All Boss Achievements (Video)

A series of videos showing how to get every single boss achievement in the game.

⚫ Foreword

Here's a series of videos where I go through how to earn every single boss achievement in Jotun.

I skipped the basic "Defeat X" achievements as there's not much point showing those when I'm showing everything else.

The general structure of this guide is a kind of "Show and tell". I show a video of a good run I got, and if that's all you need then you can leave at that point. If there's anything in the video you don't quite understand, I go into great detail on all the fights below the video.

Feel free to ask any questions in the comments below or on the Youtube videos!

Old Man Draugr Guy

This guy doesn't have any achievements, and I very much doubt anyone would ever need help with this fight. I figured I'd include it none-the-less just to be thorough.

The one thing to notice that people might not know is that once he gets big enough, you can roll through his legs to avoid the attacks when they're too wide to roll away. Just keep poking him and rolling around/behind him. That's it.

⚫ No Damage (Perfect) + Time Trials

In this section I'll show how to beat every boss without taking damage (The "Perfect" achievements) and under the time limit (Time Trial).
Usually I'll throw in an extra achievement if possible, but a few stragglers will be picked up later.

Obviously this is just for reference, and if you're trying to get the achievement for the first time on your own, you shouldn't go for all of these in one go. Pick one achievement and stick to aiming for only that until you get it. I just didn't want to have a million videos.

Jera - No Damage, Time Trial, Vegetarian

This strategy is actually very simple and safe. As you can see, there is a spot right up against her where you are completely safe from her slam attacks. Stand too close to the left root and she'll get you with the diagonal smash, and too close to the center and the overhead attack will hit you. Right in between is perfectly safe, and you can generally end the fight way before she starts summoning any roots or uses any poison (if she does, simply throw up a shield or two and keep wailing on her with Thor + Freya).

Fé - No Damage, Time Trial

So what's going on here, you ask? We start the fight with using the two Loki powers right then she grabs her shield. We won't need them for the decoy so it's nice to get the little bit of extra burst damage.

Use a Shield as the dwarves pop up before the fight begins or they might randomly ruin the fight for you.

Follow up with 4 hits of Freya + Thor before reapplying Freya. Feel free to use the last two Thors for the AoE damage because you generally don't need them. Just keep slamming down hammer hits until she moves out of range, at which point your two Odin spears should finish her off.

Isa - No Damage, Time Trial

This fight is a little bit strange. I believe going for that first icicle hit is actually slower and less efficient than just starting off right away with Freya + Thor. Yet somehow this just "clicked" a lot better with the rhythm of the fight. Same with using the Thor explosion when he's downed instead of a charged Thor strike which would do more damage. This just ended up being the most reliable pattern for me.

There's a bit of "RNG" to what attack he'll follow up with after he gets up the first time. Though I don't believe it's RNG and actually just based on your positioning. Haven't figured out a way to perfectly manipulate that though. Over all I don't think these achievements are that bad.

Hagalaz - No Damage, Time Trial, No K.O.

From here on we have entered the realm of RNG. This pattern I perform is actually very reliable and usually works, however you can easily get hit by a random spark from a tower that was randomly struck by the random lighting bolts as the boss spawns in the first time. At that point you can't really do much about it. We limit the rest of the RNG by playing it safe with Lokis during the thunderstrikes, but the first one can be horrible.

The rest is just based on positioning, really. Try to stand where I stand at the start, and roll to the left as I do, or she might start calling down thunder as her first attack. The fountain refill Thor hit is kind of a neat trick, but it really doesn't actually speed things up much at all since we basically don't use the full 3 powers anyway. So if you're dying or restarting in between attempts to spare yourself the walk back, just pop Freya+Thor as soon as you see the health bar appear like normal.

