As the length of this section proves, this is a common situation in anime, especially for female characters. However, each show/verse tends to have its own distinct face-style, with more dramatic differences between certain studios and character designers. It's hard to market a new series if the characters look too generic, but having dramatic differences in simplistic face designs within the same show can be distracting.
- The characters, especially the lead females, in Mitsuru Adachi's dozen or so manga series look very, very similar. In the art books, the only way to tell when one series stops and another begins is by the chapter headings. Each character within a series looks different, but each series has character designs similar to the previous one. With the exception of Nine and Cross Game, there's are only two heroine types in terms of appearances.
- Ken Akamatsu's extensive cast of females usually end up like this:
- In the most extreme example, Master of Disguise Kanako seems almost a Lampshade Hanging, easily dressing up as any of the Love Hina characters and passing off the big-breasted Mutsumi as Keitaro with little more than some makeup and hair styling, glasses, and a sarashi.
- The first Negima! animated series also received flak for changing the hairstyles of the girls to more bold/garish colors. Interestingly, its creator admitted not all of his own color choices were static at that point and in fact began using some introduced colors as official ones because they were cute or make them more distinguishable in merchandise and group shots.
- The spinoff manga Negima Neo is really bad about this; pick two random characters who are smiling and their faces will probably look exactly the same.
- In Sayo's profile, he apologized for making her a white-haired Konoka.
- Fujio Akatsuka's manga tend to avert this by giving characters very recognizable faces, but it still crops up in some of his works. Pretty girls like Akko or Totoko tend to have a standard "doe-eyed" look, and small children tend to have a "bird-mouthed" look similar to Chibita. Justified for the Matsuno brothers of Osomatsu-kun, however, as they are sextuplets.
- Invoked in Osomatsu-san's first ending theme "Six Same Faces", where the boys date a group of same-faced sextuplet girls and talk about how both sets seemed to encounter the same person 6 times.
- Bizenghast is very much a victim of this. Almost all the young women and men, including Vincent and Dinah, have the same face with different hair. (The old men and women were slightly less subjected to it.) They all seem to have the same height as well.
- Although Blade of the Immortal is notable for its more realistic style and lack of the usual visual gags, the female characters (except for Doa) have the same face. If Rin didn't have those hair rings, she would be practically indistinguishable from the other female characters.
- Bleach: Attractive characters tend to have the exact same facial features, sans eyes and hair, while characters who look older or are uglier tend to be very diverse in their designs. Art Evolution also homogenized once very different characters as if a single face-shape template is now used. Tite Kubo has recognized it and started to make fun of it- When Uryuu was mistaken for Ichigo, a close up of his face (nearly identical to Ichigo) was accompanied by his response, "You got a good look at his face, didn't you? So what part of me resembles Kurosaki?"
- This trope also serves a plot purpose, as it gets difficult to tell if the various identical characters are just a case of this trope, or if the resemblance is actually a plot point; for example, Uryuu and Ichigo really do look alike, because they're second cousins- something the audience (and the characters in question) don't realize until the final story arcs.
- Captain Tsubasa in any adaption, especially the girls. They look almost the same with different hairstyle and color, which can be even more annoying when two girls use pigtails. Men don't get away with it either; Schneider is just Tsubasa with blonde hair and green or blue eyes.
- Case Closed:
- Shinichi and Kaitou Kid are deliberately drawn alike, and have not-girlfriends, Ran and Aoko, who could be identical twins as well. Indeed in some non-canon movies this allows Kid to pass himself off as Shinichi whenever needed, without requiring a special disguise.
- Where the series really runs headlong into this trope is in the many, many random people around the cast who drop dead of various murder schemes, and their friends and family who may or may not have done it. As of this edit there are more than 820 episodes in the anime and over 960 chapters in the manga... and the typical one or two episode case introduces a minimum of 4 to 6 one-shot characters. That is a lot of people to make up, so it's no wonder they all start to look the same.
- Even Conan has a "twin" — Kataoka Jun from The Kidnapper's Disappearing Getaway Car. More noticeable when he wears an outfit that is the same as Conan's except with yellow bow when he finally accepts Sachiko as his second mother.
- In fact, it's even a plot point in several cases, particularly one of the latest, where Ms. Kobayashi gets mistaken for Satou several times in the police station and worries Shiratori is only dating her for the semblance between the two. (He isn't.)
