While a majority of the OFF remaster is unchanged from the RPG’s original 2008 version, there’s a good handful of unique bosses with new music, visuals, and a few story beats that are exclusive to this 2025 edition.

Fair warning, these bosses are pretty tanky, deal heavy hits, and I only recommend fighting them after you’ve cleared the third area. You can go for them as soon as you clear the area they’re in, but you’ll probably have a rough time.

These bosses are all designed to take advantage of the combat system unique to the remaster, challenging your game knowledge as well as making you think critically to win.

I’ll be showing you exactly how to navigate the purified zones to locate these bosses, give you a few quick tips, and a rundown on how the boss works, but let you earn the satisfaction of besting them on your own.

Source

Purified Zone 1

From the starting location, head up, then head right on the tracks and walk into what remains of Damien. Head into the mines, where you’ll find everything is pretty empty, but you can still navigate just fine, so head out to where the barns are.

You’ll find the usual entrance full of a bunch of rocks, which can easily be navigated by pushing one to the right, then pushing one up until you’re in the more open area. Feel free to grab those chests up top.

In this room, head to the left by pushing the rock by the entrance, then moving up, left, and up again. After a save point, you’ll find yourself in another rock puzzle, this time solved by moving right, up, left, right, up, and right again.

In the next room, push the two rocks on either side of the door in, and move the rock in front of the door to the side. This will allow you access to a room with a ton of ladders, which lead up to an eye where the boss will speak to you.

This boss is a big pushover, fitting with the general vibe of not wanting to fight and questioning why you’d go out of your way to fight. Whatever strategy you usually employ will almost definitely work here without issue.

The only issue is that Source can be pretty tanky, so that’s why I don’t recommend doing this one earlier. With a fully leveled team, wailing on the thing and not showing a single bit of mercy is more than enough to win.

Maldicion

Purified Zone 2

This one is much simpler to get to. From the start of Purified Zone 2, head up, then head left, and head back down to be on the West side of the island, where you can head over to the amusement park.

You’ll find the park far emptier than it was before, and at the top is where you’ll find another one of those moving eyes. You can once again speak to it to talk to this funky crab and start the fight.

Maldicion has a gimmick you’re probably familiar with if you’ve played any other game with an enemy type system. It periodically creates a shield, declaring the element of Meat, Metal, Smoke, or Plastic.

You can tear down these shields with raw brute strength, but it’s much easier if you remember how to counter each type. Metal beats Smoke, Smoke beats Plastic, Plastic beats Meat (haha), and Meat beats Metal.

The easiest way to counter these types is by using The Batter’s competences and reading the first word in the description of the “Run With” abilities, but if you’re having trouble doing that, there’s one other way.

You probably picked up a couple of Inspirations and Expirations throughout the game, and if you’re like me, you have a pretty big stockpile. You can use these to deal Plastic or Meat damage with any of the add-ons, so keep that in mind.

Psalmanazer and Herodotus

Purified Zone 3

To get to these guys, you’re going to walk quite a bit. Head through the first area of Purified Zone 3, and enter the top left door in the huge room. You’ll find a brand-new door at the top, which will take you to the second area.

Go up into the room that used to have a bunch of switch puzzles, now completely barren. The sugar room now has a door, and just like the first area, head through it, and you’ll end up in the third area.

Going all the way up and to the right, instead of heading to the fourth area, go up the stairs to the big metal pipes, and climb up into one to fall inside like you did the first time you were here, just without a minigame this time.

Once you’re in the sugar factory, you can head down and see all the dead bodies gone and the furnace unlit. Naturally, head into the furnace, use the much-appreciated save block, and head down the ladder to see another eye shifting around.

Psalmanazer and Herodotus are one of the hardest fights in the game, and it’s mostly because you’re expected to figure out their very vague mechanic. Essentially, you’ll get the “Vilified” status, which will severely debilitate you.

