Fire Emblem Fates had some of the most juiced combat animations in any video game in history. Just look at it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH-WRse7fDw. Aside from classic animation principles like anticipation, follow-through, bounciness, etc, it's also a check list of game design juicing tricks. Fates arguably had too much of this juicing but it still beats the extremely dry combat animations in FE: Three Houses.
@jplebreton Yeah they're so good that a major part of the FE fandom is people doing their own fan animations for the GBA games! Aside from just the high level of craftsmanship of the animations, it's incredible how far ahead the GBA FE games were of the rest of the world in terms of milking/juicing which is even more important on handheld screens where you need to exaggerate effects to have them visually register to the player.
@pervognsen god, so good. they're enjoyable just as animations but it's also gratifying to see how they realized how centrally important a part of the game they were, and committed to just absolutely crushing it quality and polish wise. even the level up UI animation is super slick and sticks in my head 20 years later, and was recognizably the same in Three Houses.
@jplebreton I can just imagine the training process of a new grad animator on the FE team. "How long should I hold my poses?" Longer. "How about now?" Longer. "Alright, it's held for over a second now." Still not long enough.
BTW, I think an underrated benefit of pixel animation is that it was easy for the combat designer to re-time them by hand since you're dealing with discrete time and discrete key frames. Not the same with continuous-time tweening and speed curves in modern game animation.
@jplebreton Yeah. As evidenced by the early 3D FE games. The combat animations weren't terrible by the standards of most games but boy was it a regression from the GBA games. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9v60k58x-c
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