Living In a Materia World Wrote:Melded to gear, materia is said to imbue the bearer with enhanced powers, ranging from herculean strength to imperviousness to torrid flames. It takes not a scholar to see that the advent of materia will change our way of life—even how we wage war.
Thank the Twelve that Zantetsuken is on top of their shit, cuz I am not. This page was originally released on the 1.0 lodestone attached to the Materia Patch. However, was wiped out during the end of 1.0 Lodestone service recently.
Anyways, from the 1.0 article Materia: A Matter of Mystery we learn some of the lore of the origins of Materia and how it's crafted. As for it's use in the IC universe, I will defer to the Level 20 Disciple of the Hand class quests, as they deal with materia enhancing crafted items. Also, the Zodiac quest has some lore on the topic.
I'll spoiler the actual lore text below:
During the Level 20 quests of most Disciple of the Hand storylines, you will be tasked with creating an item and affixing materia to it. Each guildmaster has a slightly different way of phrasing their explanation of materia but essentially all say about the same thing. I'll use Severian's explanation from "The Arcanist's Tome" as a reference since it's one of the better worded in my opinion, surprisingly.
Severian Wrote:Must I explain materia to you? <Sigh> Very well. Materia is the crystallized essence of a well-used piece of gear - the physical manifestation of an item's history with its wielder, if you will. It is not well understood exactly how these crystals work, but they have the effect of improving the properties of the objects to which they are attached.
(04-27-2015, 08:39 AM)Steel Wolf Wrote: So with that in mind--the materia offering those enhancements to a weapon....would it be canonically feasible that a weapon would have so much materia infused in it that it becomes a source of wieldable magical power?
Or is there some sort of limit on how much materia a weapon can have before it just....turns into an aether bomb? I imagine the amount of slots is essentially this limitation in "gameified" form.
This is essentially the Zodiac Weapon storyline. In order to exponentially increase your Relic's strength from Animus to Novus, Jalzahn theorizes it would require a large amount of materia - too large to feasibly attach to one weapon without it exploding. So you employ the use of a sphere scroll, which houses the broken down aether of the materia in it, and then is simply attached to the weapon to transfer the power into the weapon.
Later on, when transforming your Relic into the Zodiac weapon itself, it requires breaking down your Relic weapon into a Dark Materia - a super materia housing the souls of all that you've done with your relic before. And then taking that materia and melding it into your new Zodiac weapon.
There's some back and forth between Gerolt and Jalzahn over the purpose and properties required and such and I'll link that here:
His Dark Materia Dialogue
The quest later goes on with Mutamix's help to say the chance of success is incredibly low and that the materia... and your weapon... have a very high likelihood of kerploding like they did in 1.0.
![[Image: phDJRq2.png]](http://i.imgur.com/phDJRq2.png)
And finally, when crafting your Zodiac Zeta, the attempt is to awake the Weapon's own sentient spirit. So could arguably say it's the weapon that houses an intense amount of power with all the crap you put into it, including intelligence.
Yarr! Hope that all helps! ^^
