MechaMarshmallow

@rebel_scum: Oh my god. I've been playing FF7 on and off for close to 20 years and I had no idea this was in the game.

@zombiepie: 'So wait...am I combining these summons with the Added Effect Materia on weapons or armor? I finally am wrapping my mind around which weapons are worth using and which ones are not.'

It depends on your purposes. The elemental hit and added effect materia will, on your weapon, make your basic attacks either do damage of the element of the linked materia, or inflict status ailments of the linked materia. If equipped to your armour, it will instead protect you from that element or those ailments.

Disk 1 is the longest by far. 2 is shorter, while 3 is the shortest.

@hassun While I risk putting words in zombiepie's mouth (and if I'm wrong, feel free to call me out), I think the issue that is being taken with the particular humorous scenes in question is that they're silly and logic breaking. There's nothing wrong with having humor in your dramatic story. As you say, life is full of both. But there's a difference between a 'Yuffie gets horrible motion sickness' joke which makes sense in the situation, and 'Somehow this entire ship's worth of guards doesn't figure that there's something wrong with that weird wolf man with a tail dressed as a sailor'.

@zombiepie:

Question #1: The percentage values are accuracy or dodge rates. The numerical ones are the raw damage/reduction. I don't know the exact maths behind it, but higher is better.

Question #2: There are some materia that summons link to and they are great. MP Absorb will give you MP based on the damage you do with linked materia, and can be linked with your most powerful summon for much more efficiency. Turbo MP will increase the cost of the linked materia, but boost its power too. Elemental Hit and Added Effect will grant you either elemental attacks/ailment attacks based on the linked materia, or immunity/absorb to those effects.

The best summons tend to be the ones with raw damage or cool effects. To list a few of these: Choco/Mog is wind elemental, amazing for pairing with Elemental Hit. Phoenix revives all party members and does massive damage. Hades does a lot of status effects for Added Effect linkage. The Bahamut line of summons do monster non-elemental damage.

The best way to level materia up is to equip it on equipment with double or triple AP generation, although the best weapons in the game give no AP at all.

Question #3: I never grind, but then I'm a JRPG nut and FF7 is an old reliable game for me, so I don't find the need to. My general suggestion is that if you find yourself running into a hard spot that you're really having trouble proceeding in, that's when you need to grind and no sooner. Sadly I don't know where you would do that.

Question #4: I'd be surprised if you had mastered any materia at this point in the game. You get more AP from stronger enemies so you'll find yourself with none for some time, then suddenly mastering many materia out of nowhere. Good targets for mastery are 'utility' materia that will improve any character, such as double-cut or quadra-magic. Poor targets are powerful, MP-hogging summons that you can't afford to use heavily, and anything that you don't need more than one character to have equipped.

Obviously, any materia with a max-level spell that seems appealing should be levelled up, regardless of whether or not you intend to use the newly created materia too.

Question #5: My thinking is that it was the first time a FF game was made for a 3D console. They wanted to use the new gimmicky opportunities they had available to them but didn't know how to reconcile that with their previously 2D exclusive puzzle making experience. If you look at them, a lot of the really awful puzzles and minigames in FF7 would be a lot more effective in a 2D game where your character was always in lock-step with invisible tiles, and not so easy to carelessly wander off of a ledge.

@wchigo: 'The Speed stat affects how quickly your ATB bar fills, though personally I've never really thought it had a noticeable effect. Spirit affects magic defence.'

Speed also affects physical evasion.

@zombiepie: You don't lose your materia. You have lost your equipment temporarily. I believe you will get them back in a few hours, but if you really need it, you will have to replay that sequence. Keep in mind that aside from limited items like the ribbon, you'll probably be buying upgraded versions of whatever you lost before too long anyway.

Edit: I was mistaken: You get the accessory she is wearing back, but the weapon and armour are gone forever. Since no one else can use staves, the only thing to consider is if that armour is super good.

Believe it or not, that 'puzzle' was actually worse in the original Japanese version where you had no control over the movements! But I will agree with @beforet that the Temple of the Ancients is the worst point of the game as far as BS puzzles and annoying enemies go. I can see what they were going for to some extent with weird geometries and whatnot, but it's not good.

It sounds like you got through it though. If so, then you're basically over the 'FF7 doesn't know how to do puzzles' peak and will only be running into the occasional mostly-unoffensive puzzle or minigame from here on out.

Edit: IMO FF7 suffers the most of any FF from Square wanting to leverage new tech for minigames. People remember it fondly because all of those sections were revolutionary at the time, but I feel the best FF games are the last ones made on the 90s era platforms - 6 and 9 - because the team was most competent with the hardware and knew how to avoid the sort of mistakes you're seeing in 7.

