Final Fantasy 7 Remake guide: Crab Warden boss fight

In Final Fantasy 7 Remake, you’ll rejoin with Avalanche to take out another Mako reactor, after successfully beating the Scorpion Sentinel in Chapter 1. On your way to the next reactor, you’ll run into another mechanical menace: the Crab Warden. By this time, you’ll have three party members and a better grasp on the game’s combat, making the Crab Warden one of the most fun fights in the game.

In this guide, we’ll show you how to defeat the Crab Warden in Final Fantasy 7 Remake.

Crab Warden’s Battle Intel and weaknesses

Image: Square Enix via Polygon

Like all robot enemies, the Crab Warden is weak to lightning Materia. If you can break the different parts of its body, you’ll raise its Stagger gauge very quickly, revealing a weak point hidden in its mouth.

How to beat the Crab Warden

Tifa stumbles into the Crab Warden on the way to the second mako reactor. The boss engages the party immediately, and the fight begins. If you Assess the boss and know what to do, the Crab Warden shouldn’t give you much trouble.

Attack its appendages with lightning Materia

Image: Square Enix via Polygon

The Crab Warden is weak to lightning Materia. Ideally, you should have multiple lightning Materia equipped on different characters at this point — we suggest Cloud and Barret, with healing Materia on Tifa. Until you run out of MP, you should attack the Crab Warden with normal attacks to build up your ATB gauge, and spam lightning attacks on its various legs and weapon parts. If you run out of MP, use an Ether to restore it.

This spell quickly rips through the individual parts’ health bars. When you destroy two parts, the boss gets staggered. Switch to the generator in its mouth, and go back to pummeling the legs and arms with lightning.

After you destroy every piece, the boss should be almost dead.

Use Barret to destroy additional enemies

After the first phase, the Crab Warden summons a small army of flying robots. These bots can be a pain to deal with as Cloud or Tifa, so swap to Barret and take them out using his gun. These aren’t tough to kill, so you should still save your ATB gauge for casting lightning on the boss.

Summon Ifrit after your first Stagger

Image: Square Enix via Polygon

After you destroy two of the Crab Warden’s legs and start attacking the generator, the Summon gauge appears. You should only have Ifrit at the moment, so summon it in as soon as you can. While Ifrit uses fire instead of lightning damage, it’ll still do some work on the Crab Warden’s health bar. Get Ifrit in the fight as soon as you can for some serious damage.