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On June 18, Square Enix released the awkwardly-titled “The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales,” promising fast-paced action RPG combat and stunning HD-2D visuals.
It’s a fun game, but not one I’ll be reviewing in full today. Instead, I’m more interested in another question.
How does The Adventures of Elliot hold up to the Ys series?
Let’s take a (mostly) spoiler-free look.
Comparisons Abound
Well before its release, comparisons were already being made between Elliot and its perhaps most obvious comparison: early Legend of Zelda games. But as the demo came out and more impressions were posted online, another subset of comparisons became prominent: hey, this kind of feels like an Ys game.
Indeed, more than a few major news outlets and game review sites picked up on the similarities:
With The Adventures of Elliot, Square Enix is throwing its hat into a very specific kind of action RPG ring that should please longtime fans of the overlooked Ys series, and maybe even help drive new players to it.
There’s still some time before Elliot’s adventure begins, but an older tale offers a similar experience. 20 years ago, Ys Origin was released by Nihon Falcom with the goal of serving as the ideal starting point of the company’s long-running series of games, and it ended up becoming an all-time gem.
So How Does it Compare?
There’s a whole lot to like about Elliot. In particular, three things stood out to me.
The visuals are beautiful (as long as HD-2D is your kind of thing) and the music lives up to some of the highs of the Ys series. I loved having the themes playing in the background while I explored.
The controls, too, feel tight and responsive like I would expect out of an Ys game. It can be a very quick game if you want it to be.
There are also a lot of things to collect, from powerups at dedicated shrines to cats lost throughout time. This felt like a set of mechanics ripped straight from Ys games old and new. I got big Mishy vibes as I was rewarded increasingly potent items for delivering more and more cats to the Traveler, and it never felt like it distracted overmuch from the main gameplay.
Past those three things, however, the quality starts to diminish.
I’m used to really falling in love with side characters in the Ys series. However, the few companions that do interact with Elliot felt flat and uninteresting. I had to stop myself from skipping over some of the later cutscenes just for the sake of this review.
Additionally, the combat had real moments of joy in it that were bogged down by the extreme amount of enemy repetition in the game. It felt like there were only four or five basic enemy types, and just about as many repeating bosses. I quickly grew tired of seeing and fighting the same enemies over, and over, and over again.
(Minor spoilers start here! Skip to the Verdict if you like.)
Worse than that, though, was the exploration. You effectively traverse the same map four times through with only minor variations each time. Treasures are frequently in the same place, and there are no obvious clues to what has actually changed between each time period. By the third trip through the map I was beginning to grow quite bored. By the fourth, I had to genuinely stop and think if I wanted to keep going with deep exploration or just rush the ending.
I opted for the latter.
While the evolving palette of abilities does enable new progression options as the game does on (and in some genuinely fun ways, too!) I find exploration to be one of the most satisfying part of Ys games. Instead, it became one of the most tedious.
The Verdict
The Adventures of Elliot will likely satisfy fans of Ys to a degree, but it’s more of an appetizer for the hopefully-soon-to-be-announced Ys XI than an outright replacement.
Like many of my favorite B-tier Square Enix games, this one is probably worth waiting until it’s on a good sale. I’d happily buy it for a $30 USD distraction, but not full price.