How to quickly defeat Takezo The Unrivaled Duel Atop the Mountain

By Naveen Kohli

Thursday, October 9, 2025

Takezo the Unrivaled, Duel Atop the Mountain is considered the most difficult fight of the game. 

Takezo strikes are fast and do a lot of damage. Takezo can kill you in 3 strikes. I tested it by just standing and take his hits. A single missed dodge or parry means death for you. After experimenting 3-4 times I gauged what needs to be done. I reached the following conclusions.

• You need to be really good at parry and dodge.
• You need to have a lot of health.
• You need to be able to do a lot of damage to finish the fight as fast as possible because the blizzard phase of the fight will reduce your health pool to the point that if Takezo will just sneeze, you will die.

Before I say anything more, I just want to emphasize that above are my personal conclusions based on my play style.

I know that casual player like myself, these conclusions are a problem. I know that a single missed parry or dodge means death. We need to find a way so that we do not have to deal with parry/dodge at all or as little as possible.

After few tries, I found an easy way to handle this fight and kill Takezo in one minute without a single block, parry or dodge.

Skill

Dance of Wrath is MUST have skill for the approach I took. We need to completely disarm Takezo. Dance Of Wrath will take away both of his katanas.

Gear

I have used Armor Of The Undying. The whole fight is Katana to Katana. Weapon matching is not an issue for the fight. You get all the buffs that the gear has to offer. Those are good mele buffs.

Charms

I assigned more weight to the following:

• Regenerate Spirit during the fight.
• Boost of health pool to be able to handle bad luck of taking one hit and be able to recover quickly.
• Reduce blizzard damage. The Blizzard phase is 70% of the fight. You have to do whatever you can to mitigate the effect of blizzard damage.
• If possible, boost quickfire damage. I will take any source of additional damage at the cost of defense because we are going for offense approach.

Based on my evaluation, I picked the following charms:

• Charm of Yamatotakeru (Replace this with some other Charm)
• Charm of Inner Fire
• Charm of Thoughtful Restoration
• Charm of Enduring Resolve
• Charm of Mount Yotei
• Charm of Uncanny Aim

Fight Strategy

The strategy of the fight is to disarm and keep Takezo away from his weapons for as long as possible. Dance of Wrath disarms will completely disarm Takezo. Then use quickfire weapons to keep Takezo staggered and blinded to prolong his recovery of weapons. Watch the following video to see how this strategy works.