Style Evaluation (Formerly: Non-Sonic Sprites)

[Vipershark]

There is one thing that, even in the development of a new style, that I will like clung to as the ideal and would request be kept in mind during the development of a new style- This style was first created as a modified form of the S3&K sprites, and was designed in mind to be a successor of sorts to that style.


Those two things in mind, what would you suggest for the general style? If providing visuals, I would like to see it demonstrated on 'mainstay' characters (Sonic, Tails, Mario, etc) as this will help me understand the differences and changes more clearly.

Thanks.

One of the other problems that I have with this style is that all of the sprites look really busy. It doesn't happen so much with sonic but you can see it on Tails and Knuckles (and if I remember correctly it's taken to extremes on Amy and Blaze). I'm not sure how to describe it correctly and maybe some else can do it better, but it's like as soon as you go under the head, you try to squish the entire body in a space far too small for it, making what's in the area between the chin and shoes just look like a jumbled blurry mess of pixels. You can make out what stuff is after looking at it for a second, but if the readability is so low that you have to actually try to figure out what you're looking at then it's a problem. Again, I'm not sure how to correctly describe it, so maybe someone else can do it better.

As far as how to improve, here, I made a quick edit to sonic.


I removed the gray highlights and made the blue highlight less contrasty eye-burningly bright blue, changed the white highlight on the skin tone to a skin tone-colored highlight (though that may present an issue with your palette amount, I didn't count) and removed the brightest highlights on the shoes.
edit: In retrospect, my blue highlight is too dark and makes the contrast too low but imo it's still better than the super bright blue in the original.

That didn't fix all of the problems, but I think even with those few minor edits, it makes the sprite look a ton better.