Cargo Ship

Story mode. Written for a first playthrough and kept free of spoilers — it will not tell you what happens here, only what the game is asking of you.

Short stretch. Talk to people, fight something, arrive somewhere warmer.

Everyone is wearing the same face

Your party is disguised as crew, and they all look like generic sailors. You find them by walking up to sailors and talking until one of them turns out to be somebody you know.

Only one of those conversations is required to move the story on. The rest are optional — and the rest are where all the character writing is, so do them anyway. Some of them are also quietly changing something behind the scenes.

One of your party is seasick and would appreciate something for it. If you happen to be carrying a Tranquilizer, that is what it is for. If you are not, you cannot help, and the game notices.

Look around properly before the fight

Once the alarm goes off, the ship opens up and there are things to find below deck — including a chest up a ladder above the engine room that is easy not to notice, and a Materia that was hidden behind somebody standing in front of it earlier.

If you swept the cargo hold when you first boarded and thought it was empty, go back. It was not empty; it was blocked.

After the boss

There is a Materia lying on the engine-room floor when the fight ends.

The game does not hand it to you. It does not announce it. You will very likely be walking toward the exit with the music playing and the cutscene finished, and it is behind you on the floor.

Pick it up before you leave the room. You do not get to come back for it.

Game Notes

The cargo ship is a palate cleanser, and it is doing more work than it looks like.

Everything before this has been forward motion — escape the reactor, escape the city, cross the marsh, get up the cliff. This is the first stretch where the game puts you somewhere you cannot leave and lets you wander around talking to your own party for twenty minutes. Nobody is chasing you. There is nowhere to go. The only thing to do is find out who these people are.

It is also the first time the game does the disguise gag properly — five people in identical uniforms, and the joke is that you have to work out which generic sailor is the enormous man with the gun for an arm.

Then it puts something important on a floor and says nothing about it, because it is 1997 and nobody had invented the glowing outline yet.

Completionist mode. Full spoilers, in play order, with every permanent loss called out before you reach it. 4 entries below are marked where our sources disagree with each other — we have not picked a winner for you.

Spoilers from here.

Take the Ifrit Materia off the floor

After Jenova-BIRTH dies, Ifrit is lying on the engine-room floor. It is not awarded, not announced, and not in a chest. Step off that screen without it and it is gone for the rest of the game.

Along with the Enemy Skill Materia in the Shinra Building, this is one of only two things so far that no later trip recovers. The ship does come back — it becomes an ordinary ferry between the two ports — but the interior with its chests and its floor pickups never does.

Three sources call this permanently lost. A fourth describes it as simply dropping after the battle and gives no warning at all, which is precisely how people miss it: they read a guide, the guide says you get Ifrit, and they assume “get” means the game hands it over.

Order of operations

The ship is gated in a way that catches people out. Encounters and half the pickups only exist after the alarm, and the alarm only fires when you talk to Barret at the bow.

So: explore, talk to everyone, then trigger Barret, then sweep again.

If you swept the cargo hold on boarding and found nothing, that is expected — Yuffie is standing in front of the All Materia and does not move until the alarm. Go back for it.

What is on board

• Ether — chest in the cargo hold. Two sources say the left side of the opening hold; a third says the south-west of the main deck.
• All Materia — behind Yuffie, post-alarm. Sources disagree on whether it is a chest or a floor pickup, and on whether it is in the hold or the engine room.
• Wind Slash — chest on the catwalk above the engine room, up the left-hand ladder. A Yuffie weapon, so worthless if you never recruited her. 30 attack, 103 accuracy, three unlinked slots, double growth.
• Shinra Beta — a 12.7% steal from Marines. Encounters only exist between the alarm and the boss, so that window is the whole opportunity. There is one other source in the game — a late enemy whose dungeon eventually closes — so treat this as soft rather than hard. 30 defence, four slots with one linked pair, and zero magic defence, which is the part nobody mentions.
• Turbo Ethers — Scrutin Eyes morph into them, and carry an Ether steal at 50.8% on top. Their Ether drop is 3.2%, so robbing one is sixteen times likelier to pay than killing it. They take double damage from Wind and nullify Earth and Water.

Marines also drop Eye drops at 100% — a guaranteed drop on a random encounter, which is rare — and morph into X-Potions.

The Wind Slash growth dispute, settled

One source calls it double AP growth, another double Materia growth, and the usual reading is that the two cannot both be right. They can. A weapon record carries exactly one growth field, and on the Wind Slash it is set to double. There is no second growth stat for the sources to be describing — they are two names for the same number, and the number is two.

Against the Boomerang stolen outside Junon, the trade is the same 30 attack for one fewer slot and no linked pair, in exchange for twice the AP. Take it for the growth or leave it in the chest.

Finding the crew

Everyone is a generic sailor sprite. Aerith wanders the hold, Tifa is up the ladder on the lookout, Red XIII is the unsteady two-legged one on the cabin roof, Barret is at the bow, and Yuffie — if you have her — is the seasick one in front of the All Materia.

Only Barret is required. The others are optional and each is an affection choice, so “optional” here means “quietly consequential”:

• Aerith, on the airship: “I’ll take you someday” is +2, the dismissive answer is −2.
• Tifa, on the lookout: “Yeah…” is +2, the other answer −2.
• Yuffie, seasick: giving her a Tranquilizer is +4 — the biggest single swing on the ship. But only if you are actually carrying one. With an empty inventory the game forces the refusal and takes 2 off her instead. Buy one in Junon if you care which way this goes.

Jenova-BIRTH

4,000 HP, and settled from the game’s own tables: no elemental weakness at all, and it nullifies Gravity rather than absorbing it as one source claims. It is immune to essentially every status in the game.

There is no trick here. It is a damage race, which is exactly why the Flamethrower you picked up off the Ark Dragons in the Mythril Mine earns its slot — with no weakness to exploit, raw multi-target damage is the whole plan.

White Cape is a guaranteed 100% drop, not a steal. One source calls it stealable; the game gives the boss no steal entry at all. Check what it does before you build around it: Frog and Small immunity, no stat bonus, nothing else. It is a situational accessory that gets talked about as a general one.

The fight pays 680 exp, 64 AP and 800 gil.

One more inherited oddity: a widely-read guide recommends equipping “level 2 All” for this fight, in the same document that tells you the All Materia you just picked up is sitting at zero AP. It is advice copied forward from somewhere else without anyone rereading the paragraph above it.

No enemy skills here

Zero. Marine, Scrutin Eye and Jenova-BIRTH teach nothing. If you want White Wind, it is on the grassland outside Junon and you needed to get it before boarding; Big Guard is on the beaches on the far side.

Worth stating plainly, because a player carrying a fresh Enemy Skill Materia from Junon will reasonably spend the crossing wondering what they are supposed to be learning. Nothing.

Game Notes

Ifrit is the cleanest example in the game of a loss caused entirely by presentation.

Nothing about it is hidden. It is a Materia, on a floor, in a lit room, three steps from where you are standing. The problem is that it appears at the exact moment the game has finished with you — boss dead, music resolved, cutscene over, exit ahead — and every instinct a player has at that moment is to walk forward.

FF7 does this more than once, and it is not cruelty so much as a game made before anyone had standardised how to say there is a thing here. No glow, no chime, no pickup prompt. The convention had not been invented yet.

Which means the only reliable defence is the one this page exists to provide: knowing in advance that the floor is worth looking at.