The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales

The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales delivers a charming adventure that combines a solid narrative, rewarding exploration, and a fast-paced, versatile combat system. Its HD-2D world stands out thanks to its exceptional artistic direction, while Elliot and Faie’s journey maintains player engagement through strong pacing, varied environments, and a classic approach to action and discovery. Although it draws clear inspiration from other franchises within the genre, it succeeds in establishing its own identity through charm, personality, and many hours of entertainment.

The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales is charismatic. It may not be the best game in the HD-2D scene, but it's certainly not a bad experience. It's not only another step in the constant evolution that Square Enix began after the release of Octopath Traveler, but it's also an adventure worth experiencing, even if some parts aren't quite as good as many of us would have liked.

The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales offers everything an enjoyable action RPG should: tricky puzzle design, rewarding exploration, and nuanced combat. A lack of gameplay innovation and reliance on well-worn narrative tropes slightly hold it back from true greatness, but if you're a fan of the genre, it's still a quest well worth embarking on.

If The Adventures of Elliot become as numerous as the legends of Zelda, you'll find me a willing participant, despite the shortcomings of this maiden voyage. The inspirations are clear, but so too is the understanding of what makes for enjoyable minute-to-minute gameplay. The longer you play, the more the cracks begin to show, but the story manages to push you forward and the hidden plots beneath it make going out of your way an oft fulfilling detour. The red mage-looking Elliot has made a fan out of me, and if Link ever wants to take a break from stopping Ganon, Square Enix has a capable backup waiting in the wings.

The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales is perhaps not as good as it could have been, but that doesn't stop it from being a very satisfying time. Elliot and Faie make for fun protagonists, and the game's combat, magic and upgrade systems are deep and enjoyable. Although I would have enjoyed more puzzles and varied world maps, I had a great time with what the game gave me. If you like gorgeous action RPGs, The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales has a lot to offer, and you'll be sure to have a fantastic escapade.

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.

Whatever team Asano's original statement of intent may have been in crafting The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales, it will only have been partially honored. Beyond deploying the era-hopping mechanic as a design shortcut rather than a genuinely coherent narrative element, this latest HD-2D epic loses itself in outrageous repetitiveness, one that will have players retreading the same areas time and again; and the handful of sporadic, era-dependent variations won't be enough to fend off the overdose. There is, admittedly, a soul to it all the same, systems that work and a certain moreishness to the gameplay, yet the experience spreads out as so much scenery to be crossed again and again, all while waiting for the story to finally deign to begin. And it's very good, once it truly does. But in plenty of cases, by then it will already be too late. "Hope is eternal," one might draw as the game's moral. We'd mainly have preferred it to be in a little more of a hurry.