Yeesh, where have I been? Here's my run, a more drastic edit than the first activity's.
Things added to the design for contrast/readability, the borders on the gloves and loincloth for example.
The pose was tweaked, mostly the left leg. The curve running through the left shoulder to the bottom of the loincloth in EreKt's edit provides a good dynamic, was subtler there, but it still did wonders. I attempted to add this to my edit.
More light on dark contrast--see elbow on torso, as in st0ven's edit. Cast shadows reduce the "forced" quality of it while acting as contrast areas themselves.
Color reductions were done while retaining the palette, which was very arcadey, not much hue-shifting--the creative reusage of colors, and the shifting that resulted because of it here and on other edits, not as much, but the sword on this edit does indeed use the same palette as the sprite. Grunge was added to the sprite, the sword especially but it could be too edgy (pun intended). Keeping outlines and borders defined was one intention of the color reduction and the edit altogether, so colors close to black were removed.