to get some good hints on polycount reduction you should head over to the
Polycount forums/
its a great community for 3d game design, many big industry professionals are frequently visiting that place.
i haven't done any modelling in a few years so i'll have to spend some time catching up with the new techniques..
i haven't found a way to im/export the character meshes either... which is a little sad.. i really wanted to make some of the chars look a little more like their portrait and fix some issues with the body meshes...
animations would be great, too...
i'm quite good with those, so there'd be some martial arts moves n stuff if i managed to get new anims ingame...
well if i find a way, i'll let you know...
EDIT:
also you might wanna check out this tutorial:
using retopo tool