The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales

The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales released June 18, 2026 as Square Enix’s first real-time action RPG built in the HD-2D engine. It comes from the teams behind Octopath Traveler and Triangle Strategy: competent combat, a gorgeous world, and a story so aggressively boring for most of the runtime it feels like a tranquilizer dart to the neck.

The Kingdom of Huther is humanity’s last stand on a continent overrun by beast tribes, kept standing by a magic barrier tied to Princess Heuria. When unknown ruins turn up outside the walls, an adventurer named Elliot gets recruited to investigate. He picks up a fairy sidekick named Faie and finds the Doorway of Time, a portal that sends him across four ages spanning a thousand years of the continent’s history.

Mechanically it is a top-down action RPG. Elliot equips two weapons at a time from a pool that includes bombs, a bow, a boomerang, a spear, a hammer, and a chain sickle, each with a charged special. Faie rides the right stick with her own puzzle and combat powers. Magicite bolts modifiers onto weapons: a slower, harder-hitting boomerang, fire on the sword, and so on. The whole package is very close to another game, right down to the naming. The Legend of Zelda. The Adventures of Elliot. Square Enix playing Mad Libs on design and talking fairies. Three Tingles in a trench coat.

This is a hard game to review because I am conflicted. Some elements are great. A lot are terrible. Online glaze calls the story amazing. I will not. There is too much to unpack.

The dialogue is not good. Act one is a slog: story slow to lift off, early talk brutal. Characters announce emotional states at each other constantly. Actual lines: “The two of you trust each other implicitly. I envy such a bond.” Or: “I wish I could be more help.” “You are; just having someone to talk to is a huge relief.” The game runs on constant emotional reassurances, a supporting cast lining up to pat each other on the back for existing. Snails’-speed pacing makes it worse. The first three hours crawl. Just when combat opens up and the game recovers, it sabotages itself. Around six hours, the king clears his throat for a legend: roughly fifteen minutes of characters talking at each other, every ounce of earned enthusiasm draining through the floor. Every time this game gets interesting, it schedules a meeting that should have been an email.

Despite all that talk, you have no reason to care about anyone for a long stretch. It takes about ten hours before attachment starts. Elliot is as generic as white bread. Only in early Act 2 side quests, eight to ten hours in, does he get interesting, and mostly through how he talks to Faie. She is not human, so when he explains why returning an engagement ring to a grieving widow is right, and how humans express love through memory, you finally see a reason he might be the kingdom’s hero. Square Enix knows how to hook a protagonist fast: Zack, Cloud, Sora, Noctis, Clive. Twenty minutes and you care. Thirty years of practice. Elliot and every other character run the same loop: mild concern, then reassurance from someone else. Early game feels like a proof of concept with dialogue to match. When a hero earns zero attachment, the script assigns it by default. Bonds matter. Trust runs deep. Show me any of it. All that telling is dead weight.

Coming down hard is disappointing. I wanted to love this. I tried. I just do not. I kept booting it out of duty to finish the review. That alone is a massive indictment. Online says the story ramps late. It does, and it gets good. That is still about twelve hours before interesting. For sixty dollars, it should not take twelve hours of boring JRPG repetition to finally get good. A story that saves its whole payoff for the final stretch wastes every hour before it. This game asks for far too much.

Faie is exactly as annoying as the internet says. Game Informer clocked her as an escapee from Dora the Explorer, and that is generous, because at least Dora waits for an answer. Faie narrates the chest you are already walking toward. She narrates the torch you were obviously going to light. She reads the puzzle off the back of the box while you are still enjoying it. Insufferable.

Movement is too slow, and that compounds the slow story and slow dialogue. Tedious when it did not need to be. You run the same well-built zones over and over at a soft crawl while the clock ticks. Sprint arrives late and depletes too fast. Around eight hours I installed a movement-speed mod on PC and immediately had a better experience, clearing dull story faster to reach the good stuff. Console players do not get that escape hatch.

Promised good news: there are diamonds. Combat is satisfying. The world art is great. Magicite customization stands out in a market of conventional level-ups and skill trees. Quality-of-life wins I loved: an overworld map and fast travel that mark spots to revisit when you unlock abilities later, near-required for a game like this; townspeople with icons showing whether you have spoken to them, so you track missed dialogue. There is a lot to love once the story picks up, and I will not spoil that for anyone who waits for a sale. It also feels built with Switch and handheld players in mind. I tested on a ROG Ally: great on a smaller screen, playing the way old Game Boy Zeldas were designed to play.

The Adventures of Elliot retails for $59.99. Too much for a story-driven game this dull early. Best fit for kids, women, and ultra-casual RPG players looking for a gentle handheld experience, and I do not mean that as a dig. I wish those players got an early game with at least one buy-in moment worth immersing in. On craft and combat competency I would argue a solid 7 even with the issues. At full price, compounding those issues: 6. Banished to the Backlog. At twenty or thirty bucks on sale it becomes much more viable, a solid 7. At sixty there are too many other games that will treat your evening better.