#instashield

I don't like the Super Peelout. It feels kind of pointless in the face of the Spindash. Every time I play a fan game that has the Super Peelout, it feels like one of those nostalgia things where people remember it from old games but they never actually internalize whether or not its useful. I don't think it is.

Instashield is one of those things I do unconsciously a lot but it doesn't feel very well explained as to what use it is. It's also one of those things that's only useful on things it was designed to be used on, like spiked enemies that need the extra range. So I like it, but I don't love it, because it's weird and doesn't have enough utility.

The Drop Dash has the benefit of being a thing I also do unconsciously a lot, with the added benefit of always doing something for better or worse. But in some ways, I think that's better, because it gets you into lots of situations where you're making tons of tiny mistakes that you want to try and correct. At least for me, it helps me improve my understanding of a stage's flow.

I do wish maybe its controls were better. Mania's "double press and hold" is a little awkward, and Frontiers upgrading that to "triple press and hold" is downright garbage. It works, but I will pick nits that it's not intuitive at all. Fan games like Sonic GT handle it best where it's given a dedicated button like a bumper or something.

The InstaShield, as it appears and functions in Sonic 3, would be difficult to work with in 3D. It’s still kind of the Castlevania Whip problem.

This whip draws a straight line in front of the player, and anything that intersects with that line takes damage. It functions almost like a laser. But in 3D, suddenly it becomes super easy to miss when all you’re doing is drawing a straight line in one direction like that.

Why Super Mario Galaxy works is because it’s a sweeping motion. You are effectively doubling the size of Mario’s hitbox and saying “while spinning, anything that touches you from any direction takes damage.” It’s basically impossible to miss with that attack, unless you’re too far away from an enemy. 

I don’t think this applies to the InstaShield for several reasons. For starters, personally, the InstaShield always read to me as a Castlevania “line” attack.

Now you could flip that on its side so that you’re kind of whipping a ring of energy outwards (instead of forward), and that would work, but the other problem is that the InstaShield requires you to be in the air when you do it.

In terms of being intuitive for players to use, the idea that you’d have to jump to use your AOE sweep attack is a little awkward. Because now you create a problem where you’re above most enemies you’re attacking, or you make the enemies so big that it’s only logical you’d jump up in to them.

Because you look at the spin attack in Super Mario Galaxy, or Crash Bandicoot, or just melee-focused games like Bloodborne or even Skyrim and they’re all ground based. Certainly those games let you attack out of a jump, but it’s not the only option. Jumping is not a required step to attacking.

Okay, so you make the InstaShield usable from the ground. Well, Sonic uses his ball state for jumping and rolling already, and now we’ve got a new, separate attack state that’s different from both of those that also switches to ball state. How is that clearly different from rolling? Is rolling required to use the InstaShield first? Can you roll out of an InstaShield? I feel like it starts to muddy the waters.

So then you break this all down to its fundamental actions and it’s just an AOE attack that doesn’t have to involve spinning in to the ball state. Now you’ve just literally given Sonic the spin punch attack from Super Mario Galaxy. But is that necessarily very Sonic-y? Sonic has certainly used his fists in games before, but he’s never really been known specifically for punching.

As you can see, you can very easily fall down a rabbit hole of “Why does it need to be this way?” This kind of nitpicking can be what separates the good games from the truly great. You want something that feels organic from both an aesthetic and a mechanical perspective.

I’m also not generally a fan of the InstaShield anyway. It was more than ten years after Sonic 3 released that I finally started to grasp how to use it properly. It is, by its very nature, not intuitive at all. It’s just this thing you can do, and it’s never explained what it’s for or what enemies are susceptible to it or anything. Here’s literally all the manual says about it:

It never made any sense to me, because in that context, having a flash-shield seemed pretty useless. It wasn’t until the era of being able to pull up a Youtube video that I could see how other people played the game and realized the InstaShield’s true function. And even then, for 90% of the game, it doesn’t provide any actual tangible benefit over just attacking normally. It’s mainly useful for spiked enemies and not much else.

I have no qualms with the Drop Dash. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think it’s actually fairly brilliant as a means of traversal. This is something I’ve talked about before, about how gaining speed in Sonic games gradually became easier over time.

Sonic 1 is kind of a nightmare, right? It’s where momentum is king, and if you lose that momentum, you have to take the walk of shame to manually build it back up. Sonic CD and Sonic 2 introduce the spindash, where you can reclaim lost speed by charging a spin from a standstill. The spindash became so vital to Sonic’s moveset that Sonic Team back-ported it in to Sonic 1 for Sonic Jam on the Saturn, and most versions of Sonic 1 that don’t provide this luxury look genuinely inferior.

Then we get Sonic Adventure’s spindash, which doesn’t even require you to stop moving to use it, and eventually we end up at Sonic Rush’s boost system. All of it is built towards the same goal: to keep Sonic moving without needing to stop (or necessarily even slow down very much).

The Drop Dash rests somewhere between the spindash and the Sonic Rush Boost, but more importantly, it seemingly brings about a very important feature: the ability to change directions without having to slow down and re-accelerate. Previously, if you were moving to the right and wanted to instead turn around and go left, you’d have to stop, turn around, and accelerate in that direction (or stop, and then spindash).

The Drop Dash, from the way it looks, lets you change direction in mid-air and shoot off in that direction the moment you touch the floor. Combined with the fact that it essentially functions as a spindash where you don’t have to stop moving to use it, it has MASSIVE potential. I assume a scenario where high-level Sonic Mania play is one where you never exit your rolling state. You just spin through the entire stage all the time chaining Drop Dash after Drop Dash together forever.