Hm...

Have you played any Japanese arcade fighting games? Makers such as Capcom and SNK use animated sprites hand-drawn in the anime style, and the action can get extremely fast-paced and frenetic. I refer you to Vampire Savior (Capcom arcade machine) for an example of excellent hand-drawn sprites and outrageous combat styles.

ONI could''ve been this sort of game had it incorporated network multiplayer, and actually had the hand-animated cut scenes which it was intended to have. Instead, Microsoft made Bungie drop it, and GOD Games picked it up and shoddily half-completed it.

It''s been one of my persistent dreams to play a duel-style game with characters with truly outrageous power levels in an abandoned city. Ever seen X: Their Destiny was Foreordained, or Giant Robo? That kind of outrageous. The characters could be quite varied - a psychic supersoldier, a giant robot, a master of magic, a high-powered armored suit, any number of metahumans, Godzilla...

The real fun would be in good architectural damage modeling. Saw off giant chunks of buildings and hurl them at your opponent, or strike critical support columns to send skyscrapers crashing down on him. And of course, as in every good action movie, everything explodes. Everything.

Is this the sort of thing you had in mind?

(By the way, the fact that Angelic Layer is a shoujo anime, yet has fights which IMHO are far superior to any in DBZ, amuses me to no end. And I love the English Cartoon Network dub of Yu Yu Hakusho. It''s such a guilty pleasure.)

Duran, he was referring to the fights in themselves, not the series as a whole... a lot of the fights are fast-paced action, most of the hand-to-hand moves are drawn just as rapidly alternating sketches to portray this.

PSWind, for gun combat, if you want anime stylings you might wait for the matrix animes to come out I was going to suggest Hellsing but there isn''t much in the way of actual gun combat in it, largely one-shots. Although there is one guy that basically throws out strands of razor wire from his fingers as a weapon, that''s kind of interesting... might be hard to play balance though, or it could be completely abused a la Scorpion''s or Smoke''s spear in MK.

Occasionally Cowboy Bebop will have some impressive gunfights (specifically Pierrot Le Fue, and The Movie). But it would be hard to emulate that kind of style in a game IMHO, since it usually involves close-ups and many different angles.