- Also a plot point in the Lupin III vs. Detective Conan TV special, in which Ran is a Fake King lookalike of a European princess.
- CLANNAD: Very similar body and facial types combined with everyone wearing the same uniform AND quite a few people sharing hair-color makes actually telling characters apart a real challenge.
- Claymore can be weird about this. While all of the Claymores have fairly distinct facial features (impressive, given their identical coloration and uniformly unblemished skin), the unimportant human characters share maybe four or five faces between them, while important humans have distinctive faces.
- Applied In-Universe, twice, during the eighth episode of Comic Girls, a series about Sequential Artists:
- Kaoruko's storyboard is rejected by Amizawa partly because of this trope.
- Love Interests in Koyume's Shoujo manga are all based on Tsubasa, a boyish girl where she has a crush on.
- One chapter of Toriyama's Doctor Slump indulged in a little self-parody. It involved Arale's friend Akane disguising herself as Midori and messing with Senbei, which the author described (through narration) as "A fiendish scheme that takes advantage of my inability to draw more than one female face!" Which is odd since that very chapter proves Arale has a different face...
- Dragon Ball uses this often, with about five or six major body types copied over and over again due to the large amount of alien and monstrous races; this results in bizarre circumstances when characters like Vegeta and Jeiice meet up in Dragon Ball Z, especially when they wear the same uniform. In contrast, Bulma is one of the series's only reoccurring females since the original Dragon Ball, so she's often given a different design. (Akira Toriyama's main strength seems to lie in designing truly monstrous characters and vehicles.)
- When Goku went to Namek to find a new Kami, he said that there were a lot of Piccolos in the village.
- Android 18 is distinctive from all other female designs, while even Bulma has some resemblance to the generic female. 18 has a very different nose and eyes, probably because she was one of the only serious female fighters in the series. However, jet black her hair and you have Android 17. The similarity between the 17 and 18, along with them both having rather stand-out designs, could be intentionally invoking the Uncanny Valley.
- Many of the main character's faces look very similar, with only small changes; Tenshinhan, Yamacha, Vegeta, and the adult versions of Goku, Gohan and Trunks all share several major features (thick eyebrows, pointy nose, large eyes). All of the above characters except Trunks also have the same eye color/design (plain black pupil, color indistinguishable). The only characters from the Cell-era group that really stick out physically are Chaozu (who is barely a speaking part at this point), Piccolo and Krillin. This is especially the case whenever a character goes Super Saiyan, causing their hair to stand on end, bulking them up, and giving them sharper, fully enclosed, identically-colored eyes. For Vegeta this is basically just a Palette Swap (he already had the hair, a bulky build, and "villain eyes"), while for Goku and Gohan, it makes them look more like Vegeta.
- Oddly, the villains seem immune — even bit players like Zarbon are given more distinct looks. And barring genetic resemblances, the main villains do not have look-alikes anywhere else in the series, while the heroes all resemble each other. The unique-villains, generic-heroes pattern is rigid enough that Vegeta, who was eventually destined for the heroes' side, already looked familiar on his first appearance thanks in part to the very similar face of his comrade Raditz, who himself is an exception to the unique-villain rule because he's Son Goku's brother but could've easily been mistaken for Vegeta's brother if they first showed up together; and Piccolo, who looked unique as a villain in Dragon Ball, only had his species, 90% carbon-copies who are mostly siblings, introduced shortly after his Heel–Face Turn.
- In Fist of the North Star, more than a handful of the women look remarkably similar, which is used as a plot point. Also, before his character development kicked in, Rei looked a lot like Shin.
- From Eroica with Love is an example that oddly supports and subverts this trope. Sparing differences in hair, eyes, and wardrobe, "handsome" characters (i.e. Klaus, Dorian, and Agent Z) look very similar. Comic relief and other supporting characters (i.e. Agents A and B, Mr. James, and Bonham) are distinctive in appearance: these folks vary greatly in terms of build, facial and skull shape, height, etc.
- Lampshaded in Fruits Basket. Hanajima and her younger brother Megumi are drawn with the same face, and everyone thinks they look alike...but Hana always protests that they look completely different.
- Shojo mangaka Haruka Fukushima is incredibly guilty of this (though got slightly better after time), to the point that most of her heroines have the exact same hairstyle and hair color.
- With some occasional exceptions, Full Metal Panic! seems to be populated with face-clones.
