Can You Beat Final Fantasy VII with Items Only? - Casp

I’ve recently become obsessed with getting the most out of items in JRPGs, as they’re always under-used. You know when you’re packing the maximum amount of everything, alongside a fat stack of megalixirs, then the credits roll and you haven’t used any of it? Or when enemies drop an item you’ve never seen and you don’t even bat an eyelid because you know it’s shit? Yeah, well, I’m sick of you guys neglecting items, so I’m gonna force the pendulum back myself. Let’s see how we go in Final Fantasy

7. Okay, so rules for this run are, as always, items only. No attacking, no magicks or summons, no secondary effects such as stealing or Morph, but anything within the item command is fair game. I’ll still equip materia, and stronger armour, as well as weapons, generally for their materia-growing properties, I just won’t use them to attack. Since money will be tighter than the average play, as I’ll need to keep a stacked inventory at all times, and may need to sell Materia. If you’re unfamiliar

with Final Fantasy 7, what're you doing watching this video? Anyway, selling Materia is kind of a sin in a regular playthrough, however, they are a great source of cash. Materia are coloured baubles that can be slotted into weapons and armour of each character, and, through battle, accumulate an experience of their own, AP. Enough AP will level them up, granting extra effects, but as I won’t be using these effects, I’ll be cultivating them to sell. The AP value dictates what a merchant will pay,

and certain weapons can have Double and Triple yield, so I’ll be on the look out for those. Now that we’ve been over some light intricacies, let’s begin the run. Unfortunately, it’s already dead, as we open with two mandatory battles, one against two Shinra soldiers, and the other against the tutorial boss, Guard Scorpion, and there’s no way to acquire items in advance. I looked in to skipping these events, but it doesn’t seem like I can. Not unlike my Dragoon run, I’m gonna have to beat these

regularly, and then begin the challenge once we get to the Sector 7 Slums, which is the first area that sells items. So technically, no, it can’t be done, at least with my game knowledge, but I reckon once I have access to damaging items, I can clear the rest. If there’s a way to skip these encounters, please let me know. So I spend the first couple minutes chopping down the grunts, fleeing from every random encounter, slapping the tutorial boss with regular attacks, then running from... more Sh

inra Soldiers, before catching a train to see my girl. Now, we finally arrive at the Sector 7 Slums, which is where the run begins. From here, I grab all the loot around the bar, and sell everything, including Barret’s weapon dropped by the former boss. I’m not gonna need it, but I am gonna need gil. Lots and… lots of gil. Ethers are great, selling for 750 a pop, and will be the backbone of the early-game run. I equip my boys with materia, buy 40 grenades, and head on to blow up sector 5, which

should be fairly easy with all those explosives I just acquired. Running on through, we arrive at our first real boss, Air Buster. He’s got 1,200 health, and a chunky dumper, but our grenades do about 130 damage a pop, so we only need to hit him 10 times. Should be easy enough... As I spent all my money on grenades, and nothing on increasing my defense, he left my party in tatters. Tifa went down fast, which is the dream, Barret shortly followed, which I’m sure is… someone’s dream, and Cloud JUS

T edged out a victory with 14 health. Luckily, Air Buster drops a Titan Bangle, which will bulk Cloud up a little bit, If only we didn't fall to our deaths, because like... the bangle's not gonna stop that. The next area is Aeris’ church, where there are three skippable encounters. If I nail each of the barrel drops from the beams above, I can dodge all three, which is great. Entering the Sector 6 (5) Slums, I dump my inventory again, and stock up on grenades, which gives us around 57. I want a

couple more, as we’re about to string bosses back to back, and I’d really like to secure victory. Then, we take Aeris on her dream date: to the red light district. Now, we dress the main character up as a girl, to infiltrate the mansion of a degenerate sex pest and get our girlfriend back. God I love this game. I wouldn’t usually bother getting the best of everything for our cross-dressing femboy protagonist, however, if Don Corneo chooses him in the following section, I can avoid two battles o

f three enemies each, so 6 total grenade uses. That’s 480 gil worth of explosive, and getting the best chance for Don to pick Cloud only costs 280, so I’m making a net profit of about two and a half grenades… God, that sounds like such a waste of time. It’s probably not worth it, but I don’t know what lies ahead, so I feel 200 gil could genuinely make a difference. Don picks Cloud, we save our pittance, get dropped into the sewer, and fight Aps, the poo devil. He’s rocking 1,800 health, but we a

re still chugging through at 130 damage a pop, and this dumbarse hits himself for 160 whenever the tide rises. What an idiot. After a couple grenades, he falls, leaving us with 55. I wonder if it would’ve been cheaper to spam potions and let him kill himself… I grab the potion, the steal materia, and head for the train graveyard. There’s a bunch of loot here, including Ethers, then I head to the Sector 7 support pillar, to fight Reno. Reno’s only got 1,000 health, barely does any damage, and dro

ps an Ether. You know, I've heard great things about Japanese twinks, but this really confirms that. I blow 8 or so grenades on him, then leave everyone for dead as we narrowly swing past the crumbliest pizza ever half-baked. Heading back to Sector 6, grab everyone some slightly better armour, which more than doubles their defenses. I figure if they can take an extra hit or two, I don’t have to buy potions. This is a very dangerous plan. Then I buy more grenades, got a fat stack of 72, and head

back to collect my child… Wanna show her my grenade collection. After a sweaty round of eye-fucking Aeris’ mother, we do some climbing, and arrive at the Shinra HQ. I usually love busting in through the front door, it’s very gratifying, but I want to avoid battles here, so we’re gonna sneak off to the side entrance, and do a little leg day. See you on the other side. Arriving at the 60th floor, we’re ambushed by three armoured guards, who take 6 grenades to dispatch, but carefully sneaking past

