Treno

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.

You are here to get one item from one man in a tower. Everything else in Treno is optional and most of it is worth doing.

Watch the scenes in the order the game wants

There are seven optional scenes here, and unusually the order matters — one guide sets out a specific sequence and warns that taking them out of order can lock you out of the set.

The sequence is: stay at the entrance for the first, then go west, then down the stairs, then south, then back to the entrance and up the right-hand stairs, then north, and the last one plays when you come back from the tower.

The first of them is not just a scene. Watching it is what makes a man hand over a belt you want.

Throw money in the fountain

Thirteen times, ten gil a throw. You get a coin out of it.

That coin is one of thirteen scattered across the whole game, and a woman by the river gives you something every time you bring her one. The last few rewards are very good indeed. There is another coin here, behind the item shop stall down in the slums.

Nothing tells you any of this. Start now or the hunt is thirty hours of backtracking later.

Down in the slums

There is a chest with one gil in it. Take it anyway, for the same reason anybody does.

There is also a card down there and the second coin. This is the poor half of a city whose other half is auctioning off jewellery, and the game puts the joke chest in the poor half without comment.

Fight the thing in the basement

The weapon shop has an arena under it and it will let one of your characters fight a monster alone.

Do it now. You get a card for it and the offer does not come back — one guide is explicit that a skipped arena fight cannot be restarted. Three more monsters appear here as the game goes on and they get considerably worse.

Then the tower

Go west, along the walkway, past the chest with a dagger in it. The man at the top gives you what you came for and then shows you a way home that is faster and much stranger than the way you came.

Game Notes

Treno is where FFIX stops being coy about what it is about.

Alexandria was a festival. Lindblum was a hunt. Both were cities the game liked. Treno is a city where nobles bid on antiques in a lit room while people sleep on the dock below, and the game walks you through both in the same five minutes without a single line of commentary.

The princess does the walking, which is the point. Dagger has spent nine chapters being told she is being protected. Here she is out of the castle, in a city her own class runs, with a knight who believes in all of it and a thief’s brother who does not, and the game lets her look at it.

It is also the first place with a proper sidequest economy — coins, an arena, an auction — and all three are things you buy into rather than find. Treno’s idea of a reward is that you can pay for it.

Completionist mode. Full spoilers, in play order, with every permanent loss called out before you reach it. 7 entries below are marked where our sources disagree with each other — we have not picked a winner for you.

Two things here are genuinely one-shot: the arena fight, which one publisher states cannot be re-initiated once skipped, and the seven Active Time Events, which one publisher says must be watched in a specific order.

Everything else in Treno comes back. The city is visited three times.

The Stellazzio coins start here

Thirteen coins across the whole game, handed to Queen Stella by the river for an alternating ladder of gil and equipment:

Two publishers print this ladder identically. A third prints running totals — “8,000 Gil, Phoenix Pinion and Blood Sword” for five coins — which is the same arithmetic in a form that looks like a contradiction.

The Hammer at the end synthesises into the best armour in the game for Steiner, which is the actual reason to care about any of this.

Two coins are obtainable on this visit. Gemini, from throwing 10 gil into the left fountain thirteen times — seven publishers agree on thirteen. And Taurus, behind the item shop stall in the slums. Aries was in Dali’s windmill and Cancer was in Burmecia; the rest are spread across discs 3 and 4.

Two open disagreements in the coin list worth carrying: Leo is “near the Neptune Statue” in Alexandria Castle by one publisher and “Alexandria Castle Harbor” by another; Ophiuchus appears at Quan’s Dwelling only after all the others by one account, with no unlock condition stated by the other.

A correction of our own

The game’s Queen’s House script opens with thirteen consecutive key-item references and then lists seven named items — Phoenix Pinion, Blood Sword, Elixir, Black Belt, Rosetta Ring, Robe of Lords, Hammer.

We first recorded that seven-item block as an auction pool. It is not. It is exactly Stella’s seven non-gil rewards, in ladder order, and no publisher lists any of the seven as an auction lot. The auction is a different building.

The thirteen key-item ids are the coins themselves, which is the first block of the key-item table we have been able to name.

