Animation – Parry Everything

Kingdom Hearts ‘Floatiness’ and Gamefeel

Alternatively: “What The Heck is ‘Floatiness’ and Is It Ruining Kingdom Hearts? I Settle it Forever“

‘Floatiness’ is the extremely scientific term that parts of the Kingdom Hearts fan community have adopted to refer to a sort of shift in how some of the more modern and spin-off Kingdom Hearts games feel to play, as opposed to their predecessors. I’ve seen this term come in and out of vogue when it comes to in-depth and armchair analysis of Kingdom Hearts‘s combat, but it’s always fascinated me. I’m going to try to define what this somewhat nebulous term is specifically referring to, and how it’s been supposedly creeping its way into one of my favorite action RPG franchises. What causes floatiness in particular? What is the greater context of design which is causing whatever this ‘floatiness’ is to happen? Perhaps this exercise can help us explore the often imprecise art of ascertaining gamefeel in general. I certainly hope so.

Sora, spiky-haired protagonist of Kingdom Hearts III spins his key-shaped sword around quickly, then slashes with an uppercut at the air in the dimly lit streets of San Fransokyo. He then jumps and does the same motion elevated about 15 feet in the air before falling back to the ground. — Pictured: Floatiness?

First off, we’ve got to define it, this floatiness. Informally, it is reported as the sensation that the Kingdom Hearts player character lacks weight, impact, and to my interpretation, immediacy, or some combination thereof. For those unaware, Kingdom Hearts is a series of action games with a particular emphasis on exaggerated, superhuman feats of acrobatic melee combat, favoring style, spectacle, and emotive action, akin to combat-heavy anime and manga. All that while immersed in a fantasy world full of Disney characters, Final Fantasy characters, and a unique dream-like fictional mythology of its own. Trying to define this term will be much of what this article is seeking to accomplish.

With combatants consisting primarily of magical swordsman and dark wizards, while borrowing aesthetically from classic Disney animation, Kingdom Hearts offered its players a combat system increasingly free of the bounds of gravity, allowing its player characters to bound meters into the air at a time, maintaining that airtime through continued swinging of their sword, with a cartoonish sort of physical logic.

So, all this in mind, I set out to compare the gamefeel of several Kingdom Hearts games in my own experience to try and get a better idea. To make this process somewhat more precise, I investigated what is by my estimation one of the key metrics in determining the gamefeel of an action combat system – the timing of the primary attacks. Every action in a game as visually rich as Kingdom Hearts and its sequels has a startup time and ending lag. The former is the real-time between the player’s button input and the resolution of the action they’ve input, the latter is the real-time between the resolution of the action, and when the player’s next input can be resolved. For example, if a player character is to swing a big hammer, they’ll push the swing hammer button. As their avatar lifts the hammer with a grunt and struggle to convey its weight, we have our startup time, and as he pulls the hammer back to his side after the big swing, we have our ending lag, with the avatar unable to run or jump while resetting the hammer, in this example.

Sora from Kingdom Hearts II swings his keyblade at a volleyball in elaborate spinning arcs, launching the ball further into the air with each strike, and Sora continues after it, ascending higher and higher before falling back down. — Trust me it… it does feel very responsive.

Now imagine the hammer is a comically oversized key and you have a pretty good idea of what we’ll be measuring. Floatiness became an almost absurdly hot-button topic among Kingdom Hearts diehards due to its relationship with the much anticipated Kingdom Hearts 3. As the successor to the beloved Kingdom Hearts 2, and first numbered entry in the series for a period of thirteen years (though by no means the only Kingdom Hearts game to release in that period), a lot of anticipation was placed upon what the game would feel like to play. Its gamefeel, so to speak. Kingdom Hearts 2 has stayed in many people’s hearts as an all-time favorite action game due to the smoothness of its combat system, as any fan would tell you. So comparisons were inevitable. The stakes were high.

Kingdom Hearts 3, despite being the best selling entry in the series, gained a healthy amount of criticism from long-time fans in regards to its gamefeel. Floatiness was oft invoked. The developers seemed to take feedback from hardcore fans seriously, as the game would be later patched in key ways to increase speed and fluidity of the gameplay. More on that later. So what’s the truth? Has floatiness ruined Kingdom Hearts forever? Are we doomed to forever circle the drain of game design discourse without knowing what on earth we’re actually talking about? I’ve spoken to friends who know how to use a computer and they allege that numbers are involved here, believe it or not. So I’m afraid I have no choice but to deploy the diagram.

Data World

First let’s define some terms. All footage I used for this analysis is from the Final Mix, 60fps versions of the games, captured on a Playstation 5. All values are measured in animation frames. For the sake of consistency, in each game I tested the animations of main player character Sora or his closest equivalent (In Birth By Sleep the resident Sora-like character is named Ventus, but he’s close enough and for our purposes we’ll consider him a “Sora”). The games I will be looking at are as follows:

Kingdom Hearts

Kingdom Hearts 2

Kingdom Hearts 3 pre-“Remind” patch

Kingdom Hearts 3 post-“Remind” patch

Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep

Kingdom Hearts: Dream Drop Distance

“Startup” here is defined as the time between Sora beginning an attack and that attack “resolving”, here defined as the moment his weapon crosses in front of his body. “Ending lag” is the time between an attack resolving and when Sora can move again, no longer committed to the attack. “Cancel Time” is the time it takes before Sora’s first attack can be interrupted to perform his second combo attack. “Gravity Hang Time” is the amount of time between an aerial attack beginning and when Sora reaches his maximum falling speed. More on that later. “Engage” here means the time between inputting an attack and when sora can strike a distant enemy from a neutral position.

So these results are pretty much in line with what I expected going into this project. KH2 is the fastest game, KH1 is second fastest. BBS and DDD are dead-last, KH3 is about in the middle, while KH3 with its post-launch patch just a little bit faster than that.

Some surprises:

Every KH game seems to have the exact same startup time for the first most basic attack of a combo. Seems like they’ve been pretty happy with this one from the word ‘go’ and consistently on from there.

KH1’s movement lag from a grounded attack is insanely long, as long as DDD’s. KH2’s is way faster, and nearly the same as KH3’s.

KH1, KH2, and KH3 all cancel their first attack into an attack combo incredibly fast at just four frames, another astonishing level of consistency, although BBS and DDD combos take twice as long or more to come out.

KH2’s biggest advantages in speed are its gravity hang time, and time to engage enemies. KH3’s gravity hang time actually got worse with its post-launch patch, though not noticeably, and this has to do with a new attack added in the patch that has a longer animation in general.

BBS and DDD don’t do too badly in the enemy engagement department, better than KH1 and KH3 pre-patch, even. KH2 is still the champ here, but this fast engage time might be a saving grace for BBS and DDD.

There is a lot to talk about, so I’ll drop the chart here again real quick, just because I know you all wanted to look at it again.

Okay, So What Is It?

What’s what? Oh! Floatiness. What is ‘floatiness’? My hypothesis going into this was that it’s tied up with the aforementioned startup and ending lag statistics, which would have a huge impact on the speed of the game. Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep, Kingdom Hearts: Dream Drop Distance, and to a lesser extent Kingdom Hearts 3 are somewhat known among hardcore fans as the ‘floatier’ games, the former two by far the most guilty. I had presumed that in gathering my data, it would bear out that those two games would have the higher numbers when recording the delays, lag, and hang time. Kingdom Hearts 2 would be the fastest game, only slightly faster than Kingdom Hearts, and Kingdom Hearts 3 would fall somewhere in the middle. Indeed this was the result. So. Case closed? Shorter periods of loss of character control equals better combat? Probably a little more nuanced than that.

Golden calf Kingdom Hearts 2 absolutely has the advantage over its successors and predecessor when it comes to attack commitment. Its startup times, ending lag, and combo speed are universally faster across the board. But… they’re not that different from KH1 and KH3, even pre-patch. Almost immediately when I started this experiment, replaying each of the games side-by-side I came to realize the nuances of how gravity works in each game.

The Gravity Situation

As the Kingdom Hearts series progressed, aerial combat became more prominent. I always imagined in my head that the first Kingdom Hearts game was “the more grounded one”. And it kind of is. In the first game, attacking launches Sora high in the air toward aerial targets, and repeated attacks can keep him airborn somewhat. Kingdom Hearts 2 pushed this much further, with far more automated and accurate tracking on enemies, pushing Sora high into the air with each attack. I was kind of shocked to find that in Kingdom Hearts 2, the game I associate most with air combat, gravity is much more powerful than it is in any other game. With a delay of only 16 frames in KH2, compared to KH1’s 20, and double that at 32 frames in BBS, KH2 by far is the most beholden to gravity when the player is not attacking. This makes gravity a function of the player’s inaction. Never are they airborne without making it a conscious decision. In BBS and DDD, being strung up in the air against your will is almost the norm. There is a huge delay between aerial attacking and being affected by gravity.