the following room will avoid any more unnecessary encounters. From here, it’s a lot of faffing about, collecting whatever items I can to bulk my coin purse as much as possible, and slowly making my way to the top. I do get pincer attacked at one point, disallowing flight, so I had to burn two grenades to kill a regular enemy and get out of that battle. Fingers crossed that’s uncommon… Otherwise I’m fucked. Arriving near the apex, we free our boy, Red, and fight a big boss guy. His health and da

mage output are low, and he's got these little minion dudes, but they don't matter. I accidentally threw a grenade at one of them, but once I realised my mistake, I bounced back quickly, and took him out. Then we hit the top floor, bully a fat kid, and Barret takes a few friends down an elevator to fight two more bosses. These have a collective 2,600 health, but nothing noteworthy. We’re still stacking grenades and they go down with minimal issue… I mean we lose the dog, but whatever. Cloud’s go

t his own boss to fight, the newly-Presidented… President, Rufus. He’s got a pet cat who dies in a single grenade, as cats are known to do. Humans are a little more resilient, however, and Rufus takes 4, with a couple breaks for healing. He flees, and so do we, but while he’s a loser nerd and takes a helicopter, we opt for a way cooler method of transport: get your bike shorts on boys. Show the world what god gave you. After running through one of the coolest mini-games, still to this day, we ge

t accosted by a giant chicken nuggie machine, and he hits like a spiked truck. His physical attacks aren’t too bad, but out of nowhere, he does this spinny fire beyblade shit and wipes my crew. What the fuck? I thought this game was easy. I reload, try again, and clear it with ease, I think my main issue was dying, so I didn’t do that this time. I also realise this battle could’ve been won easier, had I put everyone in the back row. I don’t think rows will affect item damage, but they sure do af

fect defense… Now that we’re free from Shinra’s tyranny, we head to the Kalm flashback. While this particular section has no real need to fight enemies, there’s a mandatory Dragon you can’t flee from. However, Sephiroth is in the party, isn’t controllable and automatically kills it in two hits. We mash through the hordes of dialogue, and head to Chocobo Ranch. Luckily, I’m rolling in cash from all the ethers I found along the way, so I can easily scrape up for the Chocobo Lure and some Greens. A

nd luckily for us, in the first battle, a Chocobo appears. Greens are vegetables used to pacify the bird while you dispatch enemies, and are selected from the item menu, so we’re golden. He arrives alongside two elephant mongoloids, with each of these taking two grenades, and RNG be kind, as the chocobo didn’t run. I mash through the mythril mines, grabbing everything in there along the way, and come out at Fort Condor… Which I think I’m gonna skip for now, because that’s a money pit and as much

as I enjoy the mini-game, it’s not worth the risk. We head to Lower Junon, stock up on Grenades, 99 this time, as this is the last place in the game we can purchase them. I’ve been pretty lucky so far, in that the regular enemies are allowing me to flee, there’s been a solid flow of Ethers to sell, and bosses are not only weak, but very infrequent. My memory is fairly shaky from here, however, so I want to future-proof myself a little, and to achieve this, I recruit Yuffie, who is level 17, and

has a bunch of slots to slap materia on for AP generation. The rest of my party have their starting weapons and are level 10, so the hard-R ninja will be a great boon for a desperately weak roster. I fight a couple battles, as there’s a small fortune burning a hole in my pocket, so restocking grenades ain’t no thang, but the party only gains a level or so before moving on. I don’t think it’s worth grinding at this point, and to test this theory, we dive head first into the next boss: Bottomswel

l. He’s got this move that blocks you from attacking, and also slowly drains your health, and I attempted the valiant grenade rush, but lost Barret and Cloud in the process, I guess getting Yuffie was the right call. He drops a Power Wrist, an item that sells for 3700 gil, then we enter Upper Junon via Dolphin and try to blend in with the locals… It uhh... it doesn’t go great. I want to do well at this mini-game, as if you get a rating of over 50%, you’re rewarded 5,000 gil. After three attempts

, I only managed to get the second-best prize, 6 ethers. That’s only a 500 gil discrepancy, as 6 ethers can sell for 4500, so I’ll let it ride. This mini game is dumb. Following this, there’s a second mini-game, which isn’t as stupid, and I nail it for a Force Stealer, a weapon for Cloud with double AP gain. Thank you, President Rufus. Very cool. We climb aboard the ship, grab a new weapon for Yuffie with double materia growth, and fight Jenova-Birth. I made the intentional effort to buy some hi

-potions before we set sail, just in case. The ass blasting I copped from the last boss, changed me in a profound way. Jenova hits pretty hard, but with hi-potions, it was a non-issue. She’s also got 4,000 health, and takes about 25-30 grenades, so the fight isn’t as snappy as some former skirmishes, but we make it through to the other side, get some nice experience, nice AP gains, and I hope to god I can buy items on this side of the world or this run’s over. Arriving at Costa Del Sol, I very q

uickly check around for a weapon store, and sure enough, this beautiful schizoid in the corner sells molotovs, and better armour, so we stock up, and head out. Molotovs are neat, while they cost significantly more than grenades, they also have a higher damage output. Testing them on enemies, they seemed to do around 400 damage, which is about 1 damage per gil. My grenades cost 80 gil and did 140 damage or so, giving me about 1.7 damage per gil, but, with these fire-bombs, I may triumph over batt

les faster, reducing my need for potions and the like. We make our way around some bendy bends, and over to some abandoned railway tracks… Or possibly a rollercoaster frame. Steal from some baby birds, kill their mother, get some fat loot, and head on through to buffCorel (shout out to ya boi). I need the money, which morally justifies anything and everything, plus we gotta pay 3,000 gil to get into the Gold Saucer, which is like 7 molotovs. A couple story events happen, we get Cait Sith, get ta

ken to jail, and fight our next boss, Dyne. This feller is pretty easy, even with my under-levelled Barret alone. Molotovs make short work of him, taking him out in 4 turns, and my massive, gun-armed friend only requires a single heal. Now, we’re off for a day at the Chocobo races. We seize victory, are freed, and given a Buggy, with which to make progress, on to Gongaga… Fuckin' hell, who named these places? The funnest man in the world? There’s not a lot here, but we get into a boss fight with

