'ave some sprites

[Gors]

Thanks Vipershark; I haven't done anything drastic just yet, but I added some leg movement, tweaked the timing to give more emphasis, and twisted the main body a little while slashing/afterwards. I also got rid of the smoke because it was getting in the way of properly animating it. In-game the smoke would be generated separately anyway so it wasn't really needed here.



I think it looks a bit better.

Edit: One of the frames had a pixel off. Fixed.
Edit2: Found another one.

one thing that a lot of people (myself included, sometimes) seems to have trouble is when a character attacks. Most of the time, it ends up being 'let's rotate this sword/pole/club/whatever so it looks like it's flailing', and it doesn't look natural at all.

Take a look at Pkantom Kojjiro's sprites for example:



it's got the same idea as you, but notice how it doesn't look THAT powerful, but more like 'hey let's stick this sword forward'.

Adding some in-between frames with drawback and recoil (while messing with frame's speed) increases animation quality greatly: