Mt. Corel and North Corel

Story mode. Written for a first playthrough and kept free of spoilers — it will not tell you what happens here, only what the game is asking of you.

The road out of Costa del Sol goes up into a mountain made of collapsed railway. It is all catwalks, junctions and gaps.

Falling is not a mistake

Twice on the way across there is a hole in the track that you are supposed to fall through. It looks like a failure. It is not — it is how you get down to two ledges you cannot otherwise reach.

Which ledge you land on depends on the direction you are holding as you fall. Hold left at the first one and right at the second, and you will land next to something worth having.

If you get it wrong, climb back up and do it again. Nothing here is one-way while you are still on the mountain.

Walk every branch

The track forks a lot and every dead end has something on it. Do not take anyone’s turn-by-turn route, including ours — the mountain is documented three different ways by three different guides and they cannot all be right. It is small. Walk all of it.

There is also a bird’s nest on the structure with something sitting in it. Check it.

Things that eat your usual tactics

Two of the regular enemies up here shrug off the exact spells you have been relying on since Midgar. If something is taking no damage, it is not a bug — swap element and try again. The completionist tab lists which is which.

North Corel

The town at the bottom is a shanty built out of the wreck of a real one, and the people in it are openly hostile to someone in your party. The game does not explain that yet. Talk to them anyway.

Rest, shop, and take the ropeway when you are ready. That is the only way onward.

Game Notes

Mt. Corel is the first place the game asks you to do something that looks like a mistake and trust that it is not.

Everything before this has been legible: the path is the path, the ladder is the ladder. Here there is a hole in the floor, and the correct play is to walk into it while holding a direction, on the strength of nothing but a suspicion that the designers put a ledge down there.

It is a very 1997 piece of design — no prompt, no hint, no camera nudge. Just a gap, and the assumption that a curious player falls into it once out of carelessness and then notices there was something down there.

And then you come off the mountain into a town that is angry at you, and the game declines to say why for another two hours. That restraint is the real trick of this stretch.

How this page was made

Researched across one community walkthrough and written from scratch — no source’s wording appears here.

How we decide what to print

Completionist mode. Full spoilers, in play order, with every permanent loss called out before you reach it. 2 entries below are marked where our sources disagree with each other — we have not picked a winner for you.

Spoilers from here.

The two pitfalls

There are two gaps in the track you are meant to fall through, and the direction you hold as you fall decides which ledge catches you.

• First pitfall — hold LEFT → Wizard Staff
• Second pitfall — hold RIGHT → Star Pendant

Star Pendant blocks Poison outright, and the next two areas are full of things that poison you. Of the two, it is the one to care about.

Neither is a hard loss. Land wrong, climb back, fall again — nothing pushes you off the mountain until you choose to take the ropeway. It is only permanent if you leave without noticing there was a choice.

Everything else on the tracks

• W Machine Gun — a large Barret upgrade. Take it even if he is benched; he is not going to be benched for long.
• Transform Materia — Mini and Toad. Near-useless now, genuinely useful much later against a specific set of enemies and for one Morph setup.
• The bird’s nest — there is a nest on the structure with a Cokatolis in it. Most sources say ten Phoenix Downs; some describe a smaller stack. Take it either way, because the next two areas will eat them.

About the route

Three sources describe this mountain’s junctions in three different orders. They agree on the inventory and disagree on the topology, which is a polite way of saying at least two of them are wrong about the map.

So we are not printing a turn-by-turn route. Walk every branch. The mountain is small, nothing on it is one-way, and every dead end has something at the end of it. That is a more reliable instruction than a sequence of lefts and rights copied from a guide that may have been describing a different screen.

For the same reason, be sceptical of item lists for this area generally — the game’s own message data for the main Mt. Corel map turns out to be a shared block used across the whole game, so “the data says the Missing Score is here” would be an artefact of how the game stores text, not a fact about the mountain. We have not claimed anything from it.

Enemies, settled from the game’s tables

The theme up here is that your Midgar habits stop working.

• Bagnadrana (450 HP) — nullifies Fire, takes double from Ice. Carries a Diamond Pin at 12.7%.
• Bomb (600 HP) — nullifies Fire and Earth. Kill it before it self-destructs. Carries a Right arm at 12.7%, which is a throwable worth more than anything you currently own, and drops a Shrapnel at the same rate.
• Needle Kiss (180 HP) — nullifies Lightning and Earth, takes double from Wind. Lightning is the obvious spell to throw at a bird and it does nothing. Drops a Bolt Plume at 12.7%, carries a Soft at 50.8%.
• Search Crown (150 HP) — halves Fire, and carries a Turbo Ether at 12.7%. Made of paper. Steal from every one you see.
• Bloatfloat (240 HP) — nullifies Earth, takes double from Wind. Carries a Soft at 12.7%.
• Cokatolis (420 HP) — carries Softs at 50.8%, drops them at 12.7% and morphs into one, which is convenient given what it does to you.

Two Wind-weak enemies and two Fire-immune ones in the same area is not an accident. If you have been running Fire as your default since the first reactor, this is the mountain that retires the habit.

Three of those six carry Softs, including the one that turns you to stone. You do not need to buy Softs in North Corel — the mountain hands them out.

The Diamond Pin is a weapon

The name reads like a trinket and it is not. Diamond Pin is a weapon — attack 33, accuracy 102, four slots with one link, normal growth. It is the best thing on this mountain, it comes off a 450 HP encounter at 12.7%, and an accessory slot will not take it. Steal until you have one.

North Corel

A shanty town assembled from the wreckage of a real one. The residents throw things at Barret and the game does not tell you why until later. Talk to everyone — several of them are the only account you get of what happened here from the people it happened to.

Rest and restock. The ropeway is the only way onward, and where it goes does not sell anything you can pay for with ordinary money.

Game Notes

The pitfalls are the best small piece of design in this half of the disc, and they work by exploiting an assumption the player brought with them.

By the time you reach Mt. Corel you have learned that falling is bad. Every hole in every floor so far has been a wall in disguise. So the first gap in the track reads as a hazard, and the natural response is to look for the way around it — which does not exist.

You fall. You land somewhere. Nothing bad happens. And then, if you are paying attention, you notice that you steered a little on the way down, and that there was another ledge over there.

That is the whole lesson, delivered without a word of text: in this game, the floor is sometimes a route. It pays off twice on this mountain and then never again, which is either restraint or an idea that ran out of budget. Given 1997, probably both.

How this page was made

Researched across 4 community walkthroughs and written from scratch — no source’s wording appears here. 2 are marked where sources disagree with each other — we have not picked a winner for you.

How we decide what to print