Glitch City: End of the End the World

In the first edition of Glitch City, where I take games and I break them to find the delicious glitches that rest inside; I decided to take a look at a glitch I happened to stumble upon without any prior knowledge of it. There's a way to leave the Destiny Islands portion of End of the World and have Sora walk on sky and water alike! Not only can you take a look at what's behind Destiny Islands but you can also bury Goofy's stupid face in the sand.

Here's how you do it:

• Beat the game. The glitch is in the Destiny Islands portion of End of the World where you fight the first round of the final boss battles.
• As soon as Haley Joel Osment says "Is this, is this my island?" run directly behind you and jump onto the wooden shack. Going near the shore (or was it the hidden cove?) will trigger a cutscene.
• On the wooden shack, go to the far right corner of the roof and start jumping around.
• Eventually, you should have landed Sora on an invisible platform.
• Spam the jump button and watch as Sora crab walks to the heavens!
• Keep jumping until you're above the trees then head towards them. This insures that you will not fall back into the game's boundaries.
• You are now free to traverse the empty world of Destiny Islands. Not much to do really but mess around behind the island and to see how far away from the island you can get.

It's definitely a neat little trick to do and just proves I played this game too much when I was 10. I mean look at how high I got Donald's magic . . . seriously?

The V Files: The Castle in the Wall

Here is a bit of a head scratcher. Kingdom Hearts brought a light hearted look at the intertwining dimensions of Disney and Square Soft. Most of the game was a bright look at Disney's masterpieces through the eyes of the JRPG juggernaut. But as all KH players know once they reached the final level all that color and cheer is snuffed out. The appropriately named End of the World are the where the remnants of worlds lost gather in an abysmal black hole. The entire level is full of odd and creepy sightings but there's one thing that seemed eerily out of place.

After the World Terminus area of the level there lies the Linked Worlds area which consist of purple oozing walls and what appear to be remnants of an old pueblo scattered about. In one of the hallways there is a picture of a mysterious castle skewed about 45 degrees counter clockwise on the wall. It got my attention for being such a small, inconspicuous, detailed picture embedded into a wall that consists of just purple, blue, and black goo.

The only information I found on the matter was at the Kingdom Hearts wiki article on End of the World which states:

"If you look at the wall in the second part of the path to the Linked Worlds section, you can see what looks like part of the forest in Enchanted Dominion, as well as pieces of what looks to be Castle of Dreams and Dwarf Woodlands."

What's weird is that all three of the worlds mentioned only appeared in Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep, about 8 years after the original KH was released. Now it's possible that these worlds may have been beta levels or even levels that never left the conceptual stage of development. Here are my thoughts about the meaning of the mysterious castle in the wall.

• However, I don't think that they were intended to be castles exactly from these levels. All three of the suggested worlds have castles, which well, look like castles. The castles of the worlds look like your typical castle in childhood stories as does the castle in the wall. There are no distinctive features that would prove the castle in the wall is indeed Snow White's, Beast's, or Cinderella's castle.
• Perhaps maybe it was a conceptual sketch of The Radiant Garden before being finalized in KHII.
  
  
• It's definitely not the famous Disney Land castle as the number of towers of each castle don't match up with each other when a picture of both is put together.
• It could be a prominent castle that existed in one of the worlds lost to the heartless and now only exist in as a engraved remnant.
• It might have once been a portal to an area of End of the World that was cut from final game called Crumbling Islands. The area would have had Sora battle Riku for a final time. The area can only be accessed through a hack that will teleport the player straight to this cut area.

It's an intriguing mystery that remains locked away in the bowels of the Kingdom Hearts lore. Hey, maybe it will be revealed in Kingdom Hearts 3 . . . which unfortunately means that we will never know the truth.