The first elemental island I decided to visit was the Misty Swamps. I was expecting a much more welcoming atmosphere than I received going to my first island. At least I got to slowly work my way to uncover the location of the first elemental temple.

Nothing like going to your first island and getting chased out by the locals. Many of the camps where I was used to crafting now require me to sneak into the camps or clear them out of the locals. That sure makes me feel unwelcome on the islands.

I further went on to introduce myself to the local wildlife. Who turns out also did not want to be my friend either. I was however with that since everything was easy to defeat for the most part.

Things even got a bit stranger when I realized I was being stocked by some female. Who it turns out also wants me to be gone from this island. We would end up going back and forth a bit before becoming friends working towards me finding the temple in the end. She saved me a couple of times as well.

The biggest thing for me was just exploring around the place. I quickly found one of my first fragments of the blank stele. These would be white pillars sticking out of the ground that would help decode the black stele that was sitting on the middle floating island.

At the time I had no idea what or why I was even collecting them. Other than it was one of the many side activities I had to do. Along the way, I was also looking for dark energy and even found some side quests while on the island as well to work on.

I started to learn it was always worth taking a moment to scan around the skyline looking for any kind of beams of energy showing up. They could end up leading me to important things like crystal towers used for teleporting around or even ruin keys.

I did end up finding quite a large camp that was mostly abandoned. Since no one bothered me here when I was using it. Along with the fact it was right next to a crystal tower. This ended up being the camp I'd return to any time I needed to craft more food or pellets for my slingshot.

Not everywhere ended up being like that. I ended up having to run quite a few times when the local ponpons would show up and try to capture me. There were quite a few dangerous places to go exploring around it seemed.

At some point, I'd end up getting the last laugh when I needed to confront the large party that was hunting for me. While in large groups they could have taken me down. In smaller numbers and some food to heal with. I had the upper hand.

One thing I was rather thrilled by was just how large the island ended up feeling. This was not going to be a couple of hours and I'd be done exploring and doing everything this island had to offer. Even after I finished off the main quest for this island, I'd be returning to further work on some side activities.

Perhaps it was best there were almost 40 chests to find and loot on this island alone. As someone who just loves finding loot between farming ores and finding chests. I’d sometimes just log into the game to run around for a short amount of time looking for anything I had overlooked.

The swamp terrain itself was quite an interesting one to be wandering around in. There were a lot of water areas I had to go around or use a special ability to surround myself in a bubble to walk across.

There were also surprisingly a lot of rocky formations from mountains to just uneven terrain. I can only guess this was part of just being on an island. It is also rather restricted by the path forward. There were however many different ways to go around exploring.

Naturally, anytime I found myself a cave to explore even if I could tell it was just a small one. I jumped on the opportunity. In this one, I could tell there was a ruins key just waiting for me to grab it. I just had to take out the things that exploded with poison gas first before getting my hands on that key.

While I was mostly out to just explore around and collect things on chests. I was slowly working on the main quest for this island as well. At one point I had to find an item inside a hollow tree, fighting some bone frogs along a shoreline. Finally get my hands on some pink sea shrooms which sound like quite an odd thing being required for me to collect.

One thing I have not talked much about is the odd companion the game gives you. It’s a flying big called Piggy. It sometimes gives you hints and from what I can tell controls the portal to the ruins. Mostly it’s just this thing that flies around me that I wish I could shoot down.

It at least comes in handy when telling me I'm near a source of dark energy. It has a friend that needs a bunch of it. The dark energy comes from these pillars that I need to attack that slowly break down and spawn enemies to fight.

I ended up using one of my super powerful attacks that takes a long time before I can use it again. It ends up consuming energy and once that bar depletes, I can’t use it again till the bar is full again.

I managed to get off quite a few powerful hits and break the dark energy pillar apart before my attacks faded. I'd go on to collect a few of the dark energy stones that I could find on the island. It seems I'll need to visit a few islands to collect enough to help Piggy’s friend out.

Final Thoughts

After a while, I started to ignore the main quest. I was just having too much fun opening up my map and looking for points of interest. While I'm sure some had to do with the main quest. Most seemed to be side things to do. Many of them also came with rewards for doing them.

I still have quite a bit of the misty swamps island to explore and activities to do on it. I had however collected quite a few ruins keys and decided next I'd go run a few of them to increase my health. I also wanted to increase my attack damage since I have a lot of resources to use for that as well. It was starting to feel like I needed to leave the island for the moment and get those needed upgrades done.

Information

Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about Kaku Ancient Seal.

Disclosure. A review copy of the game was received for free.