Since the near abandonment of pixel-based sprites for fighting games, developers have created multiple techniques to try and best animate characters in 3D and produced very different results from one another.

Super Smash Bros. Creator Masahiro Sakurai just released his latest video on what goes into designing good video games this time around focusing on animations — that he likes to take to the extreme.

The core concept behind strong 3D animation in Sakurai's eyes is pushing a model's rig to its breaking point for action to have more impact.

Kazuya's triple spin kick from Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is the first visual example he provides to showcase what he's talking about because the Mishima completely contorts his torso backwards during its startup.

This is the same as it is in the modern Tekken games too, making the animation overall smoother and more pleasing to the naked eye — even if it ends up looking a little wonky for a handful of frames when slowed down.

Sakurai appears to feel that developers run into the problem of not pushing their animations far enough because they're worried about making it look weird or working off-model.

That shouldn't really be the case from his perspective, however, considering he believes there's "almost no such thing as 'too far'" when it comes to creating attack animations.

Sakurai looks back through older games like the first Virtua Fighter and Super Smash Bros. original prototype, Dragon King: The Fighting Game, to show how long the practice has been in place as well as some of the limitations of models with less flexibility back then.

This practice is obviously nothing new, and pretty much every fighting game now messes with perspectives and models in such a way that we don't really even notice (when done correctly).

Anyone who's interested at all in how games are developed and made to look and feel good stands to learn a lot in a short amount of time from Sakurai here, and his previous video details how he approached the first Smash title to make fighting games more accessible to all decades ago.