Southern Island 1.07
by BONZO, HSM Editor
Before the 1.7 Home update, Granzella’s Southern Island Hideaway saw its own update. With so much content coming into Home these days, it seems no developer wants to stay static; it’s been out over a week now, and still deserves a lot of attention because it was a very sizable update. Granzella is still fairly new to the scene as a formal entity unto itself, but they have proven themselves to carry on the pedigree of Irem and have taken that aesthetic to new heights. In the wake of the loss of Irem beach and Irem as a company, Granzella formed like a phoenix rising out of the ashes and brought us the Southern Island Tropical Hideaway — and more.
This space was initially met with a lot of criticism because it fell short of what we were used to for a beach hangout in Home. Not long after, we lost the rest of the beaches we had in Home, which left a huge gap for us as a community. However, take a second look at this space, because there’s more to it than you might think. Yes, it is a hidden cove; it is a seemingly small lagoon; the cliffs surrounding it and the lack of a sandy stretch of beach give it a closed-in feeling, but it is a dynamic environment. It changes periodically, and Granzella has been very good about updating it with new content.
It was updated with jet ski races. It later opened up a cave, which cleared a path to another area to explore. Granted, it led to nowhere but a stone path to a peninsula, at least at the time. Later on it was updated with a chapel carved out of the cliffs, with a balcony overlooking the sea, offering a mini-game in which the Home community could opt to hold digital marriage ceremonies, at least for a day. Then the island saw an update with a fossil digging game, giving you the option to return once a day and hunt for stone imprint fossils.
The latest update, which is update 1.07, brought with it new items, new games, and an expansion of the island. Beyond the lagoon where you simply walk on the sea floor, there is a diving game. In the store you can find a snorkel — oddly enough in the jewelry section — that will allow you to breathe underwater indefinitely. Also in the store you can purchase goggles for aesthetics, and flippers for your feet to help you swim faster. In the sea diving game you do nothing but enjoy the dive, swim and explore the wild life of the sea.
It isn’t the game itself which serves a purpose, but another addition of the island that makes the diving game an annex. Between the cave path the leads to the external mini island, and the dock that initiates the lobby to the jet ski game; a young girl wearing goggles and flippers sitting on a swing becomes the trader for the newly introduced tropical points. Various actions in the island earn you these points, and you can trade them with this young woman for various rewards.
These include some interestingly designed chairs, with a transparent seat and variations of fish adorning the back support, as well as a variety of adornment plants. Among the activities that earn you points for are digging for fossils, getting married, finding treasure at the bottom of the sea floor in the lagoon, playing the diving game and taking pictures, feeding fish with purchased feed, trading dirt clods with the appraiser, and playing the jet ski race game. The sea diving game, in and of itself, only earns you points to trade, but the real joy of it is to simply swim underwater with some sea life, including a coral reef, what I believe is a leopard shark, stingrays and a plethora of fish. At the base of this multi-platform step like formation of rock is another cave; it’s blocked off for now, but hinting at a future opening for yet another expansion to this space.
Back at the surface, the one cave which is already open saw a further update in the form of another fossil dig site. This one, however, is a paid site — not directly paid, but via another new introduction to the island: the Granzella tickets, which are now useful in the Great Edo space as well.
These tickets come in a variety of bundle packs at various prices. The largest bundle is 60 tickets for 2.99. To enter the paid dig site costs you one ticket per entry and has a limit of three entries per day. There is no guarantee you will find anything in this site, but your odds are higher than the public site of finding the rarest and largest fossils to unlock the fossil skeletons in the Fossil Museum personal space.
That integration is another example of updates this island has seen in the past and present. The personal My Private Hideaway estate opened up an area of the public space accessible only by means of owning that space. The expanded paid site is meant to integrate with the Fossil Museum to unlock the prehistoric skeletons.
Beyond the functional purposes of the Island, it has also seen some aesthetic updates. After the 1.07 update there seems to have been an explosion in the population of the virtual seagulls, because looking out over the cliffs at the sea suddenly looks like an Alfred Hitchcock film. If you pay close attention at the distant horizon you may also see a few more additions; a couple of dragon-like sea monsters which briefly breach intermittently. Underwater in the lagoon there was also an explosion of fish populations.
This space continues to grow and develop periodically. It is helping this space in making it a popular hangout, and admittedly a space I at first seldom visited I have returned to almost daily to hunt for fossils, and earn some tropical points. It’s even prompted a few impulse purchases to enhance the experience. So Granzella is on a good path to garner user activity and interest in their spaces by not letting it remain static. There’s more to this space than meets the eye, and there is more to come. You may have noticed that there is a mast of an enormous ship, poking out just over the cliff to the right of the mouth of the lagoon, and within the cove on that same side there is a cave still blocked off by boulders. There are more updates coming to this island, and each bears exploring.
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The island is a reward hunters dream, 178 fossils from digging 3 sites. Tropical points to obtain the fish chairs and plants. Wedding rings several different carats that change depending on if your wearing wedding suits if I remember right. Linked in is my own private hideaway and fossil museum personal spaces. I don’t really go there because of that, there’s too many activities in such a same place. The actual island with all its added walkways looks like Kevin Costners water world. But I’m not a reward hunter, I love the picnic area and waterfall area to hang out in but prefer granzellas glittering sands. The fossil game to do this fully. You will want to buy all the top tools, lucky charms, personal spaces and granzella tickets, even with it all and visiting the space most days it’s taking a long time to get near the target of 178 fossils so if you get hooked on that game expect to take a lot of time and money. Overall if any space updates you have to get in there try it and sample what it has to offer. You have to give granzella credit as well, when they released the update before this in Japan much earlier in the year, an update no other region had. it went bad enough for them to take the space offline for a couple of month’s to fix it, that takes bottle but got to give them respect for that.