The Huge Materia

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.

Four separate errands, spread across the map, each with its own timer or its own minigame. You now have an airship, so you can do them in the order you like.

The most important thing about all four

Failing one costs you one thing and nothing else.

The story does not branch. Nobody comments. The game continues exactly as it would have. If a timer runs out on you, you can reload, or you can shrug and carry on — both are legitimate and neither breaks your game.

Knowing that in advance is worth more than any of the individual tips below, because every one of these is designed to make you panic and panic is what actually loses them.

The train

Catch it, fight your way along it, then work the brake. About ten minutes overall.

One of the things you fight on that train is worth an enormous amount of experience — far more than anything else at this point in the game. If you have been feeling under-levelled, this carriage fixes it in one fight.

The fort

Not timed. This one is the tower-defence minigame, and here is the trick: you want to lose the field battle. Losing drops you into a straight fight with the commander, which still counts, costs you nothing in unit fees, and hands you something that winning cleanly does not.

Afterwards there is a Materia on the ground where the egg hatches. Fifth time. Look down.

The underwater one

Fight down to the reactor, beat the thing guarding it, then a submarine chase with a ten-minute limit that several guides describe as far more time than you need.

Before you leave the dock, open the chests. There are three, one of them is a key item, and missing that key item quietly costs you two more things in a town on the other side of the world.

The rocket

A locked hatch with a four-button code: Circle, Square, X, X.

Sources cannot agree on how much time you get — one says the first try is untimed, three say the clock runs from the start, one says there is no clock at all. Since nobody knows, just have the code in front of you before you start.

Game Notes

This is the moment Final Fantasy VII briefly becomes a different game.

For twenty-five hours it has been a line: corridor, town, corridor, boss. Now there is an airship, four errands scattered across a world map, and no order imposed on any of them. You pick. You fly. Nobody tells you where to go.

And the game’s response to failure here is remarkably relaxed for its era. Miss a timer and you lose a collectible. That is it. No game over, no locked door, no scolding — the plot walks on and the rocket launches with however many you managed to get.

That is a confidence most games of this period did not have. It trusts you to care about something it has explicitly told you is optional, and it is right to, because you will reload the train.

Completionist mode. Full spoilers, in play order, with every permanent loss called out before you reach it. 8 entries below are marked where our sources disagree with each other — we have not picked a winner for you.

Spoilers from here.

Failing is cheap

Each of the four reactors is independently failable. Each failure costs that one Huge Materia and nothing else. The story is identical with four, one, or none — the rocket launches either way and nobody comments.

Say that to yourself before you start a timer, because panic is what actually loses these.

Reactor 1 — the coal train

About ten minutes. Button-mash to catch it, fight five carriages, then alternate inputs on the brake until it stops. Crash it and that Huge Materia is gone.

Eagle Gun — 17,000 HP, takes DOUBLE damage from Lightning, nullifies Earth and Water. The Warrior Bangle is a steal at roughly one in two; the X-Potion is a separate 100% drop, so a successful steal costs you nothing. Lightning ends it fast, which is the point when you are on a clock.

This is the only Warrior Bangle any enemy in the game carries, which is why guides call the train your one shot at it. One caution on that: the game stores a second Eagle Gun record, identical in every column, filed among the encounters for the raid on Midgar. We cannot tell from the tables whether that formation is ever spawned. Steal it here and assume nothing.

Wolfmeister — 10,000 HP, and it pays 10,000 EXP.

That is not a typo and it is published nowhere we looked. Ten thousand experience from a single non-boss encounter, on a train, in a sequence most players rush through as fast as they can. It takes double damage from Water. If you have been feeling behind going into the back half of the game, this one carriage is worth more than an hour of grinding.

Its loot table is empty in every column — no drop, no steal, no morph, and only 100 AP and 600 gil beside the EXP. Kill it and move on; there is nothing on it to take.

Gas Ducter — 3,000 HP, absorbs Poison, and also carries nothing at all.

Also in North Corel, and not part of the train: Catastrophe, Barret’s final Limit Break manual, from a woman in a house near the inn. Easy to fly out of town without it.

Reactor 2 — Fort Condor

Not timed. This one turns on the tower-defence minigame, and the correct play is counter-intuitive: lose the field battle deliberately. Losing drops you into a direct fight with the commander, which counts as a win when you beat him, costs nothing in unit fees, and gives you the drop. Win cleanly and you never see it.

The loot argument has a third answer

One database lists a Vagyrisk Claw as a steal from the commander. Another says the fight has no steal at all.

