How to beat Queen Gibdo without the Vow of Riju in Tears of the Kingdom

As soon as you reveal the Lightning Temple in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, the game introduces you to Queen Gibdo, the dungeon’s boss. You fight this moth-like creature once before you enter the dungeon and again once you complete it, both times using Riju’s lightning ability to render her vulnerable. If you choose to play through the final boss sequence without having finished the main Gerudo questline, however, the game expects you to take down Queen Gibdo without Riju’s lightning to aid you. Although Queen Gibdo presents more of a challenge than most of the other dungeon bosses, she is still more than beatable even in this scenario, which this guide will help you accomplish.

Fighting the Queen Gibdo

Primary Weaknesses

Usually, Queen Gibdo will start the fight by skittering around while intermittently firing concentrated blasts of sand in your direction, an attack similar to the elemental beams that the Gleeoks use. Fortunately, this attack doesn’t pose as much of a threat as the Gleeoks’ beams, allowing you to easily steer clear of it by running to the side.

Like the regular Gibdo enemies, the Queen Gibdo remains completely impervious to damage by default, and you can only bypass this invincibility using elemental attacks. Although the game lists fire and electricity as the Gibdos’ primary weaknesses, any elemental attack will do the job just fine. Even the flashbang effect produced by Dazzlefruit will work, although it doesn’t cause damage directly.

You can use melee weapons with elemental properties if you’d like, but Queen Gibdo’s fast movement speed means that it’s easier to use arrows with elemental materials attached instead. Even with the boss’s massive size, though, you’ll still need to aim carefully. Try and aim when she briefly stops in her tracks if you have trouble hitting her as she moves around.

Screenshot via PC Invasion

Dealing Damage

Once you land an elemental attack on Queen Gibdo, she becomes vulnerable to regular attacks for a limited time. It’s not quite time to go for an all-out assault, though, as the Queen Gibdo will now occasionally slam down and generate massive sand tornadoes while she limps away from you. If you had Riju with you, this would mark the time when you would use her lightning ability to instantly stun the boss and dish out as much damage as possible before she recovers. Without that strategy to lean on though, you will have to land multiple attacks to stun her instead.

You can go for the melee approach, although from my experience, it’s much easier to do this with one-handed weapons or spears rather than the slower two-handed weapons. The Queen Gibdo will still go for the tornado attack as you do this, however, so after you hit the boss a few times, run away from her to avoid the initial slam and then circle around the tornadoes to continue your assault.

Stunning From Range

Alternatively, you can just use arrows instead, which I found to be by far the easier approach. Regular arrows will eventually stun her on their own, but you’ll accomplish this faster if you equip your arrows with Bomb Flowers or other powerful attachments. Just remember that the tornadoes will block your shots, so move to the side when they spawn before you resume firing.

Once you stun and wail on the boss for a bit, she will get up and restore her invulnerability before retaliating with a charge attack. Simply moving out of the way will keep you safe, but note that once this happens, she will be completely invulnerable to even elemental attacks until she stops charging. Avoid attacking until then to save up on resources.

Screenshot via PC Invasion

Second Phase

Once the Queen Gibdo’s health is depleted halfway, the four mushroom-like Gibdo nests will spawn hordes of grounded and flying Gibdos that will all move to swarm you. Additionally, the Queen Gibdo will stay up in the air while firing more sand blasts at you. While you can focus on Queen Gibdo while avoiding the enemy hordes, doing this will likely make the fight more dangerous unless you have high health and defense. And unlike in the Lightning Temple fight, the Gibdos here will inflict gloom damage, which can become problematic if you don’t have meals that can heal it. Because of all this, you’ll want to find a way to stop the Gibdos from spawning.

If you did this fight as part of the Gerudo questline, the game will have already taught you to use Riju’s lightning on the Gibdo nests’ glowing purple weak points to destroy them. What the game doesn’t tell you, however, is that Bomb Flowers work just as well if not better, especially since they don’t have a cooldown tied to them. Make sure to fire Bomb Flower-infused arrows at the purple weak points whenever the nests open up to spawn more Gibdos. Otherwise, the nest will simply shrug off the explosion.

Upon destroying the nests, the game presents another complication. When fighting Queen Gibdo outside of the Lightning Temple, the nests don’t leave behind beams of light when destroyed. These light sources instantly killed Gibdos when they ran into one, but with them gone, you will have to take out the remaining Gibdo hordes on your own.

Focusing On the Gibdos

All of the strategies that normally work against Gibdos will work here too, with Bomb Flowers coming especially in handy. Personally, I found Dazzlefruits to be the most effective items to use in this situation. Although they don’t directly harm the Gibdos, their large areas of effect can render swaths of them immobilized so you can pick away at them with arrows.

Once all of the Gibdos are dealt with, you still have to contend with Queen Gibdo proper, who will likely still remain airborne. Oftentimes, though, if you try and fire an elemental arrow at her, she will quickly dart right out of the way. I found that waiting until she darted on her own before letting the arrow loose worked more often than not. There also exists the off-chance that she will try and divebomb you, but I’ve rarely gotten this to happen.

Once you get her out of the sky, the fight basically plays out the same as before aside from her ability to produce five tornadoes instead of three. If you keep using the above strategies against Queen Gibdo while taking care to avoid her attacks, then you will have conquered one of Tears of the Kingdom’s trickiest story bosses without utilizing Riju’s sage ability.