Final Fantasy VII Best Builds: Optimal Materia Combinations for Cloud

Cloud is the easiest character to build around in Final Fantasy VII, and honestly the strongest. His Strength and Magic are both the best in the party, so he can swing a sword or sling spells and be scary either way. The real power doesn't come from the sword, though. It comes from the Materia you socket into it, and from picking gear with the right slots. Here's how to sort all that out, from the Buster Sword all the way to loadouts that chew up the Weapon bosses.

Cloud's Weapon Slot Priorities

What the slots are doing

Slots come in two flavors: linked pairs and single slots. A support piece only does anything inside a linked pair, since support Materia work by modifying whatever sits next to them. Single slots are fine for magic, summons, and command Materia, but pairs are where the combos live.

Growth rate is the other half of the deal. Normal growth feeds Materia the standard AP, Double and Triple multiply what comes in, and a few pieces pay out nothing at all. A sword with eight dead slots can still be the best sword in the game, which is a little funny but true.

The early and mid game picks

The Buster Sword carries you through Midgar just fine. Two linked slots is exactly enough for one pairing, something like Restore + All, and it grows at normal speed.

At Mt. Nibel, grab the Rune Blade off the first area. Four slots at Double growth sounds great, with one catch: the slots don't link. No All, no Elemental, no support tricks at all. That makes it a grinding sword. Park your AP-hungry Materia in it for farming runs, then swap to something else when a real fight shows up. You can buy another one later in Junon for 3,800 gil once the Highwind is yours.

The endgame swords

Ragnarok drops from Proud Clod during the raid on Midgar, and it's kind of a sleeper. 97 Attack, +43 Magic, and six linked slots. Three full pairs is more combo room than almost anything else Cloud can hold, and it swings at full power no matter what his HP bar looks like. If you build around pairings, this is your sword for the last stretch of the story.

Ultima Weapon is the reward for hunting Ultimate Weapon, the dragon you chase around the world map in the Highwind until the final battle over Cosmo Canyon. The stats are Cloud's best: 100 Attack, 110 Attack%, +51 Magic, and eight linked slots. The catches are real, though. The slots grow nothing, so Materia parked in it stays at its current level forever. And its damage scales off Cloud's current HP as a share of his max. Full HP means huge hits. At half HP, the sword sulks. Keeping Cloud topped up becomes part of the build, which matters in a bit.

Apocalypse is the weird one, and the grinder's best friend. 88 Attack, three slots, none of them linked, and all three at Triple growth. That works out to nine slots' worth of AP, and the only other triple-growth equipment in the game is Cid's Scimitar. You'll find it in the final room of the Ancient Forest, reachable with a green, black, or gold Chocobo, or once Ultimate Weapon is dead.

So the rule of thumb: fight in Ragnarok or Ultima Weapon, grind in Apocalypse.

Best Support Materia Pairings

Support Materia do nothing alone. They modify the piece they're linked to, and only from inside a pair. After that it's all about picking the right partners.

The everyday pair

All is the early workhorse. Link it to Restore and Cure hits the whole party. Link it to Fire or Ice and you can wipe out mob fights in one cast. An All starts with a single use per battle and works up to five at master. Side note that pays for the rest of the game: All is quick to level, and a mastered copy sells for 1,400,000 gil. Farm a few and money stops being a topic.

The sustain pairs

HP Absorb hands Cloud 10% of the damage a linked ability deals, as healing. On Ultima Weapon it's beautiful, since more HP means more weapon damage and more damage means more healing. The loop feeds itself. Pick it up in Wutai or the Northern Cave. One warning: never link it to healing magic. If the linked ability heals the target, HP Absorb hurts Cloud instead of helping him. That's not a joke, it's just how the piece works.

MP Absorb is the same idea for MP, at 1% of damage dealt. Knights of Round deals up to 129,987 damage, so a maxed cast gives back around 1,300 MP on a 250 MP summon. That's a profit every time, as long as the thing you're hitting actually has MP. You buy it from the Wutai item shop during Yuffie's sidequest, and it's very easy to walk right past.

MP Turbo, found at Whirlwind Maze, trades cost for power. The linked spell hits harder and costs more MP, scaling up with the turbo's level. It's the go-to link on Bahamut ZERO and Knights of Round whenever raw damage per cast is what you're after.

