Final Fantasy VII stands out among other games in the series for a lot of reasons. But I wanna talk about one particular reason I rarely see brought up…

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Final Fantasy VII doesn’t really feel like a Final Fantasy game to me. The plot, the characters, the setting, I could make a video about every one of those. But a bunch of people have already made those videos. I wanna focus on the aspect I NEVER see talked about when comparing FFVII to the rest of the series.

Welcome to System Review. And this, is Final Fantasy VII’s Materia.

Final Fantasy is a series known for its jobs. Knight, Red Mage, Dragoon. It’s how your party members are classified. A White Mage focuses on healing teammates, while a Black Mage casts damaging spells on enemies. There’s occasionally a little room for jobs stepping outside of their niche, like the White Mage will sometimes have a damaging spell, but for the most part, those roles strictly define how the character plays.

Every Final Fantasy game through 6 handles jobs in one of two ways. Either you PICK a character’s job, or it’s predetermined. Final Fantasy 2 is kinda weird, but that’s a whole other can of worms. Maybe for another video.

The first type, where you pick the job yourself, is pretty self-explanatory. You decide what role you want that particular character to play. In the first Final Fantasy, you couldn’t change jobs once you name your party and start the game. Though in 3 and 5, you could change any time out of battle.

In 4 and 6, characters are locked into predetermined roles. Rydia will always be a Summoner. That’s just part of her character in the narrative.

Both of those methods have their upsides. When you can pick whatever you want, you have a lot of freedom to build the perfect team for YOU with the characters YOU want. But when the characters are locked down, it really grounds the game. It’s unlikely some Ninja character would become a White Mage in-world, so the gameplay and the story work together there. It’s cohesive.

I wouldn’t blame anyone for preferring one system over the other, they both have their draws. Jobs were at the core of the series back then.

Everything changed when Final Fantasy VII rolled around.

There are no jobs in this game. No Machinist, no Monk, no White Mage, there’s just people. Barret, Tifa, Aerith, these are defined characters. They’re obviously inspired by jobs of the past, but the roles they play in battle aren’t necessarily affected by that influence. On their own, characters don’t have any special abilities. All they can do is a simple physical attack, perform a Limit Break, and use an item.

You add magic spells through Materia.

Materia are little orbs that hold some specific power. You obtain them by finding them in the world, buying them from shops, receiving them from NPCs, everywhere really. Equipping a Fire materia gives that character access to the Fire set of spells. Same with Thunder, Poison, et cetera. It doesn’t stop at simple spells though. There’s a materia type that grants you passive boosts. More stats, giving you a chance to automatically counter attack, stuff like that.

The most interesting type is the support materia. These don’t do anything on their own, they augment other materia. If you equip an “Elemental” materia alongside a “Fire” materia on your weapon, you’ll do fire damage when you attack. If you equip an “All” materia next to a “Poison” materia, you’ll target all the enemies when you cast the poison spell instead of just one.

Most materia can be leveled up, so when you first acquire and equip a Time materia, you’ll only be able to speed up how quickly your party members attack. But once that Time materia hits level 3, you’ll be able to cast a spell that stops the enemy from attacking.

That’s a very slight distinction from previous Final Fantasy games, but it’s VERY important.

The character isn’t levelling up and learning spells.

The materia is levelling up.

The item holds all that power. If you were at the end of the game and destroyed all your high level materia, you wouldn’t have access to any high level spells. You’d hit pretty hard with your sword, but be S.O.L. if you needed to deal magic damage.

Having the materia be where spells are held rather than the character, gives you a lot of freedom. You can swap materia freely between characters, so anyone use any spell.

I love what that does for the game.

Any character can become any role based on the materia you give them. That’s not to say they’re completely blank slates, they do have base stats you have to consider.

Here’s a chart ranking the characters in each stat against each other. This box being a 3 means Cloud has the 3rd highest HP stat and this being a 1 means Aerith has the highest Magic stat.

Just by looking at this, you can tell some characters might perform better in certain roles than others. Considering Barret has the lowest MP and Magic stats, you might not want him as your spell caster.

But who knows, maybe that fits the spot you need on your team? His high HP and Vitality make him pretty tanky, and a tanky healer could be pretty useful.

Or maybe you just like him as a character.

Maybe you identify with the struggles Barret has gone through in life. Maybe you think him and Cloud are inseparable. Maybe you think he’s just a badass dude with a gun for an arm.

All of those are perfectly valid reasons to use him in your party.

Alongside Cloud, I usually pick Cid and Yuffie as my two party members.

I like Cid, because I’m a big fan of spears in games. Dragoons are an iconic job in the Final Fantasy series and Cid pulls inspiration from that. One of his limit breaks has him continuously leap into the air and stab the enemy over and over, isn’t that the coolest shit ever?

I pick Yuffie because I think she’s a fun character. She’s a kid that seems in over her head with all this Sephiroth nonsense, and I love her for it. She’s constantly cracking jokes but she’s not afraid to get serious when she needs to. And I think it’s funny when she gets sea sick.

Sure, those characters might not be the best for the roles I gave them, but they became part of MY story. In someone else’s playthrough, Cid and Yuffie might not have ever been in the same party.

