I jumped into the Battle Tower this weekend. You can only register a three-poke team, so I brought in Darkling, Knifejaw and Gringo. Although they make a big deal about "surviving seven matches in a row," your team is completely healed between bouts so it's not such a problem. I beat the lv50 mode. The Sableye did most of the work against the randomized, robotic opponents. ("I'M READY FOR BATTLE ARE YOU")
But here's what gets me. You get no experience for Battle Tower matches. So what's the point? And how are you ever supposed to become competitive enough to attempt the lv100 mode? You also don't get any money out of it. My big reward for beating lv50 mode was the Iron item. Maybe after lv100 you get Carbos. Hot damn.
Fighting battles without receiving experience points is just nuts. It kinda flies in the face of the game's predominent logic: that your trained creatures improve in skill and ability as they continue to battle. I mean, creating larger and better pokemon is why we play the game.
The eCard battles go the same way. For all the mess of having to connect two GBAs, the eReader and a link cable, scanning a battle card gets you a strange three-on-three match with no experience and no reward. You don't even see any new pokemon (at least not with the two battle cards released to date.) It might be worth it if you at least could +1 your pokedex records with a visual spotting of a Gastly or a Scizor or any of the 100-some pokemon types missing from the normal Ruby/Sapphire quest. But you don't.
This irritates me because I now have no motivation for walking into Battle Tower again. (Unless one of ya'll can tell me about amazing future rewards!) And since Sapphire has no "second quest" like Gold/Silver/Crystal, that leaves me with just some sidebar pickups... like hunting the Regi's and Latias (or Latios?)
Magic Box posted a single line rumor that Nintendo is working on a Pokemon RPG for GameCube. I think that's important enough that I need say no more about it.
Time: 61:48
Badges: 8
Pokedex: 76 (seen: 155)
Party: Darkling (Sableye) lv50, Knifejaw (Sceptile) lv49, Gringo (Mightyena) lv48, Razorbeak (Swellow) lv53, Golduck lv46, Kyogre lv46