The fight-swingers

Quadra Magic casts the linked spell four times and only charges MP once. Each cast deals half damage, so it's a clean 2x overall, not the 4x the name teases. Still great value for one cast's MP. It lives in the Materia cave north of Mideel, reachable with a blue, black, or gold Chocobo. And here's the trap worth repeating: Knights of the Round is the one summon in the game that will not work with Quadra Magic. No amount of wishing turns one Ultimate End into four.

Final Attack + Phoenix is the safety net. When the holder dies, Final Attack fires the linked Materia, and Phoenix revives every fallen party member at full HP while dropping fire damage on the enemies on the way out. A mastered copy works five times in one battle, so something has to kill Cloud six times total before it sticks. Final Attack comes from the special battles at the Battle Square, and it can be lost forever if your Materia inventory is full when you win it, so clear your bags first. Phoenix comes from winning the Fort Condor defense during the Huge Materia quest, or from digging at Bone Village.

Sneak Attack deserves a mention too. It fires the linked Materia the moment a battle starts, with a chance that climbs to 80% at master. A free opening Knights of the Round, or a free buff before the enemy even twitches, is well worth a pair.

Countering with Counter Materia

Three different Materia have "counter" in the name and none of them work the same way, so untangling the pile is worth a minute.

Counter Attack and Cover

Counter Attack, the purple independent one, is simple. Cloud gets hit, Cloud swings back with a normal attack. The chance starts at 20% and reaches 100% at master, and copies stack, up to eight counters off a single hit. Eight mastered copies means Cloud answers just about everything aimed at him. The first drops from Materia Keeper at the Temple of the Ancients, and chocobo racing prizes hand out more under the deceptively plain name "Counter".

It gets silly next to Cover. Cover, from the garden outside Aerith's house, gives Cloud a chance to step in front of attacks aimed at allies, up to 100% when it's mastered. Put both on him and he pulls fire off the squishier characters, then punches back for free, over and over, at zero MP cost. Across a long boss fight, that adds up to a mountain of damage.

Counter and the Mime loop

Counter, the yellow support one, links to a Command Materia and answers attacks with that command. Steal, Sense, Throw, Morph, Deathblow, Manipulate, Mime, those are the options. A level 2 Steal makes him counter with Mug, stealing while he retaliates. There's a cute trick here too: if he also knows plain Steal from a level 1 copy, one Counter triggers both, a Steal counter and then a Mug counter back to back.

The famous endgame use is Counter + Mime. Cast Knights of Round once. From then on, every time Cloud takes a hit, he Mimes it, a full Ultimate End that ignores the 250 MP cost entirely. This is the classic solo setup for Ruby and Emerald Weapon: one character, Knights of Round + HP Absorb on one pair, mastered Counter + Mime on another, cast once at the start, then go get a snack. Counter is found in the Northern Cave, so it's a last-dungeon pickup.

Magic Counter

Magic Counter, the yellow support sibling, links to Magic or Summon Materia instead, and answers with the highest ability that Materia has learned. Point it at Bahamut ZERO for damage, or at Restore so Cloud patches himself up whenever something touches him. The chance runs from 30% up to 100% at level four. It shows up as a chocobo racing prize at the Gold Saucer, or in the Northern Cave.

One stacking note: counter effects cap out at eight per hit taken. Once you're there, more copies are wasted slots.

Elemental Linking Strategies

Elemental changes what your gear is. Link it to any Materia with an element, and the pair does completely different things on a weapon versus armor.

On the weapon

Weapon-side, Elemental pours the element into Cloud's physical attacks. Against an enemy weak to that element, his hits do double damage. Against one that nullifies it, his hits do nothing at all, so the matchup matters more than the materia's level. Machines are usually bolt bait, and plenty of late-game monsters fold to one specific element, so peek at a weakness chart before a big fight.

A quiet tip: use summons as the element donor when you can. Green Magic Materia nick Cloud's Strength, and this build lives on physical swings. Ifrit donates fire just as happily as the Fire Materia does, without the tax.

