The Adventures of Elliott: The Millennium Tales

• Genre: Action RPG
• Spoiler Free Review: Kind of spoiler free up until where I say I'm going to do big spoilers but still round-about spoilers throughout, just trying not to be specific.
• Time Played: 30 Hours
• Too Short/Long: It's not excessively long game, but the pacing/progression don't do it any favors. It feels way longer than it is because it seems like it's going to wrap up at multiple points and doesn't really offer anything new for a long time.
• Did I cry: It did manage to squeeze a tear or two out of me despite how my recount may sound.
• Soundtrack: It wasn't bad, but overall just a little too general cheery adventure music for me. When they "went hard" it felt forced and not exactly in line with the rest of the tracks. Individually there are no bad tracks, but it didn't have an identity of it's own - it was clearly just taking from what inspired it.
• Why I played: The visuals and the gameplay are both huge draws for me. I love the "H2-2D" look and I also really like Ys games, which this takes most of it's inspiration from.
• Jank: There were a few times I had to restart the game because the ability to use Faie just completely bugged out. Often during the worst possible times, such as doing this challenge gauntlet - which I still managed without the help of Faie mind you, despite some of her later abilities being kind of overpowered.
• Difficulty: Very low. I thought I saw something about there being special scene if you die at certain points and so there were times I purposefully died to see if anything special would happen, but it never did. Other than that I never died - I used potions to prevent death - it's not like I didn't take damage, but at least early on in the game I had the 99 combo going for so long I decided to just take it easier and play a bit more quickly/recklessly, which would actually lose my health, but nothing a potion didn't solve.
• Pleased/Disappointed: I'm not exactly disappointed with the game as a whole, just exhausted. I guess what I'm most disappointed about is the poor writing and lack of consistency when it comes to continuity and paradox.
• Recommend to others: I probably wouldn't recommend it over what it draws inspiration from. Ys, Mana games, Zelda games a bit, and then the many games that were also inspired them, such as one of my absolute favorites; CrossCode. I just couldn't help but feel like this was less good than so many other games in so many other ways - visuals aside, because those are still very fun, and it does have higher production values in other aspects too, but it just comes up short on how fun or interesting it is.

Overall I did enjoy it, but I was left exhausted of it by time I was done. I think that's the first misstep - the pacing/world design. On it's own, there is nothing wrong with the world - arguably even a decent - if not extremely generic world. You got your woods, desert, snowfield and volcano, and town all of which are so uninspired the ice land is literally called "White Area", and to the west of that? "West Area", though it's kind of funny having both Nothern West Area and Southern West Area, and Neverwither is a clever name for a forest place.

Regardless, across a millennium, nothing really changes for these environments. Not for the most part. Some bridges move, some ladders move and that's about 90% of it. Fallen trees that block your path somehow remain for a thousand years in some cases, or perhaps a tree falls in the same exact place after a window of it opening. Key locations have a couple switch ups, but for the most part you're exploring the same exact map 4 different times. Every dungeon has a collectable in every time too, it could be a useful life piece, or it could be an item that you already collected via the random gacha system the game has, but don't worry if you collect one you already have then they'll compensate you by offering exactly 1 of the item you need 5 of to perform a gacha draw. Wowie kabowie. You're telling me after I find 5 useless chests along an hour of treasure hunting I can do a SINGLE gacha pull which will likely award me... a duplicate item which will award me exactly 1 of the gacha currency.

I was waiting the whole game for this kind of fight. Every Ys game has this kind of fight.

The fact this game even has a gacha system I think just hurts it entirely, but you're kind of reliant on it because it's also you're main source of upgrading your character. Sure you can find some of those upgrades out in the wild, but not enough for it to matter. They should have went one way or the other, doubling up on that felt poorly thought out. But I guess they wanted to give you something for your efforts. It just wasn't enough. Especially considering I'm basically revisiting an almost exact same copy of the same exact area 4 times except they put the ladder on the other side half the time. There is even an area early in the game where you notice the ruins of buildings or houses, so you'd expect to see the actual houses some point in history? But no. Even going back a thousand years, I guess those were never actually houses. It just feels unfinished or just not fully realized at the least.

