I was gonna say, this seems like a game the PT crew would be into back in the day... And it was!
These sprites are so 2006, you gotta love it.

I actually had to double-check to be certain. In just a couple more years it'll have been 20 years since it first became playable and has continued to be, which is insane to think about.

@Sonikku Oh wow. I didn't realize the game was that old.

Opted to rip these sprites partly out of nostalgia -- back before the Spriters Resource had the forums in its current iteration, it had a forum named Pixeltendo.
Sometime around 2006-2007 this game was discovered and people on it had a brief obsession with it -- being a fairly polished game despite its overall simplicity: arrow keys to move and jump, A/Z for the "normal" attacks and S/X for the "magic" attacks, D/C for the defend/counter moves, and spacebar for "special" attacks when your special meter is at 50% or higher.

For anybody curious, this game is still playable as the servers are still up as of this comment. You'll probably need a Flash emulator to actually play it though -- I had the best luck with one on Google Chrome.
Remember to click the "M" ("manual") button once you enter a match with one of the CPUs though, since by default it'll be set to "A" ("auto-fight").
If you choose a character, you'll be unable to change it until you find an item by defeating another character, which is random and rare.

The white Hippo, Dino Rider, Hippo Rider, Flying Hippo, Ghost Boy, and Demon Barbarian are all bosses and to my knowledge don't have items associated with them.