Glad to be helpful! I'm admittedly not too knowledgeable on animation myself, I only learned this recently trying to look up an explanation for why the walk cycle was bothering me, but I'll try to elaborate on the whole contact pose thing.
Basically, walk cycle animations tend to have 4 key frames: one contact pose where both legs are on the ground, one on the front and one on the back; a second contact pose where the legs' positions are reversed; and two passing poses in between where the legs are superimposed. So for example, you could animate a character like this:
- With their left leg on the front and their right leg on the back (first contact pose, idk if it matters which leg goes on the front first)
- With the right leg raised behind the left, both right below the body (first passing pose)
- With the right leg in front and the left leg on the back (second contact pose)
- With the left leg raised in front of the right leg (second passing pose)
- Loop back to the first contact pose.
It's admittedly a bit hard to tell because the animation is so fast, but here, each of the playable overworld characters seem to have only one passing pose where the legs are perfectly still, which I think is acceptable under this limited pixel artstyle; but also only one contact pose that repeats after every passing pose, with the same leg on the front and the same leg on the back (which one is which depends on the side, since the sprite is mirrored) every time. So it ends up looking like the character is only ever taking steps with one of their legs somehow, if that makes any sense.
Again, I wasn't even sure if this was intentional, especially since the forward and backward walk cycles look much better, and it's argurably a very minor thing many players won't even notice. But I did find it quite distracting myself, so I thought it was worth mentioning. Hope this helps!
(Oh, and I'll have to think about the playtester thing)