The Guardian Force animations are probably too long. One of the best parts of the FFVIII remaster is the ability to set the game to 300% speed, allowing you to breeze through the GFs if you don’t want to bother boosting them and just wanna get your battle over with.
But the GF animations managed to cram a ton of character into the span of 30 seconds. My favorite has always been Brothers.
Watch the little drama that unfolds here. These two minotaurs have been doing this for years, double-teaming monsters and wrecking shit. This situation has clearly happened before— chucking a dude so hard he enters the upper atmosphere—and the only solution is to toss one of them up too. Nobody likes it, but they live with it, so they have to rock-paper-scissors over who gets launched into space.
I love the little mouth move that Sacred (the big guy) makes as soon as he sees his partner (who’s just named Minotaur). It’s like he’s saying, right, okay, here we go. He knows what must happen next, and it does.
I love that these guys tell an entire shared backstory in a few seconds. The Brothers appear earlier in the game as an optional boss battle, but honestly, I learned more about them from the summon animation than I did from their first appearance where they actually have dialogue. It’s like they’re drawing from pantomime or silent film slapstick.