Hands-on impressions of The Adventures of Elliot, Square Enix’s HD-2D action RPG that fuses compact, old-school dungeon crawling with experimental weapons and modern progression ideas.
A New Old-School Adventure From Team Asano
Square Enix’s Team Asano has spent the last decade perfecting throwback RPGs built on turn-based combat and layered stories. With The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales, the studio finally steps into real-time action, and the result feels less like a nostalgic costume and more like a thoughtful reconstruction of classic top-down Zelda.
Across multiple recent previews, including lengthy hands-on sessions and interviews with the developers, a clear picture is emerging. Elliot is not trying to compete with modern open-world Zelda. It chases the pace and texture of 16-bit adventures, then rebuilds them with contemporary ideas about progression, experimentation, and player respect.
Compact Dungeons With Dense, Puzzle-Box Design
The most striking part of Elliot’s structure is its refusal to sprawl. Rather than long, multi-hour labyrinths, dungeons and side caves are compact spaces that can be cleared in a focused session. The goal is to ensure that every room has intention, whether it is a combat puzzle, a traversal twist, or a secret.
Hands-on reports highlight how the game constantly layers small gimmicks inside these tight spaces. One early sequence drops Elliot into a pumpkin patch, where bouncy gourds act as springboards to launch him over gaps and up to higher platforms. Another dungeon tucks bombable air vents into walls, turning a simple corridor into a vertical playground once you realize you can redirect airflow and open new routes.
Crucially, these ideas stay digestible. Rooms are laid out in a way that lets you see the cause and effect of your actions. Hit a switch and you will probably have line of sight to the gate that just opened. Redirect an air current and you will watch Faie, your fairy companion, ride the draft to a new perch. It feels closer to a series of intertwined puzzle boxes than a single, exhausting maze.
This compactness also lets the game lean harder on secrets without becoming tedious. Optional wings of a dungeon might be two or three rooms deep, just long enough to hide a tricky combat encounter or traversal puzzle but short enough that chasing them never feels like a detour that will derail your session.
A World Built Around Short, Satisfying Loops
The structure around those dungeons supports the same philosophy. Instead of a massive continuous overworld, the map is carved into regions that you can meaningfully explore in 15 to 30 minute bursts. Each area combines small outdoor routes, miniature cave networks, and self-contained dungeons.
Fast travel is generously available, even inside key dungeons. If you have solved a puzzle room or fought through a gauntlet once, the game rarely forces you to do it again. Save points act as both rest stops and warp anchors, making it easy to dip in, clear a wing, and bail out if real life calls.
This cadence gives Elliot an almost episodic feel. Sit down, poke into the ruins of a long-lost era, find a side cave you missed, tinker with a new weapon build, then log off satisfied. It is the exact opposite of modern adventure bloat, and it plays directly to the strengths of its puzzle-box dungeon design.
Seven Weapons, Zero “Correct” Answers
Combat arrives from the Secret of Mana side of Square’s DNA. Elliot swings, blocks, rolls, and parries in real time, and enemies telegraph attacks clearly enough to encourage timing and positioning rather than memorizing combo strings.
Where the game really differentiates itself from simple Zelda homage is its weapon philosophy. Elliot eventually gains access to seven core weapon types: a sword, spear, hammer, bow, bombs, boomerang, and a chain scythe. Almost all of them can be used both for combat and for light puzzle-solving, and the design deliberately avoids turning any single tool into a permanent answer.
In previews, developers described a “no wrong choice” mindset. Spears thrust quickly and cover straight-line distance, great for poking through tight corridors or keeping shielded foes at bay. Hammers swing slower but have a heavy hit-stun that can break armored enemies or stagger mini-bosses. The bow allows you to kite mobs or trigger distant switches while staying out of danger. The chain scythe acts like an aggressive hybrid, letting you latch onto enemies or yank yourself across gaps.
Instead of demanding that you swap weapons only when the game says so, Elliot lets you experiment freely. Many encounters are deliberately designed with multiple viable approaches. A group of enemies surrounding an archer can be dismantled by threading precise spear jabs, breaking formation with hammer shockwaves, or circling around with the chain scythe’s mobility. The game rewards curiosity about what each weapon can do rather than insisting on a designer-approved solution.
