I think that what "framey" means is that, while the games RUNS at 60 fps, the characters aren't always animating like that. So, a move may TAKE 12 frames to complete from start to finish, but it may only have, say, 8 frames of animation. All Street Fighter games run at 60 fps on arcade, but the amount of animated frames for a move usually increases with each new game because of fster tech. SFIII has way smoother animations than SFII, even though they both run at the same speed. And I really hope I know what I'm talking about.
So that's what I think people mean when they say the VF animations feel choppy, in a sense, but this isn't a 2D game so it works very differently from sprites. Since it's a 3D animation, it should have animation at every frame filled in. And this is getting into territory I'm not entirely familiar with, but it could be the VF animations do have less key frames. By key frame I mean the major points in the animation.
Imagine animating a ball to move around in a circle in one second, at 60fps. If you animated every frame of that, there should be 60 spots the ball will move over and these form a circle. If, however, you use less dots to make the circle, it looks less circular and more angular. The ball can only move in a straight line, so the more spots you assign it to move over as it travels, the smoother it looks. If it had only had 4 spots, the ball would just move in a square shape.
If a move took 26 frames to execute, but only had 4 key frames, it would look stiff. It doesn't change the speed of the move, just how it looks. At least that's what I think they mean. I really need to sit down and look at the animations to really figure if this is true for the VFers.
