Final Fantasy VII Rebirth features an evolved form of the combat system as it appeared in Final Fantasy VII Remake. As an action RPG, Rebirth’s combat is both tactical and demanding of reaction time. There are a number of moving parts going on all at once when the blades and spells start flying.

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Synergy Skills and Abilities, which see two characters team up to execute a maneuver together, can be a tricky subject for newcomers. Mastery of these techniques is required to do your best in this game, as they will allow you to gain greater control over a fight while dealing even more damage.

This guide will go over Synergy Skills and Abilities, how they work, and which ones you should grab.

How Synergy Skills and Abilities fit into Rebirth’s combat

As it was in FF7 Remake, Rebirth’s core combat loop requires you to fill up ATB gauges with more simple attacks bound to the square button. When an ATB bar is filled, you can choose a more powerful Ability or Spell.

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Synergy Skills and Abilities sit on either side of this loop. You use Synergy Skills to boost your ATB gauge even faster, which you then use to activate standard Abilities, which charge up your Synergy meter needed to activate Synergy Abilities. It’s a little confusing at first, so let’s break down some basic combat vocabulary here to make sense of it.

With these terms in mind, the overall flow of your actions in combat should look like this:

This pattern is in addition to Limit Breaks and Summons, which are outside of the scope of this Synergy Guide.

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You’ll unlock Synergy Skills and Abilities from Rebirth’s Folio system, which we detail here. Let’s look at both Synergy skills and abilities more closely.

Synergy Skills accelerate the ATB gauge

While basic attacks will fill your gauge, Synergy Skills not only do it faster (and for two characters at once), but they typically deal more damage (and improve your relationship with whoever you used the Skill with). The trade off, however, is that Synergy Skills often take a little more time or strategy to use than just mashing square to attack.

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When holding R1 during battle, your character will assume a defensive stance and can execute offensive Synergy Skills with square and triangle, or defensive Synergy Skills with X or circle (you can swap these in the game’s settings).

Unlike ATB Abilities, Spells, Synergy Abilities, and Items, you can’t select a Synergy Skill during the game’s tactical mode, where time slows down to allow you to make strategic decisions. That said, you can always press the touchpad while holding R1 to stop time and review what Synergy Skills you have and what they do. Synergy Skills are real-time maneuvers that you’ll need to execute with proper timing, and you can easily miss or be interrupted if you’re not careful.

Some essential Synergy Skills to grab from the Folio are as follows:

Remember that you can refund all of your Skill Points in the Folio and start from scratch if you want to try out new Synergy Skills but haven’t earned enough points yet. There are a ton of combinations across the characters, all of which will work differently depending on your playstyle, so it’s best to try out a number of different Skills to see which ones you prefer.

Synergy Abilities drastically change the fight

You’ll know if an ATB Ability fills up the Synergy Gauge by the icon just under the command menu in the lower-left-hand corner of the screen. It looks like a vertical rectangle.

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Many Synergy Abilities deal a decent amount of damage, but all of them affect combat in a couple of different ways. Synergy Abilities with two yellow arrows pointing up will raise your Limit Level, allowing characters to use higher-level Limit Breaks (which you can unlock in the Folio). Synergy Abilities with the orange hourglass icon will prolong an enemy’s Staggered condition (and therefore should only be used when an enemy is Staggered). A purple infinity symbol on a Synergy Ability means you’ll have unlimited MP to spend for a while. A blue horizontal bar with three divisions will give two characters three ATB gauges to execute more ATB Abilities, Spells, and Items.

As you can see, some Synergy Abilities will make more sense to use at certain times than others. For example, say you’re fighting a monster with a weakness to lightning magic. In such a scenario, it makes more sense to use an unlimited MP Synergy Ability for any characters who have lightning materia equipped. If your characters are close to filling their Limit Break gauge, it’ll make sense to use a Synergy Ability to raise your Limit Level so you can deal greater damage once filled.

Once you activate a Synergy Ability, I also recommend switching to whichever character is not active in the Ability. Whenever you use a Synergy Ability, the camera will zoom in on the selected characters to show off their attack. While this is cool the first time, it’s best to switch to a free character to keep executing Attacks to fill up their ATB gauge, which will in turn bring them closer to being able to use a Synergy Ability.

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Rebirth’s combat is all about sustaining the momentum, pushing your characters toward greater attacks while weakening your opponent through Pressuring and Staggering.

We recommend grabbing the following Synergy Abilities:

As with Synergy Skills, the more Synergy Abilities you have, the better. And you can always respec in the Folio for free if you’re not using what you’ve unlocked.