The arena, and what it costs to skip

The weapon shop has a challenge arena. One character fights alone. Four monsters across the game, one offered per stage:

Jegged is explicit: a missed arena fight cannot be re-initiated. So Griffin is a real missable and it is the only one on this visit that any publisher flags as unrecoverable.

Three notes on the later fights, since the disagreements are already in print:

• Publishers do not agree on when Catoblepas and Amdusias unlock — during the card tournament, before the airship, after the airship. One lists them as alternatives rather than a sequence.
• The Behemoth reward is a Circlet by five English publishers and a Blood Sword in one Japanese source. We cannot settle whether that is an error or a regional difference.
• One publisher says the arena Behemoth gives no experience, gil or items at all, while a database elsewhere prints 53,168 experience against the same name — that figure belongs to the field version, and neither page says so.

The 15,000 gil for Catoblepas is the figure we used to validate our gil decoding against an independent source, so it is unusually well attested.

Everything else, by room

The entrance. The fountain, for the Gemini coin.

The west walkway. Mythril Dagger in a chest on the approach to the tower. Six publishers place it six ways — far left at the tower, left of the entrance, by the locked tower, along the walkway, past the bridge by a girl and her dog. A per-map atlas puts it on its own screen rather than the tower interior, which reconciles most of them.

The synthesis shop. The Power Belt, from the four-armed man who spent Dagger’s money on it, after the first Active Time Event. Five publishers give four different rooms: the Bishop’s House, outside the synthesis shop, inside the synthesis shop, the Knight’s House, a café. The first three are almost certainly one screen under three names.

The Auction House. 2,225 Gil in a hidden cache by a window — left side by two publishers, right by a third, “west of” by a fourth.

The Queen’s House. An Ether. Two publishers list it; two of the largest omit it entirely. It is in the script.

The slums. A Yeti Card, 1 Gil, and the Taurus coin, all on the same screen. The one gil is the smallest award in the game’s field scripts and eight publishers list it, which is the correct amount of attention for a joke.

Doctor Tot’s tower. Supersoft, and the route home that opens the next area.

The Active Time Events, in order

Treno Tradition → Pursuit → Confusion → Ambition → Meeting Place → Unexpected Visitor → Crime and Punishment.

Four publishers print the same seven in the same sequence, and one states they should be watched in that order to avoid losing the set. The first gates the Power Belt. The last fires on returning from the tower, and one guide notes you are forced into the sixth at that point if you have not seen it.

The auction house itself

Nothing here is bought on this visit — the building is a story beat. It is worth knowing what the disagreements look like before you come back:

• Nineteen lots by one publisher, eighteen by two others.
• Six lots sold only once by one, two by another, about eleven under a third scheme.
• Prices that do not reconcile at all — one publisher’s Ribbon starts at 12,400, another’s ranges from 37,200 to 95,000. These are probably starting bid versus winning range, and no publisher says which.

One lone-source warning

A single missables FAQ states that the weapon shop stock — Silver Gloves, Iron Helm, Air Racket, Chain Mail, Bandana, Chain Plate, Leather Plate — becomes unavailable after this visit. No other publisher mentions it and we cannot check shop stock from the field scripts.

We flag it rather than endorse it. If you want any of those, buying now costs you gil and nothing else.

Game Notes

The useful thing about Treno is how the disagreements cluster.

On the arena — numbers, rewards, timing — publishers differ constantly, because the arena spans four discs and every guide documents it from wherever its chapter happens to sit. On the coins, the two publishers who treat the sidequest as its own page agree item for item, and the one that folds it into a walkthrough chapter prints running totals that read as a third answer.

The pattern by now is familiar: content that fits inside one chapter gets corroborated; content that spans chapters gets improvised. The auction, the arena, the coins and the Kupo Nut chain are all cross-disc systems, and all four are where the record falls apart.

Our own error this chapter is the same shape from the other direction. We had a block of seven items appearing twice in a script and filed it as “an auction pool” because the Auction House is the famous thing in Treno. It is Stella’s reward ladder, in her own building, in ladder order — and the wrong label then travelled into our next piece of research before the script caught it.