Don't worry It will be really cool to have remakes of the episodes, especially since It will fix inconsistencies and improve the story, It will be fun to compare the versions and see the changes, i'm so excited to see more of this story, and mire Alicia and Beaford will aways make me happy
I will definetelly suport you If you make a kickstarter! Especially If we get minisodes and a dlc, i really like these games and the characters, so i would be happy to contribute on their making
And this keychains look so pretty i would love to get physical merch! (tho It might be a little complicated since i live on Brasil)
The new sprites look good, hmmm i don't know about animation plugins but if you want to make the characters look lively i have some sugestions that are more or less simple to do and would look great, tho it depends on your style so take these with a grain of salt (^u^)
(this also got really long, i don't want to be overbearing or make you feel like you have to do any of this, it's your game, you should do what will be best for you and i know i will love the result no mater what, so sorry for the long text hehe)
you could make them have diferent body poses,it doesn't need to be a lot, for example in your turn to die each character only has 3 main poses (aside from the special sprites) and the expressions are distributed acordingly to which pose suits it more, for example, alicia's pose 1 could be her with her arms crossed, pose 2 she could have her finger on her chin, and pose 3 she could run her fingers throught her hair,tho you could make more if you want
also a lot of games make some special effects appear for a second along with the sprites to emphasize an emotion every once in a while, like sparkles and bell sounds when the character is happy, or those manga blue and black lines coming down the screen when they are disapointed/sad (tho it geta tacky when used on excess)
this would be a little tricky and would take more work, but you could show little/important motions throught little drawings, not full cgs, but small squares with small drawings (like those that appear when you pick an item on simple rpgs), with this you don't need to draw a full image but can still show the characters moved
a situation where these images show could be like, the character interact with something, and have the image with only the character's hand picking an item, or show them sitting on the sofa after interacting with said sofa for example, or two close ups of their eyes, each with the pupil in a diferent position to show they moved to look at something, only this small things and nothing else, just the important part
you can look at the coffin of andy and leyley, the game it's really good at this, tho it has an insane amount of drawings, so i think aiming to have just a few of them would be better hehe
this one is the last since it might require some animation, you could make the sprites move in a simple way, like up and down to show they jumped, or have them slide to one side of the screen to show they walked, to get closer to another character sprite to show they...well got closer, or that one character is in front of the other to protect them