@yaomon i like a lot the shading, and there can't ever be too many biceps!
@pixelpd i want to see more of your red-haired character!

thanks for all the answers, you confirmed that there was something weird going on with the strike itself. I did a quick moc-up and then I didn't really iterate from there, I just went for the "final" result.

@32 I wasn't aware of the click-zoom function, i'll post it at 1x next time!

@PPD thanks for the edit, the purpose of the action itself it's definitely more readable, also looks better with a more steady head. I think i wanted to animate "too many things" and got carried away by that. 

@ Cyangmou While I asked myself some of those questions (especially the "is it responsive enough") I ended up going for "a" swing instead on focusing on the initial idea. If i have to do animations for combat game, I think that i would use the rough moc-up directly in game until it "feels good" and only after that i would draw the final version. Do you often/always work in this way?

I have a question (well one of the many..) Let's say I want to do a 3 hit combo with this character. Would you proceed to animate the whole sequence as a single animation? What happens if the player doesn't keep attacking, I will need to do some extra frames to go from that breaking point back to the idle? Or it's ok to just snap to it from any point?

cheers, have a good day : )