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Oct 27, 2017
1,443
Playing through FF7 for the first time, there's a lot of special command materia that I don't even know what the hell it does.

Deathblow?? Manipulate?? Morph?? Fuck if I know.

Deathblow does a critical hit but has lower accuracy than a normal attack. Some characters have weapons with 255 accuracy and they can make great use of it.

Manipulate lets you control the enemy and is necessary for obtaining some Enemy Skills, such as White Wind and Big Guard, which are two of the best spells in the game.

Morph changes the enemy into an item. There are some rare items that can only be obtained in substantial quantities via Morph, such as stat-boosting "source" items.
 

Cannon_Fodder

Member
Oct 27, 2017
510
I think the right answer is any debuff spell, but since that's been mentioned a lot, I think most of the techniks from FFXII are really useless. Horology and that step one come to mind.
 

GlassEmpires

Member
Dec 10, 2018
1,132
ff 7's added effect and elemental materia, and 8's attack junctions are great for utilizing status effect and "rare" elemental magic in a way that avoided wasting mp or stock
 

Rhomega

Member
Oct 25, 2017
6,639
Arizona
I never use spells that cause an effect like Toad, Mini, Poison, or Death. They have a reputation for not working.
 
Oct 27, 2017
1,443
Yeah Death is probably the best answer for me. You just end up never having a good enemy on which to use it.


Godlike in Divinity OS2. It's the first game a Geo felt worth using.

Tried my hardest to like it in FFT, but it was a joke.

Geomancy is actually quite good as a secondary skill for magic oriented jobs in FFT (as its damage is based on MA) since it gives them access to an instant cast way of dealing damage. It also has excellent range and many of the skills can and often do inflict pretty devastating status effects.
 

Syril

Member
Oct 26, 2017
5,895
I still love the story about Ultima's very first appearance.
When Final Fantasy II was originally released on the Famicom, the Ultima spell, which was difficult to acquire, was practically useless. It was initially meant to increase its power relative to the level of other spells the caster had, but due to a bug, the spell did just around 500 damage at the most on a single target. Director Hironobu Sakaguchi has later told a humorous story relating to the bug: When Square tested the game and saw the bug, Sakaguchi asked for it to be fixed, but the person who programmed it replied that legendary stuff that dates back to an age before "proper techniques" would look inferior from present's point-of-view, explaining Ultima's weakness. He reasoned that the struggle to acquire it only to discover it's useless mirrors real life, and thus he was not going to fix the bug. Sakaguchi was irritated by the reply and tried to fix it himself, but the programmer had ciphered the source and Ultima was left the way it was.
 

BassForever

One Winged Slayer
Member
Oct 25, 2017
29,939
CT
Death. It costs too much to use on normal enemies and most bosses are immune to it.

I was gonna say that, but in ff6 (pre gba version) vanish + death pretty much clowns 90% of the game and is op.

That's the problem with this topic, there are plenty of places in various ff games over the years that some spells can go from worthless to extremely useful.

I guess I'll go with full cure, it's often so much more expensive then a curaga/ja/3/4 that it's usually just over kill. It gets buffed in later games but it's still a spell that I find generally too situational.
 

Hero_of_the_Day

Avenger
Oct 27, 2017
17,347
Debuffs fail like 99% of the time. There is usually like 1 boss a game that they will make a cake walk, but outside of that, just worthless.
 

Deleted member 13155

User requested account closure
Banned
Oct 27, 2017
2,604
Demi is great for those instances where you want to lower the health of an enemy so that you can use something like Morph on it as in FFVII. Until you get Conformer anyway.

Poison works in a few FF games, like the strongest FFXIII boss can be beaten with it.

Death is mostly useless but then again there is FFVI and also FFXIII if you want to grind turtles early on.
 
Jun 20, 2019
2,638
I rarely use reflect except for edge-cases where the battle was clearly designed for it. I usually depend on magic-based healing (Cure-line spells typically). Reflect on my teammate that needs big healing can really ruin my day.

I rarely use Berserk, either, except in those games where it can be carefully contained like XII. The risk is too high for me!
 

Griselbrand

Member
Oct 26, 2017
3,242
I didn't use spells much in VIII but status junctioning 100 Death to attack made short work of random encounters.
 

Socivol

Member
Oct 25, 2017
6,672
I don't think I have ever used the Toad skill. Like many have said debuffs in the earlier games were complete trash for the most part. Final Fantasy XIII finally got it right with the Saboteur role.
 

Daysean

Member
Nov 15, 2017
7,392
Bubble, Decoy, Drain and the most overpowered spell in the game in Reverse say green magic is actually the best magic
Oh wait, Bubble is Green?
I havent played FF12 since like it came out on PS2, I really should've actually looked at what green magic was before i made that comment, because status effect magic is wack but i was on that Bubble hard as a child for that 2x HP Buff