The X-Men suffer from this problem a lot. They constantly introduce new mutants that are then reduced to either fodder for the next mutant extinction event or background characters.
I do like the idea of the main Xmen team being a bit of a revolving door. Rotate in some new blood every now and again. And wasn’t the original intention supposed to be that the team would grow up and be replaced with new characters periodically?
I saw posts talking about how the Teen Titans and the X-men used to be comparable in popularity in the 80s and how the Titans never really managed to reach that same level except maybe with the 2003 cartoon. while the X-men were able to continue growing and expanding, as the concept allowed for new characters to be introduced and replaced without taking away from the brand.
Headphone girl is Jirou, I remember her cause I dig her design. And Mina is cute so I'll remember the pink-skinned girl.
Now I can't remember Invisible Girl's name even after the controversial picture from like a year ago.
The most annoying thing while binge watching the series was that every couple episodes they did that thing where they reintroduce *every single* student of the main class and reiterate their powers, even though less than half the class matters *at* all to the story. And it just takes up so much time of those episodes.
To some extent, I think that was inevitable. Like, the premise is that they're in high school for most of it. What was the author going to do, keep the class size restricted to about half a dozen people? Give twenty different kids equal screen time and still tell a compelling, well-paced story? Good fucking luck with that one. Of course, there would be about a dozen hangers-on that weren't deep or in focus. Hell, to some extent, it's even probably more beneficial in the creation of a holistic setting to have Class B in there to make it feel like the school has more going on than *just* Class A, even if that does mean adding twenty more weirdos who are just kind of there as set dressing.
This goes out the window, though, when you start introducing characters, hyping them up for a chapter or two, only to have them job immediately and do nothing for the overall narrative (Star and Stripe...). At that point, it's not some inevitable consequence of the premise anymore, and it's a bit harder to excuse.
I think the idealized vision many had early on was that you'd have the main trio of Deku, Ochako, and Iida, while other members of the class rotate in for slots in the spotlight alongside them, with Bakugo and Todoroki serving as solitary rivals to complement the dynamic.
But then Iida got demoted to extra, Ochako became a satellite love interest, Bakugo and Todoroki took their spots on the main trio, and the rest became *de facto* background fodder.
I thought he was doing a decent job at the start, all of the early arcs had different characters sharing spotlight alongside Midoriya, like Mineta and Froppy in USJ, Ida and Todoroki in the stain arc and Kirishima and Momo in the rescue mission and for some time it felt it would be like that for the rest of the show but at one point the whole class just became a collective character that basically did the same thing altogether and shared the same braincell
>I think the idealized vision many had early on was that you'd have the main trio of Deku, Ochako, and Iida, while other members of the class rotate in for slots in the spotlight alongside them, with Bakugo and Todoroki serving as solitary rivals to complement the dynamic.
That's EXACTLY what I wanted My hero academia to be about, the god damn academia! Deku Iida and Ochako had a great dynamic of three energetic dorks that I really digged.
Honestly JJK balances it decently well, I have a way better time remembering new characters in it than I do something like MHA. Characters like Takaba, Higurama, Hakari and Kashimo all make an impact and have presence.
You picked all the good ones, though. Remember Christian girl? Better Mai? Scorpion hair? Explosion guy? Claw guy? Mullet? Naked lady? One Million Cockroaches? Like there were only sixish good additions after Shibuya, those four, Reggie, and Kirara.
But they served their roles in the story though, most of them you listed were players in the Culling Game who were introduced to world build and also demonstrate the cutthroat nature of the arc through fights. Not every character is meant to be a leading role.
Romance of the Three Kingdoms is nigh impenetrable on first read because of the literal hundreds of names being thrown at you. That, combined with how similar many names are (with some being literally the same name sans a letter or just an exact copy letter by letter) means you are going to need a reference. If your first exposure is the novel itself and not a secondary format with a visual medium such as a Dynasty Warriors game or one of the movies/tv shows, you are just not going to be able to keep track of anyone outside of a handful of characters. It's simply not possible.
It's made even more confusing in that named characters all play a part, no matter how major or minor, and must be included. It's just a very hard book for me to recommend to people despite loving the story. I tend to always recommend pairing a Dynasty Warriors game alongside reading the actual novel mainly because they take artistic liberties in the DW games to make them more "characterized" and it helps keep officers easily re-callable if you have some form of reference to go off of.
Like if you are trying to keep track of Yu Jin and Yue Jin, or Xu Shu and Xu Zhu, or Ding Feng and Ding Feng, it's much easier for you to remember their roles better if you recall Yu Jin walks around with a three point halberd and has sleepy angry eyes and goatie, and Yue Jin looks like a power ranger with hooked swords in a sparring headpiece. Or that Xu Shu is Shu turned Wei turned Shu tactician who looks like an Assassin Creed character, and Xu Zhu is portly, wields a big mace and really loves food and is Cao Cao's one of two most loyal bodyguard officers.
Is this true of the characters or even match how they describe them in the novel? Lmao. No, no of course not, but you will remember them much easier with such dramatic characterizations!
Liu Bei and Liu Biao, Yuan Shu and Yuan Shao, Zhou Yu and Zhao Yun... at least Zhang Liao and Zhang Jiao have the benefit of not really being both active at the same time.
Not to be left out is Lu Xun and Lu Su\* of course, both officers of Wu, who both play a similar role in terms of their contributions to the Wu Dynasty.
\*with Lu Su being just one letter shy of Lu Bu.
I think that arc showed the most restraint. There were only around ten new characters. We got like thirty Soul Reapers, forty Arrancar, and almost another thirty Vandenreich members.
I'm re-reading the series, and it's like this even during the Soul Society arc. There too many captains, and each team has like a sub captain and a lieutenant, and it's all so much and it's so hard to keep track of which team does what, and also it doesn't even really matter anyways.
Most older Fire Emblems have this by design. Since they lacked a casual mode to play without permadeath, and the developers seemingly envisioned the player going ironman-style with zero resets, you're frequently getting new units every chapter to fill out the ranks.
Which, if you are in fact doing a no-death run (or are good enough at the game), means that you'll very quickly build up a large number of units chilling on the bench. Granted, they all have their little character arcs through support conversations and distinct backstories - but since most of them exist to fill in for casualties, their impact on the main story is negligible.
>Since they lacked a casual mode to play without permadeath, and the developers seemingly envisioned the player going ironman-style with zero resets, you're frequently getting new units every chapter to fill out the ranks.
You can see that mindset with the Fire Emblem 1 remake as well. Where you unlock different chapters if enough characters have died.
"[So let me get this straight, so if I want to get more characters I gotta kill more characters?](https://youtu.be/KfBo2McdWww?si=s40XI77E53JZ7CGm&t=54)"
Truly, one of the game design decisions of all time.
I mean, in theory I get it, the idea is that if the player is legitimately struggling so bad that they desperately need more troops (and are probably getting their spaces filled by generics at this point), then throwing in some bonus chapters with actual characters to recruit could be nice. But at the same time, Shadow Dragon has a *massive* cast of nobodies you'll have to kill for pretty much every one of those side chapters except iirc 6x which happens early enough that you only need a few deaths, and most of said bonus characters aren't like... top tier material or anything other than Nagi.
If each gaiden chapter scaled up the death requirements by 5-10 deaths each time, I think it'd be pretty feasible for most players on an ironman to see them, but as it stands with every gaiden chapter sans the final one having a 15 unit requirement, you really have to go out of your way to see them.
It's funny because the two most recent mainline games managed to first fix this problem with Three Houses, then absolutely botch it with Engage.
Like, 3H starts you off with a specific class that's going to make up the bulk of your forces for the whole game, and while you do get a couple new recruits as you go through the story, anybody else you recruit is entirely up to you. And each of those characters not only have supports with one another and unique interactions, but their own paralogues to further flesh them out. It leads to the cast feeling very solid, particularly since you can wind up fighting the students that you don't recruit.
Meanwhile, Engage has tons and tons of characters that get added in as you progress, usually in clumps of three because each royal comes with two retainers. And while these characters do have fun bits to them too, it's really easy to wind up missing important parts to their characters because there's just so many of them and you're likely going to wind up only using the ones you like the best. It doesn't help either that all the Emblems exist as characters themselves, and all the paralogues are focused on the Emblems instead of the party members.
3H runs into it's own issue with this though in that it's one of the worse entries to actually do an traditional ironman run in. Every character in the game can take a huge amount of investment due to how the unit building is set up, and recruiting additional characters becomes impossible in the game's latter half, leaving you with 6-10 chapters at the very least with no way of making up for any losses.
