Observations on Battle Tower: Tidal Wave 1/3 of the Way In

Despite not really interacting with Battle Tower beyond getting the bit of polychrome before, I recently have had an itch to play more and have something to kind of zone out to, so I've started working my way up the Battle Tower. As of this writing, I just finished Floor 333 and thought it might be interesting to write up a few observations I've had.

The main teams I've been using are Angels, Fufu with either Yixuan and Lucia or Evelyn and Astra, and I have Caesar as a back-up. All have their sigs except Fufu, Lucia, and Caesar, and Astra is M1 (side note, does anyone know if M1W1 Astra better for Yixuan than M0W0 Lucia?). I started off mainly with Yixuan, but then I remembered the Angels all have their sigs so I switched to them as my primary team. This has generally covered me, since I have all three damage archetypes, and, at least that I've encountered, there are no enemies resistant to both Fire and Ether. Though in general, resistances and damage type don't seem to matter that much. There are specific examples, which I'll talk about more later, but in general it's fine.

Also, survivability doesn't really matter either, which was surprising. In an individual fight it may, as enemies do hit hard, but between all of these teams having healing capabilities and no damage runs being a kind of "standard," that's not really an issue. Caesar has not seen much use, though I keep her around just in case.

On the damage point, I find the scoring system annoying. You need to hit a certain threshold of points to get the badge for the stage, which I do care about getting, and a good chunk of points (30-40% of what you need) is locked behind whether you take damage. I rarely play the teams differently than I normally do, so that means the scoring largely comes down to those damage points. It will depend on the fight how much this does/does not matter; some it's totally fine to take damage, and others basically require no damage to get the badge. Most of my resets come from characters taking damage, and it gets rather frustrating.

Also, you really find out where characters' weaknesses are. Yixuan is often portrayed as being very I-frame heavy and easy to use, and this is true generally, but I have found out that, even when pressing the EX Special button, her combo can be interrupted. If you switch to a different character, she can also still end up taking damage. This is the most interesting case I've noticed of this, but it holds true more generally. I'm often taking damage in unexpected ways. Side note, I swear Yixuan's EX parry is easier to hit Battle Tower than it is in DA and Shiyu.

Probably to no one's surprise, it gets repetitive pretty quickly. There are a finite amount of enemies in the game, but even then it feels like it largely takes from a subset of them, particularly more recent enemies. I do think some more variety would be nice, particularly using older enemies, but it's ultimately fairly whatever.

DA bosses can show up, which I was a bit surprised by. In what I've encountered so far, it's been Thrall, Sarah, Vesper, and Sweeper. Defiler might also have been there, but I'm not totally sure. What's more interesting than just their inclusion is that they're largely the same mechanically, so they want you to bring in the same teams you'd use in DA i.e. Vesper and Sweeper want the Angels. It's not as restrictive as time is less of a factor, but it definitely still affects the experience of play.

Thrall is horrible in this mode. I don't know if it's just my teams or what, but Sobek will not die. I'm talking like two minutes of fighting him, multiple big Ults with Yixuan, and it barely dents him. Same thing with Evelyn, and Angels are useless against him since Sobek doesn't have an Anomaly bar. Easily my second most dreaded fight.

My most dreaded is Jane. I despise Jane since she's even harder than normal. Doesn't help that she's Ether resistant, which makes her even more annoying with my teams. Thankfully points-wise it's fine if you take damage with her, otherwise I don't think I would be getting all the badges.

That's just kind of a grab bag of thoughts after playing through a good chunk of it. Would love to hear others' thoughts, especially if you've played Tower a lot since I'm still relatively new.