Alexandria Castle — the escape

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.

You start in a cage hanging over a courtyard, and you get out of it by leaning the way it is already going.

Then a clock appears in the corner of the screen and the chapter becomes a different kind of thing.

Thirty minutes, and it runs during the talking

You have half an hour to reach the princess. The timer does not pause for cutscenes, dialogue or menus, and running out is a game over.

That is enough time. It is not enough time to explore thoroughly, which is the real design of the sequence — you are meant to feel hurried and mostly not be.

Take Marcus’s equipment off

He leaves partway through, wearing whatever you gave him. One guide out of thirteen mentions this.

It is the second time in two chapters the game has quietly taken a temporary character away with your gear on them. Get into the habit: when somebody joins who is obviously borrowed, check what they are wearing before the scene that sends them home.

The rotating platform

Below the Queen’s chambers there is a passage with a slab that turns. Two chests sit off it, and you get to them by jumping at the right moment.

One holds a sword that is a genuine upgrade — unless you already stole one off Beatrix in Cleyra, in which case it is a spare.

Do not fight the book

There is a library, and in the library there is a book, and the book is a monster with more HP than anything you have met.

Not now. Almost every guide says the same thing: it is a long fight, the clock is running, and you get another chance at it later with no timer and a stronger party. The one guide that says this is your last chance is wrong.

The jesters

Two of them, passing a spell back and forth. Hit whichever one is holding it and the spell fizzles.

Kill the smaller one. The fight ends when either dies, and one of them has barely half the health of the other, so there is no reason to fight the big one at all — except that he is carrying a spear worth taking first.

And then her again

Third time. It ends the way it ended twice before: she decides when, and you are all on one HP afterwards.

Same approach. Steal, do not bother attacking, and do not feel bad about it.

Game Notes

The clock is the most interesting thing here and it is not really about time.

Thirty minutes is generous. Most players finish with a lot left. What the timer actually does is stop you doing what this game has trained you to do for thirteen chapters — walk into every room, check every wall, talk to everyone twice. It puts a library full of books in front of you, containing an optional boss and a sidequest, and makes looking at them cost something.

And it works, because the thing the timer is counting down to is a person. FFIX has spent the game making you search rooms. This is the one time it says: not now, she is in there.

Then Beatrix appears, beats you for the third time, and lets you go anyway — and what the game is actually building toward is not a rematch you eventually win. It is her deciding.

Completionist mode. Full spoilers, in play order, with every permanent loss called out before you reach it. 8 entries below are marked where our sources disagree with each other — we have not picked a winner for you.

Two chests, both behind the rotating platform under the Queen’s chambers: an Ice Brand and a Tent. Seven publishers list that pair; one lists a Phoenix Pinion in place of the Tent. The scripts say Tent.

One guide adds an Ether in “lower areas” and a map atlas shows an unattributed Elixir. Neither is corroborated anywhere and neither is in this sequence.

The thirty-minute clock

Five publishers give the figure; one acknowledges a timer and never prints a duration. Two disagree about when it starts — when the party reunites, or when Marcus leaves.

It runs during dialogue, which one publisher notes and the rest do not. That is the only thing about it that catches people out, and it is why every guide that covers the library boss tells you to skip it here.

Strip Marcus

One publisher out of thirteen says it: take Marcus’s equipment off before he climbs the ladder. He is a guest and whatever is on him goes with him.

This is the same trap as Quina at Cleyra one chapter earlier, flagged by a different single publisher. Two temporary characters, two chapters, two pieces of advice each carried by exactly one source.

Zorn and Thorn

Zorn 4,896 HP, Thorn 2,984, both level 16. Two GameFAQs guides print 4,897 and 2,985 — one higher each, which is its own small mystery.

