Memoria and the Crystal World

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.

Finish everything else before you come here. This is the end of the game. Stiltzkin’s last set, Mognet, the Stellazzio turn-in, the Treno auction, the Excalibur, Ozma — all of it is behind you the moment you commit.

And there is a door, later on, that you cannot walk back through.

Six things to pick up

• Kain’s Lance — by the right-hand wall on the first screen
• The Tower — the small platform jutting toward you in the Recollection room
• Angel Flute — the left of the platform before the save point. Eiko’s, and it teaches Holy
• Rune Claws — behind the pillar at the foot of the stairs. Amarant’s best
• Mace of Zeus — the first platform in Gaia’s Birth. Vivi’s best
• Excalibur II — left of the final door, and only if your total play time is under twelve hours. If it is not, there is nothing there

The four fiends

Maliris — fire resistance and Body Temp. Mustard Bomb kills outright if Heat is already on someone. Steal the Masamune.

Tiamat — fire and wind resistance, and keep everyone off Float; it answers Float with Snort.

Kraken — water resistance, Body Temp and Bright Eyes. Two tentacles. The easiest of the four.

Lich — earth resistance, no Doomsday, and LV5 Death kills anyone whose level is a multiple of five. Check your party’s levels before you walk in.

Before them, Nova Dragon: wind and water resistance, and steal the Grand Armor.

Quina eats extremely well here

• Stilva → Auto-Life
• Behemoth → Angel’s Snack
• Chimera and Kraken → Frost
• Tiamat → Twister
• Maliris → Mustard Bomb
• Lich → LV5 Death
• Ash and Veteran → Doom

Seven, in one dungeon. Auto-Life on its own is worth going out of your way for.

And this is the grinding spot

Behemoth 53,168. Iron Man 42,996. Chimera and Stilva 42,785. Ash 40,329.

Nothing short of a superboss pays better anywhere in the game.

Hades

There is an optional fight behind a rock formation in the ocean room. Win it and the master synthesist opens his shop, which is the only source of several late recipes.

He also carries the Running Shoes, if you never picked a pair up.

Before the door

Past a certain point the fights come one after another with no shop, no re-equip and no way back. Set your party and your abilities first. Save first.

Game Notes

Memoria is the only dungeon in this game built entirely out of places you have already been.

Not literally — you have not stood in these rooms. But the screens are named after things you have done: a recollection, a past, a birth, a world fusion. The game spends forty hours putting a world in front of you and then, at the end, walks you back up through it in the abstract.

It is also, mechanically, the most generous place in the game. The best experience, the best blue magic, three ultimate weapons and a fourth that almost nobody will ever hold. A final dungeon that is worth exploring is a rarer thing than it sounds — most games make the last stretch a corridor.

This one makes it a museum, and then puts a door at the end of it.

Completionist mode. Full spoilers, in play order, with every permanent loss called out before you reach it. 1 entries below are marked where our sources disagree with each other — we have not picked a winner for you.

Where, but not what — and that turns out to be the useful half

Memoria is thirty-five screens and our field data holds ten award rows for it. Set against the published item list that looks like a failure, and for most of this project we have treated it as one: roughly 445 of 822 item awards in this game carry an id computed at runtime, which our reader cannot resolve to a name. It has been the single biggest hole in our data since week one.

This chapter shows what the hole actually is, and it is narrower than we thought.

Six rooms, six awards, six published items, and no extras on either side.

Read the top three rows again. In the three rooms where we cannot name the item, there is exactly one unnamed award, and the publisher names exactly one item. Not two. Not none.

Our reader does not know what these awards are. It knows precisely where they are and how many there are. The runtime-computed-id problem is a naming problem, not a location problem — and a location we can trust is most of what a checklist needs, because the publisher supplies the name.

That reframes a limitation we have been apologising for since the first week. It does not fix it. But three-for-three in the worst-covered block in the game is the cleanest demonstration we are going to get, and it means our award table can still be used as a completeness check against a publisher’s list even where it cannot name a thing.

Two small notes from the same six rows. Our data holds Rune Claws twice and Mace of Zeus twice, each pair 140 bytes apart — the flag-variant pattern we named at Daguerreo, where one award is written once per game state. Publishers list one of each. They are not two chests. And our field files the Mace of Zeus on the Stairs while two publishers put it in Gaia’s Birth, one screen along: zone-name miss number eight, and the reason we never render our own room labels as locations.

The boss run, and a control set we should have looked at sooner

Four bosses in one run, fought back to back, within a thousand hit points of each other — and every source agrees on all four. Then Nova Dragon, in the same dungeon, splits by exactly 10,000.

