Raising Materia
Raising Your Materia
The basics of the materia system are explained through the game's own manual and tutorials, but here are a few additional usage tips.
The first is to be careful about how you raise your materia. The benefits of getting your materia to attain higher levels is unquestionable, but it affects some materia far more than others. As you start getting double AP and even triple AP armor and weapons, you'll need to make sure you fill them with the right materia to maximize your magical power.
Green (Magic) materia benefits the most from going up levels, as it yields you new spells. Purple (Independent) materia often increases in power and magnitude as it goes up levels as well. Some Blue (Support) materia increases in power, but the benefits are usually slight. For example, it's rare that you'll use any All'd materia more than two or three times in a fight, so it doesn't really matter if it's level 3 (3 uses), 4 (4 uses), or Master level (5 uses). A few yellow materia yield new abilities as they go up levels, but most don't. Enemy Skills can't go up levels at all.
Summon materia are pretty much the worst. Each has five levels, which effects how many times it can be used in battle, but once again, it's highly unlikely that you'd be using them in any one battle more than once.
Materia reproduces itself when it achieves the Master level, which can be nice some times... It's always good to have another All around, I suppose. But most materia can simply be bought if you want more, and it's unlikely that you'd want duplicates of many of them, so you may want to rotate them out of high-yield materia slots after they get their highest level spells and abilities.
My main point is simply to be consciously aware of which materia you're favoring as you equip them... They gain AP slowly, but it does add up, and it's a shame to waste it on materia which don't have much room to grow.
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Sense Materia
Here's a little trick most people don't know about that makes Sense Materia a bit more useful. Once you use this Materia once to find out an enemy's HP total, you need never do it again... You can check his HP total again, whenever you want, by simply pressing select and targeting him! Pretty cool, eh?
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Enemy Skills Materia
The Enemy Skills Materia is quite different from other materia. It doesn't gain AP, and hasno apparent use at first. The magic it casts can only be gained by having enemies cast it on you first.
Your first opportunity to use it is just outside of Midgar, where you can learn "Matra Magic" from Custom Sweeper enemies. This spell targets everyone, so whoever has Enemy Skills equipped (yes, you have to have it equipped) will automatically learn the spell. You'll have to be more careful with later magic, though, to ensure that it targets the character who's holding the materia. Some enemy skills are never cast by the enemies who are capable of them, so you'll have to make them do it with the Manipulate Materia.
While this Materia seems to be a waste of space at first, it's the only way to learn a number of incredibly powerful spells, and has the very big advantage of allowing one character to cast a wide variety of spells while only taking one materia slot. Oh, and just in case you were curious, when you "master" Enemy Skills, defined as gaining all 24 skills (this is very difficult), it won't reproduce itself. But you can get up to three Enemy Skills materia in the game, and you can always "copy" spells between them by simply having the character with the full Enemy Skills Materia cast them on whoever is holding the empty one (this option may have been taken out of the final version of the game). A list of all 24 enemy skills can be found in the Enemy Skills section of the Materia page.
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Manipulate Materia
The Manipulate Materia is invaluable when used in conjunction with Enemy Skills Materia, as it allows you to force enemies to cast their hard-to-get skills. It can also be very useful by itself.
When you "manipulate" an enemy, you have access to all of its attacks and skills. You basically decide what he does on all of his turns, whenever one comes around. The catch is that it doesn't always work, and the controller loses all of his turns until the control lock is broken.
It won't work on bosses, but many strong, single enemies can be controlled. You can make the enemy destroy himself, or destroy his friends. Your allies can kill him with magic while he is unable to defend himself, but be forewarned that if you ever hit him with a regular hit, you'll lose control of him. Still, you should also keep in mind that since Manipulate turns the enemy around, that regular hit will do extra damage, and just might be worth it after all.
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Morph Materia
The last materia I'll explain about in detail (I talk about all the rest in the Materia section) is Morph. I'll give it to you straight here... This one pretty much sucks. When equipped in battle, it makes its wearer do a special attack that does only 1/8 the damage of their standard attack. If this attack ends up being the killing blow, the enemy will "morph into" some sort of item, which is listed next to the enemy in its box in the walkthrough. There are a few treasures (such as Tetra Elemental) to be gained this way, but not many.
FFVII Basics
Icy Brian's Final Fantasy VII Page
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