Kaunan - No Damage, Time Trial

Once again, this is actually a very reliable pattern to perform, but RNG can screw you over. Those falling rocks can leave behind lava that it's almost impossible to avoid getting bumped into when he falls down. Besides that, this is actually very consistent. I believe his attacks are based on positioning rather than RNG, so run at him after the first knock-down like I do, and he should follow up with a sword swing rather than a jump or the lava tendrils attack thing.

Keep in mind that this is just the most efficient way I've found, and leaves you with quite a lot of room for error. You can absolutely use the Shields or Loki powers if you think you're about to get hit by the lava rocks or his jumps, better safe than sorry. And I imagine it might be more damage efficient to toss an Odin spear in his face when he gets knocked down the first time since we never use more than one. Anyway, this is just the way I do it.

Odin - No Damage, Time Trial, Gungnir-phobia

Before I explain this fight, I want to clarify how the Gungnir-phobia achievement works, because it's weird as hell. Only certain things count as you destroying a spear, so it's a lot easier than you might think. My first instinct was that not a single spear could ever get destroyed, and that felt almost impossible. However, the only things that count as destroying spears are:

You hitting one with your axe.
Hitting one with a powered up Thor swing.
Hitting one with the explosion when triggering Thor.
And here's the kicker: You hitting one with the EXPLOSION of a Loki power.

That means that the spears hitting the decoy Loki is perfectly fine, and if you time it right one Loki should last through all three spears without exploding. You can also use Shields to block spears, and even just tank them with your health and it'll still count as you never destroying spears. It's bizarre and arbitrary. Anyway, on to the fight as a whole.


In my LP I had tons of trouble with this achievement, and just barely killed him in 60 seconds. It seemed incredibly hard, so maybe that means more of you need the help. After trying it a few times I figured out this pattern, which is very fast (what was that, 40 seconds or something?) and it eliminates so much of the RNG I hate about this fight. This might get long-winded, but I'm just gonna go through my actions step by step if you need the help:

I'd recommend dying once just to have the quick start to the fight like in the video. Drop one of the Lokis (we'll need the other one) when his eye lights up, then charge up a heavy attack.

As soon as you see the health bar, release your heavy attack, roll into him and do a light stab. He'll move down southwest, follow him and use Freya after about a second of running. This will take some practice, because if you run towards him too quickly he'll react to you and dodge away even further, and too slow and you won't have time to hit him with two Thor hits before he moves again.

So wait about a second before using Freya, roll three times towards him and use Thor to hit with the AoE, followed by two heavy attacks as quick as you can. Roll in between the hits to reduce the animation lag.

If you've damaged him enough, he'll retreat and immediately start throwing three spears. As soon as your second attack lands just start rolling southwest with the remainder of your speed power, and once you get close enough to him quickly do two more heavy attacks with the last bits of your Thor power.

They'll be a lot slower since the speed wore off, but you should still have enough time to land two hits before the spears show up. After the hits immediately drop a Loki power, and that will take care of all three spears he tossed without destroying any of them in the explosion (which would ruin your Gungnir-phobia achievement).

After dropping the Loki power, start rolling up towards the center of the arena. Use another Freya after 4 rolls or about when Odin starts moving.

Here comes the only RNG in this fight at this point, where he summons a Jotun. Don't let him do it in peace and keep throwing out Freya+Thor heavy attacks as he's summoning, but after you see what Jotun it is, you'll have to wing it. If it's Fé, Isa or Kaunan, you're pretty much good to go, since they're all easy to avoid. You can use the last Freya power or a Shield if you need to.

If he summons Hagalaz, it's quite inconvenient, since you can't just run straight for Odin. You might just want to try and ignore the lightning strikes and pop a Shield to tank the hits, but your screen will still go white which is annoying.

Finally, if he summons Jera and she's in the same corner he is, you got unlucky. I haven't tested this personally, but I'd imagine you can still just rambo in, and as soon as the poison is about to hit you, Shield and use your last Freya+Thor and you should be fine. You can use the second Shield after two attacks or so if he's still not dead.

Of course use your two Odin spears when he runs away from the center after summoning, and he should be very close to dying.

