The perspective is extremely inconsistent - some parts appear to be viewed from the side; others from high up. With the castle walls, you've even used both viewpoints in the same object!
It's also made worse because nothing is shaded and there are far too many black lines everywhere, so everything looks very flat.
This is one advantage of using isometric graphics - it forces you to use a consistent perspective, and makes shading easy
You're completely right Sketchy, all the perspectives are inconsistent. I'll copy my .mfa and start redrawing stuff to see if I like the isometric look.
Isometric is great, but animated isometric sprites tend to make your head spin.
I actually feel that if you just used the 3/4ths perspective as on the castle on the other buildings, you'd be just fine. While it's not technically a consistent perspective, it's still widely used and still pleasing to the eye.
If I were you, I'd get yourself a copy of GIMP and do your art in that, you can get access to tools that will make your life easier (layers, especially layers), and you don't have to make a copy of your .mfa every time you feel you need to update the style.
Taking a closer look at your image, you do add shading in there, though I think you should re-think your color choices. Another reason to get GIMP, you'll have access to a more intuitive HSB color picker. Take a look at a quick re-vision of your castle I whipped up:
First of all, notice how I slightly varied up each brick, I wouldn't recommend just starting off trying to draw the bricks in that shape, I actually just made solid bricks like yours, then varied them up from there. Also notice the ground, how it is cut away to simulate the grass.
Now back to the coloring. Notice how it has a slight tint, it's not perfectly grey. Also (and I used to do this when I first started doing art), I would simply darken/lighten the colors for my shading. This is where your HSB color picker helps out a ton. In case you don't know, HSB stands for Hue, Saturation and Brightness. Obviously, when you shade, your shades get lower on the Brightness, and your highlights go higher. It's also good to point out that your shades also gain more saturation, and highlights gain less. Finally, your darker colors tend to move it's hue towards Green, while highlights move towards Blue. For this particular piece, I started with a red Hue at 0, the saturation at 11 and the Brightness at 51. For the shade, I moved the hue up to 30 (drifting towards green) the Saturation up to 22 and the Brightness down to 33. The Highlights, I moved the hue all the way up to 338 (if you think of the hue as always repeating, going down from 0 sets it back up to 355, of course, drifting the color towards blue), the saturation decreased to 6, and the brighness increased to 68.
On top of that, the layering made this really easy. I simply drew the half of the front wall, made a copy of the layer and moved that copy up as far as I wanted it, drew half of the wooden scaffolding in a new layer between those layers, with the walls on the side, made a new layer for the half of door, then simply copied the entire thing and fliped it's axis. Now, if there's anything on it I don't like, I can simply change it without having to re-do the whole image or futzing with trying to carefully erase part of it, redraw the back of it, then put the new image in front.
Photoshop has these nifty tools called "slices", where you can literally slice up the image, and save each individual slice as it's own image, which gives it the same name with an incrimental number on it (makes it hella easy for importing animations into MMF2, simply just pick the first image and then tell it to import as an animation). I'm sure GIMP has tools like this.
Just make sure when you import the images back into MMF2 and you aren't using anti-aliasing around the edges, save the image as a .png8 (it might also help to make the background pink), so you don't have to sit there and remove the alpha layer to everything you try to import. (also remember that alt+Clicking on the image with the actionpoint/hotspot tool, even on the quick settings on the side, will set the actionpoint/hotspot for every image in your animation)
/rambling
EDIT: Sketchy has a really kick ass article on importing animations using box mode. It might take you longer to set up than the slice tool (since you can set guides using the rulers, then automatically make slices from the guides that stay there for as long as you have the image), but the advantage being that you can set the individual hotspot and action point for each frame, which is pretty badass. Comment edited by Oh hey, Chloe! on 10/15/2012
Just for kicks I did one of the shops in that perspective. Not too big of a fan of the thatched roof, but meh, didn't want to spend tooooo much time on it.
I'm not saying isometric is better - it just guarantees consistent perspective, which isn't always easy to get. And they could look nice too:
It may be a matter of taste, but I think the bit about highlights being more blue is backwards - it's shadows that appear more blue, while highlights are more yellowish (assuming the light source is the sun).
My favourite article on pixelart: http://petesqbsite.com/sections/tutorials/tuts/tsugumo/chapter5.htm
I think Paint.NET would be more beginner-friendly than The GIMP, and can do 99% of the same stuff. Either would be a vast improvement over MMF2's picture editor though.
I'm not sure what the two types of shop are, but they need to look a lot more different from one another - just having a slightly different sign is not enough (especially when you're targeting the small screens of iPhones & iPads).
"It may be a matter of taste, but I think the bit about highlights being more blue is backwards"
Correct, this is what I learned as well. Oddly, I keep running into situations where the opposite looks better, perhaps I'm targeting the wrong colors. This is why having a paint bucket that can instantly change a single color over an entire image is great so you can keep changing them as much as you want, and it's also important to keep in mind to not keep the same hue and saturation with your shading.
Absolutely - once you try a proper graphics app, you'll never go back to MMF2's picture editor.
Having a wide range of effect filters is really useful too.
But if I work with sumo, how can he improve himself?
I have confidence in Sumo! If you need inspiration, just check out the early art on my project page and compare it with my recent art. Sure I've taken a class or two, but nothing you can't learn on the internet.
that was the same story with me and playing guitar. I was terrible, started playing with this guy who had been playing for like a billion years, and i improved a hell of a lot. shame i'm still terrible tho
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Sumo148 
I'm just not that good at pixel art. I'll try out your suggestions though, thanks
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