- Gantz does this with Kurono and Inaba; both are similar enough in the black-and-white manga that it would be hard to tell the two apart...That is, if Kurono wasn't a great "everyone comes home alive, leave no man behind" hero type, and Inaba wasn't a cowardly wuss.
- Lampshaded in a Gintama, a manga known for its abundant fourth wall breaking, a couple of times:
- In an omake, where Ginpachi-sensei explains how to draw the characters."Next I'll teach you how to draw Shinpachi and Kagura. Draw a normal guy; make him as bland as possible. Then give him glasses. You're done! Next, how to draw Kagura. Take off Shinpachi's glasses and change the hair to white. Then give her dumplings. You're done!"
- In the host club arc, while arguing like little kids as usual, the characters make some self-aware remarks, noting that pairs like Gintoki-Hijikata and Shinpachi-Sougo look exactly the same, only differing in hair colors.
- In the amnesiac shogun arc, as his comrades frustratingly hint him at who the heck he is with and how the heck he's not recognizing he's with the shogun, saying something like "That guy kinda looks like someone important, don't ya think?" as the shogun's face is shown on the TV, Katsura, in his typical absolutely oblivious and stupid fashion, replies, "So you guys all see it too. If you put this topknot wig, every character in this manga looks the same." which is true.
- In an omake, where Ginpachi-sensei explains how to draw the characters.
- Most of the characters in Girls Bravo, specifically the girls, have similar looking faces.
- In Great Teacher Onizuka this seems to be going on with the girls' faces. Put them all in a row and ignore their hair colors. Surprise!
- Lampshaded in G Gundam Abridged where Domon points out that his brother Kyoji looks a lot like American Chibodee Crockett, for which he blames the animators.
- Yaoi mangaka Minami Haruka is well-known for having many of her characters look rather similar, compounded by the fact that she also tends to stick to one body type.
- Despite Akiko Hatsu's skill in drawing brilliantly detailed settings, antiques and clothes in both Victorian England and Ancient Japan, most of her characters tend to look very similar. Not that they are less beautiful as a result, but it's just somewhat confusing when there is two teen protagonists, both with supernatural powers, both with dark hair, both of similar build, in two completely unrelated comics.
- Hayate the Combat Butler is a pretty standard example of both this and Generic Cuteness. Subverted later on in the manga and especially with the 2012 anime, which turns the series into a Cast of Snowflakes.
- Hetalia: Axis Powers:
- While it has tons of Generic Cuteness and often relies on characteristics like Idiot Hair, many characters have distinctive eye shapes, face shapes, and expressions. The first four seasons of the anime adaptation, however, play it very straight, and doesn't help by giving everybody except for Cuba the exact same skin color.
- There are a few instances of this in the manga. Word of God notes that Sweden's face is very similar to Germany and Prussia's faces, albeit with the idea of a "stern expression" more prominent; he explains this by saying that Sweden has family ties to Germany's ancestor Germania. In another instance, he acknowledges that Kugelmugel looks pretty much exactly like a shorter Iceland with braided twintails.
- Earlier in his career, Tsukasa Hojo, creator of Cat's Eye and City Hunter, only had one "beautiful woman" face, and considering the all female main cast of one series and the vast amount of female clientele in the other, it was a face you saw quite a lot of. As City Hunter went on, this began to change, however, most evident with Kaori, who supposedly looks like a cute boy, except at first she looks like every other girl.
- After the wonderful contrast of Hugh Laurie's near-bishounen Bertie and crooked-nosed Stephen Fry's round-faced Jeeves in Jeeves and Wooster, and the gajillion different artist's interpretations of the two over the years
, it's a more than a little disappointing to read the manga Please, Jeeves and find that ALL the men have the same face-shape, just with different eyes and hair. - JoJo's Bizarre Adventure tends to fall into this as Araki's art style evolves over the years. For example, in Part 3, three of the main characters — Jotaro, Kakyoin, and Polnareff — are virtually only distinguishable due to their different hairstyles and outfits.
- Around the middle of Part 7 is where it's the worst, but since everyone has such crazy and unique outfits and general appearances, you can still tell them apart, even if all women (and most guys) have the same vacant stare and semi-open mouth.
- Araki seems to be at least partially aware of this problem based on the stand Paper Moon King from Part 8, which can afflict it's targets with face blindness. This is shown from the victim's perspective by drawing every character they see with the same face.
