Well, heh, from what limited information you give:
In a "3d" world, you can only have so many polys in the imidiate view of the player. Lets say, the environment/level itself is 30,000 poly and a character is 5000-6000 polys. So you have the environment plus two characters - around 10,000-12,000 poly total - making a grand total of somewhere around 42,000 polys - that is an arbitrary number, it's just an example. A poly is essentially a triangle, which connects to another poly - triangle - and so forth until an object is created; a house, fence, dog, ninja dude, etc. Then, you have all the environmental affects; such as shadows, textures, fog, other random shit flying around the screen. Then the SFX, music, etc.
That is a lot of shit to push out in view of the player, and keep the framerate, or actual gameplay, smooth and not bog down the system.
That's what I'm guessing Boon meant regarding the info you are pondering. If a person where to have a "legitimate" Shokan, one that didn't suck, that would be a lot of polys simply because of its mass. Including overal size and the extra arms, which all rquire a higher poly count - more polygons/triangles - to construct. Though, the dude in the krypt kinda gets me because it seams that wouldn't be to intense for a ps2/xbox to handle, but eh.
Basicaly, that's the deal. You can only have so many polygons on screen at one time. To many, and the framerate - grameplay - gets hella chunky/choppy. There are ways around these issues, such as level of detail - LOD -, streamling the mathmatical calculations of polygons on the screen, etc. All of these techniques are often left to the psychopaths, er, I mean programmers of the development team. In certain cases, there isnt' enough time to implement such features, because they take time, and money, to develope. That, and many times the technology may just be to, blah.
Hope that helps, peace.
