What pieces of equipment are safe to sell

final-fantasy-7

One thing that annoys me about Final Fantasy 7 (and 6) is that it's very difficult to sell items. Well, I mean, selling them is pretty easy, but the selling screens give you all sorts of numbers, and none of them are about the stats of what you're selling.

Chrono Trigger's sell items screen       Final Fantasy 7's sell items screen

One of those sell screens does not suck. Guess which!

The only point in holding onto old equipment I can come up with is "unequipping" people's weapon and defense slots so you can always have the best gear available for your current party, and very early game equipment will do the job nicely. People joining — and leaving — your party also can likely throw you curveballs, but other than that…

So, how can I determine what pieces of inventory are safe to sell?

Best Answer

I've collected information about all pieces of armor in the game and fed it to a little bit of Python 3 which gives me this chart, where the arrows mean " → is better in every possible way than →". This pushes better items at the top and worse items at the bottom.

                   (better armor)

enter image description here

                                                  (worse armor)

Click for bigger, searchable version

Footnotes: (1) Tifa, Aeris, and Yuffie only (2) Cloud, Barret, Red XIII, Cait Sith, Vincent, and Cid only.

How to read this chart:

  • If X → Y, it means that X is better in every possible way than Y.
  • If X → Y → Z, it means that:
    • X is better in every possible way than Y
    • Y is better in every possible way than Z and
    • X is also better in every possible way than Z (this is necessary to make the chart readable, or you get this).
  • If an item is not in the diagram at all, then it's neither better or worse than any other item, so... just don't sell it.
  • In all versions of Final Fantasy 7 prior to the 2012 PC re-releases, the magic defense stat on all armor is purely cosmetic: it only appears to have an effect on the equip screen. If you are playing the Steam or Square Enix store versions of FF7, ignore the grey dashed arrows.

In other words, if you can make a path following the arrows from an armor to another, then that other armor is worse than the first in every possible way. So, for example, the Dragon Armlet and the Gold Armlet are both better than the Shinra Beta, but the Dragon Armlet has elemental damage halving whereas the Gold Armlet has better stats in general, so neither is perfectly better than the other. When you acquire the Diamond Bangle, therefore, you can safely sell the Silver Armlet but not the Dragon Armlet.

What about weapons? The results are somewhat less interesting because all weapons can only be used by one character, and some characters have different guns dealing damage of different elements, so this splits the diagram quite considerably. Here they are, nonetheless, this time from left (best) to right (worst):

(better weapons)                     (worse weapons)

enter image description here

Click for bigger, searchable version

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