Something we miss in Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is a means of having characters take action automatically when certain conditions are met during battles. Still, there's one particular activity where that comes into play, and it even involves robots. Here's our guide on how to complete Gears and Gambits for the Cosmo Canyon Protorelic in Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth.

Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth Gears and Gambits - Cosmo Canyon Protorelic guide

We don't want to spoil the narrative arc or backstory surrounding the Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth Cosmo Canyon Protorelic quests. As such, we'll simply talk about the mechanics of the Gears and Gambits minigame:

• You can attempt these objectives once you're finished with the entirety of the Cosmo Canyon arc in Chapter 10: Watcher of the Vale. That's when Chadley tells you about the first Protorelic site.
• One of Chadley's robots/drones will then approach the device that you see at the site. When you begin the minigame, you can choose certain "gambits" for your drones. These refer to how your units will act automatically based on:
  
  • A condition, such as the robot spotting an enemy that's weak to a certain element.
  • An action, such as the robot shooting that enemy with a particular attack.
  • Robots also have self-targeting systems. For instance, you can select an action like "cast Cure" when the condition is that the robot is "below 50% HP."
• The main goal is to defeat the King Flan in the center of the arena, while also protecting your towers from destruction (more on these mechanics in a while).

Cosmo Canyon Protorelic challenge locations

Below, you can see the locations of the Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth Cosmo Canyon challenges. We've numbered them based on the order that you visit these places. Note that you need to glide toward some areas using the Teal Chocobo, too.

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Best options for Gears and Gambits

During the first Gears and Gambits match in Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, the options are fairly limited. Later, though, you should have additional settings that you can tweak. In our case, we opted for the following:

• Robot 1:
  • Foe: Blizzard Shot
  • Foe: Shock+
  • Self: Nullemental Field
• Robot 2:
  • Self: Haste Field+
  • Foe: Fire Shot
  • Foe: Gravity Shot
  • Self: Modify HP & Cost - Cost -40; HP -200
  • Self: Modify HP & Cost - HP +150
• Robot 3
  • Self: Augmentation+
  • Foe: Thunder
  • Foe: Missile
  • Self: Modify HP & Cost - Cost -20
  • Self: HP <50% - Cure Shot

Again, all these options should be available in later challenges. If you don't see them in earlier matches, that's totally fine. The basic premise is that you focus primarily on the robots that deal fire and thunder damage once certain upgrades/conditions get unlocked.

Advancing along the arena and defeating enemies

Gears and Gambits has three portals--left, middle, and right--and these are where you spawn your drones. The drones that you can spawn are based on their cost and the points that you've gradually amassed, as seen in the lower-left corner of the screen.

Your bots will move toward the center from their respective sector. Conversely, enemy mobs will also spawn and advance toward the sector that they're closest to. Hostiles will try to reach your portals to damage them, which is also why it's important to kill them with your bots.

In the previous example, Robot #2 has "Foe: Fire Shot" and "Foe: Gravity Shot." This means:

• It will first shoot an enemy with Fire Shot, expending its limited elemental ammo each time.
• When it has no more ammo, it will use Gravity Shot instead.
• Once cost/HP modifications are unlocked in later matches, you can lower a robot's cost.
• Basically, our "Fire Robots" and "Thunder Robots" tend to be cheaper so we can spawn more of them to counter enemy advances.

Best Portal Skills to use

As for Portal Skills, you can choose from three combinations, though we suggest using Option #3: Defensive Loadout. It grants:

• Regenga - Restores some HP instantly, then more over time.
• Cautious Courage - Enhances attack power and damage.

Note that Portal Skills can only be used for that particular portal's side, which means the spells will only affect the robots within that section. For instance, if we use Regenga to heal robots to the left, it will not heal those that are in the middle or right sectors.

How to defeat the King Flan

The objective in the Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth Gears and Gambits minigame is to take out the King Flan in the center of the chamber. However, this boss is also somewhat tricky, since it has its own counters and triggers. Here's a quick summary of what you can expect:

• If you press the Square button, you can cast Assess on the King Flan to see its reactions/triggers.
• If four robots are active at the same side, the King Flan tends to cast Barrier to increase its defense.
• But, if five or more robots are targeting it (i.e. other slimes have been defeated or are not being targeted), it will do a jumping attack that has a wider area-of-effect.
• It can also shift its elemental attacks and weaknesses upon reaching certain HP thresholds.

As we've mentioned earlier, the strategy we employed was more "spammy" in nature. Once we were able to lower the spawn cost of robots, we made sure that we could place Fire Robots and Thunder Robots more often. This was primarily due to matches where there were more slimes that were weak to those elements. We've also noticed matches where the King Flan switched to these weaknesses at 50% HP, which allowed us to burst it down since we already had the units in play. Combined with the Regenga and Cautious Courage spells, our robots were able to survive longer than expected.

In any case, that does it for our Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth Cosmo Canyon Protorelic and Gears and Gambits guide. Once you've completed all the tasks, you'll unlock hard mode, where the King Flan and its minions will truly test your mettle. For all other variants of this World Intel activity, you can visit our Protorelics guide.

A grand adventure awaits you in Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth. We've got all the tips and strategies for you in our FF7 Rebirth guides hub.

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