Complaints about redundancy in the gameplay loop and systems over, I think more than growing weary of that, it didn't do anything to help the pacing. The first 2/3rds of the game are spent going to each place, meeting everyone, doing little side quests that actually help build the world and don't feel pointless, but really, just truly setting up the real story of the game. Maybe in the final hours of the "first ending" you're getting to the juicy stuff, but then the game is over, and while the game makes it kinda clear it isn't actually over, you could take that first credit role to just be a hint at a sequel. It's just a little to vague about the fact there might be more stuff to find - for a better/more complete ending. So I went on.

So after that first ending, almost everything you do feels like it has purpose, like it matters to the story, like they're building up to something that actually matters across the different eras. So you get the second ending... and yet there is more and they're even more vague, but as long as you assumed there is more and it's not actually complete you're gonna go back in... and there is even more that matters and more we can do to the story and you fight the final boss for the third time and the story feels complete.

Now big spoilers here so stop reading if you care about that. But no the story is not complete, it's just suddenly like oh and by the way the actual bad thing was a dragon. Sure we mentioned this dragon earlier in the story - and you probably thought you'd go back further in time to fight it, or one of the times you went back it would be a boss of a dungeon or something. But no turns out this dragon that largely didn't have much to do with the actual story - just some of the greater history of the fictional world, was actually the true real final boss. Oh also there is a phoenix you can go get the phoenix to ride on to fight the dragon.

It was a very cool fight though, I always like a little genre switch-up.

It just feels so shoehorned in like "oh yeah we need to do a really cool thing. So then Elliott gets on a phoenix and fights a dragon!" which is a symptom of a larger problem that ills this game. The writing. I don't want to say that the writing is terrible, but it kind of is not great. There is just so much super happy positive bright eye bushy tail style writing that feels like it's aimed at teaching little children core moral values. There are errors arguably in the editing where the grammar is just terrible and I would say is something you can chalk up to these characters being historic or something, but they turn around using hundred dollar vocabulary words in perfect structure in the following sentence - arguably overedited at that point.

Time travel stories are tough, real tough. I like time skips and stories that happen over long periods of time, but I don't know if I'd ever write a time travel story. That said, even if I can nitpick them, I can still enjoy them. However, Adventures of Elliott is arguably one of the worst ones I've ever experienced, and I don't mean that from the quality of storytelling, but just with he lack of consistency. There are things Elliott does that absolutely should change the past drastically, mind you, that just have no consequence, but there are also plenty of things you do actual see realized from your interference. There are also... many many things, arguably some of the most important aspects of the game - that are entirely paradoxical and shouldn't be allowed to have happened. Which I could almost forgive if the game leaned into it, but it doesn't! There are other things that remain unaffected or at least altered the outcome because of how paradoxical it would be. It literally just picks and chooses the results based on the desired outcome, and that's why I think it's one of the "worst" time travel stories I've ever seen. The lack of consistency in the writing, and the fact that all outcomes just ended up picking the result that would be most convenient for the story. It's as if the author never double checked their work. They just wrote it entirely linearly from beginning to end and never once questioned if something they wrote earlier wouldn't make sense for later, or vice-versa. 

Also one of the last things you learn is Faie's origin and it sucks in a way that also felt like they forgot implement it into the story and were like "oh yeah lets do this". I mean it makes sense sort of for the overall theme of the game, but I still think it sucks and the fact it wasn't addressed until the very last moment when they're like and suddenly a dragon also sucked. I was so checked out at this point because the game felt like it resolved what the actual story was and was just making me go through the motions because they wanted to put one more cool scene in the game.

All in all, I don't think it was a bad game, I just think it could have used a little more refining in the writing, level design, the final final part should have been before the penultimate battle somewhere in the third quarter of the game, and all that important story stuff that happens after the first ending should have been earlier in the game. I get they wanted the multiple ending style to be like "oh this is how it could have played out" due to it being a time travel story. That's something I'll kind of give them credit for, but it's another case of where I find some of the most essential content is post credits, so they just should not have treated it like it wasn't a "real ending" at all. They should have just done an abbreviated credit where they continue right off where you left type deal and Elliott being like "Wait... I should go back to the past and see if there is something I missed" and you get an actual objective flag and go right back into the game instead of needing to load from the title menu.