Choose Your Weapons Wisely
Hopefully you’ve already gotten all available weapons for each character in Final Fantasy 7 Remake on your first run; if not, it might be a good idea to revisit some chapters on Normal difficulty first to grab them.
Try to master every ability for every weapon on each character, and then you can start to focus on which weapon you’ll want to carry with you for the Hard Mode run.
At this point in time, you should have gotten enough SP to max out some of your weapon upgrades, so do that when you can.
While the Buster Sword is cool and all, having a total of only four Materia slots by the time it’s fully upgraded is a huge downside. Its final upgrades aren’t that impressive either, and you can definitely do better with Cloud’s other weapons.
The Twin Stinger, for instance, is our current go-to weapon for Hard Mode. It’s balanced for both physical and magical attacks, just like the Buster Sword, even if its stats are a little lower. However, the Twin Stinger also boasts decent MP regeneration rates for Cloud –which is absolutely crucial for Hard Mode– as well as MP stat increases. This weapon is definitely more magic-focused than the Buster Sword, but that’s fine, because magic is essential for Pressuring enemies anyway.
The Twin Stinger also comes with the Counterstance ability, which is extremely useful for mitigating damage when facing a large group of enemies. By using Counterstance, Cloud enters a parrying stance for a few seconds, and will immediately retaliate when an enemy tries to attack him.
For the other characters, the Sonic Strikers seem to be a good choice for Tifa because of the Materia slots available and its decent speed stats, while Big Bertha is a nice fit for Barret with both Materia slots and HP buffs. Weapons with extended buff durations are also great, as you’ll likely be putting Haste and Barrier on your characters during most battles.
