Arcana Heart 3

Link animations are small animations shown of both sides of the screen while you are playing a match. To get this achievement, you have to unlock all link animations of all characters. The animations you've unlocked can be viewed in GALLERY mode. Press RB or LB to select the LINK ANIME page.

The characters you have to collect link animations can be divided into two types. 23 playable characters and 2 boss characters. The achievement doesn't unlock at the moment when you watched the last animation, it unlocks when you enter the GALLERY after that.

Boss characters

Let's start with the simpler boss characters.

Parace L'sia: She's the final boss of Score attack mode. To unlock her link animation, you have to defeat her (i.e. you have to finish Score attack mode). I'm not sure whether defeating her will unlock all her link animations, or you have to actually view each link animation. I personally have actually watched every animation when I could defeat her, so I couldn't tell.

Ragnarok: The final boss of Story mode. You have to defeat it to unlock its link animation, but this would be far easier than Parace L'sia. Also its 3 link animations are almost guaranteed to unlock once you defeat it.

Playable characters

For other regular playable characters, you have to play with that character to unlock her link animation. Also on online matches, you can also unlock link animations shown for your opponent character (but on offline versus play, you can only collect your own character's animation).

As its name indicates, link animation is shown according to your characters situation in the matches. So to unlock all link animations for a character, you have to meet each condition and view each link animation. Each character will have 9 or 10 link animations corresponding to regular conditions, and 1 or 2 link animations for winning a match under some special conditions.

Regular conditions

First, we begin with regular condition link animations, from top to bottom. In gallery, these conditions are shown in Japanese, but with some working, I suppose it's easy to match them with the following list.

Normal: The default condition. It's always unlocked when you played a character.

Of great advantage, Of advantage, At a disadvantage, At a great disadvantage: These animations are shown according to the relative amount of hit points of the two characters in the match. Please note that a character doesn't have all 4 of these. Usually a character has 2 and some has 3.

Attack level 1, Attack level 2, Attack level 3: These animations are shown when your character dealt a good amount of damage to your opponent. The greater the damage is, the higher level animation is shown. For attack level 3, you'll usually need to perform Critical Heart or a very good combo.

Damaged: This animation is shown when your character gets hit.

Victory, Defeat: These animations are shown when your character won/lost a match. As explained later, winning a match under certain condition will show a special animation instead.

Special conditions

So, this is the complicated part:P

Maybe it's easier to see by watching the video added. The video has shown the detailed conditions for each character, so here I try to categorize them.

Perfect victory
No damage taken on the final round, finish with a Super move or Arcana Blaze. Can be done in one round match.
Heart, Kamui, Lilica, Fiona
I haven't confirmed for each case, but quite likely that finish with Critical Heart also works. Please note that Lilica's animation is shown as "Special victory 1" on the gallery. But I couldn't find any difference with the other "Perfect victory" characters, so sorted her out here.

Straight victory
No rounds lost, finish with a Super move or Arcana Blaze. Can only be done in matches with two or more rounds.
Saki, Maori, Petra, Elsa, Akane, Scharlachrot
As with above, Critical Heart is likely to work, and some characters here are shown as "Special victory 1" on the gallery.

Narrow victory
One or more rounds lost, low hit point, finish with a Super move or Arcana Blaze. Two or more rounds needed.
Konoha, Mei-Fang, Lieselotte, Yoriko, Kira, Zenia, Angelia, Catherine, Dorothy, Nazuna, Eko
Again, Critical Heart may work. I didn't bother with finding out how "low" it should be, but it seems that when your character's hit point is under 25% and the bar is orange, this will work.

Narrow victory (straight)
No rounds lost, low hit point, finish with a Super move or Arcana Blaze. Two or more rounds needed.
Konoha, Mei-Fang
This is a variation of the condition above. Only characters with 2 special conditions seem to have this.

Critical Heart victory
Win with Critical Heart.
Clarice

Special case of Weiß
I'm not confident about the detailed conditions for two special victories of Weiß. I'd just recommend to do exactly as the video, if you want to be sure.


Additional notes

The link animations are shown on the default settings, but if you change the SCREEN settings when you choose a character, this animation might not show. Also, in online matches where the room setting is set as wide screen, the link animations are not shown.