Welcome back to Save State, where some games have way more to offer than meets the eye. Crimson Desert is one of those titles that’s denser than a neutron star with a lot of features and content that players may miss until way, way later in their playthrough.
Due to discovering some things later than I feel I should have, I decided to start a new save file and muck about in Pywel with all the knowledge of my previous run of Crimson Desert fresh in my mind. After starting over, I decided to speed run unlocking my favorite skills from Kliff’s skill tree, and I also bought a bunch of drink items to restore stamina because flying around the world to explore is way more fun than gallivanting on the ground like some kind of pedestrian equestrian.
One thing I remembered is something I unlocked super, super late into my first run of Crimson Desert: The four unlockable elemental powers. When determining my best route to get them early so I could experiment with them the most, this time I discovered that they’re unlockable in the game far, far earlier than I expected due to some of Kliff’s traversal powers. I found this incredibly interesting because it felt almost like sequence breaking or abusing game knowledge to get a really powerful weapon in Tears of the Kingdom early (of course, it only seems that way due to how late I found all four in my last run of the game).
With a little bit of ingenuity, I was able to unlock all of the elements after the opening of chapter 3, though I don’t see any reason why you wouldn’t be able to unlock them all as early as chapter 2 because you can abuse Kliff’s flight to get a lot of these much earlier than you’d expect!
The main skills I unlocked for Kliff were the ones you’d predominantly use to fly all across the map: the double jump, Focused Aerial Roll, and upgraded Axiom Force to level 2. Focused Aerial Roll is a new skill that was added to the tree roughly a month ago because the developer Pearl Abyss patched out a fun flying bug players were using, but they still wanted players to be able to utilize it (if they wanted) with some skill investment. I actually find this to be an incredibly interesting way to do patches because the developers didn’t just take away the fun toy players were using. They just required we work a tiny bit to be able to get it, which is both perfectly fine and reasonable.
With these skills unlocked, you can double jump, force palm jump a couple times, and then glide for a very lengthy distance, limited only by your stamina. If you were wondering what all the stamina restoring food like the teas are for, it’s to be able to fly much longer distances when switching between your aerial roll and focus mode while airborne. Focused Aerial Roll costs spirit, rather than stamina, to boost you forward, so management of both your stamina and spirit will help you travel a good bit all across the world.
If you’re really unsure about how far you can go when gliding, progressing a ways through chapter 2 and unlocking the recipe for Haiden’s Elixir can be useful to let you negate spirit use for 8 full seconds, which will let you spam your aileron rolls and assuredly make it to your destination.
So, how does all of this prep let players get the elemental powers in Crimson Desert early, you may be asking? Well, it’s because if players know where they can find those powers, they can warp to already unlocked locations or areas that can be easily traveled to, spring into the air, and freely glide to claim the prize. Climbing to the highest point in Ethereal Pathway Abyss, which is unlocked in chapter 1, you can look to the south and see the island where you receive the lightning elemental power. It’s actually incredibly easy to reach this spot by doing the double jump, force palm jump, etc., mentioned before, and all you have to do is solve a simple puzzle to acquire the power for yourself.
Spire of Frost required a little bit of know-how, but thanks to having already played Crimson Desert once previously, I wandered into this zone clad in ice resistance gear (Frostcurse armor, specifically) and used blinding flash to deal with all of the flying mobs in that location. There’s an Abyss puzzle that needs solved there, as well, and after doing so will see another floating island northwest of your location that can be reached using your newfound powers of flight. After completing another puzzle, the power of flame was obtained and, not long after, I was able to make fireballs erupt from my weapon during combat.
From there, Skyloop Bridge is relatively close and harbors a series of puzzles that can be solved to acquire frost element. This one didn’t require any crazy preparation or skill, though it was around this time I remembered that trees can be grappled to slingshot you into the air, which can be helpful if you find yourself undershooting any of these floating islands when you’re utilizing Kliff’s power of flight. The final element, wind, is located past the Gate of Advancement, which for some reason has a cave path leading to it but that path isn’t on the main map for whatever reason.
The very first puzzle in the Gate to Advancement was one I completely forgot the solution for initially, but you have a series of three spinning discs and need to rotate them until the symbols line up in a specific manner. Solving that puzzle leads you into a location with floating, rotating blocks that can be a massive pain to traverse unless you can just freely fly at any given point in time (shucks, it’d be a shame if we didn’t have that, right). After that, there’s a quick fight with orbs that shoot never-ending sprays of lightning at you, so I found it useful to clear a good number of those out, climb to the top, and then look northwest for the next fly destination.
Climbing all the way up a floating block using all the stamina recovery items Kliff can stomach leads to Riddle Square, which has a brief aerial time trial puzzle that requires you to glide through rings- though thankfully this has better aerial control than Superman 64. Completing that challenge unlocks the final element, wind, and allows you to start adding various elemental powers into Kliff’s attacks and use wind with the Imbue Element skill from the tree.
You might be wondering, “Why go through all this trouble to unlock those powers early?” Well, it’s mostly because I had a disgraceful number of hours in Crimson Desert before even discovering two of these elemental attributes, and I wanted to have fun imbuing my skills with them in a second run of it. Also, I wanted to highlight how cool Pearl Abyss’s method of patching Crimson Desert is, since most developers would have cut the ability to fly from it entirely, but turning player-found bugs into features allows you to do fun things like getting all of the elements in the game possibly even before even unlocking the Greymane camp and Damiane in chapter 3!
That being said, I think it’s time to bring this entry of Save State to a close. Look for my full review of Crimson Desert in the next week or so!
