Oh and someone should probably mention about the problems with how animations work in this game. You have to complete one animation before you can begin another one, resulting in animation lock. In the meantime, the server has already started processing the next move of your enemy, the animation of which you don't see, resulting in latency and getting murdered by Ifrit's Eruption.

The fact that animations looked dumbdown doesn't mean they will be. Your character will move differently in 2.0 and that frankly is a good thing. It makes sense that, considering the complete overhaul animation is getting in 2.0, that the PRE-Alpha presentation would not have all the bells-and-whistles animations that we would expect out of a finished game.