// KOTAKU — GAMING
The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales: The Kotaku Review
When I look back on The Adventures of Elliot years from now, I do not think I will remember any of its cast. I will not recall most of its plot, its side quests, or any of its big story moments. Instead I will remember using a fairy to suck up many snails from different corners of a large room into a huge snail pile before chucking and detonating a bomb right in the middle of them. That, to me, is The Adventures of Elliot.
The Adventures of Elliot is easily described by its title. It’s a top-down action-RPG starring Elliot, an “adventurer” (see the title), which apparently is an actual job in the land of Philabieldia held by at least half the citizenry somehow. This occupation mostly seems to consist of leaving the continent’s one (1) town and adventuring into old ruins and things, finding treasure, fighting monsters, and running minor errands for townspeople to gather items like herbs and sundry. In typical adventuring fashion, you very quickly move from minor chores (collect these herbs, kill these monsters) to kingdom-saving escapades when the evil royal advisor (yes) betrays the king and uses a magic sword to open a door into the past, while the local princess unrelatedly gets frozen in a mysterious block of ice. More on that shortly.
I like being Elliot. He runs exactly as fast as he should. His slashy slashes with his sword move exactly where I want them to, as fast as I want them to, as far as I want them to. I like his bow and arrows a lot for long-range fighting, and his boomerang—I love to throw it at exactly the right distance so it spins and spins right on a monster and does lots of damage. I like swinging his chain weapon around in circles above my head so enemies get whapped when they get too close. I like using the lance to keep big guys back away from me, and the hammer to smash groups of little guys all at once. The bombs scared me a little, because they hurt me too, until I found upgrades that helped alleviate that.
The upgrades, by which I am referring to Magicite, really make this game’s weapon system. There are Magicite available for each weapon with a wide range of effects, from baseline stat increases to cool effects like making bombs spit colorful sparklers or your chain sickle shoot fireballs when you spin it around. The regular acquisition of new Magicite effects also helped encourage me to actually use my entire arsenal, as otherwise it would have been far too easy to just stick with my two preferred weapons (sword and bow) the whole game. My only complaint with this system is that I wish there were even more Magicite options, as the fun effects on offer start to feel more and more limited as you get deeper into it.
Elliot is accompanied for most of the journey by a fairy named Faie, who you can control with the right stick or with the help of a second player in co-op. It’s a rather boring job for a co-op partner (possibly slightly more interesting if you have a child?) but in single-player, I liked having to split my brain up a bit to move Faie around in tandem with Elliot. I like her abilities, too. She can give Elliot a huge speed boost, set herself on fire to do damage or light torches, turn into a copy of Elliot that mimics his moves, allow Elliot to warp to wherever she is, and turn herself into a weird vacuum that can suck up enemies and objects (including bombs, hehehe) into a big pile. Her warp ability is probably my favorite of all of them, as it challenged me to think about dungeon spaces differently in order to pull off some pretty silly and fun shortcuts.
Loaded up with all his equipment, his boxes of rocks, and a talkative fairy, Elliot goes out into Philabieldia to do some adventuring. While the first few hours are relatively on rails, The Adventures of Elliot does a good job of opening up its world wide to you pretty quickly, especially once Elliot gets to time traveling and can visit any of four different ages through a simple fast-travel selection. For the most part, if you wan