Though the main story of Persona 5 Royal offers more than enough content to keep you entertained for dozens of hours, for those players looking for extra chances to square up, there are a few secret mini-bosses littered throughout the story. One, you meet fairly early on – Jose, the boy in Mementos for whom you’ve been collecting flowers.

RELATED: Persona 5 Royal: Every Way You Can Recover SP

Most of the optional mini-boss fights don’t unlock until you begin NG+, but Jose will take you on during your first go through the story. Follow along below for tips on how to prepare, find Jose when it’s time, and defeat him.

Unlocking The Fight

Don’t expect to fight Jose the first couple times you meet him. For the entirety of the story’s main campaign, Jose is a friend, and you can find him here and there throughout Mementos, offering to trade flowers for items and stamps for changes to Mementos.

However, once you’ve collected enough stamps throughout your dungeon-crawling in Mementos (123 stamps, to be precise), you can head into the Cognition Control Room and find Jose there. Of course, you’ll need to finish the primary mission in here first, so make quick work of your story progress here to start this fight.

The Cognition Control Room will be in the Path of Da’at, which is the final level of Mementos and is exclusive to Royal. The first time this fight is available is on 1/13.

The final stamps are on the Path of Da’at, anyway, so you couldn’t find enough stamps to fight him early even if you wanted to knock out the fight ahead of time.

When you have all 123 stamps, go in and talk to Jose as normal. He mentions feeling stuck in his progress toward understanding the world, and challenges you and the Thieves to a battle to help him out. Say no for now if your party isn’t prepared with full HP and SP (you’ll definitely want to be as ready as you can with both), but if you’re ready to square up, then go ahead and agree to the fight.

Jose's Moves

The most important thing is that you don’t underestimate Jose because he’s a sweet little guy – he packs one hell of a punch when you fight him. Jose has no weaknesses and resists all physical attacks, so SP-based magic attacks will be your bread and butter in this fight.

Below is the moveset Jose will be using in your battle.

Attack

Effect

Drift

Heavy physical damage to all foes.

Fire Ball

Heavy fire damage to all foes.

Snow Ball

Heavy ice damage to all foes.

Volt Ball

Heavy electric damage to all foes.

Gale Ball

Heavy wind damage to all foes.

Psy Ball

Heavy psio damage to all foes.

Nuke Ball

Heavy nuclear damage to all foes.

Bless Ball

Heavy bless damage to all foes.

Curse Ball

Heavy curse damage to all foes.

Confuse Ball

High chance to inflict confuse to all foes.

Launch

Preparation for Special Fireworks.

Special Fireworks

Colossal almighty damage to all foes, after charging with Launch.

Fighting Jose

One of our biggest tips for this fight is to be sure you’re debuffing Jose throughout. All of his moves hit hard, but Special Fireworks is especially one you’ll need to watch out for. Given that it’s an almighty attack, it cannot be fully blocked.

There are a few bits of good news about Special Fireworks, though. Primarily, Jose doesn’t start using Special Fireworks until he falls below half his HP. This means that the first part of the fight is still appropriately challenging, but he keeps his biggest moves for toward the end.

Additionally, after Jose hits you, he takes a turn to “observe” after Special Fireworks lands. This allows your team a free chance to heal up from the damage you’ve inevitably just taken.

The final bit of good news for this move is that you have warning that Special Fireworks is coming, as it requires a charge-up turn first. When Jose uses Launch, the preamble move to Special Fireworks, have your party guard for their next moves to minimize the damage taken.

Depending on the difficulty on which you’re playing the game and how debuffed Jose is when he uses it, Special Fireworks can hit hard enough to insta-kill even your strongest party members, so watch out and be ready to heal.

It’s also critical to have a healer or healing items on hand for this fight. Jose’s moves hurt right from the start, but once he begins using Special Fireworks, it’s more pivotal than ever to keep the party in top shape. In a fight this tough, it’s obviously helpful to keep all four Thieves in good shape.

An optional but helpful buff for your team comes from casting Tetrakarn. This move provides the party with a barrier to reflect magic attacks, and with Jose’s Elemental Ball both frequent and unpredictable, and him not having any strengths against magic, it’s a free way to reflect his damage-dealing move back at him. Let him hurt himself while you ready the party to hurt him, too.

With him able to use so many Personas, it doesn’t hurt to equip Joker with a Persona that doesn’t have any weaknesses for Jose to exploit. This advice is especially true of blocking physical attacks, as Drift is always Jose’s first move. And with so much left to chance with Elemental Ball, you can’t really prepare to block anything Jose hits you with an this attack, so removing his chance to exploit a weakness or two doesn’t hurt.

In exchange for defeating him, Jose will cough up about 20,000 EXP points and a cool ¥90,000.

NEXT: Persona 5 Royal: Guide To Every Trophy