Nilufer Hmm, just from this video alone, it's not entirely clear exactly what specific aspects of the current animation you're dissatisfied with. But if I had to guess, I think the issue might stem from the fact that right now, you're trying to express attacks almost exclusively with just one arm, which is ultimately creating a sense of awkwardness.
In the video you mentioned as a reference, during the animation, parts of the character's body flip around, showing them swinging the weapon using their entire body. Also, I think you should pay attention to how crucial the VFX showing the weapon's trajectory is. That character doesn't seem to have any complex mesh settings for its body rotation animations, yet the overall movement looks very smooth. I believe a major reason for this is the clean weapon trajectory. If this is clean, even if the character's movements aren't perfectly smooth and connected, or if there are abrupt direction changes, it doesn't feel awkward.
One approach you might try is to create the key poses first, then figure out how to connect them in between. In the current animation, the anticipation pose of raising the sword and the recoil pose after raising the sword seem ambiguous.
For the wave indicated by the red line, I highly recommend watching the video below to understand it more clearly. Thinking about the wave makes it very easy to see what pose a sequence of movements should start and end with, so it serves as a good indicator:VIDEO
For simplicity, the animated GIF above uses only four frames to show this motion. However, in reality, adding more transitional movements—like the sword's upward swing and the pose before returning to idle—would make it smoother. When actually creating this in Spine, I would pay attention to that detail. However, having a rough plan for movements like this before starting work in Spine makes the process more efficient. If drawing such poses yourself is difficult, you could take several screenshots of existing animations paused at key moments and use those as reference points while creating your own.
