// THE VERGE — GAMING
Final Fantasy meets Zelda? Yes, please
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The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales continues Square Enix’s strong run of weirdly named HD-2D games.
The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales continues Square Enix’s strong run of weirdly named HD-2D games.
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Let’s be real: There’s no shortage of Zelda-style games to play right now. That’s true even if you’ve exhausted all there is to see in Tears of the Kingdom or Echoes of Wisdom. Indie developers keep finding new ways to refresh the formula, whether it’s fusing it with a Soulslike, making it cozier, or simply shrinking it down into something more manageable. Now we have Square Enix and The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales, a curiously named RPG that mixes the classic Zelda structure with something that resembles Final Fantasy. And it’s a combination I can’t seem to get enough of.
The Adventures of Elliot is the latest in Square Enix’s “HD-2D” line of games, a loosely collected series defined largely by their visuals, which reimagine pixel art for modern audiences. The other defining trait is every game has an incredibly weird name, so Elliot fits right in. Many are more traditional JRPGs, like the Octopath Traveler series, some Dragon Quest remakes, and an actual Final Fantasy game. But Square Enix has also grown the HD-2D style to encompass more genres, like Triangle Strategy’s, well, strategy, and now an action-adventure game.
As you can probably guess, Elliot stars an adventurer named Elliot in a world of magic and monsters. In Elliot’s time, most of the land is a dangerous place, with only a single city free from the beast tribes, as it’s under the magical protection of a young princess. That makes adventurers like Elliot an integral part of society: They’re the ones who go out into the world and complete tasks that are otherwise too risky for normal citizens. Soon enough he gets pulled into a larger adventure with the fate of the kingdom at stake, at first involving one of the king’s advisers with a thirst for power and eventually spanning multiple timelines across a thousand years.