Great post and I hope everyone takes a moment to read through it, as it actually touches a few issues that haven't been talked about in other threads, yet deserve as much attention as the popular ones.


Personally I think #3 and #4 are the biggest problems with our animations/effects, and most people will not notice them until better and longer spell effects are added to the game.

Food for thought:

Picture Aero IV, and imagine it has the best spell effect in the game. Winds are called forth, hurricanes appear, and to finish it off, a tornado surrounds the enemy. Would you care about how awesome the spell effect is, if it's going to get cut off before the hurricanes actually show up, because you used Spirit Dart?


Unfortunately I do not know how hard this would be to fix. I'm assuming the issue is caused by the effects being tied to the character model.

Issues #3 and #4 are probably a sign that the animations were made for the alpha battle system, where it was almost impossible to overlap skills due to the bar that would fill before every action.

I'm honestly afraid of hearing an official response about issues #3 and #4, because I'm afraid of being told that these things are too deep in to be changed at this point. This would be a shame: It could mean that animations and spell effects would always look lackluster in our eyes, no matter how great they actually looked, simply because we would not get to experience them.