Final Fantasy IX

Learning New Abilities

This section has been put together as the result of many players being confused about how abilities are learned, equipped and used.

Magic Stones

Each character has access to a number of Magic Stones available to them which can be used to activate Abilities. The Abilities become available after a character equips certain weapons, headgear, armbands and armor. Navigate into the “Ability” menu and select the Abilities that you wish to equip.

In the bottom right side of the screen you will see a small charge bar. Once the bar completely fill up the character will no longer need to equip anything in order to access that specific Ability.

The difficulty has to do with knowing which items to equip and when. For example:

1. Do not de-equip weapons or armor if you have not learned strong abilities that are activated with them (Zidane has many)
2. Selecting the “Optimize” option works in many cases, however if will not work well for helping characters learn all of the abilities available to them.

Item number “2” becomes immediately apparent when it comes to learning Summons/Eidolons. The Optimize option will never automatically place the gems/stones into the Accessory slot and so Eiko and Dagger will never naturally learn their summon Abilities without manual intervention.

Make sure to use the Help option (by pressing “Select”) to learn more about each of the abilities and what effect they have in battle.