// KOTAKU — GAMING
The Adventures Of Elliot Devs Were ‘Surprised’ That Fans Think The Game’s Fairy Companion Talks Too Much
It’s not uncommon nowadays for upcoming games to release a free demo, run a network test or open beta, or otherwise let players experience the game ahead of launch and provide feedback as to what is and isn’t working for them. But what is rare and pleasant is actually getting to see very specific, significant, and direct results of that feedback actually implemented, like we have with The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales, including the feedback that one of the main characters needs to shut their dang pie hole.
Typically, publishers will answer questions about what changes were made in response to feedback from such events with hand-wavey stuff like “more polish,” but for The Adventures of Elliot, Team Asano and Square Enix actually published a list of fixes last month that are pretty significant. (These changes are based on feedback from the game’s “debut demo,” released last year. It has a new demo, the “prologue demo,” out now.) There are a bunch of changes to menuing to make accessing weapons and powers faster, there’s a huge change to equipping Magicite that makes it way easier to effectively give Elliot “load-outs,” Elliot’s base move speed was (necessarily!) increased, and multiple difficulty levels were added. These are not small changes! The speed at which they were made suggests maybe some of them had already been on the developers’ minds beforehand, but I’m genuinely impressed at how much came out of that demo last year.
But the biggest and most interesting change for me is one not listed in that post, explained to me by producer Naofumi Matsushita. Matsushita told me that the team was genuinely “surprised” to learn that a lot of players didn’t like how much Faie, Elliot’s fairy companion, talked. And yes, Faie really did seem to have a statement for every situation, interjecting commentary about everything from seeing a treasure chest to getting hit by an enemy. Matsushita told me the team truly did not perceive the endless chatter as an issue until players told them. “Since we had been involved with the game’s development for such a long time, we had naturally grown very fond of Faie ourselves, and in hindsight I think we may have become a little biased because of that,” he said.
For that reason, he continued, Team Asano added an option to reduce her dialogue in the settings, which I am sure many people will immediately activate when they first meet her in the game.
Matsushita and I spoke over email in a wide-ranging interview in which we discussed topics such as the invocation of nostalgia for Square Enix’s HD-2D games, Team Asano’s move from traditional RPGs to this action-RPG, and whether or not you can pet the cats in The Adventures of Elliot. Here’s our full interview to peruse ahead of The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales‘ release on June 18 on Switch 2, PS5, Xbox, and PC.
Kotaku: Tell me about the origins of The Adventures of Elliot: How did the idea for the game come about, and what was the original prototype of it like?
Naofumi Matsushita: Through the HD-2D visual style, we first explored the RPG genre with Octopath Traveler, followed by the strategy genre with Triangle Strategy. Building on that progression, we wanted this latest HD-2D game to reach an even broader, newer audience, which led us to adopt the action RPG genre. In the first playable prototype, Elliot looked different from his current appearance, and we used a temporary field that is no longer in use where we mainly focused on action elements—repeatedly testing things like sword swings, jumping, and other mechanics. As we progressed, we decided to complete a small map in its entirety, even if it was simple. We brought it to a reasonably playable state, including enemies and other elements, and used it primarily to evaluate how the game felt to play overall.
What are the most significant ways in which The Adventures of Elliot evolved over the course of its development, and how did those evolutions come about?
Matsus