The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales: PS5 Review

Developed by Team Asano
Published by Bandai Namco and Square Enix
Platform: PS5

There's a refreshing innocence to The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales, a game that's about venturing through your own kingdom and saving it, by helping others.

It's not a game for the cynical in many ways, and given how devastatingly insular our world has become, that's no bad thing.

You play the aforementioned Elliot, who must travel through the world of Philabieldia, a continent overrun by beast tribes, and try and stop it from falling. But after an incident involving a minister and his own death, Elliott suddenly finds himself hoping between time zones and facing different perils.

As a HD 2D game, The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales is beautifully presented, a game that feels as magical as the likes of Zelda but which gains itself its own personality and look and feel. Mixing hack and slash sentiment with RPG gaming, The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales feels like a relative breath of fresh air into the genre, one that embraces its point of difference and gets on with engaging its audience.

However, given a lot of the engagement is done through text-heavy exposition, it does occasionally feel like it's slowing to a crawl, an unavoidable consequence of the storytelling that could have been tightened during play.

With access to a wide array of weapons, combat is never as boring as you'd worry and the game pushes on nicely because of that very fact - this is a game that recognises some of the slower turn-based JRPGs put many off, and the move toward countering that is very welcome.

The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales won't sadly win any Game of the Year awards, but for casual players of the genre, worried about how heavy the lore of others can be, this is a welcome light touch that makes a great fist of its elements - but needs to learn a little how to shut up and get on with it.