Final Fantasy VII

Chocobo Racing and Breeding

Wait… What?

Pretty much all the best weapons, items, and summons in the game require you to have chocobos with special abilities. These apparently don’t occur naturally, so you have to breed for them. And you’ll also have to race some of them before breeding them. I know, it sounds needlessly complicated. And to be fair, it kind of is. But if you like minigames, just think of this as another minigame with ridiculously OP rewards. But if you don’t have the highwind, you’ll need to be patient until you do.

Start With a Stable

OK. You can’t start raising Chocobos until you have the Highwind. Even if you backtrack at the very beginning of Disc 2, you can’t do it. You can do this in pieces, or in one fell swoop. Be prepared to spend a couple hours if you want to do it in one sitting. It took me six hours to go through this at once, but I was writing this walkthrough and taking breaks.

Once you get the Highwind on Disc 2, pilot it to the Chocobo Ranch and talk to grandpa six annoying times to rent all six stables. Fair warning: if Cid or Tifa is your party leader, you won’t be able to get into the Gold Saucer. Dio closes it because, um, he doesn’t want them to race Chocobos? lol.

The bottom-right corner of the screen showing the outdoor chocobo pen has a second Chocobo Lure Materia. Be sure to equip both of these, as well as any Enemy Lure Materia you may have, when you go out hunting. The Chocobo Ranchers will keep the last four chocobos you “send back to the stable” in the pen area out front. You may also want to stock up on some greens while you are at it.

My guys are fast enough that the chocobo doesn’t get a battle turn before I’m done killing off the dudes it’s with, so I can usually just ignore the greens. If you talk to Choco Billy’s sister Chole, she’ll tell you to only scratch a white chocobo behind the ears. Remember this if you are headed to Mideel, but only if you have the right kind of greens. The one in my game liked . You may have to take one of each to find out what he likes. You’ll get a Contain Materia from him.

Chocobo Sage

You’ll need information and powerful greens to get all the best stuff, so head to the Chocobo Sage’s house up north by Bone Village. Remember the cave you climbed out of when you scaled the glacier before? Right across the valley from that is the mountain range protecting the Sage’s house. Fly the Highwind there and land in the little green patch beside it.

You’ll see a green chocobo in the pen next to the door. The first time you come here, go talk to it. You’ll get another Enemy Skill Materia. Because you really need four, right?

The sage remembers things over time, but you have to do two things to get him to remember something different. First, once he tells you something, head back to the Chocobo Ranch and talk to Chole. After that, fight 10 battles, then go back to the sage. Repeat the process until the sage tells you he can’t remember anything else. At this point, you should have learned everything you need to know to make the most powerful Chocobos in the game.

At any point here, you can tell Chole “Let me jot this down” and she’ll tell you all the cool stuff you’ve learned from the sage.

Since you’ll need to level up your chocobos, you should also buy 99 . Yes, they are expensive. No, there’s not really a good substitute. If you don’t have the cash, consider selling off a master level All Materia. See the Leveling Up section for information about how to quickly level up both your characters and your materia.

Breeding 101

This may come as a shock to you, but to breed a chocobo, you will need a male and a female chocobo. You’ll also need a nut. Depending on what kind, level, and racing rank of chocobos you have, and what kind of nuts you feed them, you will get various differences in your chocobos. There are seven classes of chocobo, ranging from poor to wonderful. Only certain combinations of certain genders will produce useful offspring.

The only combinations you care about are:

Parents	Prep	Result
Great Chocobos	Optional racing, but better odds if raced	Green, blue, or regular chocobo
Blue and Green Chocobos	Race both to Class S	Black Chocobo
Black and Wonderful Chocobos	Race both to Class S	Gold Chocobo
Gold Chocobos	Race both to Class S	Faster Gold Chocobo, to a point

So about those Great Chocobos I just mentioned. There’s a great deal of confusion about breeding these guys that probably results from the Chocobo Sage telling you about breeding good and great chocobos. It turns out that any combination of good or great chocobos can result in either a blue or green chocobo.

