While I am a wee-bit too young to have grown up in the golden age of the SNES, my introduction to gaming was the wonky first steps (by today’s standards) of 3D gaming, there is nevertheless a particular itch that only a top-down action-adventure game can scratch. Whether it was guiding a green-clad hero across Hyrule in one of The Legend of Zelda games released for the Game Boy at the time or hacking through the wilds in Secret of Mana, the 16-bit era provided gamers with some of the most enduring formulas of gaming that are beloved even decades later. While Square Enix’s flagship games may have moved forward with current-gen capabilities, their HD-2D visual style has spent the better part of a decade attempting to straddle the line between that period’s aesthetic and modernity. Until now, however, the style has been reserved almost exclusively for turn-based affairs like Octopath Traveller, Triangle Strategy and the Dragon Quest remakes. Enter The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales, the first time Team Asano and Claytechworks have applied their signature look to a real-time action adventure, complete with a hero in a red cap, a chatty fairy companion, and a quest aiming for genre-friendly epicness. It is a premise that practically sells itself to anyone with fond memories of the classics… but does Elliot’s millennium-spanning adventure live up to the legends that so clearly inspired it? Read on to find out!
The story of The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales takes place on the continent of Philabieldia, where humanity has been pushed back behind the walls of the Kingdom of Huther, kept safe from the roaming beast tribes only by the Spell of Safekeeping maintained by Princess Heuria. Elliot, an accomplished and relentlessly cheerful adventurer, is tasked by the king with investigating a set of recently unearthed ruins, and it is there he discovers the Doorway of Time, a portal connecting the ages. When a scheming royal minister slips into the past with designs on rewriting history for his own benefit, Elliot gives chase, and so begins a tale told across four distinct eras of the kingdom’s rise and fall.
It is an ambitious framework that is quite fitting for the era of game they are seeking to evoke, but the delivery is uneven, with a first act that meanders through predictable beats and a central plot that occasionally loses its thread entirely, at times feeling more like a medieval melodrama than a time-travel story. Where the writing genuinely shines is in its side content, with over thirty side quests weaving small, personal stories of grief, memory and legacy that connect characters across the generations in genuinely affecting ways. The multiple-endings structure is worth flagging too: your first credits roll will likely be the bad ending, and reaching the good and eventually true endings requires further investigation across the ages.
If there is one element of The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales that shines most, perhaps obviously, it is the presentation, which stands as arguably the finest showing of the HD-2D style to date and proves conclusively that it works just as well in real time as it does in turn-based battles. Characters, monsters, terrain, and even simple water effects are rendered with a level of detail that meets my high expectations, and the boss sprites, in particular, are enormous, lavishly animated showpieces. The shame of it is that the world design does not fully capitalise on the game’s central hook. All four ages share what is essentially the same map, with the human settlement changing dramatically between eras, but the surrounding wilds, caves, and dungeons are less remarkable across them, regardless of whether you are wandering the ancient Age of Budding or the ruinous Age of Reconstruction. Beyond a small handful of moments where an action in one era opens a path in another, the opportunity for clever cross-era puzzle design goes mostly untouched, and the sense of retreading familiar ground does set in well before the credits. Dungeons, similarly, lean on the simpler side, with block-pushing and lock-and-key routines that rarely ask much of the player, even if their compact layouts keep things moving at a pleasant clip.
On the audio side, the soundtrack by Tomohiro Nakamachi and Yuto Moritani is fitting, with a few tracks that will inevitably make it onto my playlist for months, if not years, to come. The main theme builds from gentle tones into a sweeping chorus, and each of the four ages receives its own musical identity, with familiar melodies reworked to suit the mood of the era you find yourself in. Voice acting is a little more of a mixed bag but still solid, with the core cast all performing admirably, leaning into their fantasy archetypes with earnest, characterful deliveries. In terms of mascots, your fairy companion will go above and beyond the ‘Navi’ levels of talkative, with a post-launch update giving you the option to reduce or remove her voice lines entirely.
The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales reveals a combat system that is comfortably the best thing about it. Elliot gains access to seven weapon types across the early hours, spanning four melee options (sword, spear, hammer, and chain and sickle) and three projectiles (bow, bombs and boomerang), with any two equippable at once and the full arsenal swappable via a radial menu that freezes combat while you switch between them. Each weapon has its own feel, its own charged special attack, and its own role in puzzle-solving, and rather than a dodge roll, defence is handled through a trusty shield with a stamina gauge, encouraging judicious blocking and rewarding a perfectly timed parry with a satisfying stun. Layered over all of this is a combo streak system, where defeating enemies without taking damage steadily increases the goodies they drop. While it may not be the number of items accessible to you in comparable games in the past, they are balanced enough that each feels weighty. On the other hand, there is a limited number of enemies you will encounter, with the game recycling enemies and bosses, meaning you might find yourself running out of difficult enemies to face off against before long.
Where The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales finds its longer-term hooks is in the Magicite system, which entirely replaces traditional levelling. Magicite are enchanted gems slotted directly into each weapon, granting modifiers that range from simple stat boosts through to genuinely build-defining effects: bombs that freeze enemies on contact, boomerangs enlarged into whirling saws, arrows that ignite targets so a follow-up shot can detonate them. Each weapon has its own pool of Magicite and a capacity limit that expands over time, so there are real decisions to be made about which effects earn a slot, and the whole loadout can be reshuffled at any moment, including mid-battle. New Magicite is primarily earned by feeding fragments collected from enemies into a vendor who dispenses them gacha-style, and while there is no real money involved, the randomness of it all does introduce a layer of grind that will not be to everyone’s tastes… or you may just get lucky and not have to worry about it all too much.
The other half of The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales‘s gameplay is Faie herself, who redeems her incessant chatter through gameplay mechanics. Controlled independently with the right stick, she can bump into enemies for chip damage, and by seeking out shrines scattered across the ages, she gains a suite of genuinely transformative abilities, from igniting herself into a floating fireball, to a vacuum ability that sucks foes and debris toward her, to creating a doppelganger of Elliot that mimics his every action. These shrines double as a tutorial and a test in one and were consistently among my favourite moments in the game. Better still, a second player can take direct control of Faie in local co-op, not something I was expecting, which proved both practical and genuinely fun during boss encounters. Speaking of bosses, they are the undisputed highlight of the combat, gargantuan and gorgeously animated creatures whose arenas make clever use of space, projectiles and terrain, and which demand you bring every weapon, magicite combination and fairy power to bear on the higher difficulty levels.
So, does The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales live up to the 16-bit legends whose legacy it so proudly wears? For the most part, yes. This is a game whose stunning presentation, superb soundtrack, and genuinely excellent combat are at the forefront, although it’s slightly let down by a time-travel mechanic that deserves a second take in a sequel and fairly simplistic dungeons, all things considered. Much like the original Octopath Traveller before it, this feels like the confident but cautious first step of a series with far greater heights ahead of it. Elliot’s first outing is well worth your time…
Final Score for The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales
This review was conducted on a PlayStation 5 copy of The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales. A review code was provided by Australian distributor, Bandai Namco Entertainment Australia.
The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales is now available to purchase on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch 2 and PC.
