Azure Dreams

"Konami goes against the grain of the RPG establishment with an original and addicting game"

In Azure Dreams, Konami has taken a risk, making a RPG that breaks a lot of the tried-and-true elements of traditional entries of the genre. The result of which is a game that's not without flaws and rough edges, yet is refreshingly addictive and offers a new experience every time you play.

You play Koh, a young monster hunter from the desert town of Monsbaiya. Upon turning 15, males of Monsbaiya are considered adults, and eligible to enter the famed Monster Tower (where most of the action in the game takes place). Koh's father was once the greatest monster hunter in the land, and the person who came closest to conquering the perilous dungeon until he suddenly disappeared many years ago. Koh's duty and dream is to follow in his father's footsteps, earn wealth and fame by challenging the tower, and to find any clues about the fate of his father. Seems simple enough, right?

Over the course of the game, Koh will have to challenge the tower many times. You climb as high as you can, collecting experience, items, and monster eggs along the way, and then teleport out when you've reached a point where it's too dangerous to continue. If you're making adequate progress, you should be able to go a little higher with each successive visit. To keep things fresh, each floor of the tower is randomly generated, every time you visit the tower. So treasures, rooms, exits, and monsters will change every time you visit. Since you'll be retracing your steps many times, the random aspect of the exploration is very important to the fun factor and challenge of the game.

One of the things that forces you to strategize in a nontraditional way is the fact that every time you enter the tower, Koh starts at the lowest experience level. He will increase in level while he's inside the tower, but it's only temporary. So in order to climb higher and higher each time through, you have to change other things. Koh only equips two pieces of equipment, a weapon and a shield. However, you can hunt for exactly the sword, wand, or shield that you want, and you can temper them with "sands" to make them stronger than before.

Another thing that is a determining factor in how far Koh will make it up the tower is your monster familiar. Much like in pokemon, every type of enemy monster you come across can also become your ally. These critters will travel alongside Koh, and will follow your exact commands, or you can set them to have a general AI pattern. They increase in level like Koh, but their level doesn't reset everytime they leave the tower. So most likely, your monster of choice will have a much higher level than Koh. Monsters aren't easy to come by though, as you'll have to track down eggs which pops up randomly inside the tower. Hatch the eggs at home, and they'll be your faithful servant. Or, if you so choose, sell the eggs before they hatch for a tidy sum. Each monster type has their own skill and stats, and you can even fuse two monsters to combine their skills into one unique creature.

Because of the random nature of the game, you may not find the same eggs in one game as you do in another. So you might have to train a different monster in each new game, depending on what lady luck throws your way. This is part of why randomness increases the replayability of Azure Dreams, because anytime your persistent searching turns up a rare item or a rare monster egg, it feels rewarding and unexpected.

The tower isn't the only place to spend time. To serve as an antidote to dungeon-crawling and grinding, there's a ton of stuff to do around the town of Monsbaiya to keep you busy between trips. The city itself isn't much to gaze upon, at first. However, once you start rolling in the dough from selling your plundered tower booty, you can spend your money on improving the town. This includes building new businesses like a library, hospital, race track, or even a casino. You can even upgrade your own house to make it bigger for your family, and increase the size of your monster hut to hold more pet familiars.

One of the real guilty pleasures of hanging around town though, is trying to get a girlfriend. There are seven pretty and eligible bachelorettes hanging around town, and Koh not only can win the heart of any one of them, he can win the hearts of ALL of them at once. Persistence, gifts, money, saying the right thing... it's an engaging and rewarding sidequest. Although, if you don't want a girlfriend, you can just ignore them altogether.

Not everything is perfect about Azure Dreams though, and it goes hand-in-hand with the different nature of the game. The flaws start with the battle system. It's hard to describe the battle system, as it's not entirely like a traditional turn-based system, and it's not a full-blown action RPG either. Like an action RPG, battling takes place directly on the map itself, against varying numbers of enemies, depending on how many are in the area. It has the look of an action RPG, yet it is, in fact, turn-based combat. The maps have a grid-like quality to them, and every time you take a step, so does your monster, and so do all of the enemies. So, the allies and enemies have the same number of "turns." The result of such a battle system is that it neither has the complexity of a full-blown traditional turn-based RPG, nor does it have the faster, more exciting pace of a pure action RPG. In essence, it's a hybrid of the two main types of RPGs, but instead of taking the best of both worlds, it takes inherently bad parts from both worlds. The result is a battle system that is too simple for spur-of-the-moment decision-making to play a big role. Most battles are won or lost before you even engage your enemy, depending on how prepared you are.

The other noticeable flaw is that you have to start each trip to the tower from the beginning each time. So, once you start reaching the higher floors, it takes a while to ascend to where you left off previously. As I said before though, the random generation of each floor helps to ease on this monotony a lot. Even late in the game, it's still worth it to fully explore the middle- or lower-ranged floor, to look for eggs or items or tempering sand or crystals that may pop up there. Plus, as the recent pseudo-sequel to this game, Tao's Adventure for the DS, has shown us, having larger, pre-mapped floors, and being able to start where you left off, does not necessarily make for a better game. Still, spending an hour in the tower without accomplishing anything or dieing prematurely can feel like punch in the gut and become discouraging.

Graphically, Azure Dreams works pretty well for a PS1 title. All character portraits are drawn nicely and vividly in a true anime-style. Sprites for Koh and the monsters of the tower look detailed enough, considering how small they have to appear. The best thing about the graphics, though, are the backgrounds inside the monster tower. The grid upon which Koh can walk appears like a levitating platform, standing over a bottomless pit. On some floors, you can see the walls of the tower swirling around, giving almost a sense of vertigo. The overall effect is really very neat.

From an audio perspective, the game is average. There's very little in the way of sound effects, and I find most of the tunes to be forgettable. I haven't yet reached a point where even after 100 hours of playing, I have to turn the sound off to play the game (like with Star Ocean 2), so maybe that's a good sign at least.

The controls are very simple (unlike in the sequel). There are only a few basic menus, and the simplicity of the battle system makes the learning curve more shallow than a game as different as this one could be.

All in all, while Azure Dreams doesn't have the slickest battle system, and while it can feel a little repetitive at times, it's almost perfect for RPG enthusiasts who love collecting and exploring. It's one of the few RPGs that makes the grind feel more like a reward than a chore. It makes every game a new experience, and it will keep you coming back to your master file, trying to improve upon it and get better. It's not a cookie-cutter RPG where you just cycle through text and passively get pushed from location A to location B. You move at your own pace, experiment, and work your way to the finish. Every floor is a mystery full of potential riches, and it keeps you driven. You drive to find that next item, or to reach that next floor. That's the addictive quality that has had me come back to Azure Dreams time and time again over the decade since the game originally came out.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 02/20/07