Since you can use any combination, I like to only use Great Chocobos since they have better default stats, which is helpful when racing later. If you’ve been racing them, it’s more likely you’ll get a blue or green one, but there’s about a 1-in-4 chance you’ll get a blue or green one just breeding them as you found them. If you do get one, there’s a 50% chance it will be male or female.

Feeding and Racing

To get past the blue and green chocobos, you’ll want to feed them greens and race them at the Gold Saucer to make them “level up.” Once you’ve got Cloud and Tifa back, you can race the blue, green, black, and wonderful chocobos you have at the Gold Saucer. See the “Going for Black” section below for information about how to level up and race your chocobos.

Random Encounters and Materia

You’ll be getting into a fair amount of battles during the chocobo side quest. Be sure to equip double-growth weapons and armor where you can, and don’t bother with Enemy Skill Materia. Use worse weapons or armor if you have to in order to have the most materia slotted, as long as you are not dropping from double growth to single growth.

Equip all the materia you might not otherwise use, especially Command Materia, Magic Materia, and Summon Materia. You’ll be using these battles to level up the materia so you can get master level materia later on.

Good Chocobos

At a glance	Details
When	Pretty much whenever, but don’t bother
What	Good Chocobos
Where	Southeast of Gold Saucer
With	Two Spencers or two Flapbeats. Only Flapbeats behind the chocobo work.

Again, there’s a lot of confusion about this on the web. You really don’t need these guys. See below for getting Great Chocobos and use those instead. But if you really want Good Chocobos, or you can’t kill off the Spirals with Great Chocobos with enough time to capture them, here you go.

Point the Highwind toward the Gold Saucer and park it due east and slightly south. In other words, park off the south end of the bay just east of the Gold Saucer. You should see some chocobo tracks there. Land near them, equip your Chocobo Lure Materia and Enemy Lure Materia if you have it, then run around in the tracks.

You should run across the chocobos fairly soon. Use greens if you need to, then kill off any other enemies that happen to be with them. You are looking for a chocobo with two Spencers or two Flapbeats behind it. Don’t capture any that are with other enemies or that have the Flapbeats in front of them. A chocobo with a Harpy is “Pretty Average.” Make sure you turn those loose.

When the battle is over, dismount and send the chocobo back to the stables ONLY if it was with two Spencers or Flapbeats. If you accidentally catch one with other enemies, just dismount and let it go. Keep track of how many you have sent to the stables. When you have sent back four (that’s the max number of chocobos that will fit in the pen outside the stables) head back to the ranch. Save your game just outside the ranch, then go inside and talk to Choco Billy about moving chocobos.

Move them all into the stables. Talk to Chole to find out which ones are best. Keep the best male and female, but let the rest go.

Great Chocobos

At a glance	Details
When	First
What	Great Chocobos
Where	Near Mideel
With	One or two Spirals, nothing else

Unless you’ve been level grinding a bit, these are a tiny bit harder to catch for two reasons. First, they run away faster. Second, the Spirals are harder to kill in one shot unless you use high-power magic. I recommend Bio 3 and Comet, but avoid Comet 2 and any Magic Materia junctioned with All Materia.

Stock up on , then point the Highwind south of Fort Condor toward Mideel. The chocobo tracks you want are due south of Fort Condor. The chocobos with Headhunters are “Not Bad” chocobos, so you don’t want them. You want the ones with either one Spiral enemy or two Spiral enemies. Those are the Great Chocobos.

Equip all the Chocobo Lure Materia and Enemy Lure Materia you have, then wander around for a bit. When you have killed off all the enemies it’s with, you’ll catch the chocobo.

If the chocobo was with Spirals, and not Spirals plus other enemies, send it back to the stable. If you catch a chocobo with anything other than Spirals, just let it go. You’ll want to send four chocobos back to the stable, then head back to the stables. Save your game outside before you go in. If you have not yet visited the Chocobo Sage, be sure to go chat with him so you have some information to share with Chole.

