Beast of Reincarnation Malefact of Fate — Kill Shidou Last

What the Malefact of Fate Actually Is

Half the confusion around this fight is naming. Malefact of Fate is an objective name, not a creature. It is what the game calls the final encounter of Chapter 3, “The Vessel”, which plays out in the Great Wall Terraces.

What you actually fight is a pair: the Nue Malefact, the beast you have already chased through the chapter, joined at the end by the Nue Purifier — Shidou. It is the first duo boss in the game.

All three refer to the same Chapter 3 encounter. If you searched one name and found nothing, that is why.

How to Beat the Malefact of Fate

Both halves are weak to Poison, which is unusually convenient — you do not have to split your build between two resistances. Bring Poison on Koo and it applies to the whole fight.

The Siphon Is the Whole Fight

The mechanic that decides this encounter, and the reason killing Shidou early backfires:

• Pressure Shidou, not Nue. He is the more dangerous of the two and the one the fight is built around.
• At roughly 30% health he latches a root onto Nue and siphons its health into his own bar.
• Attack him to break the channel. Interrupting it leaves both bosses open for a window afterwards — that window is your main damage opportunity.
• Repeat the cycle. Each siphon drains Nue, so letting it happen and then breaking it is how you bring Nue down without attacking it directly.
• Kill Shidou last, once Nue is also low.

Community guides report that Koo’s Higanbana: Roots cancels the link instantly, and that Kiku: Bloom Strike reliably knocks Shidou down for a free opening ⚠ skill-specific behaviour reported by guides; we have not verified it in-game. On Emma’s side, Blade Art: Sakura and Iaido Strike are the commonly recommended picks — see our best build guide for how to get there.

Use Lock-On to Read the Turn Order

The two rarely attack at the same time. With lock-on active the camera swings to whichever boss is winding up, which effectively tells you whose turn it is — so lock-on here is a threat indicator rather than just an aiming aid. Note that since patch 1.0.8 the auto-target options default to off for fresh configurations, so check your settings if the camera is not behaving the way older guides describe.

Patch 1.0.11 Touches This Fight Again (September 8)

One line in the fifth patch’s notes names this boss: “Fixed an issue where Shido’s Iaido Strike failed to register hits in specific positions.” Read it carefully before assuming it makes the fight easier or harder. The notes say Shido — the Nue Purifier, spelled without the “u” most guides use — and an attack of his that was not connecting in certain positions now does. If that is Shidou’s own draw strike, the fix means positions that used to be safe from it may no longer be; if the wording refers to the player-side Iaido Strike landing on him, it is the opposite ⚠ the official sentence is ambiguous about whose attack is meant; no player has described the change yet. Either way, the siphon mechanic and the kill order above are unchanged — nothing in 1.0.11 mentions them.

The Softlock That Broke This Fight — Now Fixed

Patch 1.0.10 (August 31, 2026) fixed it. If you were stuck, update and go back. The official notes list it under The Great Wall Terraces, and the wording gives away something no player report had worked out — see what actually caused it below. Everything in this section describes the bug as it stood on 1.0.9, and is kept because the fix is a day old and plenty of players have not updated yet.

Since patch 1.0.9 (August 24, 2026), players reported the Malefact of Fate fight locking up. The pattern was consistent across reports:

• You enter the arena and the fight starts normally.
• About a minute in, both bosses stop. Idle animations keep playing, so the game has not crashed — they simply stop moving and attacking.
• You clip straight through them and cannot deal damage. One report adds that the music stops at the same moment.
• The arena stays sealed. You can fast-travel out, but you cannot get back in, and the story cannot continue.
• Quitting to desktop and reloading is the only reset — and then it happens again.

This is a pattern, not one player’s bad luck. Three players now describe it independently in Game Freak’s own Steam bug thread, all on 1.0.9.0, and one adds a fourth case seen on the official Discord running on PS5 — so it is not confined to PC. One reporter puts it plainly: “all of this is since 1.0.9.0.”

A detail that matters for anyone searching: the third reporter did not call it the Malefact of Fate at all — they filed it as “a bug in the Shido & Nue battle where the enemy freezes partway through, making it impossible to proceed.” Same fight, same patch, different name. That is exactly why the naming table below exists: reports of this bug are scattered across three different names, so no single search finds them all.

