The Monster Hunter series has always been phenomenal in giving its creatures a real sense of weight and lifelike fluidity

Classic Tomb Raider. The games are about 30 years old, but I am still impressed by Lara's buttery smooth movements.

Other than that I started playing Donkey Kong Bananza yesterday. The animations look great to my eyes, but I'm not an expert when it comes to graphics and stuff. Generally I like smooth animations that fit well into the game world. I don't like clipping and that sort of stuff. Now that I mention it, I think The Last of Us did a pretty good job in avoiding that and kinda fit the movements of the character to the world around them.

I know it’s been said multiple times but seeing as I’m replaying TLOU2 )in chronological mode) I figured I’d mention it but the animation on the hands is simply unmatched.

It may have been a terrible game, but Dragon's Lair on NES still had detailed animation with lots of frames.

I'm gonna bring up Hotel Dusk and Last Window: The Secret of Cape West. The use of Rotoscoping was absolutely phenomenal and gave characters a huge sense of realism in their expressions and movements while retaining the look of a drawing:

The Midnight Walk - claymation style:

For it's time at least, Another World:

Every humanoid character here was rotoscoped with 3D polygons.

Battlefield 3 adopting ANT from FIFA was a massive jump in character animation quality for first person shooters, that game was such a huge leap that everything after that has been an iterative update.



Still looks great today, 15 years after release... And even better than games like Pokemon Z/A which hasn't even released yet.

If you're interested, this is Eric Chahi's site dedicated to Another World:

https://www.anotherworld.fr/anotherworld_uk/another_world.htm

I had Amiga back in those days, and when that game showed up it really made the splash - yeah, Prince of Persia was a year of so before it, and it was first cinematic platformer (also rotoscoped), but Another World just felt very, very different.

I must admit, I was not very impressed at first by how characters looked - I really liked both Prince of Persia and Delphine Software games (especially Future Wars), and using vectors (as polygon graphics was usually referred to back then) for characters was sort of a step down compared to sprites...but, oh man, those animations and art were really something special.

FFXV had some really great character animation, with a lot of attention paid to stuff like the clothes and the way a character's weight shifts