Final Fantasy VII

Materia

Once acquired, "Enemy Skill" should always be equipped on someone as many of the best abilities in the game are enemy skills. Combine it with Manipulate or confusion to learn beneficial enemy skills that normally don't target your party, such as Big Guard. Many are easily missable, so always keep an eye out if you don't want to use a guide.

The level of an "All" materia dictates the amount of times one can multi-target the magic linked to it in each battle. You can also use it outside of combat with Restore to heal your whole party by pressing right while targeting a party member. Another good reason to level All is the fact that at max level it sells for a whopping 1.4 million gil!

Don't stress Materia Growth Rate on gear until late game. Just use what is most useful to you at the time as you will eventually get gear that will level your materia faster.

Offensive items are fantastic for a long time. Stock up on these and go to town tossing grenades at dudes.

The "Fury" and "Sadness" status effects, available from using Hypers and Tranquilizers respectively, are very useful. Fury reduces your hit rate by 30% but also doubles your Limit Gauge accumulation, while Sadness halves your Limit Gauge accumulation but also reduces all damage taken by 30%.

In a similar vein, characters in the back row take 50% less damage from most physical attacks, but also deal 50% less damage with their own normal attacks unless wielding a Long Range weapon such as Barret's arm guns. Keeping Long Range characters in the back row gives extra survivability with no downside.

Mid-game bosses will start to use elemental/status attacks. Tossing Added Effect/Elemental to your armor with Materia of that element/status linked to it can help a lot.

Most characters have 7 Limit Breaks which are divided into four tiers. Learning the second Limit Break in a tier requires using the first Limit Break of that tier a certain amount of times - for example, Cloud has to use "Braver" eight times to learn "Cross-Slash". Reaching a new tier requires killing a certain amount of enemies with that character - for example, Cloud has to kill 120 enemies to reach his tier 2 Limit Breaks. The final (tier 4) Limit Break requires finding and using a specific item once all of the character's other Limits have been learned.

There's a major bug associated with the W-Item command available late in the game which allows unlimited duplication of any item that's usable in combat. Should you want to take advantage of it, look up "W-Item glitch" or similar for the exact method.

Also, Magic Defense is glitched and does nothing whatsoever if you're playing a version older than the 2012 PC re-release.

A quick summary of chocobo breeding: Great + Green = Blue or Green. Blue + Green = Black. Black + Amazing = Gold.