Help Leveling Up Materia

[mrdaggoth]

If you have more than one of the same materia, do they level up twice as fast?
I've seen all the advanced combinations, but i just started out and only have the basic materia like the elementals, restore, steal and cover. What are good combinations of the noob materias?

 

[Kyreaan]

Pay attention to the slots you have in your equipment. There are going to be 2 slots joined together to make a combination, such as Ice and Elemental materias. You'll strike for ice damage during a physical strike if these are placed together in a weapon. The same will happen if you use Poison materia. There is a materia called All. This is blue materia like Elemental. Blue materia is for combinations to get a certain effect. Ice and All materias will do ice damage against all enemies. The speed of materia growth won't really be faster if you have multiple materias of the same type, but you'll end up with more copies of the same materia. Look at your weapons and armor. They'll have descriptions of materia growth. Some equipment will have no materia growth.

Spoiler

The best armor in the game has no materia slots. Keep Steal materia on at all times to get the best armor. You steal it from Rude the 3 times you fight him. Keep the weapons that have many materia slots in case you want to use those together.

There are other blue materias that raise the ability of spell and summon materias. You can combine these further with Mime materia. This yellow materia will add an action choice like other yellow materias can. Mime materia will allow a character to mimic a spell previously cast without using magic points. For an example, I place Ice and All on Cait Sith. I have Mime on all of my party members. Cait Sith cast Ice on all enemies. Everyone used Mime to copy Ice and All until the enemies are dead.

Another beginning tip for growing materia is to make sure you keep Enemy Skill materia. There's an area where you must get past the Midgard Serpent on the first disc. It's in a swamp outside the beginning city. Keep Enemy Skill equipped while running your party through the field next to the swamp. Build up your characters until you can fight the Midgard Serpent instead of sneaking past it. It has a skill called Beta, which does a lot of fire damage. You keep it if your party can survive it.

 

[mrdaggoth]

Thanks for the advice! Mime sounds like a lot of fun to use, along with blue magic. Or enemy skill as its called in this one. So there is basically no point/benefit in putting two ice materia in one weapon, jointed or not right?

 

[Kyreaan]

You would only put two of the same materia on a character if you want to build both of those materias. If I have Mime on one character that became mastered, I get another Mime materia. I could place the new materia on the same character if I have a weapon with faster materia growth. The mastered Mime materia can go to another character.

 

[Shaissa]

A few things when leveling up materia

Look at what the equipment says about "growth" this determines the rate that the armor/weapon will level up the Materia. All final Weapons (except Aerith's) will not let your materia grow at all.

Usually you can either double or triple it by looking at this