You can use retopology tools and place polygon stripes on top of the handle mesh then use extrude to get some thickness. What do You use for modelling?
I heard legends, but discreet told in a press conference that they would still need to work on allowing to dysplay viewports with shaded polygons in gouraud shading ! can you imagine that ?
In game art, if you can save a few polys by using a tri, do it. It is frowned upon, however, for high-polygon models because it can cause smoothing issues and such.
TBH I think you could get the same amound of detail with a 3000-poly mesh. There are too many polygons which don't help defining the silhouette at the moment.
Those rock formations in the background don't look like they've seen hundreds of polygons, much less millions. The terrain texture doesn't look terribly detailed, either.
Thank you. Quick comparison of default Cut tool and miauu's Scalpel using the Box with flipped polygons and Backface Cull ON, as Noors suggested. Video: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Kzuov8RH8zbrbJvx6id0X8wTFG7QCC7_