The Best Game Animation of 2023

Yes, I know it's 2024 already and we're all excited about the many upcoming game releases this year has to offer. However! Anticipation is no substitute for follow-through, my friend. And I can't just let you stumble into another release year without sufficient awareness of all of the great game animation still to be found back there in 2023. Who knows how many beautifully-animated games lie uncharted in your wake? Don't worry, I got you. I have been digging, and I am here to share the fruits of

my reconnaissance. A list of games with the best animation 2023 had to offer. Now, am I saying that this list is perfect? That no games were overlooked, and that my judgment of their quality is objectively correct? Yes. Now quit stalling and hop in, let's GO I love seeing the craft of traditional animation flourish anywhere, and 2023 was an unusually good year for 2D animation in games. Never in the five years I've been making these roundup videos have I had such an abundance of high quality ca

ndidates to choose from. It warms the heart. Speaking of body parts, though... (I'm still warming up. The segues will get better) allow me to roll out our first subject: The Many Pieces of Mr. Coo. ♪ [upbeat music] ♪ You don't see this kind of whimsical point-and-click adventure game very often these days, and you almost never see them with animation like this. Mr. Coo is a character created by Spanish animator Nacho Rodriguez, who's been working on assets for this game since like 2012. And it s

hows! This game may not be long, but it is a feast for the eyes, with some of the most outlandish and entertaining hand-drawn animation you will find in a video game. Gazing upon this imagery, you might find yourself asking, "what on earth is happening in this game?" And I invite you to play it yourself and find out because I don't wanna spoil it. And also because I don't really know the answer myself. But if you are nostalgic for those surreal, inscrutable adventure games that would have you cl

icking all over a screen full of items just to see what would happen, or if you just have a soft spot for classic cartoons drawn in a style that really doesn't happen much anymore, The Many Pieces of Mr. Coo is a rare event that deserves celebration. But speaking of classic cartoons and only slightly better segues, let's talk about Disney's Illusion Island. (bright music) If you were not already aware, Mickey Mouse cartoons have suddenly become good again, and by "suddenly", I mean a decade ago.

Yes, these shorts began airing in 2013 and, if you haven't seen them, they are all available on YouTube for free and you should really check them out. It is the look of these cartoons which Dlala Studios appears to be channeling. And while I don't think Illusion Island's animation quite matches the level of polish or slapstick appeal in its source material, I do still love the way this game looks. The snappy timing, the exaggerated overlap and posing, the distinct personality baked into each pl

ayable character's version of every move. At the end of the day, any game starring some of the most well-known and influential comedy cartoon characters in Western animation history should be fun to look at. And the characters in this game sure are fun to watch. But now I must advise you maybe sit down or hold onto something because the tone of the imagery on screen is about to take an extremely abrupt turn. Say hello to Cookie Cutter. ♪ (heavy metal music) ♪ As I record this, I am very excited

to see how I end up editing this footage in a way which shows the game off while also keeping the video even remotely monetizable. The punk rock energy in this metroidvania is off the charts. And the over-the-top violence and vulgarity contained within are probably not going to appeal to everybody watching this, but Cookie Cutter's animation is brimming with that irreverent enthusiasm. And the amount of style and detail on display here is spectacular. It's not often a game has me thinking, "Boy,

I can't wait to frame through that animation later" this frequently during play. My compliments to the animators at Subcult Joint who appear to be having entirely too much fun. Of course, great animation is not always about having high levels of detail, which brings me to my next subject. Now we have all seen games which make clever use of limited animation to give a bit more life and animated personality to highly detailed, but otherwise static characters. We had some great examples of games l

ike that this year in fact. But what I love about this next one is the way it kind of does the opposite thing. For your consideration: Worldless. ♪ (mysterious music) ♪ The characters in this beautifully-abstract game are very simple, built of just a few disconnected lights and shapes floating in space. But the animation on these nebulous forms, especially in combat, is not only gorgeous but astonishingly easy to read. Just look at these attack combos... Notice how your character's body will sta

rt to take a more solid physical form for maybe a few frames at a time, which helps to emphasize the poses and the actions being implied. But even without that visible form, the carefully-sculpted arcs, spacing and smears on each part of the body are still demonstrating the character's physicality with such clarity that your brain has no trouble filling in the gaps. This player character has less defined form than a stick figure, and yet the body mechanics and, more importantly, the emotion of t