So that was a mouthful, but should accurately describe all possible scenarios, making this fight and this achievement far more consistent. As you could see, I didn't need to use a single Shield, but don't be afraid of doing so if you think quickly enough and you're about to get hit by whatever.

⚫ Miscellaneous Achievements

These two achievements are the only two that you can't realistically perform during a time trial or no god power run, so they get their own section.

Aren't they special?

Fé - Ultimate Fe's-bee

Here's how to defeat Fé without ever attacking her in melee.

It actually took me a while to realize what this achievement meant, since my first instinct when I see a giant plate of metal hurtling towards me is generally not to try and hit it back like a baseball. You have to use a heavy attack to hit the shields back, so keep that in mind.

I experimented a lot with using all the different powers, and in my tests I would never get the achievements when using a Thor explosion for damage. However, later on I found out that those do work for the achievement. So I'd recommend saving your Thor powers until she's a shield hit away from dying, and just running up to her and spamming all three. It might save you the last bit of chaos with hundreds of big dwarves swarming you.

There's not too much else that needs explaining here. Open the fight with both your spears, because otherwise she will almost never use the shield throw. Keep your distance so she doesn't scream after she slams down her shield, and generally she'll toss it instead. Make sure to take out any large dwarves that pop up near you, as they are the biggest problem in this fight. The small dwarves can pretty much be ignored.

Just hit the shield back three times, hoping that she just does slam, toss, slam, toss, slam, toss. After the third hit with the shield she'll bring up the pillars which you can break for some extra damage.

Now, since you won't be using Freya+Thor to damage her, you can use the speed powers quite freely. I use some Thors to instantly break the pillars since I didn't know they were usable for damage, but you should save them for her, or in a pinch if you're surrounded by raging dwarves. For the Freya powers. I generally just use them to travel around the map hitting the pillars, but I should've used one when she tossed the shield northwest and I would've landed that shield reflect and ended the fight earlier.

Whenever she roars you might want to drop a Loki, even if the damage won't get to her. If you do have a chance to get it next to her it's not a bad idea, but staying close means she'll use the roar more. I used my second Loki poorly since I thought there'd be more dwarves around. That one's better reserved for when she's one hit away and summons a dozen big dwarves around you.

This was quite an annoying achievement to record. It's not really a hard thing to do, but dwarf RNG and pattern manipulation can be a big dumb butt. This is the best run I ended up getting, and it could've gone a lot smoother, but this is still smoother than the average run you'd have. Dying isn't really a problem on this since you can stay away from most attacks and have no restrictions on using Heals, Shields or Lokis.

Isa - Sniper

This achievement all comes down to positioning and managing your god powers. Make sure to use your Shields and Freyas only to avoid charges or an ice breath you won't be able to dodge.

You should try to stay relatively close to him, or you will get hit by the ice breath every time. If there are no icicles nearby, it's safer to just wait for him to breathe ice and create more.

Of course, it doesn't matter if you get hit, you can just heal. I ended up never actually getting hit and this was the first attempt I made at all at recording this. So I was still a bit unsure of all the patterns, but this one is mostly just winging it rather than finding a good pattern.

A few things I learned from this run that you should take advantage of is that your Thor power can apparently instantly shoot icicles in whatever direction you're looking (holding your analog stick), even if the icicle is behind you, which is very convenient. Also note that Isa is unlikely to attack directly in any cardinal direction, so a good strategy for keeping him from attacking is to stay directly below or above him while hitting icicles, for example. Once again, something I didn't do.

If possible, you also want to try to hit more than one icicle in a single hit/Thor explosion to get more damage in at a time. It's also a good idea to try and hit one or more icicles into his face when he's knocked down, as that'll do critical damage. However, if you're completely on the other side of him, I'd say it's not worth bothering with.

