re: Do you think you could have figured out FF7's golden chocobo without a guide?

I had an unofficial guide that didn’t tell you about the underwater materia. It did however tell you what you needed to do to beat emerald weapon under the time limit so that’s what I did. This guide thought the items you get for beating emerald and ruby weapon were just sort of trophies. It didn’t mention you could trade them for the master materias and gold chocobo.

I used that guide to do everything it said to do and by the end of grinding for the bred gold chocobo and levels to take on ruby and emerald, I was well over 100 hours. I remember the timer on my save file was stuck at 99:59:59