The way you cast spells, and special abilities in Final Fantasy VII is through the use of Materia. There are many types of Materia in this game, and each serves a specific purpose that will dictate your role and build in the party like spell caster, support, or healer. Initially, when you acquire the Materia, it will be in its lowest form, and with continuous use, the Materia will upgrade to more potent spells.
To upgrade or level up Materia, you HAVE to equip it to your character’s equipment and finish fights. Each fight will let you earn AP, which is the equivalent of XP for your Materia. Once you have progressed the AP bar for the Materia enough, the said Materia will upgrade to its more effective version or unlocks a more powerful spell.
To get to know how to level up these Materia and to do it faster, you just have to scroll down!
The Best Materia To Level Up Other Materia In Final Fantasy VII Remake
Upgrading Materia is a slow process, especially for those that require a lot of AP to level up. There is a side quest, Battle Intel, that instructs you to level up all your Materia to the max level, which can be a daunting task if you don’t know what you are doing. Luckily, there is a Materia in the game that speeds up the process of getting more AP and upgrading other Materia. It is hidden behind a secret so let us uncover it.
When you start Chapter 14, as part of the story, you will visit Aerith’s home, and once you exit it, there will be a purple item lying on the ground nearby. Pick this item, and it will be a rather weird Materia called Pedometer Materia, and its description will suggest that once you have taken 5000 steps with it equipped, it might reward you with something.
You can simply walk around in circles after you have slotted it into your equipment or just play the game normally; it doesn’t matter. Once that 5000 steps are up, this Materia will transform into AP Up Materia. This Materia grants bonus AP to any other Materia that you have linked with it in your equipment using the conjoined slots.
To get the most use out of this Materia and essentially level up all your other Materia fully, have it regularly equipped to anyone of your characters and the Materia you want to upgrade.
Best Method To Upgrade Or Level Up Materia
Upgrading Materia can be quite tedious, and many of you might end up finishing the game without even unlocking the most powerful spells/abilities. So to upgrade Materia in the best possible manner, you can utilize the following method for the most effective result. There is some preparation involved before embarking on this method. Also, if you are doing this in Hard Mode, you will get the benefit of 3 times more AP, which reduces the time to upgrade Materia.
Preparations
Just to clarify, you don’t need these Materias but they will make things much easier. You will be primarily using two characters; one being your main magic dealer and the other being your secondary.
In this example, we have Cloud as the main magic dealer as he has a higher magic attack, Barret is the secondary magic user, and Tifa is used as the character that is a healer and the one carrying the AP-Up Materia linked with any other Materia that you want to level up.
In this example, we will be using the Revival Materia with AP Up Materia as it takes the longest to fully upgrade. You can very easily swap that with your Materia of choice.
Important Materia to use for this method:
- First Strike Materia
- Fire (Firaga)
- Magnify
- Ice x 2
- AP Up Materia
- Revival Materia
- ATB Stagger
- Lightening
- Magic Up
The First Strike Materia is essential to this strategy as it will allow you to use ATB right at the beginning of the battle.
Having a maxed-out Fire Materia is essential, too, and you’re also going to want to link that with a Magnifying Materia. Casting Firaga is going to be the heart of this strategy.
Link AP Up Materia with your Revival Materia. The reason that we’re connecting it with the Revival Materia is that Revival takes forever to level up; it needs 5,000 AP. And the AP Up is going to double the amount of AP that you receive for that specific Materia. It is going to cut down your time in upgrading the Materia significantly.
Slot in Ice Materia (at least Blizzara level is fine) on both primary magic caster as well as secondary.
A few secondary optional Materia that you can add on to make things a little bit easier, one of which is ATB Stagger Materia. If you have upgraded it to the max, it gives a large ATB boost but having a lower level one is fine too. Your primary magic caster should be the one equipping the ATB stagger because when you cast Firaga, you will be staggering enemies, and when this happens, you’ll get ATB from it priming you up for the next cast.
On the secondary caster, you can also equip a Lightning Materia since you will be using Thundara or Thundaga if you have it. This Materia is not a requirement, but it helps out a lot.
On your secondary caster, throw some Magic Up Materia if you have it. It just boosts the strength and damage that you will be dishing out.
Now that you have the main Materia setup all equipped, you can now go ahead in all the other slots in your weapons and equipment you can just put in the Materia that you want to level up. It doesn’t need to be magic Materia, any Materia that you want to start leveling up you can just throw in the slots here.
Strategy
Once you are already with the setup, go and talk to the Corneo Colosseum guy and select the Three-Person Team Versus Shinra Warriors challenge. This allows you to play with all of your party members in the battle, which is the best way to promote the most growth from all Materia.
This is going to be a very simple strategy. You can begin the round with your main magic caster and cast Firaga onto the middle enemy right at the very beginning of the battle. This is going to be your bread and butter as you’re going to be doing this over and over again as the enemies here are weak to fire.
Since you have First Strike Materia equipped as well as Fire coupled with the Magnify Materia, the Firaga should be hitting a pretty massive distance, and it should be hitting at least two of the enemies, if not all of them.
After you have fired the previous attack, you can just go ahead and clean up all the remaining enemies. You can also use Thunder and Ice if and when needed. You can cast Firaga again specifically if you have staggered as we also have the ATB Stagger Materia, which gives you an ATB boost if there is a staggered enemy.
This strategy is effective and will easily let you bulldoze your way through the first, second, and third rounds of this challenge. You should be taking out these enemies in just one Firaga. If the Firaga hasn’t taken everybody out, just use your other characters. You can use your secondary caster to cast another spell if you’d like to.
In the 4th round, use the main caster to cast Firaga in the middle and then use the secondary caster who also has a First Strike (you can buy 2 of this Materia) and cast Thundaga on the sentry gun to the right and then just take the other character to defeat the laser cannon on the left. By the time you take out this laser cannon, almost every other enemy will already be dead.
The fifth round is the most time-consuming though not exactly the most troublesome. All of these battles are fairly easy, but this is a little bit more time-consuming. The enemies here are weak to Ice rather than fire which is why we have equipped that on both the primary and secondary caster.
With both having the Ice Materia, you will be able to use Blizzara and Blizzaga consistently to just tack on the damage as best as you can. Both your casters should fire off Blizzaga onto the Queen Grashtrike in the middle, as it is the spongiest of all the enemies here.
It may take a little bit more effort to defeat them and a little bit for you to catch your bearings and find the rhythm of how to cast spells quickly enough, but sure enough, you’ll get it after the third maybe fourth run-through. For consistent AP, you will be running through this challenge multiple times.
Each time you’ve run through and completed this battle, you’ll obtain 55 AP coupled with the AP Up Materia, and your preferred Materia will receive 110 AP.
As math has shown here, if you’ve done this challenge/strategy 46 times on normal mode, you will have gained more than enough AP to max out Revival. On the other hand, if you’re doing this in hard mode, then all you would need to do is 16 rounds of this, and you would have maxed-out Revival. This math is taking into consideration that you’ve never used Revival before, so keep that in mind.
Some Materia-like spells, such as Fire, are the ones that get organically upgraded just by simply playing the game normally. Still, these other ones, like Revival, which have a massive AP requirement, take much more time and effort to fully upgrade. Hence upgrading these pesky Materia requires a bit of a grind, and with the method that we have provided and the AP Up Materia in hand, you will be upgrading Materia left and right.