Reno and Rude, and it’s always nice to clean up loose ends. They’re not too tough, and don’t really drop anything we can use, but they’re dead now, which is the important thing. Next, we shuffle on over to Cosmo Canyon for a broken down buggy and a laser light show, then some dump truck magician tells us that we have to brave it through a burial ground for ancient monsters that aren’t strong enough to break a steel door, the only thing keeping them sealed. This should be a piece of piss. After

besting a handful of cunning traps, we have to burn a few molotovs on these mandatory spiders that preface the boss. With a whopping 2,200 health, a handful of these eight legged freaks have to be peacefully protested before moving on. Now it’s boss time, and this feller is rocking over 5,000 health and, probably does other stuff, but I didn’t get a chance to see it, as he’s undead. A single X-Potion is an insta-kill, as it restores the maximum health value, and he takes damage from healing. Giv

en that X-Potions sell for 1 gil and a hi-potion, restoring 500 health, almost fully heals me, I’m not gonna miss it, but I will miss a fat stack of molotovs. Speaking of, this place made me a fat stack, so I do a stock up, freshly armour my fellers, the intricacies are unimportant and uninteresting, just know that I’m like a fire bomb Santa… Though, I do genuinely ponder the HP UP orb, which increases max HP by 10%, and can increase to a whopping 50% with enough AP. The only thing stopping me i

s that it costs 8,000gil, and I’d gain about 50 health from it at this point, so I decide the twenty molotovs are probably better. Anyway, Nibelheim is up next. Arriving in town, you know the play by this point, I grab any stray items and dump them for cash. The mountains contain a couple trinkets I can liquidate too, so I do a quick run, and while I’m here, have a cheeky attempt at the next boss, Materia Keeper. This guy has 8,400 health, which is a huge step up from anything we’ve fought befor

e, but it should be okay, because I believe in the heart of the items. We enter combat, he casts Trine, a lightning attack that hits everyone for 500, practically one-shotting my entire party. I knew being under-levelled would catch up to me eventually. Just didn't think it'd be so soon. I desperately cast a molotov to see what kind of damage we’re working with and… He absorbs fire. Uh oh. I can only buy molotovs at this point, so I gotta do something or the run’s over. Well, let’s see if I can

take him out with how many grenades I have left. I’ve got 59 on hand, and 130 * 59 is 7600… That’s almost 1000 lower than what I need. *smacks lips* Fuck. Just a quick post-run note, I recently discovered you can take the buggy back to Junon, where I would’ve been able to stock my grenades back up… I didn’t know this at the time, not that it would’ve helped much. Anyway, back to the video, this party’s getting crazy. With what funds I have left, I head over to the Gold Saucer, where the fate of

the run rests. I try my hand at Chocobo Racing, but the Switch version runs this room at like 10 frames per second and it was pissing me off. I dropped about 2000 gil and won a single Arctic Wind, which casts Ice2, so there’s potential here, but the luck required would leave me here for days and I can’t be arsed. I’ll save this is an absolute last resort. Next, I attempted the Battle Square, as you can use a third currency to win a fourth currency, which can buy Shrapnel, effectively a non-eleme

ntal molotov that hits all enemies. A huge issue with the battle square, is that there’s no monetary incentive, and my gil stock and item pool aren’t high enough to spam the molotovs required to take these buggers down. Also I got my shit pushed in because I’m like level 15. The enemy Zuu in the Nibelheim mountains has a 14% chance to drop a Bird Wing, which has a base power of 1000, about two and a half times as powerful as a molotov, but they take three molotovs and a grenade to kill, and only

drop 430 gil, so I’m down 2 molotovs every fight. On Mt. Corel, there’s a bird called Needle Kiss with a 14% chance of dropping an item that casts Bolt2, but they only appear in groups with other enemies. With 180 health, they’d take 2 grenades to drop, but the extra enemies make it too expensive to farm with my stack of 50 or so grenades that I can’t restock. Hey, all. Another post-scripting interjection: I should've re-written this line. After a while of smashing my head against a brick wall,

I finally found my out, and it’s in the place you’d least expect. In the adjacent jungles of Gongaga, live an enemy called Flower Prong, now what makes these guys special, is that they have a 14% chance to drop an Earth Drum, an item that casts Quake2 on every foe, and they also drop 400 gil on death, enough to buy a molotov. As if that weren’t enough, they’re weak to fire, so a single molotov will do the trick. It’s gonna take a long time to get 15 or so Earth drums, but it’s free, and we’ll a

lso gain a shit-load of levels. I am indeed feeling it now, Mr Krabs. Only one of them rock up per fight but that’s good because they use Bio2 and it does half my health with one hit. If I mash fast enough, I can hit the molotov before I take damage. I did accidentally use a limit break once and had to reset… A little too quick on the draw there... Each encounter has a unique camera position when they begin, so you can always tell when to start running, or when to race to the item menu, which sp

