// PC GAMER — GAMING
The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales review
Belief in brevity helps an infectious passion shine through well-worn locales and plotting.
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I always thought history was boring as a kid. Nuts to the past, I want cool tech, body mods, and lightspeed travel! But maybe I would have felt differently if I had a game like The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales back then. What better way is there to appreciate the past than violently cutting down a million monsters in a ye olde fantasy Philadelphia?
What is it? Time-traveling adventure full of optimism and high-octane hack-n-slashing
Reviewed on: Intel Core i7-13700F, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, 16 Gig RAM
Centered around the—you’ll never guess—adventures of a guy named Elliot, this is a classic top-down action adventure through and through. I can taste a healthy smattering of Zelda in its recipe, a smidge of Ys, a dash of Quintet’s informal Gaia series. Traveling through time to explore the history of the magic city Philabieldia (no relation to the real magic city of cheesesteaks stateside), all the elements you’d expect of the genre are here: a condensed map, various tools to help uncover secrets, and plenty of puzzle-filled dungeons, all spruced up with Square Enix’s now-iconic HD-2D style looking the best it ever has. You’ve even got a little blue fairy friend yapping your ear off.
With her portrait sitting in the corner of the screen so she can mug gameplay and cutscenes alike like a hungry react YouTuber, Faie the fairy truly loves to yap. All I'm trying to do is fight my way through a tiny cave, and yet there she is complimenting me after every fight, pointing out every item that drops or chest sitting out in the open or immediately explaining how to solve the world's simplest block pushing puzzle the second I see it. Luckily for my sanity, there's an option buried in the menus to cut her rambling down significantly, turning her from borderline unbearable to a charmingly optimistic companion. It’s frankly baffling that’s not the default.
Besides making sure you’ve always got someone to listen to, Faie provides The Adventures of Elliot’s biggest addition to a style of turn-based RPG Square Enix has gotten comfortable with in recent years., She has an entire host of abilities of her own to experiment with. I can urn her into a body double to clear out a host of monsters while sitting safely in another room, or have her warp me past entire sections of dungeons. Faie specializes in producing moments that make me feel like a genius cheating the system.
Controlled with either the right stick or by a friend, taking full advantage of her freeform powers can be brain-breakingly busy (and sometimes left me gripping my controller in a monstrous double claw), but the satisfaction of whacking an evil elephant with a hammer into Faie right as she’s turned into a mini tornado to hurl them into a pit is incredibly satisfying.
Not that I wasn’t swinging a sword plenty myself. The Adventures of Elliot is a lightning fast game. Classic JRPG electric guitar wails while I hop over boulders that are sinking into lava. As soon as I land in a locked room, half a dozen murderous monsters are beelining right for me. At its best it’s positively exhilarating, a total high-octane thrill ride. Many of the bosses especially, these gorgeous behemoths of detailed pixel work, call to mind the furious action of Ys, dashing and jumping and blocking and parrying in an endless back and forth ballet of violence.