Dude's got some Eiichiro Oda snotty crying action going on 
While I was playing Onimusha 2 I was really struck by just how good the character models looked. The PS2 had tons of games with really well-animated characters but I felt Onimusha 2's were especially nice.
One thing that's really noticeable looking back is just how bad character models and animation generally were by comparison in Western games from the same time period with the exception of Half-Life 2. Devs didn't seem to give a shit and just went with stiff faces with basic mouth flaps even if the games were otherwise pushing the envelope graphically
I think this is why Kingdom Hearts did so well at the time, their cutscenes were pretty good.
To be fair, at the time you would be watching these on an SD TV and not upscaled HD emulation, so the animation of small details would be rather pointless
You would've still been able to tell the difference between nice facial animation and a Thunderbirds puppet. I think it's more that character animation was generally seen as pretty low priority by many Western devs. I assume most had John Carmack brain and were more focused on more nuts and bolts stuff like engine optimisation and lighting than something you'd only see in cutscenes
True, true. Plus it is pretty impressive what they could do with limited hardware. I think that's why I love retro games so much. It's cool to see what they can do.