Final Fantasy VII · walkthrough
Midgar
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.
This page does not tell you where to go. On a first run through Midgar you do not need telling — the place is a corridor with the lights on, and getting lost is close to impossible. What you need is to understand what the game is quietly teaching you, because Midgar is a five-hour tutorial that never once announces itself as one, and the habits you pick up here are the ones you will still be using forty hours from now.
So: no route, no plot, nothing spoiled. Just the things worth knowing while you walk it.
Put Barret in the back row and leave him there
The back row halves the damage you take and halves the damage you deal — except for long-range weapons, which lose nothing. Barret’s arm is a gun. He can stand at the back all game, take half damage forever, and give up absolutely nothing for it.
Nobody tells you this. The game shows you the row command and moves on. It is the first of several places where Midgar hands you something genuinely powerful and trusts you to notice.
Buy Lightning as soon as you can afford it
The slums have a Materia shop, and Lightning costs six hundred gil. Both bosses left in Midgar are weak to it, and so is most of what Shinra builds afterwards. If you buy one thing in this city, buy that.
You will also pick up Restore early and be unable to equip it for a while — that is not a bug, it is the game holding it back until someone explains Materia to you. When that lesson comes, it is worth sitting through.
Read the fights, do not race them
Two bosses in Midgar are built to punish exactly one instinct: the urge to keep pressing attack.
The first raises its tail, and while the tail is up it counters anything you do with a laser across the whole party. The in-game tutorial text will tell you to attack while the tail is raised. That advice is wrong. It is the game’s own most notorious mistake, and thousands of first-time players have been bounced off that fight by trusting it. Wait for the tail to come down.
The second splits your party across a bridge and stands between the two halves, turning to face whoever it is attacking. Hits landed on its back deal five times normal damage. It is the only fight in the entire game built this way, which is a strange thing to spend on a boss most players never realise they were supposed to outmanoeuvre.
The lesson underneath both is the same one the game keeps making: look at what the enemy is doing before you decide what you are doing.
Limit Breaks fill from damage taken, not damage given
A character’s Limit gauge builds as they get hurt. That means the character having the worst fight is usually the one about to end it — and it means a character who gets knocked out loses everything they had built up.
There is a room in the slums that will explain this to you at some length. It is one of the few tutorial rooms in any game from this era worth the ten minutes.
The conversation choices are doing something
Midgar asks you a lot of small, casual questions. Who to give something to. How to answer a friend. What you thought of your night’s sleep.
There is a hidden counter behind all of them. It decides a scene much later, and nothing in the game will ever show it to you, confirm it, or let you check where you stand. This page will not tell you which answers do what — knowing would change how you answer, and answering honestly the first time is the better experience by a distance.
Just know that the questions are real, that there is no way to undo one, and that the game is listening.
There is a timer, and it does not stop
At one point you will be given ten minutes to get somewhere. It is a flat ten minutes, it keeps running at all times — battles and menus included — and there is no version of this where the game lets you pick how long you get. Opening the menu to sort your Materia does not buy you a breather. Do not dawdle, and do not panic either: it is generous.
Where to slow down
Midgar is a closed box. Large parts of it become unreachable as you move forward, some permanently, and the game gives you no warning at any point that a door has shut behind you.
On a story run this does not matter, and you should not let it distract you. You are not going to ruin anything you will feel the loss of. But if you find yourself in a district that feels lived-in — shops, people with something to say, a room with a name on it — that is worth ten minutes of wandering, because some of those districts you are seeing for the last time without being told so.
If you want the full accounting of what disappears and when, that is what the completionist tab is for. Come back to it on your second run. It will still be here, and by then it will not cost you anything to read.
Game Notes
Midgar is the best-constructed opening in the series and it earns that by being small. One city, five hours, a cast you can count on one hand, and a set of systems introduced so gently that most players come out the other side fluent without ever having felt taught.
It is also the part of this game that the last thirty years have been least kind to. Everyone knows what is in Midgar. It has been remade, re-released, referenced and spoiled so thoroughly that a genuinely cold first playthrough is close to a historical artefact at this point. If you are having one — if you somehow got here without knowing what happens in this city — then put this page down, stop reading guides, and go. You are in rarer company than you think, and nothing written by me or anyone else improves on that.
The rest of us will be over on the other tab, counting things.