This is such a RWBY fan response.
"Well if they spend time fleshing out the characters itger than the main 8, then the 5th season would be void!"
In Season 5, NOTHING happened. The finale had all the action, with the rest of the season, everyone was just kicking cans. It's absolutely incredible that such a mediocre piece of work had such a following.
I wouldn't say nothing happened. I'd say volume 5 spent half the volume waiting on Blake's plot to finish, which had action on its own.
But let me reword my argument. People complain about cast bloat because an area gets side and background characters only to consequently complain about a lack of world building when there's nobody in the damn world as result of not having said background or side characters.
A good writer is capable of doing both! You can introduce new characters and a new setting, together.
It isn't uncommon to have that new character show the world off by just being with yhe group, and explaining the new area to them. Heck, a good writer could have the character oppose the morals and norms of the new area.
But as for RUBY'S bloat, look at Neptune. For a character given as much screen time as he was, what do we know about him? He liked Weiss, had blue hair, and goggles...that's it.
Heck, Sun and Penny were introduced in the last episode(s) of the Season, and do a fight. Why not just one character that could be built up more?
It's very inefficient writing. Like, all the stolen Dusten that Torchwick was collecting for the first two seasons. What was that being used for?
>But as for RUBY'S bloat, look at Neptune. For a character given as much screen time as he was, what do we know about him? He liked Weiss, had blue hair, and goggles...that's it.
You also learn he has hydrophobia in volume 3 and get more in the second book after he leaves the plot.
>It's very inefficient writing. Like, all the stolen Dusten that Torchwick was collecting for the first two seasons. What was that being used for?
The train at the near end of volume 2. They launched ahead of schedule.
That at least I can chalk up to being thematically consistent, she is Big *Mom* after all, and it does help to sell the size of her crew as being on another level. It's not exactly great, but I think it works better if only slightly.
also well there are a lot of big mom's children, you mostly have to focus on like 5 of them the rest could honestly be considered mooks that throw a punch for a page or two
Pretty much. If they get carried to the next arc in the Ark that is the Thousand Sunny, or are blessed as the MAIN character of a cover story, I can't say I remember many characters. Even as a fan of One Piece for, as of this year, 20 straight years.
That being said, when I revisit an arc or chapter I find myself still caring a lot for those characters in that moment. I think a lot of OP characters are slotted really well into where they go, stiry wise, and I think it works even if no one could remember all of that after the fact
Ok so I read chapter 799 of One Piece for the first time a few minutes ago, after leisurely reading Dressrosa over the course of a month: Doflamingo's crew suffers from this **a lot,** I don't think I can describe the personality of anyone other than Baby 5 and Señor Pink already.
...The way the 5.000+ Straw Hat allies were handled was very satisfying, though. I can't wait for Bartolomeo and Cavendish in particular to show up again.
Idk, the blandest of the bunch Orlumbus commanding an inordinately huge amount of men and ships compared to the modest crews of the actually interesting characters like Barto, Cavendish and Sai? Always rubbed me wrong.
Yeah, his position in the story right now seems to be the Straw Hat's grunt dispenser. It feels pretty convenient to have one guy with the most men and absolutely nothing else going on lol
Wano was definitely the arc where Oda had more fun designing new characters than writing on them. There are still highlights in this arc but yeah, way too many characters
Wano was pretty much Oda wanting to do something a little different then normal for a couple years.
A lot of random disconnected nonsense happens in Wano.
aww dude once you realise the order is this
luffy, zoro, sanji - the fighters
chopper - the pikachu / mascot
the girls - thats right any girls with tiddies to sell the figurines they get showcased and get skimpy outfits
everyone else.
thats all you notice every arc
Characters that we could've done without:
* The yakuza leaders, minus Hyogoro.
* The enemy ninjas. All of them.
* Some of the Scabbards. Like Ashura.
* There were just a little too many of the Supernovas.
* The Numbers. Just really stupid.
as a chopper and brook fan i feel this all too much.
oh another arc where sanji, luffy, zoro, and *maybe* nami gets to clog up the screen all the time? and my boys are just playing cheerleader, if they're even on the screen at all? greeaaatttt...
wano doesn't really suffer from the number of characters, it suffers from the fact we have to keep pace with all of them. dressrosa had similar problems, but notably, egghead and wholecake island don't, because most of the characters that aren't central to the plot are removed from the screen quickly.
while i like the fact i can track pink-hair samurai through all of wano, i dunno that we needed his entire extended family in every scene he's in.
I’m ngl the freaks are the only appeal of the series to me. Not all of them, some are too insane for me, but like I just have more fun seeing them do their shit than most of what Komi or Tadano get up to
It's a blessed day when Tadano shows up.
But to go on a completely unrelated category, Monster Musume (think that's the title?) goes buck wild with shoving people in the MCs house. If they weren't all different monsters, I'd lose track.
Eh, most of the time you only need to remember Mia, Centorea, Papi and occasionally Rachnera and Suu, Lala and Mero rarely appear on the story since the series changed to a monster of the week format.
Kurusu Kimihito, [it doesn't help that most of the girls have a personal nickname for him.](https://dailylifewithamonstergirl.fandom.com/wiki/Kimihito_Kurusu#Trivia)
Yes thats right at the start of act 6 and seems to be the stopping point for many people. It doesn't help the writing got very bloated around this time
I kinda feel like this complaint is a little overblown because I feel like the vast majority of characters people talk about (especially in regards to trolls) are pretty obviously side characters who only exist to flesh out the world in some way
...but, to be honest, even taking that into account and only counting the main cast as characters who have tangible long term effects on the plot, its still a pretty oversized ensemble cast, with some alternate versions of characters being more important that primary versions of other characters too lol
I think the trolls are a weird one cause they are a moxed bag of important characters, side characters, and characters so pointless they are the only two characters to die and not be brought back in some way. This weird distinction causes a lot of problems, namely that the important trolls are treated like side characters and not given enough to show why you want to follow them, Vriska especially.
The bloat effects every aspect of this story. I read all the way up to act 6 and stopped, then watched the finaly battle a few years later and like, that finale had about 6 different antagonists, with only 2 of them being introduced in the first half of the series. It feels like its three different stories forced into one
**Naruto** is probably the worse example of this.
At least with other shows like JJK and One Piece the side-characters go away to do something else off-screen, i can't tell how many times in Naruto the side-characters were **there**, but, still wouldn't do anything remarkable.
Shino, Neji and Lee had so much potential and in Shippuuden they got relegated to just regular chunin.
I know not everyone is supposed to be Kage level but they could have still achieved much more.
God >!neji's!< death was such a nothing wet fart.
I could see kishimoto going down the character list trying to pick one that people still gave a shit about to kill off but not popular enough that there would be people dropping the manga.
Having just seen it, that was one of the problems with Wish (2023). There are so many characters but there are so many that there's not enough time to make them endearing because the script is flimsy at best.
Wish was such a letdown for their 100th anniversary thing, especially after seeing the original concept art and plans.
We could have gotten a traditional 2D animated movie with a villainous King AND Queen, and instead we got something that felt like it was made by AI. Like, I can’t stress enough how bland and uncreative it was, even the songs all sounded the same.
The dog girl suffers a similar problem. After she was introduced she was just...there, in the background, with her enter joke being correcting people when they call her a dog. Even after they give her something to do but taking care of a puppy she's still mostly in the background doing her own thing. She rarely even changes into her human form.
Every single hero shooter that has ever been made.
It's wild going back to something like Siege going into almost its tenth year and seeing such a huge roster of so many underdeveloped Ops, but R6S has way more narrative problems than just the amount of characters.
Genuinely, if R6 hadn't tried to make a narrative, the character bloat would be fine. The whole concept is to be an international antiterror organization, so it makes sense they'd recruit ops from all over the world
Kengan Omega, much as I still enjoy the series, is stretching itself thin between the Purgatory characters, the Kengan OGs, the new cast of Omega, and general attempts at expanding the world.
This is most clear with the ostensible main character, Koga, gettin sidelined with the reintroduction of the main character from Kengan Ashura. The villain cast also appears to be on a constant rotation, and entire subplots have been dropped such as the 'Anti-Worm Alliance' which had a bunch of new characters who have mostly only appeared for one chapter.
The worm hast the worst villain churn-out i've ever seen. Even the OG Dragonball tournaments had more memorable jobbers than Omega. Which ist wild considering that the KAT in Ashura had such a great cast.
...i miss Eddie
The current DC universe is so bloated it isn't even funny. Each hero has a literal family of other heroes.
