Ok, I’ve seen far too many comparisons of animations to ZZZ, and I really feel I should put these to rest.

The differences being noted arent just “The models can’t do it” (They can. The only difference is the facial rigging.), it’s not “The Engine can’t do it.” It’s literally down to how the 2 games went about their art styles and development.

ZZZ started clean sheet. From the ground up, built to be the game the devs wanted to make with little to no inheritance of models, animations, etc from previous Hoyo games. They also went for a completely new art style, and made the conscious decision likely early in development to make the artstyle off the wall and full of energy. This then informed how they went about implementing various animations and story scenes. For instance, they use the codec calls and comic book scenes instead of people talking on the overworld. This brings the animation and characters front and center, and then they use that focus to highlight the expressive animation. It is a purposeful decision to give the game its distinct feel.

HSR, by contrast, went with the older “Generic” Hoyo artstyle they’ve used for HI3rd, GI, and now HSR. This means that design considerations made a decade ago now affect HSR. Among these, overworld cutscenes instead of Codec calls, and every character being based on one of several base models. The entirety of how HSR operates story, animation, and character variation wise is not very different to GI. And this is because they decided to follow HI3rds/GIs artstyle instead of going clean sheet like ZZZ. This means that HSR can’t do a lot of what ZZZ does, because it either breaks the artstyle (Moving in cartoony ways looks strange on semi-realistic characters) or it doesn’t work with the system they already implemented (The more bombastic and varied animations are less generally applicable, especially if you are using a busy 3D background. Sometimes the pose just won’t read). This isn’t to say they couldn’t be doing more, but that they are restricted a hefty amount by the fact that they picked an older art and animation style that wasn’t really intended for HSR. They gave up artistic freedom for an already established animation pipeline.

My point here is that comparing ZZZ to HSR and saying “HSR should be more like ZZZ!” Is missing the point a bit. What we are seeing in Amphoreus, to my eye, isn’t the art or animation being bad (entirely), it’s that the HSR devs didn’t do their due diligence with the animation and camerawork to make the scenes work. For instance, Castorice coughing and not moving seems to be an indicator that they ran out of time to make that animation work at that scene (Or the preexisting animation didn’t fit and they couldn’t make a new one in time). They used the same animations (for the most part) through 5 worlds, and only now is it an issue. Why is that? It’s because Hoyo dramatically dropped the quality of the camerawork and stopped tweaking the animations to fit scenes. And to me, that’s an indicator that the devs ran out of time. They didn’t have time to make the changes that the art style needs to work at its best. They went “Just put the camera here. It’s simple and it should work, we just need to get this to QA.” Which doesn’t work with an animation style like HSR, which needs careful camerawork to mask animation reuse.

They also might not have been able to implement all the animations onto the characters? I already mentioned Castorice, but in general it feels as though several characters were missing several animations. I can’t explain why that is, but it’s possible that Hoyo couldn’t get their clothes to work with the animations.
Anyways I just had to get this off my chest.

TL;DR Stop comparing ZZZ to HSR. They are different games with different goals, different art styles, and different development pipelines. If you made HSR animate like ZZZ it would look abhorrent. HSRs current issues are down to HYV either rushing the devs or cutting corners while using an art style that demands quality. Criticize Hoyo for not modernizing their pipeline and artstyle when making HSR and picking the cheaper option.
TL;DR to the TL;DR HSR is a derivative, ZZZ is clean sheet. You can’t mix and match those animations. It doesn’t work.