eeds this part up immensely. I stack 14 or so drums, and with a huge gain in levels from all the experience yield, I slump my massive cock over my shoulder, and head back to slay this fiend who halted my progress for so long. With my newly-acquired items and durability, I hold up significantly better this time, though the Earth Drums do just shy of 300 damage, which isn’t enough to kill him. That’s about half his health, I am going to need at least 30. There’s no definitive amount that will guar

antee a win, because this bastard, in addition to his high resistances and damage, also casts Cure 2 when he starts getting low, so I’m gonna need a decent excess to compensate for that. I also ran out of hi potions which eventually got me killed, as I tried to Grenade him to death, 120 damage at a time, to no avail. So more drums, and more potions, got it, let’s do some grinding. We’re close, I can taste it. Instead of going back to the Forest to farm more drums, I decide to head back to the Ca

ve of the Gi, where we fought the undead boss, to find an enemy called “Sneaky Step”, who drops an item called M-Tentacles. This casts Bio3, and Materia Keeper just so happens to be weak to poison. I arrive at the door aaaaaaaaand... it’s sealed. I guess I can’t re-enter. Fuck. “Hoohoo come back when you need my knowledge.” Yeah, why don't you give me the knowledge about how to get the fuck in this door? Had I more foresight, I’d stand a much better chance with poison items, but it seems like I

will genuinely have to beat the tired old Earth Drum until I get lucky and win. I wanted to get through without grinding, but you gottsta do what you gottsta do. I stack 30 Earth Drums and return to give him a go, front-loading the battle with grenades, then switching up to drums once he’s half dead. He drops a couple Cure 2s, starts demoralizing me a bit, but then at one point, I get a string of turns and hit the drum so hard, it finally breaks. The beat is dead, and I killed it. That was insan

e. I think I’ve earned my progress, so let’s go make some. On to Rocket Town. We talk a lot, get some loot to sell, and fight Palmer. He’s pretty weak, so it’s a non-issue. His spells do okay damage, but I’m so buff at this point, it doesn’t matter. Now, we’ve got the Tiny Bronco, which is a plane but it’s this game’s sea-faring vessel, and it’s time to recover from the nightmare of the Materia Keeper, by heading to Junon and buying 99 Grenades. Our next goal is to get the Key Stone from Dio at

the Gold Saucer, he wants us to do our best at the Battle Arena, which is a string of 8 fights with varying handicaps. There are rewards for winning, but it’s not worth the amount of items you’d have to use, so you can allow yourself to die at the first match and still make progress. Next, I sell one of my Materia for an easy 10,000 gil, and head on over to complete the side content in Wutai, as we’ve got some business to take care of. On approach, Yuffie steals all our materia, we’re ambushed b

y two Shinra soldiers, and pursue the adolescent ninja to her hometown. This part always sucks, as throughout the entire game, you’ve relied on these power-bestowing trinkets, and now they’re gone, but one advantage to an item-only run is that it’s gonna suck slightly less… I hope. We enter and fleece the place, then dump what we can as Wutai sells Swift Bolts and Fire Veils, which cast Bolt3 and Fire3 respectively. They do cost 800 gil, but now we’ve got two additional damage items, giving us a

n extra element, and attacks that hit multiple enemies. Yes, it’s very sick, just as sick as our boy, Don Corneo, who has captured Yuffie and wants to do bad things to her. We engage a mandatory fight with three Shinra bad boys, and using a Swift Bolt, do 1,000 damage to everyone, instantly frying them. Also they dropped an S-Mine, which is a non-elemental item that does well over 1,000 damage. Thanks, fellers. Now, we chase Corneo up buff demon mountain and fight his new pet, RAPPS. Rapps destr

oyed me, I’m not gonna pretend I even stood a chance. Between his string of poisons and smaller melee attacks that barely spread out his casting of Aero, which does 1500 damage, I did maybe half of his health. Unlike the Shinra soldiers who took 1,000 damage from my attack items, RAPPs took about 250… And he’s got 6,000 health. This fight just got incredibly expensive. Oh well, we’ll reload and try again. I need a tiny bit more health to survive the Aero3, so I head outside to test mobs and what

kind of Gil yield we’re expecting. There’s groups of birds that die to one single item, which costs 800 gil, and they drop 1680. My money troubles are finally at an end, gamers. We’ve unearthed security in our run specifically designed to be insecure as the person doing it. I get enough health to survive the big mean bad guy, and also end up with a huge sack of X-potions, as it seems like every enemy has a huge drop chance for them. They also yields a huge amount of experience and AP... it’s a

damn shame I don’t have any materia. The extra levels didn’t help a great deal, but the X-Potions sure won the fight for me. Also the S-Mine dropped by the Shinra Soldiers did 1400 damage to Rapps, which is much more than the 250 I was getting from elemental attacks. He did cost quite a bit to take down, but he also drops 20,000 gil, and a Peace Ring, which will put me back in the green. Before leaving, I grab a few more damaging items, then head to make some actual story progress. Next on the c

hopping block, is the Temple of the Ancients, but there are two bosses in here, and I don’t know if I’ve got the gusto to take them. Once you enter, you can’t leave either, and... You know, in hindsight, I hesitate to say that after what I said about Junon... Anyway, I do a cheeky run through with 20 Fire Veils and Swift Bolts, roughly 10 molotovs, and a couple grenades. Aeris keeps laying down and having micro-sleeps but this isn’t the time to be laying about, we’ve got consuming to do. We smas

h through an Escher painting, harassing goblins along the way, then we bump into a dragon. Naturally, this bastard’s immune to fire, but takes about 600 damage from Bolts, and dies with minimal issue. The second boss, however, is a big wall, and this dude hurts. He also takes bugger-all damage from the both the Fire3 and Bolt3 items. They do about the same as a grenade, and he hits too hard to whittle him down with that kind of damage. I try a molotov, and they do just shy of 400, which is prett

