The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales is filling some pretty large shoes. This is the first time Square Enix’s HD-2D style of games is being used for an action game, having been used only for turn-based RPGs before. The specific kind of action game this is calling back to is the 2D top-down action adventure games made popular with Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda series. Zelda is a hard game, not to mention when discussing Elliot, as one look at it shows that it basically begs for the comparison to be drawn. But in the same way that Seiken Densetsu: Final Fantasy Gaiden (the first entry in the Mana series, also known as Final Fantasy Adventure) used a Link To The Past and Link’s Awakening as big inspirations to do their own thing, so does The Adventures of Elliot.
The titular Elliot lives in the kingdom of Huther, the only safe place for humans on the continent of Philabieldia. He’s an adventurer by trade, using his trips out to raise money for the orphanage he was raised in. He’s tasked by the King to go visit some ruins, and along the way, finds a portal that can take him back to the past. From here, he finds himself scouring four different key ages crucial to the history of Philabieldia to save the world.
Despite a pretty lengthy few hours of cutscenes and tutorials dedicated to establishing the world, Elliot eventually gives you free rein to engage with its setting like you would any classic Zelda title. You have a map to explore, filled with branching paths and dungeons. Your arsenal is always growing, with two main action buttons to map your gear onto. Along the way, you’ll even find chests hidden away in the world (on a hill, in a cave, or in a dungeon, for example) where you can gain a shard of life. Find four of these, and you’ll gain another bulb on your life meter. Upgrading your gear and your health is the key reason why you’ll need to explore the world, and playing through the main story will expand where you can go.
Having said all this, to claim Elliot as fully derivative would be misleading. This subgenre works really well, but they just don’t make many of them anymore. Indie revivals like Tunic exist, Nintendo has dabbled with returning to this style with the Link’s Awakening remake and Echoes of Wisdom, but they just don’t make many of them these days. Taking a classic formula to elicit nostalgia is a fine start, and the developer has put the work into making the gameplay feel as good as the classic titles you remember.
The map design was the first thing to catch my attention, as I’m happy to say Square Enix and Claytechworks continue to flaunt their mastery at the HD-2D style. The striking use of color lights up your adventure, and I think this is a pretty good-looking game on the Nintendo Switch 2. The vignette isn’t as overpowering as it has been in recent titles, and the 3D and 2D elements feel wonderfully in sync. I also feel like the particle effects on display here are much more complex than previous entries, which might explain why this game is skipping the original Nintendo Switch.
On the Switch 2, we’re looking at a decent quality image with a 60 frames per second target. The target isn’t always reached, and like with many HD-2D games on the system, there is occasional traversal stutter in particularly busy parts of the overworld. I found this version of the game to be acceptable, but somewhat lacking. It never got so bad that it was unplayable, but even lowering the graphical presets from High to Low (don’t worry, a “Custom” option exists as well) still had some minor stuttering. I liked the aesthetic of Elliot just too much to cut any of the visual features, so I kept it on High for my entire playthrough and just got used to it.
Movement speed, jumping, and attack animations feel snappy, but with enough weight to them so you have to be deliberate in how you fight in order to survive. To avoid you having to always go into the menu to switch gear or use items, you have a shortcut wheel to quickly access your inventory. I played the game on Hard, which was an experience I felt had a fair balance between punishing me for mistakes while not being overbearing.
This also led to each of the dungeons feeling exhilarating, filled with enemies and well-designed puzzles. Some of these involve special movement abilities, combat challenges, or platforming segments. The first run through all of these was a great time, and I find both the dungeon design and boss design to be my favorite parts of the entire package. They all feel deeply nostalgic without tapping into the exact reference for the games that clearly inspired Elliot as a whole.
You have seven weapons to choose from, each of these can be upgraded by completing quests or just finding them out in the field. With each upgrade, your damage output and charge attacks improve. You’ve got your standard sword, bow, hammer, boomerang, and bombs. To spice this up are the additions of my favorite two weapons, the spear and a chain and sickle. Your fairy companion, Faei, also comes with a couple of key abilities to differentiate this from its contemporaries.
