So let's get back to fighting game sprites because they are a hundred times more stylistically interesting than Pokémon.
In 2004, ex-fighting game giants SNK decided to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the King Of Fighters series by releasing
The King Of Fighters '94 Rebout, a remake of the first King Of Fighters game with newly drawn, higher-resolution sprites. The only problem was that the game kind of sucked for two reasons - it played awful, and it looked awful.
SNK decided to keep the general fighting engine and characters identical to the original game, which posed a bit of a problem - it isn't that fun to play anymore. The game feels much less refined and unpolished compared to later instalments in the series, and every character in the game was missing several of their signature special moves which were added in later King Of Fighters games.
While the graphics, although they were all re-drawn in higher resolution, SNK chose to redraw them based on the characters' sprites from
The King Of Fighters '94. This poses another problem, as the sprites were also not very good - every character in the original game have had their sprites revamped at least once by SNK, showing how their artists improved in their style and skill. As an example, compare here Joe's sprite from
The King Of Fighters '94, and two revamps later, his sprite as it appears in
The King Of Fighters '99:
So, I decided to redraw a better sprite in a style similar to KOF style to see how the game might've looked with sensible design choices:
Comparison of Joe from KOF '94, KOF '94 Rebout, KOF '99 and my attempting at re-drawing