Metroid Dread -- The Dreaded Shinespark Puzzle
2It's time my enemies shared my Dread:
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I don't think this is exactly especially brazen "spoiler" territory... but if you like to solve every little action puzzle in one of these games all on your own, maybe steer clear of these. This is mostly just a sampling of the little doodads tucked away that are meant to be reached by way of using the Speed Booster upgrade in otherwise less than totally conventional ways.
The main game barely requires its use, mostly as a key to certain obvious corridors and even more often as a means of short-circuiting a longer route or clearing up an obstruction preventing you from easily re-entering an earlier area.
However, to series veterans, it's typical of a certain type of notorious skill check archetype: the Shinespark Puzzle. Sometimes, it's just a matter of understanding your abilities and using them where the game offers an interesting opportunity. Other times, they can be densely technical and require a lot of extra knowledge you might not have acquired from the game itself.
The Shinespark itself is more or less originally a case of this, as it's originally an entirely undocumented feature of the Speed Booster. A friendly critter on Zebes demonstrates its use to Samus from the only chamber it's possible to enter with the Speed Booster without knowing about it... making a little hands-on training the only way to leave. (There's a similar room revolving around friendly natives showing off the similarly undocumented wall jump ability that Samus actually ALWAYS has, but never actually needs to use for any reason whatsoever.)
Metroid Dread at least openly states the conditions for Shinespark when you get the Speed Booster, but there's a lot more going on than just that.
For posterity, here's a breakdown:
-if you activate the Speed Booster and run for long enough, you'll begin running even faster
-during this faster run, if you crouch, you'll store the kinetic energy of your run for a brief time
-pressing B to jump will cause Samus to freeze in place momentarily, preparing to perform the Shinespark
-pressing any direction at this time will allow you to rapidly zoom off in that direction until you hit a wall, breaking any Speed Booster blocks (as well as any Beam Blocks, for that matter) in your path
However, it's not at all that simple... wait, is any of that even remotely simple?! It WAS a secret game function in the game of its origin, after all...
For instance, a charged and waiting Shinespark will NOT activate if you do a spin jump, only a regular standing jump will do it. Which is to say, if you want to take it somewhere other than on the flat surface where you initially charged it, you'll probably need to know about this. It also leads to advanced maneuvers like spin jumping, then breaking your spin mid-jump, so you can press jump from there to initiate and then designate a direction.
And it's only gotten MORE complex as games have decided to further tinker with it. For instance, Metroid Fusion made it so that doing a horizontal Shinespark into a slope would make you start running at full speed once again, making it possible to chain multiple Shinespark maneuvers together in succession. Metroid: Zero Mission furthermore extended the Shinespark ability to while you're in Morph Ball form, thus creating the Ballspark variant offshoot.
It also used to cost health energy, continuously, to Shinespark. So that's... also an interesting artifact of game design perhaps best left in the past.
Ultimately, this is a neat little bit of trickery in a super fluid and responsive game that got tinkered with to the point that it's just one of those things you have to already know a lot about in order fully enjoy.
Where things get extra interesting is if we start trying to consider where and when the world Samus has at her fingertips is designed explicitly around the possibility that people will be using a tool this incredible and under-explained... or if perhaps it's an invitation to the player to pull a fast one on it.
With many potential sequence break methods, there's a not-so-fine line between exploiting a bug that results in unexpected traversal potential that one can only speculate whether or not it was knowingly left in the game regardless for particularly dedicated and intrepid explorers to find and play around with.
Shinesparks, on the other hand, are deliberately presented to players as a powerful tool where the limitations for application are effectively as limitless as places the design team left areas long enough to generate the required speed... and the areas within reach after storing that energy.
Indeed, in Dread, the requirements seem to have been reduced to an unprecedented degree, the charge duration is longer than it's ever been, and now you can also use her newfound slide ability (in her repertoire from the very start!) or wall jump without breaking stride!