Good post TGZ, and aresee, listen to MoP. Your 'low-poly' mesh has clearly too many polygons. It really shouldn't look that different from current low polygon characters. Here's an example of how a low poly mesh with a normal map looks, scroll down to see the wireframe and materials at work.…
Whoa, that's a shedload of polys doing nothing. If you're trying to illustrate what can be done with a high-poly model and a normal-map, you need to put much more of those polys into actual silhouette instead of just rounding out the model. For example the pants have loads of big folds in the normal-map, yet the outline of…