Final Fantasy 7: How to Defeat The Airbuster

Final Fantasy 7 contains a boss at the end of chapter 7. This guide will help players defeat the Airbuster. The Final Fantasy 7 remake brings players back into the world of Midgar after over 20 years. The original Final Fantasy 7 released back in 1997 on the original PlayStation and was praised for its innovative storytelling and took the first big step in gaming to tell big stories within games. The story follows a terrorist group called Avalanche, whose main objective is to stop Shinra, a corporation harvesting the energy from the planet for power, from stealing the entire planet’s life source. To do this, they break into the Mako reactors and planet bombs from within. Cloud joins the group as a mercenary-for-hire and quickly gets deeply involved in their mission. The Final Fantasy 7 remake only tells a small part of the original story, as the rest are planned for release later on. Whereas in the original game, the Midgar section took about 10 hours to get through. In the remake, this is stretched to 30 hours, the remake was tasked with providing more context and content to the city of Midgar. On one of Avalanche’s missions, they are quickly stopped by the Airbuster after planting a bomb. This guide will help players defeat it in the Final Fantasy 7 remake.

Throughout the infiltration mission within the Mako Reactor, the Avalanche group has the option to customize how the Airbuster will function during their final fight. When exploring the reactor, players will come across terminals that require key cards. Bringing over the key cards (which are typically a couple of feet away from the terminals themselves) and using them will provide the player with different options. Players can select to reduce the Airbuster’s speed, damage, or attack. There are about 4 terminals between the start and the ending of the mission. These are the three options players have to change within the Airbuster.

• AI Programming Core: These affect the Air Buster’s tactical awareness and reduces the frequency with which it fires its finger beams, an attack that stuns enemies if discarded.
• Big Bomber Shells: This affects the number of times it will use its Big Bomber move during the battle. Discarding these makes it less frequent.
• M Units: The number of units the Air Buster has at its disposal. This does not directly affect the Airbuster’s tactical performance, collecting the discarded items can give your party a much-needed boost in the fight. These can be collected later in the mission for special items if discarded.

Removing M Units will also provide the group with helpful items. Regardless of whatever the player decides to remove, this guide will help them defeat the Airbuster at the end of the chapter.

How To Beat The Airbuster in Final Fantasy 7

Before jumping into the fight, the player will want to upgrade Barret’s Light Machine Gun weapon. Maxing out the proficiency of the weapon will unlock its ability, Lifesaver. Lifesaver means all the damage that comes along from Cloud and Tifa will immediately be transferred to Barret. As Barret is the team’s tank, having him maintain the majority of the damage is the best bet while Tifa and Cloud focus on dishing out damage. Make sure to use Thunder Materia as well as this is the Airbuster’s weakness, making it easier for it to enter stagger. Also, using an Elemental Materia makes it much easier to defeat. Link this with Thunder and equip it to Barret. This makes it so Barret shoots electric bullets.

In the first phase, avoid being shot by the Airbusters laser at all costs. Use Tifa and Cloud in close range to quickly get through this phase. Make sure to constantly use Barrets Lifesaver ability. The phase will end when the player is treated to a beautifully animated scene of the team fighting against the Airbuster. Once the second phase begins, focus fire on one of the Airbusters arms. Shattering its arm will get it one step closer to staggering. Using Thunder is a good way to remove its arm.

Make sure to maintain health by using Potions or the Cure Materia. It becomes fairly easy to ignore the character’s health in a fast-paced situation like this. The third phase of this fight places all of our heroes on one side while the Airbuster slowly combust while flying out of reach. This is Barrets moment to shine. Switch to him and keep focusing fire until he reaches close enough to the stage. Switch back to Tifa and Cloud and take out the Airbusters last bit of health to defeat it. Defeating the boss will kickstart the next major chapter of the Final Fantasy 7 remake. Cloud will become separated from the rest of the group and awaken within a flower bed inside of a church.

The Final Fantasy 7 remake contains plenty of remade bosses. The game even goes an extra step and makes normal enemies from the original game, into full fledge bosses. For example, the Hell House in the remake was originally just a normal enemy that players could find in a random encounter. The game has several moments like these where they greatly expand on the world of Midgar. The story is also given some new threads as well. In the remake, the characters of Jessie, Wedge, and Biggs are all much more important. While they all suffer the same fate as in the original, chapters are dedicated to building their characters up and making sure they leave a lasting impression on the player and Cloud. The game even introduces new characters like Roach and Andrea, two characters that help give Midgar its identity. Roach only appears for a small section of the game, but he’s part of possibly the best chapter in the game. Chapter 4 brings Cloud and group to the upper plates of Midgar where they plan to visit Jessie’s family and steal a helpful ID card from her bed-ridden father. The original laid down the ground-work of original storytelling in video games but the remake takes what the original provided and builds on its solid foundation to create a new experience.

Final Fantasy 7 is available now on PS4.

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Sky Flores
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Sky Flores is a writer and game player based out of New York City. His hobbies consist of creating content on YouTube and streaming video games on Twitch. His online alias is @SkywardWing.

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