Finally, keep in mind that this achievement is MUCH easier on a gamepad than on mouse and keyboard. Generally speaking I'd recommend playing this game on a gamepad if you have the option, because it lets you move, roll and attack with certain things in any direction you want rather than 8 fixed ones. When hitting icicles you can actually steer them very precisely by holding the analog stick in the direction you want them to go in.

⚫ Shun the Gods (No God Powers)

This section is for not using any god powers during the fights.

The only reason I've played through the game a second time without picking up any god shrines is because I thought it would look better, but there's no actual reason to skip out of the god powers. While going for these achievements you can still use the powers to travel around (Freya) or to get through the levels leading up to the bosses. If you've already beaten the game normally you can of course just continue with your save file and fight the bosses again.

Jera - Shun the Gods

So here's the first No God Power achievement. By far the most difficult achievements to get, especially the later ones. This one? Not so much.

Jera is incredibly straight-forward. Even if you don't abuse the hitboxes like shown here it's not very complicated, although you may have to avoid some poison mist.

If you play as shown and hug her about halfway between her center and the left root, the slams will all miss you and you can simply keep whacking away without a care in the world. Keep in mind that the diagonal strike can hit you if you're standing too far left and the overhead smash can hit you if you're too far right. There's a sweet spot where neither can hit you, but if you're unsure you can simply take a step right followed by a step left and you're good to go.

Begin the fight with a heavy attack, and then just spam light attacks, rolling towards her when she pushes you away. When you stun her, make sure you only hit one light attack and follow up with a strong attack at the weak point for massive damage. Roll away and then back as soon as your hit her weak point to avoid getting pushed back.

You can generally ignore the roots she spawns, and she'll usually only spawn one set of them if your damage output is high enough, but take out the ones that are too close for comfort. There's also some weirdness with her patterns, but this is generally what you'll see if you're hitting fast enough.

I have seen her get stunned the second time a lot earlier, which is good for you, but she'll likely follow up with the poison. If she only has about a quarter of her health left you can completely ignore the damage and just kill her. If you've been slacking and she has a bit more just fall back to the flower.

Fé - Shun the Gods

This fight is a little bit trickier than Jera, but should still not pose too many problems.

I find the easiest way to deal with her it to basically play it like the Ultimate Fe's-bee fight. The only difference is that you have to get some initial damage done before she'll start throwing her shield.

Once you've dealt and inch or two of damage, just fall back and await the shield throws. From this point on just keep your distance. If you're far enough away she won't use her scream attack, which is by far the most dangerous part of this fight, especially when there are a lot of large dwarves. Reflect shields until she summons the pillars, and then get ready to kite some dwarves.

You can't completely ignore them all like in the Fe's-bee achievement, so only go for the first pillar, then retreat and stay as far away from her as possible. Focus on rolling around and taking out a few dwarves at a time, especially the large dwarves, and attempt to reflect the shields as best you can. They should take out the occasional pillar as well, which helps a bit with the damage.

If the shield reflect doesn't work out at all for you, you could just make your way around the arena taking out pillars, but it gets pretty dangerous near the top when she throws shields you can't reflect and you're close enough for her to roar every other attack.

Once her health got low enough, I just decided to go rambo and not care about taking damage. If your fight hasn't gone as smoothly as mine, you can keep hanging back and hoping for another shield reflect. Though she'll summon a crap-load of big dwarves which can make things difficult.

Isa - Shun the Gods

This is not a very difficult fight due to the many times you'll knock Isa down and do large chunks of damage to his head. That said, this fight has a fair bit of "RNG". Quotation marks simply because I think it's mostly based on positioning, but I personally wasn't able to figure out how to make him totally consistent.

The pattern that he started walking in during the fight is quite unusual, and normally he walks southeast right when you begin, but it doesn't matter too much. I choose to hit him three times with icicles to knock him down the first time, because then he won't use a single attack, but you could just hit him if you want. The worst thing you'll see before the first knockdown is the slam attack, which is very easy to bait.

