the end of the run, you are going to want at least this:
+1 jump, probably +2 jumps
at least 10 jump height.

I say you want those as minimums, because you are going to need to jump around the arena in the middle of the final boss fight to hang out at pylons to shut them down. And they can spawn in places you will Need to double jump to get to (or have a crazy strong jump for). Prioritizing a bonus jump early in your run is helpful anyway, if only for getting around (and going up to 3 or 4 jumps can make navigating things like the forest map much, much easier).

Jump Height is a number you can see when you hit escape in game. That is what the jump % is adding to when you take that at a shrine, so when I say you probably want around 10, it's because 10 worked out for me with amog. When you get very high jump height even on characters that started with low jump height, they seem to be more prone to being launched super high by explosions and such. So 10 will get you where you're going with just +1 jump. It will also hopefully keep you from being launched into the stratosphere while you're trying to break down pylons and the boss is healing.

Before I go on about the actual shrine picks after this though, I just want to say: shrine picks stack with all other sources of the same thing, even other shrine picks. So you can potentially cobble together 30 or 40% life steal from shrines with enough luck, maybe even more. But after a certain point you are going to run into the opportunity cost of doing that: if you always take Just lifesteal when you see it, or projectiles, or whatever, then you're passing on other things that might help you more, and may be impossible to fit on your build otherwise.

And that's why I started this section by saying 'you want this, minimum, from shrines' and it's jumping. You can get lifesteal, size, xp, gold, silver, etc from other sources. It's okay.

With that established-
Movement speed- there's the agility tome, but that's a waste of a tome slot for a boss run. There's turbo socks, and you can potentially microwave other commons to make more. So movement speed might be a good pick from a shrine (not guarantee on the socks) but if you have the socks, you can probably pass on taking it as a shrine bonus. That said, I Did have multiple socks, it's why the screen shot shows I have 3.4x movement speed in that boss fight. Not sure if that was with or without the coward cloak bonus, but it was very sufficient for fighting the boss.

Luck- if nothing else looks good, take it. But I generally don't prioritize luck that much. Usually because of the aforementioned opportunity cost of taking a luck bonus.

Hp Regen- take some. Even if you have a first aid kit, get one or two instances of +20, or a +40 or something. You don't need to push hp regen though the sky, but getting a little goes a long way to getting you to the final fight and surviving while the boss is pylon'd up.

Crit Chance- yes if your crit chance is low (below 40%), but not at the cost of something better (projectile count is always better at the start of your run, but if you're dumping out 10 or 15 attacks, getting more crits has a better pay off). If you get your crit rate up to 60, 80, or higher? Just ignore this option from shrines unless it's the only one worth taking.

Damage, Critical Damage, Elite Damage- I'm not sure that elite damage bonus applies to bosses and mini bosses, or if it's Just for elites. That said, taking a raw damage bonus is always a good idea if you are already at the 'I have snowballed from amount of attacks' point. 1 more projectile for all weapons vs 10% damage for all weapons when you have 4 projectiles from the quantity tome? take the damage. Critical damage plays second fiddle to regular damage for shrine options, because they'll stack, but the baseline damage bonus is going to always apply vs the critical damage only sometimes applying. And the elite damage is thus third in line, because you can crit anything, but elites are only a subset of things and don't necessarily count for bosses. (I know there's an item for +15% damage to elites and bosses, but it calls them out separately, the shrine damage does not).

Jump amount: again, always make sure you get at least 1 extra jump. After that point, follow your heart, it can be fun to jump across the map in like 4 strides as the space man doing his best magic johnson impression.

Jump Power/Jump %- whatever it's called in game, this one modifies your Jump Height, and that varies by character. You'll probably want to get around 10 jump height to make sure you have enough to get to the various places during the final fight.

gold/silver bonus- doesn't really matter, at least not for helping you actually win the final fight.

attack speed- stacks with the cooldown tome, generally a solid pick.

lifesteal- if you're using the blood tome, you can skip it. If you don't have the blood tome yet, it can help. If you're skipping the blood tome entirely, then you'll want to mark this as high priority and have some hard decisions to make between projectile count, this, and attack speed.

Size- Generally useful up to a point, at least. Size increases the aoe of aoe damage, increases projectile damage, and is just generally helpful for hitting more with your attacks. That said, 40% or 50% size increase is usually like 'enough', so I generally pick up some from shrines and skip the tome of the same type.

