I figured when I read how you were going about it. You're killing it either way. I'm sure you'll find the process you like. Good luck! Hope to see Hayami on itch.io sometime.
Speak of Hayami reminds me of the art style I used to apply.
At that time, I was trying to make everything as realistic as possible visually, but it was too hard, so I made it a bit more cartoonish. It was a good time, though my marketing knowledge and inadequate skill set failed the project.
If I ever have the chance to relaunch a similar project as Hayami's, I would want to learn Houdini and make everything crazily realistic to see how I can apply the PBR rendering and procedural modeling I learned from TA's work to practice, but it always hard to find time to do more.