MSX Games quality

Once again consider that comercial games don't follow the same standars that homebrew games. In comercial games, time and cost is a critical part of a product, so you can't polish it to the perfection. This matter is applicable to other 8 bit systems in 80's, best example is Amstrad CPC. It was a very mistreated computer with a lot of Speccy port ignoring it's own capabilities. If you read the interview to the original coder of CPC version of R-Type, the company gives him 21 days to make the game, so his only option was to port Spectrum version.

So returning to the topic of MSX games, yes, there is a low % of games that uses HW capabilities correctly, but this is the hard commercial world.

Few tries about games, which could be more colourful:

Spartan x
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iv5y3WZ3i3M

Project A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpI24BWwTvU

Should The Protector be any better graphically? Maybe it´s just the robotic behaviour of the enemies which keeps bothering me. Intelligent enemies with faster game play might have hooked me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vl68ijp_gMg

Elevator Action. Maybe this is acceptable, but little more colour could have helped a lot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyh5Ljj8DzA

Coaster Race, could have more colour.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aW-9h5QwZrk

There are worse examples available, but these ones came to my mind.

I very much liked Trankor back in the day! I remember liking the graphics. I made a "map" of the floors so that I knew which way is the shortest way to the elevator. I've completed it 1-2 times!

As for the graphics, it is colourfull. It uses no HW sprites (EDIT:I believe the flame is a sprite!), but it is also a good example about that they are not needed always.

I dislike the fact that the main character is so large (also the enemies are quite large). This makes it possible to draw good-looking / realistic-looking character with the limited amount of pixels on these computers - but severely restricts gameplay, since there is only so much that can be fitted on the screen (this is not the only example I've seen). Also, you will get bored with how the good-looking character looks like quite soon, and are left with... gameplay. Well, Trantor is not bad IMO, but a trantor-like game with a smaller main character (but twice or more the amount of stuff on the screen) would have made it possible to expand gameplay quite a lot!

I looked at the different versions of Trantor on Youtube - didn't know it had so many ports!

Just wondering why they didn't include a introduction demo in the MSX version!

In this particular case, they could have indeed used HW sprite for the main character at least (and the flame) - however, isn't there a size limit for a sprite? In that case, they could have used several. Also as MSX sprites are one-coloured, the game would have looked a bit less colourfull, if they had swapped the SW enemies for HW sprites. Also at points there are so many enemies there would have bound to be some flickering (but, othwerwise smoother movement). I've never actually noticed the pixels are wide. The status bar is quite monochromatic, I think unnecessarily so, now that I've seen other versions of it.

Also, have to correct myself, the flame is not a HW sprite, or it at least seems it is not based on the Youtube video.

From the different version I can find, I honestly think the C64 version is worst in terms of platform capabilities. Plain and colourless... could have been way better.