I fully recommend buying any game for the nine cents (well, nine Club Nintendo gold points) I paid for Elliot Quest. Any game, that is... except Elliot Quest.
This game feels like it should be a home run. It’s an indie metroidvania with an overworld inspired by The Adventure of Link, complete with several distinct areas, a couple of towns, and roaming enemies that lead you to little battle stages. Elliot Quest feels like it was specifically designed for Zelda 2 fans, expanding on basically all of the elements in that game and adding a more in-depth RPG-style progression system. Unfortunately, just like something from the NES era, it’s tough as nails... and suffers because of it.
Well. I suffered because of it, anyway.
As you defeat enemies, you earn experience points, and once you’ve leveled up you earn a skill point that you can put into one of five attributes. These unlock things like the ability to fire arrows (your standard attack) farther or more quickly, the chance for a heart to replenish twice as much health, and automatic regeneration of your magic meter. This is all incredibly helpful... but you earn XP painfully slowly, and when you die or fall down a bottomless pit, you lose a big chunk of it. You can never go down a level, but it’s disheartening to find yourself locked into a difficult platforming section, failing over and over, and seeing your XP bar being completely depleted.
I feel like I’m not properly conveying how frustrating this is... every time you die, you lose several dozen enemies’ worth of experience, and when you respawn at the last save point you passed, it’s re-activated and saves automatically. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve died, quit to the Switch home screen, then closed and re-opened the game just to prevent myself from losing experience. I’d be shocked if it was under fifty. That’s how severe of a punishment this is.
Ahem. The spells and items you collect are well-utilized, for the most part... but a fireball that can light torches, an ice ball that can freeze enemies, and literally just a rock that you throw and bounces around a bit aren’t exactly the pinnacle of innovation. I do like the tornado spell, though... You can use it to draw items towards you, suck in small flying enemies and projectiles, and, for some reason... quickly travel across hedgerows that are floating in mid-air? Yeah, I dunno man.
The game does have a few things going for it. The art is okay, if a bit static (for some reason, all of the screenshots I took happen to be some shade of brown), and the level layouts aren’t terrible. You’ll occasionally find areas that connect to an area you’ve been through before, allowing you to create shortcuts... but the only points of reference any of the area maps give are your current location and the location of the boss room, so it’s easy to get lost. It’s also a huge pain in the butt just to get around the world map, even with shortcuts, as the only fast travel is an expensive item that warps you to one of the towns.
The game has a couple references to the games that inspired it, which is always a nice touch. In the screenshot above, you can (kinda) see a Chozo statue from Super Metroid, and at one point there’s a lone statue in a long room full of columns right at the start of a dungeon. I shot the statue in the head, because I’m kind of a nerd and you get a free potion by doing the same thing in a similar section of Zelda 2... and wouldn’t you know it, the statue dropped a potion.
The story is... eh? Throughout the game you’ll get a handful of flashbacks to Elliot mourning his wife, who was killed by some kind of entity called the Satar... you’re never really given specifics. It’s also revealed that Elliot tried to kill himself but can’t die, resurrected by the last blue-eyed statue (save point) to see him. He also talks to Rasa, a character implied to be important but who I only ever saw in these flackbacks. Aside from a hooded rogue trying to get you to join sides with him a few times, that’s pretty much all there is to the story... nothing ever really happens in real time, you just get flashbacks to this one scene where Elliot mourned his wife, jumped off a cliff, and talked to Rasa.
There seems to be a morality system in the game... presumably you can be considered to be good or evil, but in my playthrough, it never moved from Neutral. It feels like there are a few things you could do to affect it... for example, early on you have the choice to keep a useful item or return it to its owner... I returned it, but you could also just never talk to them, and the moral dilemma would never present itself. Joining forces with the rogue or disobeying the wishes of a goddess would probably affect it as well, and maybe there are different endings depending on your alignment, but as far as I can tell this feature doesn’t really add anything to the game.
The final boss was an... interesting, experience for me. On my first attempt, he executed a well-telegraphed move that would obviously kill me instantly, but I flubbed a jump and ended up smooshed between two huge stone blocks. On my second attempt, I started the fight by jumping and firing off two arrows, both of which missed the target... and the boss just immediately collapsed. I was wary, unsure what kind of attack this was, and inched towards him... only to find that he was defeated after taking zero damage, and I had beaten the game. Huh.
I really have no idea what happened there. Did I happen to pull off the correct series of button presses to enter a debug cheat to instantly kill the boss? Did I shoot an arrow into the perfect spot at the perfect time while his hitbox was spawning and it built up enough damage that he went down in under a second? Really, nothing I can think of makes much sense... but hey, I just wanted to check the game off of my Backloggery and be done with it as quickly and frustration-free as possible, so I’m not complaining.
Also, I just realized... the enemy from this official art for the game? Which I’ve seen dozens and dozens of times as I’ve tried to avoid draining my XP bar because the artwork is used as the home screen image for the game? Yeah, that enemy isn’t the Satar. I’ve always assumed it was, but now that I’ve finished the game, I recognize it as... just a normal enemy from a couple late-game areas. Not an important character, not a boss or mini-boss, not even a common enemy you see all throughout the game... just a random spear-throwing knight you see four or five times. Weird.
