Plokman's Backgrounds and Sprite test ground 2

[SKELTON S. SKELETON]

look; okay; here is the deal, the deets, the gnarly as deets.

You are bad at this style. you've managed to take a style that pops really well:





and make it look flat, bland, and boring. I wouldn't play an earthbound game if you did the sprites for them. The thing is about a style like EarthBound/Mother 3's is that they work by way of simplicity. They focus on key details to convey through the tileset to bring the scene together. The games also have a habit of breaking things up and making them more dynamic. Look at that bottom screenshot; the cliff of the mountain is slightly curved and breaks up the dominance of the plains. The small bits of washed out yellow from the flower give a kind of nice divisive affect to the palette.
Even look at the third screenshot, which is conveying a flat street: the road curves around where the action is frames. there are small splashes of red and yellow to dominate the grey color of the road. the characters details POP like BAZOW, even the small bits in that area of the brown from buildings make things pop out more.

The first thing anyone notices about your mockup is that you obviously used a repeating tile that you very poorly copied randomly to break things up. It doesn't make the grass look dynamic, it makes it look rumpled. There's no detailing done on the hills or cliffs, and they all follow a single, boring, flat line. There's no hint of perspective or vanishing point there; it's literally a completely flat image with no illusion of depth.