Duration- This one depends entirely on what main weapon you are bringing to the fight. Amog's poison has a duration, the spaceman's blackholes have a duration. If your primary weapon does something that runs on duration, then you might want to pick up some extra from shrines, but probably not enough to take the tome itself.

Difficulty- You can get this up from the greed totems, you probably don't need more for a boss run from shrine bonuses.

Pickup Range- You'll want some of this. I generally get pick up range any time I can as long as I have a few projectiles already. Stuff tends to die outside of arms reach, so pickup range is nice. It is not strictly necessary (especially if you got the sucky magnet item) but it's nice.

Powerup multiplier- not actually sure what this does.

powerup drop chance- Seems kind of useful, but I usually only take it if the other options are like, size and duration and I'm good on those already. There is a very limited supply of adds for the final boss fight, so you would need this to be Very high for it to help that much. I got lucky and had a single power up drop during the boss fight with like, 1.1x (so around a 10% buff to this), but it wasn't super useful and I wasn't expecting it anyway. There is probably a way to abuse this, but I presume that's going to be some kind of luck build and shenangians and getting just the right items to combo and so on.

The Boss Fight is happening in a stand alone arena with a small platform in the middle with some step ups, and rocks ringing around the outside that you can jump on. I did not try jumping off, because it's enough of a pain in the ass to get to the boss fight to begin with, why would I do that on purpose?

The final boss fight is essentially the same for both the Forest and the Desert.

The fight itself:
You start the fight portalling in nearby the central platform area. The Final Boss makes their entrance and the fight begins. Your attacks start going, and not long into the fight, your extra weapons get stolen by the boss. So any weapon you got that you didn't start with? Taken here at the start.

You will get them back as the fight progresses.

As far as I can tell, the adds (which are smaller versions of the same boss that you Can kill, but do Not share hp with the main boss) seem to be on a timer for when they show up at first, and then refills of the adds only seem to come along after the next stage is reached, with 1 more add each time.

That said, I'm not sure on the exact timing of the adds, because I've only done the final boss fight a few times.

But now you need to get the boss down by like, 2 million hp with just your starting weapon. Maybe a little more. This triggers the next part of the boss fight, where the boss ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ out, shields up, and summons 3 pylons.

The pylons are spread out through the arena, you can track where they are by the glowing lines linking directly to the boss. Sometimes a pylon is smack dab in the middle of the platform, and that's a pain in the ass to deal with. Because that pylon is most easy for the boss and the adds to bully you to death at. So if it summons a pylon to the center, run away from that one, maybe take another one while you wait for the boss and adds to chase you there, and then go for the center one while they're chasing you back towards it. Do not make it the last pylon to resolve, it's just that much harder to on yourself.

So you break the three pylons by being around them like claiming a shrine. Cool, don't get launched out of the area around them, don't take too many hits, don't get stuck on the terrain. With the three pylons done, the shield breaks, the boss stops healing, you can resume beating them to death.

Oh, and look at that: The second weapon that you picked up is back in your usable items. This is why I like getting the aegis second, because it makes surviving Much Much easier even if I never put any level ups into it. +20 projectiles tome, +godknowshowmuch cooldown, those shields go up and it's a hard time getting past them all to keep them down and actually kill me.

You are now in the position of having to beat the boss down until he repeats his pylon trick. The adds will be coming back if you killed them. I don't know what happens if you don't kill them. It could either be really bad, or a way to avoid getting more adds. Anyway, shields up, 3 pylons, get your third weapon back.

repeat.

shields up, 3 pylons, 5 adds, third weapon back: murder him.

In my particular case, I did not put a lot of levels into the weapons other than my primary, I did what I could to minimize their investment, and then put as much as I could into the sniper rifle because it has high base damage. Eventually you will run out of rerolls, and using skips after you have your build fills out is pointless, might as well take the weapon levels.

Anyway, I just wanted to make sure there was at least some kind of ♥♥♥♥♥♥ guide available for people to reference so they can get a heads up of the final boss fight and see 'oh, this guy did it, and he explained how'. So here we are. Hopefully someone makes a Much Better full walkthrough later and just blows mine out of the water.