When you have this status, the game tallies up all the damage you do, then deals it back to the entire party after the status runs out, on top of blocking you from using any of your competences.

For that reason, I’d recommend either defending, using your items, or canceling your turns to save them for later while you have this status, or attacking if you’re high on health and aren’t worried about tanking some damage.

Once the school of fish comes to defend the big fish, you should focus on a single one of them to take them out, as they can get quite annoying if you don’t keep on top of them. With enough perseverance, you should be able to finish the fight.

Justus

The Room

Since you’re likely already at the final save point in The Room by the time you’re taking on these bosses, you should have no trouble finding Justus, who resides in a staircase that opens up in the save room after you defeat the other three secret bosses.

The fight itself is far more lore than challenge, as you’re almost definitely strong enough to tank all of its hits and keep damaging it to win. It speaks like the batter, and can use attacks from your entire party, but they’re rather pitiful.

Go with your usual game plan of attacking, using items to recover CC, healing whenever you need it, and spamming your strongest hits, and that’s about all. Honestly, it’s a bit disappointing, but that’s just the way it is.

Carnival

The Nothingness

Another easy boss to find. Simply use the save point and return to the Nothingness, where you’ll find a strange portal up at the top left. You can enter this, walk up to the eye, and interact to fight with Carnival.

Quite a step up from the previous fight, this boss will frequently shift star signs, indicating which attacks are about to come out, but most of them deal similar amounts of damage and can be countered in the usual way.

That isn’t what makes this fight a little treacherous, though. Every time someone does damage, either the attacker or Carnival will win a prize, which will give them a significant boost to their attack timer and make them hit way quicker.

The thing is, this mechanic is completely random, and it’s not like you can avoid attacking for the entire fight, so you simply hope luck swings in your favor. Even if it doesn’t, it’s just a lengthy fight in general, so strap in and stock up on items before taking it on.

Cob

Red Room

For easily the most difficult fight in the entire game, you need to fight The Queen after the final save point just to get to it. After that fight, you’ll be in a red room, where you can move to the left past the room and down a set of stairs.

Within these layered rooms and staircases, you’ll find the final eye in the game, this time having you fight Cob, who is rightly upset that you murdered their friend as your first secret boss, and will decimate you without some knowledge.

They don’t do much at first, but will soon stare intently at one of your party members, damage them once, heal them, and then use Ionosphere, which is essentially a guaranteed death, typically dealing upwards of 4000 damage in one hit.

Worst of all, during this entire sequence of events, you get an even worse version of Vilified, this time blocking your competences as well as preventing you from using items, making you do piss poor damage outside a single turn.

All that said, you should do some prep work here. If you didn’t already get the Aries card, you should opt for the Ashley Bat, or some other very strong, high-damage weaponry. You do not need to care about defense; you’re going to die a ton anyway.

Stock up on Jokers, grab a ton of Golden Flesh, and a bunch of healing items can’t hurt either. When you get into the fight, you should use your first critical turn on an Eye or use it by analyzing the enemy with the Batter, so you can see Cob’s health bar in detail.

This fight will take forever, and this strategy simply makes it possible, rather than making it easy. During your debuffed turns, defend to get CC back, and attack as much as you want, but before the Ionosphere hits, make sure to cancel your turns with all your party members.

This makes it so you can get 3–4 turns in immediately after the debuff gets cleared for a single turn, and allows you to use all your strongest competences during that one turn, hopefully outdamaging Cob’s healing.

With that one turn, you should make sure to use Alpha to constantly make Cob Lethargic, as it’s one of the only status effects that works well here, and happens to be extremely effective at curbing their insane attack speed.

I’d also recommend using Epsilon to buff the Batter as much as you can, because the Batter with the Ashley Bat is the only thing that will do reasonable damage whenever you get debuffed.

If you can’t outdamage their healing, or you find that you’re getting completely steamrolled regardless, you should probably go back to Zone 3 to grind for EXP, grab a bunch of items, then come back here to finish the job.