y good, so I reload my save, go back, dump most of my fire veils for about 50 molotovs, grab some Softs, for the stoning, and re-run the dungeon. This time, we get all the items, lower our A-press count in Watch for Rolling Rocks, and arrive back at the wall. So, I made somewhat of an... accounting error. I sold too many Swift Bolts and had to grenade the dragon down, but he’s still not too difficult, even miscalculated stupidity didn’t make him a threat. Then, we clap the wall with molotovs, bu

t it was close, he did a shit load of damage, despite my recent grinding efforts. Now we’re free of Aeris in the party, which is fantastic because her up-beat attitude was bringing me down, so I take this opportunity to sort my Materia. This one may hurt some Final Fantasy 7 purists, but I’m gonna sell all my summon materia for 1 gil. They don’t appreciate in value, even if you max them out, and they’re clogging up my inventory. I sell everything with a similar persuasion, and only keep Materia

that appreciates in value, because my money woes need to fix themselves immediately. I don’t like needing to grind, a run like this should be as grind-free as possible, so gaining 20 levels because I needed a more diverse inventory… Kinda sucked. At this point, I’ve got about 25,000 gil and this is where my Final Fantasy 7 knowledge becomes even more hazy. My main concern right now is what kind of attack items I should buy. Do I stock molotovs, or opt for some of the Wutai variants? We’ve seen t

hat certain items are situationally better, so I’ve gotta make a very astute, educated guess based on vague memories. I head to Wutai for some grinding. The enemies here yield a bunch of EXP, but what I’m after, is AP. My transform materia is so close to mastery, I only need maybe 15 fights to get there, and a Mastered Transform sells for a whopping 350,000 gil. Maxing that out, and pawning it off now rockets me to the 1%, where I’ll look down upon the slum scum… Hey, maybe those Shinra guys wer

e on to something. I grab 99 of everything, Fire Veils and Swift Bolts, Grenades, and Molotovs... I think we just beat the game, boys. Why does mastered Materia sell for so much when it’s so easy to master? Is it to point out how useless Gil is except in this one situation? What a weird game. I stop in at Cosmo Canyon and pocket some of those HP Plus Materia I’ve been fawning over since my last visit, for an extra 10% max HP, then do some digging, run through a misty forest, and arrive in the Ci

ty of the Ancients. As I’ve recently acquired wealth due to a fine materia sale, the incentive to collect items from chests has dropped off pretty hard. Like, I’m still gonna do it, but the magic’s gone, you know? Because I sold it. Anyway, the next boss on the chopping block is JENOVA LIFE, she comes packing 10,000 health, and our Fire and Bolt items do about 500 each. From what I can see, she’s entirely Water-elemental, and Yuffie has a Water Ring, which makes her immortal. Cloud and Barret ar

e so high level, I don’t even have to heal, and I clear her with no issue. Awww man now I feel bad. Pretty sure I just broke the game. Consider the juxtaposition right: We started with scraping up scrap and sucking dick for cock to clear long strings of enemies with padded health, then hours grinding for drops to blast through elemental resistances, and now we’re just throwing items and winning. There’s no threat, it’s boring. I ruined the run by being too good with money… Oy vey… Oy vey indeed.

Moving after our boy Sephiroth, we do some snowboarding, climb some mountains, it’s all fairly uneventful and… snowy, but then we have to fight four giant icicles hanging from the ceiling. These take one Fire Veil and two molotovs to clear. Some easy experience, and I’m still rocking over 80 of each attack item. Boss time, Schizo. Hate to put a good schizo down, I’d love to hear his take on market sentiment and the globalist elite, but we need to make progress. This feller is of two minds, and

each is its own individual enemy. One absorbs fire, the other, ice. While I can’t use my fire attack items, neither of them absorb thunder, and a Swift Bolt hits each head for just shy of 1,000 damage. He’s got a fairly big health pool and dishes it out with a mix of Water and Ice attacks which Yuffie absorbs, but she doesn’t absorb the fire blasts. These do around 800 damage to each character, which still hurts even with our various resistances and large health pools, and he has an earth attack

that hits everyone for around 500 damage. One head goes down, unleashing a thunder attack that hits everyone for 1,000, and the only reason I didn’t wipe, was because Cloud absorbs Bolt. Hot damn. Okay, boys, the run’s back on. Then I kill the last head with a final item, and Cloud reaps the entire yield. Well, turns out having near-unlimited attacks doesn’t mean anything if you can’t take a hit yourself. Heading to the peak of Gaia’s Cliff, we encounter something that looks a little bit like S

ephiroth, as Tifa worms her way into our party… JENOVA-Death shows up and tries to hustle, but we’re wise to her tricks. She’s rocking 25,000 health, the highest so far, but has no real resistances. I do a little damage test, confirming that she takes 400 and change from the Veils and Bolts, and just shy of that from Molotovs. Everything is viable, it’s just gonna take a little while. She doesn’t have much in the way of damage, and it seems largely based on fire. Barret has a fire-resist amulet,

and Tifa absorbs it, so we're sweet. All she really has outside of that is silence, but unless there’s a form of silence that blocks off item use, I think we’re golden… Hang on, is there a form of silence that blocks item use? Oh god… I hope not. Anyway, she focuses on Tifa and Barret enough that my Cloud scrapes on by with bugger-all elemental resistances, and after dumping a fair stack of my inventory, she goes down. I’m not super happy that I’m extremely rich from selling Mastred Materia, bu

t at the same time, I don’t think this fight would’ve been possible without that lump sum. 25,000 health is a lot. If we’re talking pure financials, we do about 440 damage from items that cost 800 gil, which comes out to a whopping 45,000 just for this boss. That’s not even including JENOVA-Life, who had 10,000 health, and Schizo with two lots of 11,000, which would’ve tallied around 70,000gil depending on the items. There’s a lot of story stuff, we get into a slap fight with an Aryan queen, a p

lanet squid gets his head blown off, then we’re back in control, and piloting an airship. Now that the world has opened up, we’ve got a few more options for damage. We can return to the Gold Saucer and piss our fortune away, or we can head on over to Fort Condor for a new attack item. S-Mines are now purchasable from Disc 2 onward, at a whopping 1,000 gil a pop, we get 99 of them, return to Wutai and restock our elemental Veils and Bolts, and we’re poor again… The materia inheritance has run out

