I've really fallen in love with this spirte/billboard effect. Any gamedevs around to comment on how this might of been achievable? Is it individual pieces rigged onto a skeleton?

It's really fascinating, would love to dig into the models and check it out myself.

I too really like appearance of how the models look and animate, I find it charming in a similar way to stop motion animation in movies like the original Clash of the Titans.

I've theorized about how they created it and heard it's a similar system to what was used in the Actua Soccer games as well: https://www.mobygames.com/game/1190/vr-soccer-96/screenshots/dos/293803/

I think they created a standard rigged 3D character and rendered out each bones associated body part at multiple angles, I'm guessing 8 along each axis and a few to fill gaps in between for what I think would be a total of 26 images per body part. I have some experience doing 8 directions for sprites in Doom like games, It seems similar to that but for each individual bone.