Sora from Kingdom Hearts 1 jumps into the air and slashes at the three headed Cerberus from Disney's Hercules, before quickly falling back to the ground and dodging out of the way of a shadowy breath attack. — Gravity

Ventus from Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep (who resembles Sora) swings at an airborn enemy shaped like a pot. Several attacks miss, and Ventus is left hanging in the air for a moment before falling, after each attack. — Gravity

I think this is a major piece of the floatiness puzzle too. Being on the ground in these games naturally gives you a lot more options. You have access to your dodge roll. You are able to more precisely place yourself for things like blocking, or jumping out of the way, or lining up the right attack. Simply, being in the air is advantageous in some ways, but also a lot more risky. In the less ‘floaty’ games it feels as though being airborne is always a conscious choice, whereas the others place you there in spite of the player, and leave Sora hanging in a risky position for far longer than a player might intend. The ability to get back to the ground quickly gives finer control over the player’s risk vs. reward, and the game forms a more solid and consistent relationship with that risk vs. reward.

Gamefeel Good

The title of this article mentions gamefeel, so I’m going to take a moment to discuss that. Like ‘floatiness’ this term is a little hard to pin down, so, uh, how about wikipedia. They seem to know everything.

“Game feel (sometimes referred to as “game juice“) is the intangible, tactile sensation experienced when interacting with video games. The term was popularized by the book Game Feel: A Game Designer’s Guide to Virtual Sensation^[1] written by Steve Swink. The term has no formal definition”
Wikipedia Article on Game Feel

Well that was absolutely no help whatsoever. Wikipedia cites input, response, context, aesthetic, metaphor, and rules as the features a game can change to influence gamefeel, and this seemingly comes from Mr. Swink as well. It’s as good a place as any to start, so let’s see how this applies to our floatiness dilemma.

I don’t want to get too into the weeds with these, so I’ll limit my observations to response, metaphor, and rules. Suffice to say I think KH does pretty universally well in the input and aesthetics department. Context is a bit more nuanced, but again, trying to limit our scope here.

Let’s be a little contrarian and try to make at least a very small part of this gamefeel equation tangible. We’ve already broken down that there seems to be a correlation between the delay between action and reaction in Kingdom Hearts, and the popular perception of how well the games feel to play. KH1 and KH2 are beloved with their snappy reaction times, KH3 is well liked but garnered a lot of fan feedback. BBS and DDD are liked but not necessarily for the fluidity of their combat, and I rarely see gamefeel cited among their strengths. The data easily illustrates the importance of response time as a variable.

The metaphor at play here is how the timing of attacks translates to what the game is trying to convey. The main thing the mechanics of KH is trying to convey is melee combat. All these varying measures of time and attack resolution and ending lag etc. is all metaphor for the physicality of swinging a sword at a guy. A real person cannot instantaneously move their arms, the sword has startup time and ending lag in real life. That’s why these time gaps are there in the first place. It wouldn’t be a very fun game if you pressed the attack button and just instantly won. So as in a real, actual battle, you have to consider how your various actions leave you open to counterattack. On the other hand, one can go overboard with this, as in real life you’re also trying to minimize your vulnerabilities, and a swordsman is not going to be flashy at the cost of leaving himself open to a hail of enemy attacks. These are things people intuitively understand, and so players bring with them preconceived notions of how entities should behave in these situations.

Sora from Kingdom Hearts 1 blocks an attack from a dark ball with a mouth. Immediately, he counters with a series of fast strikes in the air. He loses altitude with each strikes, and ends his combo standing on the ground. — Pictured: Gamefeel??

Drill even further down and you get to the rules of the game itself. Enemies are attacking you, while you’re trying to attack them. If you are locked into an animation you are unable to deploy any defense to stop them, and so we have a game. Risk, and reward. However, if the player’s control feels disconnected from how these rules operate gamefeel is thrown off. In Birth By Sleep and Dream Drop Distance, attacking creates great gaps of no-player time, where inputs on your controller mean nothing. You are vulnerable to attack, and a passive observer in the world. This disconnect throws off both the player’s relationship to response and to the rules of the game, as overly long and committed attacks can become more of a liability than an asset. In KH1 and KH2 throwing out attacks is almost always fun and satisfying, and usually rewarding. It’s often a lot more burdensome to do so BBS and DDD. BBS and DDD have other methods of dealing damage besides the basic attack, but since the basic attack is so pivotal in the main series, a lot of players are thrown off by how minimized it is in these spin off titles, which primarily utilize the command deck instead.

The Command Deck

So why is Birth by Sleep and Dream Drop Distance so damn slow compared to their peers? Well these two games share two very important elements in common. First, they were each developed for a handheld family of systems. Second, they share the game design system known as the command deck. These two points of similarity are very much entwined.

Kingdom Hearts and its two numbered sequels utilized the ‘command menu’, a little persistent menu in the corner of the screen that can be navigated in real time to select whether you want Sora to attack, use an item, or cast a magic spell, essentially. 90% of the time you will be spamming the attack button. The command menu was meant to evoke the strategic decision making of a turn-based Final Fantasy game, but re-tuned for an action combat context. Ultimately contextual combo modifiers became a much greater source of player expression in gameplay, and the strategic applications of the command menu are limited. However, it remains an elegant way to give the player a lot of options without bogging the game down with too many buttons.

When Kingdom Hearts went handheld it rethought its combat. Suddenly, we’re dealing with a much smaller screen, and the camera had to be pulled in on the player character to compensate. As a result, enemies can much more easily hit you from off-screen or sneak up behind you. Consideration was clearly given to a system that better fit playing on the go, where deep concentration on twitch-reaction may not be as viable or palatable. The command deck was the answer, a cooldown-based system where actions are selected from a rotating list and can be used at any time. Now the flow of combat is dictated by these ability cooldowns, and the regular attack combo was made to be more slow-paced, flashy, less freeform, and yes, more floaty so as act more like a stopgap to using the command deck, rather than the main form of attack itself. The command deck has a lot of advantages such as the ability to customize your attack loadout in a much more granular way, but it also has its own host of problems, which I won’t get into here.

Ventus from KH BBS slashes at green impish enemies on the ground. In the bottom left corner, the command deck can be seen. — In each game the command deck is present in the bottom-left

Sora from Kingdom Hearts Dream Drop Distance slashes at the air while standing on the ground in a mailroom, then does in the same after jumping. The command deck can be seen in the bottom-left. — In each game the command deck is present in the bottom-left

The point is, Birth by Sleep and Dream Drop Distance are deliberately slower games made so because they were designed to be played on the go, and utilize entirely new systems that weren’t designed with KH1 or KH2’s speed and flow in mind. Because KH3, BBS, and DDD share a lot of development talent though, it seems like a lot of the design philosophy of these handheld games bled over into KH3’s headliner console game, which was jarring for a lot of people.

Okay So… Is This Bad?

In my opinion, one of Kingdom Hearts‘ greatest strengths is the immediacy and responsiveness of its gameplay. A fine degree of control gives the player a much wider spectrum of possibilities in any given scenario, and this is what leads to a creative space within gameplay for players to express themselves through the gameplay. This fluidity also allows disparate gameplay mechanics such as movement and sword attacks to blend. Kingdom Hearts 2 always feels as though its many, many mechanics are in a harmonious conversation with one another. Engaging a ground enemy can be converted into an aerial assault, which can flow into a strategic repositioning, etc.

So yes, I think it weakens Kingdom Hearts‘ identity somewhat when some of the more experimental entries in the series have dabbled with slowing down the combat and making its pieces more discrete. The particulars are a bit beyond this already enormous article, but I did want you to understand my motivations for trying to understand how and why Kingdom Hearts 2 feels so different to play than a game like Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep.

Sora from Kingdom Hearts 2 slashes at a volleyball, sending it bouncing into the air. — Up… and Down

Kingdom Hearts is a series about ridiculous anime battles between magical wizards wielding baseball bat-sized keys as weapons. People fling themselves through the air to attack one another. It’s not realistic, but it exists within the heightened reality realm of animation. Its primary inspirations are, after all, some of the animation greats, including Disney of all things. Animation works to heighten reality because it has an understanding of its underpinnings. Even if people can jump twenty feet in the air, there still has to be a since of presence and weight. It has to give the impression that some sort of underlying laws of physics are at play even if they aren’t one-to-one to our own laws of physics.

