Playing every PS1 game - ATV Racing (x2), Azure Dreams

Today, we start with two unremarkable arcade quad bike racing games, and then undoubtedly the biggest surprise package of the process so far.

ATV: Quad Power Racing

Have you ever had a great idea for something, gone to the effort of making it happen, and then slowly come to realise that this isn’t actually as fun as it sounded in your head? This is the feeling which I expect dawned on the developers at Acclaim as they were putting the last pieces together on Quad Power Racing.

Get used to this sort of view.

On the face of it, what’s not to like about the concept? Racing games? Tried and true. Quad bikes? Cool. Off-road ‘extreme sports’? Very cool. Surely mixing them all together is a nailed-on winner?

There’s a shortcut on the left, but it doesn’t actually make much difference.

Well, in the case of Quad Power Racing, it turns out that it isn’t (and don’t call me Shirley). Everything about the execution is so…dull. The menus are boring, the choice of vehicles are boring, and the race courses, given their ridiculous length, are excruciatingly boring.

The AI isn’t much good, so you’ll soon overtake them.

No, seriously. The courses are so long, winding and uninteresting that the first time I completed a lap, it came as a surprise that you have to do it again twice in order to complete the race, a process which can end up drawing 10 long, yawn-inducing minutes out of you. There is the odd hidden ‘shortcut’, but that’s about it. The AI isn’t hard to beat and you find yourself spending the latter two laps just driving alone out front, waiting for it to end.

The 2D tree sprites are just there for you to bang into and come to a halt.

Outside of the ‘Championship’ mode, there are the standard single-race and time attack modes, and that’s it. File under ‘never again’.

Kept my attention for: An hour
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 2/10

ATV Racers

Oh God, it’s more guff from Midas Interactive. Read back on some of our previous adventures if you wish.

No expense spared on the environmental variety.

It’s an attempt at a Mario Kart style racer, with the production value of something you’d find as a free gift loose in a cereal packet.

Choose from a roster of cutesy animal racers, but they’re all the same on the track.

Shallow, boring, and over in a flash - much like most every other Midas game.

Kept my attention for: An hour
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 1/10

Azure Dreams

I’ll be honest. My overriding thought when loading up Azure Dreams - a game which I simply considered to be another one of those random localisations of obscure Japanese anime RPGs which would be too turgid to get deep into - was about finishing the letter ‘A’, and in doing so at least making it far enough through the list for the exercise to not be a total failure. I was thinking about interesting upcoming games like Blade and Battle Arena Toshinden and not expecting to spend more than an hour or two on Azure Dreams.

Is this a dream? Is the colour Azure present?

Well, I got that all wrong. It took a bit of getting used to, but after giving it a chance, Azure Dreams had me hooked. It’s a great example of the sort of non-focus-grouped, non-minmaxed, ‘raw’ flavour of game design you used to get before the age of gigantic development teams and triple-A studios and risk-averse publishers with extensive QA. Azure Dreams is not a simple, intuitive, or even a truly great game, but sometimes the mystique that comes with having to work everything out yourself (and when not much about the game’s context is coherently explained) makes for a more interesting experience.

There’s plenty for the min-max RPG stattos to pore over.

But what is the game actually about? The short answer is ‘God knows’. The game’s title definitely has no bearing on what is actually at its core a roguelike tower-ascent game with a mixture of Pokemon and Harvest Moon (or for zoomers, Stardew Valley). The only exposition you’re provided with is a short FMV pre-main-menu which introduces a small village oasis in the middle of a desert as the location where the game takes place. Next to the village is a gigantic stone tower, and in the tower are monsters - and monster eggs, which treasure-hunters seek in order to sell for money. That’s it, there’s no further worldbuilding, no explanation of how the village or tower got there; the universe of this RPG starts and ends at this one village in Whoknowswhereville.

The universe of Azure Dreams, in its entirety.

Your character treads familiar RPG territory - a strong and silent teenage scamp who wants to reach the top of the tower like the great warriors before him (or whatever). You awake one morning and assume control. The game gives you no further instruction beyond an assumption that you will head to the big tower and just sort of take it from there.

Despite what it looks like, that is what passes for a motorbike in Azure Dreams.

