Gizamaluke's Grotto

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.

Before you take a step into this cave: the Lindblum trolley stops running the moment you enter. The three districts close behind you and the only shop left is the one at the gate, which sells potions and nothing else.

Buy what you need now.

Bells open doors and you do not have many

Burmecian soldiers are dying at the entrance, and one of them gives you a bell. The bell opens one door, and then it is gone.

There are more doors in here than there are bells, so do not open doors to see what is behind them. Take the left-hand small door first, then the right, then the big one in the middle. That order collects the other bells as you go.

If you do run dry, go back to the first soldier’s body. There is another one on him — several guides describe it as a safety net and one describes it as only appearing when you are stuck.

Three of the four items are hidden

None of them is a chest you can see.

A vest behind the cave wall on the upper-left path. Gloves along the back wall near the top of the bell room stairs. A hat on the strip of ledge that runs underneath the bridge, towards the camera — that one is walked past by almost everybody, because the bridge reads as scenery and the ledge under it reads as the edge of the map.

Hug the walls. This is the last area in the game that is this dense with hidden pickups per square metre.

The moogle under the bell

There is a moogle pinned under a fallen bell and his wife would like him out. Vivi is carrying a Kupo Nut. Hand it over.

You get a key item for it that opens the last door. You can only carry one nut at a time, and this moogle gives out a different prize on every disc — so it is worth coming back with one whenever you pass.

The fish

Thunder and wind both hurt it and nothing else really does. It counters your physical attacks and it counters your magic with silence, so someone is going to get shut up and it may as well not be Vivi.

There is an Ice Staff on it that is worth three attempts.

Do not climb the vine

On the way out there is a vine going up. It leads somewhere you are not ready for — the only thing living up there is a dragon that will end the party in about two turns.

It is a good place to come back to. It is not a shortcut.

Game Notes

The grotto is the first time FFIX gives you a resource you can waste.

Everything before this has been generous. Free healing springs, unlimited mist jets, shops that restock, a festival you cannot fail. Here you get four bells and five doors, and the game does not tell you that in advance. It just puts a soldier’s corpse in front of you, gives you a bell off it, and lets you learn what a bell is worth by spending one on a door you did not need.

It is also the first place where the war is not abstract. Burmecia has already been attacked. The soldiers at the entrance are not enemies and not quest-givers; they are people who ran this far and stopped. One of them hands you the thing that lets you keep going.

And then it drops a giant fish on you, which is very much this game — it will do something quietly bleak and then immediately do something absurd, and never acknowledge the gear change.

Completionist mode. Full spoilers, in play order, with every permanent loss called out before you reach it. 5 entries below are marked where our sources disagree with each other — we have not picked a winner for you.

Entering the grotto closes Lindblum. The castle trolley stops and the three city districts become unreachable; only the Dragon’s Gate merchant remains, and it is a plain item shop. Four publishers state this and it is the single most consequential fact about the area.

How many Gizamaluke Bells — and why everyone is nearly right

Seven publishers say four. Three say five. Game8 says three.

The field scripts have four places a bell is awarded: the soldier at the entrance, after the black mage fight, the soldier at the end of the left path, and the chest under the bell.

That does not make the five-bell publishers wrong. Caves of Narshe describes the fifth as the entrance soldier’s body respawning a bell when you have run out without opening the main door — the same award site firing a second time, which produces no extra site. Final Fantasy Wiki describes it as a safety net against getting stuck. StrategyWiki goes further and presents it as unlimited.

So: four award sites, at least one of which can fire more than once. The argument is about whether you count places or pickups. Game8’s three is the only figure that is simply short — it omits the second soldier.

Spending them

There are more doors than bells if you open everything, which is why one guide prefaces this section with “doing this wrong will rob you of treasures”. The route that collects as it goes: small left door, then small right door, then the large centre door.

Publishers disagree about the geometry — whether the centre door or the bottom right reaches the bell room, and which side the Holy Bell’s door is on. Two say both routes reach the same place, which explains why the descriptions differ without anyone being wrong.

The three hidden pickups

None is a visible chest.

• Bronze Vest — behind the cave wall on the upper-left path. Game8’s item list omits it entirely.
• Mythril Gloves — against the back wall near the top of the bell room stairs.
• Magus Hat — on the ledge running underneath the bridge, towards the camera.

The Holy Bell comes from Moguta, and Gizamaluke drops a Tent.

Moguta’s Kupo Nut table

Vivi’s Kupo Nut goes to Mogmi, the wife, to free Moguta from under the bell. One publisher says the nut goes to Moguta directly; six say Mogmi. The prize is disc-gated:

Every other delivery gives a Tent, Phoenix Pinion or Ether at random. Four publishers print exactly this, and our own field data shows all six items awarded from one script in the grotto — the three disc prizes plus the three-item random pool, in the same place.

You can only hold one Kupo Nut at a time, so each disc’s prize is a window. The disc-4 Aloha T-shirt is the only one of the eight in the game not obtainable from a chocobo dig, which is why completionists come back for it.

The Extension is not missable — it can be synthesised in five places.

Gizamaluke

Level 16, 3,175 HP. Every publisher agrees on the figure. StrategyWiki alone prints 1,200 gil where the rest say 800.

• Weak to thunder and to wind. Four publishers print both; three print only thunder. Halves water, immune to earth.
• Counters physicals with Crash and magic with Silent Voice, which silences.
• Steals: Elixir (100%), Magus Hat (25%), Ice Staff (6.25%). Game8’s steal table has only the first two and omits the Ice Staff.
• Drops a Tent. Card is a Mythril Sword.

The Tent argument

One guide opens the fight by throwing Tents at it, to land Darkness and Silence. Another warns that a Tent fully heals it if the status does not stick.

Both are describing the same item and the same fight. The first is a gamble worth taking on turn one, when a full heal costs you nothing; it is a bad idea later. Neither guide says that.

The randoms

• Lamia, 994 HP, weak to thunder. Entice confuses the men — Freya is the only member of this party it cannot touch, which one guide flags and the others do not.
• Hornet, 293 HP, weak to thunder and wind.
• Skeleton, 400 HP, weak to fire and holy. A Phoenix Down reduces it to 1 HP.

The vine at the exit

Climbing it reaches Popos Heights, where the only encounter is a Grand Dragon. At this point in the game that is a wipe. Six publishers flag it, most of them as somewhere to farm experience much later rather than as a trap — which reads differently if you find it on the way past.

What is actually missable here

Very little. Neither this area nor Qu’s Marsh appears on Jegged’s missables page at all. The grotto stays open and you return to it more than once — for Kupo Nuts, for Popos Heights, and for a chocograph.

The only time-limited things are the per-disc Kupo Nut prizes above, and the Mognet letter from Moodon, which Caves of Narshe uniquely claims only exists if you scored over 100 points at the Festival of the Hunt.

Game Notes

This is the first area where the published record disagrees about a quantity rather than a placement, and it is instructive that everybody is nearly right.

Four bells, five bells, three bells. The structure underneath is four award sites with a repeat on one of them, and each publisher documented the part of that they could see from where they were standing. Someone who never ran out of bells counted four. Someone who did counted five. Someone who took the efficient route counted three.

None of them is being careless, and none of them says which case they are describing — which is the actual problem. A guide that said “four, plus one more if you get stuck” would have settled this twenty years ago.