I don't see how relaxing one's arms to the sides makes them seem like a butch or a "soilder".  If you wanted an exaggerated feminine stance you could bring the elbows in as much as possible and the hands out a bit.

If you were going for an isometric perspective, I suggest making her torso shorter by eliminating the section between her hips and boobs.  Maybe make her legs shorter, too if they look too long after you make the torso shorter.

Note that my edit has a lot of banding issues.  Banding is something that I'm still trying to overcome.  The most striking example of banding in my edit is in Shinobi's right leg.  The light blue highlight hugs the black outline too closely.  It could be fixed by breaking up the light blue line closer to the bottom.

EDIT:  Here, I did another edit now that I have more time.  I tried to eliminate the banding and changed such a sharp black to a color much easier on the eyes.  I also moved his right arm forearm down a few pixels as I thought it was too long before.

I think the palette's fine.  But your using a lot of pillow shading.


Here I did a quick edit.  It's not a great edit.  It's just to show you what you did wrong.  I changed the highlights and shadows to contour to the shape of the character.
I can't really put it in words so well.  But look at his pants and hair as an example of what I'm talking about.

Also, your palette was a bit messy.  I know you tried to only use the colors above his head, but you actually used 32 colors, some of them appearing only once.


Try to work on yours again.  I didn't work very hard on the edit because I have to go somewhere soon.  So I know you could do better than me if you tried harder.

That reminds me of the cartoon Street Sharks.  I lol'd at the robot, samurai gold fish.  The sharks' sprites are kinda cute with the nubby hands and feet. 

I think the squid's tentacles could use some work, though.  some are fatter than others, they sometimes bend at sharp angles, and some are wider at the end than at the base.