The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales is a delightful new take on HD-2D

If you saw the recent Nintendo Direct, then chances are you caught wind of The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales - a new HD-2D title, but this time with a focus on Action combat instead of turn-based. You probably also heard about how the game received a demo excluisive for Nintendo Switch 2, although the full game will also release on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC (Steam). Since the demo dropped shortly after the presentation, we were curious to see exactly what sort of Action RPG the title is.

Upon starting the demo, it's hard not to draw comparisons to The Legend of Zelda - the 2D titles such as Link's Awakening and Echoes of Wisdom, sure, but even some elements of the more recent 3D titles make an appearance. Throughout the slice of the game world that you can explore in the demo, Elliot can come across a number of caves, dungeons and shrines - with the latter containing a challenge that will gift a buff to your maximum health upon completing it. In the demo, these shrines task you with utilizing your fairy companion's abilities to maneuver otherwise impassable danger, or to take on an increasingly difficult gauntlet of enemies.

Combat is very similar to a 2D Zelda; particularly the Game Boy ones. You can equip any 2 of your weapons to the X and Y buttons, and that includes your melee weapon. By default, Elliot has access to a basic sword; through some exploration you can find an upgraded version, and if you really go out of your way you can grab a scythe as a reward for the completely optional dungeon waiting for you to discover. Both the sword and scythe feel fairly good to use, though there are a few quirks that I hope can be ironed out by the time the full game releases next year. As is tradition, Square Enix is hosting a player survey to gather feedback alongside the demo release - one element I hope to see changed is some visual variety in melee weapon swipes. Even if mechanically nothing changes, I hope that Elliot can swing his sword back and forth. It feels like the combat would feel more natural with that one aesthetic change.

Your bow and bombs work as you would expect, though the bow can be charged up into a spread shot of arrows (only the 1 is consumed, so don't worry about wasting ammo by doing so), bombs are about the same as how similar games would present them in their stock configuration. What makes Millennium Tales stick out, and what brings the game over the edge into being an RPG, is your Magicite loadout - and how weapons can see drastic changes in their function depending on which magicite you've found and equipped.

While players can equip accessories with more generalized improvements, magicite when equipped applies to a specific class of weapon. A magicite for a sword will not impact a scythe, and vice-versa; and the same holds true for ranged weapons such as bows and bombs. When magicite is equipped, it can bestow a buff upon the equipment it's tied to. For a scythe, it can make it so that when you charge it up, you'll constantly spawn fireballs around you; with the right magicite, a bow's arrow can automatically target and strike an additional nearby enemy after a successful snipe. Bombs can become rubber, bouncing an additional distance after being thrown.

Of course, there are more basic effects too. A flat damage increase, a reduction in charge time for weapons that allow you to charge up and store stronger attacks, a buff to attack range. Every magicite comes with a cost associated, and you have a maximum number that the cumulative cost of each magicite cannot exceed. While this means your loadout is limited to a degree, already Millennium Tale allows players to save multiple loadouts for each occasion. Depending on the loadout, especially difficult bosses can be trivialized - but even during the middle of combat, you can pause to enter the menu and swap out your magicite without any worry. While your main method of acquiring magicite is semi-random - you can donate magicite fragments to roll for magicite of a specific weapon class - you can also find the base level of certain magicite while out in the overworld, and in dungeons.

Exploration, especially in dungeons, feels great. While puzzles weren't especially complicated, one gimmick in the optional dungeon to the south stood out. It tasked me with remembering different elevations, and which pits to drop down to reach a specific location. Normally such a puzzle would be frustrating, but Millennium Tales' overworld and dungeon maps surprised me with a full 3D rendition of your surroundings. In the case of the sand dungeon, you could even pinpoint where you might be dropped off after a fall by noticing where sand is piled up on each subfloor, while pits and stairs to differing floors are noted separately without utilizing the same iconography.

While I was satisfied with what little exploration the demo provided, it's also clear that the 2~ hours of content the demo offers is quite the small fraction of the whole game. We only saw around a quarter of the world map, and that's just the map for the time period the demo takes place in. While to a similar degree I can't say for sure that every boss fight will be a winner in the final release, I was thoroughly impressed with the boss design on display with the two that the team chose to include for the demo. Both made good use of Elliot and Faie's kits, and on the Hard difficulty felt engaging and yet fair for the most part. Lord of the Maw in particular had some incredibly cool attack patterns that has me excited to see what else the game has in store once players have grown acclimated to its myriad systems.

Truth be told; I didn't have many expectations heading into the demo. I didn't think the team necessarily had the chops to make a compelling action game, yet by the end The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales has become a must play. While there are some lingering issues with the demo build - while the game does generally look great, there are some artistic choices I can't wait to turn off, going by the obvious graphics settings menu; hopefully the same toggles can help smooth out performance, if things aren't ironed out in the default Switch 2 profile by launch - they all pale in comparison to the enjoyment I had with the game. It seems Square Enix has yet another HD-2D banger lined up, and I couldn't be more excited for the chance to play more.