Settled, and neither is right. There are three versions of this commander and none of them has a steal entry:

Which one you face depends on how far the story has moved. So both camps are describing real items and both have filed them in the wrong column — the Claw is a drop, not a steal, and it comes from a version of the fight most players at this point in the game will never see.

The Huge Materia run gets the 8,000 HP version, so the Imperial Guard is what you are playing for.

Phoenix Materia is on the ground where the egg hatches, immediately after the fight. On the floor, not awarded — the fifth time this game has done that. One source says Fort Condor closes permanently afterwards; Phoenix can be dug up at Bone Village later, and the standard missables FAQ walked back its own warning about this on reader evidence.

Reactor 3 — the underwater reactor

Open the three chests on the dock before you leave. Battle Trumpet, Scimitar, and the Leviathan Scales.

The Scales are the one that matters. They are a prerequisite for a Wutai sidequest, and missing them forfeits the Oritsuru and the Steal As Well Materia — two items in a town on the other side of the world, lost to a chest you walked past here. One guide states plainly that you cannot come back for them.

Carry Armor — 24,000 HP on the body, plus two arms at 10,000 each. Settled: it takes DOUBLE damage from Lightning and nullifies Poison and Gravity. Defence 100 and Magic Defence 150 are both high, so Lightning is doing essentially all the work. Kill the arms to stop it picking your characters up and carrying them out of the fight — they pay 1,400 and 1,500 EXP and about 90 AP each in their own right, and they carry no items and no gil, so there is nothing to steal off them first.

God’s Hand is a guaranteed 100% drop and the only entry on its table. One source lists this boss as having no drop; it does. There is no steal.

The submarine chase is ten minutes and several guides call it far more than enough. Lose it and you forfeit that Huge Materia — but you keep the submarine, which makes it one of the only failures in the game that still leaves you better off than before you tried.

Reactor 4 — the rocket

The code is Circle, Square, X, X. Every source agrees on that. On PC it is the OK, Switch, Cancel, Cancel inputs.

Nobody agrees on the timer. One FAQ says the first attempt is untimed and a three-minute clock starts only after a wrong guess. Three sources describe it as timed from the moment it begins. A fourth mentions no timer at all and says the scene resolves identically either way.

Since the accounts are irreconcilable, the safe play is trivial: have the code in front of you before you start.

The Ziedrich advice is backwards

Guides treat this fight as one of your few chances at the Ziedrich — arguably the best armour in the game — and urge you to steal it here.

Settled, and it reverses the advice. The game stores three Rude encounters carrying a Ziedrich:

This is the worst of the three by a factor of four, not the last chance. Try it — a free roll is a free roll — but do not reload the fight twenty times for it, and do not believe anyone who tells you this is your only shot.

Venus Gospel, Cid’s ultimate weapon, comes from returning to Rocket Town afterwards and speaking to the man watching the rocket repeatedly — one source says three times. Settled from the game’s data as a Rocket Town item.

The payoff, and two arguments we are not settling

Bahamut ZERO — three sources, three requirements. One wiki says you need both Bahamut and Neo Bahamut in inventory. A community answer says either is enough. A second community answer says there is no summon prerequisite at all, only the four Huge Materia.

We cannot read this out of the data we have, and we are not guessing on something this expensive. Carry both earlier Bahamuts and collect all four Huge Materia — that satisfies every version of the requirement, and the Bone Village dig is a slim fallback if it goes wrong anyway.

The colour claim. Most guides say the four Huge Materia are coloured by which reactor they came from. A community answer says the colour is assigned by the order you collect them in, regardless of source.

Both accounts produce identical results for a player who succeeds at all four in story order — which is most people — and diverge the instant anyone fails or skips one. That is precisely the shape of a claim that looks settled for twenty-five years and is not, and it is why players who miss one reactor end up asking why they have the “wrong” colours.

Game Notes

The Ziedrich is the best example this project has produced of a guide being right about the facts and wrong about the advice.

Every source that mentions this fight says the same true things: Rude is here, he is carrying a Ziedrich, you can steal it, and the Ziedrich is superb. All correct. The conclusion drawn from those true facts — steal it here, this is your chance — is backwards, because the one number nobody had is the rate.

One in eight here. One in two, twice, later.

You cannot see a steal rate by playing. You see a success or a failure, and if you got it on the second try you conclude the odds are fine, and if you reloaded eleven times you conclude the game is cruel. Neither player learns the number. Both write it up as “steal the Ziedrich from Rude,” and the reader has no way to know that the same sentence describes a coin flip in one place and a long shot in another.

This is what a table gives you that a memory cannot: not a different fact, but the weight of one.