I've always wondered why sprites are 90% anime
My guess, in all honesty, is because when working with such a little place, you have hardly enough room for details to make them look any more realistic than anime. Small eyes to fit the proportion of a head don't normally look right, big eyes make them more noticable for expressions and so on. As for anime designs of hair and clothes and so on. I guess the same thing, small spaces have small room to make the average human hair and such different from the next sprite, so they go to the extreme to make them different. That's just my opinion though.