Worth doing on a first run
How this page was made
Researched across 3 community walkthroughs and written from scratch — no source’s wording appears here. 1 is confirmed first-hand in play, which is a stronger claim than any guide can make.
Completionist mode. Full spoilers, in play order, with every permanent loss called out before you reach it. 11 entries below are marked where our sources disagree with each other — we have not picked a winner for you.
Spoilers from here. This page assumes you have finished the game once and are back to take it apart. Party members are called by their default names throughout — the game lets you rename all of them, so your save may read differently.
Midgar is the most punishing stretch in Final Fantasy VII for a completionist, and it is punishing in a way the game never once signals. It plays like a prologue — linear, tightly scripted, five hours — but it is a sealed box with a series of one-way doors in it. Cross one and the district behind you is gone. Cross the wrong one and something is gone for the entire remaining forty hours.
Worse, this is the part of the game where the guide ecosystem is least reliable. Midgar has been written up more than any other area in the series, most of it copied forward from a small number of very old documents, and the errors came with it. We have flagged every place we found sources contradicting each other rather than quietly picking a winner, because picking a winner is how one site’s mistake becomes everyone’s.
The one thing that is actually unrecoverable
Before anything else. Of everything in Midgar, exactly one Materia is permanently, genuinely gone if you miss it:
The Enemy Skill Materia in the specimen tank on the 68th floor.
Not the copy — the Materia. There is no second one in Midgar, it cannot be picked up once the escape starts, and the 68th floor is not on the route of the raid that brings you back to this building much later. Every source we checked agrees on this, which is rarer than it sounds. Take it the instant the cell opens, before you look at anything else on that floor.
Everything else on this page is either recoverable, replaceable, or a convenience. Treat that difference as real — a guide that flattens “this copy is missable” into “this is missable” has told you that missing an early Restore Materia ruins a run, when the shop two hours later sells another one.
Sector 1 and the No. 1 Reactor
Two Potions from the downed guards on the platform before you move. A Phoenix Down in the side room past the first gate, a Potion at the far end of the upper pipe run, and the Restore Materia on the walkway just before the core — the first Materia in the game, and one you cannot equip for another hour.
Guard Scorpion has 800 HP and folds to Lightning. The tail is the whole fight: while it is raised, the boss counters any action with a party-wide laser for around seventy. The game’s own tutorial text tells you to attack while the tail is up. It is wrong, it has been wrong since 1997, and it remains the single most famous piece of bad advice in the game.
Then a flat ten-minute timer that does not stop for anything — not battles, not menus. Opening the menu to re-equip does not buy you a breather, whatever the guides that claim it pauses tell you.
Freeing Jessie on the way out is not optional, and the way that error propagated is worth a paragraph. Guide after guide lists it as an optional good deed, and then notes — correctly — that nobody can find a reward for doing it. There is no reward because there is no decision. Her leg is caught in the grating, the exit does not open without her, and Biggs will tell you she is not back yet. You go and get her. An entire branch of FF7 folklore exists to explain the missing payoff for a choice the game never offered.
Sector 8
A Potion by the fountain, and then the only purchase in Midgar that most missables lists do not treat as an item at all: the flower.
Buying it does nothing on its own. It does not enter your inventory in any useful sense and it is never consumed. What it does is unlock a choice at the bar an hour later, and that choice is worth five points on the hidden affection counter to either Tifa or Barret. Skip the flower and the choice simply never appears. It is the cheapest five points in the game and it is one screen wide.
The affection counter, since it starts here
There is a hidden value tracked for Aerith, Tifa, Yuffie and Barret, and it decides who accompanies Cloud at the Gold Saucer much later. Starting values are Aerith 50, Tifa 30, Yuffie 10, Barret 0. Ties resolve in that order.
Every number on this page comes from Terence Fergusson’s mechanics work, which was done by reading the counters directly out of memory on the PC release rather than by inference from play. That is a stronger provenance than almost anything else written about this game, and it is worth naming, because most guides reproduce his figures without attribution and a reader has no way to tell which claims were measured and which were guessed.
One consequence of that work is worth repeating because it contradicts a claim you will see everywhere: battle party composition does not build affection over the course of the game. The values exist in the code and the date script ignores them. The commonly repeated advice to keep a favourite in your party for forty hours is doing nothing.
