Final Fantasy VII

The superbosses

Updated 2026-09-13

Full spoilers.

Three optional fights, in a required order: the roaming Weapon first, then Emerald and Ruby. Both of the big two hand you an item that is worthless until you trade it to one NPC in Kalm.

The order, and why

Ultimate Weapon must die before Ruby appears. Every source agrees. So the chase comes first whether you meant it to or not.

The Weapon chase

100,000 HP, level 61, Magic Defence 50. It flies over the world map once you have the Highwind; ram it and it lands somewhere, and where it lands depends on how hurt it is.

Its damage carries over between encounters — it never heals. Once it is worn down it goes to Cosmo Canyon for a fight you can actually finish.

Settled from the game’s tables, and it explains a long-running argument: the game stores this boss as several separate encounters, and every one of them pays zero EXP, zero AP and zero gil — except one. That exception is the Cosmo Canyon fight, which pays 35,000 EXP, 3,500 AP and 25,000 gil and drops the Ultima Weapon at 100%.

A zero-payout encounter is an encounter the designers did not expect you to finish. That is why you cannot kill it at Mideel however hard you hit it.

The steals change by formation. It carries three distinct steal entries — a Curse Ring, a Reflect Ring and a Circlet — and each is 50.8%. “Roughly one in two” was right and is now a number. Which item belongs to which formation is the one part the tables do not settle; the published mapping puts the Curse Ring at Mideel, the Reflect Ring on the ground and the Circlet in the air. Bring Steal every time you meet it — the aerial one needs Long Range to connect.

Shadow Flare is learnable on the killing blow at Cosmo Canyon with Enemy Skill Materia equipped, and it is learned even if the attack kills the character carrying it.

Emerald Weapon

1,000,000 HP. Level 99. Defence 90, Magic Defence 90. Underwater, in the sub, roughly between Junon and Costa del Sol. Ram it to start; surface to avoid it.

Settled elemental profile:

• Takes DOUBLE damage from Lightning.
• Absorbs Ice and Water.
• Nullifies Earth.
• Halves Gravity — but percentage-damage spells still land for the damage cap, which is why Demi spam is a legitimate way to take the first half-million off it.

Its eyes are separate 25,000 HP targets.

Rewards: 50,000 EXP, 50,000 AP and 50,000 gil, plus an Earth Harp at 100%. Those figures were single-sourced and unverified when this page was written. They reproduce exactly, and 50,000 AP is the largest single payout in the game by a distance. It has no steal entry at all — not a hard steal, none.

The timer, and removing it

A 20-minute countdown starts with the fight. One source says “less than thirty minutes”; five say twenty.

You remove it entirely with the Underwater Materia: morph a Ghost Ship into a Guide Book, then trade the Guide Book to the Kalm Traveler.

The morph is settled: the Ghost Ship has 6,600 HP and the Guide Book is its only morph result. Its drop and its steal are both a Phoenix Down, so the morph is the entire reason to fight it.

What kills you

Aire Tam Storm deals roughly 1,111 damage per Materia equipped on the target. “Aire Tam” is “Materia” backwards, which is the game telling you the mechanic in the attack’s name. Nine Materia on a character is lethal; strip your party down before you go in.

Ruby Weapon

800,000 HP. Level 59. Defence 240, Magic Defence 250. Buried in the desert around the Gold Saucer; ram it with the Highwind.

Its elemental profile is the correction on this page. One guide says it absorbs Fire, Ice, Lightning and Earth. Another says Fire, Ice, Lightning and Water. Settled from the game’s tables:

It nullifies Water and Gravity. That is all. It absorbs nothing.

Both published lists are wrong, and they are wrong in a way that matters — a player who believes Ruby absorbs Fire, Ice and Lightning will avoid the three elements that work perfectly well on it. What is actually stopping you is not resistance, it is Defence 240 and Magic Defence 250, the highest in the game. It is a wall, not a mirror.

Desert Rose is a guaranteed 100% DROP. Several sources list it as a steal; it has no steal entry at all. Both halves of that reproduce in the enemy records, which also settle the payout: 45,000 EXP, 50,000 AP and 30,000 gil.

The opening move

Ruby stays invulnerable while three characters are standing, and its Whirlsand removes party members until one is left. So the widely-used approach is to enter the fight with two characters already KO’d, giving Whirlsand nothing to take.

Worth being clear: that is a player-found shortcut, not a requirement. Several guides present it as the way to fight Ruby. It is a way. Sources also disagree on what to do next — some say keep one character alive all fight, others say revive the other two once it is committed — and that disagreement is unresolved.

It is not immune to Stop, which is the other half of the standard approach and the reason the Hades Materia from the Gelnika is worth carrying.

What the rewards are actually for

Both trophies go to the Kalm Traveler, one NPC, in Kalm:

Guides routinely call the Gold Chocobo a disappointing reward on the grounds that anyone who can beat Ruby already has a submarine and has therefore already been to Round Island. That is an opinion contingent on doing things in a particular order, not a fact — if you came at this from the Weapon chase rather than from breeding, it saves you the entire chocobo sidequest.

Battle Square, while you are here

Omnislash is 32,000 BP and W-Summon is 64,000 BP.

Leaving the Battle Square forfeits all unspent BP. That is the single most expensive thing you can do by accident in the endgame, and it is worth putting in bold on any page that mentions the arena.

After buying Omnislash a Cloud-only Special Battle opens, rewarding Final Attack Materia on the first clear. Ho-chu appears in it — 4,300 HP, absorbs Poison, takes double damage from Water, and pays 750 EXP, 70 AP and 2,500 gil.

Its loot is now exact. The Circlet is a steal at 12.7% — Ho-chu has no drop entry at all, so the Circlet is only ever a steal — and it morphs into a Ribbon.

Ribbon, and the detail every published list gets wrong

Ho-chu is not the only Ribbon morph. Master Tonberry morphs into one too — 44,444 HP, an Elixir steal at 50.8% and a Megalixir drop at 12.7% — so the arena is not the only route to one.

The immunity set is settled at exactly fourteen statuses: Sleep, Poison, Sadness, Fury, Confusion, Silence, Frog, Small, Slow-numb, Petrify, Death-sentence, Berserk, Paralysis and Darkness.

Slow and Stop are not among them. Published immunity tables routinely list both, and neither is in the mask. Nor is instant Death — Death-sentence is, and those are two different statuses. Death is the one thing a Safety Bit covers that a Ribbon does not, which is the only reason to ever wear the lesser accessory.

Things to disregard

“You need to be level 80 for Emerald.” The game has no level gate on any of this. That is strategy advice that hardened into a requirement through repetition.

Boss-specific “Lucky 7s” attacks. One source attributes a 7777-triggered attack to Ruby and another to Emerald. That is the game’s general trailing-sevens damage quirk being described as though it were scripted boss behaviour.

Ruby’s absorb list, in either published version. See above.

Game Notes

Ruby Weapon’s fake resistances are the most consequential error this project has found, because unlike most of them it actively changes how you play.

An inverted elemental table on a boss you were going to punch anyway costs you nothing. But here, two different guides tell you Ruby absorbs three or four of the elements you own — and if you believe them, you rule out most of your magic before the fight starts and go in with a narrower toolkit than you needed.

The truth is more interesting than either version, too. Ruby is not resistant to your elements. It has Defence 240 and Magic Defence 250 — the hardest shell in the game — and what people experienced as “my Fire did nothing” was never absorption. It was arithmetic.

Twenty-five years of players felt a spell land for almost nothing and reached for the explanation the genre had taught them: it must absorb that. Nobody was being careless. They just had a number and no table, and a number without a table is a story.