Sorry sir, you are not allowed to enjoy a feature of SwSh on these boards, you will have to come with me quietly
to be quite honest my impression is often the opposite when you post :P
Not everyone who has problems with SwSh is just part of a hive mind, you know!
... okay, but in more seriousness, I admittedly
was responding pretty defensively there - I was wrongly anticipating a different kind of response and sort of expected you not to take the criticism seriously
(even specifically because I'm not the target audience or by labeling it just a nitpick by people looking for faults where there were none - it's probably pretty easy to tell that those were what I had as I was writing)... buuut actually you didn't do that at all and you had a much better response. I sort of feel like a jerk now for judging you based on my first impression. OTL
I'm sorry for my tone in that message;;
In any case, I'll try to give a more serious explanation this time around, not for the sake of argument but just because I do think battle facilities are an interesting discussion topic, and I'd rather end it on a note that invites more conversation than I did before!
What's wrong with SwSh's battle tower? It's by far my favourite iteration of the concept and the one time I've actually enjoyed playing it.
Huh, I'm happy to hear you enjoy it!
I'd actually be curious to hear you talk about your experience with it if you're willing - I don't think I've ever heard anyone say that, so now I'm interested in your take!!
But yeah, the main issues I personally have with it are...
Okay, so first to recap what I said in the post I linked, because I realize it was very long and only a short segment in the middle was actually relevant
(my fault for not having made a better ramble on it by now): up until now, the Battle Tower has been getting better and better every time it was introduced. Nothing to do with SwSh so far, but here's just a brief history on how it's changed over the years:
- Crystal's Tower was a simple system with ten level-based sets, and you were just going for a streak of seven at a time.
- Ruby and Sapphire streamlined it a bit and had a standardized level system, and Emerald went further and introduced BP and a more user-friendly reward system (previously, it was just random items for every streak - generally Vitamins, which aren't worth seven battles). In addition, every game starting in Emerald has some form of single-player-accessible Multi Battle mode, generally all in a different way. Emerald also introduced Battle Videos.
- Generation IV in particular made a very nice QOL change by making it possible to enter Pokémon of any level and just have them scaled down to 50 (while previous Towers forced you to enter different courses for different levels if you accidentally overleveled, and your team still had to be relatively even). Platinum also made it possible to share Battle Videos.
- Black and White divided the Normal and Super Modes, which was actually a change I really liked because Normal Mode could be a sort of "tutorial" mode that was pretty feasible even with an unoptimized, non-EVed in-game team but still established the battle facility rules well enough... and then once you got to the "real" battles of Super Mode, you could jump right into serious battles no matter what your streak was (they still escalated in difficulty, but you were done facing random NFEs), whereas previous Generations had to incorporate both the "easy mode" and the "serious mode" into every single streak; incidentally, while the Subway Bosses didn't do much with this, BW did set the precedent for every battle mode having a different boss (with dedicated teams), and subsequent games continued this to a much better effect, with properly dedicated teams for the modes
well actually the Chatelaines also had some really weird teams but-- okay should I just put this in the Gen VII section.
- X and Y made some
major strides forward in QOL (incidentally, while I've gone back and played the older Towers since, the Maison was actually the first time I got particularly into the feature
as a casual player, and it was very beginner-friendly) - being able to take a break after any battle and
much better BP rewards being the main two
seriously, it does take way too long to grind for any good items in past Generations. X and Y also made it possible to save more than one Battle Video of your own at a time
and introduced mock battles against the AI, allowing one to learn from their mistakes, practice different strategies more easily and see what they could have done better.
- ORAS made the small but crucial step that
no TMs are locked behind BP at all, which is something I value a lot because - like I mentioned above - it actually does mean that the feature finally exists for its own sake and no one who dislikes it on principle has to deal with it (which is good because a lot of people do consider the streak-based system to be frustrating and unfun); especially since TMs stopped being tradeable and became infinite-use, they were much more valuable and much more important, so this was a legitimate grievance to have with every battle facility before this.