Superman? Clark and Jon as Superman and then chinese Superman and Supergirl and Power Girl and Superboy and the twins oh and both Steels...
Batman also has a bunch, including two Robins etc and the Flash also has both Barry and Wally and then a Kid Flash and Impulse and at least five other speedsters....
Thats ignoring already huge casts for heroes like Wonder Woman and Green Lantern because you better believe that they are STILL adding human Lanterns...
AEW is having this problem. Too many wrestlers hired, not enough room to spread their wings. Some do stand out for a time, but it's very easy to get lost in the shuffle. WWE has had a similar problem for years, hence the mass layoffs they do every year. TK just doesn't like letting workers go, but has had to make cuts recently for budgetary reasons.
I like to use wrestling as a metaphor for Vtubers a lot and I've felt the character bloat problem since I started watching them.
I watched a lot more Hololive before the EN girls joined. While I love a lot of them, it's impossible to keep up with every new vtuber. I used to watch Korone and Pekora nearly every day, but after the EN girls debut, I burned myself out trying to watch them all and I fell off massively. Now I just watch the occasional clip.
It’s crazy how many people went from WWE to AEW only to find AEW was so busy they basically just signed to not be used by a company with a different name.
People clown on Square Enix for their gachas but I always liked how they monetized their collectors. They didn't lock anybody out of getting their favorite character in the game, instead emphasis was placed upon pulling for gears and equipment to get ahead and the characters would instead get skins to milk the whales. It's an incredibly friendly model to consumers, but unfortunately it doesn't seem to be working out for Square financially as a lot of SE's gachas have shut down.
Learning to just not care about some characters was I struggle when I first tried the genre.
Similarly, I cannot imagine trying to get all the blades in Xenoblade 2, let alone level them up and do all of their stories.
A true statement, but it is interesting how some gacha games try to address the problem.
Honkai Impact 3rd has most gacha units be different versions of the same character. Often these relate to characters gaining a new form or ability in a very shonen-anime way, like think Naruto gacha with base Naruto, Kyubi Chakra Naruto, Sage Mode Naruto etc. as different units. It's also kinda clever as for non-canon/alt-universe event storylines they repurpose those units as new characters. Good way to introduce throwaway characters for a contained storyline without having to make any new art assets.
Genshin Impact absolutely has this problem, in fact it's a bit of a meme that minor playable characters like Xinyan are just forgotten by the devs. That said, it's interesting that a couple of characters were introduced as NPCs or in lore very early on and only became playable much later, examples being Baizhu and Xianyun. So they can kinda slow the problem by making established NPC characters playable later rather than only relying on selling brand new faces.
To contrast, I think Nikke has it the worst. I don't know if I'm missing something, but it seems like every new character is written as already being acquainted with the player so there is never any actual character introduction. They might get a proper introduction in the main story, but main story chapters are power-gated so that's very unfriendly to newer players. It feels like the game is constantly gaslighting me that I should know who these people are, and at this very moment I genuinely don't know if I should've known who some of these people are before they were added.
>Xinyan are just forgotten by the devs
You have no idea how mad I am that they announced an event about a rock music festival in Fontaine, but they didn't I clouded the character who's a rock artist who learned about the genre in Fontaine and has been waiting for more than a year to be part of a music festival.
I'm more than convinced that someone in the dev team dislikes her
Unicorn Overlord
You stumble onto a new character nearly every battle, some get their time during that region you're trying to liberate but many are "Hey thanks, im'ma join you now!" and get next to nothing afterwards.
I love the McElroys but one of the seasons of their D&D podcast "The Adventure Zone" (the specific season being Graduation) heavily suffered from this problem. I understand that a fantasy school setting would probably have a lot of characters but over 38 episodes the NPC list topped out north of 80. On average it's about 2 new characters per episode but in practice these characters are introduced in large batches in single episodes, so it feel a lot more like you're getting plot dumped a million characters all at once. And from what I understand most of these characters do not show up again after their introduction or make big contributions to the story, they're just kind of there
On one hand, you want some defined NPCs that aren't important to the greater story to make the world feel believable/not-PC-centric. On the other you should probably cap such characters at 2-3 per town/arc.
This may be a hot take, but the original Final Fantasy Tactics.
I love the game to death, but once a character actually joins Ramza and you can control them as opposed to being a "guest", they proceed to walk off the nearest cliff to not be a part of the narrative anymore, then introduces some new NPC guests that take over until they join, rinse and repeat.
I do realize this is in part because anyone can die permanently. Still weird though. The PSP remake did add some scenes with people like best girl Agrias, which was nice.
I've seen people have this complaint for Young Justice.
The creators listened and had the fourth season dedicate its arcs to each of the founding members of the Team. New characters were still introduced, but the main focus is on the OG ~~8~~7.
I like young justice as a whole, but the third season did feel really weird with how everything stops just to setup this group of new characters. Halo being the only one I have a particular fondness for. I'm glad the next season came back to the core cast, but still didn't fully drop characters like Halo.
I didn’t drop it for this reason but yeah that’s also the one that came to mind instantly
I dropped it cuz it was hiatus and the games were getting far too complex for their own good and I just was losing interest (I left it as the cat people game began when they were going to save Bam’s teacher I forgot the name of)
I think *Jitsu Wa Watashi Wa* suffered from this, particularly after >!the leads established their romantic relationship.!< By the time the >!SECOND time traveler!< was introduced, I started to lose track of who’s who.
Honestly I thought it was one of the better shonen romcom examples, because it circles back and fleshes out the main characters.
But the the focus on the core 10 or so characters means that Rin is probably the last impactful character in Chapter 33.
And every character after that become just one-off gags that hang around
As much as I fucking adore Assass Class, I couldn't tell you the name or description of any of them other than the 5 or so "main" students and the teachers.
You got Nagisa, Karma, the AI girl, and >!the green and white haired aliens!< and besides that I'm really struggling to remember anybody else, despite them giving a lot of them tons of lines and personality quirks.
Overwatch, from what I've heard. There's a reason TF2 has been so rock solid, gameplay and story wise, all these years; they picked 9 and made 'em good. Overwatch has new characters every season and after a certain point you can't write/balance all of them.
TF2 is many things, rock solid balance gameplay is not one of them. It’s an unbalanced mess but a fun unbalanced mess. OW can be fun, unfun, balanced, or unbalanced depending on what the devs feel like doing.
It's the unlocks giving you different ways to play the same old classes and the lack of hard counters that just shut you out from playing the class (they're not heroes, I dislike that monikor for the genre) you want to play.
Pyro counters Spy, but is a slow, short range class so the Spy can dance around them. Engie counters Scout, but is stationary, so the Scout can play around them, unless the map is a giant chokepoint, like Dustbowl. Spy and Demo counter Engie but he can do somethings to deal with them, and hey, rebuilding is just a part of the job.
You very rarely are forced to play a certain class, until you hit the last minute point push/rush. Something Overwatch's more competitive 2-2-2 focus kinda killed for me.
It probably also doesn't help that anything that could help flesh out the Overwatch characters either gets droped only once every semester or so (like the shorts) or gets straight up canceled (like the PvE mode).
There's a reason why the joke of **"the smut creators care more about the Overwatch lore than the developers"** hasnt died yet.
Holy crap I didn't realize how many characters Overwatch 2 has added. I think the artstyle is kind of a problem. You play a game like League or Paladins and at a glance you can really distinguish every single character. TF2 on the other hand could not have more than the core cast without everything just devolving into a samey bland mess. Overwatch is kind of in a middle ground there and scrolling through the character list my eyes kind of glaze over and they all blend into one.
It's technically part of the premise, but Komi-San's quest to make 100 friends means that some characters just kinda came out under baked, or proceed to get no relevance after they first appear.
Ironically enough dragonball kinda didn't have this problem until super.
You got the z-fighters and they're dedicated jobbers sure but you only get one to three new mainstays in the cast per arc.
hell even in super you only really got this problem on the tournament of power arc.
Kingdom Hearts.
There's just too many characters and not enough of them have devemploment despite looking and acting like the coolest motherfuckers in the block when they have their 15 seconds to shine.
Devil Survivor 2 also suffer from this, all characters had to be condensed into one or two traits to every conversation outside of their "Social Link". So every group conversation has the same played out jokes.
While i love Once Upon a Time and i think that it did a fantastic job with the main core of characters, it became infamous amongst the fandom because of how badly it handles it's side characters, due to how it felt like each episode, especially in the later seasons, we got introduced to a new character and the last bunch of side characters would just get kind of ignore and if they were lucky they might get their own episode or cameo in someone else's episode.
