Your palette didn't have enough contrast in it, mine is pretty wacky color wise but it's the values and cool/warm transitions that are important.
You know id honestly love to explain what I did but I kinda just started messing around 
regardless you had the very general shapes ok but some needed some fine tuning and you have to think of the major forms of the figure and how light hits on those( back-rectangular prism, legs-cylinder etc)
I think that makes a lot of sense. When I first started pixelling, I had a serious problem with getting the contrast in a piece where I wanted. Wen you are that far zoomed in and painting one tiny little block at a time the colours have a tendency to stick very close together resulting in a washed-out pallette.
One thing you have shown quite well here which I still need to work on is graduations between warm and cool colours. The more I look at the great pixelart around here, and the closer I look, the more I notice the artists are doing funny things with the colours. It's extra obvious with your version of the Feral Girl right next to the original, but in isolation you just kind of take it for granted and wonder why it looks so dynamic with so few colours!
