Final Fantasy VII: Overrated?

[Karellen]

Actually, you cannot just spam your characters with materia like crazy. For instance, green (Magic) and red (Summon) materias come with trade offs and bonuses on your stats. The more of these materia you equip on a character, the lower it's HP and strenght goes. So you need to balance things out and think about the way you distribute your materia across your characters. There is also the way you pair materias with one another and the weapon you put them on to think about. Weapons can have a single, double, triple or no growth at all. The materia system involves a lot of planning and strategy and allows a lot of possibilities and experimentation.

I found the stat bonuses to be mostly insignificant. If they had been a 10 or 20% increase/decrease each then it may have had an effect but as it stood I didn't feel dissuaded with loading any of my characters up with any sort of magic. Similarly I only ever used the double/tripple EXP weapons while they were the most powerful as well, since there is no real need to level anything up quickly due to aforementioned lack of challenge within the game. The only materia I remember spending a significant amount of cash on was HP Plus.

As far as how one obtains materia, they are handed to you very much in the same way that magic was handed to you in earilier FFs. Just as you could purchase many spells on shops and others you found in other places, so too it is in VII with materias. The most powerful materias are not handed to you and involve doing sidequests that are not part of the main game.

I bought the vast minority of my materia. Most of it was quite literally lying on the ground. The REALLY powerful ones like KOTOR and Mime require lengthy sidequests, yes, but there are plenty of relatively broken materia like the ones I mentioned such that you don't have to touch those to obliterate everything beyond the game's uber bosses.

And with spells and other abilities of materias, you obtain them as you level up, very much as you obtain magic from Espers in VI or learn new abilities of a specific job in V as your characters win experience.

I didn't comment on that at all.