The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales (2026)

Lots to like here, but not quite enough to push it over the edge into "great" territory.

I love the 2D-HD art style, I'll never get sick of it due to me growing up on Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 6. However I didn't love the look of the locations/dungeons/ outside the towns for some reason and I think it lends itself to my biggest problem with the game.

This is a time travelling adventure, which I generally like, but here it feels a bit half baked. The world itself is only so-so to explore, but there's almost never a point in time where I could just go in one direction and get to where I want there. There's always crap in the way blocking me, like trees, or rocks, or fences and constant zig-zagging around. The warp point/save points are plentiful and helpful for fast travel, to be sure, but it annoyed me mostly if I wanted to go find a cat or a specific dungeon (which I had a hard time telling if I'd been to before since it's the same map 4 times) it always felt like a chore. Even the "speed" boost power with your fairy was fun, but I'd constantly be bumping into stuff.

However, the hover cape was my favorite part of traversal. I was constantly hovering over little chasms, or skipping tiny puzzles because I'd spent all my money on this little accessory. Nice!

Voice acting, world building and characters are all solid, if a bit saccharine. No issues there.

Aside from a few really irritating bosses, the boss fights and combat in general is fun. Lots of weapons and combinations of fighting styles with ranged weapons, magicite you can use to customize your weapons/fighting style and plenty of power ups/healing options at your disposal. This is very much a Square Enix take on Link to the Past and while it's nowhere near that, it's certainly a respectable effort.

I was soured a bit at the end - I really, really don't like when I hit end credits and it's not the "real" or "good" ending. I get that a lot of people like back tracking to collect a bunch of stuff, but when it's mildly irritating to do so (why have those little loading screens on a system like the Switch 2???) I completely lost interest after finding out how much I'd have to do/collect in order to see the true ending. This is more of a personal preference, so it may not bother you.

I hope I don't sound like I didn't enjoy the game, I very much did! Just a few nitpicks here and there. Mercifully, you can tell your fairy companion to shut up, though I only did that a few times.

Square-Enix’s latest HD-2D adventure takes some cues from the Zelda series, similar action-adventure and JRPG games, and a few more modern influences with mixed but not bad results. You’ll quickly find yourself with a sword, shield, boomerang, bombs, bow, and a talkative fairy, questing through dungeons and overworld screens, collecting pieces of heart, and even doing some BotW style shrines as side content. But I’d advise you not to think too much about 2D Zelda’s classics, since in comparison you’ll find this very lacking in flow, satisfying integration of new gear and abilities into the level and encounter design, overall memorability, and some other things I’ll get into. Nonetheless, I was pulled in by its generous demo and personally ended up liking it more than other recent games in this lane.

It kept me going through weaker bits in part thanks to the story, whose straightforwardness and sentimentality mostly worked well for me. (Your mileage may vary, as some seem to really not be into it or how it’s localized at all.) Even if the game’s side quests for example are super basic in their actual design, I kept doing them for the little narrative moments they offered. My problems with the story were more in terms of structure and flow, as it felt a bit stuck in what still felt to me like a long “Act I” for a lot of the game, doesn’t really feel like it reaches significant enough milestones or moments of enough weight to satisfyingly move along. It also has three endings that you basically seem meant to get in order from worst to best as you gradually learn more, but I don’t really get the point of doing it like this when it’s not like there were choices and consequences that mattered earlier.

Time travel as a somewhat underbaked-feeling aspect of the game hurts both the story flow and the exploration in various ways. It eventually comes together a bit in the sense that it builds out this history of the world and its core conflict and some of the characters by showing you key points in time in the same places, and there’s something to the aspect of visiting a place that’s familiar enough to get around but changed over time in the main city at least. It’s just that when the whole map and dungeons and caves and things are mostly the same, once you’ve hit the fourth era where you walk the exact same route in the same place, it feels like the differences between times can’t compensate for how physically contained this journey is. The lack of direct consequences of your actions and sections of being truly stuck in an unfamiliar scenario, very few interesting writing moments coming from the fact that Elliot is out of place, it all just feels like it lacks sufficient purpose, stakes, and depth in general.

Exploration’s appeal wore off not just because of the repetitiveness of the map, but also since during the first half I felt actively conditioned against doing it after so many instances of being “rewarded” with a useless little upgrade that I already owned or my companion literally saying “we aren’t supposed to be here right now”. That upgrade system is not entirely bad since I did feel like I could actually somewhat create a “build” within constraints and change it around flexibly, but the gacha-style implementation of how you get those upgrades feels pointless, and I wish you could make use of a lot more of the upgrades at once to build in-depth for multiple weapons or something with how many there are. The talky companions are possibly the most common complaint about this game, and I think they’re charming but definitely feel very overbearingly written for people who have never played a game before, which is very weird considering I feel like the audience for this is just people who already like 2D Zelda and Final Fantasy games…

The game has pretty decent characters whose portraits are generally the best thing it has going for it visually, with the visuals in general still being relatively nice for the HD-2D style that I usually don’t care for. In terms of combat it’s pretty solid as well, with bosses getting surprisingly a fair bit more complex than those in something like Zelda, and the weapons feeling satisfying and almost all worth using. But really any praise I can give it in any particular area is ultimately just let down by the kinds of weaknesses mentioned above, a game that is worth a try and that I enjoyed my time with but which is unfortunately not essential and would need a lot of rethinking for a sequel to approach the greatness of its inspirations.