Final Fantasy VII

Disc 2: Return to Midgar

Diamond Weapon

You’ll be treated to cut scenes of Weapon en route. Head to the green area outside of Midgar, materia up, then save and get in Weapon’s way.

Prepare for a hard battle. If you have W-Summon Materia and Knights of the Round Materia, link them to make this a relatively short battle. Otherwise, unleash your most powerful magic and summon attacks. Be sure to check out the Beating Weapons section for more info.

After a lot of cut scenes, head back to the Highwind and try to go to the crater at the far north.

Optional: Fighting Weapons

If you are powerful enough, you may go after the various Weapons at this time. If you’re a completionist, you’ll at least want to hit up the floating weapon so you can get Cloud’s so you can get into the powerful battles at the Gold Saucer’s Battle Arena. With this, you should be able to get the Final Attack Materia. Junctioning Final Attack Materia to Phoenix Materia is a VERY powerful “oops” prevention.

Parachuting Into Midgar

When you’re ready to go on, FLY to Midgar. If you try to approach on foot, you’ll have some issues.

You’ll notice Yuffie isn’t parachuting. But on the deck, there she is?!? Heh heh. Whatever.

Once you’ve watched the parachute cut scene, head up and save, then talk to Cait Sith and you’ll be able to go down the ladder.

When you get to the bottom, head up and right. Follow the catwalk until it leads up to a plank. Left from that is an . On the right, if you continue way past the ladder, is a .

Go back to the entrance and head down the ramp, then down the ladder at the bottom to get to the next screen.

Head right and you should jump down to the next platform. Head left and climb the ladder. When you get off that ladder, head left a little bit and then up the next ladder to your left until you get to the next screen.

Continue up the ladder and jump off to your right. Head right, under the ramp you came down, and jump into the chute there.

The platform you come down to has two boxes on it. The right box has an . The one on the left has the .

Head up the stairs to end this level, or down the ladder if you want to get the rest of the stuff here.

I assume you want the rest of the stuff.

Go right at the bottom of the stairs and jump into the thingy. At the top of the climb, go left and climb the ladder there to go up a few levels.

The box here contains the weapon for Barret. Go back down the ladder, into the chute, then left and up the ladder to get to the platform with the two now-empty chests.

Head up the stairs to the left of the chute to get out of this place. Feel free to use the save point en route.

When you emerge from the chute into the subway, you’ll be able to go either up or down. Go up to leave, or down to get the W-Item Materia.

Optional: W-Item Materia

I can’t recommend going down to get that W-Item Materia strongly enough.

If you want to go down, you can’t take any of the left branches of the “Y” roads. Just go straight down two screens and talk to Barret. Go down seven screens and there’s a box with a . Grab it and head down two screens for a box with a and talk to Red XIII. Go down two screens and get the and . Go down one screen and pick up the W-Item Materia.

The W-Item Materia lets you use two items at once, but it also duplicates the first item you select if you cancel the W-Item action before using it. This lets you duplicate as many of any item as you want. I recommend doing this with your Megalixirs.

Here are the steps to make this easier to understand:

Choose W-Item from the command menu in a battle.
Choose and use it on your guys.
Choose again, then press cancel before using it.
Repeat step 3 over and over.

Anyway, equip your new materia, save if you want, and head back up past all 14 screens.

The Turks

When you’re ready to leave, head up.

When you try to walk past the ladder you first entered the subway through, you’ll be approached by the Turks. You can choose to fight them or ignore them. They’re not really that hard, so it’s mostly a question of whether you want to get some items.

Steal what you want, then take them out. Technically you can get back into the chute if you want to save, but it doesn’t look like you can get all the way back out from here.

Head further on down the road, up toward the far end of the screen.

Shinra Headquarters Detour

There is a left exit and a right exit on this screen. The up-and-left one is a non-return path, so let’s go up and right first, then left at the electricity.

There’s a ladder here that you can climb. This leads to a save point and the entrance to Shinra Headquarters, where Cait Sith will pop up and tell you the Sister Ray isn’t here.

Here you can visit the Turtle’s Paradise poster on the ground floor if you missed it earlier. On the second floor there’s a fully automated shop where you can buy regular items. There are two boxes here, too. The right one has a and the left one has a .

If you take the elevator up to the 63rd floor, you can get the Glow Lance. Actually, that looks like a translation error, since your inventory calls it a Grow Lance. I can’t really fault the programmer for that one. Japanese has the Ro spelling, but no equivalent for the Lo spelling. The syllable itself is pronounced somewhere between the two (almost ‘rlo’) - and I once had a native speaker tell me how hard it is for him to tell the difference between the two sounds.

There’s an on level 64 in the locker that Cloud refused to take the megaphone out of waaaay back on Disc 1. :)

There’s nothing on 65, and you can’t get out on 66, 67, 68, or 69. That being said, if you go up and down the stairs on these floors, you can run into enemies that you can steal from or morph.

Go to level 59 and take the stairs down one, two, three, and get the . Then go down four, five, six, seven flights of 14 stairs and one flight of 10.

Let’s see, that’s… 108 floors. Yeah. This TOTALLY makes sense. ;)

Actually, I think each two staircases counts as a floor, so it does add up to 59 floors. Whoa. It’s actually on purpose. Sorry, I get sidetracked by numbers pretty easily.

Anyway, when you have all this junk, head back to the tunnels and go down three screens, then take the left fork of the “Y” split. At the end of this fork is the outside world. Move forward and you’ll head up a ladder to the next level.

Boss: Proud Clod

Head forward a little bit and you’ll see a large robot come after you. After more bad dialogue, you’ll get to fight the Proud Clod.

Yup, that’s really its name.

You’ll be rewarded after this battle with 15,000 XP, 2,500 AP, and 40,000 Gil. Which is nice, but it didn’t even level any of my materia or characters up.

You get the after this battle. It also begins to rain. Go figure.

Barret’s Ultimate Weapon

Note: If Barret isn’t in your party for this next bit, you’ll miss an opportunity for his ultimate weapon. Be sure to use the Save Point on the next screen to use and ensure he’s in the party.

Head up one screen and open the two boxes at the very beginning of that screen for an and a . Save if you need, but make sure Barret is in your party.

It’s kinda hard to see, but you’re supposed to run up the stairs, which look like a ladder, just to the right of the save point and down toward the boxes.

As you are climbing these stairs, be looking for a green treasure chest. If Barret is in your party, you’ll receive his weapon. The power of this weapon increases based on the total AP of all equipped Materia, so it’s ridiculously powerful when filled with master level materia.

When you get to the top of the stairs, go to the top-left corner of the platform, and then walk toward the bottom of the screen to go up the next set of stairs.

Head left and then up to get to the last flight of stairs.

When you get to a level with lots of electricity sparking, get your guys ready for a boss battle.

Boss: Hojo

After you are ready, go talk to Hojo.

After you “kill” Hojo, you’ll be treated to Helletic Hojo, Right Arm, and Left Arm. Use the above pattern exactly the same way.

Kill him off to fight Lifeform-Hojo NA. Same tactics work for me on this one, too. I got a for this battle, though. :D

Kill him off and the battle is over. 25,000 XP and 2,500 AP. Still no materia level up for my characters. Whoa.

Ah. In my game, I only needed to get a few more materia to master level before I could trade them in for Master level materia, so they needed a very large amount of AP. More on that later.

Watch a bunch of cut scenes and try to figure out what’s going on. Eventually, you’ll be offered the chance to save, then asked to swap out discs. When you get control again, you’ll be on the Highwind ready to jump off at the North Crater.

Move on to the Disc 3: North Crater section.