Alexandria and the Prima Vista

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.

Most games spend their first hour teaching you how to fight. This one spends it teaching you how to look at things.

Search the dark room before you light it

You wake up in the cargo hold of a theatre ship with a candle in the middle of the floor. Lighting it starts the story. There is gil against one wall and a Potion against the other, and once the scene begins you do not come back for them.

That is the whole game in ninety seconds: the thing you are obviously meant to do is also the thing that closes the door behind you.

The fight you cannot lose

A man in a mask interrupts. You are not supposed to win this and you cannot actually lose it — the story moves on regardless, and a knocked-out party costs you nothing at all.

Which means it is free. Steal from him until he has nothing left. One of the three things he is carrying is a dagger that is a straight upgrade on what you are holding, and you will be using it for hours.

Alexandria rewards the slow

Then the game lets you out into a town during a festival, and this is where first-time players lose the most.

Alexandria is small and almost nothing in it is signposted. There is money in the grass. There are cards in barrels, in dressers, in the corner of a bar. The church has a ladder, and the ladder has a rope at the top, and pulling it does something. A man by the docks has lost his cat, and the cat is standing back where you came in.

None of this is required. All of it is gone when the town is.

Go everywhere. Climb everything. Talk to people twice — this game has a habit of putting the real answer in a second conversation, and it does it here more than once.

The ticket does not work

You will eventually reach the booth, and the ticket you are carrying is a fake. The man behind the counter feels bad about it and hands over some cards instead. That is the end of the ticket as a plot device — nothing later depends on it — so do your searching before you go and talk to him.

Get a hundred

The play itself asks you to hit buttons in time. There is a score, it is counted in nobles, and you should care about it more than the game lets on.

Every input you get right and get quickly is worth double. Every mistake costs ten. You can retry as many times as you want and the game keeps whichever attempt you did last, so a perfect hundred is a question of patience, not reflexes.

Get the hundred. Then, while you are walking a knight around the castle afterwards, go and find the Queen and talk to her. The second half of that is the part people miss, and what she gives you exists in single digits in the entire game.

Game Notes

The Prima Vista is a stage that flies, and FFIX opens by putting on a play inside a play for an audience that includes at least three people who are lying about why they are there.

It is a remarkable piece of confidence. The game’s actual protagonist is backstage in costume. The princess is in the audience and is not going to stay there. The knight is chasing people through his own castle and losing. And the scene everyone remembers is a sword fight that is not real, scored on a minigame, watched by a crowd that thinks it is watching Lord Avon.

Then it sets the ship on fire and drops it into a forest.

What is easy to miss on a first run is how much of the next forty hours is already here. Not plot — posture. A game that will keep asking whether people are what they are dressed as opens with a troupe of thieves in costume, performing a play about a kidnapping, while committing one.

Completionist mode. Full spoilers, in play order, with every permanent loss called out before you reach it. 12 entries below are marked where our sources disagree with each other — we have not picked a winner for you.

Two things in this stretch are gone forever, and neither of them is an item sitting in a chest. Both are rewards for finishing something, and both have a second step that is easy to skip.

The only two permanent losses

The Moonstone. Score a hundred nobles in the sword fight, then — as Steiner, afterwards, walking the castle — go and find Queen Brahne and speak to her. The score alone does nothing. There are four Moonstones in the entire game and this is the first.

The Elixir. Find all eight of the other Knights of Pluto, then talk to Breireicht on the west tower stairs, then keep talking to him. He does not hand it over on the first conversation, and a lot of people leave after one.

Everything else here is a consumable you can buy within the hour. What you lose by skipping it is the treasure count, not the item.

Why the knight count looks wrong

One guide says eight knights, two say nine. Both are correct and neither says so: Steiner is the first of nine, so there are eight others to go and find. Dojebon is the one that costs people time — he walks a circuit around a walkway, and chasing him does not work. Wait on the second floor on the right and let him come down into you.

The figures published for this stretch are wrong

This is worth being precise about, because it is not a small discrepancy.

The man in the mask is level 1 with 10,188 HP. Published figures give 188 and 160, and one guide puts him at level 10. The three Steiner fights are 10,169, 10,167 and 10,162 HP in that order. Every guide we checked publishes some subset of 169, 167, 165 and 162 — and two of them attach the right numbers to the wrong fights.

