Time for a bit of crit -
Firstly, I am loving your progress on it, it looks fantastic. But I feel some improvements can still be made.
Size -
When matching up from the bottom of path to the fence with the original, it appears that your buddha and flags are too large, as well as the backdrop consisting of temple and trees. This may still be affecting the illusion of the guards in some way. If you can easily resize those parts of the stage, maybe try it and see how it looks.
Color -
Currently the sky (which matches the original) suggests a bright sunlit day, but the tone of everything else looks like its from an overcast day. I figure an image is better than explaining it all to you, so here is a rough version of how I imagine the stage should kind of be:
It's just a quick example, but I think its closer to how it'd look in the sunlit environment that it's supposed to be. The trickiest part is the ground and shadows, the only way I could properly edit it is if I had the PSD, but I guess this still helps to get a point across.
But anyway, the ultimate decider of the time of day/contrast is the lighting of the characters IMO. That should be the priority. Unless different sprite sets of lighting are going to be used - but I assume that's not the case now. So Bleed and all you guys doing the stages should try to find a good balance between character lighting that matches every stage (good enough), while still trying to preserve the tone of the originals somewhat. I don't think it'd be fair for either Bleed or the stage makers to have to change the lighting on all their work after it was finalized, simply because a balance for the lighting wasn't figured out earlier on and created problems later. So it'd be good to discuss this now I think.
One final thing, about the flags. Firstly, I'd personally like to see the dragons on the original flags redrawn. These ones, while more detailed, are very different and look out of place to me. The color of the flag itself doesn't look right to me either.
Okay, that's pretty much all I can think of. I don't know how much of it I'm correct about, but thought I'd put it out there anyway.