FF7 Rebirth beginner's tips to know before starting - Polygon

Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is the sprawling second entry in Square Enix’s ambitious trilogy of Final Fantasy 7 remakes. The game is full of open world content, involving tough battles, dozens of minigames, and even a relationship system.

Some fights can be tough and some of the side content can be annoying, but it’s important to think of Rebirth as a marathon, rather than a sprint. With all there is to do, we gathered up some tips that we wish we knew when starting Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth.

Whether you’re coming straight from Final Fantasy 7 Remake or if you played it on launch (four years ago!), these tips will help you figure out how to get your groove in Rebirth.

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Diversify your party

Right away, you’ll want to set your party to have at least one character who can easily attack airborne enemies. Barret will make quick work of flying enemies early on, and Yuffie can too (once she joins your party). Aerith can also help with flying foes, but Yuffie and Barret do a significantly better job on the offensive front. You can also launch Cloud and Tifa up to the sky using specific abilities, though it’s just easier to simply have a character that can handle the airborne stuff quickly.

There’s also several parts of the game where you have to play as specific characters, so you definitely won’t want to keep anyone on the bench too much. The more you play with everyone in your party, the better you’ll be at knowing how they work.

Keep switching party members in battle, too

It may be tempting to just keep hacking and slashing as Cloud, but without specific materia, your party members aren’t very smart — they won’t use their special abilities on their own, so you need to swap and do it for them. Plus, switching to other party members helps charge their ATB gauge faster.

If you want to use powerful Synergy Abilities (which you should), you have to utilize your other party members and their skills first. After expending their ATB gauge numerous times, you’ll be able to unleash these strong skills that do lots of damage or offer helpful support.

Image: Square Enix via Polygon

Pick up everything, and actually use the crafting system

It’s easy to ignore your item transmuter, the crafting system in Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, but there’s no harm in just picking up everything that you walk over and using it to craft extra gear and potions. Your inventory for resources is essentially unlimited. (You can carry 99 of any resource.)

You don’t have to go out of your way to find stuff, but you should get into the habit of picking every single resource you get, and crafting new items in the item transmuter.

Quite a few side quests will additionally force you to attain a certain crafting level in order to proceed, so staying on top of your crafting ensures you won’t get impeded by being underleveled.

Materia makes all the difference

You should fill up your materia slots with different orbs, even if you don’t think you’ll really use them. An empty slot is a wasted slot, because all equipped material gains AP from battles, even if they go unused.

You’ll never know when you’ll need that extra Warding materia combined with Petrify materia to avoid Petrification. (This is me telling you that you will need that linked combo at a specific point in the game. When all of your party is petrified, you get a game over, so... take this advice.)

Use your Limit Break — or lose it

If your Limit Break bar fills up towards the end of the fight and you think, “Oh, I’ll save it for the next fight,” prepare to be disappointed. Your Limit Break bar will reset every fight, so there’s no holding your Limit Break for a boss fight or for the next one. Might as well use it while you can!

Limit Breaks give temporarily immunity, but Synergy Abilities don’t

During the cool little cutscene animation that plays when activating a Limit Break, that character will be completely immune to all incoming damage. This means you can also deploy your Limit Break at key moments to avoid devastating attacks.

However, despite the fact that Synergy Abilities also trigger a brief cutscene, they do not grant any type of immunity. Your characters can and will die during a Synergy Ability, if they don’t have much health and are standing in the way of an attack.

That said, you can’t really use summons to avoid damage either. The cutscene that plays during summoning freezes the entire battle temporarily during the cast, so you’re not necessarily avoiding any damage — just putting it off until after the vignette wraps.

Image: Square Enix via Polygon

Assess provides more information than just elemental weaknesses

Some enemies just straight up have no elemental weaknesses, which means you’ll have to stagger them by using other (often very specific) means. Maybe you have to attack a certain part of their body, or perform a counter at right time. Either way, yellow text on the left side of the Assess menu will provide you with information on how to stagger enemies.

Additionally, Assessing enemies in different areas will upgrade Chadley’s combat simulator, allowing you to unlock enemy skills that you can use in battle.

Prioritize Purple chests

If you see a purple glowing chest in the distance, you should actively try to go to it. While yellow glowing chests contain gil or items, purple chests hold new weapons in it, making them necessary to grab if you want to unlock new abilities for characters.

There are also a few minigames that reward weapons, so keep your eye out on that prize list to make sure you don’t miss anything.

Most points in the open world can be used for fast travel

After activating towers, interacting with ziplines, scanning lifesprings, and doing just about anything that gets marked on your map, you can actually fast travel back to these areas. It’s largely helpful if you need to backtrack content you skipped, but it’s not immediately apparent at first.

I don’t know why you would need to fast travel to this specific zipline, but you can.

Image: Square Enix via Polygon

You can return back to old areas throughout the game

While there are moments of the game where fast travel will be disabled, you’ll be able to continuously return to previous areas up until the beginning of chapter 13 — in which you’ll be told that you can’t return once you start the next part. Don’t worry about putting stuff off, as you’ll always be able to go back to it (until the aforementioned final part).

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The world of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is huge, but we have your back if you need help. We have a rundown of side content rewards, a breakdown of the game’s length, and even an explainer on how to plan ahead for your Gold Saucer date.

If you need more nitty gritty guides like how to find things like ziplines in Costa del Sol, soldiers in Junon, or the Tonberry King boss in Corel, we have those, too. Or if you love Queen’s Blood, we have a comprehensive list of cards and how to get them.

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