Oeilvert

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.

Two things about this place before you go in.

Magic does not work. White, Black, Summon, Sword Magic and Blue Magic are all sealed. Vivi and Quina have nothing to do here. Send fighters.

You can never come back. Once you take the Gulug Stone the ruin closes for good and anything you left is gone.

Buy from Stiltzkin first

He is in the moogle room with a Hi-Potion, an Emerald and an Elixir for 888 gil — and he leaves partway through the dungeon. Go and find him before you start solving anything.

Buy a Green Beret on the way in

Mimoza runs a shop outside. The Green Beret teaches Clear Headed, and Ark’s Propeller Wind confuses your whole party. Several guides call skipping this the chapter’s biggest mistake after the party split.

She also gives you a letter for Mooel, inside.

The chests

• Remedy and Rising Sun in the entrance hall
• Elixir behind the orb that changes colour
• Shield Armor and Diamond Sword in the hologram room
• Power Vest and Feather Boots in the ship room
• Gaia Gear in the moogle room, in the far corner

That is all eight. Nobody lists a ninth.

Epitaph — carry Softs

There is an enemy here that casts Mirror, which copies one of your party. If you do not kill the copy within about a turn, the real character dies.

Throwing a Soft at Epitaph destroys it instantly, before it can do anything. Carry some.

If Quina somehow came along, eating one teaches Angel’s Snack.

Ark

20,002 HP.

Steal the Holy Lance. It is Freya’s best weapon for a long stretch and this is the only place in the game it exists. Also worth taking: an Elixir and a Power Vest.

With magic sealed, healing is items and Freya’s Reis’s Wind, which still works. Watch for Photon, which drops somebody to 1 HP.

It drops a Pumice Piece, which is part of the summon named after it.

Game Notes

Oeilvert is a dungeon made of exhibits, and it is the only one in the game.

Everywhere else you have been is a place people live in or a place something is guarding. This is a building whose entire purpose is to explain things — displays of ships and stars, a room of stone faces that talk at you, machines that light up and describe what they are showing.

None of it is a puzzle in the ordinary sense. The puzzles are almost incidental: touch an orb, climb some stairs. What the ruin is actually doing is handing you information, patiently, in whatever order you choose to walk through it.

The game has spent thirty hours telling you things through moogle letters and paintings on a wall. Here it simply sits you down.

And then, because this is a dungeon after all, it locks the door behind you on the way out.

Completionist mode. Full spoilers, in play order, with every permanent loss called out before you reach it. 3 entries below are marked where our sources disagree with each other — we have not picked a winner for you.

Ark is a clean twenty-thousand, and that matters

20,002 HP at level 38. Five publishers, no dissent, nobody printing 10,002.

We checked specifically, and the reason is next door: Valia Pira at the Desert Palace is a textbook +10,000 case, with five publishers at 12,119 and one — the same one as always — at our stored 22,119.

So this chapter contains, simultaneously, a twelve-thousand boss that carries the offset and a twenty-thousand boss that does not. Magnitude is not the selector, which was the last plausible simple theory standing.

Tally so far. Carriers: Zaghnol, Deathguise, Lani, Armodullahan, Valia Pira. Clean: Hilgigars 8,106, Soulcage 9,765, Ark 20,002, and every ordinary encounter checked. Scarlet Hair still disputed four ways.

Still no discriminator. Still playtest entry one.

Key item 277 is the Gulug Stone

Our id run through this stretch of the key-item table now reads:

Eight publishers name the Gulug Stone, it is the only key item in Oeilvert, and taking it is the entire reason the party came. It cannot be missed — the story does not move until you have it, and Kuja takes it off you shortly afterwards.

This one did not need the count-and-location technique. There is one key item in a one-key-item dungeon, and eight sources say what it is.

Sixth zone-name miss, and this one is a monster

Our field layer calls the screen where the Gulug Stone is awarded the “Tombstone”.

No publisher describes a tombstone, grave or memorial anywhere in Oeilvert. The stone is taken from a device at the end of the ruin, after the boss, in the chamber with the lift.

What the ruin does contain is a random encounter called Epitaph — which is literally the word for an inscription on a gravestone. Our label has, in all likelihood, been generated from an enemy that spawns on that screen rather than from anything in it.

After Town Walls, Corridor, Brahne’s fleet, the fishing area and Theatre Avenue, that is six. The standing decision has more than earned itself: our zone names never render as locations.

This one is instructive about the failure mode, though. It is not random. It is a plausible word, correctly associated with something genuinely on that screen, and attached to the wrong thing — the same shape as the Quan’s Dwelling “fishing area”, which named a real dive spot and hung the wrong item on it.

