Quote Originally Posted by Karellen View Post
Such planing is absent in FFVII because you can equip so much powerful materia at once, with a lot of said powerful materia being practically handed to you as the game progresses.
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.

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.

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.