So I initially wrote this in the post-win moment of beating the forest final boss, and now that I am consistently challenging the desert final boss, it has become apparent that it's not just 'oh they have some different attacks, but you'll be used to them by the end', Anubis is also a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ because he'll throw pylons up on high rocks that Require you to have good jumps. Like, if you're really good at the platforming, and you can get the timing right, and not get hit and murdered and so on, you can get away with having 2 jumps total and still reach the bastard pylons.

But you're going to want 3 jumps total, more as you like. It will make the fight significantly less of a pain.

Beams: Anubis' beams are a pain to deal with, and that is why you will need to use cover. The pylons can serve as cover for as long as they exist, so when anubis is doing the single target 'tracks you and tries to murder you' red beam, camp out behind a pylon, get that one cracked and keep moving.

If he's using that before the pylons are up, then double jumping diagonally can help you get out of the beam while it is hitting you. Like, he has the beam on you, you jump, the beam is still on you, get that second jump in at a diagonal and you'll get away from the beam, at least briefly.

I also find it generally easier to hug nearby the boss when trying to avoid the beams in general. I misrecalled earlier that his head might get in the way of the beam if you get behind him. It does not. But bunny hopping around him, especially on diagonal bunny hops, can help you keep him from getting the beam to stick on you. Distance gives him an easier time getting an angle on you.


The ground attacks that anubis sends out should be something you're used to by the time you make it to the final boss. You can try to bait them to start in a spot and then shimmy around them so they don't launch you while trying to capture a pylon, and you can stand in between the area markers to avoid getting hit for the wide area version. I don't expect this to be new information to you if you're aiming at the final bosses, but it might be for someone, so here you go.

If it hasn't already become apparent: you can use the ground-up attacks to launch yourself far by jumping shortly before they go off and angling the direction for where you want to go. If you have the skill to do this consistently, and a build that keeps you from dying for doing it, this might be a way around needing extra jumps to get to pylons. But I would still get the extra jumps to have the reliability of reaching the pylons.

Edit: Having now beaten Anubis, I have some additional suggestions.
https://images.steamusercontent.com/ugc/10365024419734841360/5DA330E747F61B515563251352B98980E434A880/?

To start with, managed to get a decent screen shot of the fighting arena. There's a lot more vertical rocks that pylons can wind up on in the Anubis fight compared to the Bark Vader fight for the forest. I know I said get at least 2 jumps, but like, 4 or 5 total jumps made this fight Much easier to deal with.

Additionally, if you want to get crazy with this, you can try what I did (with a number of tries until I got all the right things along the way and made it to the end)- Play Athena. Get the cooldown tome, the projectiles tome, the armor tome, and the thorns tome. Healing is going to be a matter of picking up hp regen from items and shrines, lifesteal whenever you can, and mostly you're going to rely on the shields from aegis to keep you alive, and when those run out, the armor percent helps with that. Grabbing evasion and critical rate from items and shrines can help you make use of various items if you can get your hands on them (like the demonic blade, which helped a lot for healing for me this run). I found that ~180 hp regen was enough, because by the end of the run my cooldown was very fast, so it was hard for enemies to do enough attacks on me fast enough to actually land damage on me. I had something like 75% effective armor by the end (from oh so many levels of the armor tome). I got lucky and picked up the sniper rifle as my second weapon, which made the rest of the fight easier because I coulld focus on avoiding getting hit by beams and such while whittling the boss back down to get to the next stage of pylons. I used the poison flasks because poison stacks up on targets and that becomes consistent and reliable damage when you've already got like 7 projectiles from the tome and you're pushing the cooldown tome up to 150% or more anyway. And then the blood magic was because I got it early enough in the run to use it to pump my max hp up and that synergizes well with the +20% damage per 100 max hp ring, and so on. https://images.steamusercontent.com/ugc/16036423652806317460/C5CF61CFE098C3293F0E29F4EA95B9633B9969D6/?

So that build worked out well but relies on items and hitting shrines for specific bonuses and so on. The safety margin provided by the Chonkplate, for example, was incredibly helpful throughout the entire run. In one of my failed runs, I wound up getting stuck not being able to hit the third area gate to leave because I ran out of time to the point that I was just too swarmed by ghosts to get to it. And yet the build was so tanky in that run that I lasted the 6 minutes required to get the achievement for that.

Whatever you choose to do with your own run at the boss fights, Good Luck.