Lindblum

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.

Lindblum is the first place in FFIX that is genuinely large. Three districts, a castle, an air cab between them, and no hurry at all.

Take the hurry it offers you anyway on exactly one thing, and then relax.

Do the Theatre District before you go into the hideout

This is the whole warning for the area.

There is a man blocking the street in the Theatre District who wants to talk about an actor. Talk to him. He gives you an autograph. Then go into the artist’s studio and look behind the red chair.

Both of those disappear the moment you enter the Tantalus hideout, and the game does not hint at it, and the hideout is where the story is obviously pointing you. Neither item does anything you will notice. They are collection pieces. But they are the only two permanent losses in a very large area, and they go while you are doing exactly what you were told to do.

Everything else here can wait, including the castle.

Then wander

Search all three districts properly. Money in the inn, chests in a house north of the pickle stand, a tent under a tree outside the church, armour up a ladder inside it, and a free set of gloves sitting on the synthesis shop’s workbench that nobody stops you taking.

The hideout has three chests of gil and an action figure on the bed upstairs. Check both gates on your way out — there is a card on one platform and a tent by the other.

The synthesis shop is the point of the city

This is the first place you can combine two things into a better thing, and it changes how you shop for the rest of the game.

Two daggers make a better dagger. A hat and a wrist make a robe. The robe sells for more than the parts cost, which is the game quietly telling you that the economy has a hole in it and you are allowed to use it.

You do not have to. But buy a spare or two of the cheap inputs while you are here, because you will want them later and Lindblum is where they are cheapest.

The hunt

Then the city holds a hunt, and you are in it.

Twelve minutes, three districts, monsters worth points, and two rivals scoring while you do. The clock does not stop for menus or for the air cab.

Save before it starts. There are three different prizes and which one you get depends on who wins, and you only get one of them. A knight’s ring that absorbs lightning, five thousand gil, or a card. Most people want the ring.

Practically: clear the Business District, because it holds six of the fourteen monsters and the two highest-value ones. Then Theatre, then Industrial if there is time. A big beast shows up near the fountain in the last few minutes and is worth more than everything else combined — the steal off it is a weapon and a pair of gloves you cannot buy yet, so steal before you swing.

Game Notes

Lindblum is the game relaxing, and it is the only time it does this before the back half.

There is no dungeon. Nothing is chasing you. Vivi goes shopping. Steiner is uncomfortable in a foreign city. Freya turns up and is immediately the most interesting person in the party, and the game gives her a ring and a festival rather than an explanation.

The Regent is the first adult in this story who is straightforwardly pleased to see you — which lands strangely, because you arrived by kidnapping his niece, and he treats that as a slightly awkward family matter rather than a crime.

And there is the hunt itself, which is a festival where a city watches three outsiders and a monster and cheers. FFIX keeps putting performances in front of you: a play, a hunt, a card game, a beauty contest later. It is a game about people being watched while they pretend to be something, and it never once stops to point that out.

Enjoy it. Burmecia is next.

Completionist mode. Full spoilers, in play order, with every permanent loss called out before you reach it. 14 entries below are marked where our sources disagree with each other — we have not picked a winner for you.

Two things in Lindblum are permanently losable and they go together, to the same trigger, with no warning: the Autograph from Lowell in the Theatre District and the Moogle Suit behind the red chair in Michael’s studio. Both close the moment you enter the Tantalus hideout, which is where the story sends you.

Do the Theatre District first. That is the entire missables story for the area, apart from the Festival, which happens once.

The Festival prize, and the thing eight publishers cannot agree on

You get exactly one of three rewards, decided by who wins:

Nobody disputes that. What they dispute is the Master Hunter key item:

• Four publishers say it comes regardless of which of the three wins.
• StrategyWiki says it goes to whoever has the most points when the clock hits zero.
• A Steam guide ties it to scoring over 100 points.
• Final Fantasy Wiki’s Festival page does not mention it at all, and instead says a letter is sent if the winner clears 100.

The first group is right. The reward script has three branches — gil, card, ring — and awards the same key item at the end of each one. There is no branch where it is withheld and no point threshold anywhere in it.

Worth knowing, because the advice that follows from the wrong version is “score above 100 or lose the key item”, and that is not a thing you need to worry about.

Which win to take

Save before the Festival starts. Most guides recommend Freya for the Coral Ring, which is the best of the three by a distance at this point in the game. Completionists want Vivi, because the achievement only fires on a Vivi win.

Two published methods for a Freya win, and they are not the same:

• Through Zaghnol — steal both items, drop it near zero, then have Zidane KO himself so Freya lands the last hit. Six publishers describe this.
• Lose early — one GameFAQs guide tells you to KO Zidane at the first opportunity and skip Zaghnol entirely, calling it “probably the most anti-climactic part of the game”. Final Fantasy Wiki confirms a pre-Zaghnol Zidane KO hands Freya the win.

The second is faster and costs you both Zaghnol steals, which is the trade Caves of Narshe states plainly and the others do not.

Zaghnol

Level 9, 1,574 HP. StrategyWiki prints 1,500 with an asterisk it never resolves; everyone else and the battle data say 1,574.

