You must master and have in your possession at least one of every type of materia in the game. There are 83 total unique materia.

• The materia must either be in your inventory or equipped on a character (it doesn't matter if they are in your active party or not). You will not get the achievement if you do not have one of every materia type mastered and in your possession at the same time.
  
• To be clear about this, if you master a materia and sell it before getting the achievement, you will need to master that particular materia type again.

There are four materia in the game that you do not need to master. You simply need to have them in your inventory to get the achievement. These materia are:

• Master Magic
  
• Master Command
  
• Master Summon
  
• Underwater

You must master at least one Enemy Skill materia.

• There are four Enemy Skill materia in the game, but you only need to master one of them for the achievement.
  
• All 24 enemy skills must exist on one Enemy Skill materia for it to be mastered (i.e. you can't have 23 skills on one Enemy Skill materia and 1 skill on a different Enemy Skill materia.)
  
• Note that there are missable enemy skills that will keep you from getting the Materia Overlord achievement. Refer to "The Enemy Skill Materia Details" section of this guide for detailed information on this topic.

It is recommended that you do not fail any of the Huge Materia quests. Receiving all four Huge Materia allows you to obtain the Bahamut ZERO materia.

• If you failed one or more the Huge Materia missions, don't lose hope. There is a possibility that you will be able to dig up Bahamut ZERO in the Bone Village on disk 3.
  
• If you failed the North Corel Huge Materia quest and didn't make it to at least the second train, you will lose your chance to obtain the Ultima materia. You will have the opportunity to buy this materia if you fail the quest, but only if you at least made it to the second train. This topic is covered in detail in the "Missable Materia List & Locations" section of the guide.

You are allowed to have a total of 200 materia in your inventory at one time. Make sure that you do not reach this cap if you can help it. There are reports that if you reach this cap, random materia from your inventory are destroyed. If this happens to a one-of-a-kind materia, you are going to be stuck reloading a previous save or restarting the game.

You can master your materia in any order.

Know that there are numerous forums filled with people that claim that they should have received the achievement, but didn't. These individuals claim that the game only checks for the achievement after an enemy skill is learned. Since these individuals apparently mastered the Enemy Skill materia before all other materia were mastered, they claim that they missed the achievement because they were unable to force the game to check for the achievement after mastering their remaining materia.

After writing this guide, I have had several individuals leave forum posts indicating that they received the achievement and that they did not have to master the Enemy Skill materia last. I wanted to include this information in the guide to dispel this myth, just in case a different forum has cast doubt in your mind as to the order that materia must be mastered. Understand that there is great opportunity to miss this achievement without knowing the game intimately or following a guide and I believe that people claiming that they did not receive the achievement because they did not master the Enemy Skill materia last simply missed something that they are not aware of. Again, to be absolutely clear, you can master your materia in any order and this has been proven many times. I hope this helps to put your mind at ease concerning this debated topic =)

Most people share that they receive the achievement immediately after mastering their final materia. However, there are reports that occasionally after all materia are mastered, one final random battle had to be fought and won for the achievement to pop. Keep that in mind as you approach mastering your final materia.

Below is a list of all of the unique materia in the game. These are divided up by materia type and sorted in alphabetical order. There are 83 unique materia in total.

You must have at least one of each of these materia in your inventory and they must be at the "Mastered" level for the achievement. Note that you cannot master the four materia with red font (Master Magic, Master Summon, Master Command, and Underwater). Simply having these four materia in your inventory will suffice.

You will come across most of these materia naturally throughout your playthrough. However, there are a few that you need to keep your eye out for as they are located in sections of the game that you cannot return to. I have outlined these harder to find materia in the next section of this guide.

Note: You may notice that other guides will indicate that there are only 81 or 82 unique materia. I believe these guides are not considering a couple of the confusing "counter materia" to actually be separate, different materia. There are three counter materia named: Counter Attack, Magic Counter and Counter. After I received the Materia Overlord achievement, I meticulously went through my inventory and I assure you, there are 83 unique materia and if you use the table below as a checklist, you will get the achievement.

There is some confusion as to which materia is actually permanently missable and you will find a lot of conflicting information if you review different guides on this topic. A lot of guides out there will list materia as permanently missable, but sometimes they can actually be dug up in the Bone Village, backtracked to, or even purchased in stores at certain points in the game. Some guides also fail to identify materia that you only have one shot to obtain.

To ensure that you don't miss anything permanently, I have outlined in the table below the materia that is 'missable' in the sense that you cannot return to the area that they are first found. I have also included materia in the list that seem to give Materia Overlord aspirants a difficult time even though they can be obtained by backtracking. Rest assured, if you keep an eye out for the materia on this list and pick them up when you are in these areas, you will receive the achievement.

I included the area that these materia are located in to help you to know when to start looking. As you play through the game, simply reference this list and make sure that you pick up any materia in the area. If you are allowed to save, I would suggest that you save just before entering these areas, or just after entering them. That will give you a known-good game state to revert to if you miss one of these materia.

Note: You may need to click the image of the table below, then open the link that is displayed. This will dispaly the table in its native resolution and it will be easier to read.

