The Adventures of Elliot Review
After playing over a dozen hours so far, Temu Zelda is quite compelling as you play as Elliot one of the greatest adventurers in the land of Philabieldia, who finds a magical door to another time and eventually must travel between four different timelines to save the kingdom and the princess. The visuals are beautiful and is the latest square title to use the HD-2D engine, which somehow looks better every time. Combat is real time and when you incorporate the weapon variety, combinations, fairy powers and magicite passives you can equip onto weapons, it feels very unique. Exploration is fun, environments are fantastical and varied, the shrines and dungeon puzzles are satisfying and the story is engaging as you always want to see what happens next.
The game has a hard time finding the right difficulty balance. Normal mode is a cakewalk and hard mode is relatively punishing. The adventure is also missing some stakes since there are an abundance of save points on the map and even when you die, your fairy sidekick can revive you for pocket change. Speaking of your fairy sidekick Faie, she is overly talkative and irritating even when you adjust the chattiness in the settings to reticent. The biggest issue is that it doesn’t trust the player and give them enough autonomy. You are constantly told what to do, which could be overlooked, but it instantly highlights exactly where it is on the map too. The reason that The Legend of Zelda became iconic in the first place was that it wanted you to get lost in the world, which made the adventure magical.
The Adventures of Elliot is a good to great attempt by Square-Enix to create an action-adventure in the vein of The Legend of Zelda. All the classics are here including a princess needing assistance, brightly colored tunic, collectible heart fragments, boomerangs, bomb-able walls, slicing grass, smashing clay pots, finding plenty of gems that a look a lot like rupees in both, trial shrines and dungeons full of puzzles. It’s hard not to draw comparisons to Zelda with so many parallels, but if you like the classic action adventures, Elliot is sure to please with a great balance of retro staples and fresh ideas.
