Pocket Fighter Style figure (WIP, C+C)

[Dessa]

So, a friend started up a big ol' game project (who knows how solid it is, but I need an excuse to do a lot of pixels), and she plans a fighter of sorts with chibi, pocket/gem-fighter-esque sprites.  For now, she just wants to see what sort of stuff I can produce.

I'm working from a reference given by someone in the project with much better traditional media skills than I, here:



This is what I came up with:

Not a bad start, I don't reckon, but I know it could be better.
I suspect that this will be displayed at 2x, FYI

Issues I see: 
-In my image, Jetta's shoulders/hips/feet don't quite seem to line up, but I feel like they match the reference pretty well, where they DO seem to line up.  Perhaps it's in my shading?

-My face doesn't quite match the reference.  Its curves in the jaw especially don't seem to match up.  I suspect that I shouldn't quite expect pixels to curve like that, but I do wonder if I could do this differently.

-The boots look rather muddy.  Would it help to use a contrast color in there to define the lines a bit?  If not, what else could I try?

-The linework is a bit harsh in a few places, I'm just noticing, but that shouldn't be too hard to fix.

Thanks in advance.

Update:

No comments or critique, but w/ev.  The work goes on!  I've messed with this enough.  I'll call it final, I suppose:

->
Added dress detail, and brightened the outline colors a bit, which softened them a bit.  Dropped a colors that didn't add much, particularly with the glasses, which I made blue instead of the greyish that they were.  Then I yellowed the eye whites a touch for contrast.

[YellowLime]

It looks pretty good, I found it hard to find possible mistakes... especially since the reference is too big, and your sprite too small, and also way down 

But if there's anything I can say about it, it's that the lightning seems sort of weird.



(hope I didn't mess up the ratio, because I resized manually)

On the second one, I "fixed" the lightning on her hands (assuming light comes from the left)

On the third one, I further shaded her left arm, as if her torso prevented the incoming light to reach said arm. I don't know if that was your intention, so that's why I made the second one.

In any case, I felt that her right arm was being lit from below. The shaded knuckles seemed off to me...

Hope I helped 

Edit: I just discovered that you can enlarge images when you click on them. 

[guskooyman]

I made an edit of this, but I might have changed a little too much. It doesn't exactly have the Pocket Fighter style anymore.
Here's your original and my edit side by side:


And an animated gif:


I reduced the color count from 15 to 12, raised the contrast, and changed the hues a bit.
Just my opinion, but I thought you might have tried to follow the concept art a little too closely. So I changed the hair slightly, and changed the perspective on the legs. I also tried to make her face look slightly more feminine, but it didn't really work out the way I wanted.
My edit obviously isn't perfect, but hopefully it'll help you out a bit or just give you some ideas.