Well lots if not all recent anime are full 3D and you cant see the difference but i do agree on the fact that to get closer to artists drawings i would require more work so my renders looks like 2D ( im not even at the anime lvl atm ) but they do it so its possible..
I'd need a
VERY reliable source to even start buying this. Almost all recent Anime
character sprites are hand-drawn (their expressions, movement and etc.). Some is hand-drawn on digital medium, other still on paper. They do use computers to combine animations, add lightning, shadows, integrate them into backgrounds properly but the
sprites are almost always hand-drawn. 3D animation where sprites are modeled and created in 3D is mostly US based, japan is nowhere near catching up to that, but they do not really look 2D either.
It's a misunderstanding... almost all of the modern anime is
computer animated so people immediately jump to conclusions that everything is done using computers. Stuff that was created in 3D from the start is quite obvious in Anime series, some do it partly, like for cars and tech (and STILL draw the character sprites btw

). Backgrounds are sometimes rendered in 3D and flattened but even that is usually done in anime movies, drawing comes out cheaper due to outsourcing.
Actually if you know a single anime series where character have obvious 2D look but were 3D rendered from the start, I'd like to check them out, if not to watch (due to lack of time) but just to see what that looks like. *With a reliable source confirming that sprites were 3D at some point...
Are you sure about it?
No, that just made sense to me

Just feels like auto-equip should be job/task oriented...