- Though the males can come off better, every female character in Jormungand has the exact same, triangle like face.
- Hentai manga artist Gunma Kisaragi suffers from this big time when it comes to his female characters. Aside from breast size and accessories, (i.e, glasses, hairstyles, etc.) every female character has the exact. Same. Face. The fact that his widely-praised art style is rarely critiqued makes matters worse, as it gives him little incentive to diversify designs.note
- Lampshaded in Kodocha. Fuka and Sana have practically identical faces. However, as a whole, Kodocha averts this trope.
- Masami Kurumada of Saint Seiya fame is very famous for this. He has two faces for men (normal men and bulky men), one face for little boys and one face for girls. That's all. The fact that many of his characters share similar hairstyles doen't really help — it was for that reason that the anime adaptation gave them tons of different hair colors.
- Kyoto Animation ran into this problem around the late Oughts. After the runaway success of K-On!, many characters of their later anime like Hyouka, Tamako Market, and Sound! Euphonium uses the same basic facial model for the girls and the boys. Their styles are actually different between anime when you compare them, but they're still very similar to the casual eye which has made many people mistake Kyoto Animation for only having one art style.
- Free!, another Kyoto Animation work, runs into this problem as well. Girls and younger-looking boys such as Nagisa and Nitori (as well as full grown adult Ms. Amakata) tend to follow the standard Puni Plush model. Bishōnen boys end up either looking like Haruka or Makoto. Particularly Makoto, as Eternal Summer's Sousuke looks like a darker-haired Makoto with Tsurime Eyes, while Rei's brother looks exactly like Makoto with blue hair.
- Most of the women in the Lupin III franchise. It gets to the point that Japanese Fujiko can easily impersonate a Bound and Gagged Soviet officer and an American stewardess with nothing more than a stolen uniform and pair of contact lenses.
- Hiro Mashima has often been decried of doing this both within and across his series Rave Master and Fairy Tail, especially in regards to his female characters, which can only be distinguishable by eye shape. Granted, the male characters who aren't elderly or outright inhuman tend to suffer from this as well; it's just that the inhuman female characters are always cute. It's gotten to the point where people are crying foul over his follow-up work, EDENS ZERO, for essentially just recoloring the hair of Fairy Tail's main leads and passing them off as new characters; and that's not taking into consideration the fact that the main characters of Fairy Tail are guilty of this themselves, evident when one examines his other works such as Monster Soul.
- Leiji Matsumoto tends to use the same faces over and over again. Sometimes it's explained (Mamoru Kodai was supposed to be Captain Harlock, for example), and sometimes it's not. Most obvious in his female heroines, who are all wan, thin, and ethereal beauties with butt-length to ankle-length blonde (well, red in Emeraldas' case) hair.
- Mobile Suit Gundam SEED and its sequels/spinoffs have about four basic body and face types — and character designer Hisashi Hirai's every work after Gundam Seed (Heroic Age, Fafner in the Azure: Dead Aggressor) features the exact same character designs, arguably due to Gundam Seed's great success. (Which is a shame because he was quite versatile in his earlier works.) It gets a little absurd when you notice that the only difference between Kazuki from Fafner and Shinn from SEED Destiny is eye color. No wonder the English-speaking mecha fandom gave him the nickname "Sameface". The 2012 Remaster of Gundam SEED is another perfect example. While SEED was the start of his generic art style, at least the early episodes had the characters with more distinctive features and unique quirks. The remaster completely throws these out in favor of making everyone look as identical as they did in SEED Destiny.
- Monthly Girls' Nozaki-kun has an in-universe example to lampshade such trend in Shoujo manga. Many of the male characters in Nozaki's manga Let's Fall in Love! use Suzuki as a character model. This was exacerbated in Chapter 77, where Yuzuki is completely unable to tell the guys apart, and wonders why their hairstyle changes every few panels or so.
- Morinaga Milk's protagonists are often identical to Mari from Girl Friends (2006).
- Exaggerated and invoked in Mori no Ando as every character has the exact same face.
- Mushishi: Realistic hair and clothing, combined with simplified faces, means great difficulty telling most of the characters apart.
