ROLLING ( O O ) !!!

Piku will always try to stand on the ground beneath them when not balled up and walks really slow. Piku has two jump heights. Pressing the jump button while standing will allow Piku to do a full height jump. Coming out of ball form while on the ground will do a jump about half the height of the standing one. Coming out of ball form before hitting the ground will make Piku stand instead of doing the short hop after landing first. Ball form is the fastest way to get around for the most part with some exceptions that I will mention. Doing a standing jump horizontally and balling up as soon as you can after the jump will give you the same height while still giving the most distance cleared because ball form has more horizontal speed. Ball form is fastest in water so maximize ball form in water while spending as little time as possible in the water. They can also kick things, which is neat but you can miss interaction timings because they're stuck kicking.

Learning the correct position you can interact with things/npc's is important because they're not all the same and you don't want to have wasted air time that you can't interact with something because you short hopped, were in ball form, made the animation longer, didn't cover enough distance fast enough etc. Memorizing the correct distance that it takes to come out of a horizontal short hop is helpful all over the game. Walking is faster than rolling when you can interact with something within the time it would take to do a full short hop coming out of a roll horizontally. It is faster to come out of a roll just before you hit the ground if you need to do a standing jump or interact with something as opposed to short hopping.

Dec. 1/2020 So after playing this game for a long time I have realized that Piku has a way to reliably halt vertical momentum. This only applies to platforms that you can jump through to the top however. If you were to jump with A, hop out of ball form, launched by a mushroom, spring etc. Piku's feet will free moving in the air to interact with anything. If at anytime when you are mid air and you go into ball form, after you come out of ball form you will now snap to any platform you jump through saving you all the wasted time on jumps that don't line up with Piku's jump heights. For really short platforms that you can't reach with ball for you can do this trick but it requires really fast inputs.