Monster arena = infinite gold?

[L0ki]

Don't monster arenas basically make gold irrelevant and every other form of farming pointless? Because you can just repeat arenas endlessly and they give such absurdly large amounts of gold with such little effort you can unlock all the gear available for sale anytime you get to the next monster Arena.

This combined with getting full HP and mana every time you level up and the amount of free gear the game throws at you like prayer rings removes all balance and most difficulty from the games original design.

Am I completely missing something or are monster arenas simply an infinite gold cheat that is easily accessible to the player? You can even turn the difficulty down to Dracky on demand which makes it so you can't even lose in the arena.

[Melodia]

The amount you get after the inital win isn't exactly that much for the amount of time it takes to go through four bouts. You're much better off just fighting.

As for turning the difficulty down....I mean you can do that any time to make buying equipment irrelevant too now can't you.

[VertVentus]

Kind of, but it's not that relevant in the main campaign and King Hydras (Snooze, Hypnowhip) in post-game is still optimal for EXP farming.

All the sparkly spots invalidates the need to buy equipment, so you can hoard your gold for the post-game's requirement of delivering 25 Elfin Elixirs (50k each) for a trial.

• Rank 1 = 100G Entry Fee, 80G per win = 220 net (Romaria)
  
• Rank 2 = 200G fee, 80G per win = 120 net
  
• Rank 3 = 300G fee, 120G per win = 180 net (Ibis)
  
• Rank 4 = 500G fee, 200g per win = 300 net
  
• rank 5 = 2000G fee, 800g per win = 1200 net (Manoza)
  
• rank 6 = 3500g fee, 1400g per win = 2100 net
  
• rank 7 = 5000g fee, 2000g per win = 3000 net
  
• rank 8 = 13000g fee, 5200g per win = 7800 net (Cantlin)
  
• rank 9 = 20,000g fee, 8,000g per win = 12000 net
  
• rank 10 = 36,000g fee, 14,400g per win = 21,600 net (Jipang, Post-Game)
  
• rank 11 = 99,999g fee, 33,333g per win = 33,333 net

Cantlin rewards is good until post-game, but that's pretty late in the 2nd overworld (last third of the game). You may be using Thief's Padfoot to avoid the high encounter rate much sooner than that, and when you do reach that point, enemies are probably dropping 500 ~ 1000 gold per fight?

This remake's balanced in a bad way where physical damage sucks unless you're stat capped + using (Falcon Blade) Persecutter since Sap isn't a defense decrease anymore, so buying weapons isn't as impactful compared to Duplic Hat spells or Wild Side Monster Pile-On (fixed damage). You could spend money on defense gear, but only a select few protect you against breaths/spells (otherwise Insulatle/Magic Barrier) and critical hits ignore defense, or you could just Sleep/Confuse lock even bosses for universal damage mitigation.