heir animation reads with perfect clarity. It is so impressive. Hey, I told you there was a lot of good 2D game animation this year! And we are not moving on to the next category until you have been made sufficiently aware of Have a Nice Death. ♪ [cutely-spooky music] ♪ I just love the way everything in this roguelike moves. The animation is snappy and funny and full of personality, but also just relentlessly stylish, a perfect midpoint between Nicktoon and Rayman. It can be difficult to actuall

y soak that in when you're in the thick of combat just trying to survive, but take a second to appreciate how cool these attack animations look, those colorful smears on every swipe of the scythe. And that's just one weapon! There are so many weapons in this game and they all look equally cool. It's not every year we get a game with such a distinct animation style, much less one that is so consistently well-executed or so complimentary to its game's art direction. I wish nothing but success for

the folks at Magic Design Studios because no one else is making games that look quite like this. They have clearly got some kind of lightning captured in some sort of bottle over there, and I need to see what else they plan on doing with it. But all right, we can move on now. And we should, because boy we've got a lot of other games to talk about still. ♪ [upbeat music] ♪ To impress upon you just how much good pixel animation is happening in a single year of video games lately, let me just give

you a rapid-fire sampler of some 2023 highlights. There was the 8-bit inspired look of Bat Boy. The 16-bit look of Gravity Circuit. There was Full Void evoking the feel of games like Flashback and Out of This World. We got not one, not two, but three Souls-y metroidvanias with lavishly detailed character and environment art. The animation on these more complexly-rendered characters in Blasphemous 2, The Last Faith and 9 Years of Shadows may be a little stiff, but the lush detail in all of this i

magery is so gorgeous. But then there's also games like Astral Ascent and The Mageseeker taking the opposite approach, using simpler forms, but more fluid, detailed motion. We had Octopath Traveler 2, Star Ocean: The Second Story R, Cassette Beasts and Bleak Sword DX all exploring the possibilities of classic pixel art characters inhabiting a more three-dimensional space to varying degrees of success. We also got another beautiful Advanced Wars influenced look from Wargroove 2. We got all of thi

s wonderful environmental motion and boss enemy animation in Sea of Stars. And I don't think any one animation made me laugh quite as hard as dragging your unconscious partner through the snow in Bread & Fred. But if I have to narrow this extraordinary list of games down to the ones which impressed me the absolute most (and I do), there's really only two games it could be. And one of them is, without question, Pizza Tower. ♪ [upbeat music] ♪ Pizza Tower may not literally contain more animation t

han the rest of 2023's games, but when you're playing it, it sure does feel like the most animated game you have ever seen. This game's animation is superb, but not simply because it is wacky or because every move contains so many handcrafted frames of animation. That is impressive, but you can animate something poorly at a high frame count. Like, adding a dozen chaotic in-betweens to a bad animation is not suddenly gonna make it good. As I have often said, good game animation achieves the needs

of both function and appeal. And this game obviously has appeal in spades. It is wild and weird and not a little unsettling, but what a fun game to look at! This poor goofball is really going through it right now, and you feel that barely controlled anxiety in every animation. But appeal cannot thrive without function. And you would think that this game would suffer in that department with all of this chaotic energy and so many animation rules and principles being thrown out the window in the n

ame of comedy. But McPig clearly understands animation fundamentals well enough to know exactly where and how they can break rules to entertain without sacrificing on the responsiveness or the clarity the player needs. I won't be surprised if we see some other indie creators imitate this visual style in the future, but the level of animation skill on display here has ensured that Pizza Tower is gonna be a tough act to follow. There is one other 2023 game with pixel animation worthy of discussion

here, though, and one that I've not heard nearly enough people talking about yet. In the event that you've not heard of this one yourself, it is my great pleasure to introduce you to SANABI. ♪ [upbeat 80s synth music] ♪ I was not prepared for this sci-fi platformer out of South Korea to be one of the best things I played in The Year With All the Video Games. This character feels amazing to control, in part because of how well their animation sells the physicality of their traversal, even at thi

