By bainz Published on Nov 1, 2025

How to Build Raidou! (Raidou Remastered)

In Raidou Remastered: The Mystery of the Soulless Army, you have full control on how you want to build the protagonist: Raidou Kuzunoha XIV. I recently released a video on how I built him, from his chosen stat distribution, his weapon, his Active Combat Skills and his Passive Skills. I also went into the Demon Allies I chose, why I went with them and how I built them.

If you want a full in-depth explanation on those topics, watch the build guide video. In this post, I’ll be providing some of the relevant images, along with commentary on the main topics. Check out my YouTube Channel for more SMT guides, boss fights and more.

Stats

To start out with, like some other SMT games, each time Raidou levels up, you are able to assign one point in either Strength, Magic, Vitality or Luck. Incenses, which you get throughout the game, can also increase either Raidou or his Demon’s stats.

These are what the different stats in Raidou Remastered do:

Strength: Increases Physical sword attacks and Combat Skills
Magic: Increases Magic Combat Skills, Magic Defense, Stats of Ally Demons
Vitality: Increases Physical Defense and Max HP
Luck: Increase Critical Chance, Ailment Resistance and Item Drop Rates

In my opinion, Magic is the priority in the early game due to it having triple benefits for your entire team. Vitality is a good option after you get a decent amount of Magic, to help live strong Physical attacks. Once Raidou is able to learn stronger Physical attacks, such as Heat Wave, you can consider adding some Strength points. Luck, due to only affecting the RNG elements, is a last priority for me.

Weapons

The main way to actually customize Raidou is through Sword Alchemy in the Goumaden. You can unlock more weapons for Raidou as the story progresses, in the form of swords, spears and axes. Swords offer standard balanced gameplay, spears are faster and good for the Combo Meter, while axes are slower but do more damage per hit. I found swords to be the most comfortable, so by late game, I stuck with a sword called Murakumo. But any weapon works, as long as they have the same base attack and bonus stats.

In NG+ there is a spear called Ameno-Nuboko which has 410 base attack, making it best for Raidou in subsequent playthroughs.

Active Combat Skills

Heat Wave is another good option over Menacing Blade

Next are the 3 skills you can use in combat. There are a number of them in the game, but I actually stuck to 2 early ones for my entire playthrough. The first one being Magnetize from the Type-32 Gunto Axe, which restores 50% of your MAG. Because of how important MAG is for your Demon allies, this skill never left my build. The second one was Zeal from the Kiyotsune Axe, which cures your team’s status ailments and triggers ‘Zeal’ for the party. The effect of Zeal seems to provide a status immunity, and increase your team’s offense and defense during its 10 second duration. It has a longer cooldown of 30 seconds, but it’s the only team boosting skill Raidou gets, so I kept it my entire playthrough.

The last one was always kept to an attacking move, usually a Physical one, as I had Demon allies to hit enemy weaknesses. I liked using moves like Heat Wave and Menacing Blades, but there are a number of good options. Megidoloan is a nice Magic nuke, but its 60 second cooldown made me not use it much. In the end, try them all out and keep the move you like using the most.

Passive Skills

One of the most important parts of building Raidou are his passive skills. You get 6 to start out with, but can unlock 2 more from Case Files 30 and 42.

There are a ton of good options here, so I’ll just list the ones I chose for my final build:

Summoner’s Will: Increases damage of Spirit Slashes
Righteous Heart (unlocked from Case File 42): Increases all sources of Spirit gain
Devil’s Ruin: Increases the damage of Devil’s Bane (Raidou’s counter)
Martial Instinct: Slightly reduces the amount of time until Raidou’s combat skills can be used again (tested and found to be a 20% reduction)
Shield Breaker: Greatly increases the damage allies deal to foe’s weakness shields
Diamond Disposition: Greatly increases the damage dealt by and MAG cost of Demon attacks
Capricious Miracle: Provides a chance that Demon attacks do not consume MAG
Blessing of Mercury: Reduces Demon’s MAG consumption (20% reduction)

As you can see, this is a fairly offensive set-up, because those are the types of builds I tend to prefer. But if you find yourself taking more damage or dying, there are defensive passives like Vengeance Seal, Resist Phys, Resist Fire/Elec, Resist Ice/Force, Resist Mind/Death, Tiger/Dragon Stance, Phoenix/Tortoise-Snake Step and Inspiring Flash.

Some other passives I considered were Heroic Poise, which increases the damage of sword attacks at full HP, Merciless Strikes, which increases damage dealt to stunned enemies, and Summoner’s Rebirth, which restores 20% of damage taken as MAG. Most of the passives I have mentioned are naturally unlocked pretty late, as they’re the best ones in the game. In early game, I used ones like MAG Drainer, Combo Rondo, Devil’s Trick and Phoenix Step.

Demons

Something else I wanted to include in this post were the main Demons I ended up using. Every Demon skill in Raidou is transferable, meaning there isn’t much separating Demons gameplay wise, in fact only their base resistances offer much reason to use one over another. The Demon that actually has the best resistances is Thoth, a Level 38 Demon that has better resistances than even Level 70 ones. 5 immunities at Level 38 is insane, and they come at a time when you can get Resist Phys easily from Hayatoro. I made this Demon into my main buffer and healer, they were given all the temporary duration buffs. The passive Skill Extension increases the duration of buffs cast and Magic Boost reduces MAG consumption.

The other Demon I ran was usually an Elemental attacker who could stun enemies and had the other buffing skills I was missing on Thoth. I chose Black Frost for this role because they’re my favorite SMT Demon, showing that anyone can be used for this role. Black Frost has the buffs that last the entire fight, so the rest of the time they could use MAG for attacking skills. I did use the DLC passives that boosted damage such as Mage’s Craft and Destructive Joy, but many other passives work here. With just these two Demons I had every single buff active with full uptime, healing and plenty of damage, so I stuck with this set-up for my playthrough.

Conclusion

And that was my guide on building Raidou, with a small tangent on my Demon allies. In this game, there’s not really one optimal build, this was mainly to show what I used and what options there are. Last thing to mention, in NG+, you are able to unlock 4 new Passive skills.

I haven’t played NG+ yet, but all these skills sound good, particularly Goddess Lullaby depending on how good the MAG restoration is. But for this post, I wanted to keep things limited to a NG playthrough. Let me know if you liked this post by viewing my guide video and sharing the post/video for other players! Thank you for reading.