I won't be of much help here, as usual, but why do people feel uncomfortable with characters that don't have a dark outline? In some point and click games (like MI, MI2, Indy, Pop1 and 2, etc), I actually liked it that there were no yoshi island-ish black outlines around them. The bg's were, at times, very detailed--sometimes, even more than the sprites themselves. To me, since the characters will be moving anyway, they won't really merge into the background. Besides, looking at it realistically, we don't have black outlines around us X).