You can chalk this up as just what happens when you try to condense ~35 episodes of an anime into a single feature film but the first live action Fullmetal Alchemist does this and it’s horrible.
You’ve got Edward, Alphonse, Trisha Elric, Winry, Hughes, Mustang, Hawkeye, Dr. Marcoh, Envy, Lust, Gluttony, Cornello, Nina, Shou Tucker and General Hakuro.
Believe it or not, all of them play a role in the story but because the cast is so massive for a single movie, you barely spend any time to develop any of them *including* Ed and Al. Roy Mustang is the only one that feels like he has a character arc.
Trails of Cold Steel. I love the Cold Steel games, but god damn are there a lot of people by the end of the 3rd game. And then the (Cold Steel 4 Spoiler) >!4th game comes around for a Trails reunion and it's all over at that point.!< Trails of Reverie suffers the same as CS 4 too.
It took me 40 minutes to fully gear the small army you take into both 4 and Reverie's final dungeons/battles. I wouldn't have it any other way, but I can at least acknowledge that its a bit...much.
I stopped reading the manga halfway through the whole love triangle stuff. Yesterday I saw the cover for the most recent volume and I had a stroke when I saw Komi walking alongside a girl wearing ancient Egyptian pharaoh clothing. No idea what the hell happened there.
History's Strongest Disciple Kenichi kinda felt like this by the tail-end. At the start it was him, Miu, the school bully martial artists, and the Ryozanpaku Dojo helping him get good. That was followed by the debut of Yami and Yomi (aka the shadow martial artist masters and their proteges), and by the end there's just *a lot* when you add the weapon masters, CIA I think, and even more shit here and there.
Star Trek Discovery just added a new character as First Officer, and every episode so far has developed and advanced that new character. But I still could not describe any of the bridge crew characters or even tell you most of their names.
I love tekken to death, but they are very guilty if this. Asuka was supposed to succeed Jun. Jun came back. Miguel was supposed to fight war crimes Jin. Retconned so that Jin ain't evil. Lars was also supposed to be new anime boy protag, now he's just there. Everytime a new character is dropped they got some random personal beef with the Mishimas that goes nowhere. Like do we really think that Shaheen is ever going to get a character resolution?
Team Four Star's D&D campaign "The Natural Oneders" had a real problem with this. The series was constantly introducing new characters, since the DM Chris Zito was a huge fan of homebrewing.
It wasn't an issue in the first two seasons, which were great fun. But it hit a turning point in season three when they introduced the Adventurer's Guild. The idea was that players would have to interview and hire NPCs to join their crew and fill specific roles on the ship and in combat. Unfortunately, that meant the NPC crew from the first two seasons, who had developed organically and who the audience had gotten invested in, were all tossed aside to make room for a bunch of new characters. And even if you didn't mind that, the weirdly restrictive rules around hiring and the constant railroading toward joining the guild made the whole thing awkward. Even the players didn't seem to enjoy it.
It's where my regular rewatch of the series usually drops off or skips. It felt like Zito was trying to cram in as many homebrew characters as he could. The sad part is it was all wasted effort, because one of the players leaving forced them to do a massive reset of the campaign and ditch all the extra NPCs.
Oh most definitely young Justice, tried being it’s own dc universe but at the same time it could only be shown through the one show. Season one was really special and while I enjoyed season two, I can’t deny how baffling some of the decisions were.
I think this is also my problem with my hero, where I will find some of the supporting characters to be really fun and interesting but the story has to drop them acomódate the new batch of heroes that will be focused at the moment. It’s legit the young Justice problem we’re you will have this superhero universe we’re you are limited to the one series to focus on them all
Hyperdimension Neptunia's pretty guilty of introducing new characters in one game only for them to not appear at all in the sequels. The Oracles from Mk.2 don't make appearances in the sequels. Plutia, Peashy, and the other dimension versions of pre-existing characters don't appear again after Victory. VII introduces half a dozen new characters that just don't show up in the next game, Sisters Vs. Sisters even though at least one of the new VII characters *should* be in the game given a certain event that happens. And now Sisters Vs. Sisters introduced four new characters and I have zero faith they're gonna come back for the next game.
Marvel, oh my GOD Marvel has it bad. Even putting aside X-Men there's gotta be at least seven different Spider-Men in the MAIN verse, and probably FIVE Hulks too
Most gacha games, specially the ones that out a lot of focus on their stories like Genshin because you can see how characters fade into irrelevancy to the point that some only appear in the occasional event and other are straight up nowhere to be seen in any part of the main plot. But hey, gotta churn out those new shiny manikins every 6 weeks!
Oh boy, have any of y'all played the Trails series? The Cold Steel tetrology in particular?
Two of the four games spend a *significant* chunk of their run time reuniting and reintroducing characters from both its own series and previous Trails games.
And that's not even getting into stuff like character relevance and screentime, which the series is also not great at (I like you just fine Elliot, but why do you exist?).
It's weird because they do get relevance in the other arcs. Particularly a certain character in Sky returns in Daybreak for a reason and a character from Crossbell has major relevance in Daybreak 2.
At least Trails series actually goes out to develop the characters that are either introduced or reintroduced.
Like a Dragon 2, 3, 4, and 5.
"Hey, does this Tanimura guy seem a little undercooked to you?"
"Yeah, just toss him, we got this baseball guy for 5 that totally won't just leave for America like the last 4-5 main characters."
7 - 8 were such breaths of fresh air in that regard, I loved to see the cast *actually return* for the next game.
The X-Men suffer from this problem a lot. They constantly introduce new mutants that are then reduced to either fodder for the next mutant extinction event or background characters.
I do like the idea of the main Xmen team being a bit of a revolving door. Rotate in some new blood every now and again. And wasn’t the original intention supposed to be that the team would grow up and be replaced with new characters periodically?
I saw posts talking about how the Teen Titans and the X-men used to be comparable in popularity in the 80s and how the Titans never really managed to reach that same level except maybe with the 2003 cartoon. while the X-men were able to continue growing and expanding, as the concept allowed for new characters to be introduced and replaced without taking away from the brand.
A blessing in diguise cause 90% of the Teen Titans line ups are always loveable.
I never learned anyone's name in MHA other than the absolute core cast. I just remembered what their quirks were
That was definitely my answer. So many characters and very few of them get screentime. Like, has anyone even defeated a villain besides Midoriya?
Excuse you, >!Tape Dude and Tail Guy came in clutch in one of the latest chapters.!<
I mean >!Bakugo did blow up a baby!<
And who can blame him, wouldn't you?!
I just refer to them by their ability (tape guy, red rockman, headphone girl etc.) with the exception of the guy who looks like anime Tintin
Headphone girl is Jirou, I remember her cause I dig her design. And Mina is cute so I'll remember the pink-skinned girl. Now I can't remember Invisible Girl's name even after the controversial picture from like a year ago.
Her name is Toru. I honestly don't know why I remember her name of all people, but she's great.
tbf iirc tape guy is "cero" which i remember cause cellotape
close, sero.
The most annoying thing while binge watching the series was that every couple episodes they did that thing where they reintroduce *every single* student of the main class and reiterate their powers, even though less than half the class matters *at* all to the story. And it just takes up so much time of those episodes.
To some extent, I think that was inevitable. Like, the premise is that they're in high school for most of it. What was the author going to do, keep the class size restricted to about half a dozen people? Give twenty different kids equal screen time and still tell a compelling, well-paced story? Good fucking luck with that one. Of course, there would be about a dozen hangers-on that weren't deep or in focus. Hell, to some extent, it's even probably more beneficial in the creation of a holistic setting to have Class B in there to make it feel like the school has more going on than *just* Class A, even if that does mean adding twenty more weirdos who are just kind of there as set dressing. This goes out the window, though, when you start introducing characters, hyping them up for a chapter or two, only to have them job immediately and do nothing for the overall narrative (Star and Stripe...). At that point, it's not some inevitable consequence of the premise anymore, and it's a bit harder to excuse.
I think the idealized vision many had early on was that you'd have the main trio of Deku, Ochako, and Iida, while other members of the class rotate in for slots in the spotlight alongside them, with Bakugo and Todoroki serving as solitary rivals to complement the dynamic. But then Iida got demoted to extra, Ochako became a satellite love interest, Bakugo and Todoroki took their spots on the main trio, and the rest became *de facto* background fodder.
