Just don't try to emulate current AAA graphics standards and techniques, most likely you will fail miserably.
I don't find it advisable to base your concept on "buying art assets" either.

Instead, I say (you have to) try and find your own style, in terms both of a visual style and content creation (!). Even and especially as a lone wolf programmer. My personal advice is to NOT use normal maps, they suck when they are not generated from high poly assets (do you really have the time to create them?) and the result in general looks terrible when it's not coming from AAA studios.
When it comes to animations, the part which I hate the most, you can save a lot of work when you don't use one continuous mesh but separate parts (still one model) for legs, arms and so on, like in N64 times. They are much quicker to animate, no distortions and you can do much of the animations with code, too.

When you want to create a game on your own you have to find such time and effort saving details, and when you do so, even the A8 editors can be enough to make it happen in a reasonable amount of time. Although my models and art assets in general suck I can create them in a very quick fashion using MED, much quicker than with any other program, and mostly SED to do shading - instead of real textures - and animations via shaders.