Guys i'm in a real bind here I need to turn in this game I'm making as an assignment tomorrow but the sprites i'm using are weirdly cropped so they have a huge white border around them, So i'm begging you guys does anybody have properly cropped sprites for two top down characters preferably different colors?

Why don't you fire up your random pixel editor, eg paint, and crop the images yourself?

BEcause I thought it would have been more difficult than that thanks for the help

I really feel like an idiot right now but I can't seem to remove the background entirely does anyone know a decent tutorial or something?

Modify background pixels to have full transparency. How to do that depends on your pixel editor, but I am sure its manual or else the Internet knows.

Try using GIMP. Make the background any colour, say white. Then add Alpha Channel in the layer. Select the regions of the background (white in this case) and hit delete. You'll get a checkered background indicating that it is transparent.

Here's another solution that basically any editor can do:

Put in the image that needs a transparent background.

Draw over it using a pencil tool.

Delete the image in the other layer which doesn't have the transparent background.

Save as PNG.

OR

Make a blue and red circle. Use those as your characters.

I really feel like an idiot right now but I can't seem to remove the background entirely does anyone know a decent tutorial or something?

You can't make the background *transparent* in MS Paint. You have to use something like Paint.NET or GIMP.

An easier option is filling the "background" with a solid color (like RGB (255,0,255)), and then it'll be alot easier to use GIMP or Paint.NET to rapidly edit those parts out, or for your own game code to ignore those colors.