To master the enemy skill materia, you will need to learn all 24 enemy skills on the same materia. While there are four Enemy Skill materia in the game, you only have to master one of them.

The primary thing to be aware of with mastering the Enemy Skill materia is that two of the enemy skills are missable:

• The Trine enemy skill is only obtainable from three enemies in the game and once you progress to a certain point, you cannot return to any of these enemies again. To clarify, if you do not obtain this enemy skill at one of these three points, you will not be able to master your Enemy Skill materia. Also, if you're a perfectionist and want to master all four Enemy Skill materia (remember, you only need to master one for the achievement), you will need to wait to complete the Pagoda side quest in Wutai until after you have all four Enemy Skill materia in your possession (make sure you do this before progressing the story to disk 3). Godo is your last chance to obtain this enemy skill. Here are the enemies that will cast Trine and the locations where they are encountered:
  
  
  • Materia Keeper, found at Mt. Nibel
    
  • Stilva, found at Gaea's Cliff
    
  • Godo, found at the end of the Pagoda side quest in Wutai
  
  
• The Pandora's Box enemy skill is only obtainable from a Dragon Zombie in the Northern Crater on disk 3. The Dragon Zombie enemy will only use this skill one time. To be clear: If a Dragon Zombie has used this skill on you, even if you run into a different Dragon Zombie later in the game, they will never use the skill on you again. You only get one shot! Make sure you learn this enemy skill the first time you encounter a Dragon Zombie and reload your game if you miss it. I would suggest that you create at least one separate save file before entering the Northern Crater on disk 3, just to give you a known-good file to restore from in case you miss this.

Below I have included a list of all 24 enemy skills sorted in alphabetical order including which enemies you can learn them from, as well as which area these enemies can be found. Remember that you can obtain 22 of the 24 enemy skills at any point without having to worry about them. Trine and Pandora's Box are special exceptions and can be completely missed (they are in red font in the table below for this reason). Make sure you pick up these two enemy skills when they are available or they will be lost forever and you will have no way to obtain the Materia Overlord achievement.


The Enemy Skill Materia automatically scrolls through the enemy skills list, which can be annoying if you are unsure of which skills you have and which skills you are missing. Below are a couple of screenshots of a fully populated Enemy Skill Materia that you may find useful:

There are quite a few guides out there on places to farm AP. However, the best AP farming location in the game is not available until you reach disk 3. On disk 3 in the Northern Crater, there is a swamp area that allows you to have random encounters with an enemy called Magic Pot.



The Magic Pot enemy is immune to all damage until you throw an elixir at them. Once you hit them with an elixir, they are easy to kill as they only have around 4,000 hit points. They are worth a whopping 1,000 AP each. If you picked up any double or triple AP growth weapons and armor, you can master your materia very quickly in this area.

One thing to be aware of with the Magic Pot enemies: They will steal your stuff if you don’t kill them quickly. This includes your items, weapons (including ultimate weapons), armor, and even materia. Don’t fight them if you don’t have elixirs or you might lose your items permanently.

Another issue with the Magic Pot enemy is that you can’t buy elixirs anywhere in the game. There is a bug that you can exploit where you can get an endless supply of elixirs in a cave at the Great Glacier and you can also use the well documented W-Item glitch to duplicate elixirs. If you’re like me and you want to keep your game cheat/exploit free, you can also steal elixirs from an enemy called Master Tonberry which happens to be in the same area as the Magic Pots. The Master Tonberry also appears in a few different areas of the Northern Crater, allowing you to farm them for elixers without worrying about running into Magic Pots while you are low on elixirs.

The Master Tonberry can be a dangerous enemy depending on your level and equipment due an ability that they use called Everyone’s Grudge, which deals unavoidable non-elemental damage equal to the number of kills that a character has amassed throughout the game x10. An easy way to improve your ability to take these guys out is to equip the Final Attack Materia paired with the Revive Materia. If you have mastered these materia and have several copies for your active party characters, this will allow your party to auto-resurrect if they are killed. Final Attack paired with the Phoenix Materia works well too.

Just keep your elixirs stocked up and take out Magic Pots. You can master all of your materia in this area within a few hours if you have double and triple AP grown equipment and a good stockpile of elixirs. It helps if you can hang on to your save crystal and place it somewhere nearby so that you have the ability to save every so often as well.

This is also a great place to knock out the Master of Gil achievement if you haven't done so already. If you have double and triple AP growth equipment, it doesn't take long to master an All Materia in this location. You can sell an All Materia for 1,400,000 gil. If for some reason have zero gil at this point in the game, you would need to master 72 All Materia to have enough for the achievement.

For those unfamiliar with the game, I wanted to put together a section in this guide that outlines some of the more time-consuming things that need to be done to obtain certain materia. These materia will require that you fight special optional battles or participate in mini-games that have no impact on the main story. The purpose of this section is just to give you a heads up on what is involved to obtain some of these more difficult materia in an effort to help you decide if this is an achievement that you want to pursue.

