Once you finally reach the Sector 7 Slums, you’ll run into Chadley, the slightly creepy 15-year-old research trainee – who looks about 12. Chadley’s a research intern for Shinra, but he quickly outs himself as a double agent, promising to give Cloud and co. more powerful materia if Cloud helps gather information from the field.
But getting materia can take a while. Fortunately there’s a neat trick to ensure you don’t have to grind any more than you need to, forcing Chadley to come good on his promise of bringing Shinra down.
The first task Chadley gives you is an Assist materia. Scanning two enemy types will grant access to the Auto-Cure materia, which you can buy from Chadley. Auto-cure is an excellent materia for everyone else in your party, as it’ll only work on characters that aren’t being directly controlled by the player.
After that, you’ve got three more tasks: casting fire, ice or lightning magic on vulnerable enemies, using unique abilities on staggered enemies and charging the ATB gauge 10 times, and staggering 15 types of enemies. Progress on all the tasks is completely concurrently, so if you stagger an enemy and then hit them with the element they’re vulnerable to, you’ll be killing two birds with one stone.
You can pick up the lightning materia from the item shop when you go debt collecting with Tifa. It’s worth grabbing then, only because you’ll do some work for the community watch before running into Chadley, and because it’ll save you having to double-back.
Completing the elemental vulnerabilities challenge will unlock the Wind materia, which means you can start levelling that up straight away after it’s purchased. It’ll take a bit longer to unlock the ATB Boost and First Strike materias. But you can pre-unlock other challenges before Chadley gives them to you.
You’ll run into Chadley again as you venture throughout the slums – how is this kid allowed to roam between the sectors unsupervised? Anyway, he’ll offer a string of challenges around assessing enemies, exploiting elemental weaknesses, defeating multiple trash mobs with a single attack, and defeating three unique monster types.
The second time you run into Chadley, he’ll let you unlock Shiva’s Materia through a VR simulation, which is relatively easy to do with Aerith’s support (but watch out for Shiva’s ultimate attack, which will do 1000-ish damage to your party depending on your magical defence). When you hit Don Corneo’s town further on, Chadley will appear again, offering another VR simulation with a giant chocobo. You probably won’t be busting the big chocobo out all that often, but there’s stat bonuses for having it equipped, and having more summons is always a positive.
Still, the key to getting all of Chadley’s materia as fast as possible is just knowing what he wants before he asks for it. Progress for all battle intel is tracked, even if you haven’t been given the task. So as long as you make sure you knock items off this list, you’ll get all Chadley has to offer as soon as possible.
- Assess enemy types (2, 10, 20)
- Hit enemies vulnerable to fire, ice or lightning once each
- Use unique abilities on staggered enemies, and charge the ATB gauge 10 times
- Stagger enemies (15, 40 times)
- Increase stagger damage bonus to 200%
- Defeat 2 or more enemies with a single attack
- Defeat unique monster types (3)
- Use Refocus twice in battles
You won’t get the Refocus materia until a few chapters in, so completing that is a little harder. But staggering enemies well in advance is just good principle, since exploiting every enemy’s weakness is part and parcel to defeating the toughest fights without several restarts.
Increasing the stagger damage bonus is a little trickier, since the game doesn’t really direct feedback on how to do this. But the answer is by using Tifa: her True Strike ability increases the damage enemies take while staggered, so the trick is really just to make sure she has enough ATB gauge stored up, use another party member to stagger whoever you’re fighting, and then have Tifa burn both her ATB charges on True Strike. You could even double up by equipping Tifa with the ATB Boost materia, so you can get even more charges in a short space of time.
The rest is pretty straightforward and largely a matter of numbers. Keep popping Assess every time you go into a new fight, don’t forget to block with Cloud in Punisher Mode for extra stagger metre, and don’t overlook Barrett’s Focused Shot and Cloud’s Focused Thrust, both of which are great bread and butter tools all around.
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