Burmecia, Realm of Eternal Rain

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.

Freya is from here. That is all the setup the game gives you before it shows you what is left.

Walk across the balcony

One chest in this city sits at the end of a balcony that is about to fall down. If you run at it the floor gives way and the chest is gone for the rest of the visit.

Walk. It is the only trap of its kind in the game and it costs you a pair of boots that are genuinely useful.

Search the beds and the carts

Burmecia hides things the way a ruin hides things — under furniture and behind debris rather than in chests on pedestals.

There is a coin behind an overturned cart on the first street. There is a key item under a bed, on the far side, which is why people walk out without it. There is another chest in the same bedroom that four separate guides place in four different corners.

Take the antidotes seriously. Something in here turns people to stone slowly, and the city is handing out the cure for a reason.

Some of the chests are not chests

Three of them are monsters. They look exactly like the real ones, they are worth a good deal of money, and they call in a friend that steals from you.

Nothing is lost by opening them. Just do not be surprised.

Two people are still alive

There is a room with two survivors in it. Nothing points you there and nothing happens if you skip it.

Go and talk to them. A scene much later, in a city a long way from here, only plays if you did. It is the sort of thing this game does constantly and never flags.

Freya gets her spear

Behind the left-hand door off the fountain square. It is a real upgrade and it teaches her something worth having, so put it on before you leave — one guide reminds you and the rest assume you will.

Behind the right-hand door is a staff for Vivi and a moogle who runs a shop. Take the letter. Take the nut.

Picking up the staff brings a travelling merchant out of nowhere. Buy his bundle. He does this eight times across the game and buying from him every single time is the only way to get what he is actually offering.

The fight at the end

You cannot win it, in the sense that it ends when she decides it ends — about ten turns in, with everyone on one HP.

So treat it as a shopping trip. Steal. There are three things on her and the third is very rare indeed, which means those ten turns are all the attempts you are ever going to get.

Do not bother attacking. One guide is explicit that hitting her actively makes the stealing worse.

Game Notes

Burmecia is the turn the game has been walking toward since the black mages came off the production line in Dali.

It does not make a scene of it. There is no cutscene where somebody explains what happened. There is rain, and empty streets, and bodies, and two survivors in a room who are not important to the plot and get a conversation anyway. Freya walks through her own city and the game declines to give her a speech about it.

Then Beatrix arrives and you lose, and the game is quite clear that you lose — not a scripted defeat dressed as a draw, an actual defeat, with the four of you on the floor and her walking away.

It is the first time FFIX has let a fight mean something, and it does it by taking the win away.

Completionist mode. Full spoilers, in play order, with every permanent loss called out before you reach it. 9 entries below are marked where our sources disagree with each other — we have not picked a winner for you.

Burmecia holds eleven pickups. One is lost by moving too quickly, one is the only thing a dedicated missables guide flags in the entire city, and one of them we got wrong ourselves.

The Lightning Staff — a correction to our own data

Our extraction showed two Lightning Staffs in the vault. Sixteen published guides show one.

They are right and we were wrong. The script holds two complete copies of the same chest routine, 253 bytes apart, with a conditional that jumps over the second — one chest with two presentation paths. Our collapse rule catches the tight version of that pattern and not the wide one.

We are writing it up here rather than quietly fixing the table because the check only happened at all thanks to the disagreement. There is one Lightning Staff in Burmecia. StrategyWiki calls it a Thunder Staff, which is a naming difference, not a second staff.

The only published way to hold two at this point would be stealing one from Black Waltz 3 — and that steal belongs to the second Black Waltz 3, at Summit Station, which is after Burmecia. Jegged’s staff page lists “Black Waltz 3” without saying which fight, which is how that confusion starts.

The one chest you can lose by moving

Germinas Boots, at the end of the crumbling balcony. Run and the floor gives way, taking the chest with it for the rest of the visit. Walk.

GameFAQs states it plainly. It is the only trap of its kind in the game, and the boots are otherwise a chocobo dig away, which is a long way off.

What is actually flagged missable

The dedicated GameFAQs missables walkthrough flags exactly one thing in Burmecia: buying Stiltzkin’s bundle — Soft, Hi-Potion, Ether for 333 gil. This is the first of his eight stops and buying every one is what pays out at the end.

Everyone else draws the line somewhere different:

• Jegged files the whole city under one-time areas — “collect all treasure chests before completing the area” — and enumerates nothing.
• Caves of Narshe flags two: the Kupo Nut exchange with Atla, because you can only hold one, and the wounded-Burmecian scene.
• Final Fantasy Wiki’s permanently-missable-content page has no Burmecia entries at all.
• Three publishers flag the Cancer Stellazzio; the GameFAQs missables walkthrough does not.