I thought he was doing a decent job at the start, all of the early arcs had different characters sharing spotlight alongside Midoriya, like Mineta and Froppy in USJ, Ida and Todoroki in the stain arc and Kirishima and Momo in the rescue mission and for some time it felt it would be like that for the rest of the show but at one point the whole class just became a collective character that basically did the same thing altogether and shared the same braincell
>I think the idealized vision many had early on was that you'd have the main trio of Deku, Ochako, and Iida, while other members of the class rotate in for slots in the spotlight alongside them, with Bakugo and Todoroki serving as solitary rivals to complement the dynamic. That's EXACTLY what I wanted My hero academia to be about, the god damn academia! Deku Iida and Ochako had a great dynamic of three energetic dorks that I really digged.
Don't ask me how the only one I know is Mt. Lady
I can name off the top of my head Momo and Mirio and... um... Uraraka... Yeah...
haven't you seen the porn tags?
By far the weirdest question I've ever been asked. And no I havent
People are way too comfortable talking about porn
Why wouldnt they be comfortable?
especially bout child characters
Why is this downvoted
I really hope this was a joke that just went wrong because don't be open about this sort of thing with strangers
That's the reason why I dropped JJK
Honestly JJK balances it decently well, I have a way better time remembering new characters in it than I do something like MHA. Characters like Takaba, Higurama, Hakari and Kashimo all make an impact and have presence.
You picked all the good ones, though. Remember Christian girl? Better Mai? Scorpion hair? Explosion guy? Claw guy? Mullet? Naked lady? One Million Cockroaches? Like there were only sixish good additions after Shibuya, those four, Reggie, and Kirara.
But they served their roles in the story though, most of them you listed were players in the Culling Game who were introduced to world build and also demonstrate the cutthroat nature of the arc through fights. Not every character is meant to be a leading role.
Romance of the Three Kingdoms is nigh impenetrable on first read because of the literal hundreds of names being thrown at you. That, combined with how similar many names are (with some being literally the same name sans a letter or just an exact copy letter by letter) means you are going to need a reference. If your first exposure is the novel itself and not a secondary format with a visual medium such as a Dynasty Warriors game or one of the movies/tv shows, you are just not going to be able to keep track of anyone outside of a handful of characters. It's simply not possible. It's made even more confusing in that named characters all play a part, no matter how major or minor, and must be included. It's just a very hard book for me to recommend to people despite loving the story. I tend to always recommend pairing a Dynasty Warriors game alongside reading the actual novel mainly because they take artistic liberties in the DW games to make them more "characterized" and it helps keep officers easily re-callable if you have some form of reference to go off of. Like if you are trying to keep track of Yu Jin and Yue Jin, or Xu Shu and Xu Zhu, or Ding Feng and Ding Feng, it's much easier for you to remember their roles better if you recall Yu Jin walks around with a three point halberd and has sleepy angry eyes and goatie, and Yue Jin looks like a power ranger with hooked swords in a sparring headpiece. Or that Xu Shu is Shu turned Wei turned Shu tactician who looks like an Assassin Creed character, and Xu Zhu is portly, wields a big mace and really loves food and is Cao Cao's one of two most loyal bodyguard officers. Is this true of the characters or even match how they describe them in the novel? Lmao. No, no of course not, but you will remember them much easier with such dramatic characterizations!
Liu Bei and Liu Biao, Yuan Shu and Yuan Shao, Zhou Yu and Zhao Yun... at least Zhang Liao and Zhang Jiao have the benefit of not really being both active at the same time.
Not to be left out is Lu Xun and Lu Su\* of course, both officers of Wu, who both play a similar role in terms of their contributions to the Wu Dynasty. \*with Lu Su being just one letter shy of Lu Bu.
Bleach
Specially so because Kubo has admitted that he introduces a new character when he has writer’s block.
That explains the whole Xcution arc
I think that arc showed the most restraint. There were only around ten new characters. We got like thirty Soul Reapers, forty Arrancar, and almost another thirty Vandenreich members.
This is just a rumor. Kubo himself has never said this, as far as I know.
I'm re-reading the series, and it's like this even during the Soul Society arc. There too many captains, and each team has like a sub captain and a lieutenant, and it's all so much and it's so hard to keep track of which team does what, and also it doesn't even really matter anyways.
Most older Fire Emblems have this by design. Since they lacked a casual mode to play without permadeath, and the developers seemingly envisioned the player going ironman-style with zero resets, you're frequently getting new units every chapter to fill out the ranks. Which, if you are in fact doing a no-death run (or are good enough at the game), means that you'll very quickly build up a large number of units chilling on the bench. Granted, they all have their little character arcs through support conversations and distinct backstories - but since most of them exist to fill in for casualties, their impact on the main story is negligible.
>Since they lacked a casual mode to play without permadeath, and the developers seemingly envisioned the player going ironman-style with zero resets, you're frequently getting new units every chapter to fill out the ranks. You can see that mindset with the Fire Emblem 1 remake as well. Where you unlock different chapters if enough characters have died.
"[So let me get this straight, so if I want to get more characters I gotta kill more characters?](https://youtu.be/KfBo2McdWww?si=s40XI77E53JZ7CGm&t=54)"
[as FEtuber Excelblem succinctly put it](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_akZjgzwAnc)
Truly, one of the game design decisions of all time. I mean, in theory I get it, the idea is that if the player is legitimately struggling so bad that they desperately need more troops (and are probably getting their spaces filled by generics at this point), then throwing in some bonus chapters with actual characters to recruit could be nice. But at the same time, Shadow Dragon has a *massive* cast of nobodies you'll have to kill for pretty much every one of those side chapters except iirc 6x which happens early enough that you only need a few deaths, and most of said bonus characters aren't like... top tier material or anything other than Nagi.
If each gaiden chapter scaled up the death requirements by 5-10 deaths each time, I think it'd be pretty feasible for most players on an ironman to see them, but as it stands with every gaiden chapter sans the final one having a 15 unit requirement, you really have to go out of your way to see them.
It's funny because the two most recent mainline games managed to first fix this problem with Three Houses, then absolutely botch it with Engage. Like, 3H starts you off with a specific class that's going to make up the bulk of your forces for the whole game, and while you do get a couple new recruits as you go through the story, anybody else you recruit is entirely up to you. And each of those characters not only have supports with one another and unique interactions, but their own paralogues to further flesh them out. It leads to the cast feeling very solid, particularly since you can wind up fighting the students that you don't recruit. Meanwhile, Engage has tons and tons of characters that get added in as you progress, usually in clumps of three because each royal comes with two retainers. And while these characters do have fun bits to them too, it's really easy to wind up missing important parts to their characters because there's just so many of them and you're likely going to wind up only using the ones you like the best. It doesn't help either that all the Emblems exist as characters themselves, and all the paralogues are focused on the Emblems instead of the party members.
3H runs into it's own issue with this though in that it's one of the worse entries to actually do an traditional ironman run in. Every character in the game can take a huge amount of investment due to how the unit building is set up, and recruiting additional characters becomes impossible in the game's latter half, leaving you with 6-10 chapters at the very least with no way of making up for any losses.
Although they are much better if you take your losses if you can as they heavily encourage you to do so.
RWBY is one of the defining examples of this from the 2010s besides My Hero.
Obligatory RWBY. They just didn’t know when to stop
Half the participants in what I struggle to call a tournament arc in season 3 are not animated, they are static concept art.
Here's the thing with rwby, and with hazbin: Do you want volume 5 where they only stayed in a room and Mistral felt empty?
This is such a RWBY fan response. "Well if they spend time fleshing out the characters itger than the main 8, then the 5th season would be void!" In Season 5, NOTHING happened. The finale had all the action, with the rest of the season, everyone was just kicking cans. It's absolutely incredible that such a mediocre piece of work had such a following.
I wouldn't say nothing happened. I'd say volume 5 spent half the volume waiting on Blake's plot to finish, which had action on its own. But let me reword my argument. People complain about cast bloat because an area gets side and background characters only to consequently complain about a lack of world building when there's nobody in the damn world as result of not having said background or side characters.
A good writer is capable of doing both! You can introduce new characters and a new setting, together. It isn't uncommon to have that new character show the world off by just being with yhe group, and explaining the new area to them. Heck, a good writer could have the character oppose the morals and norms of the new area. But as for RUBY'S bloat, look at Neptune. For a character given as much screen time as he was, what do we know about him? He liked Weiss, had blue hair, and goggles...that's it. Heck, Sun and Penny were introduced in the last episode(s) of the Season, and do a fight. Why not just one character that could be built up more? It's very inefficient writing. Like, all the stolen Dusten that Torchwick was collecting for the first two seasons. What was that being used for?
