Square returns to the top-down action adventure genre with a new hero.
What Is It? The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales is a 2026 action-adventure game from SquareEnix which uses the company’s HD-2D visual style. The game follows Elliot as he is called into action in a quest that will see him helping save the world. For the genre-sticklers, this game might be considered an action-RPG, but it is, ultimately, a Zelda-like which I consider to be action-adventure.
Elliot is called in by King Hichard to explore some newly discovered ruins near the castle. Shenanigans ensue and Elliot quickly finds himself hopping through time to unravel the mystery and save the world from the evil Kaifried. The story takes some turns throughout and is mostly entirely serviceable. It doesn’t ever get in the way and is entertaining enough if you want to follow it closely through the dialogue-heavy cutscenes.
On the gameplay front, this is an action adventure game. Elliot will eventually find a handful of different weapons ranging from swords and spears to boomerangs and bows. You will also be accompanied by a fairy, Faie, who gains special magic abilities as the game progresses. Elliot explores the world of Philabieldia to reveal new dungeons, passageways, and ability upgrade temples.
The combat is fun with the customization being a standout feature. You can map two weapons at a time to the face buttons on a controller. I typically kept melee and a ranged weapon in my two spots, but any combination will do. Pressing the button will perform a normal attack while holding it will charge up the attack for more damage or an alternative attack style. Each weapon can be equipped with Magicite, special upgrade abilities found or randomly crafted throughout the game, which augment the behavior or stats of the weapons. Upgrade your hammer to add a blowback feature and increase its area of effect by 30, or maybe simply increase the base damage. As you collect magicite and toss it into the upgrade-making RNG, you will be left with no shortage of options for customizing each weapon.
I mostly ignored Faie’s abilities during combat, but that’s not to say they were useless. One ability allows Faie to act as a duplicate of Elliot, you can use this to double the attacks you are landing on a boss, for example. Faie’s abilities are more necessary in the puzzles which exist in the game, but are typically quite light and mostly serve as a reminder that Faie has abilities at all.
There is a decent amount of enemy variety in the game, most of which play off of a few basic types. Still, over the course of the 20+ hour game, the basic encounters get a bit routine. They aren’t particularly challenging over the last stretch of the game when you have Elliot powered up. The bosses, by contrast, make up for their early lack of variety with some solid difficulty. You can equip health potions to restore up to 10 HP (I had around 15 HP in total by the end of my run, for reference), you will lean heavily on these during boss fights. Well, that or you will be more careful about when you attack so as to actually conserve your HP. The game does not punish you from simply brute-forcing most everything, it only costs money (‘tul’ in the game) to refill those potions or pay Faie to resurrect you after a death.
On the exploration front, Philabieldia is a fun place to explore. There are plenty of dungeons to find with treasures within. Also, the various temples to learn new skills or increase Elliot’s max HP are fun. They act like tiny challenges and contain some of the best puzzles in the game. Elliot is able to jump from the start, a feature that the game leans into pretty well. Various bosses or enemies will require a jump to avoid getting it, and the dungeons are full of platform-to-platform jumping sections which add the smallest bit of platforming to the game.
The game has a few endings, without spoiling anything; you’ll want to see the third ending. It took me about 24 hours of game time to do this. I did the majority of the side quests but did miss a small few along the way. The art style looks the same as the other HD-2D games SquareEnix has churned out in recent years. The world looks nice with a good variety of locales and colors.
The Best Part: This is a nice, throwback top-down (okay, tilted view) adventure game. I am always going to be game for one of those, and to see it coming from a major publisher like SquareEnix is wonderful. The game hits a lot of the expected marks of the series through exploration, light puzzling, a range of combat options, and so on. Sometimes it’s just nice to play something completely new that feels so familiar.
The Worst Part: The hand-holding. The developers of this game clearly don’t trust their players. Primarily through the fairy, the game holds your hand every step of the way to an obnoxious degree. If you discover a dungeon that you can’t currently complete, the fairy will say “why are we here, don’t we have more important things to do?” Okay, fine, saves me some time exploring the dungeon I guess. When you see a cracked wall, even 20 hours into the game, the fairy says “hey, that wall looks really weak, I wonder if we could destroy it.” As you’re fighting bosses that you can’t retreat from, she says “fall back Elliot, we need to leave so you can heal.” There are all perfectly reasonable things to say for beginners and wouldn’t be out of place on Easy mode, but to have them on Normal difficulty is mildly insulting to players. The game released an update to allow you to completely silence the non-story commentary from the fairy, but it landed after I finished my playthrough and I don’t think zero commentary is the right play either, they simply needed to get the balance right and didn’t do so.
The Verdict: The Adventures of Elliot is a brand new action-adventure IP from a AAA publisher in a genre that had previously been lost to time in the AAA space. This, on its own, is great news to gamers like myself. Square’s history shows some amazing work outside of the JRPG genre, particularly in the PS1-era I am so incredibly fond of, so to see them revisiting some of their older genres is absolutely a welcome sight.
Does Elliot deliver on the promise of the premise? Mostly, I’d say. I have some issues with the hand-holding the game forces upon players, for one. Beyond that, the combat doesn’t ever have any real stakes because Faie can just bail you out with a revive at the cost of money. This issue is more prevalent because the currency in this game is mostly useless outside of buying health potions. Pretty much all money you get after a certain point will go towards health potions or Faie revives, the latter of which is only necessary because the game mostly trains you into brute-forcing your way through tough fights because it only costs money to heal or revive. It’s quite a boring cycle that the game employs and definitely deflates the overall experience a bit.
Beyond those issues, none of which I would really consider to be major, the game is a fun time. You get to explore a unique world, witness an interesting story, meet some fun characters, and do a lot of old-school action-adventure video game stuff along the way. Exploring Philabieldia is a good time and a lot of that comes from the time-travel mechanic which has you seeing the same places over the course of a few different time periods. It is fun to learn the world and see it change. The downside here is that the game doesn’t really reward exploring too deeply because you will mostly get weapon power-ups and there’s a good chance you already made them via the local magicite dealer in town.
The Adventures of Elliot has some highs and lows, but it is a fun game that I had a good time with. The positives of getting to experience a throwback action-adventure game like this far outweigh the various complaints I had along the way. More than anything, the game creates a strong foundation upon which something truly special could be built if the developers are allowed the chance at a sequel. Is that reason enough to play this one? Hard to say, but if you want a new AAA Zelda-like game in 2026, you aren’t exactly flush with options and can take heart in knowing Elliot is an entertaining, faithful entry in the genre.
How to Play: PlayStation 5*, Xbox Series, Switch 2
*console played on for this review
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