Style Evaluation (Formerly: Non-Sonic Sprites)

[Vipershark]

I never really wanted to get into it because I wasn't sure if I was the only one who felt this way, but seeing somebody else comment on the overabundance of shading (aka the plastic look) confirms that I'm not the only one who noticed it and I'm sure there are many others that did as well.

To be frank, it's ugly and makes all of your sprites look bad.

For example, the light gray color in Mario's mustache is just... well, it's way too bright. It sticks out and is really obvious and clashes with the rest of the sprite. Mustaches aren't shiny, so why is Mario's? That one single white pixel in the middle of the blue is the same way. Why is it even there? It sticks out like a sore thumb and its placement really makes no sense to me. It just looks completely unnecessary, almost as if you accidentally placed the wrong color pixel but didn't catch your mistake or something. Not only that, but the highlight on the mustache just flat out doesn't make sense. It appears that the light source is almost... under(???) Mario while his hat and clothes are lit from the upper right corner.

I'm not trying to come across as angry or rude or anything, but I really can't put it any other way than the plastic look simply makes your sprites look bad. The shading just makes no sense. In a lot of places it's almost as though you're throwing colors and shades on the sprites just to have them there, and you add so many colors in such small spaces that you might as well just be pillow shading. It just comes across as... really amateurish, I guess.

Note that this doesn't just apply to Mario; I feel this way about all of the ModGen sprites (including and especially Sonic). I think it's really cool that you want to put a bunch of different things in one unified style, but when the style itself is ugly, you might want to rethink what you're doing because it just brings everything down.