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Tower 1: Here be Monsters
Now that we've committed to a route for the next ~6 chapters, we have access to the Tower of Valni. While there are skirmishes on the world map, odds are that if you're going to do some grinding, it's going to be here.
If you're unfamiliar with FE8, the tower has 8 levels, each populated by a semi-random assortment of monsters. There are chests and other goodies on the way up the tower, and you can unlock some interesting stuff for finishing the tower in its entirety, but you have to do it all in one go. If you need to retreat on Floor 7, the next time you come in, you're coming back to Floor 1. Later in the game, we'll be able to scale the whole thing, but for now, we're confined to this first floor. Other points of note include that this is one of very few instances in the game where your main lord is not required, and if we get in over our heads, we always have the option to retreat and leave with all the experience we've gained until that point. But don't mistake that for mercy - dying in the tower is just as real of a death as dying anywhere else in the game.
With those introductory notes out of the way, let's talk about the first floor. The boss is always an Entombed, and the randomization is whether or not there are extra entombed, and how many and what kind of skeletons you get. In this case, we have no entombed and an Iron Lance skeleton, but you can also get Sword and Bow variants, or maybe no skeletons at all. There also might be droppable items, but none of these guys have anything this time around.
Since we're dealing with monsters all the way up the tower, we get the Chapter 4 experience the entire time. We can still use the tower for grinding, but it's much, much harder than in Vanilla FE8.
The boss is pretty weak in comparison to his company, and is basically a guaranteed level for almost any unpromoted unit you can throw at it. You really don't need much of any strategy to deal with these guys, so I'll spare you the tactical talk and get right to the levels after one quick demonstration.
It has come to my attention that our romhacker was a little sloppy when it comes to making sure everyone's weapon ranks match up. Everyone in the game has a set of weapon ranks for both magic and physical weapons, and this is the source of a very interesting glitch you can do very late in the game. The important thing about this is that the author did not clear out everyone's "invisible" weapon ranks (weapons for mages, magic for physical units). Thus, Pent, who was originally Gilliam, still has his C rank in Lances. While he is still saddled with Gilliam's growths, this gives him a very unique use - I can use him as both a physical unit and a mage. Naturally, the mage has no animations for using a Lance, so the game simply acts like I turned off animations and proceeds as normal.
With that little oddity shown off, today's contestants are Pent, Colm, Neimi, Lucius, Priscilla, Erk, Natasha, and Lyn. Who earned redemption? Who earned a continued spot on the bench? Here we go!
A few great ones, a few duds. Lucius is still straddling the line between "just useful enough to keep active" and the bench, Lyn and Natasha didn't get anything, and Colm managed to pick up another point of speed, so I guess that's something.
The victory condition for every floor is a rout, and since we're not far enough to continue, the game sends us to the save screen and kicks us back to the world map. You can repeat this whole process as often as you have the weapons to do it, and FE8's difficulty curve is kind of weird in that they almost expect you to use it a little, especially in hard mode. At any rate, I'll see you in Chapter 9.