Despite appearances, it wasn’t a magic genie spell that made KH2 so satisfying to play. It was hard work, clever planning, likely some very precise number tuning, and likely a whole lot of playtesting. I want to know the nitty gritty of what made Kingdom Hearts one of the smoothest action games in existence, what distanced it from that, and what brought it closer to that esteem once again. Because you see, there are still those Kingdom Hearts 3: Remind post-launch changes to talk about.

Kingdom Hearts III And The Combo Modifier

In Kingdom Hearts, Sora has a very basic attack combo, with little by way of alternate options for the player, at first blush. You press the attack button, and sorry does the next hit of the combo. Rinse, repeat. The wrinkle though, is that Sora can gain abilities which cause his attack combo to behave differently depending on where Sora is standing relative to his target.

Kingdom Hearts 2 pushed this contextual combo modifier idea much further, with hosts of new options that allowed the player to flex mastery over the system through mastery of manipulating these contextual attacks. They did things like make engaging enemies faster, extending the combo, increasing the power and range of combo finishers, among other things.

Kingdom Hearts 3 launched with its share of combo modifiers, but they lacked the breadth and applicability of KH2’s abilities, and they did little to speed up combat overall. That is, until it was patched in anticipation of the Kingdom Hearts 3: Remind DLC. Numerous combo modifiers were added which increased the overall speed of Sora’s basic combo attack and made the game feel overall more responsive. I don’t think the Remind DLC gets enough credit for just how much it improved, and it’s kind of refreshing how in tune it is with popular feedback. Real people playing your game can tell you a lot about that mystifying, all-important yet elusive gamefeel.

Sora from Kingdom Hearts 3 showcases an attack combo with a flashy series of slashes accentuated with powerful light energy, these attacks come out rather rapidly. — Combo Modifiers

Sora from Kingdom Hearts 3 showcases an attack combo with a series of slashes. These attacks come out noticeably slower than the other image in this gallery. — Combo Modifiers

Airstep is Literally a Game-Changer

Kingdom Hearts as a series has done a decent job with teaching players about its systems and how they work. Some of the more advanced mechanics that deepen higher-level play are a bit more obscure, but usually reaching a baseline level of competency at core systems is pretty straightforward. Kingdom Hearts 3, however, I found stumbled at instilling the importance of oce of its most important new mechanics, the airstep. The airstep allows the player to manually aim the camera toward a distant foe, and fling Sora at them at high speed for a relatively quick engage across a huge battlefield. This was obviously done to compensate for the much larger environments featured in KH3 as compared to older games, but utilizing this move frequently and often, even in close quarters, really does change the way the game is played.

Airstep can cancel out of nearly any other action, you see. In terms of making the game more fluid, or moreover in terms of giving the player fine control over their actions, the airstep affords an enormous amount of power and precision to determine the pace of fights in Kingdom Hearts 3. This along with the ability to cancel combo finisher attacks, which was added in the Remind DLC update, makes the whole combat a lot more cohesive and much more fluid than you might initially expect based on the raw frame data. Speaking of which, the frame data was improved in that update as well! The fact is that this latest iteration evolved the combat in a lot of interesting ways that I don’t want to see abandoned in favor of just making the series going forward exactly like everything that came before.

Sora from Kingdom Hearts 3 blocks an attack, before the camera zooms in on his enemy, Sora then zooms to their location in a flash of light. — Here Sora is sent at the boss straight out of a guard, exploiting an opening in an exciting way

Kingdom Hearts Is Doing Fine, Actually (But It Can Do Better)

So yeah, when people say Kingdom Hearts 3 feels ‘floaty’ as compared to Kingdom Hearts and Kingdom Hearts 2 the evidence is there. Attacks are less responsive and more of a commitment, generally, and gravity is turned off more liberally. You will literally find Sora floating more without direct player intervention. However, the frame data differences, discounting the gravity aspect, are minor at best. It’s really that gravity delay that accentuates the small differences to give a pretty stark impression. Birth by Sleep and Dream Drop Distance are so far afield of the gamefeel of the main series games that it’s clear there was no intention of recreating those mobile games for KH3’s release. The developers have further made it clear their intention to deliver an experience their longtime fans can enjoy with the changes made to the Remind DLC.

