The reason I use the word "garish" is because many of the colours used are very pure and rather bright on the eyes. Although I first assumed that all the colours used had a colour depth of 4-bits (reminiscent of the colour palette found in the Windows 3.x operating system, for instance), I checked a number of them and they're not quite the same, although they are very close.
Just for fun, I made a modified version of one of your maps, changing a number of the colours to ones I would personally find a bit more pleasing to look at. Of course, this is the opinion of an artist talking here, so I would be a bit more stringent about such things as colour harmony, contrast, not allowing certain colours to dominate over others, etc. You're completely free to dismiss this nitpick of mine however. As I have said before, the maps are still very readable with the colours you have chosen.
If you need any help with the Japanese, I would be happy to lend a hand. åÂ݋Â΋ÂÂã†望むãªらã€Â僕ã«手ä¼Âã‚ÂãÂ݋¦下ã•ã„ï¼Â
I dunno why I have this thing about pure colors; I've always just liked to have pure values so they're more easily recognizeable as red, blue, whatever. Which is weird since I can still recognize them as that, even in the modern Windows Paint palettes (which are often more blended), but... *shrugs*
I did look at your alterations and while they did help the contrast with the dark-green a little they at the same time muddied the contrast with the gray background, which is there mostly because some people on the EO2U boards mentioned that a pure-white or pure-black background was a bit hard to look at regardless of the context. This is particularly important with the shortcuts, since they're very hidden, even in-game, so you sort of want those to pop out. Indeed, most of my decisions with the color contrast were for that reason: to make sure important features, like chests or FOEs, are actually very visible so they don't have to hunt intensely. (I've some other maps for EO that would basically place numbers alone near features - not like I do it, where I mark specific tiles - and it would be insanely hard to find the specific number. That's a flaw I'm trying to avoid like the plague.) That's why there's a lot of red-on-green, dark-on-light contrasting; since it attracts the reader's eyes, they know its there.
This all said and done, I have made some slight changes to the coloring.
- The dark-green was changed from a value of 108 in the RBG values to 128, or simply #008000. ... How I chose 108, I've no idea. Made it a little brighter in the end, seemed to help a little.
- The purple for Resource Points was lightened to more of a pink, mainly for keeping the Mine and Chop Points' icons visible.
- The blue for the labyrinth entrance was lightened as well, but I kept the "S" black, mostly for consistency issues and black was more visible.
You can sort of these in my 5F map (the "S" box being the one you cannot):