Virtual Pet Reviews: Azure Dreams

I had to strip back my list of games in this genre to review because I realised there was a distinct difference in my head between a ‘Virtual Pet’ game and a ‘Monster Collection’ game. I’ve struck a few things from my to-do list based off them being too far in to the monster collection genre and less about animal care mechanics, anyway this game is about as on the edge between the two as I’m allowing myself to review.

Azure Dreams is very much also a monster collection RPG, but I’ve justified it in my head as a virtual pet game as well because of some of the additional mechanics – You need to feed your monsters, hatch them out of eggs and some of the ways you can interact with them loosely feels like I can justify it being a virtual pet game, plus I love this game and wanted a reason to include it.

Azure Dreams is everything

It’s one of my favourite ever games, it combines so many things I love in its varied genre; it’s an RPG, it’s a pet game, it’s a monster collection game, it’s a rogue-like, it’s a dungeon crawler, it’s a Stardew-esque village and dating sim. It’s literally a little bit of every type of game I love rolled in to one

The game features Koh, a kid who’s just become old enough to enter Monsbaiya Village’s monster tower! Monster tamers have a lot of prestige in the village, they bring back treasure, aid development of the village and gain the skills you need to own and train a variety of different magical creatures.

The aim of the game is simple, climb to the (40th) final floor of the tower and slay the monster that lies atop it!

The game has a super simple end goal but there’s a million reasons why that’d going to take you a LONG time. Firstly, the monster tower is a series of randomly generated floors, so depending on what items and monsters you encounter, you have some really productive runs and some really non-productive ones.

The only way to leave the tower with all your treasures intact is to find a wind crystal, which is just like any other item in the game – a roll of the dice to come across. Fortunately your level does carry over and you can get a little further each time until it’s a rarity that you won’t encounter wind crystals on your adventures.

The tower also has eggs, eggs that you can bring home and hatch in to your own monster to train. Your monsters level up in the tower with you can need food, and sometimes equipment to stay alive in the tower.

There’s also a village progression element to the game, as the treasure you return home with gets sold for gold, and the only real thing to spend gold on in the game is new buildings and upgrades to existing village features. Eventually you’re left with a village with so many extra side quests and fun things to do you totally forget that you were up to floor 35 last time you visited the tower and that final boss monster can probably wait a month or two!

Scoring

I’m grading virtual pet games that I review based on four metrics:

• Fun: Simply put, how entertaining is the game?
• Pet Design: How cute, interesting and good of a concept are the pet designs?
• Progression: What, if any, benefits are they to caring for the pets? Do they serve another in game purpose? How fulfilling is taking care of these pets?
• Replay-ability: How much would I go back to this pet game, and why.

Fun: 3.5/5

I think Azure Dreams is a ton of fun. You visit the randomly generated tower, find and fight monsters and no journey in to the tower is ever the same. It can however get a little repetitive especially in the earlier stages of the game before you have enough wind crystals to safely return without losing progress.

Pet Design: 5/5

Azure Dreams feels very similar to Digimon to me in terms of character design, it’s probably that heavy anime aesthetic.

The monster designs range from cute and blobby slime creatures, to really cool dragon and gryphon inspired things. There’s 50 types of monster to collect and they can all grow to be reasonably strong within your team, so you can play however you like.

Progression: 3/5

Progression is rated more on the progression of the ‘pets’ themselves rather than Azure Dream’s progression as a story driven RPG. It definitely scores something, as you can’t possibly finish the tower without feeding your creatures and hatching some backups alone the way. You also teach them moves and propose strategy in the turn-based aspects of the game so keeping your monsters alive and well is definitely key to progressing in the game.

But in terms of actual pet progression there isn’t really any. Your pets don’t grow or evolve, they’re very much RPG characters in the sense that they’re just players sometimes.

Replay-ability: 4/5

I find Azure Dreams super replay-able. The nature of its rogue like features means its meant to be replayed again and again. Because every visit to the tower is unique it also means every new game is also unique, and you’ll discover different monsters and encounters along the way, and you can make different in game choices that affect the local village around you.

Final Score: 3.875

Honestly a deserving score for a great game. I’m still on the fence about whether it can truly be labelled a virtual pet game but it’s as far out of the scope as I’m allowing anything else to be.

Something really cool about Azure Dreams that I recently discovered was its online community is still going, and more than that, they’ve released some modded ROMs of the game that include extra floors of the tower. You can now play up to 100 floors and there’s modifications you can make to your ROM to make the experience truly fun and unique, it’s a great way to breathe new life in to a great classic.

Check out the Azure Dreams (De-)Randomiser here.