Barret starting on zero against Aerith’s fifty is why a Barret run has to take every single Barret point Midgar offers. There are not many later.
On the train home
“Thanks anyway” is neutral. “Looking forward to it” costs three Tifa.
Sector 7 slums — the district that never comes back
Sector 7 is the only part of Midgar that is unreachable by any route, on any disc, by any means, once the plate falls. The Key to Sector 5 does not reopen it. The parachute raid does not pass through it. It is gone.
Take the All Materia and the Ether from the upper floor of the tall building — sources call it the Beginner’s Hall, the weapon shop and the armour shop interchangeably, and it is all the same staircase. Note that All is recoverable: there is another as the C Coupon prize in the Shinra Building, and Red XIII arrives wearing one.
Buy Lightning. One guide claims Sector 7 is the only vendor in the game for Iron Bangles and that the window shuts when you board the train. No other source we checked repeats either half of that, and you do come back through these slums before the end. Relevant to a stock-everything run and nobody else.
The affection choices here are the flower gift (five to Tifa or five to Barret), the drink at the bar (five Tifa), the response to Tifa’s accusation (five Tifa), and the morning question — five Tifa or five Barret.
The train to the No. 5 Reactor
Three one-shot pickups as you move forward, none of them repeatable because the train only goes one way: a Phoenix Down from the man at the back of carriage one, a Hi-Potion from the man at the lower left of carriage two if you answer “Yeah…”, and 100 gil back from the pickpocket in carriage three if you catch the chime and pick “That’s right”.
Reaching the last carriage without triggering a security lockdown is worth five Tifa and five Barret — the largest single swing anywhere in Midgar, and the only choice in the city that pays two characters at once. The carriage timers run roughly fifteen, fifteen, thirty and seventeen seconds.
Sector 4 and the reactor
An Ether past the laser checkpoint, a Potion on the west side of the plate chamber, a Tent by the save point, an Ether in the three-button room.
Air Buster has 1,200 HP, is weak to Lightning, and is the only side-attack boss in the game. Your party is split across the bridge and it turns to face whoever it is engaging, which means attacks on its back do five times damage. Also note that a Restore linked to All heals single-target only in this formation — the split breaks the link’s targeting.
Drops a Titan Bangle. Afterwards, “(Be strong)” is two Barret; the alternative costs three Barret for one Tifa.
Sector 5 and Wall Market
Everything from here to the pillar is inside the area the Key to Sector 5 reopens on Disc 2 — excavated at Bone Village, appearing in your item box the following morning. That makes this whole stretch soft-missable rather than hard.
In Aerith’s garden: Cover Materia on the furthest platform and an Ether. One source places Cover upstairs in the slums instead, using the same description it gives for the Turtle’s Paradise flyer, which reads like a conflation; three others put it in the garden. Cover is also sold in Wall Market for a thousand gil later, so this is a convenience either way.
Upstairs in the house, in the white package: a Potion and a Phoenix Down. You have to sneak past Aerith’s door to reach it, and you have to walk — running wakes her and restarts the attempt.
Turtle’s Paradise Flyer No. 1 is upstairs in the far-right house, on the wall by the sleeping boy, and you have to read the sign rather than just enter. Sources place this house on both the east and west sides of the slums and at least one marks it as not missable at all. The majority say far right. In the same room, the boy’s drawer holds 5 gil now or a Turbo Ether later — take one or the other, never both.
“No way!” to the girlfriend question is one Aerith. “Yeah, that’s right” costs five, which is the heaviest single penalty in the city.
Wall Market and the disguise
Sense Materia at the playground — though guides disagree about whether it is collectable on the first pass through Sector 6 or only on the way back. Red XIII arrives with one regardless.
The disguise is the most branch-heavy sequence in Midgar and every piece has three tiers:
The Silk Dress comes from answering “soft” and then “shimmers” to the shop owner’s father in the bar. The Blonde Wig comes from beating Big Bro at the gym — the inputs cycle Square, X, Circle in rhythm, mashing loses, and the result is final the moment it lands. Save first. The Diamond Tiara comes from staying at the inn, buying the 200 gil item from its vending machine and trading it to the man slumped at the Materia shop counter. The Sexy Cologne comes from eating at the diner, answering “It was all right” for the pharmacy coupon, redeeming it for the Digestive, and giving that to the man in the bar’s back room. The Member’s Card gets you into the Honey Bee Inn for the underwear and the makeup.
