Azure Dreams is a PlayStation Roguelike video game developed by Konami and was originally released in North America on June 30, 1998. It got OK reviews and didn’t move too many units making it a somewhat rear game to find these days. Since it was part of the Konami family I had a rather surprising moment with the character Pyshco Matis in the game Metal Gear Solid, in which he did the famous memory card read and brought up “Azure Dreams” of all games. This blew my mind because I thought nobody knew about this game and here was video game bad guy speaking its name. I can just image that poor voice actor in the recording studio saying “you what me to say what?!”… I digress. A stripped down version was later released on the Game Boy Color (which is, meh). and a semi-sequel called “Tao’s Adventure: Curse of the Demon Seal”, was released on the Nintendo DS in 2005 (which I have not played… yet).

Pros:

The game focuses around this monster tower you go exploring in search of treasure and such. In a feat of programming mastery, every floor (besides the first, second and last) of this 40-story tower, is totally randomized. The combination of items, creatures, traps, rooms, and pathways are something you will never see twice. This makes every trip into this quite challenging dungeon crawler experience, quite varied. The floors get progressively more challenging as you go up, obviously, making the upper floors sometimes sweat inducing, since you don’t want to loose all that treasure and progress you made to get up there. It is not uncommon for you to start to think out EVERY SINGLE STEP you are taking in the turn-based isometric chess-like gameplay. The biggest focus, however, is finding familiar eggs and raising them to do your horrible battle bidding, but your character can actually participate in battle (unlike those sissy Pokémon trainers). Each familiar is unique, most evolve and most have some kind of special ability or magic. You level them up, a few you can equip, and you can even fuse tow of them together to merge traits, not bad for an older game like this. Beyond that, there are a few cool side things you can do too. You can use your money to build up your home and the entire town at that. Most import of all you can GET CHICKS, BRO! …ok this doesn’t really “enhance” the game, but there are a bunch of love interests that you can “achieve” by meeting various goals and then you can see them in their bathing suits at the pool….wow… yep.

This trailer video should give you a good taste of all of it.

Cons:

With all of these pluses you think this game would be a hit, well it has a few major drawbacks. This game is brutally unforgiving. If you “die” in the tower you loose all progress, items, etc. that had on your person and you start right back in town. This really sucks because your character does not accumulate levels only your familiars do. So the only way to make your character rock is to continuously improve some specific items, which if you die in the tower, you lose them. Tower trips can become major undertakings, to say the least. 40 floors and you will probably won’t break into the double digits until your 3rd or 4th shot at the tower. A single item called a “Wind Crystals” is the only thing you can use to leave the tower safely with your items intact and these things are actually semi rear to find in the tower. You think such a critical item would be on sale at like an item store, but it’s not! The town does, however, have a monster store and a weapons store, but wait, they have NOTHING to offer, and you think that later on as you get better creatures they would have better stock items… NOPE, just the same old pile of nothing. Your familiars keep the levels that gain trip to trip (thank god) but they drain MP as they are in use in the tower. So you can only use them specifically and strategically. Most of this I can forgive as kind of smart thinking on the creator’s side to keep the game continuously challenging, but it’s a bit demanding, to say the least. All of this pales in comparison to the insanely repetitive music. There is ONE key melody in this whole game and it is twisted from floor to floor. Sounds good on paper right? No, it’s fucking horrible. The melody is not that bad by itself, but after hearing it (in one way shape or form) for hours on end, you are ready to ram a Wind Crystal right into your ear drum.