Still alive. Took some time to improve the pixel art of the pillar, although I'm afraid I sort of broke the continuity of the tiles. the middle part still need work.

Welcome, Deejay

No issues with the colours, and I still love your clusters as much. Those beautiful flowers you have, however, make the scene look more artificial (as in garden), imho, especially given how they stick to the grid. The flat, white ones are those that work best imho. They get a bonus for a second variant (be it blue, yellow or orange), but again, mixing all the colours together is something you make in a garden, but that I'd not expect from wild life. As a level designer, I'd likely as you for logs instead of flowers-to-line-up, but I might be happy to pick one of those higher-flowers and use it as a way to make specific locations more memorable.

some experiments:

- variation on how much "higher grass" you have around a tree will reduce how "similar" tree look.
- allowing half-tile alignment on flowers could make them look more organically-placed.
- for some flowers, a 2 or 3-tiles patch might work better than individual items.

Any ideas for NPCs or monsters ?

Kids these days with their immediately responding controls. They've never played Prince of Persia!

Prince of persia had very dedicated mechanics, partly because you never use jumps to overcome spikes or avoid ennemies/thrown hazards. You've got your sword for that. If you try to inject PoP's animation into a mario/sonic/kirby/dukenukem/superprincesspeach-like gameplay, you end up (imho) with a torture engine such as Infograme's Fantasia-on-Genesis.

As part of game design, you usually decide which laws of physics you will comply to, and which one you'll allow the player to break.

As for the animation, I note that the first airbone frame is way too far away from the one on the ground, which makes your animation look like she magically got beamed mid-air.

I'd say you can compensate the lack of anticipation for the jump by a frame that shows how much energy was involved into this sudden dash-in-the-air (there's a lot of this in DragonBall comic), for instance stretching or blurring the foot that just kicked the ground so hard, but bringing all the rest of your character's mass upwards.