@NinjaWaddleDee I think your reaction is in part because we've kind of reached the limit of what people can do with "conventional" pixel art these days that just making a game "retro-styled" very much isn't enough anymore these days so increasingly newer pixel art games really need to go a notch above in term of presentation.

Be it art style, animation, additional effects to support the pixel artwork/etc or also stuff like world design and visuals(look at the sheer amount of clutter here in the presentation that nonetheless always feel cohesive).

In this case, this game succeed on indeed going for that "notch above" with very fluid animation and a lot of personality to it's characters both in the animation of their sprites but also in the clear artistic design that went to make every character have a clear characterisation even as something made with "pixel" art.

There's a lot of pixel art that limit itself to the limits of classic titles in the medium and you can see here from the fluidity and sheer amount of animation for the character(be it in their emoting or limbs flailling as they speak) that this game didn't let itself be restricted to these limits.

The world design is itself also surprisingly well rendered with a lot of personality and you can bet a lot of time must have been spent on concept artwork phase to sure they would nail down the specific visuals of everything before actually bringing it to production. It's not just that it's well-rendered but you can see they spent a lot of time researching and experimenting with what they'd like their visuals to be like.

And specifically, I bet their concept artist must have had a huge library of fully rendered anime/manga set in similar post-apocalypse styles to guide the art direction rather than rotely only looking at past pixel art games for references.

I'd say it visually reminds me of the Mana or Chrono Trigger series but honestly.... that's just nostalgia speaking because this is clearly a work above either of these two since it didn't limit itself to the same kind of restrictions they had to deal with as SNES titles back in the days.

So it'll be very much a case of game we could truly think of as "2020s pixel art" rather than the " '90s pixel art" of these older titles.