Since I'm using a controller, it makes angling and aiming the icicle shots (and movement and rolling in general) a ton easier. If you have access to a controller I would heavily recommend it for this game.

Once you knock him down, make sure you're below him so that you can hit his face, that's where you do the most damage. Two light hits followed by a heavy attack is the most damage you can get during one stun.

After that you kind of have to wing it based on if he breathes, slams or charges. The former two are easy to deal with. If he charges just go through his legs. The entire fight is basically "stay close and run through his legs" because no attacks can hit behind him. Chase him when he charges or he might use the breath which can end up being unavoidable.

Keep in mind that rolling is only faster than running before he turns the arena to ice. Once you're on ice, rolling is only worth doing when you need to quickly change directions. Roll twice then just start running and you'll maintain speed much better than if you spam rolls.

Hagalaz - Shun the Gods

Okay.. I'm not gonna say that this fight is easy.
But it's pretty easy.

At first, the amount of RNG may seem overwhelming, but there are a few good rules of thumb that make this fight fairly simple to wing.

First of all, understanding how the lightning calldown works. Generally, the game tries to "lead the target" depending on where you're moving, so if you double back a lot and circle around, the lightning strikes are easy to avoid. If you just run in a straight line, it'll sometimes be impossible to dodge a strike without rolling backwards. Being able to dodge lightning strikes makes this fight more or less trivial.

Secondly, pay attention to the lightning rods. If 2-3 are active, I'd say just run to the last one(s) and try to force out the calldown attacks. Before she splits I'd recommend trying to kite the strikes while just getting some damage done to her, but after she splits I generally just run around the arena trying to trigger a knockdown as soon as either of them begin calling down lightning.

When you do get them down, either by charging all the lightning rods or by either of them using the lightning beams to stun the other one, avoid the wave of sparks that shoot out as they fall and make your way to the head. I believe you can get 2 hits in, followed by a heavy attack, but if you don't want to risk them waking up it's fine to just go for a single heavy attack. To the head they do ridiculous damage.

Beyond that, I'm quite aggressive when going for damage, and you could essentially play this fight without ever hitting her before a knockdown if you just want to run around the lightning rods baiting attacks over and over. Perfectly safe and legitimate, but it would take a bit longer to do.

In general, you can kind of just avoid the sparks. If you have the choice of running towards one of them near an inactive rod and one near an active rod, of course go for the inactive both to activate it and to not have to dodge sparks shooting out. They usually aren't a problem though since they do very small amounts of damage.

Kaunan - Shun the Gods, Risky Business

Welcome to Hell. RNG Hell!

Ignore the fact that I pretty much had a perfect fight, because that isn't really too relevant here. As with all the fights, the first sequence of moves is completely consistent and more or less perfected until the first knockdown, so study that hard, because that'll kickstart the rest of the fight.

Start off with a heavy attack. From where you hit his foot I roll southwest and walk a little bit left-ish to position myself. After the heavy attack make sure you get three more hits in before he jumps, then start rolling towards the center of the arena.
When you get to the center, get in 4 hits of any kind while trying to reposition yourself below him and he's guaranteed to get knocked down. During a knockdown, make sure you're hitting his head/horns for bonus damage. Two light attacks followed by a heavy attack.

Past this point, it basically comes down to positioning and RNG. A few more tips though: You want him to use his slash attack as little as possible, because it can be tricky to avoid in phase 2, and doesn't leave him open for damage for very long.

Whenever he jumps back to shoot lava out of the ground, make your way towards the center of the arena. If you're far enough away from him he'll always jump towards it, letting you set up for an easy heavy attack.

If lava is covering the area below him, or if you're forced to dodge his jump attack upwards, you may want to consider not attacking him at all. If you knock him down when you're not able to reach the head it's a massive waste of damage (I got lucky in the video).

Beyond that, it really is just RNG. The lava patches can completely ruin your day. Try to stay relatively far away from him to bait out jump attacks, but don't take the fight too close to the edge of the arena. If he does do any slash attacks, just stop moving before he hits until you know where he's aiming before you roll in the opposite direction. Good luck, you'll need it!

