The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales

The first time we see Elliot, he’s out in the woods looking for a simple comb an old man dropped when he was gathering herbs. He doesn’t care that it’s not a glorious job or even that the old man won’t be able to pay him much; it’s just the right thing to do. Elliot is that kind of guy. He helps run the orphanage he grew up in, and we see him always being nice to the children there, who in turn all love him and believe Elliot to be the greatest adventurer in the entire world: he’s not only the closest thing they have to a father figure, but also their role model. So, Elliot fights monsters and saves people to live up to their lofty expectations. Elliot would never disappoint a kid, you see. He’s that kind of guy.

It’s good that people like Elliot exist in the world of Philabieldia, as humankind is confined to a single city shielded from the raging beasts outside by a magic spell: relying on the powers of Princess Heuria to survive, they’re in desperate need of a hero. Adventurers like Elliot, then, are needed to venture into the wilds to gather resources and explore, as most people expectedly remain safely inside. So, one day, King Hichard commands Elliot to investigate a newly discovered ruin and search for any magical advantage they can find over the beastmen. Elliot, of course, accepts. “I will do everything in my power to be of service,” he says. Because he’s that kind of guy.

The tone here, especially due to the style of the music (it sounds like Dragon Quest, if Dragon Quest were ever allowed to get creative and bold and have more than ten tracks, and a bit like Octopath Traveler as well), is of a simple, unpretentious adventure, filled with good vibes but underlined by a small but not inconsequential dose of melancholia. If Elliot is ever optimistic, one man he encounters says, “I had dreams for the future, too, when I was young. But it turned out I didn’t have the power to change a single thing.”

Most of the sidequests follow this man’s vibe rather than Elliot’s. Our adventurer is that one-dimensional happy-go-lucky guy who goes into perilous dungeons with a smile on his face and an unwavering confidence that makes him seem invincible. The fate of other adventurers, however, shows the stark reality: one of the quests has Elliot going back to the site where one of his colleagues died to grab a token for his fiancée, now a widow. “If only our last exchange could have been one of kindness,” she laments. Another mission has us witness a couple’s quarrel: Diona is hurt that Heurich is giving too much of himself to the quest of finding a cure for her malady and forgetting to enjoy their precious moments together. And, most of all, she fears for his safety and doesn’t want to eventually send Elliot to grab tokens for her, too. A third sidequest is about a kid in the orphanage trying to find out how their father – the captain of the royal guard – could have died if he was as fierce and invincible as Elliot. We find his remains in a cave.

The meat of the story – the human struggles, the hurt, the pathos – is found in these sidequests, which develop even some of the main characters in unexpected ways: we learn, for example, about some surprising connections regarding the antagonist Kaifried that paint him as a tragic man who is now impulsive and decisive to make up for some past reluctances that cost him dearly. Thanks to them, he goes from a simple plot device – a bland power-hungry villain – to a full-fledged character. Not everyone is that lucky, however: Elliot himself remains the subject of Bonnie Tyler’s song, and Heuria follows suit, being an altruistic princess with little depth.

But the narrative’s main problem lies in the time it takes to show its hand. After all, if, unlike Bonnie Tyler, you’re looking for a layered, conflicted, emotionally devastated hero, Elliot isn’t that kind of man. He’s not nearly complex enough to carry a story by himself; he needs other characters and themes to play off his unabashed heroism and frame it in an interesting light. However, the themes here take too long to even begin to develop.

The Adventures of Elliot tells a story about alterity, about the never-ending battle between us (humans, civilized and good) and the Other (beastmen, animalistic and evil) and how easy it is for us to become cruel when dehumanizing that other: we stop seeing them as individuals precisely to shield ourselves from guilt, as our conscience wouldn’t be able to deal with the violence of our actions otherwise. The problem is that this comes to the forefront only in the (albeit great) last third of the game (where the harrowing succession of tragedies makes even Elliot somber), leaving the first 20 hours devoid of much substance, shallow and adrift.

However, the lighter tone of the first hours is important to make the last ones hit harder: contrast is an effective narrative tool to make an impact. And Elliot’s optimistic nature also serves as a beacon of light when things get dark and misery and death become a constant in people’s lives, since, as one character rightly puts it, “Even the slightest bit of joy can give you the strength to go on living.” In other words, Elliot turns into the anchor holding everyone in place, preventing them from causing even more tragedies, precisely because of the kind of guy he is.

But story aside, what kind of game is The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales in the first place? This is a top-down action-adventure game with real-time combat, time travel shenanigans, and dungeons akin to The Legend of Zelda, although the direct comparison does poor Elliot no favors.

The combat is where the game shines, as Elliot’s array of weapons all feel and function totally different and can be tweaked considerably with passive skills, which are equipped with items called “magicites”. We get most of them with a gacha system, spending crystals to receive random magicites that vary in purpose and level. However, the key here is that instead of just increasing basic stats, such as charge speed and damage, some of them add unique, game-changing properties to each weapon: a fully charged hammer, for example, can unleash lightning bolts in an area with the right magicites, turning a short-ranged weapon into something that can hit faraway enemies as well. Spears can leave a trail of fire on the ground, causing “burn” on enemies, and even bombs can become a viable main weapon, increasing in size, freezing monsters that go near them, and dealing huge damage to mobs.

