@Mr. X: You were greatly attentive to detail I must say; it's hard to compress a character like Magic Man then render him from several different angles, and I think you pulled it off pretty well. Personally I would prefer this adaptation to the Japanese one, even if it scales wrong, just because I think it looks a little more stylistically fitting with the rest of the NES masters.
Screwed around with the sprite a little bit- not great by any stretch of the imagination but I thought I'd show the product of my tinkering, if it might inspire you or anything. Any way you
cut the cards (ha..ha) he would be a bitch to animate.
Some of the changes I made are stylistic preference (tried to give the hat a more relaxed shape, and I made the size of the gem on his staff the same size from each pose).
I think for the diagonal view, the gaudy pose from the game works well, but yeah it's hard to make work with the N/S/E/W directions; so I kinda dumbed them down into more generic but vaguely reminiscent positioning.
