Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 — Golgra Boss Guide

Golgra is the Gestral Chief in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. The living mannequins are known for their love of fighting for fighting’s sake, but unlike most of her comparatively harmless kin, Golgra is actually one of the Continent’s most dangerous brawlers. Players who think they can style on the game by challenging her to a duel on their first visit to the Gestral Village are in for a rude awakening.

With a massive reserve of HP and kick combos that hit like a truck, Golgra can one-shot even high-level characters. If you’re going to fight her, you need to be prepared.

All Golgra Fights

There are actually four opportunities to fight Golgra throughout the game. Her moves and combos remain the same throughout, but when she appears as a boss in side quests, her stats are mercifully reduced. It’s when you challenge her to a duel in her hut at the Gestral Village that you need to really worry.

The three less-challenging fights with Golgra take place:

• When you speak to Golgra at the Gestral Village as Monoco for the first time. (This is a separate fight from choosing Monoco to duel her normally, and is much easier.)
• When Verso and Monoco travel to the Sacred River as part of Monoco’s Relationship Quest.
• In the final round of the Dark Gestral Arena, accessible from the sky in Act 3.

All fights against Golgra are one-on-one duels, except the battle at the Sacred River, where your party is restricted to just Verso and Monoco.

The ultimate test against Golgra can be taken at any time after you’ve met her in Act 1, simply by talking to her in her hut and challenging her to a duel. You can choose which party member will face her, but your chosen fighter should be Level 80 or even 90 to stand a chance. For that reason, it’s much better to come back near the end of the game to try your luck.

Best Strategy For Beating Golgra

Golgra’s combos have a decent delay before each kick, so with a little practics you can usually learn to parry and counter them after a few tries. The trouble is that each hit that goes unblocked deals five to seven thousand damage; most characters will fall immediately on missing a block.

Equip weapons that scale with Vitality and/or Defense and max out those Attributes to help increase your character’s resilience, using Recoats if necessary. Recovery Pictos like Second Chance are also vital, since with only one character a single mistake can end the fight if you don’t have a way out.

Once you’ve learned Golgra’s combos to the point where you can reliably parry, Augmented Counter helps wear down her health bar quickly.

Characters built to Break and Stun can fill Golgra’s meter a few times throughout the battle; each turn she loses to Stun is a turn you don’t have to worry about parrying! Burn can also help speed up the fight, but you’ll need to inflict a lot of stacks at once to do any real damage.

Second Phase

When Golgra gets below half of her starting HP, she changes forms, using longer, more complex combos. Most of them are variations on the attacks from her first phase, but you should watch out in particular for when she shakes the earth. This requires a jump counter by a gradient counter, which isn’t a combo that you see very often in the game, so it can come as a surprise the first time you see it.

Despite her burning appearance in her second phase, Golgra is neither immune nor resistant to fire damage.

Rewards For Beating Golgra

Each character that defeats Golgra in a duel receives their Gestral-themed weapon:

You can get these weapons in other ways; for example, the winner of the Gestral Tournament when you recruit Sciel gets their Gestral weapon as a prize, and Sakapatates sometimes drop them as loot. Beating Golgra in her hut also yields Grandiose Chroma Catalysts and (occasionally) Recoats, and it’s an efficient way to level up the Gestral weapons that you already have in your inventory without spending resources.