So in a chaos of directions I... decided to use realtime 3D for the characters for a list of reasons, but that meant concepting, modelling/rigging/animating stuff so I hit the ground running. 
For some reason i had it in mind for her to be like Iris from MMX4 but then I realized thick long hair is a huge no no in 3d modeling so I went for an anime pony tail thing. Then I had it in mind to go not just low poly but early PS1 segmented limbs and potentially vertex colors. This is something FF7 was known for doing for enemies, which involves assigning colors to vertexes as opposed to UV textures which became more dominant as 3D became more understood. I see it as an excuse to avoid having to do extra skin weighting and get some nostalgia points. I'll likely use faceless enemies with no textures to cut down on any UVing.
Tiringly enough this means weighing each bone to each body part specifically as I'm using Rigify to speed up the rigging process. There's probably a method to auto binding the individual meshes to only one bone each. I still need to figure out the hair as it's one solid piece but it might be more interesting to make the hair into a poly segment snake and animate it manually via programming since the auto rig doesn't provide custom options.
we in business