- Sun and Moon did something I
really loved: the boss trainers every tenth battle who were all recognizable characters, either from Alola itself or from other games in the series. In my opinion, this made building a streak more interesting - now that there are smaller benchmarks, you can take it one set at a time and feel like you're making meaningful progress, and you can actually look forward to every tenth battle rather than focusing solely on the big picture (especially because it might be someone you haven't scouted yet, which was another cool feature that was introduced at this point - even if you don't actually do the single-player Multi Battles, I feel like there's a certain amount of excitement in scouting your favorite characters from the game and even just in facing a particularly tough opponent or an interesting team and knowing you can get them on your side if you win).
And that's not to mention how good the NPCs' teams got over time - especially in the Tree, even regular Trainers showed off a huge variety of Pokémon and made effective use of Z-Moves and Mega Evolution, and there was a distinctly smaller proportion of deliberate hax-based mechanics (like Bright Powder/Quick Claw) than other facilities. There's always going to be
some luck involved - because it's Pokémon - but it really felt like you could compete against yourself and actually work on your consistency rather than feeling like
that many losses were out of your hands (which I know is a very common complaint about battle facilities in general).
I don't think they've ever been
perfect, and I can totally understand why they're not for everyone, but I think they've gotten better every time - and you know what's downright
crazy in this series? Every improvement I just listed above
actually stuck for the next iteration of the facility! The Tree is my favorite Tower clone hands down, not
just because of my innate Alola bias but because it's the culmination of
everything the others are and more.
There
have been a few missteps along the way
(even in the Tree, as much as I love it - I'm a little unsure of Normal Mode using fully evolved opponents and such when it's always seemed like the beginner-friendly tutorial mode, and USUM in particular made the weird choice of removing some of the core restrictions of the facility so it wasn't even a functional tutorial of how the facility worked to a new player; I forgive these things because they make no difference once you start Super Mode anyway, but I will admit that the Maison has a stronger introduction) - but on the whole, the facility has actually felt like it was getting more and more polished each time, with the earlier stages becoming increasingly beginner-friendly, the later stages feeling increasingly like real tests of skill, and the core mechanics making it increasingly fun
and increasingly rewarding to pursue a streak. I've spent countless hours playing in battle facilities in nearly every game, because it's one of the few postgame features that's replayable and consistently interesting and challenging - like, I've probably spent more time in the Tree than the rest of the game combined in both SM and USUM - so it's one of the most important parts of a game for me and can kind of make or break my long-term experience with it.
So with all of that context on why I find the Battle Tower important to my experience and why I was so frustrated that SwSh didn't deliver on it in the same way, here's why I have such a hard time enjoying the Tower in Galar by comparison.
Some minor things first, in terms of the quality of opponents: instead of either fighting the main boss only at significant benchmarks like every other Gen or fighting a wide variety of NPCs (even like the Gym Leaders or something!) more frequently - or both, like the Tree - you instead fight the same one boss, Leon,
all the time. In terms of the NPCs' teams, maybe I haven't done the Tower enough to judge fairly, but from looking at the datamine, it seems like they really took "it's no longer streak-based" to heart and went back to their old habits of prominent luck-based elements. Nearly 10% of Battle Tower enemies hold either Quick Claws or Bright Powders alone, and I think I remember seeing some sort of Shedinja gimmick where each of them invalidates a different way to knock it out so you have to guess the set every time.
And this isn't that relevant because it was never the most important battling style, but it is pretty jarring to go from Sun and Moon having the most in-depth multi battle system yet to... a complete lack of multi battles,
even in local multiplayer, for the first time since Generation III introduced them. It feels like a pretty surprising thing to drop, especially with the emphasis on multiplayer in the rest of Sword and Shield? Again, though, this one isn't that important to me personally; it's just... a weird step back.
But the big thing for me really is just the loss of streak counting. What I've always understood to be the focus of a feature like this - fighting battles endlessly and seeing how much you can win - is
becoming more consistent. The mere fact of recording streaks in the first place is a testament to that: the longer you go, the less luck is on your side and the more apparent it is that you really have triumphed over the facility.
But when the game stops recording your streak, it just feels... less meaningful. It no longer even keeps track of your streaks at all in favor of a rank system, and whenever you do lose, it actively supports resetting to continue from where you left off instead of trying again from the start - it just feels less like it's what you're actually supposed to be doing. Logging your own streaks is possible, but it's kind of unreliable, much less permanent and much less satisfying; the fact that the game acknowledges when you made it further than usual and keeps track of your best record is a big part of what motivates me to
try to "compete with myself" and set new personal bests, and SwSh just doesn't have that.
