SRW Z3 - Jigoku-Hen

[AmuroNT1]

Some of the animations are fantastic (Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann and Nu Gundam spring to mind), but others are kind of awkward (like the Arbalest, which is kinda clunky) and some are lazy (basically all five of the Endless Waltz Gundams, Sandrock and Altron in particular).

The problem comes from the fact that there are different animators of different skill levels working at Banpresto. Nu and GL were done by "Arios-san" (so nicknamed because he did the Arios' fantastic animations in Z2), while the FMP and Wing stuff was handed off to a relatively new animator, which is how you get this kind of discrepancy.

[Shinji103]

Not to mention several of the status screen/still poses look just plain dumb, like the Raphael Gundam's.

[Raikoh]

while the FMP and Wing stuff was handed off to a relatively new animator, which is how you get this kind of discrepancy.

Only the playable FMP units have newbies working on them, you need to keep in mind. For some reason they put the ones you see the whole game to the new staff while they made the old staff (like Arios-san) animate Amalgam units. Hence this.

The strange thing with Z3 is that even though all the sprites look great, it has some of the strangest level of animation I've ever seen in SRW. Half the units look great and the other half look awful. I think a general rule of thumb is that for most units, their animations look just "okay" but the strongest attack ends up looking great (ones that stand out off the top of my head? Delta Plus, Arbalest, most 00 units, Orguss, Alto's VF-25, Burglarydog [BEST CUTIN], Boss Borot, Wing Zero, Koenig Monster). Oh, except for Black Ox whose weakest attack is the coolest looking. Go figure.

Though I'm personally shocked nobody's been mentioning the Eva animations, which I would say look worse than the FMP ones. Nor are they mentioning how Destiny Gundam's animation probably looks better than ever (with one of my favorite cutins in the game on its beam cannon).

Guess I just am naturally attracted to the things nobody's talking about.

[AmuroNT1]

Not to mention several of the status screen/still poses look just plain dumb, like the Raphael Gundam's.

Yeah, I'm not really a fan of the sprites where the "idle pose" makes it look like the machine is in mid-jump or something, but that's just me I guess.

Only the playable FMP units have newbies working on them, you need to keep in mind. For some reason they put the ones you see the whole game to the new staff while they made the old staff (like Arios-san) animate Amalgam units. Hence this.

Though I'm personally shocked nobody's been mentioning the Eva animations, which I would say look worse than the FMP ones. Nor are they mentioning how Destiny Gundam's animation probably looks better than ever (with one of my favorite cutins in the game on its beam cannon).

Yeah, I did indeed forget about the Amalgam units being so well animated, which kind of serves to throw the stiffness of Mithril's ASes into sharper relief. Granted, maybe you could justify it with the Lambda Driver and point out that at that point in the story Souske's still not really comfortable with it. I suppose we'll see when we get the Laevatein in Tengoku-hen, but I'm pretty sure they're going to pull out all the stops on that one.

And I don't think I actually watched Destiny's animations...I skipped most of the returning stuff simply because I figured a lot of it would just be higher sprite-count reworkings of Z2 animations and it wouldn't get as much love as brand-new units.

[yazi88]

Its very likely the animations for most of the units will be better for part 2 given how Hakai Hen and Saisen Hen were with certain units.

Hopefully Zero's Shinkirou can ACTUALLY GET A DYNAMIC KILL animation in the next game.

Perhaps some new secrets like Stark Jegan in the next game too?

[Shinji103]

So I finally cleared my game backlog and started this, but what's with the "Meet in the Hangar" and "Go Hiking/Don't go Hiking" mission selections? What do these do and how are the two options different?

[Raikoh]

So I finally cleared my game backlog and started this, but what's with the "Meet in the Hangar" and "Go Hiking/Don't go Hiking" mission selections? What do these do and how are the two options different?

The Hiking one is just a route split.

As for the Hangar, they handle route spilts a bit differently in Z3. Most of the time, you keep the entire cast and the splits change how events play out (one example is the "Investigate Neo Zeon/Observe Neo Zeon" split, where the first route has Unicorn events occur followed by Aquarion, whereas it's the other way around in the second split). When there are acutal splits where the party separates, then the "Meet in the Hangar" option is just there to get the player up to speed as to what happened in the other routes, plot-wise.