The Village of Dali

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.

Stop at the observatory on the mountain before you go down into the village. An old man lives there, he collects coffee, and there is money behind a rock.

The coffee matters in about thirty hours. Remember his name.

Dali is a nice place and you should be suspicious of it

It is a farming village. There are fields, a windmill, an inn, and everyone is cheerful in a way the game has not shown you before.

Search it properly anyway — money on the road, chests in the inn, and a coin behind the pillar on the windmill’s ground floor. That coin is one of thirteen and the set pays out very, very late. Start collecting now or do not start at all.

Sleep at the inn. Play the fortune game at the desk; it is ten gil and there is an achievement in it.

Then Vivi disappears

A villager grabs him. You go looking. And the windmill turns out to have a staircase under it.

Everything below is one visit. Once the sequence downstairs plays out you do not come back, and there are eleven things down there to pick up.

The thing in the basement is stronger than you

This is the one real warning for this area, and most guides do not give it.

The underground has four kinds of fight in it. Two of them are ghosts, which are fine. The other two include a Skeleton with 400 HP — roughly three times anything you have fought, in a dungeon you reach about four hours in.

It is weak to fire and to holy. Vivi handles it. But if you walk down there with low HP and no Tents because you were told this place has ghosts in it, you are going to lose a party member and possibly the run.

Three of the four most-read FFIX walkthroughs do not mention that Skeletons are down here. They are.

Shop first, because there is nothing after this

There is no shop between Dali and the end of the next chapter, and there are two boss fights in that gap.

Buy the hats. Buy Tents. If you want to be clever, buy Wrists in bulk — they are cheap here and they synthesise into something worth having later, and Dali is the best place to stock up.

Two bosses, one element

The black mage that attacks you as you reach the airship is weak to wind, and nothing else. Earth does not touch it.

Two other things about it are worth knowing before the first turn: it will not attack Dagger at all, and if Vivi casts fire at it, it casts a bigger fire back. So Vivi’s job is not damage here — it is the thing he usually does not do.

Game Notes

Dali is the turn.

The first three areas were an adventure: a play, a crash, a cave. Charming, linear, and essentially harmless. Then the game puts you in a village where everyone is friendly, and under the village there is a production line, and on the production line there are black mages, and Vivi has to look at them.

FFIX does not make a speech about it. The scene is quiet and it is over quickly and nobody in the party says the obvious thing. It just shows you a room and lets you understand what Vivi has understood.

The village above carries on being nice. The windmill keeps turning. That is the joke, and it is not a funny one: the people in Dali are not villains, they are farmers who have a contract, and the game is careful to make them pleasant right up to the moment it shows you what they are shipping.

Then it puts you in a crate and sends you off with the rest of the cargo.

Completionist mode. Full spoilers, in play order, with every permanent loss called out before you reach it. 10 entries below are marked where our sources disagree with each other — we have not picked a winner for you.

Dali is the first area where the published guides disagree about something that can get you killed.

Skeletons are in the underground

Jegged lists three random encounters for the Dali underground: Ghost, Skeleton, Vice. GameFAQs and Caves of Narshe list two — Ghost and Vice. Final Fantasy Wiki lists Ghosts alone.

Everything about this pointed at Jegged being wrong. Its own bestiary page for Skeleton names nine locations and Dali is not among them, and Skeleton is Level 8 with 400 HP, which is wildly out of band for disc 1.

Jegged’s walkthrough is right and its bestiary page is the incomplete one. The underground has four random formations:

Ghost and Skeleton never appear together. Half the encounters down there include a 400 HP enemy, against a party whose hardest fight so far was a 472 HP boss with four characters — and this one comes at you during random exploration.

Skeleton is weak to fire and to holy, and halves shadow. Vivi is the answer. Go down with full MP and Tents, not with a hat.

For the record, Jegged’s other counterintuitive claim about this area holds up too: Ghost halves holy despite being undead, which is what Jegged publishes and no other source carries.

The gil figures, which we can now read directly

Dali holds four of the thirty-three gil awards written as literals into the game’s field scripts. They are:

One widely mirrored guide prints 137 for the village-road pickup. Every other publisher says 120 and the script says 120.

Two smaller placement errors worth knowing if you are checklisting: Game8 lists the 135 twice, once inside Morrid’s house and once outside it, and there is only one. Game8 also files the 156 above ground in the village; it is in the factory entrance, where Final Fantasy Wiki and Gamer Guides put it.

The underground list is eleven items, not ten

In route order: 156 Gil, Potion, Eye Drops, Ether, Potion, Iron Helm, Leather Wrist, 95 Gil, and behind the opened door Phoenix Down, Potion, Phoenix Pinion.

GameFAQs omits the Eye Drops, giving ten. Everyone else, and the field data, gives eleven.

The Iron Helm is worth a note: if you stole the other one off Plant Brain you now have two, and two is the right number for the next several hours.

The village, above ground

Inn. One Potion and one Antidote. Caves of Narshe lists two Potions; there is one.

Windmill, ground floor. Aries, the second Stellazzio coin. Gamer Guides marks it missable. The long-standing GameFAQs missables FAQ does not list it at all. Take it now.

Observatory Mountain, before the village: Hi-Potion near the cart and the 135 Gil behind the rock. GameFAQs adds an Ether to this list that nobody else has — almost certainly Black Waltz 2’s drop, folded in because GameFAQs also puts the fight up here.

Mognet. Gumo at the inn takes Mois’s letter from the Ice Cavern. Kumop is hiding in a barrel in the underground storage area and gives you one for Mogki. Miss the barrel and the chain breaks.

Active Time Events. Jegged counts five; Gamer Guides lists a sixth, which Jegged’s own page mentions without counting.

Black Waltz 2 is fought at the cargo ship loading area

Six publishers, six answers:

Caves of Narshe manages to contradict itself, filing the fight under Observatory Mountain in the walkthrough while its Black Waltzes page describes the party fleeing on an airship.

The script that starts the encounter is in the cargo-ship loading area — a different field from the mountain and from Morrid’s observatory. Final Fantasy Wiki is right, and it is the least-cited of the six.

The fight

Level 6, 1,030 HP. StrategyWiki prints 1,000; everyone else and the data say 1,030.

• Weak to wind. Immune to earth. One Steam guide says “weak to Fire”, which is wrong twice over given what happens next.
• It counters Vivi’s fire with Fira. Gamer Guides gives the tell: once it announces it is here for the princess, stop casting.
• It will not attack Dagger. Every publisher agrees. Its Fira hits the men.
• Steals: Steepled Hat (100%), Leather Plate (25%).
• Drops: up to four Ethers. Caves of Narshe prints “Ether x4” and everyone else prints one. Caves of Narshe is right without saying why — all four drop slots hold an Ether.

One published claim we can flag but not settle: GameFAQs lists Black Waltz 2 as vulnerable to Mini, and Final Fantasy Wiki lists Mini among its immunities. Both agree that Black Waltz 3 is vulnerable, so the asymmetry may be real.

Coming back to Dali

Several of the best things here are on a return trip, and the guides blend the two visits badly.

The Mayor’s Key is in the Mayor’s house — search the desk until the sleeping child mutters, then the heater. It opens the door behind the windmill.

Behind that door: 30,000 Gil, the largest single gil award anywhere in the game’s field scripts, and Burman Coffee from searching the same chest again. The coffee is the third of Morrid’s three and finishes that sidequest.

The window is the Treno card tournament, before the final round. Two independent missables sources say so. Game8’s page on the key never states what it opens or that it can be lost.

Final Fantasy Wiki is the lone dissenter here: it dates the 30,000 to “disc 2+” and lists it as its own find rather than behind the key. The field data shows the gil and a key item awarded at the same place, which supports the one-chest-searched-twice account that four other sources give.

The windmill’s second floor holds a Cachusha and an Elixir. Final Fantasy Wiki dates them to disc 2, once the windmill stops; Gamer Guides documents them only in its disc 3 chapter. Both chests are in the data. The disc is not something field scripts can tell us, so this one stays open.

Final Fantasy Wiki also lists an Elixir in the field outside Dali that no other publisher carries. It is in the data. Fandom is right and alone.

Game Notes

The pattern that started in Alexandria is now clear enough to name.

Where the guides agree, they are almost always right. Chest lists, item names, room layouts — seven publishers, one answer, and the game agrees. Where they disagree, the disagreement is rarely fifty-fifty. It is usually one source that did the work and five that inherited a paraphrase.

Dali has both directions in one area. Caves of Narshe is the only publisher to print “Ether x4” and it is right. Jegged is the only one to put Skeletons in the underground and it is right. Final Fantasy Wiki is the only one to place Black Waltz 2 correctly, the only one to list the field Elixir, and the only one to get the 30,000 gil’s gating wrong.

Nobody is reliable. Some of them are right about the specific thing in front of you, and the only way to know which is to go and look.