Talk to Choco Billy about moving chocobos and name or move all your chocobos into the stables. Again, I pick names like “GudMal3” and “GrtFem1” so I can tell them apart just by the name.

After moving all the chocobos into the stables, talk to Chole. If you have shared info from the Chocobo Sage, she will now tell you which chocobos are best at which things. Use her info to decide which male and female Great Chocobos are best, then let the other ones go. See the “Mating for Blue and Green Chocobos” section below for instructions on mating these Great Chocobos.

If the Gold Saucer is open, you can always enroll your chocobos in a race in order to see their top speed and stamina values. If you’re not sure which one is best based on Chole’s observations, this can be a helpful way to make up your mind.

Wonderful Chocobos

At a glance	Details
When	After you have a Black Chocobo
What	Wonderful Chocobo
Where	South and west of Chocobo Sage’s house, or near the town on the Northern Continent
With	Jumping Rabbits, nothing else

Carob Nuts

On an island due south of Bone Village, run around in the light green areas until you come across an enemy called Vlakorados. Use Bad Breath, Magic Hammer, Magic Breath, Comet, and Demi 3 on this guy. He’ll go down eventually.

If you defeat him, you’ll get a , but that’s a terrible waste because you can steal or mug one from him, and you can morph him into an . Yes, you read that correctly. My favorite strategy is to cast Bad Breath to put him to sleep, then use Magic Hammer to steal all his MP. Then steal his nut and cast Demi 3 over and over until he’s got so few HP that I can morph him. I use a character with massive strength. See the Leveling Up section for info on morphing enemies for stat-ups.

If you have already gotten your blue chocobo, see the section below about acquiring the surprisingly useful Quadra Magic Materia. Junctioning this with Gravity Materia can let you cast Demi 3 four times in a row, which should radically reduce the amount of time this will take. If you desperately need a but you’re having too much trouble with this guy, you can also buy a for 500 GP at the Gold Saucer. GP is hard to come by, though, so it’s probably more efficient to just level grind your guys instead.

Mating for Blue and Green Chocobos

Again, there’s a lot of confusion on this one floating around the web. You don’t need Good Chocobos, just Great ones. You can use Good Chocobos if you can’t catch the Great ones, but I’d recommend getting your characters leveled up and going after Great Chocobos rather than wasting time on Good Chocobos. That’s because their OFFSPRING will be racing, and you want to start with the best breeding stock you can.

Save before doing this. You need one blue and one green of opposite genders, and the genders are random. Talk to Choco Billy and select “Mating Chocobos.” From talking with Chole above, you should have narrowed your chocobos down to two Great Chocobos: one male and one female. Choose to mate those two and give them a when he asks.

If you’ve been racing these chocobos, there’s a 50% chance it will be blue, and a 50% chance it will be green. If you haven’t been racing them, there’s about a 25% chance it will be green and a 25% chance it will be blue. The other 50% chance is that it will be a dud. If you saved above, you can try again.

It takes fighting 10 battles before you can mate these guys again, so once you have one blue or green chocobo, go fight and return so you can try for the other color and gender. Eventually, you should have one green and one blue chocobo of opposite genders. It can take a while, but keep trying.

When you are getting into battles between matings, consider going to the area with lots of Spirals southeast of Mideel and morphing Spirals into items to buff up your characters. It’s a great way to pass the time and level your team pretty quickly.

If you are doing these tasks with Cid or Tifa as your party leader, you cannot yet breed for black or gold chocobos. However, you can use your blue river chocobo and green mountain chocobo to go and get some great loot. Skip down a bit. If Cloud is your party leader while you’re doing this, save your game once you have a blue and green chocobo of different genders, then see the Going for Black section below.

