Well... one tile could have always used a little love.

If I remember correctly its used after something has been removed from the ground like a rock or plant.
I'm not sure if it has multiple variations to match the ground color or if it uses transparency because I couldn't find a reliable sprite rip.

The past month or two I've been studying "Game feel" for a personal project.
(Below is a poorly segmented and unrevised rant about indie games, sorry :/)
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Today I thought I'd take a break from tweaking variables and mashing buttons to play some flash game oldies to see what I could learn from some of my favorite games.  As you could expect my younger self wasn't as good at perceiving the difference between a game that was "fun" from a game that was the "funnest thing posted today". I played though some truly clanky, buggy, jank looking games that I only managed to get through based on nostalgia alone. Obviously there were some gems (Heli-attack is still amazing) and games still preserved immensely by their pixel art's infinite resolution but overall you can really see where the indie games of that generation fall short from games of this generation.

Wait hold on! I get what your thinking. Those older games were under heavy limitations and in addition to slow computers actionScript# didn't help optimization much either. Well I argue that you don't need a fancy GPU and a programming language faster than assembly to make a game that's fun, a game that feels good, or game that has gameplay that holds up when you play it again in the future.

I've been talking smack about the older games but they definitely had their own strengths. Back then awesome developers would create a lot of their games as a hobby for their community and fans would be inspired and develop their own. Now the indie market has expanded and as we all know has become flooded with poor quality games people want to charge for. I'm not saying that these developers don't deserve money for their games I'm just asking where'd the love go? Back then I could see that the new developers would try to make their games better with each release so theirs could be like the developers that they were inspired by now a lot of developers want to just stuff so much content into the store you end up accidentally buying it during a sale.

Are indie games even indie? Most of them have publishers and a company name.

Even with the ever growing avalanche of crushed dreams, stolen money, and bad games the good games that stand out REALLY STAND OUT. Thanks to the markets expansion indie games have been better than ever. Even though there is an eternal increase in bad games the amount of good games coming out has had a large increase as well. The best games are no longer just Dōkutsu, Alien hominid, and idk hamster ball? I can just open my steam game library and any indie game in the list will be better than those (okay maybe not better than cave story).

Anyways I've lost track of what I was saying. It's 6am and I haven't slept yet...zzz
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(End of rant)

tl;dr
If you are a new game developer and you want me to not hate your game please either use non-pixel based coordinates for movement or multiply your movement speed for diagonal directions by sqrt(2). Here's a diagram.

Seriously guys. There is so many resources available online now. No excuses.

Not sure why but Cluster hype out of nowhere. I decided to rework some old files for about 20 mins to see how it works.

I think 2 is the best. The body is less broad than the others giving a little more clarity to the characters gender.
But I'm sure you can make something even better than all 3 of these if you study some classic sprites from top-down games.

(2x, meh) (Paint's 8x zoom doesn't cut it anymore on my retina screen )

Try'na get better at blocking out characters, poses, etc. One day I might break and actually draw something.
Does anybody know some god tier fighting game artist who never picked up a pencil?