None of it changes how you play: all four are scripted and none can be won. It matters because the same guides are the ones telling you what you can steal.

The steal rates, which do change how you play

FFIX gives every enemy four steal slots, and the chance attached to each slot is the same for every enemy in the game. First slot always. Second slot one time in four. Third slot one in sixteen. Fourth one in two hundred and fifty-six.

So:

• The Mage Masher off the masked man is the third slot — 6.25%, not the 6% usually printed, and it sits behind a Potion and a Wrist.
• Steiner’s Leather Hat is 100% and his Silk Shirt is 25%. The figures of 70% and 6% in circulation for this pair are not right.

That last one is not a typo in one guide. It comes from a description of how stealing works that treats the common slot as “whatever is left over” and then divides the remainder — which produces numbers that look plausible and are not the game’s.

Steal from Steiner in the first fight or not at all. The second and third have no steal list whatsoever.

Where the guides disagree about what is even here

Four pickups are missing from one of the most widely used FFIX walkthroughs, and if you are checklisting against it you will finish this area thinking you are complete:

• the Remedy near the weapon shop
• the Bomb Card from Tom by the docks, after you return his kitten
• the Phoenix Down in the guard house
• 3 Gil upstairs in Ilia’s house

The last one is settled by arithmetic rather than opinion. One source gives the total gil for the chapter as 341. Add up every individual pickup and you get 341 only if the 3 Gil is included; without it you are three short.

Smaller disagreements, none of which cost you anything if you simply search everywhere: whether North Street holds one Potion or two, whether the steeple holds one Potion and one Tent or two of each, and whether 63 gil is in a chimney on the roofs or in the house beside the chapel.

The jump rope is not missable, and is a bit

Two guides file the jump rope under permanent losses. Two others say plainly that it comes back. Both are describing something real.

The rope returns from disc 3 in the Alexandria church, playable with Vivi or Eiko, and the cards and key item with it. What is genuinely tied to disc one is a single Mognet letter that appears once you clear fifty jumps — and even that is hedged by the source that raises it.

If you want the rewards, do it now because it is convenient. Not because you have to.

Everything else, in order

Cargo room. 47 gil on the left wall, a Potion on the right, both before you light the candle. One guide claims a third pickup by the barrel; three others describe two.

Main Street. Zombie Card near the camera, Potion by the statue, Lizard Man Card against the back wall behind it, Sahagin Card in the rear doorway.

Grandma’s house. 9 gil by the bed, a Potion by the table, Fang Card in the dresser upstairs.

North Street. Potion against the left wall, 33 gil in the right-hand grass, Goblin Card in the left.

The tavern. Flan Card in the barrel bottom-left, 27 gil by the stairs, Potion in the bottom-right barrel.

Shops. 38 gil on the item shop floor, an Ether along the synthesis shop’s back wall, the Remedy somewhere around the weapon shop.

Town square. Phoenix Pinion by the cart. Then the ticket booth, and three cards for the forged ticket.

Ilia’s house. Eye Drops by the stove, 3 gil upstairs.

The steeple. Potion and Tent by the entrances. Climb the ladder and pull the rope for three more cards. Kupo is here, and is the only save point in the town — take his letter for Monty, because Monty is in the next area and the next area does not stay open.

The rooftops. 29, 63 and 92 gil in the chimneys.

The castle. Phoenix Down at the foot of the bed in Blutzen and Kohel’s room, another in the guard house, then the knights, the Elixir and the Moonstone.

The escape. In the engine room, turn the valve wheel left for a Phoenix Down to the right of the engine, then back right for a Phoenix Pinion behind it.

Game Notes

The most interesting thing about this area is not in it. It is what the numbers say about the guides.

Six or seven substantial FFIX walkthroughs cover this stretch, and they were plainly not written from the same place. Their boss HP figures form a small spread around a true value none of them quite states. Four separate pickups are missing from one of the best-known of them. Two guides call the jump rope missable and two call it recoverable, and both are half right.

None of that is carelessness. It is what happens when a game is twenty-five years old and every guide has been partly written from the ones before it. The errors are inherited, not invented — which is why the same wrong steal percentages turn up in several places at once, all of them downstream of one description of a formula.

It is also why this guide is going to be tediously specific about where a number came from.