Question about monster palettes

One idea for palettes is to convert the colors to HSL or HSV and then rotate the hue of the entire palette. This should give you a wide range of colors which still match the original image fairly well. IIRC this was an option in an old version of RPG Maker.

Unfortunately the number of monster palettes is a limitation of the SNES hardware and the battle graphic engine. Monsters are normally rendered as sprites, so they have to use one of the 8 sprite palettes. Four sprite palettes are used for characters, and one is used for animations. The remaining three palettes are used for monsters.

That being said, a few monsters only use 8 colors instead of 16, so in some cases it might be possible to squeeze two 8-color monster palettes into a single sprite palette slot (one palette in colors 0-7 and another palette in colors 8-15). You would then need to set the appropriate bits in the monster graphics to use the second set of colors. This would require a bit of asm code inserted in the graphics initialization routine.