Yoshi and the Mysterious Book Guide | Chapter 6 Remote Isle Completion

The last few pages of Mr. E's magical encyclopedia send the player on a journey to the rugged, isolated beaches of the remote island—straight out of the page. This is the final, sixth chapter and the culmination of all you've learned on your whole watercolor journey.

The Remote Isle is the climax of the game before you reach the end of the story, and it will give you every chance to test your puzzle-solving ability and your knowledge of all the local ecology.

The overall aesthetic of this island is beautiful and slightly melancholy, and it's a fusion of the previous environments in the game. In one viewing you'll see lush, colorful jungle landscapes merge into sharp, steep mountain passes and deep, dangerous oceanic trenches.

The entire stop-motion technique is used to its fullest here, with sweeping rainstorms and ominous rolling fog giving a very atmospheric feel to the vast hand-drawn landscapes. But it's not possible to be totally captivated by the stunning visuals.

In the final chapter, the style of pacing changes drastically as you aren't given hand-to-hand tutorials on every individual mechanic anymore but are thrust right into a vicious rampage of complex environments with multiple layers that require you to adapt on the fly and have a complete grasp on all the creatures you've encountered throughout this book.

The Grand Summoning Mechanic

The last portion of the Remote Isle is an introduction to a game-changing, fundamental mechanic that not only changes the entire loop of the game but also requires you to experiment with one or two new native species at a time.

For the first time in the entire game, you can now actually summon just about any creature you've met or managed to document in your encyclopedia. Using the "magic" of Mr. E's fully colored pages, creatures can be pulled directly out of the page and into the environment.

You are able to call one creature at one moment, but it changes everything that has happened up to that point in your adventure. All of the relaxed observation, diligent note-taking, and playful experimentation you've engaged in at the Wildwoods, Coastal Caves, and Seaside turns out to have been rigorous and intentional training.

You aren't just responding to whatever "creature" the game drops in your pitch area. Instead, you have a totally open-ended puzzle sandbox where it's up to you to search through your brain, select the right bio-device for the task, and control the environment entirely without it.

For the first time, you can summon creatures to fight the island's environmental hazards that block your path and threaten your life. Discover a new summoning capability that changes everything you need to do on the huge environmental obstacles dotted around the island and that pose a threat to your life.

If you ever come to stand at the base of a tall waterfall that seems to be too high to jump, there won't be a handy bouncy creature waiting for you. One must choose to overcome the obstacle with one's own own knowledge and experience. Consider using the Bafloonder from the oceanic chapters to use its water-filled bubbles as a makeshift jetpack, enabling you to blast your way through the dense waterfall below.

Or you can use a silk spider from your past trip deep into Bug Country to feed it one of the flies you've caught, which creates a huge, jumping web that you can then jump over to get over the bug hazard altogether. The game doesn't need to be holding your hand all the time and assumes you know how to navigate the living, breathing world it encompasses.

When a narrow mountain pass is totally full of a huge wall of solid stone, you have to be able to recall the early contact points and invoke a Scatterpuff to send its rooting seeds out to naturally crack and crush the stones to dust. If debris is blocking a tunnel underground and is too heavy to lift, having a heavily armored Stag Lifter come out to lift the debris manually is your best bet.

It's the most amazing amount of creative freedom I can imagine—and that's only because it requires you to have a clear idea of all of the particular interactions and elemental reactions occurring with each single creature in the book.

The Labyrinth of Memories

At the core of the remote isle is a network of memories—this is the memory test and the mechanical execution test. This is a dark cavernous region where you lose your ability to summon creatures freely for a short period of time and then have to navigate by the remaining magic left by any former inhabitants.

You'll see glowing ethereal silhouettes of creatures such as the Glubbits, Croakaokes, and armored flies. But to walk through these dark corridors, you will need to perform the same interactions you had used in the past, without any visual cues or assistance from Mr. E.

This involves remembering what kind of fruit would cause what kind of reaction for any given creature, or the exact bounce rhythm for any specific creature. The labyrinth smoothly connects these environmental challenges together, having to switch from a high-speed chase sequence where you must avoid flitting around celestial predators to a delicate, precision-based platforming sequence.

Damage in these ethereal areas usually resets the puzzle room and requires constant concentration and perfection. A great, but unsettling, and altogether wonderful progression that is a fitting tribute to the progress made since the first time you wandered bravely into the wildwoods and absorbed the ways of the world around you. 

Eventually, the mysterious book's storyline reaches its dramatic and highly anticipated conclusion as you successfully navigate the depths of the labyrinth and successfully overcome the brilliant, summon-based puzzle gauntlets of the overworld.

The unruly pair of Kamek and Bowser Jr. introduce themselves as your main villains in the first half of the game, but their constant tampering with the magic in the encyclopedia accidentally rips a hole in the pages, and then a full-grown and furious Bowser appears! The final boss fight is a huge, multi-fight event where you must utilize your new summon abilities quickly and effectively while you're under pressure and attack.

Bowser doesn't just deal you a blow here and there; he is constantly manipulating the terrain he is going to battle you on, effectively eradicating the safe platforms or places and embedding traps all over the arena of the battle with tainted ink.

The only way to survive this hectic battle is to scramble through your mind's database and summon the first appropriate monster you can think of to actively neutralize the very type of monsters he is attacking.

In the first round of the fight, Bowser will try to pour a layer of toxic thick sludge into the lower portion of the arena. You need to get a Snurfboard and quickly get on it, as you've got to keep gliding across the sticky, glistening goo without being hit by his sweeping fire breath attacks.

During the second phase, he'll start throwing big spiked rocks that break apart the ground upon impact. Now it's time to call an Ouchin, grab it, get it sticky-punky, and shoot it directly at the incoming boulders to jam them in the air—creating temporary platforms of platforms to allow you to climb up to his height.

The last area is a hectic crawl as Bowser swarms the complete backdrop in flames, where you have to goad the deep-sea Bafloonder into lifting you a lot higher and into safer air. The trick is to time your aerial moves perfectly, waiting for him to put the fireworks on his back; then you make a deadly ground attack and strike his soft, exposed shell with the tip of your bill.

It's an extremely exciting, quick test of reflexes and working memory of the whole magical encyclopedia, where you must have full mastery of it before you can get your final, earned win.

Archiving at the end of the day.

Once you beat Bowser and return the tainted ink to the edges of the book, you get a wonderfully organized and moving closing cut. The game offers a lot of closure and satisfaction as your amazing trip fills all of Mr. E's pages in bright, colorful, hand-drawn color and with all the notes you have made while playing.

The endgame of Remote Isle is the perfect culmination of this cozy platforming romp, vividly fulfilled by the game's philosophical core alone. It's a successful conversion of a relatively laid-back, non-competitive observing game into a very creative and open-ended puzzle platformer.

Located in Chapter 6, it's a place where you can have full control of the watercolor world and play out the challenges you have set up for yourself, which will make your time spent researching, documenting, and interacting with it extremely meaningful, rewarding, and memorable. 

Also, check our Yoshi and the Mysterious Book Review and other guides:

• Yoshi and the Mysterious Book| Everything You Need to Know Before Buying
• Yoshi and the Mysterious Book Guide | Chapter 1 Wildwoods Completion
• Yoshi and the Mysterious Book Guide | Chapter 2 Coastal Caves Completion
• Yoshi and the Mysterious Book Guide | Chapter 3 Seaside Completion
• Yoshi and the Mysterious Book Guide | Chapter 4 Settled Valley Completion
• Yoshi and the Mysterious Book Guide | Chapter 5 Bug Country Completion