Okay, so thus far, preferences seem to run 3, 2, 1 in that order, and no one likes 4.
Perhaps I'll now point out the differences between the sprites:
-1 has only one skin-tone shadow colour where the original sprites have two
-2 changes the orange leather-shadow colour to the lighter of the reds in the cape
-3 and 4 both use the same colour for the darkest skin-tone shadow and the darkest leather shadow, but there are only one or two pixels of leather shadow in that frame, so maybe it isn't a completely fair test for these.
There are three more frames that I'm going to present individually to be torn apart, because I'm not entirely happy with them:
These are three of Magus' attack frames, done up provisionally using the same colour set as Sprite 3 above. They're the only frames in the entire spritesheet that use a second cloak-highlight colour, and I'm not entirely happy with my choice, but I also don't see what else I could have used. (They also use the leather shadow rather more than the other sample frame shown above.)
