I vastly prefer the wider screen and the wider field of view, it's way more immersive, imo. I know you want to be accurate to the original game, although I feel this is one of those things that should be dropped. Playing a narrow cellphone resolution on my widescreen TV makes me feel claustrophobic and wishes for something more. It also reminds me that this originates from a flip phone game and feels dated from 15 years ago. I think there are many times when being too purist is a bad thing, sort of like how some fans get hot and bothered over literally any change the FF7 remake had over the original ("how dare Aerith's dress is more of a white tone instead of a hot pink tone! Rawrrrr!").
The main reason why people would play our version instead of Richter's is basically for a visual novel (for now, unless we get skippable optional battles as you said), higher fidelity feel with some better graphics, so we're already sort of appealing to the "higher graphics" crowd anyway.
The sprite actually looks good! Which sort of shocks me a bit because I've never actually done anything like this before. And yeah, as you said, they're a liiiiitle big and maybe should be reduced about 80% in height. If you pause at 9 seconds in the video when Cissnei is standing by the window, I think the best height would be where the top of her head reaches the top of the window.
Do you know if there's a way to disable 8 directions for now? The swerve between 8-9 seconds bugs me, and 8 directions is more of a stretch goal for now. Doing all the sprites in the game for me is daunting enough, but something I can do. 8 directions of top of that makes me feel overloaded.
https://www.mediafire.com/view/pr7kw61aukgn372/CissneiEdit.psd/fileHere's an edited psd where the fourth sprites are flipped, so her running up/down animation should look more even.
For now, I think I'm going to skip Reno and do the Soldier/Avalanche guys next. Reno has a lot of unique animations (for example, he has an attacking sprite and unconscious-on-floor sprite) and he carries a rod behind his back. I don't want to betray quirks like that so stuff like that will take a bit of effort.
I know there's going to be times where we're both busy. I think ideally, we could try to release the final game before the end of the year. And of course, I don't want to bottleneck you, so you can add chibi sprites as placeholders like you've been doing. I can pump out a spritesheet about once a week, so by the end of the year, I'd have 25 sheets done at that rate which should be enough to cover the whole game or so.