Going for Black

Again, you cannot do this if the Gold Saucer is closed, so if you’re running around with Cid or Tifa as a party leader, skip down to get river and mountain chocobo loot. Otherwise, let’s get ourselves a Black Chocobo.

To get the Black Chocobo, you’ll need lots of cash. You can sell one master-level All Materia and get 1.4 million Gil, enough for two or three batches of 99 . You’re going to have to feed your green and blue chocobos some to make them raceable, then you’ll race them to the top of their class. If you used Great Chocobos instead of Good Chocobos, I’ve found you only need to feed them 25 each. YMMV.

If you haven’t visited the Chocobo Sage, see the section above and do so. Be sure to talk to him every time you visit to buy stuff, then tell Chole so you can refer back to this stuff later.

After feeding your blue and green chocobos, fly to North Corel and take the tram up to the Gold Saucer. Head to the chocobo racing attraction and talk to Ester over by the staff room. She’ll let you race your chocobos. Keep racing your blue and green chocobos until they are at least in Class A. I use the short courses for these races.

Press Start to start the race, then Select to take over manual control of your chocobo. Hold down R1, R2, L1, and L2 while you press Circle. When your stamina gets to half, let go of Circle and press Square until your stamina recharges. When it’s recharged, use Circle again. If you have not been feeding your chocobos, you can beat these guys, but you’ll be totally out of stamina by the end of the race. You’ll have to time it just right. Play around with it for a while.

If you have been feeding them, these races should be trivially easy. Even at Rank B, your chocobo should be able to win these races in automatic mode. He’ll have nearly three times as much stamina as your opponents, so it’s not really even a contest. You shouldn’t have to actually participate for some time yet. If you are going to try for cool items in the Battle Arena or buy the stuff in the Wonder Square arcade, be sure to take the GP instead of the items when you finish races.

Your chocobo should move up a rank every three races you win. I let my chocobo run on its own until I got to Rank A, then I had to manually take over. When both of your chocobos are Rank A or S, head back to the ranch and mate the green and blue ones with a . If your chocobos are too young, you may have to fight up to 10 battles before they’re ready to mate.

When you have your Black Chocobo, it can do everything a blue or green one can do, so you can actually turn those guys loose at this point if you want. However, offspring have random stats, and sometimes they are better than others. If you have a spare or twelve, consider going for two or three Black Chocobos. You just need to fight 10 battles between matings.

After that, talk to Chole and select “Chole’s Chocobo inspection” to find out which is the best one. You can let the others go, and use the best one as your breeder.

Again, if the Gold Saucer is open, you can always enroll your chocobos in a race in order to see their top speed and stamina values. If you’re not sure which one is best based on Chole’s observations, this can be a helpful way to make up your mind.

Gold Chocobos

Go to the longish island on the northeast area of the map and steal, mug, or win a or several from the Goblins in the forest of one of the islands there.

Now that you have a Black Chocobo and a , head to the chocobo tracks up near the Chocobo Sage’s house. Since you’re by his house, buy back up to 99 again. When you get to the snowy tracks, equip all your Chocobo Lure Materia and any Enemy Lure Materia, and make sure you don’t equip Slash-All Materia.

Look for chocobos which are only with rabbits. Any number of rabbits is fine. When you’ve caught a few, head back to the ranch and save outside. Move all your wonderful chocobos into the stables and talk to Chole to find out which is the best one to breed with your Black Chocobo. If all your wonderful chocobos are the wrong gender, just reload your save and go fight a few battles to reset the random seed value.

Feed the black and wonderful chocobo 25 each, and then head to the Gold Saucer and race them to Class S. Yes, it actually takes Class S this time. Whichever is faster, race in several Class S races to try and get good loot. As long as Chocobo Joe isn’t racing, you should be able to win a few races at this point.

I think you need to race about five times in Rank S to get the gold chocobo. You don’t have to win, though. Once you’ve got these chocos raced up, head back to the ranch, save outside, and mate them with a .

