It is cartoony, but whether it's
too cartoony depends on the style of the rest of the game. I think this style looks quite nice!
The main deviations from realistic proportions are the small distance between the eyes and the tiny nose that's very far away from the mouth. To make him look younger, you may also want to move the eyes down a bit, as they're rather high up on the head. You could also make his cheek lower and rounder.
The hair is essentially pillow-shaded. There's no sense of volume/form to it, and the large shadows on the fringe (which is typically quite thin) make it look more like peanut butter than hair. Hair lies on top of the head, and with the exception of some particularly voluminous hairstyles, tends to follow the form of the head, just with a bit more thickness. Shade it accordingly. If half the face is in shadow, then a good chunk of the hair should be too.
The shadows/highlights on the face suggest a different light source than the shadows/highlights on the neck and torso. The torso feels very flat because the contrast is so low, the shadows and highlights are barely visible.
The tears don't read well for three reasons:
- The outlines are skin-coloured rather than shirt-coloured, which makes them look like they're skin-coloured objects on top of the shirt, rather than behind/below it. Use the same colour you use elsewhere where the shirt is right on top of skin, like the sleeves.
- They're almost uniformly sized. Try making one a little smaller and the other a little bigger, so they're more distinct.
- They're rather round and bean-shaped. That is plausible and even common, but in a limited space, you probably want to emphasise the "tear" aspect. Try making them smile-shaped, with the fabric hanging down into the hole.
Miscellaneous:
- Objects that aren't shiny, such as his shirt, shouldn't have distinct highlights.
- Add some hue-shifting! Your colours look dull because you're shading with darker versions of the same hue. If the characters spend most of the game outside, where they're likely lit by the sun and a blue-ish sky, try making the highlights warmer and the shadows progressively cooler/purpler.
- Use highlights sparingly. The midtone or the shadows should generally dominate. If the highlights do, then you haven't left enough space for midtones and shadows to do their job in showing the form and main colours of each object. If you feel you need highlights to make the object look light enough, then you probably need to lighten your midtone.
- You have a lot of colours, especially in the face, that are very similar to each other. Try to do everything with as few as possible, and add new colours as you find that you absolutely need them. It makes palette management easier, makes recolours easier, makes smaller files (smaller palette = smaller indexed files), and makes it easier to make each asset coherent with every other asset, as it's easier to make them share colours in a significant way. Plus, the fewer colours there are, the less time you spend switching between colours as you work!
- If you're not going to do a lot of palette swapping, consider reusing colours for multiple objects! For example, the eye whites and highlights are almost identical to the shirt colours, why not just reuse those colours? It feels clever and it helps the image feel unified.
- You don't need to AA 45-degree lines, they read as perfectly smooth without AA.
- AA with colours that are about halfway in value between the two colours you're AAing between. Too dark or too light and it won't look like AA. For example, the outline on the tops of his shoulders looks very thick because the AA is so dark.
- With a style like this, you don't need much (if any) AA at all!
Here's an edit that incorporates most of what I said, just in case I didn't word it well. On the left is an edit of the tears in the shirt, the colours, and some shading/highlights. On the right, I also edited the facial anatomy to be a little bit more realistic, while still keeping the cartoony features, because I think they look good.
