Maybe eishya caught some of this stuff but I'm seeing these problems, so I wanted to do a take on it...

There are a few things in this crop I messed with here.



One wall I made a full out brick texture, skewed. Did a rough tiling job. More realistic way but time consuming and the detail can be distracting, depends.

Other wall I winged it, it's a stripped down version of this. This is totally broken and won't tile w/o cleanup, just wanted to show alternative that fits in more with yours.

A good key to this (2nd texture): Borders are a cheap way to add detail. It's one of the places where the contrast is, contrast is what eyeballs get drawn to, power of suggestion. You can have wastelands of blank space, add 2 details around borders and it can work. But a lot of your borders are flat. Look at what I did w/ the weeds between grass and bricks. So something is missing is there and transition tiles like this probably are gonna fix it.

IDK if it's a broken-down projects (possible) but if it is this there's a lot more I would change too. You can make it look rough but still cartoony.

Edited a tree. Work on your trees bro!

Not a lot to say about this one, palette captured the original games pretty well. Link sprite is a little hard to read but I don't know what perspective you're going with here (top-down or side) so it's hard to give details.

Will there be more mockups?

Oh, so the problem with my first sprites was that they followed a straight line?

That's a rough approximation of what I meant but there's loads more to it than this. You work out what is different about each guy and stretch stuff like the stance and proportions to fit it as much as the style allows. (if you see consistently you can't stretch this, that's an extremely weak style that you should change or face the wrath of the art gods.) That's still not covering 1% of it tho, indeed you can't cover most of it with words.

EDIT:


Check the silhouettes of these against yours and the color count also, see how you can tell these dudes apart. That's pretty important for players too.

Apologies if the points of my post ATM are not coming thru, they're pretty rushed now, such is life.

Was gonna say this animation could definitely use some staggering. What I had in mind was pretty advanced stuff tho, transitioning between last tweens and extreme poses (probably putting some examples here)

Is the mask not changing angles intentional? I mean it totally works in the idle loops like it's staring us down, but wonky in the rest of the anim.