The item list is unanimous and our count is right

All eight chests, confirmed by seven publishers with no dissent and nobody listing a ninth: Remedy and Rising Sun in the hall; Elixir behind the colour-changing orb; Shield Armor and Diamond Sword in the hologram room; Power Vest and Feather Boots in the ship room; Gaia Gear past the moogle.

The only disagreement is how many rooms the ruin is carved into — some guides separate the Elixir’s chamber from the hologram room, some merge them, which is also why our own layer groups three items under one label. Nobody disagrees about which chest holds what.

Stiltzkin leaves halfway through

Hi-Potion, Emerald, Elixir for 888 gil — his sixth stop, in the moogle room.

He disappears partway through the dungeon, one publisher states explicitly, and Oeilvert never reopens. So this is the only stop on his route where the window closes inside the area rather than when you leave it.

Two publishers flag it on dedicated missables pages. Buy before you solve anything.

Ark’s elements are a four-way mess, and we are not resolving it

Our field reads null earth, weak wind — the same mask Valia Pira carries, which made us suspicious enough to check whether it means anything.

It does. Eighteen distinct records in the game share that exact mask, so it is a recurring pattern rather than a default — and one of the eighteen is Zemzelett, whose earth immunity and wind weakness two publishers confirmed independently back at the Black Mage Village.

So our reader handles this mask correctly where it has been checkable, and the corpus here has no majority at all. We state our read, state the four-way split, and assert nothing.

What is not in dispute: steal Elixir, Power Vest and Holy Lance, unanimous across seven publishers. The Holy Lance is the one that matters — Freya’s, and this fight is the only source in the game.

And the Pumice Piece is a real drop, confirmed by six publishers, not a misattribution. Pumice Pieces assemble into the item that teaches the summon Ark. The boss drops a piece of itself, which is either elegant or a joke and is probably both. Three other sources exist later, so it is not unique.

Two Ogres, and three publishers who cannot agree

Our field gives 3,727 at level 32 here and 3,300 at level 29 at the Desert Palace. Game8 says precisely the reverse. No fourth source exists to break it.

This is the fifth name in the game covering two records — after Zaghnol, Skeleton, Mistodon and Beatrix — and the first where publishers disagree about which record goes where rather than about whether there are two.

Filed as disputed with our figures stated and the contradiction named.

Epitaph is worth knowing about

Zero experience and zero gil on the record we read, which is usually a marker for something unusual, and it is: Epitaph casts Mirror, which spawns a copy of one of your party. Fail to kill the copy within roughly a turn and the real character dies.

Throwing a Soft at Epitaph destroys it outright before it can act. Four publishers give the trick.

One publisher describes farming it by letting it cast Mirror three times before finishing it, for a number no other source repeats. We are not carrying the number.

Quina can eat one for Angel’s Snack — which is awkward, because Quina is the character with the least reason to be in this dungeon.

The magic seal, precisely

White Magic, Black Magic, Summon, Sword Magic and Blue Magic, all sealed — one wiki enumerates the five commands and three walkthroughs describe the effect.

Freya’s Reis’s Wind still works, because it is a Dragon ability rather than one of the five sealed command types. That makes her the party’s healer here and is the reason guides converge on her, Steiner and Amarant behind the mandatory Zidane.

The party split itself is free and, per every publisher that addresses it, has no lasting consequence. The only real decision is which half gets the mages, and the answer is the Desert Palace.

One-time, and everything in it is missable

Three publishers classify Oeilvert as visit-once. One adds the mechanism — an Iifa root blocks the entrance afterwards — which is single-sourced but uncontradicted.

So the chests, Stiltzkin’s bundle, the Mognet delivery and any Blue Magic eaten here are all permanently missable, and none of them is flagged as such by most guides, because the area is mandatory and “missable” gets reserved for optional content.

No ATEs, confirmed the same way as the Desert Palace: two purpose-built ATE catalogues list nothing between Lindblum and Bran Bal.

Game Notes

This area and the one beside it make a nice pair for anyone wondering what a data layer is actually for.

At the Desert Palace, our figure for the boss was wrong and five publishers were right, and the only reason we knew was that a sixth publisher agreed with us. At Oeilvert, our figure for the boss was right and the corpus had no opinion at all about its elements.

Neither outcome was predictable in advance. What made both of them readable was having two records of the same thing, built by completely different methods, and the discipline to ask what would produce both rather than which one to believe.

Thirty-one areas in, that is the only technique in this project that has never once let us down — and it is not a technique for reading game files. It is just what you do when you have two witnesses.