A fourth report settles what this is not. The most detailed one yet comes from a player on Linux (Nobara, Proton-GE) with a Radeon 9070XT — so the freeze happens on AMD hardware and on Linux, as well as on Windows and PS5. That rules out a GPU-vendor or driver explanation and points squarely at game logic, which is consistent with a patch having rebuilt this encounter.

Two details in that report are new and useful. First, the freeze seems to fire on a trigger, not at random — the player describes everything being normal until “presumably, i hit some kind of cutscene trigger”, at which point both enemies drop into idle ⚠ the reporter’s own supposition. For a fight Game Freak just converted into an event battle, a cutscene trigger is exactly where you would expect it to break.

Second, this is why the softlock is permanent: the game will not autosave while it still considers you to be in a boss fight. So if you leave the arena, the state you are stuck in is the state that gets saved.

Things that have been tried and do not work: verifying game file integrity (everything validates), switching between all three difficulty settings, and changing graphics settings. Do not spend time on those.

What Actually Triggered It — the Fix Reveals the Cause

For a week nobody could say why some players hit this and others walked through Chapter 3 untouched. The 1.0.10 note answers it, and the condition is not one any player report had identified:

“Fixed an issue in the The Great Wall Terraces zone where players who lost their initial boss battle prior to the patch could not progress after re-challenging the boss, even upon fulfilling the victory conditions.”

Read that carefully. The trigger was losing this fight before 1.0.9 landed. If you died to the Malefact of Fate on an older build, then updated, the re-challenge is what broke — which is why the encounter started normally and then stopped paying attention to you. Players who had never lost it, or who reached Chapter 3 after updating, were never at risk. That neatly explains why reports were scattered rather than universal.

One honest caveat. Game Freak describes the bug from the developer’s side — a re-challenge that will not complete — while players described the symptom: bosses dropping into idle, music cutting, the arena sealing. Those read as the same fault from two angles, and the zone, the fight and the timing all line up, but we cannot prove every reported case is covered by this one fix ⚠ our mapping of the official wording onto the player reports. If you were affected, update and test before assuming.

If You Are Still Stuck After Updating

• Load the save from before the arena, not the one made inside it. The pre-fight save is the clean entry point.
• Report it. Game Freak’s support site takes tickets, and a case that survives 1.0.10 is genuinely new information — the fix targets one specific trigger, so a softlock without that history would be a different bug.

A note on how this got fixed so fast. The player who filed the original report said on August 31 that Game Freak had responded to him and hoped to ship a patch “sometime this week”. The patch landed the same day. That is the second time this shape of signal has delivered — a developer called the previous fix “very close” on August 20 and it shipped on the 24th.

Why the Patch Notes Are the Clue

Game Freak has not acknowledged the freeze. But the 1.0.9 notes contain one line that nobody has connected to it:

“The boss battle in The Great Wall Terraces has been changed to an event battle.”

The Great Wall Terraces contains exactly one boss battle, and this is it. So the patch that rebuilt this encounter is the same patch the freeze reports date from. That is a strong coincidence, and we think it is the likely cause — but we are labelling it as inference, not fact: Game Freak has not linked the two, and nobody has published a before-and-after test ⚠ our reading of the patch note; not officially confirmed.

What You Can Actually Do

There is no workaround. Nobody has published one, and we are not going to invent one. What is worth doing:

• Keep a save from before you enter the arena, not one made inside it. This is the single most useful precaution, because a save created inside a sealed arena has nowhere to go.
• File a support ticket if it happens to you. The developer-badged account answering that Steam thread has been explicitly asking players to submit tickets for progression blockers, and this is one.
• Do not downgrade. When the Fuji Frontier elite bug hit, players reinstalled older builds and it changed nothing, because the broken state lived in the save. Assume the same until someone proves otherwise.

We re-check the official bug thread daily and this section is where any update lands — including a fix, a workaround, or a second wave of reports that changes how widespread this looks.

This Fight Comes Back — Twice

Chapter 3 is your introduction to a pairing you will meet again, which is another reason the naming gets tangled. From our full boss list:

The siphon cycle works at all three, so what you learn here carries. One patch note worth knowing for the Chapter 6 version: since 1.0.8, the Lv 32 Nue Malefact you meet earlier in Fuji Frontier flees instead of fighting and hands you the abilities the fight used to reward. That one is a deliberate change, not a bug — players often call that boss Erica or Erika ⚠ community naming, and she is still fought properly later in the same chapter.

Frequently Asked Questions