Technique Question - Modular Spriting

[GrooveMan.exe]

Note: I reserve the right to post this here soley because it's a question directly relating to Spriting and Pixel Art; not covered by an existing board or topic. I do not condone haphazard question or request threads to be posted in S&PA

By Modular Spriting I mean large ingame objects made of smaller sprites rotated. The technique is used in the Metal Slug games, the recent Super Robot Wars games, and in some recent Castlevanias.

There are 2 main topics I'd appreciate discussed relating to Sprite Models:

- How do they compare to spriting an object as one unit? Does it increase or decrease the difficulty and/or the time to complete a piece? Does the size of the resuting object become a factor?
- How easily is this kind of spriting method implimented into a game? Having a lot of moving parts may be a hefty load to get animated and interacted with in game. Would assembling and animating outside of the game engine be a viable tactic?