s tiny size on screen. But the real star of the show here is the animation in story scenes. These character sprites are drawn at such a small resolution, somewhere around 40 and 24 pixels tall respectively, and yet even with so little detail to work with, the amount of expression and surprisingly nuanced performance these animators get out of these low resolution sprites is amazing. Between the clear differences in physicality between characters, the little gestures and intimate interactions the

y share, the frighteningly sudden bursts of violence between these augmented beings, and the way that action is rendered with such beautiful smears and impact, there is such a quiet confidence to the way this game stage and animates its story that I almost never see in pixel art games like this. Wonder Potion knocked this out of the park, especially given it appears to be the studio's first game, best I can tell. Keep an eye on this team. I have a feeling they're gonna be a big deal. But all rig

ht, next category! ♪ [ heroic orchestral music] ♪ As usual, this year brought us a fresh crop of very impressive-looking AAA games serving up naturalistic 3D in large quantities. Call of Duty continued to exhibit some of the most consistent animation polish you will find anywhere, especially in their first person weapon handling, which is... mm! So fine-tuned. Diablo IV was yet another showcase of how bonkers good the Blizzard cinematics team is. The annual crop of sports titles brought yet anot

her round of iterative refinements to what are already some of the most dauntingly complicated technical animation systems in video games. Star Wars: Jedi Survivor brought some more great lightsaber combat and some wonderfully sincere performances. And not just from the human characters! This Muppet will melt your heart. And then there was Lies of P, which not only managed a legitimately impressive imitation of Fromsoft's signature animation aesthetic, but more importantly, also achieved the fun

ctional gameplay animation clarity that makes From's games so good. I know from experience exactly how hard it is to produce naturalistic animation at a high level of fidelity. I have seen how many talented people it takes, how many years of slow work it requires to deliver results like these. So all of these games represent impressive animation accomplishments. But there were a handful that achieved something particularly challenging or interesting this year, and one of them, surprising no one,

was Marvel's Spider-Man 2. ♪ [heroic upbeat music] ♪ If the folks at Insomniac are going to keep delivering at such a high level, then I have no choice but to continue applauding them, even if my hands are starting to hurt. I have praised impressive action spectacle in a lot of games over the last five years, and I will do so again. But the look of Spider-Man action is a quite unique thing when you think about it. It's all about quick, slippery agility. A character narrowly evading death by con

torting himself around every hazard and flinging himself all over the place at high speed. It is scrappy and desperate, but also playful and exhilarating. And this team has the look of Spider-Man action honed to perfection. Their swinging system, their combat system, the big setpiece moments sprinkled throughout these encounters... It is hard to imagine a better-animated Spider-Man gameplay experience. The performances look great too, and it makes me so happy seeing a character like Hailey in a

massive production like this. It's not just the existence of a deaf main character performed by a deaf actor, but the amount of effort so many people have clearly put into doing that character justice. I know exactly how time-consuming hands and fingers are to animate, especially when it comes to intricate gestures. It's tedious! So I recognize the effort and care that have been put into animating proper sign language in conversations like these, and even animating characters at varying ASL skil

l levels, and it just makes me happy. But hey, speaking of AAA studios with a frighteningly-consistent track record of showing up in these videos... Hello again, Capcom. I see you've brought a Resident Evil 4 remake. You shouldn't have. Come on in, gimme your coat. ♪ [lively Spanish guitar music] ♪ Good naturalistic animation is not always about making things realistic. No, even within the realm of "Realism", there is always lots of room for stylistic and tonal variation. And Resident Evil games

have their specific tone so completely dialed in. There is just the right amount of camp in the acting here. Whether that takes the form of over-the-top scenery chewing or self-serious machismo, all of it is performed with complete commitment and sincerity, no matter how absurd. It's not just the character performances during cinematics, though. The gameplay animation is also striking a similarly impressive tonal balance. The animation is grounded in real human physicality, but in a more height

ened, slightly video-gamey way. It's the spin kicks and the wrestling moves your hero occasionally deploys. Or the way enemy hit reacts are cranked up to almost arcade-y levels of exaggeration to better emphasize the impact of bullet hits and lend more gameplay clarity to the chaos. Capcom's animators have been knocking it out of the park in all of their big franchises lately, and I don't know how they're doing this so consistently across multiple teams, but wow, it's fun to watch. And that's no

