1: VTuber Style In-frame Reactions
One of my close friends actually showed me this tweet, suggested that I write a journal entry on it, and thus this page was born. Let me explain.
The games above, Megaman Battle Network and Spy x Anya, have this "VTuber reaction" thing going on. What if I told you some games in the 2000s did this as well? Mayhaps 20 years ahead of its time if anything? While it may not be the exact same, I'd like to present three examples that are similar to this from the early 2000s: Super Monkey Ball, Katamari Damacy, and Klonoa Heroes. I'm sure these weren't the only games to do this, but it's a really cool concept!
The first two Super Monkey Ball titles have life icons in the main game that actively show what facial expressions are on the monkey's face. It's very unique for its time and I hadn't noticed how similar it was to the Megaman and Spy x Anya examples shown above until recently!
The Katamari games have been doing this since the very start of the series in 2004. This is the closest example to this that I could find regarding 3D games from the early to mid 2000s. Since the Prince and his cousins are very tiny little guys, they show the character model on the bottom right corner of the screen, complete with facial expressions!!
Klonoa Heroes is probably my favorite example out of these. This is a GameBoy Advance game released in late 2002, not a console game with 3D graphics like Super Monkey Ball or Katamari. I know it takes a lot of work in making 3D models and they absolutely have charm to them, but the face spritework for this game is literally oozing with charm.
There are individual artworks for entering and exiting areas, being damaged, critical hits when attacking, using specials, collecting items, status effects such as poison, and more. This isn't even all of the face sprites.
Overall, this is a super cool thing to see in games in general. I will have to do research eventually on if there's any other games that do this.