Adventures of Elliot Review: The Best New Zelda-Like RPG

Square Enix has built a quietly impressive catalogue of games under its HD-2D banner — and Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales might be the most ambitious one yet. This is the title where the Adventures of Elliot formula takes a sharp left turn away from the series’ usual JRPG roots, borrowing the bones of a classic Zelda adventure and wrapping them in the kind of world-building depth you’d expect from a Final Fantasy entry. The result is one of the more interesting releases Square Enix has put out in years.

• Adventures of Elliot mixes classic Zelda dungeon structure with Final Fantasy RPG depth in a single compelling package.
• Adventures of Elliot is the latest in Square Enix’s HD-2D line, sitting alongside Octopath Traveler and Triangle Strategy.
• The game spans four distinct time periods on the same world map, drawing strong comparisons to Chrono Trigger.
• Magicite-based weapon customisation and collectible fairy spells give the game meaningful RPG progression without traditional levelling.

What Is the HD-2D Series — and Where Does Adventures of Elliot Fit?

If you’ve played Octopath Traveler, Triangle Strategy, or the Dragon Quest HD-2D Remake, you already know the look: pixel-art characters rendered against richly detailed, painterly backgrounds with aggressive depth-of-field blur that makes every screen feel like a diorama. It’s a style Square Enix has been refining for years, and it’s aged remarkably well.

What’s interesting about the HD-2D line is that it isn’t really a series in any traditional sense — there’s no shared universe, no recurring characters. The only real connective tissue is the visual approach and, as any fan of the brand will tell you, the increasingly elaborate game titles. Octopath Traveler II, Live A Live, Triangle Strategy — they’re a distinctive bunch. Adventures of Elliot fits that naming tradition perfectly.

But where most HD-2D titles have stayed firmly in JRPG territory, Adventures of Elliot breaks rank. This is an action-adventure game, and its primary reference point isn’t Final Fantasy VII — it’s The Legend of Zelda.

The Zelda Blueprint, Executed Properly

Adventures of Elliot wears its Zelda influences openly and without apology. You slash grass and watch gemstones tumble out. You collect heart pieces to extend your life bar. You work your way through a series of increasingly complex dungeons, each one gatekeeping a new tool — bombs, a boomerang — that you’ll immediately need to solve the next puzzle. You even get an annoying fairy companion. Nintendo’s lawyers are presumably unconcerned, because none of this is new territory for indie developers either, but the execution here is sharp enough that the familiar scaffolding doesn’t feel lazy.

The dungeon design follows the classic Zelda rhythm: smaller early dungeons that introduce mechanics, larger later ones that demand you combine everything you’ve learned to find the big red boss key and reach the final encounter. It’s a structure that works because it works — there’s a reason indie studios keep returning to it. What makes Adventures of Elliot stand apart is what Square Enix has layered on top.

Adventures of Elliot’s RPG Depth Is Where It Gets Interesting

This is where the Final Fantasy DNA kicks in. Adventures of Elliot doesn’t use a traditional experience-and-levelling system, but it does introduce a collectible resource called magicite — a substance that lets you customise Elliot’s weapons to suit different playstyles. Prefer a faster, lighter approach? Tune for that. Want raw damage output? Magicite accommodates it. It’s a simplified version of the materia system Final Fantasy VII fans will recognise immediately, and it adds a meaningful layer of character expression that most Zelda-style games skip entirely.

Your fairy companion — annoying as she may be as a character — also functions as a spell repository. She can learn a range of magical abilities: setting enemies on fire, warping Elliot out of danger, and more. These aren’t just combat tools; many tie into puzzle solutions across the game’s dungeons. Managing her spell list becomes its own quiet strategic layer.

And then there’s the talking. Adventures of Elliot is, by any measure, a chatty game. Elliot himself speaks — which immediately puts him in a different category from Link, Nintendo’s famously silent protagonist. The result, as one reviewer noted, is a picture of what Link might be like if he ever opened his mouth: nice but kind of boring. That’s a fair summary. The dialogue-heavy pacing will suit players who enjoy traditional JRPG storytelling; those who prefer their action uninterrupted may find themselves mashing through conversations.

Four Time Periods, One Map — and a Very Chrono Trigger Energy

The biggest structural swing Adventures of Elliot takes is its time-travel framework. The game’s world doesn’t change between eras — its geography stays largely fixed — but the four different time periods you visit transform what that geography means. A grand building you admire in one era is a crumbling ruin in another. Open fields eventually give way to a sprawling kingdom. Bridges that exist in the future simply haven’t been built yet when you visit the past, forcing detours and alternative routes.

This is Chrono Trigger territory, and Adventures of Elliot leans into it confidently. The comparison isn’t just cosmetic: like Squaresoft’s 1995 classic, the appeal here comes from building a mental model of a world across centuries — understanding why things are the way they are in Elliot’s era by seeing the events that shaped them. Dungeons get remixed versions of themselves as you revisit them across timelines; a cave that was straightforward in one period might be flooded, collapsed, or repurposed in another.

It gives the game a sense of genuine history that most action-RPGs can’t match. You’re not just moving forward through a story — you’re assembling a picture of an entire civilisation’s arc, from a magic-saturated golden age through the ruins that followed.

One detail worth flagging: cats. Adventures of Elliot is apparently very serious about cats. They’re scattered throughout the world across all four time periods, and tracking them down and befriending them isn’t just a completionist quirk — it unlocks genuinely useful items. It’s the kind of specific, slightly eccentric design decision that distinguishes a game made with personality from one assembled by committee.

Accessibility Without Hand-Holding

Square Enix has made Adventures of Elliot approachable without defanging it. Save points are generous, and fast travel is available and encouraged — the game is designed around the assumption that you’ll want to return to town mid-dungeon to restock before a boss fight, and it actively facilitates that. There’s no punishment for preparation.

When you do hit a wall on a boss, the fairy revival system gives you a cash-funded safety net: she can bring you back during a fight, though the cost escalates with each use. It pushes you toward resource management and light grinding rather than raw repetition, which is a more interesting solution than simply reducing enemy health.

For players who want a tighter challenge, a combo system rewards uninterrupted combat efficiency with better item drops. It’s the kind of optional depth that elevates the ceiling without raising the floor — skilled players get more, but less experienced ones aren’t blocked.

The Bigger Picture: Square Enix Is Taking HD-2D Seriously

Adventures of Elliot is the clearest signal yet that Square Enix sees the HD-2D label as a genuine creative platform rather than a nostalgia vehicle. When the series launched with Octopath Traveler, it felt like a smart but narrow bet — gorgeous pixel art for players who missed the SNES era. The label now encompasses turn-based JRPGs, grid-based strategy titles, and now an action-adventure game pulling from Zelda and Chrono Trigger simultaneously.

That’s a meaningful expansion of scope. The indie space has spent years proving that the Zelda formula can support wildly different creative visions — from the punishing Tunic to the cosy A Short Hike. What Adventures of Elliot adds to that conversation is a major publisher’s resources, a distinctive visual identity, and the kind of world-building ambition that smaller studios can rarely sustain. Whether it becomes a recurring HD-2D sub-franchise remains to be seen, but Square Enix has clearly found something worth developing further here.

Source: The Verge

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