How to beat Yellowbrow in Black Myth: Wukong

Yellowbrow is the final boss of the third chapter in Black Myth: Wukong, and he’s one of the toughest mandatory bosses in the final game, even though at first he’ll lure you into a false sense of security. 

At the very least, Yellowbrow fooled me. When I finally climbed the mountain and met Yellowbrow in the temple, I was shocked by how much easier his fight was than Yellow Wind Sage, the final boss of Chapter 2. Sure, every so often he would vanish and reappear on the other side of the arena, but aside from that he didn’t seem to have many tricks. Then Yellowbrow trapped me inside a magic sack and transformed me from a monkey into a smaller, wilder monkey, and everything went off the rails. 

The real Yellowbrow boss fight happens after that transformation. First the Destined One needs beat the Macaque Chief yet again, then he has to run through the miniature temple that Yellowbrow puts him in. Finally the two of them meet on one of the temple’s platforms for a three-phase final battle. This one isn’t for the faint of heart, but here’s everything I learned during the many, many attempts it took me to kill Yellowbrow. 

How to beat Yellowbrow

The best thing to do to beat Yellowbrow is plan ahead. Before you even reach the top of the mountain, you should craft plenty of medicine to help boost your damage, defense, and shock resistance. Once you enter the temple, you won’t have a chance to stock up again before you’re in the real Yellowbrow boss fight. 

The basic strategy for beating Yellowbrow involves damaging him as quickly as possible the moment the fight starts. There will be phase transition animations each time you take out a third of Yellowbrow’s health, and during those you’ll take some unavoidable damage. Because of that, you should aim to get to that first transition before needing to use any of your drinks. 

Throughout the battle, Yellowbrow will coat himself in gold, and you’ll need to hit him a half dozen or so times to break the coating and open him up to damage. It’s possible to get him to the first phase transition before he uses the gold ability, but sometimes he can be pretty quick on the draw. When he’s coated, you should mostly focus on dodging his extremely damaging electricity attacks, and take a single hit on him between each of his attacks. 

PSA: Don’t summon your duplicates during the fight. I thought it would be great to have a team of monkeys wailing on Yellowbrow, but it turns out he can take control of the duplicates and make them attack you. That was a rough way to die. The Immobilization spell also becomes useless against Yellowbrow after his first phase transition, so use it or lose it. When it comes to swapping spells, I will say that my transformations really came in handy for doing large chunks of damage and absorbing some of those electrical attacks that I struggled to dodge. 

Despite the animations and unavoidable damage, Yellowbrow’s actual move set doesn’t really change between the phases. He’ll continually teleport around the arena to keep you running, and he’ll keep coating himself in gold to resist your damage. Aside from that, he uses electrically charged melee attacks that coat the ground in AoE damage. His main two moves are a massive downward swing that rips up the ground and a spinning attack that can hit you multiple times if you don’t roll away. 

There’s no way around this being a tricky fight. Having a good medicine supply and knowing that you can’t get greedy with your magic helps, but beyond that you’ve really just got to focus on pacing out your drinks and learning how to dodge Yellowbrow’s most damaging attacks. By the time you beat him, you’ll be well prepared for the back half of the game.