Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth: How to Improve Your Fighting Skills

Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth has a pretty interesting combat system. It presents some unique mechanics such as the stagger system, pressuring, and synergy skills and abilities. Combine these mechanics with all the unique playable characters, you have yourself a pretty deep combat system.

In the beginning, though, it’s easy to find yourself overwhelmed with all the options at your disposal. We’ll be giving you some useful tips to improve your skill and deal with all the fights you need to win.

How to Improve Your Fighting Skills

You can improve your fighting skills in a few different ways. When considering all the different options you have in combat and all the ways in which they synergize together, there’s always more to learn. To get you started on progressing your combat ability, we have 5 useful tips!

Aerial Combat

The first tip we have for you is to focus as much as you can on using aerial moves and doing aerial combos. You can tell if a character’s ability is usable in the air by looking for the symbol highlighted below. 

Almost all the characters have their own way of getting airborne, and you should take the time to experiment. For example, by pressing and holding the attack button Square after dodging with Cloud, you will be teleported to an enemy. This is a good way to get up to airborne enemies and do some good damage.

Doing aerial attacks over ground ones yields you certain advantages. For one, you’ll be much safer in the air. There are likely to be fewer enemies attacking you, so you can focus on attacking more than being defensive and having to dodge.

When you do have to dodge, you’ll find that the basic dodge is a lot faster in the air than it is on the ground. This makes it easier to avoid damage, meaning you can focus on attacking more. 

Stagger

Stagger is a state that enemies can enter, which allows you to do bonus damage to them.

You can be done with longer fights with stronger foes a lot quicker if you just focus on staggering them first, and then attacking with everything you’ve got. 

To apply Stagger, we need to learn about the Pressure system. All enemies have a bar under their health bar, which shows how much Pressure they have built. When this bar fills up, enemies will enter their Stagger state. 

To fill this Pressure meter, we need to hit the weaknesses of enemies. You can figure these out through either experimentation or using the Access Materia.

Once you know their weakness, use it against them to build pressure meter and stagger them. This is by far the most efficient and effective way to deal with enemies. 

Unique Abilities

Each character comes with their own Unique Ability which can be used by pressing Triangle. These are fun to use and very useful, but there’s a bonus feature of them that a lot of players don’t know about.

By using your unique ability against a staggered enemy, you can fill your ATB gauge a lot faster than regular attacks. 

In addition to that bonus, Unique abilities will work better on Staggered enemies anyways. It’s a win-win either way, so be sure to make use of your Unique Abilities.

Some players tend to save up their Unique Abilities for emergency situations, but we want to avoid those from happening in the first place. 

Precision Guard

Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth has its own version of Parrying, called Precision Guard. To use it, just press R1 to block right before an enemy’s attack collides with your character. The timing can be finicky, but the rewards are great. 

For one, all damage you might have taken from that attack is nullified. The game says “Immune” above your character, showing you that you took no damage and that the Precision Guard was timed correctly. 

It also increases the Stagger bar on enemies, meaning they’ll Stagger sooner allowing you to hit them for extra bonus damage. If you’re finding the timing too difficult, you can make use of the Precision Defense Focus Materia. 

This does a few things to make Precision Blocking more useful and convenient. For one, the timing window for a successful Precision Block is extended.

Any damage you do after staggering through a Precision Block is also boosted. All in all, making use of Precision Guards will greatly boost your effectiveness in combat. 

Synergy Skills

The last tip we have is to make use of all of your available Synergy Skills. Depending on who you’re playing as and who’s in your party, the game allows you to use a few different Synergy Skills.

All of these do different things, and their applications vary depending on the situation. 

A lot of these are extremely useful and provide bonuses that can affect your combat ability by a lot. For instance, Cloud can’t parry ranged attacks, but the Counterfire skill fixes that shortcoming immediately.

Playing around with them and seeing what fits your particular situation and needs is key to mastering the combat in Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth.

That’s it for our combat tips on how you can increase your fighting skills. Eventually, with some practice, these will all become second nature to you and you’ll be a beast in the combat arenas. We’re happy to have helped you in that journey!

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