• Weak to water. Halves thunder — Caves of Narshe says immune; it is halved.
• No drops, no card, no experience and no gil. Everything it is worth is in the steal list, so steal on your first turns.
• Steals: Mythril Gloves (100%), Needle Fork (25%). Jegged publishes 70% and 23%, which is its usual convention rather than the slot weights.

One flat contradiction worth naming: Caves of Narshe’s enemy database says Zaghnol has no steal list at all — “Stolen Items: None”. Its own walkthrough tells you to steal from it, and eight other publishers list both items. The database entry is the one that is wrong.

When it appears — nobody knows

Six publishers say the clock has to drop below 4:30. Three say “around four minutes” or “approximately 4.5”. Two say the clock has nothing to do with it and that Zaghnol appears once you have cleared the districts — and those two disagree about whether it is two districts or three.

We cannot settle this one from the files. Clear the Business District early and be near the fountain late, which satisfies every version.

The hunt monsters

Fourteen of them, and they are separate enemy records from their overworld namesakes:

Distribution is six in the Business District, four in the Theatre District, four in the Industrial District. Three publishers give per-district point totals of 90–102, 40–48 and 46–54, and those reconcile exactly with Final Fantasy Wiki’s per-monster table — strong evidence all three derive from the same source.

One correction. Final Fantasy Wiki states that hunt-variant monsters award hunting points instead of gil and experience. That is true of Mu and Fang, which give zero of both. It is not true of Trick Sparrow, which gives 65 experience and 198 gil in the hunt version. Caves of Narshe publishes those figures and was assumed to have copied them from the overworld entry. It did not — they are in the hunt record.

None of the hunt monsters can be stolen from except Trick Sparrow, which has a single Ore.

Everything else, by district

Lindblum Castle, guest bedroom. Glass Armlet by the beds, Ether on the upper level. Mogki is here and the Mognet step is two actions, not one: deliver Kumop’s letter from Dali, then talk to him again for the letter to Atla. Guides that describe it as a single action cost you the next link.

Business District. 163 Gil in the inn’s front-left corner. Hi-Potion and Echo Screen upstairs in Card Freak Gon’s house. Tent under the tree outside the church. Leather Plate inside the church up the ladder — called the balcony, the scaffolding and “above the organ” by three guides describing the same chest. Silver Gloves free on the synthesis shop workbench, which is worth 720 gil next door.

Theatre District. 127 Gil in the greenery, which eight publishers place in eight different ways. Ore in Michael’s studio. Then the two key items above.

Tantalus Hideout. Three gil chests: 97, 68 and 282, 447 between them. Two publishers map the amounts to the chests in opposite orders; two others publish only the total. The amounts are not in doubt. Mini-Burmecia from examining the bed upstairs — two guides call it missable and nothing here closes behind you.

Industrial District. Leather Wrist by the Air Cab stairs, Bronze Vest outside the pub, Steepled Hat and the Mimic Card upstairs in the house past it. Game8 puts the last two in the Business District; six publishers put them in the Industrial District, and so does the field data — the room sits in the Industrial block of field ids, not the Business one.

The gates. Wyerd Card at the north end of the Serpent’s Gate platform, and a Tent right of the Dragon’s Gate doorway. Four publishers list these and four omit them entirely. Both chests are in the scripts.

Two things that look missable and are not

Silver Gloves. Final Fantasy Wiki is the only publisher to state the window: available now, and again any time after the party returns from the Outer Continent. They are only out of reach while the city is besieged.

A Stellazzio coin. There is no coin in Lindblum on this visit. The Sagittarius is in the Business District and it is disc 3. Several coin tables list Lindblum without a disc column, which reads as a find you missed. You did not.

The one thing to buy

A Javelin, 880 gil. One publisher flags it, twice: this is the last shop that stocks one before Cleyra, and Freya’s synthesis path needs it. No other publisher mentions it and nothing else here is flagged as shop-exclusive.

While you are at the synthesis shop, the Cotton Robe is the classic money exploit — and it is worth noting that four publishers give four different figures for what it costs and returns, including one that prices the input Wrist at 130 gil against the same guide’s own shop listing of 200.

Steam and PS1

One difference matters here. High Speed Mode does not speed up timers. A Steam player running at high speed covers materially more ground in the same twelve minutes than a PS1 player did, which makes the Festival easier in a way no publisher connects to the Festival specifically.

The remaster also adds the achievement for a Vivi win, which pushes completionists away from the near-universal “let Freya take the ring” advice.

Game Notes

Lindblum is where the guide corpus stops agreeing with itself.

Up to now the disagreements have been about placement — which corner, which side of the stairs. Here they are about mechanics. What makes Zaghnol appear. Who gets the key item. Whether a steal list exists. Whether a monster gives experience. These are not things you can be vague about and still be useful, and on each of them at least one major publisher is confidently wrong.

The Master Hunter case is the clearest. Three incompatible rules are in print, two of them impose a condition the player has to plan around, and the script has no condition in it at all. Somebody, a long time ago, reasoned from “the winner gets a prize” to “the winner must have earned it”, and it propagated.

The lesson is not that the guides are careless. It is that a mechanic nobody can see is a mechanic everybody guesses at, and guesses get written down in the same typeface as facts.