Oooooooh Final Fantasy VII. One of the great loves of my life ^__^
Yeah the orbs are most likely the materia orbs from Final Fantasy VII, unless your hubby has fantasic futuristic vision (or one of the currently PSMs), because it just so happens that Final Fantasy XII also uses magical orbs.
Anyhoo, back to FFVII because that's what I know and love.
I never knew that materia had to be touched to be activated, so I'm not sure about that part.
For convenience people equip materia into spherical slots in their weapons, armor, and accessories. However I think in a RP situation materia do not need to be equipped to be used, as was the case with Aeris's white materia (holy?). During the game though only equipped materia can be used. If you forgot to equip your best materia before fighting Sephiroth, too bad.
The more slots a weapon has, the better. Also note that some slots are linked, and thus when a materia and it's complementary materia is equipped you'll get a new effect (more on this later).
Ok, on the the purdy colors!
Green - Probably the most common (?) materia, and the first one that you get. Your run of the mill elemental materia are green: fire, ice, thunder, etc etc. Equipping green materia and leveling up your character will in turn level up the materia. For example the spell Fire can be upgraded to Fire 2 then Fire 3. The exception is Ultima, an element-less, but extremely powerful green materia. And I guess maybe Cure and Heal as well, unless you count those as Holy elemental.
Red - The summon materia. Once the red summon materia is equipped, the monster is summon is=n a similar fashion as casting a green materia spell. However, contrary to typical mytho-summons, these summons only appear and do their attack, and then they're gone. They do not stay with you. The strongest summon in FFVII was Knights of the Round Table, where 13 knights are summoned and appear one by one to attack the enemy. Leveling up a red materia will not increase the power of the summon, but simply increase the number of times you can use the summon per battle (if your MP allows for it XD)
Yellow - Skill materia, or action materia. These materia enable the user to use a new skill. A good example is the "Steal" materia, which allows the person to, well, steal. It can leveled up to "Mug," so that you can deal damage while stealing.
A curious exception is the Enemy skill materia. Yellow enemy skill materia are preprogrammed to learn certain attacks of certain enemies. In order to learn the attack you must
1) Have the materia equipped.
2) The character with the yellow materia equipped must receive and survive and enemy skill they want to learn.
Enemy skill materia are preprogrammed in the sense that you can't learn every single enemy skill out there. Only a select few have been chosen for you to learn. A common mistake and reason to kick yourself later is forgetting to equip the often neglected enemy skill materia during a difficult boss fight in order to make room for your Cure 3 materia, then learning later that you could've learned the boss's ultimate attack.
Purple - Special materia, as I like to call them. An example is the Chocobo call materia. (I think that's what it was called). Equipping this materia increases the chance of a chocobo appearing during a random battle. Then I think there was also a increase luck purple materia.
Blue - Support materia. Remember the linked slots I mentioned earlier? Good. So let's say you managed to level yourself a nifty Fire 3 materia. Put that in a slot that is connected to another slot. Now in that other slot you can put a blue support materia, the most important and commonly used being "All."
[Fire 3]-[All]
So now they're linked. Now you can cast Fire 3 on all the enemy targets at once!
An interesting thing about blue materia is that like summon materia they effect is not enhanced when you level them up.
With all materia when you max out it's level, it "reproduces" and you have a brank new same materia with 0 exp that you get to level again.
The nifty thing about that is the "All" materia is extremely easy to level and "clone," if you will. And so when you get your new All materia and you used that, since it's the same effect as your mastered All materia, and sell your mastered one! An effective way to make money.
Black - There is only one black materia in the world. It enables the user to cast Meteor (unknown level?) that is capable of detroying the world.
White - There is also only one white materia in the world. I assume it allows the casting of Holy, although the method is widely debated. It can counter the black materia.
Can you tell that I loved this game? ^____^
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