Alexandria — the Ruined City

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.

Alexandria is standing but only just. The castle is shut — only the town is walkable.

Sweep the streets

There is a lot on the ground here, and no puzzle attached to any of it:

Sapphire, Ether, Remedy, Amethyst, Topaz, Peridot, Opal, a Tent, 365 gil and 4,832 gil, spread through the streets, the square and the ferry dock.

Four guides give nearly identical lists. Walk the whole town.

The girl in the square

Talk to her for the Alexandria Card.

Beatrix has something for Dagger

She gives Zidane a Garnet — the gemstone, not the princess — to pass on.

It teaches Dagger Bahamut. You cannot miss it; it happens in the scene.

The jump rope moved to the bell tower

And both Vivi and Eiko can play now, where before it was Vivi alone.

The prizes climb with the count: a Cactuar Card at 50, Genji at 100, an Alexandria Card at 200, a Tiger Racket at 300, and the King of Jump Rope at one thousand consecutive jumps.

One thousand. It is an achievement in the re-releases and it is exactly as tedious as that number suggests.

Not on this visit

If a guide has you racing Hippaul or ringing the bell for Shiva and Ramuh cards, that is the earlier Alexandria visit, before the attack. Those windows are already behind you.

Later, at the steeple

Stiltzkin’s last stop and the start of Mognet Central are both up there, and neither is available yet. Come back on the final disc.

Game Notes

Alexandria is the only place in this game you visit five times, and the game keeps quietly rearranging it.

The first time it is a festival — a play, a crowd, a princess in a tower. Then a castle to break into. Then a coronation with a footrace in the street. Then it burns. And now you walk through the same streets picking gemstones out of the rubble while a child runs about trying to give you a trading card.

Nothing in the game comments on any of this. The square is the same square. The bell tower is still there, and the girls who were skipping in it before the attack are skipping in it again, and now Eiko can join in.

That is Final Fantasy IX’s whole approach to a ruined city: people put the rope back up.

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.

An id outside every range we had, and a skipping rope explained it

Our Alexandria steeple script carries id 1010.

Every id we have mapped in this game sits well below that. Items run to the mid-200s, key items 258 through the low 300s, cards somewhere in the 500s and 600s. A four-digit id is not a number we had a category for, and it had been sitting on the open list for two batches.

It is the King of Jump Rope — the key item for one thousand consecutive jumps at the bell tower.

And it did not come from decoding anything. The steeple script holds six awards at even spacing, five of them in ranges we recognise. Publishers document a jump-rope prize ladder at that same bell tower: a Cactuar Card at 50 jumps, Genji at 100, an Alexandria Card at 200, a Tiger Racket at 300, and the King of Jump Rope at 1,000.

Four cards and a key item, in one script, in the place the ladder happens.

That is the count-and-location technique again — the fifth time it has worked, after the Coloured Stones, Hippaul’s prizes, the three potions and the four mirrors. And as always we are naming the set, not the members. Which id is the Cactuar and which the Genji does not follow from anything we can read.

The match is also weaker than the Coloured Stones’, and worth saying so. That was four unknowns against a documented set of four. This is six awards against five documented rewards, with one left over — id 282, which one thread of research suggests might be the Kupo Nut from this visit’s sweep and which nothing confirms. It stays unnamed.

What is genuinely new is the range. 1010 tells us there is id space above 1000 for something other than ordinary inventory — a trophy-shaped object rather than a thing you carry. Worth checking whether anything else in the game lives up there.

One block, two visits, a disc apart

Our alex5 script set holds both:

Four publishers confirm the first and two the second, and the reason one block holds both is the ordinary one: it is the same town, and the visits are gated by story flags rather than by separate scripts.

This page is the Disc 3 visit. The steeple’s Disc 4 contents are listed as what they are — there later, not now — because a reader standing in the ruins who goes looking for Stiltzkin will not find him.

Third area where we have had to split one block by flag rather than by script, after Madain Sari and Alexandria’s own Disc 3 pair. It has stopped being a surprise and become a step.

The research pass corrected our neighbouring page, and we were already right

One useful non-finding. The pass came back flagging that Hippaul Racing, the Disc 3 Stiltzkin stop and the bell-rope Shiva and Ramuh cards belong to the coronation visit, before the attack — and warning that if our alex5 block contained them, our boundary was wrong.

It does not. We had already placed all three on the coronation page, from our alex3 data and a separate research pass, eight areas ago.

Recording it because a check that confirms a boundary is worth as much as one that corrects it, and this project has had four boundary corrections against one confirmation. The confirmation is the rarer event.

The Ribbon has a condition eight areas long

Stiltzkin’s final bundle is Moonstone, Ruby and Elixir for 5,555 gil, and he hands over a Ribbon — but only if you bought every one of his eight bundles: Burmecia, Cleyra, Fossil Roo, the Mountain Path, Alexandria on Disc 3, Oeilvert, Bran Bal, and here.

Miss one and there is no second route. A community answer puts it plainly: skip Oeilvert’s stop and the Ribbon is simply gone. The only other Ribbon in the game is in the Treno auction.

This is the single longest-range missable we have documented. The failure happens at Oeilvert on Disc 3, where he leaves partway through a one-way dungeon — and the consequence only becomes visible at the steeple on Disc 4, with no message and nothing to indicate why he did not hand anything over.

No route-shaped guide can hold that. The condition spans eight chapters and the penalty is invisible at the point of failure. It is the clearest argument yet for an evergreen page organised by Stiltzkin rather than by place, and we have now found the same shape four times — the moogle letters, the Stellazzio, Morrid’s coffees, and this.

Two candidate ids, one good and one not

324 = Superslick. Two publishers place it with Ruby in the mini-theatre, as the midpoint of the Mognet Central chain on Disc 4, and our data awards id 324 in the mini-theatre script. Good match, and it extends our key-item mapping above the Stellazzio block for the first time.

282 = unknown. One thread suggests the Kupo Nut from this visit’s sweep. No publisher places a Kupo Nut at the steeple specifically. Not published.

Both are recorded as candidates rather than names, on the rule that has kept 286, 258 and 283 honest.

The sweep, and what the corpus adds to our list

Four publishers give near-identical item lists for the ruined town: Sapphire, Ether, Remedy, Amethyst, Topaz, Peridot, a Tent, 365 gil, 4,832 gil, the Alexandria Card from a girl in the square — plus two our working list did not have, an Opal and a Kupo Nut.

Our own rows for these are runtime-computed, so we cannot confirm the list from our side; we render theirs.

The castle is shut on this visit — one publisher states it and none contradicts. Worth saying, because a reader who swept Alexandria’s castle twice already will go looking.

An unreconciled Alexandria Card

The girl in the square gives one. The jump rope pays one at 200 jumps.

No publisher addresses whether these are the same card from two routes or two separate copies, and it matters to anyone tracking a card collection. Flagged, unresolved.

Game Notes

The jump rope is the best thing to happen to this project’s id table and it is worth being clear about why.

We had a number with no category. Nothing about 1010 suggested what kind of object it was, and no amount of staring at the surrounding scripts was going to say — there is no structure in a four-digit id.

What resolved it was asking a researcher what happens at that bell tower, and being told that a prize ladder runs there with five named rewards. The id did not decode. It was identified by what a player does in the room.

That is the fifth time now, and the technique has a shape worth stating plainly: our data can see how many of something there are and where; the corpus can see what they are; neither can do the other’s half. Five id blocks have fallen to that division of labour and none has fallen to reading bytes harder.