FE7 is imo a phenomenon on it's own, I got to know Roy and Marth from SSBM.

Roy of course looked enough like Eliwood that just the boxart sold me the game.

Also it certainly was the most well-rounded, accessible and best balanced game in the series and it has no really easily noticeable flaws, which made it a super polished game for a market who hasn't been exposed to something similar before.

And I played some tactical games before.



At first I was like, oh hey it certainly is easy to make drawings out of simple blocks and FE7 style looks really simple enough to be pulled off. It's definitely not of course.

I am just playing Awakening and the rhythm of the battles is terrible compared to FE 6/7/8, so that I think turning it off is more beneficial.



Fact is that FE7 was a company product and they used the same sprites for 3 games with very little addition.

Most of the animations certainly took days to create for experienced artists and they even had 5 games of source material to work from.

However they cut down on realism and put style, snappyness and timing over realistic movements, which in the end worked really well for the "stage fighting"

So while the original artists of FE certainly would have been able to polish up some animations with additional tiny movement (which I basically did with the first iteration on the archer) budgeting reasons and saving money everywhere possible most likely prevented this for the original production.



And going high-bit with them is really tempting as an artistical expression of skill since you need to be at the level of traditional 2D Disney animators, and have the pixel knowledge on top.



However companies usually take the road that they do the cheapest thing which looks best. Golden Age animation movies died off, bc. 3D was easier/faster to get a result with and therefore got overly aggressive promoted by the industry.

I don't deny that there is a huge mass of people in the FE fandom really prefering great 2D animation, however I think it's a facot of 3 or 4 in terms of overall cost compared to 3D, plus you need extremely skilled artists which are rare to find.



So artistically speaking the sky would be the limit. Fact is that what they did with FE7 is already far beyond average in terms of what we see in 2D gaming animation.