As an afterthought I show a clip of getting the Risky Business achievement, but that's essentially a non-achievement. If you can get any of these other ones, intentionally taking damage isn't really that difficult. I just had to include it to have every single boss achievement in the videos.

Odin - Shun the Gods

Welcome to the hardest achievement in the game!
And by hardest, I mean most random and complete baloney.

Honestly though, this fight is pretty much a coin-flip, and the thing I hate the most about this entire game. The sheer amounts of RNG in this fight, particularly in the last 25% mean that you can just get absolutely crushed even if you technically played it perfectly.

With that in mind, this is one of those achievement you just have to bite the bullet and grind out. For reference I believe this took me about an hour to an hour and a half to record.

Now what can you do to perform better in this fight? Learn the timing of destroying spears. Sometimes you get screwed and multiple spears arrive at the same time, but mostly you can swing quite early since your axe has a very long-lasting damage hitbox.

Whenever you think a spear is arriving in a second or two, I'd recommend doing single attacks, cancelled into a roll, then repeating. By cancelling single attacks you cut down on the animation time of the axe hits, so you're pretty much constantly in a roll animation, which is fairly quick and lets you adapt much quicker to when a spear shows up. I do believe it's actually better overall in terms of flexibility and damage, but keeping up the most efficient timing through an entire fight might be a bit too much.

I got quite lucky with his summons this fight. The first one being Jera on the opposite side of the map from where Odin was going, which is ideal and basically removes her entirely as a factor. An inconveniently placed Jera is an absolute nightmare for this fight. Past that, I wanted to show that you can actually reflect Fé's shield just like in her normal fight, however it's slow, risky and doesn't do much damage at all. It's maybe 1.5x the damage of a heavy attack. It isn't really worth it, but just so you know it's a possibility in case she's the first Jotun he summons and there's no other risk involved.

The final summon is chaotic as always, and you just have to avoid damage as best you can while hoping that you've performed well enough up until this point to tank a few hits. That's pretty much all there is to it, really.

In conclusion, this fight comes down to luck, copious amounts of luck, properly managing your animations and rolls, more luck, not cancelling any inputs like dodging too early before an attack actually hits and some luck. I'm still fairly bad at it myself, but with enough dedication you'll get the fight down on a technical level fairly quick. That's about all I can tell you.

⚫ Afterwords

Thanks for checking out these walkthroughs!

I know I might be a bit too long-winded and convoluted in my video descriptions, but I just figured I'd cram as much information in there as possible for anyone who's struggling, and if people don't need the elaboration they can just watch the video and be done with it.

Hope you enjoyed, I had a lot of fun playing this game and making these walkthroughs.
Thanks to Thunder Lotus for being awesome!

As always, feel free to leave any comments or questions below if you need tips or anything.

[Shilag]

I have finally compiled the Valhalla walkthroughs from Youtube into a guide here on Steam, for anyone that's looking for that.

[Shilag]

@Artillery only
I have a full guide for all the Valhalla bosses/achievements on my Youtube channel. I've just been chronically lazy and haven't made them into a Steam Guide.

[Andy]

Can you do a valhalla guide?

[Fernando Locke]

Amazing! I can't believe you did that without a single hit!

[Stabby Cat]

You are my fricken hero! Thank you!

[MellowLemons]

Still the best guide around for this game. Finished all the no damage / time trial achievements in just a few others plus some of the others.

[GGyu]

Thank you so much!!! This guide is really helpful to achieve my achievements.

[Mercotroll]

Holy God, your no damage fights are unbelievable. I didn't think it could be done (ain't nobody got time for that either, but cool to see there are people crazy enough to try). Great job

[Asfalto]

Very useful guide!

[Natrea]

A very helpful guide! Did "Shun the Gods" achievements as the first ones (beside plot achievements). Totally worth it!