You control her with the right thumbstick, which can even be turned into a co-op function if you wish to play with a friend. Her abilities are Ignite, Sprint, Warp, Vacuum, and Copy. The interplay between these abilities and your own kit for Elliot against the many foes across the game made for a really fun challenge. Most of these abilities stay relevant throughout the entire game, for both combat and puzzle solving. Each of these abilities can be upgraded by finding special shrines throughout the ages, to add additional effects like an explosion AOE for the ignite spell.
Once you get Faei, a key aspect of Elliot’s gameplay loop reveals itself. Every time you die, you’re given the chance to revive by spending some of your tul (money). It initially starts at 200, but from there, each subsequent death will multiply the previous amount by 2. This will reset whenever you reach a checkpoint, unless you play on the game’s Very Hard difficulty. Enemies, especially bosses, can be pretty deadly on Hard. They all have fun attack patterns you’ll need to master, and can often be approached in a couple of different ways.
In my experience, making it to the end of the dungeon always encouraged me to take stock in how much money I had before challenging a boss. Do I want to head back to town to stock up on potions, knowing that’s less of an opportunity for a revive if I need it in a pinch? Maybe if I wasn’t thorough in combing through the dungeon, my wallet would be light anyway? While I wish there were simply more to spend your money on to add more friction to this system, I think this is a pretty smart change. The key things you can spend money on are potions, the occasional accessory to give you a buff, food for cats, and upgrades to your Magicite box, which allows you to equip passive upgrades to Elliot’s gear.
Magicite is an interesting system that I love conceptually, but find the execution to be mixed. Each piece of gear has fifteen different magicite abilities. These can be overall improvements like shooting fireballs from your chain whip (making it the most broken weapon in the game), or something that gives you a buff while giving you a nerf. An example of this would be being able to increase your bow special attack damage by a percentage, but now you can’t move or charge. These kinds of sacrifices for specific kinds of power are interesting, and the decisions are made harder by your limited equipment cost. You have a max amount you can equip for every item, and the better the ability, the higher the cost.
Like I mentioned, the max amount you can equip can be increased at a Magicite shop in each of the era’s main towns. This also introduces that part of the system I’m not fond of, where you can spend Magicite fragments found as a reward for bosses or in chests to essentially gacha roll different abilities. The more you use the system, the more you can level this shop up to increase your odds of getting a higher level version of the abilities. The redundant magicite you roll for comes back to you as a single fragment.
I’d say on average, most chests across all four ages give you magicite. This is great early on as your gacha results are refined. You don’t have many fragments yet, since you’ve only beaten a handful of bosses and can’t explore too much. Since only fifteen abilities exist for every seven of the main weapons, though, I found myself unlocking all of them by the halfway point. That meant most of the chests with magicite immediately just turned into a fragment to spend back in the gacha system. These games are all about the joy of discovery in an unknown world, to delve into perilous dungeons to find loot and make it back out to do it all over again. When those chests do give you a unique weapon upgrade, or even a Shard of Life. The dungeons in this game are fantastic to run through on your first trip, so being rewarded with one of those was a delight. When it’s a Magicite you already have, even a slightly better version of it, that’s just a lot less exciting.
Elliot’s biggest flaws and greatest strengths all tie into the exploration of the main world. I had an amazing time exploring the initial two ages in the first half of the game. You’ll find yourself going back and forth between them a few times, slowly getting items you need to progress further in another timeline. Sure, there are some similarities to the maps, but there are enough little details in the paths forward through certain areas to make it work. The world has a wonderful design to it, with key biomes in the environment to offer visual variety, and secrets littered all about. Getting the bombs for the first time just to go back and unlock caves by blowing up walls is a classic Zelda experience they nailed perfectly. Just imagine that kind of “Ah-hah!” moment again and again.
