Agreed. Guilty Gear Strive (and also Xrd to a lesser extent) do a really, really good job of mimicking 2D animation while being entirely dynamic, 3D animation.

Agreed. Guilty Gear Strive (and also Xrd to a lesser extent) do a really, really good job of mimicking 2D animation while being entirely dynamic, 3D animation. Of course, as you said, a lot of that is because it’s a 2D fighting game. So the players have no control of the camera or lighting. Each character in a match has lighting hand applied separately from the other character and separate from the lighting of the environment, so they always have perfect lighting, even if it isn’t physically correct. And just like how Arcane was in production for ~5 years, there is no secret to how Guilty Gear looks: it’s just a lot of hard artistic labor. It isn’t necessarily like the only thing preventing games from looking like Arcane is a hardware problem.