Hey Ian - that's pretty awesome. Though at this point if I will redo this character again - I might as well upscale the entire freaking deal to be easily ported to, say 3DS or iOS.
...Honestly, I was hoping people would unilaterally say the cartoony style is more fitting, so I could just finish this project by new years and be done with it. Now that it's all been ripped to shreds and I've been called a pedophile, I'm not so sure I even want to. Not being a big pussy here - just saying it how it is. Up to this point this whole thing has been propelled by a single breath of enthusiasm and what you saw in that video was drawn, animated and coded in just over a week in my spare time. After today the enthusiasm is almost entirely gone. I still want to finish this game - as I promised Mr Carlos Abril - the creator of the original 8-bit game (who BTW signed off on the cartoony version), but now I have an enormous amount of doubt weighing down my vision in addition to all the art I need to redo, not to mention all the art I still need to draw.
...Meanwhile at the depression cave!
<<<Animated the larger walk cycle.
If I look at the video I can feel this enthusiasm you had and I doubt that there is place for improvement, if you keep the whole thing in mind. Of course a change in resolution leads to more awesome graphics, but you are nearly finished and it looks great as it is. Honestly I don't see any point in redoing the whole thing just for the sake of graphics. Use your time to improve the gameplay or make another game instead - and than you can always start with a bigger resolution and then other issues and challenges will occur for sure.
People who will play the game aren't interested in awesome character art - they look at it as a whole thing and they like it or they don't like it - and if they don't like it I think it's because of the gameplay.
The question is always what works and what doesn't work. Well in the image you can see that I think that in the first lines the one with the red frames have the most character. Number 2 of them although has a bigger size, so it isn't fitting to the rest (doesn't work imo although it looks pretty nice).
If you analyze both framed sprites it you will see that the biggest difference in shape is the hair. I made a sloppy copy paste edit with another sprite of the first row to see if it might work with different hair. Maybe it does if you are exactly reproducing the shape of the hair of sprite "2", I was to lazy to try it out, because in my opinion the "1" sprite has a pretty strong shape and just looks good.
Edit: I also recognized that the torso of "1" is quite big compared to your resized edit - this could also change the impression from a young girl to a woman.
To your bigger char: PPD made a magnificient edit, although I think that the female impression of his sprite is caused by the strong tilt of the pelvis ("5") and that the legs are close together.
Your sprite has a static horizontal pelvis and one leg is painfully disconnected to the pelvis. All in all it reminds me more of the classical male strong and static superhero stance which is "guarding" something. Although I also have to say that I really prefer your style of lighting.
Because of this I tried to bring the advantages of both sprites together ("6"). I changed the pose, toned down the knees and the upper arm (they took imo too much of the attention) - although the changes are slight they completely alter the impression. Decide it on your own.
However I'd use this big char as character study for another game and stick with the stuff as it is in the video. Ask people who aren't pixel artists, but played the original game and also ask different people how it looks. I doubt anyone will say it's made bad.
EditII:
quick copy&paste + resize for the character - proportion studies if you want so. The second one uses the legs of the first line resized sprite, the third one resized legs from my PPD&yours together edit.
Maybe it helps too.