t even the only AAA horror game with killer genre acting animation this year, because there's also Alan Wake 2. ♪ [somber piano music] ♪ Remedy Entertainment is out here pushing it to the limit, leaving it all on the field, giving 110% for the chance to be Number One in a race no one else is competing in. I love them. Remedy has been experimenting with ways to integrate live-action film into their game stories ever since 2016's Quantum Break. And the thing about trying to tell stories that star

both live-action and digital versions of your characters is that you've gotta be confident in your team's ability to replicate the subtleties of those actors' performances in game. And this team is getting real good at doing that. Like, I'm not saying that you can't tell the CG and the live-action people apart. Of course you can. It's not like Remedy is being subtle with a handoff between these two things, but I think it is telling how much the in-game character performances don't feel like a no

ticeable downgrade. How the live action bits feel more like a playfully disorienting artistic choice than some lack of confidence in the fidelity of their characters' digital incarnations. Every release since Quantum Break has just felt more and more confident in technology, in cinematography and artistry, and I have no idea what a better version of this looks like, but I feel pretty certain that Remedy is going to show us. Are these videos getting longer? I feel like they're getting longer. Let

's talk about Mortal Kombat 1. ♪ [dramatic drums and orchestral music] ♪ The Mortal Kombat series has a unique aesthetic challenge built in. You see, most of today's long-running fighting game franchises began life with either a traditional 2D pixel art look or full 3D graphics. But Mortal Kombat's visual identity was built on digitized still images of live actors. It made Mortal Kombat stand out in an arcade, but that unique look also had its trade-offs. There was an uncanny, kind of charming s

tiffness to the way Mortal Kombat fighters moved. The characters may have looked more realistic than most fighting game sprites, but their awkward style of motion absolutely did not. But that's okay, because while this bizarre human stop motion isn't what I would call "good animation" exactly, it was very distinct and memorable. Mortal Kombat would switch to 3D graphics pretty quickly, but this look is still a core part of the brand's visual identity. It's what a significant number of people wil

l see in their head when they think "Mortal Kombat." And that presents an interesting challenge to someone creating animation for a new entry. How do you improve upon the animation of these classic movesets without stripping away everything that makes them recognizably unique? How do you make good animation that still evokes the clunky animation it's based on? NetherRealm has spent the last 12 years figuring that out. And I think that this is their most successful effort yet. And not even becaus

e of the elaborately gory finishers and special moves, even just these basic movesets on each character somehow have more natural body mechanics than we saw in previous efforts, while also managing to evoke the old clunky move sets more strongly. And that is astonishing. But NetherRealm has also been getting real good at faces over the last decade. And the face performances in these cinematics are easily some of the most appealing and expressive performance capture results I saw all year. Now fr

om the sound of things, working at NetherRealm has not always been a pleasant experience in the past. And I don't know how conditions are over there these days, but I sincerely hope that things have improved because this team is doing some stellar work, and they deserve to work at the sort of place that strives to deserve them. But speaking of M-rated games and over-the-top violence, I think it's also worth mentioning Final Fantasy XVI. ♪ [gentle guitar music] ♪ This game pushes the franchise's

animation quality forward in both very loud and very quiet ways. Final Fantasy games are not always great at nuanced character acting animation. And this entry does have shortcomings there too, especially in the side quests and the optional conversations. But overall, this game is going for a less melodramatic or caricatured style of acting performance than you often see on Final Fantasy characters. And I really like the results. There are some touching moments of human emotion and connection in

these scenes that make the drama hit all of the harder. And then, once the combat kicks in, Final Fantasy XVI serves up some of the most over-the-top animated spectacle you are going to find in any of these games. These battles are absurd, an almost overwhelming fireworks display of shounen battle anime action and some of the flashiest effects animation I have ever seen. Even in the regular battles down on the ground with the normies, this combat animation looks so good. I understand that some

folks from both the Kingdom Hearts and Platinum teams provided some help with this game's development, and I have to assume that they contributed some of their expertise to Clive's move set, because this is some of the coolest-looking character action ballet to be had. It is going to be some time before I reach this entry in my slowly ongoing Final Fantasy animation retrospective, but I look forward to that day because there is a lot to dig into. But before we move on to our final category, I ha