Wei and Kal

Two survivors in a room, no marker, nothing lost in the moment. Talking to them is a prerequisite for an Active Time Event on the third Lindblum visit, which feeds the watch-everything achievement.

Gamer Guides is the only publisher that makes the connection, and it also states that Burmecia itself contains no ATEs that count — so a reader checking for ATEs here finds none and moves on.

Can you come back?

Publishers contradict each other, and one contradicts itself.

• Jegged’s missables page: Burmecia is a one-time area, disc 1 only.
• Final Fantasy Wiki’s unrevisitable-locations page: only the palace is sealed. The town is not on the list.
• GameFAQs’ Mognet guide lists a disc 4 delivery to Atla in Burmecia, which requires re-entering. Caves of Narshe’s moogle guide says the same. So does Jegged’s own Mognet page, against Jegged’s missables page.

Practically: the moogle is reachable later, and no publisher says the chests are. Take everything.

Beatrix

GameFAQs is the lone dissenter on all three, and its HP and MP figures are both digit transpositions of the majority values — which is what a transposition actually looks like, as against the 10,000 gaps elsewhere in this game.

No elemental weakness. She absorbs healing. She takes Slow, which two publishers recommend. No experience, no gil, no drops.

The steals, and the ten-turn window

• Phoenix Down — 100%
• Chain Plate — 25% (one guide calls it a Chain Shirt)
• Mythril Sword — 0.39%, the fourth slot

Three publishers print that last figure three ways — 0.4%, 0.39%, one in 256 — and they are the same number. Jegged’s 70%/23% for the first two is its usual convention; the slot weights are 100% and 25%.

The fight ends on her tenth turn. That is the whole budget. A 0.39% roll across however many steal attempts you can fit into ten turns is not a plan, it is a lottery, and GameFAQs adds the detail nobody else does: attacking her makes it worse, hurting your defence and impeding the steal, so do not bother unless you already have all three.

Is it winnable?

Five publishers say flatly not. Three say emptying her HP is a valid alternative end condition. One calls it winnable outright.

They all describe the same ending — a finisher that leaves the party on 1 HP — and no publisher reports any different reward for draining her. So the disagreement is framing. The finisher itself is contested too: five say Stock Break, Final Fantasy Wiki says “either Stock Break or Climhazzard”, which may be collapsing her three fights into one entry.

Everything else, by room

The suburb. Cancer behind the overturned cart. Soft in the first building and another hidden behind the stairwell. Germinas Boots at the end of the balcony — walk. Potion. Protection Bell under the bed, far side — seven publishers list it and Jegged’s item sequence omits it. Ether in the same bedroom, placed behind the shelves, on the left, in a hidden chest and behind the fireplace by four guides describing one chest.

Uptown. Phoenix Down and Tent in the courtyard.

The square. Mythril Spear behind the left door — six publishers describe six different ways of acquiring it, from pulling it out of a statue to it being handed over in a scene. It teaches Reis’s Wind. Lightning Staff behind the right door. Atla runs a Mogshop and a save point, takes Mogki’s letter, gives a Kupo Nut and a letter for Monev.

The North Gate Tent and Hi-Potion are counted as Burmecia by five publishers and assigned to Daines-horse Basin by GameFAQs. Two others omit them.

The randoms

• Basilisk, 346 HP, weak to ice. Gradual Petrify turns a character to stone after a countdown, which is why the city is full of Softs. Only two publishers document the move.
• Mimic, 346 HP, weak to holy, worth 777 gil — and it summons a Magic Vice, which steals from you. Three of the chests here are Mimics.
• Ironite, 889 HP, weak to ice and wind. Quina learns Angel’s Snack from it.
• Magic Vice, 297 HP. Two publishers disagree about its first steal slot — Echo Screen or Eye Drops.
• Type A, the black mage, 398 HP. Game8 gives 155 experience and two steal slots; Caves of Narshe gives 115 and four.

One outlier: Gamer Guides places Nymph in Burmecia as a Blue Magic opportunity. No other publisher does, and GameFAQs puts it in Daines-horse Basin.

Game Notes

Two things in this area are worth holding on to.

The first is the Lightning Staff, because it is our error and it is the same shape as the one we made on Ozma earlier the same day — an extraction disagreeing with the entire published record. That time we published the extraction. This time the disagreement was the trigger to go and check, and it took one look at the disassembly. The rule works when you apply it.

The second is the Mythril Sword. A 0.39% steal inside a fight that lasts ten turns is not a reward, it is a thing to know about. Every guide lists it. None of them does the arithmetic out loud. If you are going to spend a save file on it, spend it knowing that the expected number of attempts is in the hundreds and the window is ten turns — which is why the people who own one mostly got it on a run where they were not trying.