Summary

• FF7 Remake Part 3 can improve Materia loadout options to save time and hassle.
• Swapping Materia is a tedious process in FF7 Rebirth, hindering player experience.
• FF7 Rebirth's menus are in need of larger changes, as some layout choices make little sense.

Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth has set a high bar for FF7 Remake Part 3 to live up to, but it also leaves some room for improvement. There's a lot at play in FF7 Rebirth, from complex story machinations to a wide array of combat systems, and it's no surprise that not everything is balanced or honed as well as it could be. While FF7 Remake Part 3 will have unique challenges of its own, improving on returning elements that need the work will also be critical to making it a perfect send-off.

One of the most interesting parts of FF7 Rebirth is the Materia system, which keeps the classic options for magic and abilities from the original FF7 alive while adding some of its own twists. Equipping Materia can power up characters in significant and varied ways, from unlocking powerful summons to increasing the rates for drops. It can also be a hassle, however, and changing loadouts or swapping Materia between party doesn't need to be as much of a drag as it is.

FF7 Remake Part 3 Can Improve Materia Loadouts

Swapping Materia Is A Pain In FF7 Rebirth

By the end of FF7 Rebirth, it's possible to equip any given character with a substantial lineup of Materia, but the game doesn't offer any systems to save or transfer these loadouts. Although this can seem like a minor inconvenience at most early in the game, the frustration that the missing feature can cause increases across FF7 Rebirth's runtime. It can prove especially annoying when dealing with later side content, as some of the optional fights found just before embarking on FF7 Rebirth's final act are particularly challenging and demand the right setups.

Micromanaging Materia isn't something that's going to interest every player, but it's hard to ignore Materia swapping altogether. A difficult arena gauntlet in FF7 Rebirth might have enemies that are only weak to one particular element, or defensive options could be necessary to survive some boss attacks that AI-controlled party won't consistently avoid. Certain Materia options are incredibly specialized, like ones that swap HP with MP or Attack with Magic Attack.

Compounding the issue is how frequently moving characters in and out of the active party can require materia adjustment. Short of a lot of optimization and grinding, no party is going to have all the relevant maxed out materia for all seven party in FF7 Rebirth, a number that's going to be even higher in FF7 Remake Part 3. Moving around a bunch of materia just to bring a different character into the party for a while isn't exactly motivating, and it's an unfortunate downside to the fun of shaking it up.

Options for powerful summon Materia are even more limited, and the gap in power between the best and worst summons is significant.

Other FF7 Games Did Materia Loadouts Better

The Original FF7 & Crisis Core Offered More Options

The thing that's particularly conspicuous about the lack of Materia loadout features in FF7 Rebirth is that older games already set a better precedent in this regard. The original game didn't have the option to save loadouts, but it did offer the option to transfer all slots between characters in one go. This alone would go far in FF7 Remake Part 3, making pulling characters in and out of the party easier in a basic sense, even if a little tweaking could be necessary for the perfect setup.

Crisis Core: FF7 focuses on a single character rather than a party, but it gives the protagonist Zack the option to set up different loadouts and switch between them as necessary. Although Zack has fewer Materia slots, making swapping loadouts more necessary at times, there's no good reason why this system couldn't have carried over. FF7 Rebirth puts a similar concept to use when it comes to the card game Queen's Blood, so it's particularly hard to justify the lack of one for equipment that's fundamentally necessary for combat.

FF7 Remake Part 3 Needs To Fix FF7 Rebirth's Menus

FF7 Rebirth Menus Don't Always Make Much Sense

The larger problem surrounding the annoyance of wrangling Materia is how much of a pain navigating menus can be in FF7 Rebirth, an area that feels significantly less intuitive and streamlined than it should be. There are a lot of options and information to wrangle in the game, so there's no world where the menu feels minimal and seamless, but some decisions made in FF7 Rebirth seem fundamentally illogical. Swapping Materia, for example, is done through the equipment menu rather than the Materia one, and it can take hours upon hours of playing to get used to this weird choice.

This sense of strange design extends to more than just Materia, with a similar example lying in party swapping being categorized under the combat menu rather than the party one. The very first option in the overall menu is "Item Transmuter," something that most players are likely to use significantly less often than party and equipment settings. It doesn't make much sense for minor additions that weren't even in the original FF7 or FF7 Remake to take precedence over core gameplay concepts, but with FF7 Rebirth's approach, some key menus end up over halfway down a long list.

It's easy to be hopeful about changes to these problems in FF7 Remake Part 3, as swapping around menu functions and adding a few utility features should be a lot easier to implement than most potential gameplay overhauls. At the same time, it's hard to understand why unintuitive concepts made it this far at all, and it feels like something that could have easily been honed during playtesting.

Whatever the reason for FF7 Rebirth's frustrating choices surrounding Materia and equipment, they're problems that simply have to be dealt with for now, and a bit of extra time spent in clunky menus isn't likely to ruin anyone's overall experience with the game. When Final Fantasy 7 Remake Part 3 rolls around, however, failing to improve things could start to feel a lot less forgivable.