Thus begins the roguelike. Starting at the bottom level, a friendly monster appears out of the ether and declares itself your partner for the foreseeable. Both you and it start the game at Lv. 1, with pisspoor stats, but - and here’s the thing - only your monster partner retains its stats each time you leave the tower. Every time you come back, you start from the bottom floor, and your player character is back at Lv. 1, though any better equipment you bring back does retain its stats on re-entry.

That grey-and-black oval is a monster egg. Take it home and hatch it to complete your Pokedex.

If this sounds like a recipe for a grindfest, that’s because that’s exactly what it is. There are no shortcuts to higher floors, and leveling up isn’t exactly a quick process. Oh, and if you die (which you will, a lot, until your monster friend levels up a bit), you lose all your gear and wake up in bed the following day to try again. Oh, and you can’t leave the tower once you’re in there without either dying, or using a special item, which is only found randomly in the tower.

In true roguelike fashion, each floor is randomised and your map is drawn as you go.

That’s the core gameplay baseline, and it’s punishing. Enemies on each floor persistently respawn, and finding the elevator to the next floor quickly isn’t a given. Decisions regarding the special exit crystal become an important factor in this regard, as if you do not presently have one, you have to keep rising through the floors (facing tougher and tougher enemies) until you find one and can finally breathe easily. If you bring one with you, it takes up one of the five items maximum you’re allowed to take in (and your monster pal, weapon and shield take up three of said slots).

If you’re unlucky you might arrive on a new floor only to get immediately ganked. Game over.

There is an incredible amount of depth to this game if you get down into it, which is what ended up getting me hooked. All monsters subscribe to a particular element - fire, water, or wind, in a classic RPG rock/paper/scissors formula - and all can be put under your own command if you find and hatch one of their eggs (which have a small chance of appearing on any floor). Some monsters aren’t any good, some are very powerful, and it’s up to you to mix and match to work out which of the beasts get to stay in your limited stable of monster kennels at home, and which get callously sold off to the monster trader in the village.

Admire your monster collection in a small dungeon beneath your home.

Some monsters have special moves, and some have hidden traits, like being immune to a certain status effect. What increases the intrigue further then is the ability to ‘fuse’ two monsters together to create a single, stronger one, which may or may not inherit moves and traits of either. Play your cards right and you could end up with a monster with the ‘half MP consumption’ trait of one fiend and the ‘double attack’ trait of the other, making for an intimidating beast. Not much in terms of the combinations and capabilities of various monsters has been well catalogued online, so the game retains the sort of pre-internet mystique you don’t normally get these days. It reminds me a lot of Digimon World, which wouldn’t be released for another couple of years.

In Azure Dreams, you can take a break from monster hunting to engage in earthly vices in the casino.

I haven’t even touched on the village development and (cheesy) ‘find a wife’ elements to the game, which almost add up to whole separate games themselves, but I’m going on a bit too much. In short, money earned flogging swag from the tower can be spent on turning your home from a tiny hovel to a multi-roomed palace, or financing the construction of whole new additions to the village, from the mundane (a mini theatre) to the bizarre (a, er, casino, complete with working slot machine minigames). Successful ascents up into the higher echelons of the tower effect how your fellow villagers perceive you, with you starting the game as an unrespected village whipping boy to whom some won’t even speak, and slowly turning into some sort of local hero.

In Azure Dreams, you can take a break from monster hunting to bet on horse racing at the local track.

It’s far, far from perfect. Things really are quite a slog, grinding your way up the tower and levelling up from Lv. 1 every single time. The Japanese-English translation is very ropey. The difficulty of getting your man to face the right direction on the tower’s grid system means many a turn wasted swinging your sword at nothing. After putting 20+ hours into it, I had only just made it half way up the tower, and levelling up becomes so slow that the grind gets excessive just to progress even slightly forward. It’s still beyond everything I expected though, and is a surprisingly deep and complex game that I don’t think gets talked about enough, if it gets talked about at all.

In Azure Dreams, you can take a break from monster hunting to engage in will-they-won’t-they sexual tension with more or less every female villager in your search for love.

Kept my attention for: A week
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 7/10