Bran Bal

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.

A village at the bottom of the roots. You cannot come back here, so do the whole page before you move on.

First: there is a moogle in a jar

Moorock is trapped in a vase in the Storage room, and until you let him out there is no shop, no save point and no Mognet stop.

This is the single most important line on the page, because nothing announces it. You can walk every screen of this village, open every chest, and leave without ever finding out there was a shop.

Let him out first.

Six chests

• Minerva’s Plate — up the first staircase, hug the left wall
• Flash Hat — the right-hand path beneath the stairs
• Elixir — the back room
• Elixir — the laboratory basement, examine the hole
• Wing Edge — the storage room
• Angel Earrings — the northern shore of the pool

If a guide told you the Minerva’s Plate was in Terra, this is the one it meant.

Buy Zorlin Shapes

6,000 gil each, and this is the last place in the game that sells them.

You want more than one. They feed two of Zidane’s best weapons later, and one of those feeds a pair of gloves after that. Three is the floor; four or five if you intend to have everything.

Esto Gaza used to sell them and is sealed. Daguerreo used to and stops. This counter is the end of the line and nothing tells you so.

Stiltzkin, seventh of eight

Diamond, Ether and Elixir for 2,222 gil. Leave the Storage room and come back and he will be there.

This is the seventh set, not the last. The eighth is waiting at Alexandria on Disc 4 for 5,555 gil. But this one is behind a door that shuts — so if you are collecting them, the run either survives this room or it does not.

Before you leave

Save at Moorock. What follows is a run of boss fights with no chance to re-equip in between, so spend at his counter now rather than regretting it in twenty minutes.

Steiner and Dagger are unavailable for this stretch. Swap them out.

There is no boss here. Control passes to Eiko for a while — watch the Active Time Events and talk to everyone, which both gathers the party and counts toward the movie-watching achievement.

Game Notes

The moogle in the jar is a good example of something this game does repeatedly and almost never flags.

Bran Bal has the last Zorlin Shapes in the game behind it. It has Stiltzkin’s eighth set behind it, and the Ribbon behind that. It has the save point before a boss run behind it. All of that sits behind one optional conversation with a piece of pottery, in a village you cannot return to, in a chapter where the story is doing something loud enough that most players are not looking at the scenery.

The game is not being cruel. It is being consistent: Final Fantasy IX puts its rewards where a curious player would go and nowhere else, and it declines to mark the difference between a room you can skip and a room you cannot.

What is unusual here is only the concentration. Most missed moogles cost you a letter. This one costs you a shop.

Completionist mode. Full spoilers, in play order, with every permanent loss called out before you reach it.

Everything here is behind a moogle in a jar

Moorock starts trapped in a vase in the Storage room. No shop, no save point, no Mognet stop until you let him out, and nothing in the village points at the vase.

Behind that one conversation: the last Zorlin Shapes in the game, Stiltzkin’s eighth and final set, the Ribbon that depends on it, and the save point before a consecutive boss run. In a village you can never return to.

The Zorlin Shape problem

6,000 gil. Buy several. This is the last counter in the game that stocks them.

The sources are three, and two are gone:

How many you need depends on how complete you intend to be. The Zorlin Shape is an ingredient in Masamune and in Sargatanas, and two Sargatanas synthesize into Thief Gloves. One wiki says buy at least three. A synthesis FAQ that works backwards from “one of everything” lands on four for the weapons, five if you also want one left in hand — twenty-four to thirty thousand gil, spent here or not at all.

Jegged’s shop list for this room does not contain the Zorlin Shape at all. The Fandom page for the village does not mention it either. It takes the weapon’s own page to find out that this shop is the last one, and nobody who is reading a walkthrough of Bran Bal is reading that page.

The counter, in full

Weapons — Orichalcon 17,000 · Avenger 16,000 · Holy Lance 11,000 · Bistro Fork 10,300 · Defender 9,340 · Zorlin Shape 6,000 · Gladius 2,300 · Mythril Racket 2,250 · Mythril Dagger 950 · Mage Masher 500 · Rising Sun 500 · Dagger 320.

Armour — Minerva’s Plate 12,200 · Platina Armor 10,500 · Demon’s Vest 10,250 · Adaman Hat 6,100 · Defense Gloves 6,000 · Flash Hat 5,200 · Dragon Wrist 4,800 · Platinum Helm 4,600 · Coronet 4,400.

Items — Hi-Potion 200, Phoenix Down 150, Echo Screen 50, Soft 100, Antidote 50, Eye Drops 50, Vaccine 100, Remedy 300, Annoyntment 150, Tent 800.

Two things fall out of reading that list next to the chests.

The Avenger is here for 16,000, which is worth knowing if you spent ten turns stealing one off the Earth Guardian two chapters ago. We flagged that at the time; here is the counter it is sold at.

And the chests are largely a rebate on this shop. Of the twelve chest items across Terra and Bran Bal, seven are on this counter:

There is a Minerva’s Plate in a chest up the stairs and another on the counter for 12,200. Open the chests before you shop.

The genuinely exclusive pickups are the ones not on the list: the Wing Edge, the Angel Earrings, and the three Elixirs.

Stiltzkin, the eighth and last

Diamond, Ether and Elixir for 2,222 gil. Leave the Storage room and come back; he appears then, not before.

Our field data reads this room as three separate award units in a single block, which is the shape a fixed-price purchase takes rather than the shape a chest takes — chests in this game always come paired with a gil unit and these do not. It is a small vindication of a rule we set early and have never had a clean illustration of: never publish a bare count from the award table. Read naively, this room has three more chests in it.

