Aesthetic and Necessities

Final Fantasy XIV has a number of aesthetic animation on characters, including some gesture and emotes, for example when your character laughing he's actually makes the laughing expression on his face and the appropriate body language, it's a trick taken from Aion and RIFT but FFXIV made it better. Your character head follows an ally or even a mob when targeting it, the legs tilted when on uneven ground, even the death animation is satisfying (other word from frustrating) and I like the fact that when I logoff a character on an inn, he'll make the wake up animation when I login

Of course sleeping in front of the inn can be considered a public offense :P

Another one is the sound: music of Final Fantasy is one single point from being perfect, it's gorgeous and atmospheric, it's rare for some repeated theme can be so familiar and still enjoyable even after a few weeks, Ul'dah Theme for example is different on day and night, creating a feeling that at night your character should be in bed rather than huddling in the nearest market =)), I also have suspicion that the upbeat tempo of Garuda's theme is my downfall since I tend to sync anything, (including my tapping) to a song, I might accidentally push that limit break button too soon =))

On combat however the graphical aesthetics becomes complicated, my longest animated skill "rage of halone" can be a perfect example, it features the character slashing the enemy four times, ended with a flashy groundsmashing animation, it takes like three second from casting to dealing damage, and this is when it becomes a problem, rage of halone is not a channeled skill which means it shouldn't/can't be cancelled, unfortunately your character can move while using this skill which result into an awkwardly sliding animation. Not to mention a controversial issue: unchanneled long timed skills locked the character position which means no matter how far you are from those red circle area, as long as you're still doing animation for that skill (and cast it while inside red area) , you're still gonna get hit

I also returned to WoW several weeks ago for the last raid content: Siege of Orgrimmar, it's also a perfect opportunity to examine my character animations, my warrior is of course instant casting all the way, and the animations are mostly one second and deal instant damage, it doesn't have much animation (almost none actually) but it does the work. It looks like Square is still using the old MMORPG system for positioning (where miss is not based on positioning but your stat) and failed to update/mix it with the new positioning system. On newer MMO like TERA and Guild Wars 2, positioning is everything since battle occurs actively.

the ability lag is also still a hot topic out there, it ranged from the cancelled skills when chaining attacks until the skill becomes completely unaccessible or didn't deal any damage, mostly blaming the animation and lag on server side, I think SE really needs this addressed since they've been completely silent about this issue,

Aesthetic should be necessary but should be carefully cultivated in order not to breaking the immersion of gameplay, other than that SE has put a real effort to creating Eorzea to be full of beautiful things... and characters :D