Important note: choose the Black Chocobo first, and then choose the wonderful chocobo. I think there’s a bug or something with the game, because when I chose the Wonderful Chocobo first, I got a dud. Maybe it was a fluke, but it was pretty annoying.

If you choose black first and you still don’t get a Gold Chocobo, you may have to race a bit more. If your chocobos are too young to mate, go fight 10 battles. I like to morph Spirals down by Mideel for items during these battles. Then you should be able to mate them.

Once you have your Gold Chocobo, feed him 25 and he should be able to win just about any race at the Gold Saucer without Chocobo Joe, and should be able to win against him occasionally, too.

Using Chocobos to Get Cool Materia

There are quite a few things you can do with your chocobos to get cool stuff. First off, by running your chocobos in the Chocobo Races, you can earn cool materia, items, and accessories. As your rank goes up, starting at C, then B, A, and eventually S, so does your chance to earn cool stuff like Sneak Attack Materia, , Counter Attack Materia, and more. See the Gold Saucer section for more information on what you can get and where to get it.

Mime Materia

If you have a green chocobo, talk to Choco Billy about riding chocobos and you can ride the green one out. Ride it to the Highwind and fly to Wutai. About halfway up the continent, on the easternmost tip, is a cavern you can only get to by riding a chocobo. Go there for the Mime Materia. You’ll have to dismount to get in.

Ancient Forest

After that, take the Highwind to a grassy area by Cosmo Canyon, and head to the top of the mountains. There’s a weird green mini-mountain sticking up. This is the Ancient Forest. Save your game outside and head in. You’ll have to alternate between grabbing insects and frogs here. Use your Enemy Skill Materia here. You’re not necessarily going to be getting skills, but you can use Magic Breath and Bad Breath to get through faster.

Grab the first insect you see, and read the instructions.
Take that insect under the bridge and release it near the top of the ramp.
Go back and get another one and do the same.
Get the third insect and release it from the top of the ramp, and that should make the bug plant eat it.
Go get another insect, jump onto the plant, and release it.
That will make the second bug plant eat it.
Go back and get the third insect, making sure to give it to the third plant.
You’ll be able to hop all the way across now. When you get to the other side, head down toward the big red plant at the bottom.
Walk almost to the item in its center, and grab it. That’s the , Vincent’s weapon. Then go back.
If you go too far, you’ll get bitten, dropping your HP dangerously low. I don’t recommend that.
Go right. You’ll use the bungee springy thing to get across the chasm.
Go around the tree to the item at the top of the screen. That’s the , Red XIII’s weapon.
Head right to the next screen.

This screen isn’t that much different from the previous one. Ignore the sack sitting on the tree trunk for now. We’ll come back for it in the next section.

As soon as you come onto the screen, grab the insect and head right.
You should have the option of jumping or staying when you get to the pink springy plant. If not, you may have to walk back in a circle to trigger it.
Jump.
At the top of the ledge, move to the right, and let your insect go. The plant should eat it.
Jump across the two plants and spring-jump over the red carnivorous plant.
Grab the frog and go right to the green ramp.
Let the frog go while facing left to make the plant eat it.
Jump on and wait.
The plant will spit him out eventually, and catapult you to the orange ledge with a blue thing on it.
Grab the blue thing and jump down.
Walk over close to the carnivorous plant you spring-jumped over earlier and throw the blue thing in.
When the plant folds up, go and get the Slash-All Materia on the ground by it, then go back to the right.
Equip Slash-All Materia to your strongest character so that he can attack all your enemies at once. Fun fact: if another character has the Mime Materia, they can mime the slash-all attack.
Pick up the frog again, head right, and put him in the other plant at the top of the screen.
Jump on that plant to be launched over the next carnivore plant, then head right to the next screen.

More of the same kinds of puzzles. We’ll be picking up a few things we missed earlier here, though.

