Also a DF fan, and I agree. Even his example of a "popular" retro-styled game looks better than his personal examples. The fact that he doesn't note that is telling It's not just the style, there's an element of taste that is totally absent in the samples from his games. Everything is cluttered and hard to look at. Everything has a busy texture going on. 3. All the characters only look in diagonal directions. I made this choice because I once thought all the art would be hand-drawn, and I desperately needed to reduce the number of icons I needed. This was a mistake, and I'll probably try to fix it in Queen's Wish 2. And half the reasons he cites for the reason his games look that way ARE just sloppiness/laziness.
2. Queen's Wish uses art made by a lot of different artists. That means that the style is not quite consistent. We've done our best to make it blend well, but it's a little off.