, boys. However, we do have access to hundreds of thousands worth of damage now which is pretty nice. I head to the Nibelheim basement to unlock Vincent because… I don’t know, I just hate leaving loose ends, then we ignore all the other loose ends and head to Mideel. We find Cloud, then head over to Corel to run a train on a bunch of miners. Hang on, what? That's not what that means? Wh-what does it mean? This is a 10-minute timed mission where you string a bunch of mini-bosses, but failure stil

l progresses the story. Instead of wasting my precious resources, since, you know, I’m poor now, I just wait out the timer and let a bunch of miners die a gruesome death. I think it’s worth it to save a couple bucks, I’m telling you, that Shinra’s got the right idea. The rewards for completing this section correctly are the Ultima materia and a summon, but I can’t use either, not even for cash money. At this point, my Ice materia is only a couple thousand AP from hitting mastery, and that’ll bul

k my cash hard, so I quickly top that off, dump it for a small helping of gil, just enough to buy my victory at Fort Condor. I forgot that I don’t have to win, and it cost me like 40,000 gil to win, so I reload and let the bad guys have it. The boss that rocks up from losing has 8,000 health, which is like like 7 S-Mines, that's way cheaper. Then we get wrecked in a scripted battle with Ultima Weapon, and save Cloud from his own subconscious. Now our golden boy is back, it’s time to fight some r

eal bosses. Back to Junon for hopefully the final time, we infiltrate the underwater reactor, and clear out a bunch of generics. Yuffie flexes her crane game proficiency, then we fight a giant spider machine. This boss has three pieces, the body, and two arms. Being a machine, it takes extra damage from lightning, so our Bolts do about 1,000 a pop to each enemy. He does pathetic damage until grabbing Barret, wherein our Lightning spam pisses him off to the point where he crushes the poor dude’s

rib cage. RIP brother. You were a real one. Everyone else is at full health, and the body pops a laser that takes them well below half, so I get barret up, dump a Megalixir, I know, I’m a monster, then we remove the arms and slowly chip down the body with S-Mines. The body is slow, so he dishes out one more laser, then we take him out. Bosses don’t have a lot of health, but they are starting to hit like a brick wall. We pass the submarine pilot test with swimming colours, then I head to the Sunk

en Gelnika, I’m allowed to say that, my people are aquatic. This is a sunken submarine filled with some of the toughest enemies in the game, and some pretty decent loot. I tried to take one of the foes and he hurt me real bad, so I’ll just flee and try to grab all the shit. There’s a boss battle with Reno and Rude here but they’re never worth mentioning. Damn shame too, because they’re great characters, like if I were a Japanese woman, right, I’d definitely crack Rude’s skulls in my quest for go

ld... I grab everything, and on the way out get pincer attacked and nearly die. Crazy stuff. Grabbing the ancient key at the bottom of the sea, we head on over to Rocket Town, for some Huge Materia. I didn’t remember the game having this many throw-away encounters with a handful of Shinra grunts, but our memory often times protects us from the less savoury parts of our beloved experiences. At the top of the rocket, is our boy, Rude. Didn’t I just crack your head open 20 leagues under the sea? Ho

w are you here already? He casts some sort of barrier on himself but it doesn’t stop my onslaught of S-Mines, and it’s not long before he goes down. This game's got some sporadic-ass boss placement. Anyway, then we do the rocket shit, get the huge materia, Cid has a couple of mid-life crises, we stock up on S-Mines, and head to Cosmo Canyon. Speaking to Bugenhagen and his big, fat rumper dumper, there’s some back-and-forthing in the City of the Ancients, until we awaken a weapon, who slowly trud

ges toward Midgar. It’s boss time again. The harsh realisation of him taking zero damage from S-mines was eased by the discovery that he takes 1200 from Bolt items, and with only 30,000 health, he goes down pretty quick. There’s a hard stomp, and some fire moves, but we’ve got high health and a good elemental resistance spread. It was such a non-issue that I didn’t even heal. This feller pays out 25,000 gil, which is more than enough to re-electrify my inventory. Once he’s taken care of, we’re b

ack to Midgar for some reason. Moving on through, we come up against the first of many bosses: It's the Turks… again… but Rude and Reno have brought a friend this time, and she ain’t fucking around. I have a go, but as the boys have Lightning and Fire absorption, this battle will absolutely tank my inventory, and I might need it later, so I take a death, reload, and skip the battle. Yeah, you can just choose not to fight them, so that’s what we’ll do. Now, this is where I get a very important ma

teria, but I’m on the fence about using it. W-Item, allows a character to use two items in a single turn and also allows you to duplicate usable items. It is a materia command, but it’s still the item command, so it’s technically not breaking the rules, but it also technically is. I think for this run specifically, I’m going to use it. I never said glitches were off the cards, in fact, I wish I could glitch past the opening two battles, but W-Item isn’t giving me a strict advantage outside of re

