Ipsen's Castle

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.

The rule of the castle

Inside Ipsen’s Castle, weak weapons hit harder. The lower a weapon’s attack power, the more damage your Attack command does.

It applies to weapons only — abilities, magic and armour all work normally. So Vivi and the casters should carry on as usual, and everyone who swings something should swap to the worst thing they own.

Kumool, the moogle inside, sells cheap weapons for exactly this reason.

Seven bad weapons to collect

The castle is littered with the weakest weapon in each category, deliberately:

Dagger, Broadsword, Mage Staff, Fork, Rod, Air Racket, Cat’s Claws.

Take them, use them here, and do not keep them.

Everything else worth having

• Aquarius, a Stellazzio coin — behind a pillar on the right of the very first room
• Barette — behind a wall puzzle. The sequence is Examine, Push, Pound, Think, Push, Pound, Try Something Drastic, Rest
• Ancient Aroma — move the two pots anticlockwise between the three pedestals until the electricity settles
• Maiden Prayer — down the pole below the courtyard
• Golem’s Flute — in the sword room

Tonberries

There are Tonberries here. Fight one or two if you like — they are worth good experience and good steals.

Do not farm them. Their Everyone’s Grudge does damage based on how many Tonberries you have killed in the entire game, and it compounds. Grinding them here makes every later Tonberry a one-shot kill.

The four mirrors, and Taharka

At the end you pull four Elemental Mirrors — Fire, Water, Wind and Earth — out of the wall in one go. That starts the fight.

Taharka has 29,186 HP, and is weak to fire and wind.

Steal the Orichalcon — it is the rare one and it is worth the turns.

If Quina is with you, Mustard Bomb ends it. Heat kills anything that acts while afflicted, bosses included.

You can come back

Unusually for this point in the game, Ipsen’s Castle stays open — a moogle here is part of a letter chain on the final disc. Nothing inside is permanently lost.

Game Notes

Ipsen’s Castle is the best single joke in Final Fantasy IX, and it is a joke about you.

For thirty-five hours the game has trained one reflex above all others: the numbers on the weapon go up, so buy the weapon with the bigger number. It is the first thing you learn in any of these games and the last thing you stop doing.

Then a building turns that rule upside down and hands you a rusty fork.

And it does not tell you. It shows you an upside-down castle, puts a shop full of rubbish weapons inside it, and waits to see how long you take. The moogle is not being helpful. The moogle is the punchline.

How this page was made

Researched across 5 community walkthroughs and written from scratch — no source’s wording appears here.

How we decide what to print

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.

Ids 278–281 are the four Elemental Mirrors

Four consecutive key-item ids, all awarded in one room at even 500-byte spacing.

Nine sources name them unanimously: the Fire Mirror, the Water Mirror, the Wind Mirror and the Earth Mirror.

And the structure of the room explains the structure of the script. Every publisher describes the four mirrors coming out of the wall together, in a single action — one puzzle, one grab, four items. That is exactly what four evenly-spaced awards in one field script look like.

Fourth success for count-and-location, after the Coloured Stones, Hippaul’s prizes and the three potions. The key-item table now reads continuously across a long stretch:

Ids	Contents
273	Supersoft (candidate)
274–276	Strange / Unusual / Beautiful Potion
277	Gulug Stone
278–281	The four Elemental Mirrors
300–303	The four Coloured Stones
304–316	The thirteen Stellazzio, zodiac order
324	Superslick (candidate)

And a probable answer to the Fire Shrine anomaly

We have been carrying an open item since the first week of this project: fields 2550–2554 zone as Earth / Water / Earth / Wind / Earth, and no “Fire Shrine” string exists anywhere in the shipped data. Five fields, four shrines, one element missing and another repeated three times.

The mirrors explain what those shrines are for. The research explains why one of them may not be there.

Only the Earth Shrine is actually played. The party splits into pairs and carries a mirror to each shrine, and four sources agree that Zidane and Quina’s fight at the Earth Shrine is the only one the player fights — the other three happen off-screen while you watch.

The Fire Shrine is the extreme case. It is named, it is real, and per one wiki its fight is narrated entirely: Freya and Amarant deal with it without a map ever being drawn.

So the likeliest reading of our zone data is that Earth is the shrine that needed a real battle map, which is why it appears three times, and Fire never needed one at all, which is why the string does not exist.

That is our inference and not a publisher claim — nobody writes about shipped zone strings. But it is the first explanation we have had for an anomaly that has sat unexplained for thirty-five areas, and it arrived as a side effect of asking what four items a castle gives you.

The shrines are area 36, and we will write them knowing what they are.

Taharka is clean, and that makes five controls

29,186 HP at level 46 — six publishers, no dissent, nobody printing 19,186. The most consistently reproduced figure in the batch.

