The Adventures Of Elliot: The Millennium Tales - Shut Up, Shut Up, Shut Up! (Review)
- James Stephanie Sterling
- 3 hours ago
- 9 min read
The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales
Released: June 18th, 2026
Developer: Team Asano, Square Enix, Claytechworks
Publisher: Square Enix
Systems: PC, Switch 2 (reviewed), PS5, Xbox Series
“Let’s see, where are we?”
“Let’s see, where are we?”
“Let’s see, where are we?”
“Let’s see, where are we?”
More than half the time you open your map, the vocal equivalent of pubic lice repeats a single phrase.
“Let’s see, where are we?”
“Let’s see, where are we?”
“Let’s see, where are we?”
Where we are is Hell, and we're drowning under a torrent of acoustic swill. Perdition's cacophonous overseer presents as a fairy with the exact voice you’d expect a fairy in a localized Japanese game to have - squealing, whining, patronizing, enthusiastic to an exasperating degree. She never shuts her absonant maw, even if you go into the settings and reduce the frequency of her chatter, because this tiny demon’s idea of “infrequent” is in fact very fucking frequent. This is, truly, Satan's dreaded Inferno.
“Let’s see, where are we?”
“Let’s see, where are we?”
She talks when you open the map. She talks when you fast travel. She talks when you hit an enemy. She talks when an enemy hits you. She talks when you find a treasure chest. She talks when you open a treasure chest. She talks when you blow up a wall. She talks when you enter a cave. She talks when you see a cat. She talks when you pet a cat. She talks when you’re near a city. She talks when you use a save point. She talks when you’re browsing the fucking menu! She talks and talks and talks, and of course she doesn’t have enough unique phrases to cover even 5% of her vacuous waffle so the little fucker repeats herself to eternal degrees.
“Let’s see, where are we?”
Can voice acting alone ruin a videogame? The Adventures of Elliot seems intent on answering that question, its incessant squawking is genuinely so bad it turns an otherwise great game into a sickening sanity vacuum. For whatever unhinged reason, this videogame simply won’t shut the fuck up, and the English localization is so despicably obnoxious on top that I had to switch to Japanese to take the edge off. However, the repetition becomes maddening even in a language I don’t know.
Not since Code Vein have I felt so talked at, so harassed by NPCs who feel like every single little development requires a running commentary. As is seemingly obligatory with such games, the phrases spoken are lengthy and specific enough to be highly conspicuous, making their aggressive repetition even more than annoying than terse sentences would be. The problem is bigger than one motormouthed fairy, too - player actions are constantly accompanied by the title character making exaggerated noises, such is this game’s commitment to reinforcing its hostile wall of sound. It is downright pathological.
When I played the demo way back when, I found its noisome barrage so repellent as to be a borderline dealbreaker. I was relieved to learn the final release came with an option to switch allies from “talkative” to “reticent,” yet it barely makes a dent in the landslide of acoustic slime. In fact, I thought the setting was a prank at first, so ineffectual is its representation of reticence - this game quite literally doesn't know the meaning of the word. Unless I mute dialogue entirely, I fear I’ll soon cram stilettos into my ear holes like Masao fucking Kakihara, and I just don’t think forcing the game to be text-based is an acceptable solution.
Aside from its atrocious verbal diarrhea, The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales is a lovely game. I wish I could’ve started this review with the very next paragraph rather than a justifiably angry screed, because I do have good things to say.
Apt though it may be to compare The Adventures of Elliot to The Legend of Zelda, it more reminds me of a different action-adventure game, though calling it “different” is a stretch. It may be splitting hairs to namecheck Alundra, seeing as it was basically Sony’s answer to Zelda back in the PSX days. Nevertheless, Alundra is the game that keeps springing to mind, and since I have a ton of nostalgia for the game I used to rent from Blockbuster, it’s not a bad comparison at all.
The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales represents a slight deviation for Tomoya Asano’s talented team, shifting their signature visual style from turn-based RPGs to something more immediate. It’s no less of a fun throwback than Octopath Traveler though, and players who grew up on the likes of Zelda Classique, Alundra, and Beyond Oasis will find a comfy home within Elliot’s trappings.
An overhead perspective, single-button attacks, bombable wall cracks, the genre’s most common hallmarks are all present and correct. Where it feels most obviously different is its breezy feel - dungeons take very little time to complete, challenge shrines offer quick jaunts in small arenas, and the story moves along at a swift clip. Nothing feels rushed despite the pace, and it’s not too short a game by any means. Surprising as the brevity of dungeons may initially be, I’m all about a game with inertia so I appreciate how little this one dwells on anything.
Our protagonist Elliot does his thing in the land of Philabieldia, and like every other American, I keep reading it as Philadelphia. Humans have it rough in Philly, most of them concentrated in a single city and protected from malevolent beast tribes by their princess’ magic barrier. Elliot’s an adventurer who braves the outside world to support an orphanage, and we join him on a royal quest involving lost civilizations, mysterious evils, and time travel… the kind of time travel that you need to not scrutinize unless you want a nosebleed. The mechanical implications of Elliot’s chronological meddling are as numerous as they are often unexplored, having consequences only when the plot demands them.
Even with time travel involved, it’s a straightforward story for a straightforward game. Elliot’s a good guy, the villains have standard motivations, and you just don’t have to think very hard about what’s going on. This isn’t a negative thing, sometimes you want to enjoy an adventure closer to Krull than Willow. Not that Willow's complicated, but... uh... whatever.
