>>995160
>(but also because I’m solo and don’t have the time and resources to make too many high poly things)
Keep in mind that many PS2 games (though not all) baked their models from high poly models to begin with, and this is fairly important when it comes to matching the style, this is especially true of mechanical things. Here's an example from Armored Core 2 Age Age. I've pasted the in-game model over the high-poly model the texture was (likely) baked and edited from.

Depending on how you want to handle the artstyle, your time savings may not be as great as you think. There's an exponential drop-off between in time savings between PS1 and modern, to PS2 and modern, to PS3 and modern. Every generation demands more detail. Atleast if you stay on the PS2 side of things, you don't need to do normal, roughness, or metalness maps. Most of the time, PS2 models just had the equivalent of colormap with baked lighting.

If want something that's looks nicer than PS1 and are solo, I would strongly advise you go for the PS2 look more so than the PS3 look.