Mythra's Shrinking Swordfight.

Story: Having just enough time to prepare for the blow, Nia was thrown back with immense force as she raised her sword to block Mythra’s overhead strike. She skidded across the ground, before looking back towards her training partner. “Ha! You think you can take me?” Mythra taunted her from across the room. “Oh, you’re done.” Nia thought as she gritted her teeth. Normally the blades’ special powers like Mythra’s foresight and Nia’s cellular regeneration weren’t viewed in a positive light during practice as they didn’t really help train swordplay, but Mythra was really getting on Nia’s nerves with her cocky attitude. Well, that, and with the multiple, multiple times Mythra had cheated during their training sessions, Nia was sure just this once would be okay. Nia’s core crystal began to glow a bright blue and red as she prepared her magic, before a mighty beam was let loose from her chest. Having been far too busy gloating to be paying attention, Mythra was caught in the swirling beam. “What-” she began to say as the magic started to take effect. She felt an electric shock run through her body, followed by an extreme pressure over her body, soon replaced by a feeling of vertigo as she plummeted to the ground. “Nia- what was-” Mythra began to say, as she pushed herself off the floor. She got an answer to her question soon enough, as two giant feet pounded the ground next to her. Nia’s feet. Mythra quickly realized that Nia had shrunk her down to a tiny size. But she didn’t have a whole lot of time to take in her now-giant surroundings, as a hand wrapped around legs and lifted her into the air. Mythra could only glare angrily at Nia, as she dangled helplessly in front of her face. “Nia! Put me down!” She yelled, meaning to sound threatening, but her size betraying her. A smirk grew on Nia’s face. “Hmm, is the mighty Aegis feeling a bit small right now?” Nia asked tauntingly. She lifted her other hand up to Mythra and readied her magic again. “Wait Nia! Don’t you da-” Mythra cried out, but it was too late as her body was once again enveloped in a blue light, and she shrank to an even smaller size. “Oh come on! Really!” She exclaimed as the shrinking stopped and she got her bearings. “Why?” “Let’s just say I didn’t like your attitude.” Nia said, her smile even bigger. “Now either you behave, or…” Mythra crossed her arms in annoyance. “Fine, just don’t shrink me any smaller. And put me down, I’m getting dizzy.” Notes: If you haven’t already, go play Xenoblade 3, it’s so good. That’s what’s been eating up the majority of my free time recently, which is a big reason why I haven’t been animating anything. That, and I was waiting for the models to come out. I want to do something with the main cast, but it’ll probably take time for them to get some easy to work with rigs set up. I decided that I couldn’t use the XC3 models, I’d just use Nia, a character who technically shows up in XC3. And despite her appearing in tons of shrinking animations, I’ve never actually shrunken Mythra before. I think Pyra’s been shrunken 3 or 4 times, but not Mythra. So that’s the main reason why I picked her. I’m super pleased with the majority of this animation. There’s a lot of character in the movements of both characters. My favorite is how Mythra crosses her arms over her chest when she’s being held upside down. That was actually really fun to animate. I just flipped the camera over so I could work normally, but it was still really fun to think about things from that angle. The sword-fight at the beginning looks really cool too. I wanted to go for a swirly motion where it pans around Mythra readying her strike, and I think I did a good job of that. You can’t see Nia early on, which is a good thing because she’s just standing still. The charge looks like it has a lot of power behind it, and the impact feels really cool too. Mr. Sakurai, the lead developer behind Smash, started making Youtube videos, and one of the topics he covered was something called “hit stun”, when you pause the action during a big impact. So when Mythra’s sword hits Nia’s, it pauses the entire scene and induces a bunch of camera shake before starting again. I think it looks pretty cool. I also love Nia’s animation here too. The way she slides back looks super satisfying. I used quartic deceleration in order to sell the effect and it looks pretty cool. The way she charges up her chest laser also looks pretty sick. And I like the way she picks up Mythra between her two fingers. The laser from her fingers also looks surprisingly good. And if anyone can spot all 3 XC2 memes in the story you are as much of a gigachad as Rex is.