Times when the animation made it hard to take parts seriously, or just looked weird.

Even if you loved the game, there was probably at least one part that was clearly supposed to be serious, but looked silly, or was supposed to be taken one way, but wasn't exactly clear because of the way someone was being animated - especially in games which had limitations (and I'm sure even the more advanced games of today are limited in some way, somewhere?)

Here are some of my examples;

Rinoa about to be attacked by Igiuons - They don't seem to be attacking at all, they're just standing there looking playful. They're moving their heads around like two pets who want to play.

Locke and Edgar "swooning" over Terra's magic - They basically sink off the screen, and it looks really weird, and doesn't really make sense to me. Were they supposed to be scared of her (in which case "swooning" makes no sense) or in awe of her (in which "swooning" makes some level of sense).

Rude, and some NPCs drinking at Junon - They didn't (or couldn't) animate the drinks, so for a long time it just looked like they were banging their fists on the table for no reason (I may be wrong, but I may have just worked this out today.

The "confused head-tap" Seen in FFV and FFVI (and maybe other FFs) when a character is confused they appear to tap their head. They are probably meant to be scratching it (though at least one FFVI transcript took it to be waving). It looks silly, and I remember liking it when I was younger. In fact, back then, my dad said something to me that I didn't understand or found confusing, so (for some stupid reason, as he wouldn't recognise it at all) I mimicked the "confused head-tap") to show that I didn't understand what he meant. It backfired, because he thought I was calling him stupid. :roll2

The head slapping thing is actually pretty common in anime to show confusion. That or it happens when a character hits their head after figuring out a conclusion that seemed impossible but was actually pretty simple so they lightly hit themselves on the head as punishment for being too stupid to notice something so obvious. It depends on the context of the scene and lord knows V and VI did re-use a lot of different animations to convey a wide range of emotion so it would be easy to find some confusion.

The swoon thing is more of the character fainting over becoming overly excited usually through terror, over excitement, or for comedic purposes, over being overcome with lustful thoughts.

On topic, I would say the animation of Cloud overpowering Sephiroth in the Reactor always bothers me cause it looks ridiculous, Cloud somehow in the air can get leverage and land back on the ground but also when throwing Sephiroth, Sephiroth never lets go of the sword. It just looks so hokey and kind of kills the scene for me. I think its one of the reasons why I like Last Order's version of it better cause it all made more sense to me and actually gave off the badass vibe the original had intended.

There are also lots of stuff in IV that can be kind of confusing since the sprites are so small and simple that the few animations tened to have broad strokes based on the context of the scene .

The squats didn't make a nice transition into Crisis Core.