Angels movements looks sufficient/good, maybe a bit too much arm-flailing but that might be nitpicking. Though this is YOUR game, make it as such you'd like it to be, if you're going to ask us about everything it'll never be done.
But other then that, I'd still say that there's to many platforms. at least over the water. And I'm thinking that maybe the "shots" should be something more solid-looking.. maybe.

Don't make it too complicated i think, animation-wise, as long it looks natural. Mario in SMW didn't really breath of life, be he did what he was doing looking great.

I'd definitely prefer straight sprites to ragdolls. All living objects are not ragdolls, and the only realistic use I've seen of the technology is to toss non-living objects realistically (like dolls or corpses).

Draw sprites. Lots of sprites. Not just sprites for walking and jumping, but for reacting to the environment, or even just facial expressions for standing still. That will do more for your characters than a physics engine will.

What makes it awkward, I think, is the slow transitions between animations, particularly the ground-to-jumping and the jumping-to-falling ones.

For example, his arms and feet fly back when he jumps, but they do it very slowly relative to his jumping speed. I think the game would come across as more responsive if you sped up those in-between animations a lot.(Two or Three times faster.)

Also, seeing as the character kind of moves like Kirby (instant acceleration to top speed, no momentum, etc) you might want to look at the little quirks in that character's animation. Having the character flip when he stops rising and starts falling in his jump is a good example of that.


Again, I'm a completely uneducated person in this field, and not me nor anyone else commenting has a Wii Ware game in development to brag about, and you're probably just trying to get this thing done, so feel free to ignore what I say. I won't take offense.