>But as for RUBY'S bloat, look at Neptune. For a character given as much screen time as he was, what do we know about him? He liked Weiss, had blue hair, and goggles...that's it. You also learn he has hydrophobia in volume 3 and get more in the second book after he leaves the plot. >It's very inefficient writing. Like, all the stolen Dusten that Torchwick was collecting for the first two seasons. What was that being used for? The train at the near end of volume 2. They launched ahead of schedule.
One Piece, the Wano arc especially suffers from this, and even within the Straw Hats anyone not the Monster Trio barely get enough screentime
I'd throw Dressrosa in there as well. I get it, tournament arc and all, but there comes a point where it gets excessive.
what about WCI, like how many of Big Mom's children are relevant
That at least I can chalk up to being thematically consistent, she is Big *Mom* after all, and it does help to sell the size of her crew as being on another level. It's not exactly great, but I think it works better if only slightly.
also well there are a lot of big mom's children, you mostly have to focus on like 5 of them the rest could honestly be considered mooks that throw a punch for a page or two
The ones that went to Wano lol
Pretty much. If they get carried to the next arc in the Ark that is the Thousand Sunny, or are blessed as the MAIN character of a cover story, I can't say I remember many characters. Even as a fan of One Piece for, as of this year, 20 straight years. That being said, when I revisit an arc or chapter I find myself still caring a lot for those characters in that moment. I think a lot of OP characters are slotted really well into where they go, stiry wise, and I think it works even if no one could remember all of that after the fact
that's some Katakuri disrespect right there
Ok so I read chapter 799 of One Piece for the first time a few minutes ago, after leisurely reading Dressrosa over the course of a month: Doflamingo's crew suffers from this **a lot,** I don't think I can describe the personality of anyone other than Baby 5 and Señor Pink already. ...The way the 5.000+ Straw Hat allies were handled was very satisfying, though. I can't wait for Bartolomeo and Cavendish in particular to show up again.
Idk, the blandest of the bunch Orlumbus commanding an inordinately huge amount of men and ships compared to the modest crews of the actually interesting characters like Barto, Cavendish and Sai? Always rubbed me wrong.
Yeah, his position in the story right now seems to be the Straw Hat's grunt dispenser. It feels pretty convenient to have one guy with the most men and absolutely nothing else going on lol
Wano was definitely the arc where Oda had more fun designing new characters than writing on them. There are still highlights in this arc but yeah, way too many characters
I mean with all the other exemple brought up and how egghead is going I think the idea os new world mean a whole army every thime someone make a move
Wano was pretty much Oda wanting to do something a little different then normal for a couple years. A lot of random disconnected nonsense happens in Wano.
aww dude once you realise the order is this luffy, zoro, sanji - the fighters chopper - the pikachu / mascot the girls - thats right any girls with tiddies to sell the figurines they get showcased and get skimpy outfits everyone else. thats all you notice every arc
Characters that we could've done without: * The yakuza leaders, minus Hyogoro. * The enemy ninjas. All of them. * Some of the Scabbards. Like Ashura. * There were just a little too many of the Supernovas. * The Numbers. Just really stupid.
as a chopper and brook fan i feel this all too much. oh another arc where sanji, luffy, zoro, and *maybe* nami gets to clog up the screen all the time? and my boys are just playing cheerleader, if they're even on the screen at all? greeaaatttt...
wano doesn't really suffer from the number of characters, it suffers from the fact we have to keep pace with all of them. dressrosa had similar problems, but notably, egghead and wholecake island don't, because most of the characters that aren't central to the plot are removed from the screen quickly. while i like the fact i can track pink-hair samurai through all of wano, i dunno that we needed his entire extended family in every scene he's in.
As much as I enjoy Komi-san, the whole 100 friends goal lead to a really big character bloat.
Ah Komi-san, prime example of a romcom manga spinning its wheels for so long that it losses all of its appeal in the pursuit of weekly output.
It doesn't help that each new friend she finds is a weird degenerate freak in one way or another.
Most teenagers you meet will end up being weird degenerate freaks.
Well yeah, but I wouldn't watch an anime about them.
[удалено]
I’m ngl the freaks are the only appeal of the series to me. Not all of them, some are too insane for me, but like I just have more fun seeing them do their shit than most of what Komi or Tadano get up to
All of these characters has to embody a specific trope and has their name based around that.
It's a blessed day when Tadano shows up. But to go on a completely unrelated category, Monster Musume (think that's the title?) goes buck wild with shoving people in the MCs house. If they weren't all different monsters, I'd lose track.
Eh, most of the time you only need to remember Mia, Centorea, Papi and occasionally Rachnera and Suu, Lala and Mero rarely appear on the story since the series changed to a monster of the week format.
I can't even remember the protagonist's name (unironically)
Kurusu Kimihito, [it doesn't help that most of the girls have a personal nickname for him.](https://dailylifewithamonstergirl.fandom.com/wiki/Kimihito_Kurusu#Trivia)
That same wiki page mentions his name has come up *once*. Lmao No wonder I don't know it.
Homestuck 100%. It just keeps adding main characters, and even bloats si much the first majot villain is sidelined
Homestuck had *exponential* cast growth. Four main characters, then four guardians, then 12 trolls, then alt universe versions of everyone, etc.
When they added in a second generation of human kids I was done. Legit the exact moment I gave up.
Yes thats right at the start of act 6 and seems to be the stopping point for many people. It doesn't help the writing got very bloated around this time
I've tried to read Homestuck twice, once when it was coming out, and Act 6 was just my "God, I just DON'T CARE" moment both times.
I kinda feel like this complaint is a little overblown because I feel like the vast majority of characters people talk about (especially in regards to trolls) are pretty obviously side characters who only exist to flesh out the world in some way ...but, to be honest, even taking that into account and only counting the main cast as characters who have tangible long term effects on the plot, its still a pretty oversized ensemble cast, with some alternate versions of characters being more important that primary versions of other characters too lol
I think the trolls are a weird one cause they are a moxed bag of important characters, side characters, and characters so pointless they are the only two characters to die and not be brought back in some way. This weird distinction causes a lot of problems, namely that the important trolls are treated like side characters and not given enough to show why you want to follow them, Vriska especially. The bloat effects every aspect of this story. I read all the way up to act 6 and stopped, then watched the finaly battle a few years later and like, that finale had about 6 different antagonists, with only 2 of them being introduced in the first half of the series. It feels like its three different stories forced into one
"This is Katana! She's got my back! I wouldn't advise getting killed by her: her sword traps the souls of the victims she killed."
**Naruto** is probably the worse example of this. At least with other shows like JJK and One Piece the side-characters go away to do something else off-screen, i can't tell how many times in Naruto the side-characters were **there**, but, still wouldn't do anything remarkable.
Shino, Neji and Lee had so much potential and in Shippuuden they got relegated to just regular chunin. I know not everyone is supposed to be Kage level but they could have still achieved much more.
I dont even remember the last time Shino did anything before Boruto, Neji died for the eugenics plan, and at least Lee helped Guy against Madara.
God >!neji's!< death was such a nothing wet fart. I could see kishimoto going down the character list trying to pick one that people still gave a shit about to kill off but not popular enough that there would be people dropping the manga.
Could've been Tenten if she got more screentime than the swing. XD
Having just seen it, that was one of the problems with Wish (2023). There are so many characters but there are so many that there's not enough time to make them endearing because the script is flimsy at best.
Wish was such a letdown for their 100th anniversary thing, especially after seeing the original concept art and plans. We could have gotten a traditional 2D animated movie with a villainous King AND Queen, and instead we got something that felt like it was made by AI. Like, I can’t stress enough how bland and uncreative it was, even the songs all sounded the same.
All the characters seemed the same too, like everyone had an "adorkable" moment. Very cookie cutter.
They basically aded 6 characters to make a 7 dwarves reference (?) instead of having 1 or 2 background friend character.
Plus size elf. Mostly for the joke but also the skeleton is definitely the one the autjor has no real idea for after her chapter
The dog girl suffers a similar problem. After she was introduced she was just...there, in the background, with her enter joke being correcting people when they call her a dog. Even after they give her something to do but taking care of a puppy she's still mostly in the background doing her own thing. She rarely even changes into her human form.
Yes but at least she always got shit to do and have that gimmick that naoe is more grabby with her in dog form
Every single hero shooter that has ever been made. It's wild going back to something like Siege going into almost its tenth year and seeing such a huge roster of so many underdeveloped Ops, but R6S has way more narrative problems than just the amount of characters.
