Jumping part 2: don't waste your double jump

This article is part 2 of the jump series: today I’m gonna cover why instant double jumps as Falco are basically riskier full hops and aren’t actually helping you.

First thing I want to cover is speed, as instant double jumps (IDJ) are considered to be faster than full hops for some reason, probably related to the different animation, as Falco spinning might invoke a sense of speed, similar to how Mario and Doc are sometimes considered to have different speeds, but in reality they move exactly the same, Mario just spins more during his jumps.

Instant double jumps are technically faster than full hops, but not meaningfully so, a frame perfect IDJ (double jump on the first airborne frame) into ff is only 4 frames faster than a full hop. Here’s 2 gfycats showing IDJ with short hop and full hop respectively, they are identical when done frame perfectly as you double jump before you get any noticeable height.

Not much of a difference, right? If you do the double jump 1 frame late, you save 3 frames, 2 frames late and you save a single frame. Marginally faster. Let’s look at how it works with a full hop:

In this case, if you’re late by a frame on the double jump, you save 2 frames total. Double jumping 2 frames late makes your total airtime identical to a full hop, and jumping anything later than that makes it slower than just full hopping.

The IDJ isn’t really helping with anything here, and is actively hurting you by leaving you without a jump, which can lead to situations like this one:

Westballz lost 2 stocks in no time because he IDJ’d and M2K swung at him. This happens more often than you’d think, albeit in less obvious ways (not 2 in a row, higher percent, etc.), so it flies under the radar.

With that out of the way, let’s look at what an instant double jump can actually do for you. Double jumps ignore previous velocity, so you can be running one way and IDJ the other with no loss of speed, while a full hop would have your previous speed counteracting the backwards velocity you get from the jump. This can help with consistency, as you don’t have to worry about where you were going and at what speed, you just need to make sure you point the stick in the right direction before pressing jump (kinda like a shield stop).

Height also matters, since a well-executed IDJ goes a bit lower than a full hop, you can avoid landing on top platform on Battlefield and Dreamland when doing so. And if you want to go barely higher than a full hop, doing a full hop into double jump a few frames later will get you there, but that’s on the more obvious side of things.

IDJ also changes your ECB, which allows you to do perfect wavelands on Dreamland side platforms: normally the ECB updates just after you pass the platform, so doing the airdodge either misses the platform (early) or has you spend a frame in the airdodge animation (or more depending on the angle) before touching the platform. This isn’t an issue on other stages.

I hope this article helps people understand IDJs better, and think of when it’s really a good idea to use them, instead of defaulting to them or doing because they're faster.

In part 3 of the jump series I’ll go over backwards short hop applications aka the backflip.