A question on Yuffie in Final fantasy 7
This question interested me so I decided to do a run through and avoid picking up any materia. Any that was forced upon me I just "trashed". To my surprise there are no safeguards on materias, I thought I was stuck when Priscilla gave me Shiva but I was able to trash summons too.
So I played through the game without any materia up to the point you get the Tiny Bronco (the earliest you can go to Wutai).
Note: I am playing PS4 version so I have the cheats for unlimited HP/MP and 3x speed, so this was much easier than it would be on the original PS1 version.
Answer
The scene where Yuffie steals your materia is exactly the same, everyone acts like materia was stolen even though I had none at all. Dialog is all the same as if you had had some to steal.
Additional Information
After completing the Yuffie side quest she gives back your materia. This is the MP Absorb materia that you pick up during the "hunt for Yuffie". So technically the dialog for giving back materia makes sense, as there is always at least one material for her to return.
Strange Glitch
During the quest to get my materia back (of lack there of), I was able to somehow get 2x MP Plus materia out of thin air!
I want to start by saying I dont know if this glitch is specific to the Yuffie sidequest, or if its doable elsewhere too. I also dont know if it would happen if I had materia going into the quest or not... I've never found this before. However, it happened during this experiment so I will include it as part of this answer.
Here is what happened to get the glitch to happen...
- My team before Yuffie stole materia was Cloud, Vincent and Yuffie (in that order)
- Barret joined after Yuffie ran off and I replaced him with Cid using PHS
- I played side quest until I got MP Absorb from chest which Yuffie immediately steals
- This prompted me to check my materia list. Empty. So I went to "Exchange" to check if anyone had materia equiped
- Nobody did, but to my surprise the cursor was defaulted to an invisible character. You couldnt see any slots or materia but you could navigate the cursor to all 16 slots (8 weapon and 8 armor). They all said "MP Plus"
- I tried pressing triangle to remove the materia this worked on the first 2 weapon slots only. The rest just did nothing
- This gave me 2 MP Plus materia in my inventory that I didnt have before
My best guess at how this glitch was possible...
- I have config set to cursor = memory
- Before Yuffie left my party I had checked her on the exchange. So cursor was still on her slot when I went back in to exchange later
- The game possibly defaults to MP Plus when it doesnt know what to do in this situation
- I expect the reason why I could only remove 2 materia was because Yuffie was previous equiped with a 2-slot weapon and a 0-slot armor, and the game thought that invisible person was Yuffie so her weapon/armor logic was applied
Overall that was a lot longer answer than I was expecting from this experiment but a very interesting outcome none the less.