This is going to be the controversial opinion (and it is opinion not criticism) but I did prefer the pixel portraits and text. For me personally I find the HD a weird juxtaposition.

It's a situation of not pleasing everyone (or just me) so don't take it to heart. Doesn't change the fact that I'd still play the game which is ultimately the most important thing anyway.

Thanks for the feedback!
I personally am well aware of the risk of going with this mesh of pixel + HD. I also know people will sometimes react adversely to it, but I'm faithful it's the best choice for several reasons.
Were this a short, unambitious project, I would be fully accepting of utilizing pixel art for everything, resolution locking the game, defining a very narrow palette and such. But this is a huge, extremely ambitious project (almost overwhelmingly so) and as such, I'm confident HD will be our ally.

That comes for several reasons:
- Palette cohesion across a huge project with several thousands pieces of separate assets is far easier to do when you have full color control, gradients and such.
- HD graphics are easier to edit and adapt to new environments than pixel art is. that makes the assets resist and adapt better to change. The portraits, for example, if I needed them to be bigger for some specific section I'd have to redraw them. Here I can just resize them, and the raw size is actually really big.
-I, as an artist, have an easier time expressing certain things through painting / drawing than I do pixel art. That's especially true for portraits. I believe the positive impact of having more freedom and fluidity when drawing said assets will generate a positive outcome on the "acting" of the characters even with nostalgic, retro players.
-For scaling / resolution purposes, HD art is very flexible. So are the very low resolution tiles, which will look good scaled by, say, 512%, but DEFINITELY not scaled by 148%. That's very similar to how Record Keeper does things, which is a technical reference for me.
-For visual clarity within menus and whatnot. Many will say that clarity independs of resolution, but I digress, and with this being an RPG, the lack of jaggies, and possibility for smaller fonts to remain readible where in small resolutions it would only barely be, opens up more possibilities for UI design.

That's pretty much my reasoning behind this, and Felds agrees with everything.
(I kinda am the guy that brings up resolution, scaling and other technicalities when we talk about the game, hahah.)

I don't pretend to know the intricacy of UI design or pixel art. Thanks for explaining everything so clearly - I certainly feel put in my place.