The Adventures of Elliot’s development team has quietly been mastering the modern minigame, and its latest action-RPG once again shows us how it’s done

I still think the best example of the Switch 2’s funky new mouse JoyCon exists in the horribly named Bravely Default Flying Fairy HD Remaster. If you’ve followed me from my old haunt at VG247, you’ll have heard this before, but I think it bears repeating: the best demo of the new hardware doesn’t come from the Switch 2 Welcome Tour or something like Drag x Drive, it comes from a re-release of a 14-year-old 3DS game. Yes, really.

Let me explain. There are two new minigames in Square Enix’s Switch 2 RPG remaster that specifically leverage the two JoyCon 2 and their mouse functionality. These take the form of a rhythm game where you guide your chosen character through a Theatrhythm/Persona Dancing All Night-inspired sequence, and an absolutely unhinged airship minigame in which the cast backseat drives the he-thinks-he’s-the-protagonist dandy womaniser, Ringabel, as he tries desperately to pilot his vehicle through an aerial course of madcap nonsense.

The rhythm-action minigame remains unique, as far as I’m aware, in that it requires you to use two JoyCon mice in order to properly move, click, and boogie your way through the minigame. The airship game is less unique, but still fun, weird, and a worthwhile add-on to an already exceptional RPG.

Now, why am I bringing this up here? Because the development team behind the title has a real gift for this sort of additive experience, and its upcoming (and, again, horribly-titled) The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales once again proves that any good role-playing game can be made leagues better by a good minigame or two. I will point to Final Fantasy 8’s Triple Triad, Yakuza 0’s Cabaret Club, Suikoden 2’s cooking, or any of the casinos in Dragon Quest to prove my point. See also: any fishing minigame ever, except Stardew Valley.

Anyway, The Adventures of Elliot is Square Enix’s take on classic Zelda. A travelling swordsman with a fairy companion? Go figure. But the top-down view, the pot-throwing, the cracked walls you bomb through, the grass you can – and are encouraged to – mow down, the gems that make up the different currencies, the ‘drop’ container health UI… Elliot doesn’t so much wear its influences on its sleeve as it has them tattooed all over itself. But that’s no bad thing, at least from the two-hour demo I played, anyway. The game is good, too: the world is huge, there’s a lot of freedom, and there’s a real goofy charm to it that won’t be a surprise to anyone that’s played the Octopath series (it’s the same team behind both games). As a bonus, there’s a sort-of Chrono Trigger-y time travel mechanic I didn’t get to see too much of in my playthrough, but I’m told is substantial and narratively impactful.

That fairy companion I mentioned, Faie, can learn abilities. There are five of these you unlock as you progress through the main game, ranging from a teleport that lets you materialise elsewhere on the screen – handy in battle and in the field – to a powerful sprint that can charge up your melee attack and close the space between you and distant foes before they can get an attack out. There’s also ‘Ignite’ that allows you to damage and weaken enemies, alone or in groups.

These gimmicks, in themselves, allow the developers to bolster the game with a nice suite of challenges and bonus areas that test your aptitude with each new skill. Typically, you move Elliot with one thumbstick (or mouse JoyCon) and Faie with the other. Honestly, it gives Geometry Wars at its most complex, at times. But it’s not in the world map and combat that these abilities are really pushed to their madcap conclusions: it’s in their minigames.

Oh yes. Each ability has its own minigame (of which there appear to be five). Teleport has you warping between islands, dodging hazards, and collecting pebbles in an increasingly fraught dash against the clock. Ignite’s dedicated game is a sort of rhythm-action reflex-testing nightmare. Sprint is a Crash Bandicoot-inspired towards-the-camera chase sequence that gets harder the longer you survive. There are five ranked reward levels, but also seemingly a secret set of ranks that go up to SSS – eat your heart out Devil May Cry. And your reward for finishing these bonus challenges? Music, of course! Besting them rewards little vinyl discs containing bits of the soundtrack, alongside some essentially useless flavour text between Elliot and Faie when you exit out of the menu.

But I don’t really care about that. It’s nice to have rewards, but it’s even nicer to have a full screen of ‘SSS rank’ rewards, glinting pointlessly at you in their respective menu tabs. If you are driven by material compensation, however, there are even more minigames and activities out in the world. The most notable is perhaps the ‘Find the cats!’ one, which makes room for some hilarious lines from NPCs such as, “There are still 48 cats out there, and 12 more in this era!” Thank you, Ailurophilic Traveller, for guiding my time-travelling, cat-collecting downtime. Per the Traveller’s reward tab, if you find 50 cats, you get the ‘Medal of the Katzenmesiter’, a Golden Egg used to increase currency gain by 100 percent, special weapons, and so on. Very RPG fare, but absolute catnip (pun not intended) for a specific kind of completionist goblin.

The Bravely Default series, the Octopath Traveler series, and now Elliot are all presided over by director Tomaya Asano, whose team within Square Enix’s Creative Business Unit II is known as Team Asano. It feels like the group cares deeply about the history and legacy of minigames in RPGs, and knows that no matter how compelling or attractive the main gameplay loop is, it needs something else as dressing; a nice bit of sauce to go with the steak. I’m pleased to see – in an industry as obsessed with trimming the fat as it is at the moment – Asano is still making room for something as non-essential, but deeply meaningful, as the good, old-fashioned minigame.