Pronounces death on any one opponent or ally
Description
Roulette is an enemy skill in Final Fantasy VII that instantly kills a target chosen randomly from both the player and the enemy parties. The player can learn it on the Enemy Skill Materia from Death Dealer. The skill does not work on bosses and is not useful in practice, but can be collected for completion's sake.
Obtained[]
If obtaining all enemy skills the earliest they are available, Roulette is the second-to-last Enemy Skill the player learns, obtained from the Death Dealer in the Northern Cave in the right descend area. It targets a random target in battle, and if it hits the Death Dealer itself, it will die.
To have an easier time learning it, the player can cast the Enemy Skill Death Force on the character with the Enemy Skill Materia to protect them against Instant Death to enable multiple casts of Roulette in one battle. Casting it on the party and on the Death Dealer itself may also be helpful. The player can also stack all Enemy Skill Materia to one character, and kill the other two as to have fewer targets for the skill to land on.
Death Dealer only uses Roulette as a counter when it has less than 25% HP remaining, and only casts it once per battle. The player can Manipulate the Death Dealer and use Roulette every turn until it hits the character with the Enemy Skill Materia to hasten the process.
Use[]
Roulette kills a random target in battle. It is never preferable to use this skill. It is obtained so late into the game, in the final dungeon, that the player will no longer be fighting against large groups of enemies where the enemy party would have a greater chance of being hit by it than the player, and they likely already have many superior Instant Death skills, such as Flash, Odin, and Death. The Death Dealer enemy also drops the Kiss of Death item. Instant Death skills are not particularly useful anymore at the final dungeon, anyway. Learning Roulette is more for novelty and for mastering the Enemy Skill Materia than to actually ever use it in battle.
However, the Core and the Body of Bizarro∙Sephiroth can be killed using Roulette, which it is not protected against, though trying this will be a gamble.
Etymology[]
Russian roulette is a potentially lethal game of chance in which a player places a single round in a revolver, spins the cylinder, places the muzzle against their head, and pulls the trigger. "Russian" refers to the supposed country of origin, and roulette to the element of risk-taking and the spinning of the revolver's cylinder being reminiscent of spinning a roulette wheel. As only one chamber is loaded, the player has a one in n chance of hitting the loaded chamber, where n is the number of chambers in the cylinder.