Some magicites make weapons perform better when we are at full health, others the other way around, and we can quickly switch between them through a radial menu. Couple that with the powers of Elliot’s fairy companion, Faie (who’s so annoying, she’ll make you believe you were too harsh to Zelda’s Na’vi), and we have a lot of elasticity in terms of creating builds and putting them to good use: Faie allows us to warp behind enemies, for example, or set off bombs immediately with fire.

If The Adventures of Elliot nails combat, the same unfortunately can’t be said about the way it handles its time travel concept and structures the overall exploration. Very early on, Elliot learns about the location of a special door that leads him to hundreds of years in the past, to a previous Age. The thing is…the past looks a hell of a lot like the present. The main city is completely different, just preserving its location and size, but with a unique layout and vibe appropriate to that time period: in the Age of Magic, for example, it is thriving with elevators and magical barriers, while in the Age of Reconstruction it is a crumbling ruin. But the rest of the world, well, it is basically the same: not only the layout remains unaltered, but even the little things like enemies and architecture (like tents) remain mostly the same.

 

But it gets worse, as we eventually visit two other periods and discover that they follow suit: the main city is different, but the rest – the snowy regions, the lake, the fiery mountains – remain unaltered. There’s usually just a log, a block of stone, or something similar blocking one path that was open in another era, and that’s it: 500 years amounted to that, a new piece of wood in the middle of the way.

We can find ruins everywhere on the world map (they usually serve as the game’s dungeons), which is all fine and dandy in the present but stops making sense as we travel further and further back in time and find them still the same (as ruins, in a crumbling state) in each Age: ruins, despite what you may think if you’re weird, are not born like that; they are made. They were once temples, installations, palaces, research labs. They had a purpose before Papa Ruins and Mama Ruins loved each other very much, and a seagull delivered Baby Ruins to them. Here, however, it doesn’t matter how far back we go in time; each and every one of those ruins remains just a bunch of ruins – with just one notable exception by the end.

In other words, The Adventures of Elliot is a game about time travel in which we barely see the passage of time affecting the environment, besides the occasional piece of stone blocking a path. Take the dungeons themselves: they are proper dungeons in one Age only, as in every other Age most paths inside them are blocked by whatever, leaving just a couple of rooms available with a random and often quite useless treasure chest. And can we see a reason for the dungeon only being open in that specific Age and blocked in the others? No. Can we see a reason why some are more in a crumbling state in the past than in the future? No. Can we see a reason for Square Enix to release Switch 2 ports at full price without the possibility to upgrade and even use our old save files? Also no.

This is a game that already asks us to suspend our disbelief regarding the context of the dungeons (in one, we’re after a kid who went off inside one by herself and, since she’s in the boss room, it means she managed to solve puzzles, defeat monsters and pass through tough platform challenges, then return all the keys to their respective chests, all by her lonesome and so maybe, just maybe, she doesn’t need our help) so their overall design not being that great either is just rubbing salt in the wound, as most of them barely pass for the first tutorial dungeon of a typical Zelda game.

They hardly develop their respective mechanics – when they have one – which are also quite simple and fail to leverage their unique theme: in an ice cave we shoot at crystals to open doors or make walls of ice disappear, and that’s it. There’s a wall of ice in our way? We just look around for a few seconds for the nearby crystal, shoot it, and then proceed. Great use of the ice motif.

But much worse is the fact that these dungeons seem haphazardly designed, with too many empty spaces that serve no purpose, such as empty rooms and corners, or separated platforms with a single enemy and no reason for us to go there to defeat it.  This is not a game designed to give every space a function.

And they can get quite rigid in the way they are meant to be solved as well: if there are some spikes on the ground blocking our path and we are supposed to raise the water level to swim above them, then that’s the only thing we can do, since if we get to a high platform and try to jump and glide over the spikes, we’ll just hit an invisible wall. The only type of flexibility present here is the option of using the accessory that makes us hover in the air for a while instead of Faie’s ability to warp to get to distant places.

One nice thing about these dungeons is that most of them are optional, making exploration more rewarding by giving us better equipment or special items, and we can usually tackle them as soon as we get in the Age where they’re fully open. However, sometimes, it can be incredibly frustrating to get to the end of one of these optional dungeons and discover that it wasn’t actually optional after all, so nothing spawns in the boss room until we get to a specific point in the main story, and we’re just left standing there and wondering if it’s a bug or if we missed anything.

In the end, time travel in The Adventures of Elliot means that we have four carbon-copies of the same map to explore, with many spaces fulfilling no function whatsoever (conspicuous corners usually hold a treasure chest or an NPC or any type of purpose in just one of the Ages, remaining vacant and useless in the others), and no guarantee whether the time we spend exploring will lead to anything useful. Sometimes we’ll go into a cave just to find out that there’s nothing interesting there or, worse, a treasure chest that holds a magicite we already have, meaning it will be converted to a single crystal (we need five to buy a random magicite in town, which can also be something that we already have and be converted to another single crystal) and shatter our hopes that this cave would finally hold something nice.

Finally, we also have some Breath of the Wild-style shrines spread through the world map in each Age: small arena-like challenges or puzzles that reward us with something akin to a heart piece. They are done well, each with its own particular idea or puzzle that we’ll rarely see elsewhere, such as a platform/puzzle challenge with moving tiles.

So, if you are looking for a complex, layered story with a troubled protagonist and tightly designed dungeons and maps, you won’t find that here. But if you’re looking for a light-hearted adventure with just the right amount of bite, and don’t care about running around the same places over and over again, you’re in luck: The Adventures of Elliot is just that kind of game.

August 08, 2026.