• No elemental weakness. One publisher says ice; four print no weakness and Game8 prints every element at 100%. All agree they take Slow.
• They drop nothing. Four publishers say so explicitly. Jegged is the only one listing drops, and the two items it lists are the two items every other publisher lists as Thorn’s steals.
• Steals: Zorn has Partisan (100%) and Stardust Rod (25%); Thorn has Mythril Armor (100%) and Mythril Armlet (25%).

Six publishers split the steals per jester and not one of them swaps the lists, which for this corpus is unusually clean.

The fight ends when either one dies. Thorn has barely half Zorn’s health, so the fight is as long as you want it to be — steal from Zorn first, then finish Thorn.

Beatrix, the third time

Level 19, 5,709 HP. Five publishers agree.

Two GameFAQs guides print 3,352, which is the HP of Ralvuimago — the boss in the very next area. One of them keeps Beatrix’s own MP of 4,203 alongside it, so it is a copied field rather than a different measurement, and it has propagated between the two guides.

• Steals: Phoenix Down (100%), Ice Brand (25%), Survival Vest (6.25%). Eight publishers agree. One boss guide prints Thunder Gloves instead, which is what she carried at Cleyra.
• No drops, no experience, no gil. She has Cura now, and Climhazzard as the finisher.
• The fight ends the way the other two did. No publisher says otherwise.

Tantarian

The book in the library. Level 41, 21,997 HP — more than three times anything you have fought.

It is not last-chance here. Six publishers say there are two opportunities, this one and the later Alexandria visit, with the later one final. One Steam guide says this is the last chance and is contradicted by everyone including two publishers who explicitly describe the second attempt.

Almost every guide recommends deferring it, for the obvious reason: 22,000 HP against a thirty-minute clock.

Two things our data settles

It drops Running Shoes. Six publishers say so. Game8 says “this enemy does not drop any items” — and the battle record has Running Shoes in the guaranteed drop slot. Game8 is wrong, and the item teaches Auto-Haste, so it is not a rounding error.

It is weak to holy and halves shadow. Caves of Narshe lists it weak to both. Game8 prints holy at 150% and shadow halved. Game8 is right. Taking Caves of Narshe’s reading into a 22,000 HP fight means spending half your turns on an element that is being resisted.

So on Tantarian the two publishers are each right about one thing and wrong about the other, which is a fair summary of this whole project.

Steals: Ether (100%), Elixir (25%), Silver Fork (6.25%), Demon’s Mail (0.39%). The Demon’s Mail is a long-odds roll, but unlike Burmecia’s Mythril Sword this fight lasts long enough to actually make the attempts.

The escape encounters

Bandersnatch 899 HP, Type C 623, Soldier 459. None has an elemental weakness; Silence works on the mages.

One oddity: Game8’s Type B page lists its location as Cleyra only, while GameFAQs’ encounter table for this castle includes it. Gamer Guides and Jegged name only Type C here.

What is not here

No Stellazzio coin. Leo is in the tower room and belongs to a later visit. One missables guide files a West Tower coin under a heading worded “Alexandria Castle: Revisit” with no disc attached, and its description matches Leo — which is exactly the kind of thing that sends a reader searching this sequence for something that is not in it.

One moogle, Mosh, in the chapel. He carries the letter for Monty at Pinnacle Rocks and two more to read.

Our own data has a marker in the guardhouse that we had been reading as a moogle. No publisher places one there, so we have stopped treating that marker as proof of one — it is an undecoded id that usually, not always, sits where a save moogle is.

Game Notes

The Beatrix HP figure is the most instructive thing on this page.

Two guides print 3,352. That is not a typo, a transposition or a rounding — it is the correct HP of a completely different boss, the one you fight in the next chapter. And one of the two kept Beatrix’s real MP in the next column, which means a single field was overwritten rather than a row being duplicated.

You can see the error’s shape and still not know which guide made it first. That is the recurring texture of this corpus: the mistakes are legible, traceable in form, and almost never attributable, because everything downstream of them looks exactly like independent agreement.