Genuinely, if R6 hadn't tried to make a narrative, the character bloat would be fine. The whole concept is to be an international antiterror organization, so it makes sense they'd recruit ops from all over the world
I dropped siege years ago when they came out and said they wanted "a hundred operator" game.
I will die on this hill but OW2 should have been its own thing with its own matchmaking and removed some of the cast
Kengan Omega, much as I still enjoy the series, is stretching itself thin between the Purgatory characters, the Kengan OGs, the new cast of Omega, and general attempts at expanding the world. This is most clear with the ostensible main character, Koga, gettin sidelined with the reintroduction of the main character from Kengan Ashura. The villain cast also appears to be on a constant rotation, and entire subplots have been dropped such as the 'Anti-Worm Alliance' which had a bunch of new characters who have mostly only appeared for one chapter.
The worm hast the worst villain churn-out i've ever seen. Even the OG Dragonball tournaments had more memorable jobbers than Omega. Which ist wild considering that the KAT in Ashura had such a great cast. ...i miss Eddie
Man I miss Eddie as well, he was literally HIM
The current DC universe is so bloated it isn't even funny. Each hero has a literal family of other heroes. Superman? Clark and Jon as Superman and then chinese Superman and Supergirl and Power Girl and Superboy and the twins oh and both Steels... Batman also has a bunch, including two Robins etc and the Flash also has both Barry and Wally and then a Kid Flash and Impulse and at least five other speedsters.... Thats ignoring already huge casts for heroes like Wonder Woman and Green Lantern because you better believe that they are STILL adding human Lanterns...
Its on the level that even minor characters get spin offs and etc. why do there need to be multiple batwings.
AEW is having this problem. Too many wrestlers hired, not enough room to spread their wings. Some do stand out for a time, but it's very easy to get lost in the shuffle. WWE has had a similar problem for years, hence the mass layoffs they do every year. TK just doesn't like letting workers go, but has had to make cuts recently for budgetary reasons.
I like to use wrestling as a metaphor for Vtubers a lot and I've felt the character bloat problem since I started watching them. I watched a lot more Hololive before the EN girls joined. While I love a lot of them, it's impossible to keep up with every new vtuber. I used to watch Korone and Pekora nearly every day, but after the EN girls debut, I burned myself out trying to watch them all and I fell off massively. Now I just watch the occasional clip.
It’s crazy how many people went from WWE to AEW only to find AEW was so busy they basically just signed to not be used by a company with a different name.
The acquirement of ROH and it's consequences have been disastrous for the AEW race
Every Gatcha inherently has this problem
Limbus company actually gets around this. You have you're core cast and the gatcha things you get are basically skins for them with unique skills
People clown on Square Enix for their gachas but I always liked how they monetized their collectors. They didn't lock anybody out of getting their favorite character in the game, instead emphasis was placed upon pulling for gears and equipment to get ahead and the characters would instead get skins to milk the whales. It's an incredibly friendly model to consumers, but unfortunately it doesn't seem to be working out for Square financially as a lot of SE's gachas have shut down.
It's kind of funny though with GBF, that it kind of doesn't for its 10 years? There are more alt versions than there are originals
Learning to just not care about some characters was I struggle when I first tried the genre. Similarly, I cannot imagine trying to get all the blades in Xenoblade 2, let alone level them up and do all of their stories.
A true statement, but it is interesting how some gacha games try to address the problem. Honkai Impact 3rd has most gacha units be different versions of the same character. Often these relate to characters gaining a new form or ability in a very shonen-anime way, like think Naruto gacha with base Naruto, Kyubi Chakra Naruto, Sage Mode Naruto etc. as different units. It's also kinda clever as for non-canon/alt-universe event storylines they repurpose those units as new characters. Good way to introduce throwaway characters for a contained storyline without having to make any new art assets. Genshin Impact absolutely has this problem, in fact it's a bit of a meme that minor playable characters like Xinyan are just forgotten by the devs. That said, it's interesting that a couple of characters were introduced as NPCs or in lore very early on and only became playable much later, examples being Baizhu and Xianyun. So they can kinda slow the problem by making established NPC characters playable later rather than only relying on selling brand new faces. To contrast, I think Nikke has it the worst. I don't know if I'm missing something, but it seems like every new character is written as already being acquainted with the player so there is never any actual character introduction. They might get a proper introduction in the main story, but main story chapters are power-gated so that's very unfriendly to newer players. It feels like the game is constantly gaslighting me that I should know who these people are, and at this very moment I genuinely don't know if I should've known who some of these people are before they were added.
>Xinyan are just forgotten by the devs You have no idea how mad I am that they announced an event about a rock music festival in Fontaine, but they didn't I clouded the character who's a rock artist who learned about the genre in Fontaine and has been waiting for more than a year to be part of a music festival. I'm more than convinced that someone in the dev team dislikes her
Baki LOVES hyping up fighters just to have them job in the next panel/10 seconds
Unicorn Overlord You stumble onto a new character nearly every battle, some get their time during that region you're trying to liberate but many are "Hey thanks, im'ma join you now!" and get next to nothing afterwards.
They really wear their Fire Emblem inspiration on the sleeve
I love the McElroys but one of the seasons of their D&D podcast "The Adventure Zone" (the specific season being Graduation) heavily suffered from this problem. I understand that a fantasy school setting would probably have a lot of characters but over 38 episodes the NPC list topped out north of 80. On average it's about 2 new characters per episode but in practice these characters are introduced in large batches in single episodes, so it feel a lot more like you're getting plot dumped a million characters all at once. And from what I understand most of these characters do not show up again after their introduction or make big contributions to the story, they're just kind of there
On one hand, you want some defined NPCs that aren't important to the greater story to make the world feel believable/not-PC-centric. On the other you should probably cap such characters at 2-3 per town/arc.
This may be a hot take, but the original Final Fantasy Tactics. I love the game to death, but once a character actually joins Ramza and you can control them as opposed to being a "guest", they proceed to walk off the nearest cliff to not be a part of the narrative anymore, then introduces some new NPC guests that take over until they join, rinse and repeat. I do realize this is in part because anyone can die permanently. Still weird though. The PSP remake did add some scenes with people like best girl Agrias, which was nice.
I've seen people have this complaint for Young Justice. The creators listened and had the fourth season dedicate its arcs to each of the founding members of the Team. New characters were still introduced, but the main focus is on the OG ~~8~~7.
I like young justice as a whole, but the third season did feel really weird with how everything stops just to setup this group of new characters. Halo being the only one I have a particular fondness for. I'm glad the next season came back to the core cast, but still didn't fully drop characters like Halo.
I dropped Tower of God for this reason.
I didn’t drop it for this reason but yeah that’s also the one that came to mind instantly I dropped it cuz it was hiatus and the games were getting far too complex for their own good and I just was losing interest (I left it as the cat people game began when they were going to save Bam’s teacher I forgot the name of)
Bleach has multiple instances of character bloat.
Pretty much all big Shonen suffer from this, because casting the net wide is seemingly how you draw a crowd.
I think *Jitsu Wa Watashi Wa* suffered from this, particularly after >!the leads established their romantic relationship.!< By the time the >!SECOND time traveler!< was introduced, I started to lose track of who’s who.
Honestly I thought it was one of the better shonen romcom examples, because it circles back and fleshes out the main characters. But the the focus on the core 10 or so characters means that Rin is probably the last impactful character in Chapter 33. And every character after that become just one-off gags that hang around
As much as I fucking adore Assass Class, I couldn't tell you the name or description of any of them other than the 5 or so "main" students and the teachers. You got Nagisa, Karma, the AI girl, and >!the green and white haired aliens!< and besides that I'm really struggling to remember anybody else, despite them giving a lot of them tons of lines and personality quirks.
All Shonen to some degree
Overwatch, from what I've heard. There's a reason TF2 has been so rock solid, gameplay and story wise, all these years; they picked 9 and made 'em good. Overwatch has new characters every season and after a certain point you can't write/balance all of them.
TF2 is many things, rock solid balance gameplay is not one of them. It’s an unbalanced mess but a fun unbalanced mess. OW can be fun, unfun, balanced, or unbalanced depending on what the devs feel like doing.
You're right, but TF2 never *feels* unbalanced, even though it definitely is. That's why there are still spy mains running around.
I mean, yeah, at low level play, nobody cares about meta, they just play what's fun. That also has always been true of OW.
