Pokemon XD: Gale of Darkness - Walk Through Walls via Platform Distortion?
Posted by: VaeporSage
Date: 2018-02-06 13:04:05
So there's this glitch in Pokemon XD: Gale of Darknesss for GameCube in the final enemy lair where very rarely, upon defeating 1 specific enemy team member, the floating transport platforms in the room go ballistic without warning and start to oscillate in and out of existence, allowing you to walk (and teleport) across thin air to reach them as they violently shake throughout the room.
The glitch has been replicated, documented and attested to by a handful of other YouTubers over the years, although unfortunately two other videos capturing it in action have since been removed.
It's a pretty fascinating display: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2Hlrdyk2iw&t=5s
But apart from how visually transfixing it is to watch the game mess up its functions this badly, there's something else about the glitch that interests me which is so far unexplored, and it shows up at 1:55 in the video above. By walking across thin air, the glitch allows you to clip through a wall, and theoretically explore out of bounds (!!!).
This is especially remarkable given just how glitch-proof a fortress XD: Gale of Darkness (and Colosseum) has proven to be: glitch species, items, moves, Pokémon with 65535 HP, etc. transferred from the GBA games have almost no effect in the GameCube games, as the error handling system seems pretty much airtight.
Why does it happen?
Although the cause of the glitch is so far mostly unknown, we have a couple of key clues. For one thing, we know that it takes place exclusively after defeating Cipher Peon Gromlet. The interesting thing about Gromlet is that he is one of only two trainers in the game with a Wailord on his team (the other is located on Mt. Battle and hasn't been known to trigger any similar effects). During the battle with Gromlet, the camera has to zoom out significantly in order to accommodate the Wailord on-screen.
So it's possible that the wide zoom-out could have a distorting effect on the moving platforms after the battle. But the glitch is still a rare occurrence. So it must be that it's triggered by a combination of events at once, with the Wailord being an important factor in the equation, but not the only one.
…which is why it's particularly lucky that we happen to have footage from a "Let's Play" playthrough of the game that shows us everything that happened before the glitch was suddenly set off! The only question being…well, what exactly could have triggered the glitch, besides the Wailord? And that's been the mystery for the best part of a decade by now. Could it be a particular sequence of events during the battle? A certain move used on the Wailord? Perhaps even having checked certain event flags in the game previously? You name it, it's anyone's guess.
Here's the 10-minute section of playthrough immediately preceding the glitch, including the battle with Gromlet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hdosaT6NCI
***For anyone brave enough to investigate and find out more about the causes of this glitch, I'm happy to offer like $15 PayPal and/or a bunch of old holofoil Pokémon cards to anyone who makes a breakthrough on this.*** :P
I'd imagine that actually analysing the game's internal data directly would be the most effective means of coming to a conclusion, but just from observing the playthrough alone I'd imagine there are definitely some concrete deductions to be drawn that I've missed. Thanks for reading! :)