Ignore the first insect and go right until you get to the next one.
Grab it and throw it into the insect eater at the top of the screen, then go get the other bug and throw it in the second plant.
Jump, jump, springy up to the next level.
Remember that sack you couldn’t get on the last screen? Go left and down from here to get it. That’s the , girls only.
Go down a little to jump off, then frog-jump right again.
Do the same insect-jump-jump-springy path to go to the next level again.
This time go left and up around the tree and back to the right to spring-jump three times to the far right. If you end up going down to the next screen, you’ve gone too far. Backtrack and try again.
Get the item at the bottom of the right side of the screen. That’s Typhoon Materia.
Go back across the three springy things, but when you land this time, head down and right. You should be able to walk to a different area.

More frog and insect mini-games. You did equip the Typhoon Materia you just got, right?

Walk down the tightrope to the right.
Pick up the bug and throw it into the plant on the top right.
Jump up twice and grab the blue thing.
Jump down and throw it into the carnivorous red plant.
When that goes away, run around and get an insect, then throw it into the insect eater at the top of the screen.
Jump left and grab the bug.
Release the bug near the opening just under the left edge of the rope to coax out the frog.
Move the frog closer to the plant you just hopped across.
Go back and get the final insect on the far left and use him to plug the plant you came across on.
Grab your frog and head across.
Use Mr. Frog on the far-right insect eater to jump the chasm to your right.
Put him in the plant, then jump on and wait. You’ll be catapulted, er, frog-a-pulted across.
Head into the cave and go right to get the from the chest.
Head up for an toward the top of the screen, in another chest.
Finally, head out the opening at the top left to be warped back to the world screen.

Quadra Magic Materia

If you are using a green chocobo, ride him to the Highwind, then take the Highwind to the Chocobo Ranch and swap him out with the blue one, or black/gold if you have ‘em. Go to a grassy area east of Mideel. This is confusing, but there is a way to use the coastline and shallow water to get to the cave on the eastern tip. Head inside for the Quadra Magic Materia.

HP<->MP Materia

Note: You can’t do this if Cid or Tifa is your party leader.

Once you have finished the above few side quests, mate your blue and green chocobos and get a Black Chocobo. Now take him to the area just north and west of Costa del Sol, across the bay to the west, and visit that cave for the HP<->MP Materia.

This materia will swap the maximum MP and HP available for a character. This means, for example, you could easily give Cloud 9999 MP and 999 HP. Of course, if someone isn’t covering your mage, he’ll likely get killed off fairly quickly, but it’s an interesting idea.

Vincent Weapon and Level 4 Limit Break

When you have Cloud as party leader, take the mountain chocobo to North Corel, and take the mountain chocobo up the mountains to the west. Go around to the west side of the waterfall and dismount, then approach the waterfall with Vincent in your party and watch some cutscenes. Then you’ll be back outside.

Equip any Enemy Lure Materia and fight some battles with Vincent so that he uses his limit break. I took the chocobo to the sub and did my fighting in the Underwater Crash Site. After about 10 battles, Vincent had used his level 3 limit break a few times, and that was enough. After a few additional playthroughs, I’m pretty sure this is about the 10 battles and not the use of the limit breaks.

I slot a master Cover Materia to him so he takes all hits for everyone and gets limit breaks often. Come back here after that. When you go back to the cave, you’ll receive , Vincent’s ultimate weapon, and , Vincent’s level 4 limit break.

Knights of the Round

The Knights of the Round Materia is the second coolest materia in the whole game. Don’t get me wrong - it’s the best summon by far, but if you can manager to get master level materia for all summons in the game, you can turn that into a Master Summon Materia. And I mean, what’s cooler than only having to slot a single materia and being able to cast all summons 5 times?

Knights of the Round is the greatest of all summons. Once you have a Gold Chocobo, you can go after this one. In the far northeastern corner of the map is a tiny little island that you can only get to via the Gold Chocobo. Head up there and enter the hidden cave. This summon can easily wipe out any non-boss entity, and most of the bosses. The exceptions are the Weapons.