Unfortunately, by the time I got to the third age, the Age of Magic, I realized that the map was basically the same as the first two ages. There are minor differences in some of the paths you can take, but I’d say roughly 90% of what you explore here is identical to the previous maps. Dungeons themselves have new paths available to you, there might be a handful of new caves, and there are all new shrines, but this was more or less the same map. Then I got to the final age, and found that it was once again the same map. Some more little variants, a slight recolor, some new shrines, but ultimately the same. The only thing that feels really different is the village of humans, but even that’s always located in the bottom right corner of the map.
I didn’t let this deter me, and I explored every single inch of each of these maps to completion. I got all the treasure chests, found all the hidden cats (consider them the game’s main collectibles), and did all the shrines. I fought all the bosses, maxed out my health, and even did every single side quest. By the time you make it to the back half of the game, you already have almost everything you need to explore everything, so I figured I might as well just clean house right away. While there were some fun surprises in these new maps, and ultimately it was worth it thanks to the endgame, I couldn’t help but find that exploring in Elliot had diminishing returns. I think they stretched themselves too thin, and I would have preferred fewer ages with more substantial differences between each of the maps.
Content re-use also applies to enemy variety, and I found many of the same enemy types used to the point of stagnation in the final stretch. Recolored bosses will also show back up in optional dungeons on occasion, but admittedly, I can’t be too mad about this. Like I said before, I find the boss fights to be a high point. It only got annoying if doing a re-used boss tucked away in a dungeon in a later age rewarded me with a magicite I already had.
What truly allows Elliot’s faults to make it more of a stumble than a fumble is that both the gameplay and story remain strong for most of the experience. While Elliot’s script wasn’t the most engaging I’ve seen from Square’s legendary catalogue of classic games, it’s hard not to deny that it has some really fun ideas under the hood that threw me off guard. While the plot beats are a bit predictable, the story of self discovery it eventually weaves was very well told. I think most of the plot is front and backloaded to an odd degree, but what is there works. I would have preferred if the pacing of the story hadn’t been so lopsided, but I ultimately enjoyed my time with this world and the cast of characters.
I also really appreciate how obtuse the game is willing to get where it counts. You have an objective marker for main and side quests, but there’s more than a handful of unmarked events you’ll need to understand the full picture that you’ll only get by going out of your way. Pay-off to side quests that involve dabbling in past ages are found by just talking to NPCs found in future ages. While exploration could feel like a slog by the end, ultimately, I was rewarded intrinsically with story pay-offs. And extrinsically? I got to appease my base instincts and dungeon crawl again and again.
Hell, I even like that the game lets me turn town partner chatter off in the settings menu to remove hints. The prologue part with Heuria is a bit overbearing in this regard, but once you get Faie as your main partner, this setting kicks in, and the game let me breathe. I realized that of my 27-hour playthrough, most of it involved me just playing the video game unbothered. I even got stumped by a handful of puzzles, and had to revisit a couple of key dungeons to find really out there secrets.
Elliot is a solid first attempt to use the HD-2D style for an action-adventure title. There are a lot of great ideas here, but I don’t think this had the budget it truly needed to allow them all to shine. I’m glad someone stepped up to the plate to make another game inspired by classic Zelda, but it’s hard not to think that the gameplay starts to peter off by the end. Combing through every nook and cranny to uncover all the secrets is why most people come to these games, that’s the adventure. I think a version of this that scaled things back to three eras and put in more effort to differentiate them would have been a much stronger version of the game.
Despite my frustrations, by the end, I just couldn’t find myself to truly dislike The Adventure of Elliot: The Millennium Tales as a whole. It just has too much heart, and I see a lot of room for improvement. This is the kind of game where you can just tell the people making it approached the project with pure passion. I’d love to see them get another shot, because you can just tell a follow-up could be legendary.
Version Tested: Nintendo Switch 2
Review Copy Provided by Square Enix
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