There’s an authenticity to Elliot’s nostalgic action-adventure gameplay. It’s confident enough in the simple joys of hack n’ slash combat that it doesn’t try to get too fiddly - you have two attack buttons to which you can bind a pair of weapons, you press for quick attacks, hold for charged specials, block with a trusty shield, and that’s all you really need. Elliot collects a standard but reliable set of weapons, including such mainstays as the sword, the bow, and the spear, while your opponents rarely have more than a single signature attack.
Ranged weapons can be a little tricky to aim with eight-point directional movement, but they’re lifesavers once you get the hang of them. Melee choices have very clearly defined advantages and drawbacks, each providing a distinct fighting style despite such basic controls. Crucially, The Adventures of Elliot isn’t afraid of power fantasies - with the right enhancements, most weapons are capable of turning mobs into formalities.
Enhancement comes in the form of Magicite. Fundamentally, the system behaves like gems and weapon sockets in more loot-heavy games, but they’re more compelling here than usual. Weapon-specific Magicite is formed by combining collectible fragments, and each one is randomly imbued with a single upgrade and a points value. Weapons can have as many upgrades active as Elliot’s current point maximum allows, and continuing to craft Magicite will eventually increase the odds of getting stronger and rarer upgrades.
While every weapon gains access to basic perks like increased damage or shorter charge times, some Magicite grants unique, occasionally dramatic, enhancements. The Bomb, for example, can be altered to become bouncy, pause their detonation when held, or spout damaging fireworks while the fuse is lit. The chain-and-sickle probably has my favorite upgrade, causing a wave of small fireballs to gush out of it for as long as you hold its infinitely chargeable spinny attack. These exotic perks give each weapon a strong sense of character as well as a remarkable increase in usefulness.
I love the whole Magicite thing. It’s a great example of how simple systems can have a dramatic effect on a game if they come with just a little creativity.
Elliot gains additional help from his nauseating prick of a fairy sidekick, who can be commanded to surge forward or moved manually with the right stick. She stuns any regular enemy she touches for a teensy window of time, remotely gathers pickups, and collects a small selection of magical abilities useful for both adventuring and puzzle solving. Over time she’ll be able to set things on fire and teleport Elliot to her location among other handy tricks. As much as I hate her - and I fucking despise her - I’m grateful for the dash spell which significantly speeds up exploration.
Said exploration takes place across a decently sized map dotted with caves and small dungeons. While the world is fun to adventure across the first time, trawling back and forth can grow quite tiresome - a problem entirely compounded by a time travel plot that necessitates multiple alternate representations of the exact same map.
It wouldn’t be so bad if the world dramatically changed between time periods, but these different ages are mostly glorified palette swaps. The game utterly stretches credulity when eras set generations apart from each other don’t just feature the same enemies but the same enemy placement. Do they really expect me to believe two wolf men have been standing in one immutably static settlement for decades? So little has been done to make each time period sufficiently different beyond the human city hub that I struggle to buy into the narrative’s central bloody premise.
Mechanically, the time hopping doesn’t offer much beyond surface level suggestions. Some puzzles or shortcuts may only work in one era, but they’re largely self-contained challenges - you can expect tons of missed potential in terms of time travel puzzles, examples of causation, or other meaningful interactions between past and future. In all honesty, the whole gimmick comes off like a poor excuse to constantly reuse assets, and while I’m not saying that’s definitely what it is, there sure as hell isn’t another convincing justification.
The recycling of assets speaks to a lack of diverse material overall. There’s not a lot of enemy variety, most models come with several palette swaps, boss battles are reused a lot, and the range of stuff to collect is modest at best. Elliot’s individual elements are high quality, but they’re spread very thinly across the game, an issue which only becomes more obvious the further you get into it. It becomes something of a theme in conjuction with all those regurgitated voice lines - if it's worth doing once, The Adventures of Elliot will do it at least a dozen times.
Nevertheless, the core gameplay remains fun enough to have retained my interest for a decent chunk of time. Combat’s lent an extra level of investment with a simple but smart little killstreak system - chaining kills without getting hit leads to better combat rewards, but getting damaged just once will break the combo. Since battles themselves aren’t very difficult, the frailty of kill chains makes fighting far more tense than it otherwise would be. When a single strike costs you all your bonuses (unless you equip an accessory that protects the streak by one hit), encounters become consequential regardless of your health bar.
Every positive part of this game is elegant in its simplicity - none of the components are new or complicated, but they are polished, precise, and easy to get comfortable with. Similarly, the beautiful graphics have been seen in several games now, and they remain as pleasing to the eye as ever. I still haven’t gotten bored of looking at that beautiful pixel work and the way it juxtaposes against the flashy visual effects.
It would be a pleasant little game if only it wasn’t among the most fucking obnoxious things I’ve ever had to listen to, and I include my own voice in that list!
We have on our hands an enjoyable game with some of the worst audio direction in videogame history. It constantly attacks the ears with unbearably performed voice clips so repetitious, and unnecessary that I lost all desire to keep playing it. Reducing NPC chatter in the options doesn’t work, changing audio language doesn’t help - the only way this game should be played is with its yammering fully disabled, but that's a garbage solution! The wider experience does itself no favors by being repetitive in many other ways, but even if it were an exceptional game, I'd still be completely put off by the fucking noise, and the fact it was explicitly designed to be so offputting only makes it more contemptible.
Can voice acting ruin an entire videogame? The Adventures of Elliot has answered that question, and the answer is shut the fuck up, videogame!
5/10
