Alright, restart done, codecs work, I'm letting GENS renderer this avi and I'll give you the rundown in the meanwhile. First of all, welcome to pixelation! This isn't a place like other places, it's a place of magic!
Let's talk about what a video game sprite does. Before we discuss how it is as a collection of color, we need to discuss its quality in gameplay terms. The first and most important thing a sprite must do, aesthetic considerations aside, is read well. So the player knows what he's looking at and how it works, which is the business end of the pike, so on. In this term how does your current sprite above fare? Pretty well! I can tell it's a girl with an anime haircut, holding an elaborate weapon, that she is in her battle stance and that she's wearing bright purple armor. This is good, a lot of game art doesn't even arrive to this much. However there is much more you can do with this. Let's talk pose, is this a grounded stance? It looks a bit wobly to me, and she seems to be leaning forward also. I think if you try to hold this pose in real life, you'll fall down. It's mid-squat but the legs do not seem to suggest the needed curve so her center of gravity is supported. This is a common effect, she seems to be sitting on an invincible stool. I changed the pose to something more grounded. The upper body now, though how she holds the weapon is probably how you'd hold this weapon, is this a battle-worthy weild? When she thrusts forward with that thing, do her arms have the space to extend the thrust properly? Is her body going to move forward with it, giving it the necessary momentum to pierce? Furthermore, as in any martial arts school, she'd be in a sideways position relative to the enemy and will have her fore leg and fore arm in between them to maximise cover and minimise space she can get attacked in. Is that limp fore arm in a good position to deflect strikes? I pulled the hand up and coiled it, ready to both deflect and extend with the necessary force to pierce. The far arm was also tucked in and made a sensible length, as in your version the length suggested reaches far below the knee. I pulled the whole upper body 3 pixels to the northwest so she seems in balance and has the room to thrust forward if needed be.
That's it as far as stance critique goes. These are the issues that elevate a sprite from just being there, to feeling purposeful. The player will not appreciate these things consciously, but he will unconsciously. He will leave the game with an impression that the sprites and presentation was vivid, realistic and alive, though it's just a bunch of pixels, and the aesthetic is relatively safe-anime. That labouring in the fine aspects of the craft gives your art a level of class, regardless of what aesthetic you're going for.
As far as shaping goes now. In this sprite, how big do you think a pixel is? Since an arm is made of 5x5 pixels, let's go with 5 cm per pixel or so. That's a big ratio, and suddenly a single pixel has great strength to alter a shape by being or not being there, being a pixel lower or higher, so on. Groups of pixels have even more power, and their shapes do most of the work to suggest volume, contour and texture. Speaking of texture on this size, you did well to simply forget about straight-ahead rendering it and instead implying it. There's no sense to try this for such a small size. Instead we have simple planes, lit and rendered according to their volumetric qualities. How do you fare on this respect? Passably good, but it needs a bit of work. Let's talk about banana-legs. Is that a shape you want for a leg? Does it suggest the firm stance of a warrior? An abstraction of course is necessary at this size, you can't very well go in and pixel toes and veins, but you can certainly imply a heel in there. The heel is the most powerful part of the lower leg, and all you will do as a pikeman will be to plant them down and thrust from them straight to your upper body. Likewise, this whole sprite is too 'round', too 'soft'. Not a warrior, but an anime plush toy. You shade everything equally, almost a bit pilloshaded, so the gal seems flat. There is a severe lack of contrast and depth to this piece, and this is amended by not treating an 'arm' in your brain as 'flat color, then outline it, then put an even highlight on it' but as a collection of blobs of color, shaped with intent, where pieces of them will cast shadows on other pieces and where your biggest strength is implying volume by going from dark, to light. You do this wonderfully on the skirt for examle, where the body and spear cast a shadow, but the arms are a bit messy, and the legs are not volumetrically considered well enough. You'll see in my edit that both far leg and far arm are darker than the fore ones, and that I tightened up all the shading. Your shading is noisy, you haven't spent enough time with your pixels, you don't know yet what they can do. There is no shortcut to this, you have to do what you are doing for a few years, and then you'll look back on your pixel art today and you'll go 'jesus christ, that's some careless pixel placement'. Again, careful a single pixel placement means nothing to the consciousness, but it's a cumulative effort and eventually the subconsciousness knows it is looking at something robust, intentful and real. Not real as in 'realistic', real as in achieved, reached an end, serviced an end. Final.
And a few words about pixel art tricks. Look at your palette entries next to the art and look at mine. Do you see waste of resources? Do you see lack of control? Do you see lack of intention? These things are the bane of the medium. It must not only look like pixel art. It must be pixel art. Otherwise it's just wastefully 'retro' "omg it looks like snes art, my nostalgia, I can feel it swelling up!". That is meaningless and best left to the intellectually bankrupt. What matters is that it has the grace of what almost a decade of continued research and application of the modern form of pixel art has to lend it. We don't need to do this, in the era of millions of colors and 3d, yet we do. Why is that? To make the art real, to make it reach its desired end. Tighten up your color usage. Travel the whole range of contrast available to you, from black to white. Later on you'll say 'you know what helm, fuck that, this piece needs an etherial quality so I won't use pure black, and my top shade will be a bright gray' and more power to you. This piece here doesn't need an etherial quality, nor was such intended. Right now the colors you're using confuse the forms, though not too much. Close one eye and defocus the other and look at your piece and mine (might have to zoom them back a bit to do so) and think about which of the two reads best. You don't need too many hues to work with for game art, what you need is strong contrast to portray depth and shape. NES art is in some ways so much more Final than the blurry snes art that followed. If you cannot do it with 3 colors, you will not be able to do it with 16 or 256 when it comes to small sprites. The smallest the more difficult.
Think about the power of the outline in these sizes. Look how I am separating the spear from the body behind it. That might be for you a useful effect, yet you don't want full outlnies all around the sprite, and you definitely don't want that selout madness that capcom does because it kills puppy souls, so what do you do? I use light-dependent outlines. This means that since the implied lightsource here is above, the darker parts of the outlines are below. On the top outlines tend to almost dissolve into the bodies of color they're contouring, but not completely. If you check my piece against any background color you want, from the pleasingly vague pure black to the warshest pure white you'll see all the parts still read and there are no annoying jaggies. This is kinda difficult to get a hold of, but it's worthwhile.