i am not fucking kidding in a fighting game context you have around 3-15 frames to read what an animation is doing and the belts serve an absurdly important purpose of dividing parts of a design.
Like, look at this animation on johnny from xrd. I use this one as an example because Johnny is wearing a jacket, pants, and hat that are all the exact same fucking color, but in execution, this shit is still really readable. Partially because the division created by his belt and bare chest makes it REALLY clear what is the top half of his body and what is the actual leg doing the sweep. You know where his head is even though it's covered because even if the hat is being lost in his shoulders, and you can always tell where the top of it is because of the white belt on it. Where's his right shoulder begin and end? Oh, there's a little belt on the middle of his arm, so I can then tell where his arm is placed even if it's lost against his lapels and shoulders. Then you've got the shoe that literally tells you where his foot ends, with the stupid shoe belt and black sole highlighting it against the brown background. all while looking so stupid that he ends up being sick as hell. all of this is clear enough that you can process it all in the literally 18 frames this is onscreen, and just. this shit is held up by belts, respect the stupid ass belts dammit
tangentially related but this is also a real world trick for getting a sense of someone’s movement and intentions that has translated into multiple video game genres for me
several lives and buried parental expectations ago i was forcibly enrolled in a middle school american football league. it sucked but an actually useful piece of advice my coach gave me was “you wanna know where someone’s going? look at their belt. all your movement comes from your legs, and the belt is pointing more or less in the right direction.”
sure enough i became much harder to evade because i stopped looking at their shoulders, which were lying to me, and started looking at where their lower body was trying to take them. i wasn’t fast by any means but i had long arms and a modicum of wit
20 something years later this showed up in elden ring of all places. margit the fell omen kept setting off my panic reflex, the delay on his attacks was too obnoxious, i struggled to build a sense of timing… and then i remembered this advice, started watching his lower half and suddenly i knew exactly when he was going to swing and move, because fromsoft has some inclination towards reasonable sources of motion from swings on at least humanoid opponents
you actually have some wiring for intuiting motion and stance if you know where to look because your brain also has a blueprint for generating that motion! so emphasizing where all of that comes from, especially in a game that’s as (comparatively, to other guilty gears) grounded as strive seems like a good idea for readability (ed: i do not play this game and am new to the genre)
as an alternative to belts i encourage arcsys to explore codpieces in character designs.
this is actually legitamately fascinating and i WILL be keeping this in mind from now on, but also it is worth noting that they did indeed try the codpiece with Justice having an inexplicable robo-girldick
