I’m making this to be called out if I’m just wrong in a bad way. But I feel like a lot of anime style lately is starting to look very samey? I don’t know if its because of gotcha games but I’ll see a anime character and go "hmm have I seen this character before?’ When in the past I would know a anime character even if I didn’t watch the show. Maybe it’s just the type of anime that is popular now? Honestly no idea.
People have been complaining about anime same face for over a decade now so you’re not the only one noticing if thats any consolation.
If anything I feel like the problem’s gotten less pronounced over the years, compared to like 20 years ago. The style has become more homogenized, but characters seem to have more clearly distinguished features than they did, even when they’re being slotted into generic archetypes where their clothes and color palettes make them reminiscent of another character with that same archetype. I think it’s probably that that makes them seem more samey, because of how much derivative LN genre-writing slop there is being adapted where characters are literally just a more famous character with the serial numbers filed off and a different jawline or something.
Makes sense. I mostly avoid fandom spaces like the plague, and I don’t keep up with anime like I used to. But I normally like to know a character when I see them popping up on my spaces (who knows maybe it’s a media that I’ll like) but wanted to make sure I wasn’t being weird or just suffering from old person syndrome.
I’ve moved on from most anime myself but that’s only because it started leaning more and more into isekai and high school setting which have always been my least favorite genres, bit they sell so thays what gets made more and more. There is still good stuff out there though if you know where to look
I think the same face thing existed since forever, early manga/anime would joke that when they reused the same character/design it’s bc said character was an “actor” playing a different role. I think after 2003 a lot of anime just became more generic with their art style in general, SAO being the prime example of boring anime and boring design.
Tezuka was famous for this. He’d re-use designs in a commedia dell’arte kinda way.
Yeah, that was the Osamu Tezuka’s Star System. I wonder if that was the inspiration behind things like Aki Ross in Final Fantasy Spirits Within, or Laura in the Kenji Eno games which was basically the same thing but for movies and games.
I think later on, after Tezuka passed away, his son and the people on his studio sort of gave up on this system, which is why we had some weird ethnically swapped characters like Kenichi being African/South American-Japanese in Astroboy 2003.