This is the seventh of eight, and we want to correct ourselves here, because we first wrote that it was the last. It is not. Jegged’s ordered list runs Burmecia 333 · Cleyra 444 · Fossil Roo 555 · Conde Petie Mountain Path 666 · Alexandria on Disc 3 777 · Oeilvert 888 · Bran Bal 2,222 · Alexandria on Disc 4 5,555. Our own page for the Disc 4 Alexandria visit had it right all along; this page did not, and contradicting a page we had already published is worse than being wrong once.

All eight are what pays the Ribbon, and it also settles Driving the Hard Bargain. If one was missed, the usual place it happened is Oeilvert, where he leaves partway through a one-way dungeon and the consequence does not surface until the Alexandria steeple a disc later, with no message.

The point that survives, and is the one worth acting on: this is the last stop behind a door that shuts. The eighth is in a town you can walk back into. This one is in a village you cannot.

The Vaccines arrive one area too late

Moorock sells Vaccines at 100 gil. Terra’s Movers — the 23,801-experience encounter, the best in the game — are behind you.

So the ordering is:

• Grind Movers in Terra and your Vaccines have to be stolen, because the shop is ahead of you.
• Grind Movers in Pandemonium and you can buy them by the handful, because the shop is behind you.

Both are true, both are in the corpus, and we have not found a page that puts them together. Given that Virus zeroes experience outright rather than reducing it, the choice is worth a sentence somewhere and gets one nowhere.

The moogle in the jar gave us the largest decode of the project

This is where a loose end turned into a result, so it is worth setting out.

Our field data marks this room with an award of item id 294, which resolves to no name in the game’s item table — the table stops at 255. We had it filed as a stray on two pages and were going to leave it there.

It is not a stray. 294 appears 58 times, in 45 distinct rooms, across 37 script prefixes. In the whole out-of-range id space the next largest concentration is five. And it is never paired with a gil unit, which every chest in this game is — so it is not a chest.

All 45 rooms are documented moogle rooms.

Why that is not a coincidence

Five locations in this game have exactly two Mognet moogles, and our data has exactly two marked rooms in each, with the room names matching:

And the two big moogle populations that are not on the letter route are both absent from our data. Madain Sari has six moogles — Eiko’s family — and no marker anywhere in its scripts. Mognet Central has the postal staff, who receive the last delivery rather than sitting on the route, and has none either. The reading predicts both absences and gets both.

Two moogles in this game relocate — Monty from the Evil Forest spring to Pinnacle Rocks, Mois from the Ice Cavern to Fossil Roo — and both ends of both moves are marked.

And Terra has none. We wrote “there is no moogle here” on the previous page from publishers alone, before we had looked. The data agreed afterwards.

What we are not claiming

We do not know what 294 actually is — the moogle, the mailbox, a service flag, or something our reader is mis-typing as an item. The id range and the unpaired shape are the whole of the evidence about its nature.

We are not naming moogles from it. Our rule is that a count-and-location match names the set, never the members, and this is a textbook case: the two moogle FAQs we consulted disagree about where Mosh is — one says the Alexandria steeple, the other the castle guardhouse and chapel — while agreeing completely about which rooms have moogles in them. Our data resolves rooms. The corpus resolves names. Neither does the other’s job.

A prediction we are writing down before we can check it

The Memoria and Crystal World scripts carry no 294 at all. If this reading is right, Memoria has no Mognet moogle. We will find out when we write that page, and if there is one there, this decode is wrong.

What it is for

Mognet runs for forty hours and every published account of it is route-shaped — a letter at a time, in play order, across two dozen chapters. We now have the whole board: 45 rooms, indexed from the game’s own data. That is the document the corpus does not have, and it is the next thing we build.

The rest of the chapter

No boss. Two publishers confirm it, and our encounter data for this block holds only Hecteyes and Ring Leader — no Movers, which is the other half of the grinding-window problem above.

Steiner and Dagger are unavailable. This is the restriction we had filed on the Terra page and have moved here, where the corpus actually puts it. One publisher suggests Eiko in Dagger’s slot and Amarant, Quina, Freya or Vivi in Steiner’s.

Four Active Time Events, toward Movie Critic. Control passes to Eiko for a stretch and you gather the party by talking to everyone who saw Zidane.

Save at Moorock, and do the equipment pass at his counter. Caves of Narshe is the only guide that says why: what follows is consecutive boss fights with no window to re-equip between them.

Game Notes

We nearly did not chase the 294.

It showed up as two rows on two unrelated pages, both marked “name-pending” by our own reader, and the honest first read was that our item table was short a couple of entries. It went on the open list — item five, between a handful of other unknown ids — and stayed there for three areas.

What changed was writing this page. Bran Bal’s Storage room is a moogle room, a shop, a save point and a Stiltzkin stop all at once, and having to describe all four in one paragraph meant looking at the room’s data properly instead of glancing at it. The 294 was sitting next to the moogle.

The rest took an afternoon: count the instances, list the rooms, go and find out whether the corpus puts a moogle in each of them. It does. Then — and this is the part that took the longest and mattered most — go and find the rooms where the reading should fail. Madain Sari has six moogles and should have shown up if the marker meant “moogle”. It didn’t, and that near-miss is the strongest evidence we have, because a marker that fires on every moogle would have.

Three areas on the open list, and the answer was in the room we were already standing in. That is not a lesson about diligence. It is a lesson about what writing does: you cannot describe a room carefully and keep an unexplained thing in it.