I have started a thread on our Game Design Forum about stylised game characters. The current experiments that I’m doing for Drama Princess use fairly realistic models. But I’m jaleous of what games like Animal Crossing can get away with in terms of animation and behaviour.
As we have established before, consistency is of utmost importance for believability: a realistic looking characater that bounces around like a rubber ball is not believable (Prince of Persia), realistic animatitions that get repeated over and over again by many different characters neither (The Sims). So I think that if I reduce the realism of the characters a notch or two, the demands on the Drama Princess engine in terms of believability may be a bit lighter.
I’m not interested in going all the way down to cartoon level, however. So the thread mentioned above, is about trying to find examples of stylised character designs that would be suitable for use with a serious topic. If you have any tips or know of any games with stylised characters, please post (either here or in the forum).