Does The Tower of Valni "Ruin Fun?"

[@Dunco64]

I'm in the "if you don't like it just don't use it" camp. When i was a kid playing these games i used it a lot and i think it enhanced my experience, especially on hard mode and i have fond memories of making that little wall of 3 tank units to chip away with the weaklings behind.

[@coldeed]

2:30 False. You can enter the tower and retreat to reroll enemies and loot. You can easily break the games economy. It really doesnt matter. If your not horrible the game gives you so many strong ready to roll units, gold and stat boosters that you really never need to use it to trivialize the game. The greater benefit is it gives you more to do. People complain about the game being short when they ignore it has 18 extra maps of content between tower and ruins. Sure plenty are recycled, but that doesnt really bother me. Most of the time I don't really bother running tower just like I dont bother abusing arena. Only times I would is if I want to say get a trainee to t1 for free or throw some levels on a dogshit unit like Marissa.

[@setythewindsage6576]

I think nothing is ever wrong with the option it make your runs easier, I barely use the tower unless I am trying to catch up someone or need to take someone off the bench for an iron man, but nothing wrong with the option. Two things to mention though that you didn’t is one, when the tower unlocks you need to beat chapters to unlock the higher floors, not relevant to the specifc video but you can’t unlock the higher floors right away. And two you can in theory weapon rank and support grind here to, which sometimes I do the latter so I don’t have to do the support grind in main story chapters. Good video with good point I generally agree with. This is just my take and some little extra things of note.

[@MythrilZenith]

I did mention that you only unlock one floor per chapter but I skimmed past that part so fast it's understandable if that got missed. Floor 1 was really the main focus and culprit anyway. If they made floor 1 really easy but less rewarding, and made people have to play into deeper chapters to make a profit or get unique weapons, then that would at least be a more balanced grinding experience, instead of having both all the best loot AND the best exp rates from floor 1.

[@PH_777]

Personally i just make it so people that go there are cursed for the rest of the game.

[@happygol-lucky5938]

Infinite Grind Potential is simultaneously terrible and great for game balance: You can, in theory, break the game with it at any level of skilled play, but a player with low skill or low luck growths can also use it to catch up low-level player units in the event you have lost a lot of units in an ironman run (assuming you are ironmanning in the first place) or you ended up recruiting Amelia and wanted to use her because, why wouldn't you? General go brrrt. I think that the tower, in that regard, is better than something like, say, Awakening's Infinite Grind Potential due to the high early-game cost of the Reeking Boxes and the way that Reeking Boxes scale with the highest unit in the player's army. Valni is easy to use and catch up with, or break the game with. Awakening, especially on Lunatic, is incredibly easy to snowball a singular unit which will make THAT unit incredibly powerful...but it WILL make it harder to level up units without using that unit as a pair-up pack mule.

[@MythrilZenith]

And either way I would rather have it built into the game from the start intentionally than have it added in as dlc.

[@clairevoyantarachnea]

While there's something to be said for a more curated game experience and the somewhat paradoxical trend of having somewhat limited options usually enabling more creativity, not less, I am generally in favor of video games offering options to enable a wide range of strategies, playstyles, and skill levels. The tower of valni may not be perfectly implemented, but it offers the option for players (especially new players) to tailor their difficulty with the game and to more easily engage with elements of the game beyond finishing the main story missions- things such as working on support conversations or cultivating growth units to get satisfaction from their level ups. Though I think it could have been interesting if there was a harder difficulty setting in the game where the tower of valni and skirmish maps were either disabled until the postgame, or if the "retreat" option was no longer available for those elements in that difficulty.

[@brightht2324]

At the core, no? It's something that can be helpful. I've done a couple Ironman runs and initially I wasn't going to use the Tower or the Arena. However, bad luck, lackluster levels, bad planning, things like that, near the end of the game I lost most of my good units. So I could use the Tower of Valni to train up the remaining units that I had benched or I could restart. I chose to use the Tower. The run somehow finished even though the Pegasus Knights died first map. Even though the unit grinding wasn't that fun, it let me finish the run which was fun. Then again, I remember using the Tower when I first started playing and that was the only way that I was able to beat the game. Sidenote, it's funny that everyone talks about the Tower of Valni in Sacred Stone but no one really talks about Gaiden\Echoes where it's pretty much required to grind.

[@DarkWorldQ8]

I definitely agree with "if you don't like, then don't use it". I like the option to grind a bit in the tower or arena to make make some units better, but I don't like to max my units and make the game a pushover. In the past I would max my units in the first arena they come across, but, I no longer do this.

