Thunder Plains Towers in Final Fantasy X-2: Calibration, Prizes and the Cave

Updated 2026-10-10

Full spoilers.

The Thunder Plains have ten lightning towers, five in each half. In Chapter 2 an Al Bhed technician asks you to calibrate them. Each tower is a short button game. Do them all and you get the Samurai’s Honor grid. The scores matter more later: in Chapter 5, fiends overrun the towers again, and the chest each tower leaves depends on how well you calibrated it. A perfect score on Tower 10 is a Ribbon.

Chapter 2: calibration

Talk to the Al Bhed by the first tower in the south half, near the Save Sphere on the Guadosalam side, and offer to help. He goes off to the Travel Agency. Each tower is marked on the minimap. Walk up to one and press Cross to start its game.

Every game is 30 commands. Three misses end the run and send you back to the start of that tower. Your score is how many of the 30 you got. Only your best run at each tower is kept, and a failed attempt doesn’t count against you. Accounts differ on whether the towers stay open into Chapter 3 (with the best of Chapters 2 and 3 counting) or close when Chapter 2 ends, so treat Chapter 2 as your one chance and get every tower perfect there. Save before every tower and reload anything short of 30.

Tower	Half	Who	Game
1	South	Rikku	One button prompt in the middle of the screen. Press it.
2	South	Paine	Buttons fall down the screen. Press each one as it lands. It speeds up.
3	South	Yuna	Repeat a sequence from memory: two buttons, then three, then four.
4	South	Rikku	Same as Tower 1, but the prompt jumps around the screen.
5	South	Paine	Falling buttons, faster.
6	North	Yuna	Memory, two to four buttons, with harder buttons.
7	North	Rikku	Two-button combinations in random places, vanishing quickly near the end.
8	North	Paine	Falling buttons, fastest.
9	North	Yuna	Memory, two to five buttons.
10	North	Yuna	Memory, two to six buttons, entered backwards.

Tower 1 is nearest Guadosalam and Tower 9 nearest Macalania. The south half is easier throughout. Early towers use only the face buttons. Later towers add the d-pad and shoulder buttons, and Tower 10 uses everything, triggers included.

Tips:

Rikku’s towers: stay relaxed and press only what you see. A wrong button is as bad as a slow one.
Paine’s towers: watch the bottom of the column, not the top. A wrong press and a button that lands unpressed both count as misses.
Yuna’s towers: the whole sequence must be right. One wrong button is a miss. Say the buttons out loud. For Tower 10, say the sequence and then say it again backwards before you start pressing.

Samurai’s Honor

When you have done the towers, talk to the technician inside the Travel Agency for the Samurai’s Honor garment grid. Accounts disagree on the exact condition. Some say every tower calibrated once. Some say five finished and all ten attempted. Some say all ten done with at least five perfect. Do all ten and get a perfect 30 on at least five, and you meet every version. If you are going for the Ribbon anyway, you will have done far more than that.

What your scores buy in Chapter 5

Each tower’s chest in Chapter 5 depends on your best score there, in five bands:

Tower	0–5	6–14	15–24	25–29	30
1	Ether	Ether x2	Turbo Ether	Turbo Ether x2	Elixir
2	X-Potion	Mega-Potion x2	Elixir	Elixir	Megalixir
3	Mega Phoenix	Mega Phoenix	Elixir	Elixir	Megalixir
4	Power Wrist	Black Belt	Hyper Wrist	Power Gloves	Champion Belt
5	Tarot Card	Hypno Crown	Talisman	Pixie Dust	Regal Crown
6	Yellow Ring	Lightning Gleam	NulShock Ring	Ochre Ring	Electrocutioner
7	Blue Ring	Watery Gleam	NulTide Ring	Cerulean Ring	Short Circuit
8	Red Ring	Fiery Gleam	NulBlaze Ring	Crimson Ring	Freezerburn
9	White Ring	Icy Gleam	NulFrost Ring	Snow Ring	Sublimator
10	Tetra Band	Tetra Gloves	Tetra Guard	Tetra Bracelet	Ribbon

Many printed tables give Tower 5’s lowest and middle prizes as Silver Bracer and Gold Bracer. The chest actually holds a Tarot Card and a Talisman.

The perfect-score prizes are worth the effort. Ribbon blocks almost every status ailment. Champion Belt, Regal Crown and the element-absorbing gold accessories (Electrocutioner, Short Circuit, Freezerburn, Sublimator) are hard to get anywhere else.

Chapter 5: “A Fallen Genius?”

The mission starts when you land. Fiends are feeding on the towers again.

Clear Towers 1 to 9. There is a pack of Rhyos at each tower, five in the south and four in the north. Every fight leaves that tower’s chest.
The plains have their normal chests as well. South: Remedy, X-Potion x2 and an Ochre Ring. North: Budget Grenade x2, Turbo Ether x2 and Sleep Grenade x2.
Tower 10 isn’t on your path. It stands across the water on the west side of the north half. When the other nine are clear, a red arrow on the minimap leads you there, and the boss jumps you on the way in.

