This kingdom has a lot of keys, and we haven’t even gathered half of them.
Rather, the keys in the title here refer to the Monarch Wings and Isma’s Tear, which open quite a few locks all around the kingdom. There are a number of things gated specifically by those two items, and now we can go everywhere that’s required to finish the game. (The only other “endgame” item requirement was the Lumafly Lantern.) That’s not to say we have all the major upgrades, but we do have all the ones required to get the first ending to the game. However, I don’t immediately take action to get towards that end. Rather, I act on some of the other stuff that’s lying around the kingdom’s edges.
This game has a lot more text than I first thought, but then again, the Hunter’s Journal is a huge chunk of it. It’s a step shy of the enemy scans in the Metroid Prime series, and text there only appears after you kill the foe, but the text is also much less about how to kill foes and just descriptions of what they are and why they’re here. I do really like the secondary text for foes, so I’ll certainly try to get as much of that as I can, but it might take a while for some of them. I expect I’ll be going out of my way for a few when I’m right up at the end of the game.