Why not rorating the hero and making it "alien breed"-style?
Viewing post in From 8-bit to 3D? An Unexpected New Look! comments
The perspective of the hero is certainly something to experiment with. My intuition is that the top view of the character will be uninteresting (you'll see helment and shoulders mostly) and possibly hard to read visually. That being said, once we have a 3D model it'll be easy enough to try different perspectives. I like current perspective though and it's consistent with 8-bit version.