In fairness, it had been 13 years since a main Kingdom Hearts game had been made when KH3 was released in 2019. With just a few tweaks I feel they were able to bring it up to parity with KH and KH2 in terms of fluidity. It’s not the tightly wound, exceptionally blisteringly fast experience of KH2 precisely, but do remember that KH2 was developed only three years after the original, so the developers were coming right off the back of designing an already exceptional combat system. The experience was fresh. From where I stand I don’t think the future of KH is in any danger. Three years on from KH3 as of the time of writing this in 2022, and KH4 seems to be around the corner, poised to improve in ways reminiscent of how KH2 improved.

The Kingdom Hearts 4 reveal trailer doesn’t actually show any basic attacking in favor of mostly displaying the new movement options, and any gameplay it does showcase is subject to a lot of change to begin with, but what it does show looks pretty snappy and responsive to me. I’ll let you be the judge. The KH team learns quickly, and their intentions for this series’ gameplay have been made clear vis a vis the Remind DLC update. They understand the data I’ve so painstakingly gone to lengths to describe and how it affects gameplay, clearly. The KH3 update was so precision built for improvement it’s kind of astonishing. And, with KH4’s refocus on ‘reality’ as an aesthetic, I would not be surprised if a little more gravity came back to the party to polish the combat system even further into something really special.

Sora from Kingdom Hearts stands on a floating platform with a shield-wielding enemy, and rapidly dashes at and through them, holding out his keyblade.

Whatever you’re talking about, I don’t care…

If Your Game Needs a ‘Skip Animations’ Button It’s Too Slow

I notice a lot of people turn off battle animations in Pokémon games. It’s kind of wild this is even something they considered right? I mean it makes sense on the surface, RPGs like Pokémon can be time consuming and people often play it on the go, or lead busy lives. But let’s take a step back here. We’re streamlining by cutting out the battles? Isn’t that, like, most of the actual game of Pokémon? To be clear I don’t think people are wrong to utilize this feature, I use it too. But why has it come to this? Why does the central gameplay mode of Pokémon have to be so time consuming it becomes tedious to the point of cutting its art assets out of the equation? I think this is really something happening within the game itself – if your game needs a ‘skip animations’ option to be playable by enough people to warrant the existence of a ‘skip animations’ option, well, the title’s right there. Options aren’t bad. It’s not that the option is there that bothers me, it’s that so many people, myself included, feel compelled to use it. Perhaps there’s a greater issue here. Pokémon games’ combat is turn-based. The player can take all the time they need to formulate a strategy each turn, but once their choice is locked in, the battle plays out before them. They aren’t directly participating so there’s no stress or pressure on the player tied in with the speed of the game… unless waiting long periods of time stresses you out.

I want to head this all off with some proposed solutions to the problem I’m about to describe in greater detail. I don’t want to come off as overly negative, but rather constructive. I love Pokémon dearly, but I feel as though it has at times struggled to meet the expectations of its own success. Personally I feel as though it is showing its age now more than ever in a number of departments. There are techniques that have been employed by Pokémon‘s contemporaries that allow combat, even turn-based combat, to be very breezy and flow seamlessly. One of my favorites is one employed by the popular Persona series of RPGs, a franchise that, lord knows, started out as a slooooow and ponderous combat experience in 1996. Lessons were learned from this, though, and by 2008, Persona 4 was establishing one of the smoothest and most appealing turn-based combat systems in the business, an advantage that would serve the explosively popular Persona 5 well eight years later.

A gray-haired Japanese high school student stands in a dreamlike space resembling both a castle and TV set, with a distorted background.

Several monsters resembling giant mouths stand before him. He crushes a crush in his hand and an ethereal samurai warrior appears before him. The warrior shoots a bolt of lightning at one of the monsters.

This scene plays out a second time, except the samurai appears much more quickly and the lightning attack resolves faster. — The saved time doesn’t seem like much, but it adds up over a full length game!

