The Adventures of Elliot Review

Introduction

The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales (AOE for brevity) is an HD-2D action adventure by Square Enix. You'll step into the world as the titular character, Elliot, as he journeys across time in an effort to save his kingdom from peril, all while helping the people in each era with their problems.

I'll attempt to break down the aspects of the game into individual categories and assign a score out of 100 based on certain entirely subjective criteria. The criteria I'll base my score on can be found here.

Spoiler warning

While I try my best not to spoil puzzle solutions or other major parts of the story/gameplay loop, it is hard to write an in-depth review without doing so to some extent. If you have not played the game and do not wish to have aspects of the game revealed to you ahead of time, do not read this review.

Gameplay

The gameplay in AOE is reminiscent of a more linear Breath of the Wild. You'll travel around the world completing quests and fighting various monsters or machines while engaging in real time combat with a large variety of different weapon types and equipment.

You can easily swap which weapon you are using at any given time, as opening the weapon wheel freezes the game, preventing you from getting punished for changing weapons mid-combat. While the variety is large, I found myself only really using 2-3 of the weapons just for simplicity, swapping outside that range only when absolutely necessary to progress through the section of the game. I think the idea of having so many tools at your disposal is neat in concept, however, in execution, it feels a bit too uncomfortable to frequently change up the gameplay loop. This ultimately ends up making the fact that swapping is a hard requirement for progression a bit more of an annoyance.

Equipment exists in the form of accessories, but the implementation feels a bit lackluster. You are given only one equipment slot at the start of the game, with others being unlocked through a boss-rush-like gauntlet you unlock after some progression up to a maximum of three slots. Most of the various pieces of equipment you'll collect feel somewhat inconsequential to progression, as most seem to only provide a small buff to very specific playstyles. I think it would have been nice to see some more accessories with significantly stronger effects to function as something to define a specific loadout or build, rather than complementing existing ones, as I never felt like going out of my way to collect accessories as a result.

Gameplay Score: 14/20

Design

I've always been a big fan of the HD-2D style of art in games, especially fantasy games. The visual design of AOE does well at complementing the theming and overall style that the game was created in, managing to create impressive looking arenas & locales without necessitating high-fidelity models for characters or terrain. Overall the stylistic choices fit the game very well and help to elevate the exploration experience.

As for the design of the world itself, I find it a tad disappointing that even though the game takes place over what are seemingly distant times chronologically, the overworld is effectively 100% the same across all of them. There is some nuance to this, many dungeons have different physical layouts over the different time periods, but the majority of overworld areas are completely identical, making the re-exploration of areas in a new time period quite unsatisfying.

Design Score: 16/20

Music

I'm always thoroughly impressed with the music in Square Enix's titles, with AOE being no exception. There is well over an hour of orchestrated tracks that do a fantastic job of nailing home the theming of each unique time period. Additionally, every time period has slightly different renditions of tracks for common areas, which I think is a great way to keep tracks from feeling incredibly repetitive as you spend time in each area throughout the game. However, while all the tracks are well-made, I don't really feel as if there were any standout pieces in the OST. The music is good, just not necessarily memorable.

Music Score: 8/10

Lore

The story in AOE is pretty easy to follow. The vast majority of information is clearly presented to the player through dialogue and cutscenes, with smaller details being discoverable through various memoirs found across the map. I think that the story itself is fine, it feels a bit cliché at times but doesn't ever get particularly boring to follow. There are also multiple discoverable endings that you can get (bad/neutral/good) which I think helps to make your story actions feel like they have a bit more weight.

Lore Score: 7/10

Controls

_{NOTE: I played this game with gamepad controls, and the following is based on that.}

The controls were fairly well done, I did not have any major problems throughout my playthrough. My chief complaint here is mostly just on the slight clunkiness of the control scheme for controlling your fairy companion, Fae. I understand that there's a limited amount of ways to control something on a gamepad control scheme due to the smaller amount of buttons compared to a keyboard, but I could not stand the fact that most of the controls for Fae utilized the D-Pad. Once I got used to the controls it wasn't that bad, it just made early game a bit more cumbersome.

Control Score: 9/10

Difficulty

I was left a bit disappointed by the difficulty in AOE. There are a number of difficulty settings to choose from for your playthrough, and I chose to do my playthrough on the hardest difficulty to give myself a good challenge. Despite this, I never really felt as if any specific boss / segment of the game was a particularly hard obstacle to overcome. At most, I had to refight a boss once or twice to get past it, which for being the hardest difficulty setting was a fair bit underwhelming. If I had played through this game on any easier of a difficulty I genuinely do not think I would have died more than once or twice throughout the game.

Combat difficulty aside, I also want to touch on just how incredibly easy all of the side quests in the game are. Most of the quests are in the style of "Go talk to this guy on the other side of the map, then come back to me, then go talk to another guy on the other side of the map, etc." which is just incredibly boring to complete. On top of this, quests that actually involve combat are usually super tame in nature, putting up no real challenge. I think there was room to flesh this system out a lot more as far as enhancing the difficulty goes.

Difficulty Score: 5/10

Overall Quality

I went into AOE with high expectations due to it being a Square Enix title, which is why I think I was bothered so much by the fact that on launch the game was somewhat of a buggy mess. To their credit, a lot of these issues have been fixed in post-launch patches, however there are still serious problems with the game even at the time of writing this article.

For being an HD-2D game, it released remarkably unoptimized. There were several sections in the game that significantly reduced my frames, which is always cause for annoyance. In addition, until their post-launch patch to fix it, having Fae out of hiding and moving around would absolutely tank the frame rate of the game down to around 20-40 FPS. As a result, I had to play through the game with Fae tucked away almost the entire time, only bringing her out to solve mandatory puzzles. Outside of this, even using charged weapon attacks would sometimes just absolutely demolish the performance of the game. I'm really baffled at the fact that a lot of these issues didn't get caught in playtesting / QA from Square Enix as this has really left a sour taste in my mouth.

OQ Score: 10/20

Final Thoughts

The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales is, at best, an average game from a renowned publisher. I think that the core idea is good, and had potential to be a great success, but it fell short in far too many areas to be anything other than a slight disappointment. With a completion time of around 20-25 hours, I don't know if the quality of the game justifies its $60.00 USD price point. It's certainly not a bad game, but at triple A pricing, I would hold off until a sale if you plan on purchasing.

Overall Score: 69/100

_{All images used in this article were sourced either from the Steam Store, press kits, or personal screenshots taken from the game.}

_{Review #007}