[@dominicjannazo7144]

The take i want to hear is what do people think about Creature Campaign? Is fighting a bunch of monsters fun for people. Having recently played every CC map, the only things i found interesting were reused fe6 map gimmicks, and the one extra overworld map you can only see in a skirmish. The lack of extra objectives makes the maps all blend together, and most of the recruitable bonus characters are just an extra bundle of stats. Except queen died-in-a-cutscene, its interesting that she's playable at all.

[@MythrilZenith]

I found the Lagdou Ruins to be an interesting challenge when done on-cartridge, with no save states or rng manipulation or the like, but grinding multiple times for all the bonus characters stops being fun in itself and just becomes a completionist checklist.

[@xenofes2]

I'm fine with optional grinding being available for people that want it, I just struggle when the game is designed with grinding in mind. Revelation for example, provides very little money and a lot of underleveled units, plus frequent difficulty jumps, so the game clearly expects you to do some grinding. Final Fantasy Tactics is worse, essentially requiring massive amounts of grinding just to try to play normally, as soon as the third or fourth required battle. I don't want to deal with that because grinding for grinding's sake is just boring.

[@MagikarpPower]

SS feels designed with grinding in mind, or maybe that's because my units got stat screwed as well... the respawning encounters are also my least favorite parts of Sov. it should be optional

[@marcoasturias8520]

It's always the tower of valni and never the Ruins of lagdu or whatever it's called

[@MythrilZenith]

Lagdou Ruins are a true endgame challenge that doesn't unlock until the second to last chapter in the game. It effectively becomes a postgame dungeon more like Thabes in Echoes or the endgame paralogues in Awakening. I have fundamentally no issue with Lagdou, it comes off as more truly optional content than Valni which feels a lot more like just a training ground until you get to the top floor with the lasers.

[@maverick5169]

I love the idea of a dungeon rewarding you with better tools if you beat them, but I think that the Tower of Valdi doesn't have the best execution, and that comes mostly from GBA FE lacking the features of other games. Picture this: I am playing Conquest and there is a dungeon with a powerful boss that gives me a point-blank scroll. Many people would recommend trying the dungeon out to boost the effectiveness of any bow unit, like Mozu or Niles ect. SS not only lacks that but the game is so easy that unless I wanna quickly get out of Recruit and Pupil for the trainees, I don't feel compelled to do the dungeon. Cool I am getting Ismaire in the postgame, who cares? Echoes does this fairly well, dungeons give you boosting fountains, new fancy weapons and sometimes gold coins, probably the best excecution of the concept in the series. And then Engage has the tower of trials that gives... Uh... Orbs to power up the emblem weapons. Uh, cool, can you give me materials for normal weapons instead? Or a scroll skill? Or maybe the npcs that somehow don't join you like Celine's mother. I could solo the lv50 trial with Ike!Jade, I really don't need the rewards. There is a SRPG that really excels in making dungeons tho, Tactics Ogre Reborn. First of all, the game has a level cap system so you can never destroy the difficulty by being 10 levels above everyone. In the second chapter you unlock this forest which has classes that you couldn't normally recruit. You can tame dragons, gryphons and cockatrices which are super bulky units with good status moves or fairies which have good support skills, you can get materials that you need for crafting some of the best weapons and you can recruit zombie units, which flat out cannot die even after being knocked out and will respawn in 3 turns. Then in the 4th chapter you unlock: 1: six dungeons with plenty of stat boosting items, recipies for crafting and a brand new class for some story characters. 2: A dungeon that allows you to recruit the lizard/lamia version of casters, which is currently a top pick due to its insane skills, and liches who are the top generic mages. Not only that but you can get the items you use to reclass some character, including your protagonist, into a unique class 3: A super long dungeon with 110 floors or so, there you can recruit necromancers, farm the top equipment, get some really busted spells and some other fun stuff regarding the undead. Even the postgame has its own unique dungeons, this time with a more holy flavour to it. In short, dungeons should give valuable tools for the player without destroying the levelling curve. Good weapons, secret characters, things like that.

[@MythrilZenith]

Yeah, if the game is developed around it then you can have a bunch of cool side stuff and really flesh out the "rpg" side of things, but Fire Emblem doesn't tend to have nearly as much variety so it usually ends at exp. Extra incentive to "finish this once then stop" would be preferable imo and make dungeons feel more like how FE treats paralogues.

[@intensellylit4100]

If "fun" is so easy to ruin, maybe it's not worth all that much!

[@MythrilZenith]

Thanks for commenting to help the video despite not watching it!

[@intensellylit4100]

@@MythrilZenith Yeah, no problem, man! Really though, my comment was just a dumb joke.