The South Gate

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 disc turns over and you are somebody else.

Zidane’s party is where you left them. This is Dagger and Steiner, on the other side of the continent, trying to get through a checkpoint. It is a short stretch and an easy one, and it exists mostly so that the two of them have to talk.

Take the racket and the pass

At the gate there is a chest on the left with a tennis racket in it. Take it — it is useless now and it becomes a decent weapon later if you feed it to a synthesis shop.

A guard puts a gate pass on the ground rather than handing it to you, which is the sort of small rudeness this game keeps noticing. Pick it up.

There is a chest up a ladder at the station that you cannot reach. You are not missing a trick; come back much later.

Shop

The station sells potions and the usual. It is the last shop for a while and the party you are carrying is two people, one of whom is wearing an entire suit of armour and cannot heal anybody.

The rematch

At the top of the cable line, an old acquaintance is waiting, and it has been upgraded.

The important thing, and no guide quite says it: this one has no weakness. The version you fought on the cargo ship folded to wind. This one does not fold to anything, so stop looking for the trick and just hit it.

What it does have is two staves in its pockets, and they are the only two of their kind you can steal anywhere. Take both before you finish it.

Then down the other side

There is money in a chest past the broken bridge — a decent amount, and eleven different guides put it in six different places, so look around rather than trusting a description.

On the way out, take the left fork through the crop field. There is an Elixir in it and one guide calls it your only chance.

The arches are a different thing

Scattered on the world map there are four stone arches, and the game files them with this area even though you reach them at wildly different times.

They have real things in them — a tent, a potion, a coffee that matters in about thirty hours, two elixirs and a large pile of gil. Almost no walkthrough covers them, because they are not on the way to anywhere.

If you are the sort of player who drives into every corner of the map, they are there. If not, nothing here is required.

Game Notes

This is the shortest chapter in the game and the most structurally interesting thing about it is who is in it.

FFIX splits the party for most of disc 2, and the split is not a gimmick — it is the whole argument. Dagger has spent the game being fetched, carried, kidnapped and rescued. Steiner has spent it chasing. Here they are alone on a mountain railway with nobody to defer to, and the game makes them the playable characters and gives them a boss fight.

Neither of them is good at this. Steiner cannot heal. Dagger cannot hit anything. They have to actually cooperate, which is the first time either has been asked to.

And the black mage they meet is the same design that came off the line in Dali, sent again, still following orders. The game does not say anything about that. It just puts it in front of the princess whose mother built it.

Completionist mode. Full spoilers, in play order, with every permanent loss called out before you reach it. 9 entries below are marked where our sources disagree with each other — we have not picked a winner for you.

Disc 2 opens here, with Dagger and Steiner. Every publisher that labels discs ends disc 1 at Burmecia and starts disc 2 at Summit Station — worth stating, because our area numbering follows the game’s own field order and a reader cross-checking against a disc-numbered guide will hit the seam at this page.

Black Waltz 3 has no weakness this time

Level 9, 1,292 HP, 864 gil, 5 AP. Six publishers agree on the figures.

The elemental profile is where it gets interesting. This fight has no elemental weakness at all — the battle record is flat across all eight elements. The cargo ship fight is weak to wind at 150% and immune to earth.

Game8 publishes both tables and reproduces exactly that contrast. Caves of Narshe publishes Wind-weak and Earth-immune for the rematch, and its database entry for the rematch is the cargo ship record duplicated — same level 7, same 1,128 HP, same stats, with the steal slots blanked. Its own walkthrough repeats the figures inside the Summit Station section. Every other publisher gives the rematch level 9 and 1,292 HP, so the entry is recognisably the wrong fight.

Practically: stop looking for an element. Hit it.

The steals, and where a long-standing confusion comes from

• Steepled Hat — 100%
• Lightning Staff — 25%
• Flame Staff — 6.25%

This is the only place either staff can be stolen. It is also the source of a claim that trips people up in Burmecia: Jegged’s staff page lists the Lightning Staff as stolen from “Black Waltz 3” without saying which fight, and a reader in Burmecia concludes they should already have two. The steal is here, which is after Burmecia.

The gate complex

Bohden Gate. Multina Racket in a chest — six publishers, six descriptions of the same corner. Gate Pass left on the ground by a guard rather than handed over, which is why it gets walked past.

Bohden Station. A Potion in plain sight, which five publishers list and Game8 omits. A shop selling the usual consumables — the last one for a while, with a two-person party. There is also a chest up a ladder you cannot reach: two publishers tell you to ignore it, and it is a card on a later disc.

Summit Station / the Rest Stop. A Phoenix Down — placed bottom-left by two publishers, top-right by a third, “near the entrance” by a fourth. A Kupo Nut, which one publisher makes conditional on having returned the previous one to Gizamaluke’s Grotto. Nazna is the moogle.

Publishers also disagree about what this place is called — Rest Stop, Summit Station, Summit Station Rest Area, or just South Gate — which makes cross-checking lists harder than it should be.

Alexandria Station. 1,610 Gil. Eleven publishers place this chest and give it six homes: on steps, on stairs, after a bridge, in a rickety-bridge offshoot, at Alexandria Station, after the boss. One rounds it to “around 1,600”. The figure in the script is 1,610.

On the way out, take the left fork into the Dali crop field for an Elixir. Five publishers list it and StrategyWiki calls it “your one and only chance”.

The four arches, which almost nobody covers

The game files four world-map gate structures with this area. They are reachable at different points and none is on the way to anything, which is why the published record on them is thin to the point of being a single source.

Treno Arch’s 3,206 gil is the second largest single gil award in the game’s field scripts, after Dali’s 30,000. We could reach exactly one publisher that documents that map, and its listing matches the script item for item including the figure. No walkthrough we checked mentions it at all.

Two things to know about the others:

• The Moccha Coffee is one of the three rare coffees for the observatory sidequest, with Kirman and Burman. One missables FAQ says it becomes unobtainable once you reach Terra. Three publishers spell it three ways — Moocha, Moccha, Mocha.
• Melda Arch has one Potion, not two. Our own extraction showed two; the second is bought from a shop in the same script, not found. The tell is a gil deduction immediately before it.

The Burmecian Arch, and a mis-filing worth naming

The Tent and Hi-Potion at the Burmecian Arch are listed by four publishers as arch items, which is where the scripts put them.

Game8 lists them as Burmecia items — “chest on the left side of the gate” and “chest on the right side of the gate”, as the first two rows of its Burmecia treasure table, with no arch qualifier. The result is that Game8’s Burmecia page shows two Tents. GameFAQs files them under Daines-horse Basin, naming the region rather than the structure, but its prose still points at a Burmecian Arch. Gamer Guides does not cover them at all.

If you are checklisting Burmecia against Game8, you will search a ruined city for two chests that are on a road outside it.

Game Notes

This area is the clearest case in the game of coverage following the critical path rather than the content.

Everything on the route is documented by ten or eleven publishers, right down to arguing about which side of the stairs a chest is on. Step off the route by one screen and the number drops to one. Four arches, ten items between them, a gil award larger than anything in the first two discs — and the published record is a single per-map atlas with no prose.

That is not carelessness either. A walkthrough is a route, and a route does not go to the Treno Arch. But it does mean that “I checked several guides” is not the safety net it feels like: on the main line they corroborate each other, and off it they all have the same blind spot at the same time.