Status	Records
Clean	Hilgigars 8,106 · Soulcage 9,765 · Ark 20,002 · Meltigemini 24,348 · Taharka 29,186
Carriers	Zaghnol · Deathguise · Lani · Armodullahan · Valia Pira (12,119)
Disputed	Scarlet Hair

Five clean records from 8,000 to 29,000 with a single carrier at 12,119 sitting among them. Whatever selects the affected set, thirty-five areas of checking have now ruled out level, magnitude, disc and boss-hood.

Steal the Orichalcon — Elixir, Mythril Claws, Orichalcon, at roughly 70/23/6 per cent. Our element read (weak fire and wind, nulls earth, halves ice) matches four publishers.

The fifth disagrees with itself: the same publisher’s dedicated stat page lists fire, ice and wind all as resistances with no weakness at all, while its own walkthrough page agrees with everyone else. We are treating that as a page fault rather than a position — and noting it is the same publisher, and the same shape of internal contradiction, as the Soulcage fire reading at the Iifa Tree.

And Heat ends the fight. Quina’s Mustard Bomb inflicts it, a character with Heat who acts is killed, and that applies to Taharka. Three publishers call it a near-instant win.

The seven weapons really are the worst in the game

The inverted rule is unanimous and precise: inside the castle, lower weapon attack power means more Attack damage. It applies to weapons only — abilities, magic and armour all behave normally, which several publishers state explicitly.

We wondered whether the seven weapons scattered here are deliberately the weakest available, and they are. Against published attack-power tables:

Weapon	Attack	Position in its category
Rod	11	lowest
Dagger	12	lowest
Broadsword	12	tied lowest
Mage Staff	12	lowest
Air Racket	13	bottom
Fork	21	bottom of its range
Cat’s Claws	23	low tier

Seven weapons, one per character type, each at or near the floor of its class, placed in the one building where that makes them the best equipment in the game. That is a dungeon designed around a single joke and furnished to match.

One guide’s prose calls the Fork “mid-range” while its own table puts 21 at the bottom of a 21–77 spread — a small internal contradiction, and the second one this batch from a publisher whose tables are better than its sentences.

This one does not close, and that is the exception

Almost everything on this stretch of the game seals behind you. Ipsen’s Castle does not.

A Disc 4 letter chain routes through Kumool, the moogle inside — which means the castle is still standing and still enterable that late. So nothing here is permanently missable: the weapons, the four accessories and the Aquarius coin can all be collected later.

Worth stating plainly, because a reader who has just lost Oeilvert, Mount Gulug and the Desert Palace will reasonably assume this one goes too, and several players on record did exactly that and rushed it.

Aquarius is behind a pillar in the entrance hall, confirmed by seven publishers — and predicted by our id table, which put the eleventh coin in this castle before anyone looked.

Do not farm the Tonberries

7,886 HP and genuinely worth fighting once or twice — good experience, four steal slots, a Peridot and a Tonberry Card.

But Everyone’s Grudge scales with every Tonberry you have killed in the entire game — four to the power of the count — so a farming session here makes every Tonberry you meet afterwards lethal. One publisher flags it explicitly and it is the only enemy in the dungeon that needs a caveat rather than a verdict.

All five encounter figures match published ones exactly: Tonberry 7,886, Veteran 6,972, Gargoyle 6,977, Agares 6,775, Cerberus 6,977.

Two puzzles worth writing down

The Barette is behind an eight-step menu sequence — Examine, Push, Pound, Think, Push, Pound, Try Something Drastic, Rest — which three publishers give identically and which nobody would find by instinct.

The Ancient Aroma needs the pots moved anticlockwise. One publisher notes the game gives a hint if you go the other way, which tells you which way people try first.

Game Notes

Two things landed in this area that had been open for a long time, and both arrived sideways.

The four mirrors were a count-and-location result — the fifth this project has had, and the technique has not once required us to understand anything about the data. We see four unknowns in one room; a researcher asks what four things a castle gives you; nine guides answer in one voice.

The Fire Shrine anomaly was not even a question we asked. It fell out of the answer, because once you know the mirrors go to four shrines and only one of those shrines is a place you stand in, a zone table listing Earth three times and Fire never stops being strange.

Neither result came from reading the files harder. They came from having a specific enough question that someone who had played the game could answer it in a sentence. That has been true of every id block we have named, and it is worth stating as plainly as possible now that we are two thirds of the way through the game: the data does not decode itself, and it was never going to.

How this page was made

Researched across 8 community walkthroughs and written from scratch — no source’s wording appears here. 2 are marked where sources disagree with each other — we have not picked a winner for you.

How we decide what to print