Two honest caveats. First, one guide publishes an exact point table with a hard threshold, which would make a full set deterministic; another insists selection is still not guaranteed with everything and tells you to save. We cannot settle it. Second, sources disagree on whether the underwear choice and the makeup count at all.
And one real trade-off nobody flags clearly: the Phoenix Down in the henchmen’s room is only reachable if Corneo does not pick Cloud. The perfect disguise and that item are mutually exclusive in a single playthrough. If you are chasing a complete item list rather than the achievement, that is a decision, not an oversight.
In the mansion: an Ether in the basement, a Hyper behind Corneo’s bed. “Yes, his name’s Barret…” is five Barret.
Sewers and Train Graveyard
Steal Materia in plain sight on the walkway past Aps (1,800 HP; takes double damage from Fire, has no Lightning affinity at all, and its Tsunami damages itself as well as you — the sources recommending Bolt here were reading the machine enemies either side of it). It always drops a Phoenix Down.
Equip Steal on your fastest character before you move on, because the Striking Staff in the Train Graveyard is a steal from Eligor at 12.7% and there is no other way to it. Eligor’s kill drop is an Echo Screen at 3.2%, so the robbery is worth four times what the corpse is. Sources disagree on whether the staff can be bought later at all — one says yes, one says not until Junon, one treats it as gone for good, and shop stock is not in the data we can read.
Nine consumables across the two Train Graveyard screens. Talking to Aerith or Tifa first in the sewers is three points to whichever you pick.
The pillar, and the last walk through Sector 7
An Ether off Reno, and it is a 100% drop. The sources calling it a steal are wrong, and this formation of Reno cannot be stolen from at all — the Touph Ring he is famous for carrying belongs to fights years of game away from here.
Then the plate falls, and the district is gone. This is the moment to be deliberate. Sector 7 is not coming back, not with the Key, not with the parachute, not ever. Everything you did not pick up in those slums is finished.
The Shinra Building
Turtle’s Paradise Flyer No. 2 is on the lobby bulletin board behind the stairs, and the door shuts when you take the lift to the 60th floor. One source puts it on the second floor; eight put it in the lobby. One claims it is only readable on the Disc 2 raid and not on this visit, which every other source contradicts.
The stairs route is sixty flights across nine screens with no random encounters and one Elixir in it. The front door is faster and costs you four or five fights. Nothing else differs.
Mayor Domino’s password
First-guess correct gives the Elemental Materia. The key card is handed over regardless of how many attempts you take, so only that bonus is at stake — and another Elemental turns up at Mount Nibel, so this is an early copy rather than the Materia itself.
Almost everything else about this puzzle is disputed. Some sources say later guesses award an Elixir then an Ether; some say Ether then Elixir; one says wrong guesses award nothing at all. Sources also split on whether the password is fixed or generated per save file — and one widely-read guide publishes a single fixed answer that appears in no other source and matches none of the candidate words the others list. Work the puzzle; do not trust a published answer.
63rd and 64th floors
All three coupon prizes are obtainable in one run: Star Pendant (A), Four Slots (B), All Materia (C). The Star Pendant’s only property is immunity to Poison. Four Slots is the one most worth the duct-crawling: four unlinked slots, 12 defence and 10 magic defence, which is more magic defence than anything else you can be wearing when you leave this city.
On the 64th floor, a Phoenix Down and an Ether in the lockers — and the thing most missables lists leave out entirely. Feed the vending machine 250 gil. It takes your money and gives you nothing, which is the joke. It is also a cross-disc flag: on the parachute raid much later, the same machine pays out a Speed Source and a Mind Source, but only for a player it robbed here. Skip it now and that payout never exists.
67th and 68th floors
Poison Materia in the chest at the back of the lab — recoverable, sold later for about 1,500 gil. While the encounters last, steal a Hardedge from SOLDIER:3rd and Carbon Bangles from Moth Slashers, both at 12.7%.
