I am completely in love with the background, this might be one of my favorite pixel art backgrounds ever

I'd love to see you do a series of these.

reminds me of old classic rpg games like eye of beholder series, dungeon master and so

looks impressive, but I don't like ui (nor i like in mentioned games)

Now that I stumbled on this again, I can't believe I didn't fave this the first time I saw it. Aside from the slightly boring looking UI this piece is amazing. The colours and the mood are really really nice.

Gorgeous!

Lovely stuff, really inspiring

Damn! Loving everything besides the UI!

Fantastic work man

Thanks guys!

@Stitchy: Thanks for that. I'll keep those details in mind, along with the other things people have mentioned here, when I revise this sometime during the week.

@sormi: I can kind of understand why games of this nature typically featured little to no environment variation and palette swapped, non-animated enemies... but I would still like to make this one somehow!

Fantastic pallette. 

This is great! I love the colors you chose for the ogre/demon looking guy's skin! It definitely has a retro feel and the knight and those walls are just epic~ (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:・ﾟ✧

I agree with others, though, that the menu color choice takes away from the piece. It's quite distracting. Perhaps black, very dark grey, or the prussian blue you used for the empty parts of the status bars would do well. You would obviously have to change the colors of the icons, bars, and body part statuses, though. Maybe replace the white in the icons with a light/medium grey to start? But I think it would give it an overall darker feel and fit better!

I'm also going to be a little nitpicky and point out that I think the highlight on the beard of the blonde guy is too bright, and on the hair of the purple lady as well. Just darkening those highlights a tiny bit would make them look more balanced, in my humble opinion. ^^;

Wow, this is really awesome. As people have said, the walls are great!

Not to diminish the quality fo this work, but that isn't anything like a photo.

This is so incredibly impressive. I can't believe you actually pixeled that background. The character sprites and knight look amazing, but I was stunned with that background. It looks like a photo!

Wow that's an amazing piece. If you ever wanted to make game like this I'd be glad to help with the programming. I'd imagine the amount of work on the pixeling would be quite overwhelming with this level of detail though.

@CELS: Ah, I'm not offended by anybody, I'm irked at the fact you pointed out, not anyone personally!

To be honest, I intended to clean up the background to the same degree as the other elements, but once I reached this point I felt like the noise was contributing to the environment, and making it feel dirty, which was something I wanted. (rationalization by someone losing their patience!)

The actual reason it's so noisy is because my method was terrible. I haven't drawn something this big in pixel art before, and once I sketched the whole thing out the task of cleaning it up was quite intimidating. I keep seeing bits that need cleaning up, but I need to put this down--I've put excess hours into it already and the desired effect has been reached.

I might still revise the UI though--after I step away from it for a few days!

@blaster: I didn't mean to insult. If photorealism wasn't the style you were going for, you could always get rid of all those noisy individual pixels. The knight and friendly units have a very sexy, crisp style of pixelling going on. If you used the same style on the walls, it would be different. What you have now is fine too, it's just that you've achieved a very high degree of realism, which normally means there's something fishy going on 
It's not a bad thing.
 

all is great o: but the walls is awesome. excellent job

Thanks for the comments guys! Encouraging!

Have to admit that I'm slightly irked that it seems to look like I've done a colour-reduction even though it's simply hand-drawn.

Regarding the UI, you guys are right. I do personally like the grey, but that may very well be an irrational feeling. I was initially going for a super-simplistic feeling (ala Wizardry) that would make it feel 'all-business', but I think as soon as I coloured the details and drew the icons it went to simplistic-cute. Doesn't help that the portraits are on the cartoon-ier side of the spectrum.

Your edits are helpful failureboy, cheers! I like how bottom corner edits are popping, but the other three really go a long way to reducing the clash between the other elements.

One of the best works i have seen lately. Good job!

Looks great. I wonder if that grey background for the characters is an optimal choice however. 

Loving it very much, would like a lot to see a game like this. I'm a fan of the old EOB games...

Wow, amazing detail. Totally agree with Carnivac, though. The GUI elements clash a lot with the rest.

like, here's a quick edit I did just using some existing colors.  Threw a couple ideas for a highlight in there:

imageshack.com/a/img34/5659/fxae.png 

Love the sprite.

Full disclosure, I thought the walls, floor and ceiling were pictures that had been modified in photoshop to fit the perspective and modified with color reduction to look like pixel art. With your WIP image, I see this is not the case. Impressive.

EOB was one of my favorite early games. I love the wall texture and the shadows and the depth of details on the enemy. Maybe make the bottom 1/3 of screen more into a UI rather than rectangles to condense the padding space between the characters

Looks great.  Really like the warrior sprite.   Only thing that lets this down overall for me is the basic looking status panels that look a bit more home in some more childish-looking RPG than the darker grittier tone set by the graphics of the game screen.

Proper awesome.

Thanks! Re: the walls/floor. My work-flow for these was terrible, and it took me a long time, but I didn't do anything extra or special. Early working image. There was some lazy flipping->scale-a-bit->editing, which you can still see if you look closely enough. I don't recommend trying to use a lighter plaster for anyone pixeling a stone or brick wall. It was a pain!

I hadn't thought about the grey a whole lot, I'll have to try some things there.

This is really cool.  The enemy is a great centerpoint and the walls/floor are "sketchy" and cool.  In fact they look almost color-reduced and I'm curious how you did them.

I think the flat gray background in the character windows could maybe have some color.  Something warmer, perhaps?