ve one, well, two honorable mentions to add. Because something unusual and fascinating happened in game animation in 2023. So if you will indulge me, let's take a minute to appreciate Cyberpunk 2077 and Baldur's Gate 3. Both of these RPGs finally reached a more completed form in 2023. Both of them are massive, and both of them had to find a solution to the classic massive RPG problem: how do you animate all of these lengthy dialogue scenes with branching conversations and dozens of hours of reco

rded dialogue involving hundreds of characters and actually make it look good? I have talked about it before, but this is a very challenging problem to solve, especially in the AAA world where impressive visuals are usually supposed to be one of your main selling points. Even in this same year, there were otherwise impressive-looking big budget games struggling with this particular challenge. I should probably make a video covering this in more detail, but I am so delighted by the fact that both

of these games overcame this challenge using completely different approaches. One team created one of the most robust dialogue animation systems ever built (again), and the other said: "Screw it, we're putting a mocap suit in the recording booth." And both approaches succeed with flying colors in different ways that suit the experience each game is trying to deliver. It is so cool! But I will be good and save that for another video sometime else. We've still got a whole category to talk about.

♪ [upbeat hip-hop music] ♪ I know it probably doesn't seem like it, but I am actually trying to keep these year-end lists narrowed down somewhat. There's just so many good ones! Like, this year we got a very different kind of Bayonetta game that was smaller in scope, but still full of personality and charm. We got another Capcom victory lap with Street Fighter 6. I find the slightly more exaggerated posing in the movesets of the previous entry a little more appealing, personally. But regardless,

the animation here is fantastic, and these paint splash effects look so cool. We got another batch of great looking 3D anime cinematics and special attacks from miHoYo in Honkai Star Rail. Arc System Works showed off some more with Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising. We got not one, but two new Sonic games with smaller scope and solid animation. Good for you, buddy. Proud of you. And while I do have some nitpicks about the cinematic animation in Tears of the Kingdom, and maybe I'll make a video ab

out that sometime too, the gameplay animation is so solid and the characters in this world are portrayed with so much charm. It's real hard narrowing down a list with this many amazing candidates is what I'm saying. But of course, some games were definitely without a doubt going to show up in this video, and one of them was Hi-Fi Rush. ♪ [upbeat rock music] ♪ It's really easy to make the mistake of assuming that a studio who's become known for making one kind of game is only equipped to make tha

t one kind of game. I would not have guessed that the folks behind The Evil Within had this game in them too. But Hi-Fi Rush is so cohesive and confident, you'd think they've been making games like this for years. I love everything about the animation in this. The rhythm-driven combat move set, the animated elements in all of these environments that are all moving in time to the beat, the way that everything Chai does, even just running or standing in place, is still grooving to the music, empha

sizing rhythm at every moment. It's kind of wild how rare this cel-shaded comic book aesthetic and stylized animation look are in games because the appeal levels are off the charts. And I really love their use of Spider-verse style held frames to reinforce that 2D aesthetic, not just because it lends the motion that snappy "hand-animated on 2s and 3s" feel, but also because it allows them to swap between 2D and 3D cutscenes almost invisibly. But you know what impresses me most about this? The ch

aracter animation is actually contributing to this game's comedy. And I don't just mean the slapstick gags, even though they are very good. I mean the character performances too. Just like delivering a joke in real life, it is very easy to animate the delivery of a funny line in a way that makes the comedy fall completely flat. But these animated performances are not only nailing the comedic delivery, but doing so in a language that's probably not fluently spoken by the majority of the people in

this Japanese studio. Huge congrats to everybody at Tango Softworks. Game development is always a challenging, often exhausting process, but it's hard not to feel the creative joy that went into making this, and I'm so happy it exists. But speaking of games thriving on intentionally limited frame rates, I wanna talk about Pseudoregalia. ♪ [gentle retro game music] ♪ This retro-inspired metroidvania may be a tiny indie project, and it does have its rough edges, but there are not a lot of 3D plat

formers with characters that feel quite this good to control. Good game feel can be such a difficult thing to analyze and put to words because it involves the combined work of several disciplines, coordinating in ways which are often invisible to the player. There's all of the carefully tuned logic under the hood that determines how quickly your character will accelerate when you move the stick, how sharply they can turn, the arc of their jump, and exactly how much or little control you have ove