That is the tightest control set in the game. Whatever the ±10,000 offset is, it is not about the dungeon, the tier, the level or the magnitude: Maliris at 59,497 is clean and Nova Dragon at 64,940 is not, and they are four screens apart.

The lower figure is the one you fight. We want to be plain about that here because we were not plain enough about it four chapters ago. Roughly twenty-five records across the game carry this offset, and it is settled by arithmetic a long way from this dungeon — Plant Brain stores 10,916 against a published 916, and you fight it at around level 7 dealing forty to sixty a hit. 916 is twenty turns. 10,916 is two hundred. Everyone beats Plant Brain in minutes.

So the checklist prints 54,940 for Nova Dragon and we treat our field as raw.

(The boss-guide FAQ’s Tiamat and Lich figures are outliers against three other sources including itself elsewhere, and we are reading them as slips rather than as a third camp.)

Seven blue magics, and nobody lists them together

Our enemy table carries a blue-magic index whose mapping we decoded early and have now confirmed three times against publishers. Applied to this dungeon:

Seven, in one dungeon, including two of the best abilities Quina ever gets. Pandemonium had three and we noted then that no publisher page carried all of them. This is the same gap, twice as wide. The information exists — in bestiary entries, one enemy at a time — and the page where a reader would act on it does not carry it.

This, not Terra, is the grinding spot

We published a claim on the Terra page that Movers were the best experience in the game, corrected it two chapters later, and here is the dungeon that makes the correction obvious: Behemoth alone pays more than twice a Mover formation.

Two oddities in the encounter table worth flagging rather than explaining. Veteran sits among these at level 44 with 6,972 HP — twenty-five levels below its neighbours, in the last dungeon. And the four fiends appear as random encounters as well as bosses, at roughly 22,000–24,000 HP, paying zero experience. We have no account of why and are not going to invent one.

The weapon almost nobody holds

Excalibur II is in the hidden spot left of the final door, and it is there only if your total play time is under twelve hours when you reach that screen.

Not under twelve hours of Memoria. Twelve hours from a new file to the last room of the game — which makes it a deliberate speedrun, planned from the opening, not something a normal playthrough recovers. Our field data holds it as an ordinary chest in an ordinary room; the condition lives in the script around it.

It is the only item in this guide we have listed as missable where the honest advice is that if you are reading this page, you have already missed it.

Hades, and the last shop in the game

Optional, and behind a rock formation in the ocean room — a hidden door in a dungeon most players are hurrying through. Beating him opens the master synthesist’s shop, the only source of several late recipes.

Our data gives his steals as Reflect Ring, Running Shoes, Battle Boots and the Robe of Lords — four slots, all filled, which is unusual. The Running Shoes are worth noting because they have three separate sources across three chapters and a lot of players reach the end without a pair.

Everything that closes

The Portal ends the Nero family sidequest — one publisher flags this as the last opportunity.

The door past it ends everything else. Caves of Narshe puts it plainly: once through, you cannot get back to any part of the dungeon without restarting the level. The Phantom card players — Master, Defense, Strong, Dark and Rare, hidden through the dungeon — are the last Tetra Master games in the game, and they are on the wrong side of it.

Past the door the fights come consecutively, with no shop and no chance to re-equip. Set the party first.

Game Notes

We have to own something on this page, because it happened while writing it.

Going into this chapter we found what looked like a breakthrough on the ±10,000 question: several records in our field sit at exactly 65,535 — the sixteen-bit ceiling — and are published at 55,535, which is 65,535 minus ten thousand. A designer picks 65,535 for a superboss. Nobody picks 55,535. It looked like strong evidence that our high figures were the real ones.

It is the same argument this project made on its first day, published, and retracted within hours — and the retraction is sitting in our own findings document, where we did not look. What killed it then kills it now: the Plant Brain arithmetic. You cannot fight a two-hundred-turn boss at level seven. The low numbers are what the engine uses, whatever the file says.

Worse, four chapters ago we wrote on the Pandemonium page that we had “no way to adjudicate” which side was right, and offered a guess about two rival datamined bestiaries. Both were wrong against our own record: it is adjudicated, and the low figures cannot have come from a rival extraction, because we scanned every affected record end to end and the lower value is not in the file at all. That page has been corrected.

The lesson is not about hit points. It is that a project accumulates a record, and after a few weeks that record is a source — as citable as any publisher and considerably more likely to be about exactly the question in front of you. We built a superlative gate last chapter because we kept contradicting our own pages. This was the same failure one level up: we contradicted our own research, by treating three thousand lines of findings as an archive rather than as something to read.

The fix is boring and we are writing it down so it sticks: before publishing on an open question, re-read what we already concluded about it.