moving a little bit of time from combat, as items’ damage output is pathetically low. Anything you can do with W-item, you can do without it, it’d just take a little bit longer. And no more evident is this, than during the following boss: Proud Clod, who has two pieces. One with 20,000 health, and the other with 60,000. Wew boy. This guy does no damage, but he takes an incredibly long time due to his stacked health. Receiving about 500 damage from our items of the elemental persuasion, and aroun

d 1,000 from an S-Mine, we slowly, and painstakingly whittle him down. A few uneventful maps away is Hojo, the next boss. This dude has three phases; the first has 13,000 health and summons two buds to assist, but they take almost 1000 damage from elemental items, so they go down quickly, having achieved nothing. Very pathetic. Once his health crosses the threshold, we get second form, Hellectic Hojo... That's apparently a word. As I’ve got items that hit everyone, and they do around 700-800 dam

age, I keep blasting away with the elemental, until he drops. This one wasn’t too bad, and next up is Lifeform-Hojo. This bloke loves his status ailments and still takes about 800 from a Veil or a Bolt, but cops a whopping 1200 from an S-mine, and only has 30,000 health. As Cloud and Barret have Ribbons, and Cid getting silenced isn’t exactly an issue, he’s as easy as the rest of the forms. After a short but sweet battle, Lifeform Hojo becomes Deathform Hojo. Now we’re on the equivalent of Disc

3, we can tackle Sephiroth whenever we want… But there’s some shit I want to do first. Primarily, like reload a save before I infiltrated Midgar, and farm a particular enemy for an item they drop… 8-inch cannons are the heaviest non-elemental damaging item you can get, and two enemies during this raid happen to drop them. The goal is to get two, and dupe them infinitely with W-item, and walk through the rest of the game. Cromwells in sector 8, have a 4% drop rate, but this fat bastard here has a

guaranteed payout, so I grab two, dupe them, then steamroll Sephiroth with my arsenal of 8-inch canons and that’s game. What do you want? I did it, go watch another video. You think the ending sucked? Well the video isn’t called “Can you beat final fantasy 7 with items only ALSO THE ENDING IS REALLY GOOD!" Huh... Well... Guess that’s the game punishing me for half-arsing it. Another quality Square-Enix product. All right, I kinda felt like W-Item was cheating anyway. So here’s how this is going

down, I got a save in Sector 8 during the Disc 2 raid, that’s right, I’m gonna do it a third time. I will not use W-item, I will not dupe items, I will beat this game, and I’ll be happy. Now, we’re back at the point of no return. I dump all my materia, stock up on 99 of all the things I can buy from stores, that’s S-mines, fire veils, swift bolts, molotovs, and grenades… You know, just in case. I head on over to Cosmo Canyon, give everyone two HP Up Materia, for maximum survivability. Next is t

he Wutai grind to restock my X-potions, which will be my main source of healing now that I can’t dupe megalixirs, and finally, but most importantly, we create a database. I handsomely created a spreadsheet of alll the items I can get from enemy drops, and a few actually feature a 100% drop rate, so let’s start by amassing some extra fire power. There’s a monster called a Tonadu, with a 100% chance to drop a Bird Wing, a wind-based item attack (attack item). They also have a 100% chance to spawn

on the beach near the Temple of the Ancients, so let’s go there and kill… Oh, I don’t know, 99 or so. After an hour or two fighting the same guy, I need a bit of a shake-up. I’d love to go smoke some Ma(r)lboros in Gaea’s Cliff for M-Tentacles, but you can’t return to it. This goes double for Gigases, who drop Earth Mallets, which casts Quake3. The Malboros have a small chance of appearing in North Crater, and there's nowhere else to find the Gigases... ever. So two powerful damaging items are o

ff the cards. I could farm Dragons at Mount Nibelheim for Fire Fangs, which cast Fire2. Unfortunately, they’re not super powerful, and dragon spawns are low, so I’ll skip them for now. Another enemy are Garudas on the Da-Chao Mountain for Bolt Plumes and Ice Crystals, items that cast Bolt2 and Ice3 respectively, but after about an hour of fighting, I only got 3 Ice Crystals and Bolt Plumes suck. Damn. Let’s go to the Gold Saucer. I have a polite chat with a man outside selling GP, then I hit up

the Battle Square to try and amass some BP, which is currency to buy Battle Square prizes. I want three Speed Pluseses for my boys, it increases their dexterity, which I’m told increases physical dodge rate and the ATB bar speed. I also want three enemy lures, to get into battles faster, speed up the grind a bit, you know? This will cost me about 13000 BP. After quite a while, I end up with 16,000 and bought three Pre-Emptive materia as well, which increase the rate of striking the foe before th

ey get a chance to move. This will not only save on healing, but also significantly speed up the grind. I’m feeling pretty good at this point, so let’s change that. Let’s go kill Ultima Weapon. I chase him around the world for way too long, popping off S-Mines where I can, doing 1200 damage, but he Ultima-ly goes down, nothing super eventful. I didn’t want to just book it to Sephiroth, so let’s have a very quick check to see if it’s possible to take Ruby or Emerald. I tried Ruby first, and there