Materia lets the player express themselves in the characters they choose.

One of my few criticisms of Final Fantasy VII is the occasional grind. You have your little party that you like, you have all the materia set up perfectly, got all the gear equipped…

Then one of your key party members leave. Or you’re forced to set up two parties of three characters each. You have to deal with the fact that one or two of your characters are massively underleveled compared to everyone else.

Thankfully, that can be (mostly) mitigated with proper planning and materia slotting. Like if I have some character that doesn’t have a lot of HP or attack damage because they’re underleveled, I’ll just throw some strong magic materia on them and put them in the backline. They’ll take half damage and be able to cast their spells in peace.

At the end of the day, they still don’t have a lot of HP and attack damage, but giving party members like that strong materia is enough to keep even weaker characters useful.

Early on though, you don’t have a lot of options in terms of builds. You only have a handful of materia and even less slots to equip them to. And man, is it ever exciting to pick up a materia you’ve never seen before.

I love the thrill of the hunt. I’m like Yuffie, chasing that dopamine hit of finding more powerful materia. Sometimes you’ll pick up a materia off the ground and it’ll be another Fire one, which is admittedly kinda boring. But a lot of the time, it’s something completely new. Getting the Counter Attack materia is awesome, because it gives you a chance to automatically attack an enemy when you’re hit. That’s a cool thing to have equipped and randomly proc in battle.

Double cut lets you hit twice when you physically attack. FOUR times if it’s fully leveled up.

And Enemy Skill? Oh, I love this.

The Enemy Skill materia allows you to steal specific spells from enemies and use them yourself. Note, SPECIFIC spells. There are 24 enemy spells you can learn. And the only way to learn those spells is to be attacked by them AND have the enemy skill materia equipped.

It is a little annoying that the game doesn’t TELL you what those spells are. And some of those spells, an enemy will never use on you. There’s one spell you can learn that revives and heals an ally, but of course an enemy would never cast that spell on you in battle. Thankfully, there is an ability in the game that lets you control enemies. So you mind control that enemy and have him cast the spell on your party member with Enemy Skill equipped.

I kinda hate the seemingly random aspect of it though. You’d have no real way of knowing which spells are learnable or not, so you just have to have it equipped at all times OR look up a guide online. I can’t rag on it too much, because I realize it does give the game a pretty good sense of discovery. Learning some random powerful spell you didn’t even mean to would be pretty exciting the first time around.

While I’m not the type of player to leave that up to chance, I can respect the choice “Enemy Skill” forces you to make. If you don’t look up the spells you can learn online, you never know when you’re gonna learn a powerful new skill from an enemy attacking you. It could happen in any battle.

But it could also happen for not a lot of battles. Or maybe you do learn a few, but they all suck.

By choosing to keep the Enemy Skill materia equipped to hopefully learn new skills, you’re losing one slot that could be used for a Cure or Ice materia.

Materia slots aren’t too big of a problem late-game, but early on, you really have to be frugal about what you equip. A handful of slots is nothing when you have a dozen materia to choose from. And it gets even more complicated if you want to level up multiple Enemy Skill materia. Do you put them all on one character? Or do you spread them out? If you spread them out to other party members, you have a higher likelihood of someone with the materia actually being targeted and getting the spell, but the other characters won’t get the spell.

There’s so much decision making just for ONE materia. You can get that deep with tons of others.

If you equip the Cover materia, that character will block damage done to other party members. So you have to equip them with a bunch of materia to make them beefy. But you don’t want them to be all powerful, because they’ll be taking a lot of damage. If they die, all that’ll be left is the unprotected weaklings.

If you equip Fire alongside an Elemental support materia on your weapon, your physical attacks will do fire damage. For a lot of enemies, that’s okay, but the occasional enemy will be fire based and heal when hit with fire. So it might be good to have another character carry Ice spells around to damage those guys.

See what I mean? Materia is free form. You’re not setting a character to be strictly a White Mage, you’re giving them some healing spells, a couple damaging spells, maybe a summon or two. They aren’t defined by any job, they’re defined by what you equip to them.

The Final Fantasy series never returned to Materia outside of the Final Fantasy VII spinoffs.

The game after it, Final Fantasy VIII, did adhere to a lot of the same principles though. No set jobs, characters become what you equip to them, all that jazz.

Guardian Forces in FFVIII are kinda bizarre at first glance, I don’t wanna get into it right now. Needless to say, it followed in the direction Final Fantasy VII set. More free-form classes as opposed to the traditional Final Fantasy Job system.

My only other experience with Final Fantasy games past VIII are XII and XIV, and those both rigidly follow the Job System of the early games. Though it is interesting to note each character in FFXII can have two jobs, so there’s a lot of room to be creative in the builds you make just like FFVII.

Materia allowed for freedom unseen in the series before. It’s part of why Final Fantasy VII is one of my favorite games.

If you wanna hear me talk about Final Fantasy VII REMAKE, check out this video. It’s probably the video I’m most proud of at this point. I put it out before part 2 was shown off earlier this year, so keep that in mind.

Thanks for hanging around, see ya next time.