Nintendo characters tend to emphasize shape and volume over details. In addition to value attenuation, a complementary amount of hue shifting can really emphasize the simplicity and beauty of this style. And the shaders I've adapted from this approach can run on a wide set of hardware from fixed pipeline mobile devices to highly programmable CGFX/HLSL environments. Normals are fundamentally one's best friend for getting high mileage here<g>.
