The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales

无聊至极 是个人一个地图打四遍能受了啊

If a modernized version of Link to the Past sounds like something you'd like, you will like this game. To call it an homage would be a bit of an understatement. Even if you never played it, this is a still a very fun game. It's got plenty of issues, too, but nothing that ever broke my interest. The games mechanics are straightforward, simple to understand, afford a lot of fun synergistic customization options through the magicite system, and give you a lot of ways to create your own gameplay style. * Also, it's worth noting that "Normal" difficulty is extremely easy. The only difficulty in the game can be figuring out boss mechanics, and if you watch the cut scene before each boss they basically advertise what you need to do. So, if you want something resembling a challenge, turn the difficulty all the way up. TAoE also gives you freedom to explore (most of the time) and play how you want. It's fun and you're free to find the fun you like. I want to be clear that I think this game's most annoying flaws are easily overcome by this, but there's not much to say about why it's good. Play the demo and, if it's your kind of game, you'll see why by the time you finish it. So, the rest of this review is going to focus on the problems with the game since you might have a better time if you try to work around them: 1) Your companion (being vague to avoid early-game spoilers) is always annoyingly providing information, and most of the time doing so *after* you're obviously aware. For instance, treasure chest sightings usually happening while you're opening a chest or afterwards. The information you get is often repetitive and unnecessary and feels like you're getting it for the first time. I'm sure some of the obvious help your companion provides is in the interesting of helping younger players, but many of us don't want or need it and there should be more granular controls to adjust this. Currently, you can only reduce the amount the companion speaks, and it doesn't change a whole lot. 2) While having lots of fun weapon and magic options is fun (the swinging scythe, albeit extremely OP, is really fun to fight with when paired with teleport), switching can be a pain. First, it didn't help that I played with an 8bitdo Nintendo-layout controller and the game treated it like Xbox, so the buttons were labeled incorrectly. Faie's magic switcher can be configured to cycle with a button press, which helps a lot, but you're still stuck with a slow means of using items and switching weapons. The main reason the weapons switcher sucks is due to how the weapons are positioned and how that doesn't change based on the control scheme. If you use Type A controls (the default), you probably won't notice this, however I think the Tybe B controls are considerably easier to work with but it causes your left weapon to be positioned on the right side of the switcher and the left weapon to be positioned on the right. It took me half the game to realize I just can't trust what I'm seeing in order to switch more efficiently. There's only so much the game can do to make switching simple when you have so many options, but it shouldn't be doing anything to make it worse. 3) There are multiple endings in the game, but if you want any other than the bad one, finding it isn't obvious. I don't actually have a problem with the need to do a little work to figure things out, but the game holds your hand through literally everything else. So, when you're left to figure out what to do after getting the bad ending, you're only really told that a better ending exists and you have to find it. This wouldn't be a problem if the game made it clear it's your job to figure it out, because otherwise it can seem like you already did everything you need to but you did something wrong at the end. 4) A lot of what you do in the game is repetitive. It doesn't feel as annoyingly redundant as, for example, Bravely Default games, but I think there was opportunity to use a bit more variance in storytelling. I don't think it's a spoiler to say this game involves time travel, and so you might expect the world to change in a notable way depending on the era, but those changes are generally more of annoyance than an interest (e.g. you're blocked somewhere in one era that you aren't in another and the reasons appear to be 100% arbitrary). In general, the biggest challenge in this game can be finding a path through or discovering key mechanics like how to dive underwater. Part of the fun of these games is finding things on your own, but finding passages 5) Adventurer Guideposts are very helpful, but they're absent from about three key locations that make you have to travel a lot by foot. I don't see any benefit in this. I often traveled by foot on purpose, because it's fun, but I think that ought to be a choice. Also, if you're inside, you can only travel to other guideposts in that location. That means you travel to the nearest exit guidepost, leave, and then travel to the outdoor one you want to go to. This isn't a huge problem, but it means you're going to a loading screen two times in a row when only one should be needed. I'm not sure why they did this. The wasted time adds up more than you might expect. 6) Despite being a low-poly game with pixel art, this game is extremely resource-intensive. This isn't surprising, given that this team seems to never put any effort into an efficiency, but TAoE is hungrier for resources than any other of its family (e.g. Octopath and Triangle Strategy). Whenever the game had an uninstalled update, it would drop to a low frame rate (guessing about 15fps) and feel like playing in slow motion. Restarting and installing the update was the only fix. I am a dev, myself, and have programmed environments that look like this game. There is no reason for a game like this to be so resource hungry. 7) Most of the quests are really stupid, and the music quest is the absolute worst of them. They're basically fetch quests that are pose no challenge and are just excessively tedious. They don't seem to have had much thought put into making them fun or unique or interesting, but rather just pad the game with unnecessary tasks. It did feel like the music quest was an attempt to do something interesting, but I just found it incredibly annoying and pointless. 8) This is going to seem like a spoiler but it's not: the final boss poses no challenge whatsoever. You can kill it with the bow in about 10 seconds without moving. Pretty much every boss that precedes it poses a greater challenge. I won on the first try without taking any damage, which is not something I can say about any other boss in the game. Even with handicaps you may choose to fight with for, uh, reasons, it's still incredibly easy. 9) This isn't exactly a complaint, but I think it should be noted: the game's story is extremely plain, predictable, and unengaging. That being said, this isn't a story game—it's a retro adventure RPG, down to its complete lack of diversity and save-the-princess objective, with a flawless hero that never strays from his moral code or struggles to know what to do. If you're expecting something else, well...don't. :-P I'm a white guy, and despite that and I prefer diversity, strong female characters, etc. I also don't think every game has to embody my values and interests. It's just a little weird to me when literally everyone is white, since that's just not what the world looks like at all, but what's nice nowadays is that there's room for all kinds of games. I know there are many under-represented people who are tired of playing white people games. If you're one of them, you'll want to pass on TAoE. Play Cross Code and Alabaster Dawn instead. They are better games. TAoE is still really fun. These are my primary complaints with TAoE but, again, it's a great game and none of these things made me want to stop playing it. I really enjoyed it.