The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales

I really wanted to sink many, many hours into this game since I generally love RPGs from Square Enix.. but this one just isn't great. The bad outweighs the good and I found it too boring. Here's my pros/cons: Pros: - The art style is great, it feels familiar and unique at the same time. - The Magicite system adds a bit of customization to your weapons, like extra crit, damage, range, and a few other fun bonuses. - Map & fast travel, even though it's in most games now, it was still nice to have. Cons: - Music feels reused and just bland. I completely muted it 7 hours in, and I've never done that in any Square Enix game. - Voice acting & dialogue: every character you interact with is annoying and overly excited about how amazing you are. I muted all voice after 2 hours and skip every dialogue box possible. The story is just bad unless you're 5 years old. - Most dungeons are puzzles to get 1/4th of a new heart piece, and they're way too easy, you could beat them with one hand, some with your eyes closed (not a joke). - Dungeon/Ruins names had zero thought put into them. See a big ice looking ruin? It's called "Ice Ruins." Other zero effort names: Forest Ruins, Water Ruins, Fire Ruins, Secret Cave 1, Secret Cave 2, Secret Cave 3, Desert Caves, etc. Names a 3 year old would pick. - Weapons are generic and boring, nothing unique. As the game progresses and monsters get harder, you find "upgraded" versions of your weapons that just bring your damage back to where it started. So in Age 1 with level 1 weapons, you kill monsters in 2 to 3 hits. In Age 3 with your new weapons, you're killing the same monsters (just recolored) in 2 to 3 hits again. Repetitive, lazy design. - The game is basically a straight line. You can explore, but if you find something meant for a quest 10 hours later, you can't interact with it until the story catches up to that point, then you have to backtrack to use it. Makes exploring feel empty. - Big one for me: combat feels terrible. You can only attack in 8 directions, but enemies move freely in any direction. If an enemy is between your diagonal and up attack, you can't hit them without repositioning. The joystick feels like an NES dpad. - The game is about time traveling through different eras. I only made it through 3 before uninstalling. Each era is identical to the last... same world map, same dungeons, same monsters, just different colors/weather. One era is a "magic" era, and I expected new magic skills to go with our weapons, but nope. It feels like the creators didn't realize other RPGs exist and thought they were making the first one ever. Extremely easy, super repetitive, toddler level dialogue. "Elliot's not the best, he's the bestest of the best." The cons list is endless for me. I genuinely didn't like almost every aspect of this game. Cannot recommend.

Ultimately my opinion is mixed. This game has highs and lows. What put me to the thumbs down is that the highs never really get to sing or overshadow the negatives. The game is pretty fun when they let you play it. But the story that is horribly written, with some of the most generic characters of all time keep getting in the way of the fun. There are all kinds of cool weapons given to you, and very little reason to use them. Your weapons can be modified in interesting ways, but it just make the game easier rather than having you use tools to deal with different challenges. This isn't a terrible game, but there are better of it's ilk that won't waste your time in ways that this title does.