Persona 5 Makoto Confidant

Getting Makoto's Confidant to Max Without Losing Your Mind

Makoto Niijima's bond ranks start opening up pretty late in the game, around mid-October, and her rank requirements are among the most aggressive for any Confidant. You need 4 Courtroom knowledge to hit Rank 4, and 4 Leadership for Rank 7. Most players just brute-force these through the classroom minigames and club activities, but that approach burns through your limited action points during the longest, busiest stretch of the calendar. I learned this the hard way during my third playthrough when I tried to max out Ryuji and Makoto simultaneously in November, and I had to reload two separate saves because I accidentally burned three days doing courtroom practice instead of heading to Leblanc for Arthur's requests. The trick nobody mentions enough is that Makoto's events scale with your social stat levels, not your character level. If you're running around Palaces at level 30 but your Courtroom stat is sitting at 2, you will fail her Rank 4 request every single time. The solution is straightforward: stop treating her Confidant as something you do between Palace runs. Do her ranks first, then clear the Palace. Specifically, complete Ranks 3 through 6 before you engage any major boss fights in November, because once Yousei and Savant become available, the calendar grid effectively halves your daily options and Makoto's requests start getting pushed into December where other priorities dominate.

Persona 5 Makoto Confidant Rank Requirements and Early Pitfalls

Here is the actual stat floor you need to clear before attempting each rank without fail: Rank 1 opens on October 15 automatically. Rank 2 requires 2 Kindness, available October 21. Rank 3 needs 3 Understanding, available October 28. Rank 4 demands 4 Courtroom, and this is where people get stuck. The Courtroom minigame happens in the library during free time, but it only appears on specific days tied to your class schedule. If you are in Class A (the default), you get one courtroom session per week. If you transferred to a different class, the schedule changes entirely. I spent an entire real-world week thinking the minigame was bugged because I was in Class B and my courtroom days were completely different from my friend's Class A setup. The workaround is simply checking the day-of-week pattern in the calendar app or a guide before your first attempt so you know exactly which free-time slots to spend there. Rank 5 requires 4 Kindness and 4 Understanding. Rank 6 requires 4 Compassion. Rank 7 needs 4 Leadership, which comes from leadership minigames in the library on alternate weeks from courtroom. This alternating schedule is deliberate game design, not a bug. Rank 8 requires 4 Courage. Rank 9 requires 4 Kindness and 4 Understanding again. Rank 10 is automatic once all prerequisites are met.

The cumulative stat investment here is heavy. You are looking at roughly 22 total stat points spread across four different social stats. Each point costs about 15 to 20 minutes of actual gameplay when you factor in travel time between locations and the minigame itself. That is 5 to 7 hours of pure grind if you do it carelessly. Do it efficiently by pre-planning your weekly free-time slots for two weeks straight and you can knock it down to about 3 hours total. One thing that catches people off guard: Makoto's Rank 6 event triggers a mandatory story sequence that locks you into a single location for the rest of the day. If you attempt this on a day where you still have pending Phantom Thieves requests or museum visits, those plans get wiped. Always check your current request list before accepting a Makoto Confidant call. The game does not warn you about this overlap. Another counter-intuitive detail: Makoto's late-game abilities for your party members are actually more valuable than her direct combat contributions. Her Rank 9 skill, Pressure Point, increases critical hit chance for all allies by 10 percent. In practice, this matters more than almost any other support skill in the final arcana because critical hits bypass enemy damage reduction in Persona 5, and the highest-level enemies in the game have significant resistance to normal attacks. Getting her to Rank 9 before January gives you a permanent damage boost that stacks with your team's existing crit skills. If you are struggling with the hardest Palace bosses and your damage feels inconsistent, maxing Makoto early might be the difference between a clean run and reloading ten times.

The main downside to investing heavily in Makoto's Confidant is opportunity cost. Every hour you spend grinding Courtroom or Leadership is an hour you are not spending on other Confidants, skill cards, or treasure exploration. By the time you max her out, you will likely be a week or two behind on your other social links. This is not a problem if you pace yourself properly, but players who try to do everything at once usually end up with nothing fully maxed and miss several important story events. The alternative, if you find yourself falling behind, is to use the fast-travel system and skip unnecessary exploration entirely until Makoto is at least Rank 7. The game does not penalize you for rushing her ranks specifically, unlike some other Confidants that have hard date locks. Also worth noting: Makoto's Confidant does not unlock any extra Personas or fusion recipes beyond what her ranks provide through standard means. If you are grinding her purely for fusion benefits, you are better off investing in someone like Joe or Sadayo, whose higher ranks unlock significantly more useful fusion candidates. Makoto is strictly a support and story investment. Knowing that upfront saves you from wasting time on a Confidant that does not pull its weight in the early game. If you want the actual game file or any modification tools, those are widely available through the official Persona 5 store and established community sites like Atlus's own support pages and the larger fan communities. Nothing obscure there.