The new material for Kano's faceplate looks great. A vast improvement for sure.
For the hair, is it really necessary to bother with the fiber stuff? Since it's so short I would imagine simply having it as a painted texture would work fine. It sounds like it would be way less taxing and I doubt it'd really look much worse anyhow. Then again I have no experience with that sort of thing, maybe it could be baked into the textures?
When it comes to the quality of the final sprites, of course some degree of consistency is desirable, but it likely won't be 100%. Even if Bleed did everything himself from start to finish, just from experience and learning from mistakes, by the time he got to the last character things would probably have changed quite a bit. Having said that, it's probably a very good idea to make sure that the sprites for all characters are rendered under the same lighting and camera conditions. I guess it might also be a good idea to not try and push the fidelity of, say, the skin textures to infinity and beyond, if it means each character will look better than the last -- reaching a certain level and accepting what it looks like, and then moving on might help with the consistency, not to mention of course prevent someone from being bogged down with the same task forever not making any real progress. On the other hand, if the (hypothetical) later, more realistic looking skin textures etc are simple enough to replicate, it probably would not be too much work to redo some of these things on older characters and re-render the sprites. Time consuming, possibly, but not too much work, I would think.
Of course in the end it's completely up to the artists actually working on the characters. But those are my two cents on the subject.