On top of that, you have access to Dynamax and any Ubers you want in every battle - so it's not even like getting a high streak is an achievement. (On the other hand, if you just self-impose "no Dynamax" for the sake of challenge, some opponents still randomly use it and others don't - it sort of requires either flip-flopping between the self-imposed challenge and a "normal" streak or being at a disadvantage, neither of which is that great.) Plenty of people
have self-imposed challenges of their own, and I respect that, but... honestly, I've seen a lot of posts by players in the Discussion and Records thread saying that it's noticeably less challenging than other facilities even then, so I'm kind of doubtful that that would be all that appealing, either. It's sort of a lose-lose - if you don't do well, it feels less important because the game actively encourages you to just ignore it and keep going, but if you manage a really good streak, it feels less significant because
everyone gets a really good streak
unless they go out of their way, and the facility is on easy mode by default.
The reward system is also undermined by this change - now that the game doesn't
track high streaks, it also can't
reward them, meaning... once you finish ranking up (which is a single-time occurrence), your reward for every battle is the same as the first one. The in-game incentive to battle is diminished greatly because the BP yield just doesn't go anywhere, and the incentive to battle
well is gone because the game doesn't respond to it at all.
Honestly, either the lack of stakes or the lack of rewards would make it mediocre enough on their own (and again, these are both things that are actually done really well in other facilities,
especially the more recent ones), but the fact that there are
neither stakes
nor rewards just makes it... tedious. It just stops it from being engaging and makes even self-imposed challenges feel fake and cheap, you know? It's like the difference between playing a self-imposed challenge in USUM and playing a self-imposed challenge in X and Y - with USUM, the game "cooperates" by having well-designed opponents and mechanics that allow it to be flexible and it's clear that the developers knew some people would be going for a challenging experience and wanted to make that possible, but with X and Y, it feels like the responsibility is
all on the player and just trying to make the game hard is working against what it has to offer.
Some of this is more a matter of mindset than anything, but I do find the Battle Tower in Sword and Shield to be underwhelming and noticeably less engaging than the rest, and I just don't think it fulfills its apparent purpose any more for me.
As much as people complain about the lack of variety and of cooler places like the Battle Frontier, if we were going to stick to the more basic standard Tower clone anyway, I feel like their constantly evolving mechanics had been the best-case scenario up until now. I mean, I've probably spent as much time in the Tree alone as much as I've played every other Battle Frontier combined - and the thing is that I'm not even that
good at it!
I
don't have any impressive high streaks; half the time, I'm just trying out goofy gimmick teams anyway, I pretty much never use the Pokémon that are actually ideal for battle facilities, and I'm not nearly skilled enough or patient enough to do the tried-and-proven reliable strategies like the popular Moody one or a lead that slowly cripples an opponent to make way for a setup sweeper.
I honestly just play the Tree because it's fun, and I didn't really think one could
get that much more "casual" than I already was if they were interested in playing it at all. Which... is kinda why my interpretation that the new changes were just to dumb it down and make it accessible frustrated me - it just felt like bending over backwards to appeal to an audience that wouldn't really be interested anyway, at the expense of the people who had enjoyed it until that point.
(Another reason I was convinced that it was a "compromise" that pleased no one: I have a friend who considers himself part of the "casual audience," struggled a great deal with past Generations' battle facilities, and found personal enjoyment in a
lot of things I didn't like about Sword and Shield, so I kinda figured he was as close as one could get to the perfect audience for the SwSh Tower - but even he openly found it boring, which is sorta what had me lose all faith that it was right for anyone. XP)
Honestly, though? If you do like it, I would
love to hear your take on what it does well!! Not only do I think it would be an interesting perspective (I really do enjoy going into design stuff like this), but it also makes me feel better to know that what it does actually did hit the mark for someone. I sort of felt like the changes were wholly misguided and no one would be happy, and that was part of why I was bitter about the changes - "was it even worth it?" and all - but hearing that you consider it a step up, I'm kinda reassured!
