Today’s addition to my little glitch series is a common one, when things just mysteriously vanish.  Mysteriously.

Sometimes, the world falls apart around you: This happens in “Spyro” games I played on the Cube.  For me, it was quite common in “Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly” for the ground to disappear in the second world, the farm level.  So I’m walking along, and then the ground is just suddenly gone, wheat and barns and scarecrows, not to mention little, purple dragon, floating in midair.  No harm is done, but it’s rather frightening to see oblivion right there below you.  And once Spyro was riding an elevator down from Cloudy Domain in “Spyro: A Hero’s Tail”, and the world decided to disappear from below him, leaving just an expanse of yellow.  Rather worried at the apparent coming of Armageddon taking place below me, I had no choice but to continue riding the elevator down.  It eventually arrived on the ground, and everything was now black, except for Spyro, the elevator, and a distant Moneybags’ shop.  Unsure of what to do, I attempted to glide towards that shop, my single beacon of hope in a world apparently come to an end.  Here, Spyro did not meet any invisible ground.  He fell to his doom.  And I reset the game and rode that elevator nevermore.

It happens to cities, too, and yet the residents always seem to be fine with it: Like in “Jak 3”, when New Haven decided to vanish right before my eyes, leaving nothing but some strange, barren place going all the way up to the city walls in the distance.  Rather put off, I didn’t dare venture beyond the city streets that were still intact.  Eventually, it returned from whatever black hole it had been munched by, and all was well again.  I’m sure the city residents that went missing that day never forgot that incident.  And likely needed therapy afterward.

This also happened in “Final Fantasy XIII-2” in Academia, the nicer version.  Nice, except for disappearing floors, that is.  Having not yet explored this location, I didn’t know what to think when I directed Noel to walk right off into air, not unlike Spyro’s farm incident.  People continued to walk along as if nothing was out of the ordinary, and I really wondered just what was going on here.  Suddenly, the ground decided to return from its bathroom break and never disappeared since.  Very strange.

What scenery or other such things has disappeared when you were playing?  And were you brave enough to venture out into it?

The Disappearing Duck