What? She's a Gamer, Too?

I know, I know. I'm just too perfect. (I'm joking, don't hate me, I'm joking.)

My friend and fellow MOB member, Domi, was ...discussing... games with me, and challenged me to write a blog post about a game I like. Okay, no problem. It would be much more of a challenge for me to write about a game we both like, since it seems we have opposing opinions on just about everything.

Do you still have your old consoles to play all of your old favorites? Good. Don't throw out your PS, because here's a worthwhile game, I'm betting you never played: Azure Dreams.

Azure Dreams is set in a hokey old desert town whose only real attraction is the giant tower it hosts. Why is this tower so popular? Because within its magical walls live thousands of monsters and treasures behold. And where thousands of monsters can be found, so can thousands of monster eggs. These eggs are valuable, because when a human raises a monster from an egg, it becomes the human's familiar and a potentially powerful ally.

You play as the son of a world famous monster trainer, Guy (I know, really creative name, right?), whose familiar, a Kraken, returned one stormy night from the tower without Guy leaving his wife to raise his two kids on her own. Since most of their income came from the tower, they've had to sell all of Guy's monsters and eggs to make ends meet. When you become of age (15- better than Pok'e'mon at age 11, but seriously, who lets their kids go off to do dangerous missions at age 15, either?) you set off into the tower to get treasures and monster eggs and live up to your father's name.

As you go along, not only do you get monsters and treasures, but everyone in the town who used to think you were a bratty little kid starts to respect you, girls who used to think you were icky start liking you, and the hokey little town you live in gets nicer and more attractive to outsiders.

I have only two complaints, but they're both kind of whiny, since both problems are completely intentional by the people who made the game.

First is, if you 'die' in the tower, you wake up in your bed as if you didn't go to the tower that day. You don't have anything in your inventory, including the things you went to the tower with. It's all gone. Yet, if you go to look at your monsters, whatever levels they gained while you were in the tower, they still have. And they've rigged it so that you can only load your save point once. If you load that save point a second time, they assume that you died and tried to restart, which is true most of the time, and it starts your game from the point that you would be if you had died in the tower. (I found a way around this, eventually, but you'll have to figure that out on your own. Bwa ha ha.)

Second is, you can only take 5 items into the tower with you. Usually, that's a monster, a weapon, a shield, a wind crystal (this allows you to come back from the tower with all of your stuff), and one other thing, which later on in the game is usually a second monster. Those red and blue sands you were saving for when you got a really nice weapon and shield, you have to take into the tower one at a time (without a second monster) to use on your stuff, because you can't use items outside of the tower.

Like I said, these are really picky things to complain about. In my opinion, with these being my only complaints, you gotta figure that the game overall is really good. Which it is. Seriously, it's a ton of fun!

Until next time,
Cap'n Kyrie