Curaga is a potent restorative Magic Materia in CRISIS CORE -FINAL FANTASY VII- REUNION. While it’s out-classed by Full-Cure in terms of raw healing power, Curaga is nonetheless the preferred healing option for most players due to Curaga being compatible with Dualcast, less MP hungry, and less temperamental during Materia Fusion. When Aerial Drain won’t suffice for healing - Curaga is the go-to fallback, and this page will provide details about how to acquire Curaga early.
Where to Get Curaga¶
Unlike many other troublesome magic materia covered here, Curaga is fairly simple to obtain, being the top tier Materia in a list that includes Cure, Cura and Regen. All you have to do is pair one of these spells (preferably mastered) with Libra, Fire, Blizzard or Lightning (also ideally mastered). And you’ll climb the ranks from Cure to Cura to Regen and finally to Curaga. Below are some ways you can upgrade to Curaga:
Yeah… you’ve got options.
You can’t buy Curaga from any shops, but you can purchase Cure from the Research Dept. QMC and Cura from The Happy Turtle. If you’re willing to grind you can simply buy Cure, master it, and fuse it with Libra (ideally mastered) to get Cura or Regen, then repeat the process of mastering the new restorative materia and another Libra. This will get you Curaga before you really have any need of it, and it’s too MP intensive for early-game use… but hey, you can get it early if you want it.
Alternatively you can find Curaga in chests in Missions 1-3-6, 6-6-5, 8-4-6, 9-4-5, 9-5-6 or 9-6-1, and you’ll earn it as a reward for completing Mission 5-2-1. You can also get Curaga from the following enemies:
- Green Grass (drop, rare) on Missions 2-3-2, 6-4-2 or 7-4-3
- Razor Weed (steal, rare) on Missions 8-3-5, 8-5-3 or 8-5-4
- Angra Mainyu (steal, common and rare) on Mission 7-6-5
- Wutai Imperial Guard (drop, rare) on Missions 7-6-1 and 7-6-3
As far as adding stats goes, Curaga is a fairly strong materia, and won’t easily change into something else. Buying cheap Materia like Cure, Fire, Blizzard, Thunder or Libra to use as a sacrificial secondary bit of materia so you can use fusion materials will suffice.
What Makes Curaga Good¶
Restorative materia is in a bit of an odd spot in Crisis Core. Aerial Drain should suffice for most of your healing needs, with the added benefit that it helps you avoid damage and also damages enemies. At 255 STR Aerial Drain should deal around 10,000~ damage - and hence, provide the same amount of healing - to most enemies. Combine that with the fact that most enemies will struggle to deal 5-digit damage to you if you have Barrier, MBarrier and 255 VIT/SPR and you won’t have much need for extensive healing. That being the case, why waste time and MP healing when you can just use Aerial Drain to do so much more?
…well, glad you asked! Sometimes enemies with very high VIT, Barrier (or similar buffs) will be highly resistant or outright immune to physical damage, and in these scenarios you’ll need to turn to alternative means of healing, as Aerial Drain won’t deal great damage to such foes, and hence, won’t heal you much. In addition, HP% attacks are obnoxiously common with late game enemies, and these don’t care what your VIT/SPR are or if you have Barrier or MBarrier. The best defense against these attacks is to not get hit, but nobody’s perfect, and it’s a good idea to have a fallback plan for when some nasty knocks you down to 1 HP.
At 255 MAG, a mastered Curaga will heal you for around 27,000 HP. With Dualcast, you’ll heal twice in succession, which is over half the maximum HP you can reach if you break your HP limit (99,999 HP). That should suffice for most emergency heal situations, but why not just use Full Cure? Simply put, Full Cure doesn’t like to fuse with other materia. At least, not while remaining Full Cure. If you fuse Full Cure with any other materia, it’ll turn into something else, which means you can’t stack stats on Full Cure Materia. With MBarrier, Full Cure will heal for a solid 49,999 (Dualcast will double this), but you’ll lose whatever stat boost you could have had if you stuck to Curaga. Curaga will only heal about half as much as Full Cure, but being able to put HP +999% or STR/VIT/MAG/SPR +100 on Curaga more than makes up for the lesser healing, especially since Curaga’s a secondary source of healing in most situations.
No Comments