Battle Tactics
Determining Your Battle Order
The ability to determine the order in which your characters act in battle situations is probably the most overlooked battle strategy in Final Fantasy VII. Most people, when they're hoping to use a specific character, tend to just hit the button to make everyone else attack (or block, or whatever) until they get to the character they're waiting for. This is completely unnecessary, and potentially dangerous: As long as you have more than one character who is ready to act (ie, their time bar is filled up), you can rapidly switch between them by simply tapping the Triangle button.
For example, say you encounter a group of enemies you simply do not want to deal with, and you've decided to obliterate them with a summon spell. Now let's say that the character with the spell is third in line. Getting to him by having the first two characters attack would not only waste their turns, it could also buy your enemies enough time to launch attacks of their own. Go straight to your summoner, and have him or her fry the enemies first. Then the first two characters will still be fully charged, and ready to finish off the survivors as soon as the spell is completed.
Remember that everyone's time bars (including your enemies') are always filling up, so never waste a character's turn in an urgent situation. For example, if your healer is about to get her turn, you should ignore any characters who are already ready to act, and wait for her. Select her with the Triangle button and have her cast the spell, then go back to the other characters' turns... In the time it would have taken the other characters to act the member she was trying to heal could have gotten killed.
There are other good uses for this tactic, too. If you're fighting against weak enemies, you can use the Triangle button to ignore everyone else's turns and go straight to your weakest character, allowing him to get the easy kill (The computer does keep track of who gets "kills," and uses it as one of the criteria to get new Limit Breaks. See that section for details).
There are a ton of uses for this option, so keep an eye out for them. Once you get used to determining your own battle order, you'll wonder how you ever did without.
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Handling Different Battle Types
There are four different kinds of battles that occur at random. Usually, you'll merely be facing your foes, with them facing you. But every now and then you'll get lucky and come upon enemies with their backs turned. This "pre-emptive" attack formation allows you to get the first shots in, and since your enemies have their backs turned, you'll do double damage! Make sure you have everyone target a different enemy, otherwise the enemy will turn around to face you after the first hit, making you lose your bonus. It's even more fun when you end up surrounding an enemy. While this forces you to divide your party (positive spells that effect all of you will now effect only one side or the other... But so will enemy cast spells), your opponents' backs are always going to be turned towards someone, so if you choose your targets carefully, you can make sure you always get the double damage bonus.
On the negative side, you'll also occasionally be forced into the same situation- either with your backs turned while enemies pound you, or surrounded by foes on both sides. When the former happen, you can exploit a little glitch in the running system that allows you to pretty much completely negate their advantage. Just tap L and R at the same time, (the same command will make you run, but you won't press it long enough for there to be any chance of that happening) and your characters will turn to run, then turn to face your enemies when you release it. Do this as soon as the battle starts, and you'll never take the double damage! Of course, you'll still be stuck in the back row, which means your attacks will do less damage (see the section on Battle Placement) until you "Change" to the forward row.
When the latter happens, and you're surrounded, your strategy should be to pick the weakest side, and then do whatever it takes to kill everyone on that side. Then you can do the running trick outlined above to make sure that everyone is facing the remaining enemies. You may get beat around for a few seconds, but you'll do much better than your foes would in the same situation, since they don't seem to know about the little running away trick...
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Running Away
Running away works the same on Final Fantasy VII as it did in the Super Nintendo Final Fantasy's. Just hold L1 and R1 down, and your characters will turn away from your enemies and try to run. It may take a while to work, so be careful- while your backs are turned, you'll be taking double damage, so you may want to let go of the buttons for a second if you're anticipating taking a very strong attack.
The easiest way to run away is to start holding the buttons as soon as the battle begins-- the odds seem better that way, and you can usually take advantage of the enemies' unpreparedness.
Are you penalized for running away? Well, the computer does keep track of how many times you've run away (the old man outside of Junon area can tell you the running tally), but it doesn't effect anything, except for the amount of damage you do with the Chocobuckle spell. So run away as often as you feel you need to!
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Battle Placement
Using the Order command in the menu screen, or the "Change" command in the battle menu (the effect of change is not permanent) you can change where your characters stand in relation to each other and your opponents. The order in which you put them doesn't matter, but their row placement does.
Characters in the back row get attacked less often, and take about half the damage when they do. When they attack, they do much less damage, unless they have a long range weapon like Vincent's, Yuffie's, and most of Barret's. Magic is not effected by their row placement.
So basically, the back row is safer for characters, but doesn't provide much of an opportunity for them to charge their limit breaks. It also means that the characters in the front row will be attacked that much more often.
FFVII Basics
Icy Brian's Final Fantasy VII Page
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