Non-humanoid hand-to-hand combat with different rigs

Let's say I am creating a Street Fighter (or Tekken, my personal favorite) kind of game, with non-humanoid characters that have quite different rigs, e.g., four-legged, bipedal with four arms, worm-like... you name it!

I am wondering what the best way might be to create fighting animations. To keep it simple, let's assume each character has only one attack, e.g., a four-arm punch, and there is no way to block an attack.

• Problem 1: For an attacker's attack to look realistic, the attacker's animation should depend on the defendant, e.g., the four arms should aim differently whether the defendant is tiny or huge.

• Problem 2: For a defendant's reaction (being attacked) to look realistic, the defendant's animation should depend on the attacker, e.g., a model won't react the same to a punch and being grabbed and thrown.

So, using animation clips only (made with Maya for instance), if I had 2 characters, I would need 2 clips per character (assuming they can't fight with copies of themselves): attack and reaction--so 4 clips. If I had 3 characters, I would need 4 clips per character: 2 attacks and 2 reactions--so 12 clips. And so on:

n x 2 x (n - 1) clips, where n is the number of characters

That's 112 animation clips for 8 characters... too much!

So I'm thinking about using Inverse Kinematics (IK) for attacks, targeting named bones present in all rigs, and ragdolls for reactions. For non-humanoid IK, I would use Final IK from the asset store. Would you do the same? If not, what would you do?