Maybe if the black in the floor tiles was a dark grey it would be more attractive.

You need to ditch the way you are making your tiles.

Turning every tile into 4 equal parts may be easy, and nice looking on its own, but when the walls, the floor, and props are all cut into quarters, they like to run together and turn the whole screen into a grid.

Imagine a brick wall, the bricks aren't layered on top of eachother exactly vertical (Well they can be, but it's not as structurally sound.)

______
|__|__|
|__|__|


_________________
|__|__|__|__|__|__|
|__|__|__|__|__|__|
|__|__|__|__|__|__|
|__|__|__|__|__|__|
|__|__|__|__|__|__|
|__|__|__|__|__|__|

_______
|____|__
__|____|

_________________
|____|____|____|__
__|____|____|____|
|____|____|____|__
__|____|____|____|
|____|____|____|__
__|____|____|____|

My best attempt at it since I got a case of the lazies and didn't want to link an example.


___________________________________
|__|__|__|__|__|__|__|__|__|__|__|__|
|__|__|__|__|__|__|__|__|__|__|__|__|
|__|__|__|__|__|__|__|__|__|__|__|__|   <---Wall
|__|__|__|__|__|__|__|__|__|__|__|__|
|__|__|__|__|__|__|__|__|__|__|__|__|
|__|__|__|__|__|__|__|__|__|__|__|__|
__________________________________
|____|____|____|____|____|____|____|_
__|____|____|____|____|____|____|____|
|____|____|____|____|____|____|____|_
__|____|____|____|____|____|____|____|     <-- floor
|____|____|____|____|____|____|____|_
__|____|____|____|____|____|____|____|

With the four grid thing your walls look like your floors, and your floors look like everything, and everything looks like everything, and that looks like a grid.
Also, this might look weird if you are using a different font, or font size, to you I say: Too bad.

*looks down*
*aims gun...*

 I just ripped these from FF2,how about this?

 

honestly that does look a LOT better! the one problem is the walls leading down to the water now really stand out strangely...perhaps make them a very dark shade of grey, much darker than the walkway...look at shading in other games as to how a downward wall in front of you shades much darker to give a shadow..

the change is definately in the right path!

To be honest, I can see almost no difference. The previous water fit more, imo.

Take a look at this. (Hint: use Opera and magnify to 300 or 400%)

One thing I've always noticed about the first three Final Fantasy's were that they were always so boxy looking.
Is there no way to edit the tile to make them look less boxy?

Perhaps I could help you with a few sprites in that regard?

Why is "item" in that menu twice?

the old water was better imo. but i agree that the walls leading down to the water need to be different from the actual walls, because otherwise they run together and are a total mess.

in the battle shot, why are there two pillars next to each other?


i'm guessing due to limited VRAM making it hard to have multiple unique tiles to smooth out edges and such.