danburite said:
Assuming they do it this way again, it will make the physical contact moves more realistic, (after all, how would these body-based moves work with Metronome?) but it could end up looking cheap.
forget Metronome. With Mimic, almost every Pokemon can legitimately use every attack.
Anyway, I was considering this, and what if instead of programming each Pokemon's attack used on every individual Pokemon, they just program the animation differently for certain classifications of size and shape. For instance, we see Pikachu using Quick Attack on Deoxys, doing a small hop and hitting it square in the chest. Now, there are several Pokemon about the size of Deoxys that could use that same animation. Then, for flying/hovering Pokemon, Pikachu's animation would change slightly by just leaping a little higher. For attacks like Vicegrip and Wrap, we'd see the Pokemon actually hold and constrict smaller Pokemon. When it comes to bigger ones like Whaleou, though, they could slightly change something like Kairikii's Vicegrip to just being some type of shove. 'Course, a lot of programming would still be involved, but it nontheless greatly narrows down the math that Dragonfree gave. One would also consider that several attacks would have pretty much the same animation (Wrap and Constrict, Scratch and Slash, Wing Attack and Steel Wing with the exception of a metal skin effect, etc.).
As for the afforementioned Mimic... I recall in Pokemon Stadium that when some Pokemon, like the Kamex line, used Withdraw, they'd actually use an animation of them going in their shell, while with others, they'd just kinda morph into a glass ball. The solution is simple: attacks have a unique animation for certain Pokemon, but there's still a more universal variant for those types of rare situations.
