Oh Adam. About the whole rules thing, honestly I never thought I was interpreting the rules, just doing research, you never specified do boktai style like THIS screenshot. you said Boktai, I looked up boktai and I said what I saw here.
I...dont know anyone else, but sometimes I think a little more precision or...rather restriction from the get go would be good, I tend to analyze everything and well...end up doing things like this :p
Ok this is the aproach I had with these.
when I looked up Popeye sketchs I saw 2 ways I could take this, a faithful to design and proportions somewhat tridimensionalized version OR a sprite that tries to be as inky as the sketches, but changes all the proportions while keeping the likeness
This is the "tridimensonalized" edition, in 48x48 32x32 16x16


Inky Ver, I sorta raymanized 'ol popeye here.
Boktai

Adult, Cooking up child right now

kay, that is it.
BTW, for creative enterprises like this, I belive one always does better with as varied refferences as one can get so...I thought I'd show this to u guys, even though it's a bit off Boktai style because it is a megaman char in Boktai
http://www.megaman-sprites.com/sprites/Classic/boktai2/Adam......I dont know exactly what you have in mind when you say pixel skill...do you expect certain elements like Selout when you say that?
MY GOD SCHU, leave something for everyone else to do , really really impressive freestyle, I feel like redoing my stuff after that monster you put there, but I've really got a lot of stuff to do
Faceless, I love how tridimensional your Boktai Popeye feels, that sort of perspective is really hard to do, I think sometimes even the Boktai spriters cant handle it, but you have it spot on