@zombiepie: 'Anyways how do I determine which characters are more aligned with magic, and which ones have a stronger affinity towards inflicting physical damage? Are there characters that are more nuanced that I should worry about or consider?'

You could go through the effort of unequipping everyone and looking at their stats, or you could google it, but to give a quick rundown:

Cloud has the best stats in almost categories, and near-top in the others. He can fill any role you want, but since he uses melee weapons you might want to avoid tanking his HP with too much magic unless you have a free spot for the Long Range materia.

Red XIII, Tifa and Yuffie are solid all-rounders. Red skews magic, Tifa strength and Yuffie speed. Red gets his best equipment earlier than everyone else, but Tifa can pull off some neat tricks with the Critical Hit materia once you get one of her accuracy-boosting weapons. Yuffie is a ranged combatant so takes less physical damage, and has very useful, fast-charging limit breaks (her ultimate sucks, but penultimate does monster damage)

Cait Sith sucks. He's got some fun, goofy limit breaks but statistically he is weaker than other options in all areas.

Barret and Cid are physical and tanky. Barret is ranged, so can potentially serve as a back-row tank. Both have really strong limit breaks, Barret's penultimate and Cid's ultimate are alongside Cloud's ultimate and Yuffie's penultimate as the most powerful damaging attacks in the game.

Aeris and Vincent are strong casters. Vincent is without a doubt weaker than Aeris, but is a ranged fighter and has a very strong limit break for sections in which you can't use materia. A word of warning on this character: Vincent was very nearly left on the cutting room floor along with Yuffie. They were saved at the last minute, but Vincent was left with only a handful of unique lines and a really bad sidequest. If you pick him, you won't be getting much story out of it. Thankfully, Yuffie (my favorite character) was also a favorite of one of the writers and has a lot of really great unique dialogue like everyone else.

The nature of the game is that you don't need to play optimally to complete it, but on a first run through focusing on a few characters and using their strengths correctly can make up for not knowing the gimmicks and secrets a lot of more experienced players rely upon.

@zombiepie 'Okay that does indeed sound awesome! Here's my issue currently: I'm running out of MP real quick. Do I only use Big Guard when there is a boss battle, or should I basically use it whenever I fight? Is there an easy way to gain MP in Final Fantasy VII that I don't know about? Or should I just continue using the hotels to restore my HP and MP?'

Typically, I only ever used Big Guard for boss battles. Healing is cheap, so if you can survive a non-boss fight without it, it's typically more MP efficient to just cure/potion your way through the damage.

MP is important in FF7 and you will discover a great many ways to manage it as you progress through the game. One fundamentally important way to improve your MP is to take a close look at your materia assignments. You might have not been paying attention to it because it's a pretty small detail, but each materia affects the stats of the character it is equipped on. Usually, magic will give +MP -HP, and summons will have a greater effect. Conversely, physical materia like cover will increase HP, etc.

What this means is that once you have a good range of materia, you can build your characters into different archetypes. Loading someone up with a lot of summons, e.skill and some healing spells will give you a high MP character who can cast powerful spells more freely. I advise ranged characters such as Barret or Yuffie for this role since they can be put in the back row to counteract the lowered max HP and not suffer damage degradation.

For my runs, I tend to run one character like that, another with cover, counterattack and similar materia to serve as a physical attacker and tank, and a third who fills the adaptable jack-of-all-trades position so that I won't be backed into a corner by bosses with specific immunities.

Later in the game you will find purchasable materia which you can slot to just flat out gain +X% to max MP or HP. I implore you to grab more than you think you will need as soon as you see them, because the % value increases as you level them up. At that point, it will become more of a balancing act of how many spell materia you want equipped vs how many stat materia.

Personally I played through the game mainly with a party of Cloud with Yuffie and Barret - their penultimate limit breaks are statistically the best in the game. (Ultimate limit breaks sadly tend to be underwhelming because damage maxes out at 9999) However, once you've got a handle on the various, poorly explained systems at play in FF7 it can become an incredibly easy game, and the characters are all similar enough aside from ranged weapon superiority and different limit breaks that I suggest you go with the characters you find most interesting, since there is a whole lot of custom incidental dialogue for almost everyone that can add a lot to some scenes.

@zombiepie In regards to Big Guard, it's an amazing spell that will make the game significantly easier. It places protect, shell and haste on all of your party members, so they suffer half damage, half spell effects and their ATB fills much faster.

The only thing to watch out for is that the half spell effects include healing.

The 'barrier' bars next to the characters names in the battle UI shows the duration remaining on protect and spell, so you can time your healing such that you cure your characters when the spell wears off, and once they are back at full health you can cast Big Guard again.

The #1 reason that I can't take this seriously is because the Gnorcs were the doofy looking bad guys from Spyro the Dragon.