Magicite Turns Every Weapon Into a Build
Sitting underneath that weapon roster is the Magicite system, which acts as Elliot’s answer to the rigidity of classic item-based progression. Throughout dungeons and hidden alcoves, you find elemental crystals that can be socketed into individual weapons. Each piece of Magicite tweaks properties like attack power, elemental affinity, status effects, or utility bonuses.
Instead of a simple upgrade ladder, Magicite pushes you toward making loadouts. You might lean into a stun-focused hammer build that chains heavy hits with a chance to freeze, or build your spear around rapid strikes with a burn effect that encourages hit-and-run tactics. Even support tools like the boomerang and bombs can inherit quirks, transforming from puzzle tools into viable combat centerpieces.
The brilliance of this system in a classic adventure context is that it divorces progression from raw item acquisition. In older Zelda-style games, you find a new tool and then the design quietly pushes the previous ones into the background. Here, you keep revisiting your arsenal, massaging each weapon toward a role you genuinely want to use.
Those tweaks also give the compact dungeon design more staying power. A revisited cave can play very differently if you decide to spec into a bow-focused build and start solving fights from across the room instead of wading into melee.
A Fairy Companion That Feels Like A Second Stick
Elliot does not explore Philabieldia alone. His fairy companion Faie is far more than a chatty tutorial box. In modern terms she functions almost like a second analog stick that lives outside your body.
In solo play, you move Faie independently of Elliot to interact with objects that would traditionally require contextual prompts. She can trigger distant switches, channel elemental effects into torches or crystals, or hover over vents to redirect air flows. Many puzzles are built specifically around this two-character dynamic, asking you to position Elliot in one part of a room while dancing Faie through hazards elsewhere.
In local co-op, another player can take control of Faie outright. That turns routine traversal into a low-pressure conversation. One player scouts a dungeon’s choke points while the other hovers over suspicious tiles, checks for hidden vents, or experiments with environmental triggers. It is a clever way of modernizing the fantasy of questing with a fairy partner without being bound to tutorial pop-ups or AI escort behavior.
Retro Structure, Modern Freedom
On paper, Elliot embraces the retro fundamentals. It is a top-down action adventure with discrete dungeons, a fairy sidekick, and pots that absolutely beg to be shattered. The twist lies in how its structure bends to contemporary expectations.
Progression is not locked to a strict dungeon order. The story spans multiple historical eras, and previews describe areas that shift depending on the time period you visit. A dungeon entered in one age might have different layouts, enemy types, or available shortcuts in another, which lets the designers reuse familiar spaces as evolving puzzle boxes instead of one-and-done set pieces.
Quality-of-life ideas are everywhere. Difficulty can be tuned at save points, so less experienced players can lower the pressure without being stuck on a single punishing encounter, while veterans who want sharper combat can raise the stakes. Fast travel trims away dead space, so backtracking becomes intentional revisiting rather than padding. Rewards are focused and readable: new traversal moves for Faie, fresh Magicite pieces, and permanent health containers that echo classic heart pieces.
Taken together, it feels like Team Asano is using modern design language to ask what people actually remember loving about 16-bit adventures. The answers are not giant maps or filler fetch quests. They are discrete challenges, a sense of tinkering with tools, and the thrill of squeezing one more secret out of a familiar screen.
Why Elliot’s Design Stands Out In 2026
The current action RPG landscape is full of enormous maps and tangled upgrade trees. The Adventures of Elliot looks sharp precisely because it pulls in the opposite direction. Its dungeons are short but layered, its weapons are broad but expressive, and its progression is flexible without being opaque.
For players who grew up on top-down Zelda, there is obvious comfort in its tiled rooms and fairy-guided exploration. For players raised on contemporary RPGs, the generous fast travel, build-driven Magicite system, and co-op friendly companion design are immediate quality-of-life wins.
If the full game can maintain the density and experimental freedom of the preview slice, The Adventures of Elliot will not just be another HD-2D nostalgia project. It has a real chance to become the template for how to bring classic adventure structure into a modern, time-conscious era of game design.