r your trajectory once you're in midair. But then on top of that, there's the character animation providing the visual feedback for your inputs. And when that control logic and visual feedback are coordinating just right, it can make that character feel almost like an in-game extension of yourself, going exactly where you want them to. Now the characters and the enemies in this game are all imitating that relatively low frame rate look of the N64 games which inspired this aesthetic. And I would

expect that to impact game feel in a negative way. I mean, your character's animation is only being updated every third frame. You are getting less visual information, right? And in some cases, that is true. Attack animations are a little muddy, and enemy move sets can be a lot harder to read and react to than I think they probably should be. But in terms of how your main character controls, the held frames have almost no negative impact on play. And I think that's for a couple of reasons. One,

even if your character's pose updates every third frame, your location in the world is updating on every frame. So your current position and trajectory through the environment is always clear. And two, the posing on these animations is really strong. So even though each frame is being held three times longer, the posing on those frames is dynamic and clear. And what's more, the limited frame rate actually makes your character's motion feel even more snappy. That's the benefit of held frames like

this. It emphasizes those extended micro moments and sharpens the contrast between them. It's so cool seeing games like this which evoke the limitations of retro hardware, while also improving upon and polishing the gameplay experiences that inspired them. But at last, only one 2023 game remains to be celebrated. And, again, to the surprise of absolutely no one, that game is Super Mario Bros Wonder. ♪ [bright music] ♪ One of the bigger challenges when animating a cartoon character in 3D is figu

ring out how to match the appeal of a 2D drawing. A traditional animator can easily adapt and exaggerate a character's form to emphasize motion or enhance their visual appeal from any angle. They just have to draw it differently. Giving a 3D mesh that kind of malleability is possible, but much more complicated. Have you ever seen those clips showing how you have to morph and distort a 3D anime character's face in order to imitate that familiar hand-drawn anime look from multiple angles? That is

exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about, and it's not always feasible, especially in games. But cheating your 3D character's shape and posing to camera like this can make a huge difference in how appealing they look. 3D film animators are doing this all the time. Now, side-scrolling Mario platformers have been using 3D character models for years. And the animation in those games has been good, but despite always having this conveniently locked camera angle, Mario Wonder is the first time tha

t Nintendo's really tried to make 3D Mario look and move more like a 2D drawing, distorting his shape and cheating his poses and fighting against everything the 3D rigs and models are trying to give them by default in order to make this character look as appealing as possible to the only camera angle that actually matters. Have you seen what the model for this version of Mario looks like? Look at this thing! Look what they have to do to achieve this look. Look at the pre-sculpted variant hands a

nd eyes and mouth shapes, and the third detached foot they need to achieve this cartoony run effect. But the result looks incredible. These character personalities shine with so much more vibrancy, and their animation reads with so much more visual clarity. Here's a fun exercise: take footage from any New Super Mario Bros game, put it side by side with some footage from Super Mario Bros Wonder, pause both of them at random times and compare how the characters look in each still image. Pretty muc

h every time, the pose you see in Wonder is going to look more intentionally-crafted. Because it was! Painstakingly. Between this and Mario Odyssey, the animation in Mario games has never been better. And if you want to see someone go into this one with a bit more depth, one of the other Dans on YouTube who talks about game animation already made a deep dive video. I will link to it down below. Man, what an amazing year full of video games, huh? Of course, some of the people whose work I've been

praising here today have probably been laid off over the last year and a half. Or had the miserable experience of seeing a bunch of coworkers and friends laid off around them. And that sucks. Maybe one of those people is even watching this right now. And if that's you, if you were one of those hit by the seemingly endless layoffs that have been sweeping through this industry lately? I'm really sorry that happened. And it's not fair. But just know that it was not any fault of yours, and I really

hope you land someplace that deserves you. But I think you are now adequately prepared to withstand the barrage of high quality animation 2024 is about to bring. Now, I have already established that this list of games was complete and without flaw, but if you still feel that the animation in some other 2023 game was unfairly overlooked, you may file your complaints in the comment section below. Or better yet: make your own video and get off my case! But thank you very much for watching. I hope

your 2024 is going smoothly so far, and I will see you again soon to talk about some more very good game animation. Until then! ♪ [chill electronic music] ♪