In Persona 4, whenever the player uses the same move on multiple turns in succession, the animation for that move is sped up, and the action is truncated. The player just saw this animation in its entirety seconds earlier, after all, there’s no need to run it into the ground. This simple consideration drastically eases the repetitiveness of spamming the same move in turn-based combat, something you might find yourself doing often in Pokémon. In Yakuza: Like a Dragon, when an attack fails to connect with a character, the information is conveyed visually and the action transitions very rapidly to the next step of the turn. The word ‘MISS’ is barely on screen for a second, as the game does not dwell on and minor things. I’m sure I can think of more, but techniques for keeping turn-based combat flow smoothly aside, Pokémon just really has a problem with the structure of its attack animations in general. To be clear, I mean the special effects like lightning that occurs when a move is used, not the motion of the pocket monsters themselves, though that’s its own can of worms. They just tend to be far too long, and often could communicate the same level of awe, excitement, dread, or wonder in half the time or less.

Several men and women are brawling an ubran Japanese market street. A thug takes a swing with a knife at a man in a red suit, but he stage-falls onto his back, dodging the attack. A second thug takes a swing with a baseball bat at a woman, but she backpedals and the attack misses. — What the attack missed? Okaythatscool moving on.

It occurred to me while watching The Pokémon Company’s recent animated short Bidoof’s Big Stand with a friend. How striking and appealing the (admittedly truncated) battle scenes were in this 3D animation! So much character and charm. Compare this animation for the move ‘earthquake’ in 2016’s Pokémon Sun and Moon to the same move in Bidoof’s Big Stand.

The pokémon Rhydon, a bipedal rhino made of stone roars, and the ground turns to brown cracked stone which rumbles and moves up and down. Several seconds later the rhydon's opponent, the pokémon magmortar which resembles a large, round bipedal dinosaur made of flames, flinches from the attack. — Roughly *five* seconds start to finish

The pokémon golem, resembling a bipedal lizard with a round boulder for a torso, stomps the ground with one foot, and jagged rocks jut from the ground as fiery cracks appear in the earth. The pokémon bidoof, a small beaver, then runs across the cracked earth and spins around the golem. — Roughly *five* seconds start to finish

It’s not perfect. The earthquake move in Bidoof’s Big Stand for one could probably communicate a bit more force and impact before I’d ship it in a game, but that could be accomplished without inflating its screen time, easily. The fighting in the animated short exaggerates its action in ways Pokémon games probably never could given that their battle animations must be generic and prefabricated to be used by hundreds of interchangeable creatures, but I must insist that Pokémon as a game franchise can get closer to this level of dynamism and flow. It could be as simple as a baseline speed pass for each battle animation. Maybe earthquake doesn’t need to be on screen for a full five seconds. Maybe thunder doesn’t need as much anticipation as it’s getting. Maybe the transitions between turns could be faster. Game animation has a lot of conventions of minimizing anticipation and downtime, making visuals as reactive and instant as possible, and this is for good reason. The benefits extend to all sorts of interactive systems, not just action-y or real-time ones.

In a desert environment, Mario throws his cap at a goomba, a brown mushroom monster. As his hat lands on the goomba's head, mario becomes ethereal and zooms into the goomba's form, 'capturing' it. This takes place over the course of 1.5 seconds.

A similar scene plays out as mario 'captures' a bipedal turtle and an anthropomorphic bullet. — Games have been condensing exciting visual effects into smooth, seamless transitions for decades. Mario’s ‘capture’ visuals looks just as impressive as any five-second-long pokémon move, easily.

The difference in timing between the in-game earthquake and Bidoof’s Big Stand is staggering to me. I feel as though the Bidoof’s Big Stand earthquake communicates the idea of an ‘earthquake’ just as well, if not better, than its in-game counterpart, in less than half the time! A difference of three seconds might not sound much on paper, but bear in mind that in a pokémon game, you’ll be seeing moves like this, on average, about six times per battle, at minimum. Small increments in moment-to-moment gameplay like this matter. More likely you’ll see moves like this play out repetitively dozens of times per battle, over the course of hundreds of battles that take place in your standard Pokémon game. Arceus help you if we count all the redundant narration about status and field effects that pauses the battle to re-explain itself every turn. This is so much dead air to add to a game, it’s no wonder Pokémon‘s ‘skip battle animations’ feature has become so popular. And why shouldn’t it? I know I use it. I mean, I want to enjoy Pokémon‘s battle animations, many of them are genuinely a joy to watch, but I can usually really only muscle through a chunk of the game before turning them off for long periods of time. They just hamper the flow of the game too much for me.

