Multiplayer?

[x4000]

Or in a related example, it's like having a three-second animation that is really flashy and exciting, rather than having a 0.5 second animation that actually feels better for gameplay and doesn't make you want to rip your skin off after the 10,000th time you've seen it.  The 2008 Prince of Persia game had a lot of that sort of thing, compared to the more economical and streamlined Sands of Time.

I think an even better example would be the summons in some of the Final Fantasy games, which are just brutal to sit through more than once or twice in the ones where they're not skippable.  Some of those are more like push the button, go make a sandwich, and come back when you're done with lunch to be just in time to catch the ending of it and see yourself winning the game.  The pacing of PoP was ridiculously fast and uninterrupted in comparison.  Heh.

That is a much better example, for sure.  I found that going back and playing Final Fantasy VIII is about impossible now because of that.  I even get frustrated with games like Chrono Trigger because of how long it takes to cast repeat spells like Lumen when you're on New Game+.  Bleh.

I guess my frustration with PoP was, in the context of an action game, it's frustrating when the controls feel disconnected and floaty due to excessive animating.  But the problem in RPG turn-based battles is often so much worse, for sure!

[Nalgas]

I guess my frustration with PoP was, in the context of an action game, it's frustrating when the controls feel disconnected and floaty due to excessive animating.

It definitely did have some of that going on, but at least the input timing was really loose so you had a pretty big window to push whatever button needed pushing...which I guess made it even more disconnected from the character, in a way, but it did at least compensate for other problems.  Having an input window of only a few frames (or even less in some fighting games) would've been pretty rough combined with long, fluid animations.  It was floaty, but at least it was responsively floaty (which is sort of a contradiction, but I'm not sure how else to put it...).

I guess it mostly didn't bother me because the game was so (relatively) short and easy, so I was mostly paying attention to all the pretty artwork, because my brain kind of handled the actual "playing the game" part on autopilot.  Probably would've been a whole lot more annoying for me in a more difficult game, or one that's less forgiving of failure/death (although there's another animation that could've stood to be shorter, too).