Day 4: Azure Sky Tower and Dream Avenue

In Boktai and Boktai two, there were two long and challenging towers. In Boktai it was Azure Sky Tower, in Boktai 2 it was Dream Avenue. In both, the mission was to collect the blue key and find the blue door on each floor, which would lead you to the next floor. In azure sky tower, the blue key was hidden in an enemy. You would have to go around defeating all of the enemies until you found the blue key, then you had to find the blue door. Each floor only had four rooms, so it wasn't terribly challenging to find the key and door. However, it was very long. The first time you go through, it is 15 floors (plus a "rewards" floor), with a boss fight on floors 5, 10, and 15. The next time, it is 18 floors, with a boss fight on floors 6, 12, and 18. Then 21, 24, etc. Once you built it up to 99 floors, after you fought the third boss, you would have to fight the silvery white knight. Emblems played a large part in the AST. There were many different colored doors that only opened if you had the right emblem. There were seven emblems: earth, cloud, water, fire, sol, dark, luna. Also, on the "rewards" floor, you can use the emblems to get special frames, the most powerful frames in each class. Unfortunately, one could only get 3 emblems on a single game pack. Dark for beating the game, Sol for restoring the solar tree to perfect condition, and one chosen at random when you entered the AST. In order to get them all, you would need another game pak to copy emblems between save files. Also, in order to fight the silvery white knight, you needed all of the emblems.

Dream avenue was different. Instead of adding floors, it added rooms to each floor. There was one switch in each room, with an unpredictable effect. You had to lure enemies onto the switch to see what happened. Effects ranged from giving you the blue key to causing an explosion that would kill you if you were too close. There were thirteen levels and then a boss, which could be quite challenging. After each battle (up to a point), you would get a special item. However, the main reason to go through was to obtain cards. There were many cards that all had special effects, such as bringing you to full health if you die, or inflicting damage on all nearby enemies. They were all one time use, and it wasn't uncommon to use them in the boss fight just to stay alive. It was much more challenging than AST, but at least no emblems were required.