agreed and the turn and move mechanics didn't help Resident evil in that regard either. and yeah I'm quite fond of 2D on pre-rendered 3D especially in JRPGs (Legend of Dragoon (PS1) final fantasy 7 (although even at the time I wasn't keen on the non battle model styling) Final Fantasy IX and the list goes on) and Adventure games Grim Fandango was an awesome one 
(I've actually done some experiments with fixed camera angle 3D adventure game style setups 
just never got around to rendering the scene down to 2D with a Zdepth mask, but AGS can handle 3D on 2D with quite a few plugins, and I think in the one I saw you import the 3D collision model and camera position too, but it involved writing C like code calling load functions etc so it's not entirely artist friendly)
Its a shame Capcom never did add analog control to the PS1 RE games since tank controls weren't needed once the Dual Shock was introduced.
Not a big fan of chibi, or perhaps it just felt unnecessary with 3D models to SD the characters which is something I agree with?
Ooo good choice on Grim Fandango, that is one of the best examples of 3D over 2D I have every played. Wild perspectives are neat but I always wanted to try this setup from a more traditional view angle like the The Sims but more action oriented, I guess I'll just refer to Twinsen again.
I've seen 3D effect via sprite/tile Stacking and often looks effective but quite bizarre, one game that uses that method I recall playing was this game called inner worlds (i forgot the title and it took me like an hour to find) but had some form of recursive tile perspective, that moved each 'planar' dependant on the camera/screen location which is like a parallax effect. don't follow what you mean by animated tiles though
Neat game Inner Worlds but I can't say I've tried it, not a bad look as far as tech is concerned since I can see its appeal despite being a tad segmented. I like the sprites and shading mostly although I've never been fond of the gritty look.
I can't remember the name but I played some arcade games that used this setup for flying through 3D like Space Harrier, with scaling it was mostly convincing for tunnels although you can never get rid of that sprite segmentation completely.
Animated tiles are looping animations, you take for example a 16x16 2D tile and create a 16 frame animation of the pattern tiling and moving left one pixel over per frame, place a line of them across the screen width and play the animation and it appears to scroll. In the case of the Nes it didn't have multiple parallax layers so game developers would use this method to fake layers of depth in the single background layer allowed.
You can do the same things with any point of repetition even a 2D sprite with true perspective but it works best with repetition or the case of true perspective a fixed track and direction for the camera on account of the increased image memory use, most examples of use tend to use a dynamic load system as to keep the memory footprint low and recycle the memory used by shifting sets of the frames around instead of pre-loading all of them at once.
or little big adventure I&II as they were called in europe, I only ever got hold of it via a demo disc back in the day, been intending to play it since I think I'll try acquiring it 
I always liked that name better anyway, same here only tried the demo of 2 but regret not buying it back then. I played through most of LBA1 but never finished it, upgraded my PC and it became harder to run it afterwards, Dosbox maybe?
was playing some saturn games via EMU recently and Dark Savior had a fixed angle rotate-able camera but would always spring back to the intended bearings, 3D scenes with 2D sprites sprites like BF 2&3. I'm currently experimenting with 2D sprites in 3D, but so far I've not got around to getting any animation working on them, I've just done static billboard sprites and rotating camera any engines you know of that make sprite management easy in 3D? I'm not skillful/patient enough to code my own system, might research how to achieve it in unity
also played Soulbringer not long ago, and that game had game characters comprised/dolled together from sprite chunks, that were all 3D generated imposters from various angles due to the free camera, 3D terrain and environment. it looked interesting
Dark Savior is a game I respect but never played it, went with a PS1 back in the day but I'll get to DS eventually. I like that camera spring setup as its a good compromise between letting the player move the camera but maintaining ideal angles for the 2D sprites. Can't say I know of any good engines offhand but maybe look for an existing game that might have become open source.
Soulbringer another neat game I wish to try and a decent approach to limited 3D. In my LOD research I wanted to apply what I was trying to do with static objects for greater pixel resolution through orthographic texture tiling using slight increase in polygons beyond the traditional billboard/imposter of 2 polygons towards animated creatures.
The most promising approach I found was "Polyposters" by some people from the University of Prague. While I didn't agree with everything they did it was the closest running example of what I wanted to do.
http://dcgi.felk.cvut.cz/publications/2008/kavan-i3d-polypostorsWhat I liked about Polyposters was the billboard mesh animation which took the burden off of the texture memory which is the main drawback of prerendered 3D sprites in that you can't give them much resolution and you are limited in the number of types you can use EG. Myth.
http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/myth-the-fallen-lords/screenshots/gameShotId,341/Where I differed with them was in context of use and asset creation standards as I saw them as an LOD that could work at close range of the 3D camera along the lines of PaRappa the Rapper but more rigidly jointed. I'd seen enough Flash animations that went with that paperdoll approach like South Park where you could get a lot of range of motion by rotation of 2D impostered body parts from only a few primary view angles (Front, Back, 3/4, Profile, etc.).
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/430324In asset creation I just wanted to add basic things like texture flopping whenever possible to reduce the texture memory used per paperdoll, use alpha masking for outline form instead of using a shaped polygonal edge, and add a higher LOD more optimal for cinematic uses.
To paint a word picture just imagine Capcom's brilliant pixel art fully represented decently on paperdolls in full 3D worlds instead of the lackluster stuff like SF EX with its phony 3D arena box and blocky fighter models.
http://www.mobygames.com/game/playstation/street-fighter-ex-plus-alpha/screenshots/gameShotId,147240/ 
I admit that dolls have there weaknesses but it sure was a long awkward transition for Japan into the 3D generation of games which only repeated once the PS3 was released, I'm just glad they are back to making 3D again to their standards EG. Yakuza3 as that long stint of DS gaming was hard on Sony of Japan.
Damn I'm long winded so I'll stop here for now.