Boss: Humbaba

HP	Absorbs	Immune	Steal	Drop
27,772	Lightning	Gravity	Hi-Potion x2 (rare: Ether)	Hi-Potion x4 (rare: NulShock Ring)

It opens with Mighty Guard, which gives it Protect, Shell, Haste and Regen. It casts Mighty Guard again at a third of its HP, about 9,250. Dispel it both times with a White Mage or a Dispel Tonic.
Uppercut hits one character hard and pushes back their next turn. Below a third of its HP it adds Tyrant Tail, which hits the whole party. It also casts Thundara and Thundaga. NulShock Rings cancel the thunder, and anything that adds lightning to your attacks heals it.
It fires Meteor, eight random hits, as it dies. Heal everyone before you land the last blow.
Don’t bother with Reflect. It absorbs its own Thundaga anyway, and Meteor can’t be reflected.

Winning ends the mission and gives the Valiant Lustre grid. The episode isn’t over yet. Turn down the Al Bhed’s first offer to take you across. Open Tower 10’s chest first and heal, then talk to him again. When he mentions a strange hole by the tower, answer “Yep, in the hole.”

Boss: Machina Panzer

Take off anything that adds lightning to your attacks before you go in. In the cave, go east, south, west, south, east, then north to the red arrow. Cid is there, and so is the boss.

	HP	Steal	Drop
Machina Panzer	30,500	Oath Veil	Crystal Bangle
Watcher-A, -R, -S	about 620 each	Potion	Potion (rare: Hi-Potion)

The three Watchers each lock one kind of command. Watcher-A locks your physical attacks, Watcher-R locks healing, and Watcher-S locks everything else. Kill Watcher-R first so you can keep healing. Or flatten all three at once with Darkness from a fast Dark Knight. When the Panzer goes into Hyperdrive, it gives the Watchers Protect and Shell, doubles their HP and heals them fully. Dispel them and keep going.

The Panzer absorbs lightning and can’t be hit by Gravity. Slow works on it. Power, Armor and Mental Break all land. Its attacks:

Gatling Gun: up to 24 small hits.
Sorcery Ray: hits the whole party hard, at half HP and again at a quarter.

Shell softens Sorcery Ray. A Gun Mage’s Mighty Guard and steady Curaga or White Wind carry you through. Steal the Oath Veil before it goes down.

The win ends the Thunder Plains episode, always as Episode Complete. Back on the Celsius, Cid hands you an Al Bhed Primer. Talk to him on the deck, then find him with Brother on the bridge. Both scenes count toward Story Completion.

The New Cave

Once Cid is safe, talk to the Al Bhed tower technician in the north half and he lets you back into the cave. Wear a Charm Bangle. It stops random battles, and that matters for the codes.

How the walls work

The cave has 16 numbered walls. Each opens with a code, which is the sum of two key numbers:

The screen shows the wall you are working on and one key number. Examine the wall to find the other.
Opening a wall shows the next wall in the order. Behind each wall are two chests: one gives you the next key number, and the other is empty.
Write every number down. Later walls reuse old codes, or add two old numbers together.
Some key numbers aren’t on any wall. They are the number of battles you’ve fought or the gil you’ve earned since entering the cave, or since the last wall. With a Charm Bangle and no fights, every one of those is 0.
The numbers change every time you play, so no fixed codes exist. You work them out as you go.

The walls open in this order: 3, 10, 11, 5, 1, 8, 12, 13, 9, 6, 7, 14, 2, 15, 16, 4.

The route

Wall	Getting there	Along the way
3	The first wall, explained by the tutorial	—
10	South along the path, then west and north	Diamond Gloves: go west before you turn north
11	South past the chest ahead	Hyper Wrist, then Mystery Veil north and east at the next junction
5	South, then west past the two-way, then north	Talisman: east before you head west
1	West	—
8	South of 1: west, south, east	Nature’s Lore: east, south, west from the junction south of 1
12	Due south of 8, east at the second junction	—
13	East along the hall from 12	—
9	East from 13, then a long way north	—
6	West, then north	—
7	A short way east	—
14	South-central, between where 12 and 13 were	Corpus Invictus: west, south, east from 7
2	East of where 1 was	—
15	North of where 14 was	—
16	North	Salvation Promised grid on the way
4	The last wall	—

What the cave holds

Treasure	What it is
Diamond Gloves, Hyper Wrist, Mystery Veil, Talisman	Solid accessories
Nature’s Lore	Use Berserker abilities in any dressphere
Corpus Invictus	Teaches Paine’s Full Throttle Break HP Limit
Salvation Promised	Garment grid
Force of Nature	Gold accessory. Adds every element to your attacks, and every element heals the wearer

Force of Nature needs a second clear. Finish the cave, leave, come back and solve it again with the new numbers. On the second run, Force of Nature turns up in the north corridor.