Did drawing sprites on the NES take a lot of creativity?

[Gors]

I don't think that the gap was intentional; it looks too weird to be proposital. If anything, the tile movement should be natural enough, and a whole leg and clothes being ripped apart when throwing/crouching certainly isn't natural.

But your idea about making smooth animation with tiles is well-executed in other games. Joy Mech Fight, for example, uses the 'tiles animated separately' technique to make a very smooth fighting game without overforcing the NES' hardware. Coding apparently takes less space than whole sprites drawn individually, so this helped the game to run steadily and support several characters.

Another famous example would be Konami's Goemon Impact on the SNES games. Goemon Impact's limbs (more noticeably the arms) are made up of several pieces and each has their own animation, giving the impression that Impact has a ton of sprites. Still, this has drawbacks, such as Impact's designs being made of floating balls (ball-limbs are much more easier to animate since spheres require no rotation; but the outcome won't look realistic at all).