Final Fantasy 7 Remake – How to Heal Outside Combat, What are Blue Benches

Much like the original title, Final Fantasy VII Remake doesn’t automatically top off or heal your party’s health and MP between battles. You’ll need to be resourceful and attentive if you don’t want to find yourself running on fumes.

Items and magic can be used to heal at any time outside of combat, while blue benches and inns will fully restore your team.

You may need a full ATB bar to use an item or fire off a heal in combat, yet you are free to do either at any time between battles. You can do so by clicking X to bring up the Command Menu, and can cycle between characters with the triggers.

Simply select what you want to do, pick your target, and voila! you’ll heal them (this is equally useful for purging negative statuses such as Poison). If you want to cast multiple cures or use more than one potion you can do so by holding down L1 to enable Multicast (which makes the process substantially less tedious).

One thing to note is you can’t do this from within the Main Menu. In classic Final Fantasy titles you would just pop open the inventory, select the potion you wanted to use, then the character(s) that needed a top off. Oddly enough, that doesn’t work in Final Fantasy VII Remake, nor does using magic from the Magic menu. If you wanna heal between fights you need to do so in the field.

Additionally, you’ll find blue benches next to vending machines scattered about dangerous areas. The vending machines are a great way to top up on critical potions, ethers and phoenix downs, but the bench is easily the most important item here. Selecting it with Triangle will allow you to rest and restore all HP and MP, much like an inn.

Speaking of Inns: these are rarer than benches, but work much the same way. Cloud’s apartment in the Sector 7 slums offers a free bed to rest your weary head, but you’ll soon notice beds and inns are more for healing between major story beats. Most of your resting will be done on benches, pure and simple.