Everything changes over time, and that's as true of gaming genres as it is anything else. Design sensibilities go into and out of style, as anyone who's ever looked at a brutalist building one moment and art deco one the next can attest. Action RPGs went from Zelda and Crystalis to Secret of Mana, then went a little puzzle-focused with games like Landstalker and Alundra while PC games took off in a Diablo-styled direction. Brave Fencer Musashi and Threads of Fate were in the classic mold while Castlevania became the -vania in metroidvania. King's Field became Demons' Souls became Dark Souls became Elden Ring, and the action RPG was raided for parts as new sub-genres like the gacha games rose to prominence.

One Adventurer and Companion in a World of Monsters and Dungeons, Just As the 16-Bit Era Intended

The action RPG isn't dead, of course, as evidenced by games as diverse as Visions of Mana and Dragon's Dogma 2, but there's an old-school flavor that's been hard to find outside of the occasional indie. That's why the announcement of The Adventures of Elliot: The Millenium Tales was so welcome at the Nintendo Direct, especially seeing as it came with an instantly-available demo. While the name leaves a lot to be desired, everything else is shaping up nicely for fans of classic ARPGs, helped in no small part by a perfect use of Square Enix's HD-2D style.

The kingdom of Huther on the continent Philabieldia (again, names are not this game's strong point) is about as peaceful a place as the last human settlement could be, protected by a wall of magic from the monsters roaming outside. A new ruin outside the city's barrier requires the services of an adventurer to see what it might hold, so the king dispatches Elliott and his fairy companion Faie to see what's in there. After a few minutes of poking around the castle and town, getting everyone's single line of dialogue and beating up a few pots and barrels to see what's inside, the Action part of the RPG kicks in.

Just about every aspect of the demo is refreshingly straightforward, designed to get right to the adventuring and keeping you there. Elliott comes equipped with his primary weapon as a sword, two secondary options in the form of bombs and arrows, and Faie has a pair of spells that help with mobility. Sword and arrows both come with a charge attack, while holding down the button when using bombs automatically picks it up for throwing. Head out into the wilderness, explore, beat up monsters, and that's the bulk of the game. It's not complicated, but it's a formula that's worked for decades now, so maybe it doesn't need to be.

The action RPG isn't dead but there's an old-school flavor that's been hard to find, which is why the announcement of The Adventures of Elliot: The Millenium Tales was so welcome.

There are a few wrinkles preventing it from being quite that basic, of course. One of the common drops is magicite fragments, ten of which can be combined back in town to create a complete crystal with a random effect. When creating a crystal you choose which piece of equipment it will be for, and if you've got a bunch of fragments you can fuse up to ten full crystals at a time. There's no point in having multiples of any type of magicite, so any duplicates will refund a single fragment, and the skills they grant cover everything from attack power, charge time, critical hit conditions, etc. Each crystal comes with a point value and in the demo Elliott tops of at twenty five points, so there are choices to be made in terms of which magicite to use. You can make magicite loadouts, though, and like weapons and fairly skills, these can be swapped out on the fly with the action paused while making adjustments.

Elliott's final piece of equipment is the shield, which blocks all damage up to a certain point before needing to recharge. Time it just right and get a free stun, because everyone loves a nice parry, but for some reason Elliott is missing any kind of evade move, leaving combat feeling like there's a dodge-shaped hole in it. Jumping out of the way is no faster than walking so that shield needs to be used, especially if you want to keep the combo alive. Each enemy dispatched without taking a hit adds to the combo, and as the combo goes up so does the amount received from drops.

At the start of the Adventures of Elliott demo the difficulty levels are either Normal or Hard, with the description for Normal sounding like Easy and Hard sounding fairly Normal. In my playthrough I went for Hard and sure enough, it's a nice challenge that managed to take me down a couple of times (especially in the two boss fights) while not feeling unfair. The enemies in the wilderness aren't particularly overwhelming, easily dealt with by charge attacks and a few swipes of the sword, but in the demo's two dungeons there are a lot more of them and they can knock Elliott's health down fairly easily by sheer volume. Thankfully, healing gems aren't all that rare a drop, and the dungeons loop around enough that heading by the auto-saving save spot isn't much of a detour. Fighting everything isn't a requirement, either, so once you've cleared an area of its secrets and have learned the map, there's no reason to beat up everything unless you really want to.

Free Hints, Applied With Sledgehammer Force

The only real issue with the Adventures of Elliot demo, though, is that it's clearly designed as a starter action RPG. The Normal/Hard difficulty level should have been a hint, but Faie's voice-over makes it clear that this is a game for beginners. Specifically, it's not an exact quote that she says anything like "Oh look at the treasure chest just sitting out in the open where you can't help but see it! Why don't you go open it rather than walk on by and miss the loot that it may contain, hint hint hint!" but it's close. Additionally, the area map doesn't contain a single secret in it thanks to cracked walls getting an icon and, just in case the player doesn't use the map, Faie pops in with a "You don't want to walk by that cracked wall without dropping a bomb on it, right?" type of statement. The dungeons have a couple of side-areas that can be missed, or even sequence-broken if you use Faie's abilities right, but the overworld seems to forget that the point of a secret is for it to be discovered.

The demo is still great fun, thanks to being a fantastic-looking throwback to a type of RPG Square Enix hasn't done anything with in far too long. The world and tone of the game all felt just right, and the promise of exploring the kingdom's thousand-year history opens up the adventure to all sorts of new locations. While the demo is Switch 2-exclusive for now, The Adventures of Elliott: The Millennium Tales will be available on just about everything including Playstation 5, Xbox X/S and PC sometime in 2026. It's a bit of a wait to see where Elliott and Faie's adventures will take them, but when they do show up it's going to be hard not to be excited just for the chance to bask in a PS1-era Square Enix RPG rendered in a modern-day reimagining of SNES-era art. Which is all kinds of appropriate for a game about time-travel, even if it only feels like those consoles were a thousand years ago and just yesterday.