The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales

2026-08-09
Last week I was writing about a game whose hero was named Leonard and now we got Elliot. In a game that is ostensibly trying to walk in the brown leather boots of Zelda's Link, Square Enix settled on Elliot. But they didn't stop there. They said, you know where Elliot's from? Philabieldia. That's not a typo. Phila🅱️ieldia. Philabieldia, of course, home to the kingdom of Huther, home to Elliot--named not for Elliott Smith and their shared love of stabbing but for the Eldertree he was found under (yes, seriously). Huther also gave us Elliot's good friend Euygene, again not a typo and pronounced "yoo-ee-gene". And people wonder why the yen is faltering.

After "Philabieldia" stopped bouncing around my brain like the early whispers of schizophrenia, I settled into the actual meat of the game. Imagine Link's Awakening crafted in the Octopath Traveler HD-2D engine, with the mechanical complexity dialed up a couple notches. You've got swords, spears, hammers, bows, bombs, and boomerangs, all with their own little 1-2-3 combo and a charge up special move to boot. There's good hit feedback, you can block and counter, you get crits that send enemies flashing and flying, and you can kite basic enemies to your heart's delight. Bosses are the premium entrees between your endless buffet of regular mobs, with telegraphed, arena-spanning attacks that require real movement and even platforming to evade before you move in to stick it to their gargantuan and ornate sprites. In that first hour I was hooked on the 🅱️ieldia bop.

All of Elliot's monster murdering is in service of a broader story about saving a kingdom and traveling through time to do so. The problem is that the story, which has a couple of genuine twists buried in it, is so FUCKING long and deeply in need of an editor. Rich, I know, coming from a rube who just wrote close to a thousand words about a D-tier PS3 RPG, but this motherfucker drags. It repeats itself constantly and feels the need to take a simple emotional beat like a girl picking a flower for her cat-mom and pro-bestiality father and turning it into a marathon of text and voice acting. It doesn't help that everyone in Philabieldia has as little interiority as the 2D sprites they inhabit. The servants: "The King and Princess treat us all like family so we love them!" The advisor, so obviously the villain he might as well have a swastika tattooed on his forehead, announcing "I want more power!" directly into the King's face, and the King going "Ha ha this guy's a real live wire, huh?" and then farting in his throne. Skimming the text wasn't enough. Skipping lines one at a time wasn't enough. I ended up blowing through entire cutscenes because I couldn't take it anymore.

Cutting the dialogue solved half of it. The other half repeats itself just as badly. In true Zelda-like fashion we cruise the overworld looking for hot, lonely dungeons, and because we're in 2026 we also get mini-shrines a la BOTW. The mini-shrines are the real stars. Five or ten minutes, in and out: jump across the moving platforms, Sokoban party, murder all the beastpeople. Their only problem is there are too few of them. The dungeons are...fuck, fine at best? Walk into the room, door locks, fight some monsters and door unlocks, silver key in third room, backtrack to use silver key, open gold chest, get boss key, backtrack to boss door, fight boss. Puzzles are brain-dead and combat is the same guys you fight everywhere else. And what's our reward for looting chests? Money (which you'll already have plenty of), or if you're lucky a heart piece, or if you're really, really lucky a weapon upgrade (for a weapon you actually use). And a heart piece is a sick reward right up until you clear an entire shrine for one and then trip over the identical thing in a random overworld chest twenty feet off the path. It all feels like a routine. A job. A shitty-paying one.

And if that weren't repetitive enough we have Time Travel. Elliot's first errand in the past is to go bomb the beast tribes--bro gets recruited into terrorism within ninety seconds of arrival. And three time periods to travel to means three versions of the same map. Three of the same map and three of the same dungeon. But don't worry, they have [sultry whispering] slight differences. Did you like the taste of mid in that first dungeon? Then you're going to like its past and past-past versions even more!

The remedy for that one is a little ability called Sprint. Ahh I fucking love a game with a movement speed increase. If you're not speccing to max Speed in Morrowind, you're not living. And here the Sprint ability turned a game that felt like work into a speed-run exercise. It makes you move twice as fast and once you get good at not ramming into walls (with Elliot hilariously yelling "EEUGHHH" super loud) you'll be able to traverse the entire map in a minute flat. Throw in the Flutter's Cape (buy it as soon as you can)--a cape that lets you float for a couple seconds and effectively allows you to sequence-break a ton of rewards early on--and you are playing a totally different game.

Because everything in The Adventures of Elliot tired itself out, the race to the finish was that much sweeter. I'm skipping cutscenes, I'm cruising at Mach 3, hitting every magic restoring point on the map along the way to keep my Sprint spell endless like Jason Statham slamming energy drink after energy drink while speeding across town in Crank. I'm dropping the difficulty to Easy so I can just rinse the enemies I've already proved I can kill 100 times on Hard and 1000 times on Normal. Every minute is honing how quickly I can get Elliot and his stupid fucking red musketeer hat to the finish line. And paradoxically in kicking everything Square Enix wanted me to do to the side, I made my own game and it was fucking good.

And then, for the final stretch, the game takes Sprint away from you. No zooming, no fast travel, just Elliot on foot in a long closing sequence whose entire content is walking up to people and talking to them. Square Enix built exactly one thing that made this game bearable and then confiscated it for the ending. I don't know that I've ever felt so thoroughly vindicated and so miserable at the same time.

The end did give me one thing though. Not the conclusion--by then I was so checked out I couldn't tell you why there were cats in clothes casting spells. Not even the bit where it inexplicably becomes a shmup, the literal only time that happens in the entire game. No, it's that after the True Ending finishes playing out, Elliot changes his name. His name was so bad even he changed it.