so, there's basically just french bread and arcsys making 2d art fighters now huh. I guess there will be Mane6 too if their crowdfunding goes well.
: <
For what its worth, you can sculpt seperate models in 3d for every animation frame you need to have drastically deforming akin to "tween frames" in hand drawn stuff and use them as "Blend frames" and scrub along your timeline in 3d to make bodyparts morph and turn into things same as using tween frames that are hand drawn. Seriously...you can make one quick sculpt in Zbrush of your end product shape and then hit it with soften brushes and other tools to make all your morphing tween frame shapes in a VERY short period of time ( like before lunch easily and with time to unwrap and texture it).Plus if you setup both FK and IK rigs on a model and use soft binds you can get really good disney style squash and stretch too. Even R Mika's ass bounce is something you can do now thanks to things like blender or maya muscle options that allow you to custom shape muscles to a rig that deform your model's skin thats bound over it without clipping errors occurring thus allowing for jiggle physics and more.
This coupled with cel shading techniques advancing like what you saw in GGXRD means that while we may see folks go 3d it doesn't necessarily mean we will have to see an end to creative and animated looking movements on character animations. The 3d folks just got to level up and get with it. For what its worth, even though its simpler to draw tween frames and do what Lab Zero does you can recreate what they do in CG readily enough and once you lay the ground work by spending the extra time one a model you can punch through things very fast to create new content or overhaul and tweak old animation content...you can even get more than color alts and incorporate full alt outfits onto such models which would almost require a complete redrawing of 1600+ frames of art for hand drawn techniques. For CG it'd really just be a matter of using layers and polygroups and swapping out parts of the model if the model is setup properly with this in mind.
I love hand drawn but folks shouldn't act like 3d wont look the same. It can and folks do it all the time for reels. No one is really pushing too hard to do it for games though which is one of the things ASW mentions when they showed the process of their shader pipeline...they also feel that their is a world of potential with 3d for creating amazing hand drawn appearances to gaming and that folks should be pushing towards that more.