THEORY: It takes ~11 frames of holding Special before the Monado Art "Dial" appears. This indication is based on a yellow glow that you see around Shulk as he is changing arts:
At first I mistook this glow for
Monado Shield, but as you can see when you slow down the clips, this is Vanilla Shulk.
The instances where you see this glow are:
- In the all character reveal (11:39 onwards):
- Skyworld, Vanilla Shulk first cycles (present for ~ 9 frames, before the Monado Jump Kanji appears)
- Skyworld, Vanilla Shulk second cycles (present again for ~9 frames, Monado Jump Kanji appears ~frame 8)
- Skworld, Vanilla Shulk dials an art (present for entirety of Shulk's selection, Shulk first begins to pose for the dial on ~frame 11)
- Gaur Plain, Vanilla Shulk (again, present for entirety of selection, Shulk first begins to pose on ~frame 11)
- In the mini Shulk video:
- Gaur Plain, Vanilla Shulk cycling (present for ~8 frames, during which the Monado Jump Kanji is always visible)
Instances where you do NOT see the glow:
- In the all character reveal:
- Gaur Plain, when Shulk dials from Monado Jump to Monado Smash
- In the mini Shulk video
- Gaur Plain, when Shulk dials after cycling through all his arts
Now, what I propose is that this glow indicates when the player is holding down the special button, and these frame counts give us an idea that the dial will appear
after 11 frames of holding down special. If you let go of special before 11 frames, as in the first two examples, you will begin an art cycle instead.
Now, why this glow ISN'T present during the dial between
Monado Jump and
Monado Smash is maybe as simple as the fact that holding B to deactive an art has been removed, so you can only dial an art or mash to deactivate. Or maybe the glow + the glow of the arts is too much, idk.
What now interests me is why in the mini Shulk video the glow ISN'T present when Shulk dials after being shown to cycle through all his arts, when the other two instances we have seen him dialing an art they were always present. It could simply be that this was an older build so the glows are odd, but I have another hypothesis:
after one full rotation of cycling arts, inputting special begins to cycle through the "dial" animation instead of the normal cycle. The only support for this is (1) we never see a Shulk cycle past
Monado Smash in the footage we have so far, and this appears to be uncut (2) there is no glow for the holding special inout as I previously theory crafted and (3) the cycling continues in a counter clockwise order through the arts as they appear.
If this is true... I don't know how I feel. Are you stuck in the Monado Dial when you are in it? Not sure if I like that design, if so. :x