Oh and since no one every clarified it (probably because I'm talking to myself in this thread), the way attack animations change is this:
You upgrade your attacks like usual in a SRW game
500cash first bar, 1000 second, 25,000 by the final 5th one.
But when you upgrade to the final bar the attack either changes to a new one or ranks up the current attack and drops back to 0 bars. If it's a rank up, the attack improves. For instance Cybuster's Akashic Buster attack goes from range 1 to range 1~3 and ups the damage. Plus the animation gets beefed up with more parts to the attack. OTOH for attacks that level up like Cybuster's basic sword slice, they get turned into an entirely new attack which means the stats DECREASE but the new attack is better and has higher damage potential when fully upgraded.
Also since the ranked up attack or new attack drop the upgrade bar back to 0, the costs drop down again too. So Akashic Buster costs 25,000 to go to level 5, and then 200 cash for level 6. So you can REALLY upgrade the damage potential fast on a rank up attack. Or with attacks that become new attacks you can get them back to the strength of the previous attack quickly since it's cheap for the first bunch of upgrade bars.
BUT since it's a SRW game and most players know you don't get all that much money, you're not going to be maxing many attacks in the game to open up the next rank or a new attack. By the end of part 1 I had upgraded two on Cybuster. But then since unlike a normal SRW game where you have 40 units to upgrade, in this game you have like...10 (or 4 actually good ones), it's likely you'll focus on just a couple units and actually hit the next attack on their upgrades.