Disc Two should be around the same length as Disc One unless you really get into the grinding. Just like FF VIII, the last disc will pretty much be end game.

I'm so glad i got to enjoy this game as a 13-14 year old, over analyzing it as an adult just seems like a bad time all together.

1) You can pretty easily continue to dick around. It's not at all necessary to max out any of the characters, nor is it necessary to master any materia. They're optional stuff that is put into the game to give players more things to do and you can easily finish the game without doing either. For me, mastering materia just seemed interesting (at the time) and I liked the idea of having mastered materia on my characters so that, for my main party at least, each character had access to every magic spell, which would normally be impossible due to the limited number of slots they have available. Complete superfluous.

2) You can do it either way. I will use poison as an example here. If you pair poison with added effect on your weapon, you will have a chance to poison enemies with your attack (a cursory glance online shows it should be a 20% chance). If the combination is slotted in your armour instead, you will become immune to the poison status effect.

Additionally, there is an elemental materia which essentially performs the same way, but with elemental damage instead of status effects (duh!). If paired with fire on your weapon slots, you will do fire damage. If slotted in your armour instead, it halves/nullifies/absorbs fire damage depending on the level of the elemental materia.

For the other materias like MP Absorb/HP Absorb, it won't matter if the combination is in your weapon or armour slots as the effect only occurs when you cast the spell/summon.

3) lol, I'll admit to laughing out loud (I'm still chuckling) when I first read this. The dickish answer would be you're wasting money. The nice answer is that you may want more than one character to have access to healing spells so you would want to purchase more than one Cure materia instead of waiting to master it (which takes a long time) before you have access to another.

4) Depending on how deep you get into side quests, it will likely be shorter than disc 1.

@zombiepie: To me it's quite the opposite, barring a select few scenes I think the mixture of drama and humour is great. That's just how life is. Fiction often fails to capture this mixture, only focusing on either the humour or the drama but FFVII is one of those games which tries to capture it all. I think, for the most part, it's better for it.

With regards to the marching parade thingy. I have completed this game multiple times. I have 100% completed it twice. I still suck at the marching bit.

@zombiepie: 'So wait...am I combining these summons with the Added Effect Materia on weapons or armor? I finally am wrapping my mind around which weapons are worth using and which ones are not.'

It depends on your purposes. The elemental hit and added effect materia will, on your weapon, make your basic attacks either do damage of the element of the linked materia, or inflict status ailments of the linked materia. If equipped to your armour, it will instead protect you from that element or those ailments.

Disk 1 is the longest by far. 2 is shorter, while 3 is the shortest.

@hassun While I risk putting words in zombiepie's mouth (and if I'm wrong, feel free to call me out), I think the issue that is being taken with the particular humorous scenes in question is that they're silly and logic breaking. There's nothing wrong with having humor in your dramatic story. As you say, life is full of both. But there's a difference between a 'Yuffie gets horrible motion sickness' joke which makes sense in the situation, and 'Somehow this entire ship's worth of guards doesn't figure that there's something wrong with that weird wolf man with a tail dressed as a sailor'.

For instance Elemental - Lightning materia on weapon would makes attacks have lightning properties so it will probably be useful against robots enemies. You can also substitute it with Elemental - Ramuh the lightning summon. Having either of these combo on your armor instead will either resist/null/absorb (depending on Elemental materia level) Lightning attacks from enemies.

Added Effect - Destruct/Odin on weapon for example will give the character a chance to instant death enemy. Added Effect - Destruct/Odin on armor will guard against instant death.

Character levels should come easier with disc 2 since you get the option to explore the world more, have reason to explore, and easy to recover. Grind if you think you really are starting to fall behind in battles or want a certain limit break or master a certain materia.

If you only focus on mainlining disc 2 it is likely shorter than 1. There are however A LOT of stuff you can do in Disc 2, some optional story beat, some ultimate weapon and level 4 limit that aren't too difficult but might requires specific timing knowledge if you want to do it as soon as you can. I think they are all doable in Disc 3 as well, but I would say you should do them in Disc 2 instead of putting it off to Disc 3 for maximum benefits.

Knights of the Round is powerful yes, but chocobo breeding is really annoying, especially if you hate chocobo racing. To get Knights there are technically 2 ways, get it through Master Summon or get it through gold chocobo, and to get gold chocobo there are technically 2 ways, breeding or Kalm traveler.

Kalm Traveler: You get a set of master materia by beating Emerald Weapon, you get gold chocobo by beating Ruby Weapon

Ha, I totally knew where you were going with the "Heal" rant.

It's not your fault for not knowing that, but for what it's worth, spell names are, for the mostpart, internally consistent within Final Fantasy. What I mean by that is, HP restoring spells are "Cure" spells. So if you look at the Restore materia (if memory serves) it should unlock "Cura" and "Curaga" as it levels up, and those would be your better HP restoring spells.

Again, not your fault, but it's the sort of oversight that series veterans would never even notice or realize is an issue.

Also, don't worry about party optimization. The fact that you can switch around materia means characters are largely interchangeable outside of their limit breaks. I beat the game using Cloud, RedXIII and Cait Sith as my main party.

@zombiepie: All the Materia I described can go anywhere, doesn't matter. As for some of your other questions, no you really don't need to worry about maximizing effectiveness. Continue to dick around. It's hard/impossible to fuck yourself out of being able to continue. Worst case scenario is that you spent an hour grinding for level.

RE: Buying multiple materia: it's useful in the short term. It takes a long time to level up materia to max, so if you want two people with restore you may as well just buy two. The extra materia is nice, but it's also level 1. When you have Fire 3, then what will you need Fire 1 for? Without grinding up the new materia, it just takes up space.

Consider grinding up for the Master Materia, but don't make it a life quest. There's a great place for grinding AP, but there is also...well, it's not an easier way of getting Master Materia, but it can be faster. I'll go into more detail if you want me to.

To the rest of the thread: Are we going to tell him about W-Item? Is that still a thing in the PC version?

You can transfer a whole row of materia slots between characters i.e. move Weapon row to someone, then move Armour row to someone. In the menu, go to Materia, navigate the cursor to the word "Arrange", click and choose Exchange. Move the cursor to Wpn or Arm, click and move to desired character. That's your FFVIII switch function in FFVII.

Didn't the game explain all this <insert sensible chuckle>

@rebel_scum: Oh my god. I've been playing FF7 on and off for close to 20 years and I had no idea this was in the game.