A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

My favorite animations overall though were definitely swordmaster, specifically their "dodge" animation. They only moved like 3 or 4 pixels, so it was hard to tell that they actually dodged. But once you saw it, it was in fact amazing.

I feel like the author is so close to the issue that they lost the forest for the trees: there will always be some games that benefit from the pixel art, it just takes a full and proper understanding of what they style instantly communicates to your audience.

Japanese animation, on the other hand, plays fast and loose with the rules. Very little is animated at the full 24 FPS, drifting around 12 to 8 to 6 FPS (called animating on twos, threes, or fours) for typical scenes. This allows for the user's attention to be captured by backgrounds and stills in expository scenes, and encourages a different style of exaggerated movement that emphasizes the ''feeling'' of the movement over brute force motion quality. It also allows the budget to be conserved for the most important scenes, sakuga ("moments in a show or movie when the quality of the animation improves drastically, typically for the sake of making a dramatic point or enlivening the action.") So called "key animators" work exclusively on these parts of an animation, and here, their skills in creating expressive motions shine when given the time and resources to completely bring a dramatic scene to life.

As the game, comic, and animation artforms grew alongside one another, early games took direct influence from styles of animation native to their creators. The concept of sakuga fit Japanese games well, which would often sparingly animate unimportant "cannon fodder" enemies for the sake of saving budget and development time for elaborate boss monsters. In contrast, I was always struck by the fluidity of motion in Western games produced by groups like The Bitmap Brothers for the platforms like the Amiga, yet unimpressed by the gameplay underneath. It seemed almost as if these groups would spend so much time lavishly animating their characters, that they would forget they were making a game.

Another important consideration is that more frames can work against an action game. Every frame of a sword swing, for instance, is another 16th of a second delay between the player's button press and the intended action occurring. A 1 or 2 frame anime-style sword swish fits perfectly into this mold, allowing for responsive control and an expression of energy. Whereas many Western games I played would lavishly animate the beginning of a jump, or thrust or swing of a sword, compromising the feel of responsiveness for the sake of the artist's ego.

So if you notice the lack of frames in a modern "pixel art" game, then while the artists might have been lazy (the typical "pixelated platformer" drawn at a lower resolution than an Atari, with more colors than a SNES game), perhaps they instead were copying older Japanese artists without understanding the reasoning behind their animation choices. Or perhaps you just don't appreciate this style of animation.

IE: What Archer does with all of its 3D models of cars it sticks into the show.