Final Fantasy 7 Remake – How to Increase Weapon Proficiency, How to Learn Weapon Abilities

Each weapon in Final Fantasy VII Remake comes with a unique weapon ability that can be learned permanently, and to beat the hardest encounters in the game you’ll need as many as you can master. Thankfully, raising your weapon proficiency and learning these weapon skills isn’t all that difficult to do.

Use the ability in combat to master it in Final Fantasy VII Remake.

Yep, it’s really that simple. At a glance you may think using the weapon in general is how you increase its proficiency, but that’s not quite the case. Say you wanna learn Focused Strike from Tifa’s Sonic Strikers, but you never use it: well, then you won’t permanently learn the ability.

Instead, use the damn ability. Whether you are controlling the character or issuing a command, using the ability will increase proficiency. It doesn’t take too many uses to max out a weapon’s proficiency meter and to learn the weapon ability, so this won’t be a slog. I learned Barret’s Lifesaver ability after roughly four uses, but I was able to do so because of the proficiency bonus.

To speed things up you can try for the Proficiency bonus, which will add a surge of progress towards mastering the ability. Some of these are simpler than others (such as the landing an attack after a stance change with Cloud), but be sure to read these carefully. Take the Light Machine Gun for Barret for example: after using Lifesaver you will need to then heal an ally once during its activation.

You can check your progress at any time from either the Materia & Equipment menu, or the Upgrade Weapons menu. Select the weapon and you’ll see the ability, it’s proficiency progress, and bonus on the right. Once you see the proficiency bar is at 100% and has a yellow check mark you have learned that ability. You can now swap back to whatever weapon you prefer and will keep the ability.