This is Super Robot Taisen, another long-running RPG only released in Japan and less successful than Pokemon.
Yet it evolved incredibly over the years that it moved into totally animated sprites by 2005 on GBA (years before Black/White semi-animated sprites on DS).
It has thousands of units (including yours and enemies from dozens of franchises) per game and each unit has unique animations (moving, attacking ,defending, getting damaged, blocking, parrying, and different animation for every single attack) all taken from their respective shows or mangas with extra effects like units melting from heat weapons or vanish from particle cannons, etc...
Each game has new animations, new sprites (now models).
The company never removed content for animations, nor removed featured they implemented before, in fact they keep adding more beside tweaking older ones.
And this franchise is far from being on Pokemon status but yet, the devs put a lot of efforts into it all the games kept being quality.
Meanwhile, the highest grossing media franchise of all time is worse than Chinese nobodies and reddit students.
Always make up excuses and lies for non-existent animations.
Their games still look worse than Gamecube games.
It's really embarrassing when smaller franchises do MUCH BETTER than big franchises like Pokemon.
What is Gamefreak's excuse to be like this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MGSCno2elA 