Megalith Online Art

[ZoSo]

I hope this goes in this forum, if i understood the rules correctly.. it should.

Well this game is basically a Online RPG im working on, it uses pretty much brush art + pixel art. Its a quite retro game.
I could post the Tilesets, but ive had some problems with people stealing them and posting them as their own.

A video : http://orpgcreation.com/recordings/Untitled/Untitled.html

Some previews :

[Ai]

* You have some visual priority issues. The guy is SO sharp compared to the tiles, he pops out so much he doesn't seem to be standing on the ground. IMO the way to fix this is to add some harder edges to the tiles where appropriate.
This is compounded by:

* Varying fuzziness of tiles . eg the wiggly trees come across significantly more out of focus than the pine trees, so when you have both on the screen, the sense of depth becomes confused. Just how shiny the pinetrees appear also makes visual behaviour a little odder.

* The slashing animation is seriously too slow. Like... WAY too slow. It doesn't look like a slash cause I can easily see the fadeout.
(This could just be a browser timing issue though) IMO you have basically two options for animating slashes in games in general:
 1. Exaggerate the movement involved in making a slash so you can slow it down a little and the player easily notices that they are slashing (eg. Aladdin)
 2.  Simplify the movement into basically one or two frames, slashing, with a sudden twist of the body typically, and optionally recovery. (eg Strider)
There's also the actual transference of force. I think FF shows this by having the character do the slash motion but the slash effect show up on the enemy -- obviously not applicable here yet..

* The actual sprites are pretty damn good, esp. in shading consistency. Reminds me of Tales of Phantasia, actually. (except for the guy, who's very reminiscent of a character from Chaos Engine.)

[ilkke]

True, there are priority issues, but I think that the characters, items etc should be sharp as hell compared to most of background. It serves the gameplay well.

To make it all fit together visually, tho, I'd recommend selectively sharpening bits of background, like tips of the tall trees and other bits that are far above the ground level.
Also, I'd make the bits at ground level, like the bases of the palms or cacti, blend in a bit more with the ground.
This is commonly done in traditional drawing, for instance using thicker strokes to denote boundaries between surfaces with larger differences in depth.
When you look at your tree, it's top is much further from the ground seen behind it than the tree's base.