The VG Resource

What games do you find have the best sprites and/or animation?

Suikoden 2 for Psx: Combat sprites and portraits are okay, but the overworld sprites are really great, they really conver the character's emotion.


Street Fighter 3: Third Strike: 2 words: Those Legs

Odin Sphere for Ps2 : The whole aesthetic of this game is perfect. Each characters has dozens of parts and they move so fluently. Backgrounds are deep and full of life.


Chrono Trigger for Snes Pretty much the best the snes can do.
Hmm, weird. Mediafire has messed up my gif...

Seiken Densetsu 3 on SNES. Top Tier topdown RPG graphics there, in terms of color and detail.


Seiken Densetsu Mobile remake. Excellent use of color to bring the world out.


Final Fantasy Tactics for the character graphics.
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/k5mJAF...ulTlE=h900

Final Fantasy 1 2 and 4 PSP remakes for everything except animation, since those are still the stiff 3 frame animations.


Cross Code (Indie Game). Smooth animations.

Terranigma, smooth animations, nice color usage and detail.

Braid - I enjoy the painted style and Tim's animations. The various effects of the world are also nice, they're quite subtle but they're also affected by the flow of time and involve the entire level in time manipulation (rather than only characters and items).



Dustforce - I really love this aesthetic and the character's animations. Honestly, one of the reasons I keep playing this and trying to get better is simply because of how cool it looks, especially when you pull off stuff really smoothly.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOe3GKOAP-I (so you can see the animation)

Metal Slug - One that everyone knows, basically all of the Metal Slug games look amazing. Both the sprites and the animations are just great.

Metal Slug's sprites are so good it's unfair

Kirby's Adventure for the NES is extremely enjoyable and holds up to this day even after 23 years

I've got mixed feelings about outlineless sprites myself. They can have a nice style like that Dustforce game up there, but they also have the ultimate problem of blending in with anything they cross over that's even remotely close to their colors, which sucks. Why's it gotta be like that? It's why I have a love/hate relationship with Cave Story's sprites, because it's constantly an issue.

CrossCode by Radical Fish Games:





It's on Steam and a demo at the moment, but it looks amazing and plays very well =D

I literally mentioned it up there, lol. I just didn't have any gifs XD. The ultimate proof that a game can look nice and be smoothly animated at the same time. Beauty like that is why I cannot accept laziness when it comes to animation, even on simple sprites.

Crosscode really look nice but i hope the screen doesnt always shake so much or that theres a way to disable it.
Metalslug's are amazing too, good thing we rip those sprite, cause theres so much shit in game, its hard to appreciate them all in gameplay.

Best sprites/animations? Basically anything by Paul Robertson. He's most famous for Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: The Video Game but he also worked on Mercenary Kings, Gravity Falls and Hey Ice King! Why’d You Steal Our Garbage?!

Word to the wise: A lot of his work is NSFW so keep that in mind before looking him up. :U

Someone's already posted metal slug, time for something else:

Knights Of The Round

King Of Fighters

Street Fighter Alpha

Jojo's Bizzare Adventure
....Fighter games have such good sprites it's unfair.

the pixel art in Nitrome games always has impressed me since I was first exposed to it.
There's just something about it...

The vector work and animations of Matt Roszak, aka Kupo707, aka the developer/creator/artist/animator of the Epic Battle Fantasy series are pretty good... and especially in recent years, are progressively getting better.
(Admittedly, i probably have a guy-crush on him! lol)
It's cute, it's very well detailed, the animations are smooth and realistic, and it yields itself pretty well to other artistic interpretations.

Whoever worked on Real Bout Fatal Fury did a great job with giving the character sprites so much personality (Special 1 and 2 also, but the original more so).

On mobile so I can't post sprites ATM, but another SNK franchise that deserves mention is the Samurai Shodown series. 3 had the best animation but later games had the better coloring.

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night has drop-dead gorgeous visuals, even when many of the enemy sprites are reused from Rondo of Blood. Alucard's sprites are also astonishingly well animated.

One of my favorite sprites have to be the original Rayman. It's cool how the majority of everything was made up of separate pieces.
Such a shame we only have two rips on the site, because the graphics are amazing and nobody else has tried ripping from it.


Most Amiga games by Pysgnosis had beautiful sprites. Notably Shadow of the Beast and especially Agony.

An overlooked classic starring the owl from the company's own logo. Just look at that wing animation.

(01-17-2016, 09:07 PM)daemoth Wrote: [ -> ]Street Fighter 3: Third Strike: 2 words: Those Legs

I ain't buying it. That has to be rotoscoped or CGI with some pixel filter. That's way too smooth for a typical sprite animation and the head is just creepy.


But yeah Metal Slug totally and also Sutte Hakkun is p. cute