’s no way. S-Mines do shy of 100 damage, he seems to absorb all of my elements, without W-item, it is impossible. With W-item, it would likely take real-time days of duping, healing, and item spam, but it is technically possible. It’d be stupidly difficult, but theoretically, it's doable. Emerald is the last guy outside of Sephiroth, so let’s see his card. He is weak to Lightning, so despite S-mines doing just shy of 1,000, the Swift Bolts do around 1,500 damage. A 99 stack means we’re clocking

in around 150,000, but this dude has the most health in the game, at a clean one million, so we’re a fair bit away, however, our green friend is also weak to Gravity. An item called TS Bombs would do 9,999, the maximum amount of damage. These drop from an enemy I have access to at a rate of 14%, and pumping through a 99 stack is just shy of one million. This means Emerald is completely viable, but the timer is what kills it. Even if I undertook the hours of grinding to acquire the bombs, 20 minu

tes isn’t enough to get a full stack of damaging items off. Not to mention his annoying shoulder eye laser things, and the fact that I’d also have to heal, and likely grind for Elixirs too, as X-Potions alone aren’t gonna cut it. If I had an hour, I think I could take this limey bastard down, but as it stands, 20 minutes is simply not long enough. To remove the timer, I’d need to use the Morph command, which breaks the rules, so Emerald gets to live… For now. I mean, also this is another one of

those things where I'm like... "Awwww, I'm gonna do it late-" I'm not gonna do it later, I can't beat him, sorry. Aaaah that's all right, we’ve still got a couple story bosses ahead of us still so let’s head to the bottom of North(ern) Crater, finish it properly this time. The cavern itself is uneventful, so let’s talk bosses: JENOVA- CLITORIS, has two folds along the labia that’re extra sensitive to almost every attack, so we hang on to our S-Mines and use this boss as a throwaway to smash some

Swift Bolts and Fire Veils. Though, I do get bored at one point and start using S-mines because I am a short-term thinker. She can barely do damage, and we do around 750 with an elemental attack, or 1400 with an S-mine, so she doesn’t last that long. With a whopping 60,000 health, and a countdown timer that scares the fuck out of me, we clear her at the last second with a bunch of powerful items. Next up is Bizarro Sephiroth and he’s also not too bad. He’s got a few bits, but they’ve got the ti

niest health pools, and a couple items would be their undoing. The body itself, the main enemy, has a decent 40,000, but it dies rather fast too, as most items do around 1,000. His damage output isn’t great, as both Cloud and Cid have Mystiles equipped, which have huge dodge rates for both magic and physical, but when this bizarre boy does connect, he does bugger-all. There is one move that leaves everybody with a single point of health though, and this scares the shit out of me because I’m extr

emely confident and hate my world view being challenged. A cheeky megalixir fixes that right up, and we keep grinding away. Eventually he drops, damn bro look at that lean. Finally, we arrive at the big boy, SAFER SEPHIROTH… That name’s a lie. It’s lying to me. There's nothing safe about this guy. He starts with a cast of Wall, but that doesn’t affect items as far as I can tell, and I’ve got a fat stack of S-mines with his name on them… the S is for Sephiroth. They do about 1300 damage a pop. He

blasts a Shadowflare which generally does in the high 7,000s but we dodge it. Following this, a melee attack it used, hitting a whopping 3,000. Pale Horse barely hits 1,000, but he’s ascended, and I can tell Super Nova is coming. So I heal up and head out to check my chicken nuggies. This attack does most of my health, so I megalixir up and use a lunar curtain but not before Cid get stoned... Cheeky bastard. The Sephiroth-Mine spam continues, with the big bad using Deen, which is just Quake3 wi

th a shittier name. Cid’s getting low but I want to keep the damage spam up, so I play it real risky. He ascends, I use another megalixir just to make sure everyone’s golden. This attack should give me time to cook another batch of chicken nuggies. Cid gets turned into a frog because I only have two ribbons, so I cue up a megalixir and head for the toilet as another Super Nova is prepared. ...Gotta clear out those chicken nuggies. He casts Wall again as we spam items, pops another Shadow Flare o

n Cloud doing 6,000 damage. That’s nothing! He rises again, fuckin really? The pale horse is off on the trot, and I tried to edge out a win before Super Nova popped but idk what his health is or how far in I am, and I do not get it. Here we go again… A third batch of chicken nuggies. I'm gonna gain like 100kg by the end of this video. A surprise technique out of nowhere, Heartless Angel, which takes two of my boys to 1 health, then he drops a DeSpell like bro just die. This is pathetic, it’s lik

e when someone has clearly lost with no hope for redemption but they keep playing to fuckin' grief and waste time. Just let me win before my Switch crashes again. He ascends to the sky, and I’m so low on S-Mines… Oh he's dead! He's dead, we did it, boys! And then Sephiroth gets sucked into his own arsehole and dies forever. aaaaa wait, wait, I forgot about the stand off. Oh shit, I can't use i- I can't use items. This is the end of the run! Right at the end of the game? Ah! Oooooooo they got me,

it’s scripted. Get fucked Sephiroth you loser. Well, that’s a game, fellers. Other than the two forced encounters at the start, and I guess, technically the final scripted battle with Sephiroth, that is Final Fantasy VII completed with items only. What a run, what a game. It’s always one of those titles I don’t remember being great, but then I replay it and despite everything, I still feel the cosmos flow through me. I become one with the lifestream, you know, but in a ‘being alive’ kind of way

. As always, thank you for watching, and god damn look at those cans. All right, now that all the losers have left, let's beat Emerald with items only fr fr this time, no cap. I give everyone a W-Item, which I definitely didn’t cheat in, and start chucking T/S Bombs like my life depends on it. Making amazing progress, this all goes to shit once his shoulder-eyes come out, and I have to take multiple turns to drop them. They have 25,000 health each, and while active, emerald counters me upon rece

iving damage. They’re weak to fire, so a fire veil does around 2,300, and it takes around 11 to fully dispatch them. Emerald also takes about 800 per veil, so in addition to the cascades of 10,000 damage, he also cops about 8,000 from that. As we’re being bombarded with counters and water lasers, we spam Megalixirs and try to outlast him, but the best I could do was about half his health. If there were a better way to drop the eyes, it might be possible. I'll be back for this green bastard one d

ay.