. . Progress on the sword - welded the verts as per hotkills suggestion, and did a little cleaning of duped faces from mirroring. Now a reasonable 296 tris.
Just a quick and dirty triangulate lowpoly test: Not focused on the custom vertex normals and shading, only triangulated faces to achieve a low poly look.
@mLink I understand your argument, but adding additional vertices while not increasing the actual face count would really just increase the amount memory usage, since all formats that I know of store all vertex/face normal information, so the calculations for texture/lighting interpolation should not change. I am not an…
Pretty good likeness to the original sprite, if you wanna go further i'd suggest adjusting the proportions. One thing I think is kind of lame is how the eyes sort of "wrap around" the head a little. You could make the front of the face a little more flat or scale up the uvs of the face or whatevr or find some other method…