You're going to need a gold chocobo to be able to reach this materia. It is located in a cave in the upper-right corner of the world map. You have two options to obtain a gold chocobo:

• You can breed one. There are a lot of guides out there on chocobo breeding that you can follow. This "mini-game" can be time-consuming and will involve racing chocobos at the Gold Saucer. There are a few guides out there that allow you to exploit glitches and avoid racing altogether to obtain a gold chocobo, but you're going to have to race chocobos to obtain at least two materia anyway, which I will explain shortly.
  
  
• You can defeat Ruby Weapon. Ruby Weapon is an optional boss, and one of the two most powerful bosses in the game. You're in for a tough fight, but there are a lot of guides and strategies out there than can help make this fight much easier. In particular, if you already have the Knights of Round materia (i.e. you bred a gold chocobo), equipping Knights of Round paired with HP Absorb and utilizing Mime is extremely powerful as you can spam Knights of Round repeatedly and you will be fully healed after each attack. Check out some of the strategies out there and find the one that works for you.

Once you have a gold chocobo, you will have the ability to access three additional powerful materia. However, these materia can also be accessed with lower level chocobo as well, which I have outlined below:


You will need to win races at the Gold Saucer to obtain the following list of materia. They show up randomly as race rewards, particularly at the higher racing brackets (A and S), so just keep racing until you see one, then make sure you win. This "mini-game" can be really tedious, so keep at it.

• Enemy Away
  
• Sneak Attack
  
• Magic Counter (you don't have to race for Magic Counter if you don't want to as it is also available in the Northern Crater on disk 3)

You will need to purchase the materia listed below with GP. You can play various mini-games at the Gold Saucer to win GP, but chocobo racing is one of the best ways, especially if you can get to the S-rank races. As stated earlier, you have to race chocobos anyway for the Enemy Away and Sneak Attack materia, so you might as well collect GP from racing until you obtain these two materia.

• EXP Plus
  
• Gil Plus

You are going to have to spend some time in Battle Square to get the remaining materia at the Gold Saucer. When you win a battle in Battle Square, you win BP. You then spend BP on prizes. The BP prices for prizes change as the story progresses and they are cheapest at the end of disk 2 and on disk 3, so if you're trying to maximize your time, it's best to wait until late disk 2 or disk 3 to complete Battle Square. Keep in mind that if you leave Battle Square, you lose all of your BP, so work on these items when you have time to be in Battle Square without leaving (i.e. saving your game) for awhile.

• W-Summon
  
• Enemy Lure
  
• Pre-Emptive
  
• Speed Plus
  
• Final Attack - Note that you cannot fight the series of battles that awards you this materia until you have purchased the W-Summon materia and Cloud's final limit break (Omnislash) from the Battle Square in addition to obtaining Cloud's ultimate weapon. Once you have done all of this, you can fight in a "special battle". Win the special battle for the Final Attack Materia.

A good strategy to make the Battle Square fights go quickly is to get Cloud's Meteorain limit break (until you can upgrade to Omnislash), then fight random world battles until his limit gauge is full. Equip a Ribbon accessory, some good armor (Zeidrich or Mystile if you have them) and the Mime materia, then enter round 1 in Battle Square. Use your Meteorain limit break, then use the Mime command repeatedly. Make sure that you don't use any other ability other than Mime or you will lose your ability to limit break. After round 8, your limit gauge will still be full and you can repeat this process to farm BP. A pretty cheap tactic, but it works :)

This one isn't so bad. You will have to use the Morph materia on a Ghost Ship enemy. They are found in the underwater reactor or in Battle Square. Once you successfully morph a Ghost Ship, you will receive an item called "Guide Book". Take this item to the man in the rightmost house in Kalm (he's upstairs) and he will give you the Underwater Materia. While this materia is fairly easy to get, I mention this materia in this section because it's helpful for obtaining the next three materia...

These can be obtained in one of two ways.

• Option 1: If you obtained at least 3 of the 4 Huge Materia from the Huge Materia quests, you have the option to master every type of command materia, magic materia, and summon materia, then return to Bugenhagen in Cosmo Canyon. Interact with the Huge Materia of the appropriate color (yellow for command, green for magic, red for summon) and all of your mastered materia will merge into a Master Materia. Note that all of your mastered materia will be destroyed in the process. Guess what? That means that you have to master them all again for the Materia Overlord achievement. For this reason, I would strongly suggest going with the second option for obtaining the Master Materia.
  
  
• Option 2: Obtaining the Underwater Materia as outlined above will help make this easier. If you are able to defeat Emerald Weapon, your reward will be the Earth Harp. You can then turn the Earth Harp in to the Kalm Traveler to receive the Master Command, Master Magic and Master Summon Materia. Understand that Emerald Weapon is considered to be one of the two most powerful enemies in the game. There are plenty of strategies around the internet for beating him, including some really cheap tricks that allow it to be performed without superb gear or materia, but know that you're in for a challenge if you try to defeat him legitimately.

By the way, the tactic that I outlined earlier in the guide for Ruby Weapon works on Emerald Weapon too. I was able to defeat both of them with that strategy at level 65.

Please rate this guide if you find it useful. I will do what I can to improve the guide with your feedback and suggestions. Thanks for reading!