Both are steal-only in the sense that matters. Moth Slasher has no drop whatsoever, and SOLDIER:3rd’s drop is a Loco weed — killing either one without robbing it first is the whole encounter wasted. The Hardedge is 32 attack against the Buster Sword’s 18 with four slots to its two, and the Carbon Bangle is 27 defence against the Titan Bangle’s 14 with three slots to its two. Those are the two biggest equipment jumps available anywhere in Midgar and neither is a chest.
Then the capture, and the cell. Take the Enemy Skill Materia from the tank first. Four Potions on the floor, a Talisman off Sample:H0512 — a 100% drop, not a steal, and the boss has no steal at all — and Red XIII joins with All and Sense already equipped.
“Barret, take care of her!” is two Barret; the alternative costs two Tifa. Whoever Cloud thinks about first in the cell gets three points, the second gets one, and Red XIII is worth nothing either way.
The escape
Split your Materia before the party separates — Rufus is Cloud alone, and sending him up there stripped is a miserable way to learn that. Dark Nation shields him, so kill the dog first — and the dog is worth killing on its own terms, because it is a guaranteed Guard Source for 140 HP. Rufus drops a Protect Vest, +10 Vitality.
The lift shaft is Hundred Gunner straight into Heli Gunner with no menu between them. Only Barret’s ranged shots reach the first one; everyone else needs magic or a Limit. Go in with enough MP for both fights, because you will not get a chance to top up. Hundred Gunner is the only boss in Midgar that drops nothing at all — 330 exp, 35 AP, 300 gil and no item. Heli Gunner drops a Mythril Armlet.
The bike chase has no score and no prize, and it still matters: every rider that reaches the truck takes HP off a party member, and that damage carries directly into Motor Ball. Anyone knocked out during the chase enters that fight on 1 HP and dies to its opening move — which is unblockable and hits everyone for about seventy. Motor Ball has 2,600 HP, opens as a back attack with your rows flipped, and drops a Star Pendant. If you took the coupon one, that is two; it is not a listing error.
What the return to Midgar actually recovers
This is the claim guides get wrong most often, so it is worth being exact. There are two separate returns and they reach different places.
The Key to Sector 5 — excavated at Bone Village on Disc 2 — reopens the Sector 5 slums, the church and Wall Market. That is what recovers Flyer No. 1, and it is also the only route to Tifa’s ultimate weapon.
The parachute raid late on Disc 2 reaches the lobby, the 2nd floor, the 59th floor stairwell, the 63rd and the 64th. That is what recovers Flyer No. 2, and it pays out the vending machine if you fed it.
Neither reaches Sector 7. Neither reaches the 62nd, 65th, 67th or 68th floors. The Elemental Materia and the Enemy Skill Materia are not recoverable by either trip.
If you take one thing from this page other than the tank on the 68th floor, take that: “you can come back to Midgar later” is true, and it is doing far less work than the sentence implies.
Game Notes
There is a particular flavour of dread that belongs to this city and to nowhere else in the game. Everywhere after Midgar is open. You have an airship eventually, a world map, the freedom to go back and fix things. Midgar is the only place that closes behind you screen by screen while dressing itself up as a prologue.
What makes it worth documenting properly is that the losses are not balanced against anything. Nothing in the design says “you may have the perfect disguise or the Phoenix Down in the next room, choose.” The trade is simply there, undeclared, and thirty years of guides have mostly not noticed it. The same goes for a vending machine that steals two hundred and fifty gil as a gag and quietly becomes a flag in your save file. That is not cruelty; it is a game made before anyone had decided what a player was owed.
We have left every disagreement between sources visible on this page instead of smoothing it into a confident sentence. That will make this read as less authoritative than the guides it draws on. It is also the honest state of the record, and a reader who knows which claims are solid and which are inherited folklore is better equipped than one handed a clean answer that happens to be wrong.
Take the Materia out of the tank. Feed the machine. Everything else is negotiable.
Everything in this area
Sector 1 and the No. 1 Reactor
Sector 8
The train home
Sector 7 slums
The train to the No. 5 Reactor
Sector 4 and the No. 5 Reactor
Sector 5 church and slums
Sector 6 and Wall Market
The sewers and the Train Graveyard
The Sector 7 pillar
The Shinra Building
The escape
How this page was made
Researched across 6 community walkthroughs and written from scratch — no source’s wording appears here. 1 is confirmed first-hand in play, which is a stronger claim than any guide can make. 11 are marked where sources disagree with each other — we have not picked a winner for you.