I believe that games are greater than the sum of their parts. Games can have great music, great writing, great animations, or even great gameplay, but it is only in the confluence of these things, in varying balances, that the true strength of games as a medium comes out. I hate having to skip Pokémon‘s battle animations to avoid feeling burnout. I want the game’s various bits of art to come together beautifully. So, it begs the question, is there something perhaps less essential than the visuals themselves that can be cut out to improve the flow of Pokémon‘s battles?

And that brings us… To the Battle Dialogue.

Pokémon‘s Battle Dialogue is one of many idiosyncrasies Pokémon has brought forward through its many generations. It’s a small window at the bottom of the screen that essentially narrates what’s going on in battle.

A pokémon will take part of an action, this action will resolve completely, and then the Battle Dialogue will narrate it, before any reaction to this move takes place. The result is an incredibly stilted and lifeless visual accompaniment to Pokémon‘s otherwise excellent battle system that so often holds it back. Take the pokémon move ‘self-destruct’ for example. It’s an old classic from the original gameboy Pokémon games. In the following scene, you will witness the literal events of a clay doll monster violently bursting into a fiery explosion, causing its opponent to become so injured it can no longer stand. See how these events are visually translated, in a way that only Pokémon can.

The pokémon claydol, a many-eyed idol-like monster is tackled by its opponent manetric, a yellow and blue canine. The claydol then uses self-destruct, causing an explosion to emanate from its body. Several seconds later, the claydol faints. Several seconds after that, the manetric faints. — What on earth did I just witness.

I hope my point is becoming clearer here. Thanks to the strange reverence held for the Battle Dialogue, which is always given visual priority, there is no sense of real presence to these creatures, no impression of cause and effect. It’s more like the pokémon are pantomiming their moves. Pokémon has, over the years, become more and more attached to the idea of making their collectible monsters and their world feel real and inviting, like a place you could actually visit. Newer Pokémon games have featured Pokémon pet simulator mini-games, wider areas of exploration, and a more complete impression of the world the games take place in. The problems with Pokémon‘s visual presentation, especially in its battles, feels utterly antithetical to this design goal to me. I know there are certainly technical and production limitations that are causing issues like this, but I felt compelled to bring it up anyway as these issues can never be fixed going forward if they aren’t given voice, and moreover perhaps us other developers can learn something from it. It’s a topic I don’t see discussed much among the *ahem* many other popular topics in Pokémon *ahem ahem* discourse.

What if, perhaps, we entertained the idea of eliminating the Battle Dialogue altogether? Now, it isn’t as though it serves no purpose. Pokémon derives much of its success from being friendly to the young and casual as well as appealing to the hardcore and diehard. The Battle Dialogue inarguably conveys information in a clear and unambiguous way, all the while reinforcing the rules of the game through its constant narration, but is it really the best and only solution for accomplishing those things? Surely, at the very least, longtime fans would woefully miss iconic phrases like “It’s super effective!”. Perhaps, but streamlining Pokémon‘s visual information could mean repackaging iconic visuals in new and exciting ways. Perhaps “It’s Super Effective!” could live on as a visual or particle effect itself, not just plain text. Yes, big changes like this may be a hard sell at first, but if Nintendo’s other recent output the likes of Breath of The Wild or Bowser’s Fury has taught me anything, is that nothing need be unassailably sacred, and sometimes fans are just waiting to fall in love with something new, even if they don’t know it yet.

When all’s said and done I don’t think my vision for a faster, breezier version of Pokémon battling is the only ‘right’ choice. But I do think Pokémon could stand to peek at its peers’ homework from time to time and modernize the way it presents itself a bit. Some of the things that greatly harm the pace of Pokémon are entirely inventions of a game designed for an 8-bit calculator of a console. Some of these things I feel the franchise has outgrown entirely, and some could be re-contextualized in a more modern way. There’s some considerations in art direction to be made too that could smooth out some of these rough edges. In this article I proposed removing or rearranging a lot of things, but honestly much of this could still remain optional. I just think it’s emblematic of an issue that could be assuaged through design rather than blunt force, if a lot of people are choosing to turn off the thousands of man-hours that went into making your game look appealing.

The pokémon pikachu, a yellow mouse, shoots lightning into the sky, which roils in the clouds before falling onto pikachu's opponent, a small brown fox-like pokémon called eevee, in a column of lightning.

The same scene plays out again, but this time edited down with bits and pieces of the animation sped up.

It runs agilely as if on wings…