Count the number of colors on Jin Kisaragi. The smooth, defined lines going down "strong", hand-crafted pixel art lines. With massive sprites built for the high-definition era to boot.
The 3D art gets a bit intricate and busy, but the 2D Sprites.
The question that immediately springs to my mind is "what did the 3D reference image look like". Rotoscoping (the animator's term for 'tracing reference footage') is an old, old process, almost as old as animation itself. You can do it well, by using the reference footage as a base to get the hard parts of the 3D motion down then putting that away and pushing the drawings, or you can do it poorly, by just tracing it and not really doing much to it otherwise.
I would bet that if you superimposed that BlazBlue animation over the 3D reference, there would be a huge difference - that looks like it's had a lot of human thought put into it.
(And then go look at Arc's latest game, Guilty Gear Xrd. Which is presented entirely 3D with some models that have had a LOT of love applied to them.)
http://i.imgur.com/mDlQYar.gif
Count the number of colors on Jin Kisaragi. The smooth, defined lines going down "strong", hand-crafted pixel art lines. With massive sprites built for the high-definition era to boot.
The 3D art gets a bit intricate and busy, but the 2D Sprites.