Vipershark sucks at spriting

[Vipershark]

WOAH WHAT IS THIS I SPRITED ANOTHER THING

so that gigantic butt starsock was hogging all the spriting fun with her tugs entry and so for revenge i got a giant burst of motivation and decided to try my hand at spriting something again

I decided to use the in-battle sprites from the Demikids games as practice. As you're about to see, they're pillow shaded and banded to hell and back, have insane amounts of dithering, and terrible palettes with insane color counts, among other things. Honestly, I can't believe that an officially liscensed game has such abysmal spritework.

Because these were just practice, I placed some rules on myself so I'd know exactly what I needed to do.
Basically, I had to fix the shading, color choice and optimizations, and make the sprite look better (or at least professional) overall WITHOUT CHANGING THE LINEART WHATSOEVER. I can change the color of the lineart (as in, sel-out) but I cannot change the lineart itself or color outside the lines; in other words, basically a silhouette-type thing.



You can see how I progressed from the original to the current one, with the top obviously being the original, the next three being my edits, and the bottom one being the current one.
Unfortunately I can't claim all the credit though, as Starsock was a HUGE help with showing me the right way to go and actually did her own helpful edit to get me started. In other words, this was basically kind of a collaborative effort, though probably 65% or so of the sprite was completely done by me after Starsock helped me with getting started.

Anyway, I'm looking for C+C on the color choice and optimizations, shading, sel-out, and AA since I didn't change the lineart at all.
More specifically, I'm looking mostly for C+C on the blade itself and the closest hand.

HELPFUL EDITS WELCOME.

Bonus: Starsock ended up adding to her own edit and taking it in a more detailed direction, heh

(obviously a wip)
I like it.