On armor

Armor-side, Elemental's level is everything. Level one halves incoming damage of that element. Level two drops it to zero. Level three absorbs it, so fire to the face becomes a heal. A level three Elemental + Fire pair turns any fire-heavy boss into Cloud's personal snack machine. Phoenix carries the fire element and works here too.

Leviathan, Typhoon, and Alexander are worth remembering as the only sources of water, wind, and holy, since no green Materia offers those three.

Added Effect

Added Effect is Elemental's cousin for status, found in the Cave of the Gi, a place you can never revisit. Grab it or regret it. On a weapon, it gives each of Cloud's attacks a 1-in-5 chance to inflict the linked Materia's status. On armor, it makes the wearer flat-out immune instead.

The best donors:

• Hades: on armor, that's immunity to sleep, poison, confusion, silence, frog, and small, all from one pair.
• Time: blocks Slow and Stop, which Ribbon doesn't cover.
• Destruct: blocks instant death, also not covered by Ribbon.

And here's the detail people miss: the linked Materia doesn't need to have learned the spell yet. A fresh Time Materia that hasn't reached Stop still grants Stop immunity through Added Effect. It's the materia's identity that counts, not its progress. Mastering a copy to duplicate it takes 100,000 AP, so plan around that too.

Late Game Materia Loadouts

The physical monster

Slot into Ultima Weapon:

• Double Cut (grows from 2x-Cut into 4x-Cut)
• Counter Attack stacks, plus Cover
• Knights of Round + HP Absorb
• whatever fills the last pair (Restore + All never hurts)

Here's the sneaky part: 4x-Cut attacks count as long range. The back row normally costs you damage, but 4x-Cut ignores that, so Cloud sits in the back swinging four times at full power while melee hits against him come in halved. Double Cut is in the research room of the Sunken Gelnika. It starts as 2x-Cut and flips to 4x-Cut at 100,000 AP, and against a single target you're looking at four hits that can each reach 9,999. That's up to 39,996 damage a turn for zero MP, and with Counter Attack stacks riding along, even the enemy's turns turn into your turns.

The Weapon-killer

For Emerald and Ruby, the solo setup looks like this:

• Knights of Round + HP Absorb
• Counter + Mime
• Final Attack + Phoenix
• Mystile armor, plus Underwater if it's Emerald

Mystile is the armor for this job. Best evasion stats in the game and six linked slots. Grab one from the Sector 8 fountain during the Midgar raid, or from the spiral section of the Northern Cave. For Emerald, morph a Guide Book off a Ghost Ship, trade it to the Kalm traveler for Underwater, and the 20-minute timer on that fight simply goes away.

Running a full party instead? W-Summon, at a painful 64,000 BP from the Battle Square, casts two summons in one turn. Open with W-Summon Knights of Round, then have the other two Mime. Every Mime is a free, full Ultimate End, and Mime even copies actions that failed for lack of MP, so the chain keeps rolling when MP runs dry. Cloud can also Mime his own Omnislash for another 15 hits at up to 9,999 apiece. Most bosses don't walk away from that chain.

Fueling it all

None of this is cheap in AP. Knights of Round needs 500,000 to master, Quadra Magic 200,000, Final Attack 160,000, Double Cut 150,000. Ultima Weapon grows nothing and Ragnarok grows normal, so do the actual farming in Apocalypse with Rune Armlets (Double growth, bought at Bone Village) on whoever isn't holding it.

The spot is the Northern Cave. Magic Pots give 8,000 AP each and can't be hurt at all until you feed them an Elixir, so stock up before you go (W-Item duplication makes that painless). At triple growth, each pot is 24,000 AP to a slot in the Apocalypse. Knights of Round's 500,000 bar works out to about twenty-one pots, give or take a formation. One good evening in the crater and Cloud walks out with the strongest summon in the game ready to copy.

Two things to keep in mind after that. Knights of Round cuts max HP by 10% while raising max MP by 20%, so the Cloud carrying it has a smaller HP pool, and that dents Ultima Weapon's damage scaling. It's one more reason the HP Absorb loop earns its slot. And the quiet truth at the center of all this: Ultima Weapon's eight slots never grow anything. The levels happen in the Apocalypse. The damage happens everywhere else.