Final Fantasy VII/Walkthrough/Finale

So here, our friends reunite. It's time to go finally kicking some goth-bishōnen butt. At the top of the stairway leading to the center of the planet, there's still one more chance to first grab all of the cool trinket the other folks have collected, get your gear in order, and pick your team as you plunge down to...

The stairs

The stairway consists of fights with some really annoying enemies. Basically, if you start mysteriously seeing "Game over" screens, it's more often thanks to these massively annoying guardians. They come in a couple of different varieties: floating eyes (Allemagne), big knights with bigger swords (Iron Man), and skeletal dragons (Dragon Zombie). (In D&D terms: Eyeballs, Level 65 Munchkins and Ancient Dracolichs). Eyes are easy, knights kill you dead, skeletal dragons die when you as much as sneeze at them, but have the nasty habit of killing you dead with Pandora's Box (Be sure you have your Enemy Skill materia equipped if you haven't aquired this Enemy Skill yet!). When fighting Iron Men and Dragon Zombies, it's best to treat each fight with equal seriousness as if it were a boss fight; start the fight with Big Guard and throw some big summons at it. You remembered to bring tons of Ether, right? Just kill the baddies, then afterwards Cure yourself and pump yourself full of Ether.

The hideous thing is coming right at us!

At the bottom of the stairs, you find yourself looking at a gigantic big... mass of... something... Mother Brain? No, something quite more unexplainable than that.

Jenova-SYNTHESIS

Lv: 61, HP: 60000/10000/8000, MP: 600/600/600, Weaknesses: -, Strong against: Earth, Poison, Gravity, Absorbs: -

Ah, Jenova, Jenova... now, somewhat more truer face, I assume. Jenova's ultimate form consists of three parts: Jenova-SYNTHESISA (the body), Jenova-SYNTHESISB (right tentacle) and Jenova-SYNTHESISC (left tentacle). The tentacles slap the characters, and, predictably, can be revived by the main body. The fight itself shouldn't be too hard if you just use a sensible guarding strategy (ie, Big Guard) - just use whatever you have in your arsenal. Big spells, summons and really heavy-hitting enemy skills are rulesome. Avoid using Knights of Round, though, even when it's tempting. The only big point is that near the end of the battle, Jenova starts counting down from 5: If the countdown reaches zero, Jenova casts Ultima and dies. If you survive the blast, you still win, but get no experience or AP from the fight (and this is the last fight where you even can get those!)

Art thou goth enough?

After the fight, you end up to the actual center of the planet. Well, it is rather hard to say where you are at the moment, but the good thing is, Holy is close by. As is Sephiroth.

For the following fight, you will get to split your party into one, two or three groups, depending on how well you got here.

Todo: How is the number of groups determined? I always get two groups!

Bizarro Sephiroth

Lv: 61, HP: 40000/2000/10000/6000/4000, MP: 400/400/400/400/400, Weaknesses: -, Strong against: Gravity, Poison, Absorbs: -

This is, as the name indicates, a little bit strange fight. The game helpfully gives you some hints on how to proceed, but that's of very little practical use. The body consists of not five, but tons of parts - A (chest), B (head), C (left and right core), D (left and right magic) and E (left and right magic). If you have multiple parties in fray, you can switch the fighters whenever you destroy a body part. Apparently the idea is to blow away the outer layers and then thwack the core parts to pieces - the core remains invulnerable until other parts are destroyed. Use whatever you have, just note that some elements get absorbed by some parts. This goes especially with fire attacks. There are some annoying counterattacks, like reviving (Bizzarro Energy (sic)), Stigma (poison) and Aurora Fence (nobody seems to know what this is supposed to be). You can't Sense the boss, so none of the stats are official. These are in case none of your characters are level 99 and you didn't use Knights of Round on Jenova-SYNTHESIS. Basically, add a couple of thousand to each part for each leet character and some more on body if you used KoR. All in all, this is a rather challenging fight. In a pinch, you may even have to use Knights of Round twice! I seem to survive with just one use, though.

Fight in the heavens

Bizarro Sephiroth falls down! I know that was a strange fight. What on earth was that thing? But there's no time for extraneous explanations! No time for transitions! Time to tackle something symbolic. And the music is pretty good. "In taberna quando sumus / non curamus quid sit humus / SEPHIROTH!" ... wait, no, it wasn't like that. Some other part of Carmina Burana, anyway.

Safer Sephiroth

Lv: 70 or so?, HP: tons..., MP: guess?, Weaknesses: -, Strong against: -, Absorbs: -

Now what on earth is THIS then? A lot of the stats are very very very debatable as you can't Sense this boss. Safer Sephiroth's stats scale based on how well you did earlier - he has over 80000 HP, even more if you have characters on level 99 or had to kill the Bizarro Sephiroth's some parts multiple times, apparently. Some sources (Kao Megura at least) say Safer Sephiroth has 680 MP. The fight is still relatively easy (as said earlier, the stairway was probably the hardest part!) Safer Sephiroth has following attacks up its sleeves: Wall. Shadow Flare, a kills-everyone-dead attack probably familiar from the Ultima Weapon fight. Pale Horse, some annoying status effects. Break, a nasty Earth attack. Heartless Angel, an attack that reduces HP to 1 and gives status effects. Supernova, a summon that reduces HP to 1 and gives status effects and is preceded by a frigging long but ah so cool animation. I heartily recommend Ribbons (or White Capes etc if those aren't available), big summons, spells of extreme nastiness. Phoenix materia is definitely recommended - causes some damage and revives some undoubtedly fallen party members. Let the love flow! This is your finest hour! Use whatever stuff you have lying at the bottom of the bag here! And, uh, a hint, Sephiroth just can't handle Knights of Round twice. =)

The end?

After the bad guy has been blown to the ionosphere, it's time to go home. Or not so for Cloud, who weirds up, goes spirit-journeying and ends up fighting...

Sephiroth

Lv: ?, HP: ?, MP: ?, Weaknesses: -, Strong against: -, Absorbs: -

Cloud's final confrontation with the dark antagonist himself, a sword duel in the depths of... cosmos... somewhere... um... Well, this fight is for show only - you can't lose. You can only use Omnislash limit break, even if you don't have it yet - at least you get to see what it looks like - and even if you don't pick this thing, because Cloud will counter-attack automatically if Sephiroth tries to attack. (Reportedly, equipping Counter materia on Cloud will lead to a little bit less spectacular results, because that way, Cloud will counter-attack normally, causing much less damage...)

The end.

Sephiroth is destroyed – in a rather unexplained way. It is quite difficult to tell for sure, though, what really happened at the end. If the end seems weird, just read megabytes of fan analysis and speculation and it all starts to make sense. Kind of.

Holy tries to destroy the Meteor. Lifestream tries to stop all. Everything goes white.

And, after some typographically offensive end credits (boring Arial - is this what they call end credits these days?), Red XIII returns to Midgar after 500 years.