Love the feedback overall! Thanks for the response. The CRT thing is interesting and explains some of why they did it that way, but I still feel a little iffy on that being a reason not to still imitate that style. Maybe I don't read these forums enough, but I've never heard anyone go back to Chrono Trigger on modern devices and say, "Dang, this game is ugly." In fact, quite the opposite! Usually people talk about how well the style has held up overall, and a lot of the sites I referenced to learn it still hold them up as ideal references. So I'm torn about how to proceed then, because this is a style I really enjoy and appreciate, in terms of whether to shift to a more modern approach to spriting.

"The only real issue is your color choices -- you need some sense of hue-shifting (i.e. shifting toward the color of the light source for highlights and shifting toward the color of shadows for the shadows). You'll want to also use some blues in the gray walls and purples in the red floors to show that there's some semblance of night outside." - This is still very confusing to me as a non-artist. Is there a good source to read on how to use color scaling in this way more effectively? There are some purples in the floors, for example, but obviously not enough.

"Finally, you'll want to establish a light source. Go look at one of the maps of Crono's room both before and after opening the window in his room. That should give you a hint of how to light an area with tiles." - did the tiniest bit of this with the crates, but I'll go back to the old masters again for some more inspiration.   This is pretty much of a first draft of everything, and lighting is on the list of things to study still, so thanks for pointing out a good source.

The 8x8 tiles is something I'm working toward, but in this case I'm going to be using 16x16 as a base for most of the things in this scene and then modifying them into different 16x16 tiles. Only one or two places on here where I did that, but I've definitely seen the value in switching to an 8x8 approach eventually. I'm not as fluid as I need to be when composing scenes yet (obviously as this is my first one ever), but I'll get there eventually.

Again, thanks for the notes! Still not 100% sure how to handle the washed out effect...hmmm. Will have to take a step back while I reconsider my global approach to it anyway I guess.

I think I fixed the pre-zooming and gridlines issues, but when I try your format, it just leaves a blank space in my post. What might I be doing wrong?

Have some questions about the other parts of your post later, gotta run atm. I'll try your formatting right below this.