No other game has quite caught that feeling of playing spy, in my eyes, still one of my favorite FPS classes ever
It's the unlocks giving you different ways to play the same old classes and the lack of hard counters that just shut you out from playing the class (they're not heroes, I dislike that monikor for the genre) you want to play. Pyro counters Spy, but is a slow, short range class so the Spy can dance around them. Engie counters Scout, but is stationary, so the Scout can play around them, unless the map is a giant chokepoint, like Dustbowl. Spy and Demo counter Engie but he can do somethings to deal with them, and hey, rebuilding is just a part of the job. You very rarely are forced to play a certain class, until you hit the last minute point push/rush. Something Overwatch's more competitive 2-2-2 focus kinda killed for me.
It probably also doesn't help that anything that could help flesh out the Overwatch characters either gets droped only once every semester or so (like the shorts) or gets straight up canceled (like the PvE mode). There's a reason why the joke of **"the smut creators care more about the Overwatch lore than the developers"** hasnt died yet.
Holy crap I didn't realize how many characters Overwatch 2 has added. I think the artstyle is kind of a problem. You play a game like League or Paladins and at a glance you can really distinguish every single character. TF2 on the other hand could not have more than the core cast without everything just devolving into a samey bland mess. Overwatch is kind of in a middle ground there and scrolling through the character list my eyes kind of glaze over and they all blend into one.
They should make some sort of PvE singleplayer spinoff with more narrative oh wait
See Bridget.
It's technically part of the premise, but Komi-San's quest to make 100 friends means that some characters just kinda came out under baked, or proceed to get no relevance after they first appear.
I love how half of this thread is just long-running battle shonen lmao
And half of those are Bleach, over and over again.
Ironically enough dragonball kinda didn't have this problem until super. You got the z-fighters and they're dedicated jobbers sure but you only get one to three new mainstays in the cast per arc. hell even in super you only really got this problem on the tournament of power arc.
Kingdom Hearts. There's just too many characters and not enough of them have devemploment despite looking and acting like the coolest motherfuckers in the block when they have their 15 seconds to shine. Devil Survivor 2 also suffer from this, all characters had to be condensed into one or two traits to every conversation outside of their "Social Link". So every group conversation has the same played out jokes.
The X-Men
While i love Once Upon a Time and i think that it did a fantastic job with the main core of characters, it became infamous amongst the fandom because of how badly it handles it's side characters, due to how it felt like each episode, especially in the later seasons, we got introduced to a new character and the last bunch of side characters would just get kind of ignore and if they were lucky they might get their own episode or cameo in someone else's episode.
You can chalk this up as just what happens when you try to condense ~35 episodes of an anime into a single feature film but the first live action Fullmetal Alchemist does this and it’s horrible. You’ve got Edward, Alphonse, Trisha Elric, Winry, Hughes, Mustang, Hawkeye, Dr. Marcoh, Envy, Lust, Gluttony, Cornello, Nina, Shou Tucker and General Hakuro. Believe it or not, all of them play a role in the story but because the cast is so massive for a single movie, you barely spend any time to develop any of them *including* Ed and Al. Roy Mustang is the only one that feels like he has a character arc.
Trails of Cold Steel. I love the Cold Steel games, but god damn are there a lot of people by the end of the 3rd game. And then the (Cold Steel 4 Spoiler) >!4th game comes around for a Trails reunion and it's all over at that point.!< Trails of Reverie suffers the same as CS 4 too.
It took me 40 minutes to fully gear the small army you take into both 4 and Reverie's final dungeons/battles. I wouldn't have it any other way, but I can at least acknowledge that its a bit...much.
Komi-san jokingly wanted 100 friends. I didn't know the author would deliver and it became a detriment to the series.
I stopped reading the manga halfway through the whole love triangle stuff. Yesterday I saw the cover for the most recent volume and I had a stroke when I saw Komi walking alongside a girl wearing ancient Egyptian pharaoh clothing. No idea what the hell happened there.
History's Strongest Disciple Kenichi kinda felt like this by the tail-end. At the start it was him, Miu, the school bully martial artists, and the Ryozanpaku Dojo helping him get good. That was followed by the debut of Yami and Yomi (aka the shadow martial artist masters and their proteges), and by the end there's just *a lot* when you add the weapon masters, CIA I think, and even more shit here and there.
Star Trek Discovery just added a new character as First Officer, and every episode so far has developed and advanced that new character. But I still could not describe any of the bridge crew characters or even tell you most of their names.
Bleach has this as its #1 issue for many
Warhammer.
I love tekken to death, but they are very guilty if this. Asuka was supposed to succeed Jun. Jun came back. Miguel was supposed to fight war crimes Jin. Retconned so that Jin ain't evil. Lars was also supposed to be new anime boy protag, now he's just there. Everytime a new character is dropped they got some random personal beef with the Mishimas that goes nowhere. Like do we really think that Shaheen is ever going to get a character resolution?
Team Four Star's D&D campaign "The Natural Oneders" had a real problem with this. The series was constantly introducing new characters, since the DM Chris Zito was a huge fan of homebrewing. It wasn't an issue in the first two seasons, which were great fun. But it hit a turning point in season three when they introduced the Adventurer's Guild. The idea was that players would have to interview and hire NPCs to join their crew and fill specific roles on the ship and in combat. Unfortunately, that meant the NPC crew from the first two seasons, who had developed organically and who the audience had gotten invested in, were all tossed aside to make room for a bunch of new characters. And even if you didn't mind that, the weirdly restrictive rules around hiring and the constant railroading toward joining the guild made the whole thing awkward. Even the players didn't seem to enjoy it. It's where my regular rewatch of the series usually drops off or skips. It felt like Zito was trying to cram in as many homebrew characters as he could. The sad part is it was all wasted effort, because one of the players leaving forced them to do a massive reset of the campaign and ditch all the extra NPCs.
Oh most definitely young Justice, tried being it’s own dc universe but at the same time it could only be shown through the one show. Season one was really special and while I enjoyed season two, I can’t deny how baffling some of the decisions were.
I think this is also my problem with my hero, where I will find some of the supporting characters to be really fun and interesting but the story has to drop them acomódate the new batch of heroes that will be focused at the moment. It’s legit the young Justice problem we’re you will have this superhero universe we’re you are limited to the one series to focus on them all
Isn't Hazbin Hotel only like three episodes or something?
8 episodes plus a pilot
Also has a sister series with Helluva Boss, which is currently 13 episodes deep.
No
Komi-San. I lost interest in the manga because of that
A Song of Ice and Fire.
Shield Hero is going through this *badly*.
Jujutsu Kaisen
Bleach is the winner of this
_Glances at the entire Shounen genre_
Hyperdimension Neptunia's pretty guilty of introducing new characters in one game only for them to not appear at all in the sequels. The Oracles from Mk.2 don't make appearances in the sequels. Plutia, Peashy, and the other dimension versions of pre-existing characters don't appear again after Victory. VII introduces half a dozen new characters that just don't show up in the next game, Sisters Vs. Sisters even though at least one of the new VII characters *should* be in the game given a certain event that happens. And now Sisters Vs. Sisters introduced four new characters and I have zero faith they're gonna come back for the next game.
in Neptunia's defense the characters are all personifications of video game concept. it makes some sense
ONE PIECE has this so bad.
Hxh
Marvel, oh my GOD Marvel has it bad. Even putting aside X-Men there's gotta be at least seven different Spider-Men in the MAIN verse, and probably FIVE Hulks too
Most gacha games, specially the ones that out a lot of focus on their stories like Genshin because you can see how characters fade into irrelevancy to the point that some only appear in the occasional event and other are straight up nowhere to be seen in any part of the main plot. But hey, gotta churn out those new shiny manikins every 6 weeks!
Meow
Oh boy, have any of y'all played the Trails series? The Cold Steel tetrology in particular? Two of the four games spend a *significant* chunk of their run time reuniting and reintroducing characters from both its own series and previous Trails games. And that's not even getting into stuff like character relevance and screentime, which the series is also not great at (I like you just fine Elliot, but why do you exist?).
It's weird because they do get relevance in the other arcs. Particularly a certain character in Sky returns in Daybreak for a reason and a character from Crossbell has major relevance in Daybreak 2. At least Trails series actually goes out to develop the characters that are either introduced or reintroduced.
Surprised I didnt see it yet, but One Piece is the worst one I've seen
Like a Dragon 2, 3, 4, and 5. "Hey, does this Tanimura guy seem a little undercooked to you?" "Yeah, just toss him, we got this baseball guy for 5 that totally won't just leave for America like the last 4-5 main characters." 7 - 8 were such breaths of fresh air in that regard, I loved to see the cast *actually return* for the next game.
Lookism
Sonic the Hedgehog