- In the beginning, Naruto actually averted this, with characters having different faces. But as a side effect of Art Evolution, if the character is a young adult, it has the same chin and mouth as every other young adult regardless of gender. Several characters also strongly resemble each other; its usually justified though as most are either related in some way, or the resemblance is deliberately symbolic (for instance, Yahiko/ Deva Pain looks almost exactly like an older Naruto; this is probably to reflect his status as an Evil Counterpart).
- An odd variant of this exists in the movies. While male characters usually have unique designs, many of the main female characters appear to be re-colored versions of characters from the show itself. For instance, Shion in Naruto Shippuden: The Movie appears to be a platinum blond version of Hinata (complete with pupil-less Magical Eyes that are essentially a palette-swapped Byakugan) while Amaru in Naruto Shippuden the Movie: Bonds resembles a tanned Tayuya. There's also a character named Matsuri who was initially created in an anime filler episode before appearing in the manga who looks just like Sakura but with brown hair and eyes.
- Aoi Nishimata may have recycled a few faces here and there.
- While No Matter How I Look at It, It's You Guys' Fault I'm Not Popular! (at least the anime version) is pretty good at avoiding this, Episode 2 and the end of the first volume of the manga had an in-universe example. Tomoko gets excited because a boy in her class drew her fairly pretty, so she thinks he might have a crush on her. Turns out, as he's in the manga club, he draws all the background girls with the exact same face. He mentions how that to him, this design is for characters who are "nothing special."
- One Piece has a good deal of this, Eiichiro Oda does wonderful job of making all of his male characters have unique faces but his attractive female characters' faces mostly tend to look alike. Though kudos to Oda that he managed to avert this in the Amazon Lily arc where he had dozens of female characters with different facial features. Still, even past the Time Skip, you too easily label female characters under "Nami clone" or "Robin clone" categories.
- Originally even the male characters had similar features, e.g Shanks having the same eyes and face shape as Luffy (to the extent that fans widely assumed this was intentional and thought Shanks was Luffy's father) but then Art Evolution kicked in and Shanks looks distinctly different. Sanji also looked more like Luffy in the early days having a rounder face, nowadays Sanji looks more like Zoro or Law being square-jawed.
- Pani Poni Dash! parodies this by just having two generic characters (one male and one female) that look out of place compared to the main characters taking up often dozens of seats in a classroom in one shot. Sometimes these characters are randomly replaced with other objects, including, but not limited to animals.
- Lampshaded in an omake for Psychic Squad, when a male character asks to keep his signature headband because there's already two other guys with the same hair/face style and he's worried about not being recognized.
- Psyren is usually just a mild case of this with its male characters, but it has a few especially jarring examples with its main character. That was very confusing during the fight at the Grigori research facility when Ageha fights a guy who looks almost identical to him.
- Studio Gainax's Yoshiyuki Sadamoto even satirized himself with this; pointing out that you could draw Shinji by drawing Nadia's face with different hair.
- The female students in Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei are the same design except for hair and eye style or props, making it difficult for the uninitiated to tell them apart.
- Exception: The foreign exchange student, Kimura, is very easy to tell apart from the other girls, being the only blonde/blue-eyed girl in the show. She also wears a different uniform.
- Maria also averts the trope to some degree, although it may be due to her different skin tone rather than her actual facial features. Then we have the Gonk Kotokon...
- Naturally, Kiri is the easiest one to tell apart, since the times when she's not wrapped up in her blanket is when she's being Ms. Fanservice.
- This gets even more apparent with the end-of-episode guest artwork from other six-face mangakas, like Rumiko Takahashi.
- Sgt. Frog: Keronians are a borderline case, since they come in a rainbow of colors and a few even throw out the humanoid build. Thankfully all Keronians have their own personal symbols.
- Shuichi Shigeno has, perhaps inevitably, slipped into this territory. More than a few longtime readers have pointed out that the Two Guys From Tokyo are essentially an overweight Takumi and Itsuki and, when Mika was introduced, honestly thought for a while that Natsuki had made a comeback.
- Takako Shimura, mangaka of works such as Sweet Blue Flowers and Wandering Son, even admits that she always draws works where the characters don't look very different (which means many characters from different series look like characters from other series). When the only apparent differences between girls and boys are hairstyle and clothes, it's not exactly surprising that Nitori can easily pass for a girl just by putting on a hairband. Art Evolution comes into place by middle school in Wandering Son and fixes the issue but some characters, like Kanako and Nitori, still look pretty similar.
- Masamune Shirow is a major offender here. His male characters are okay and plentiful, but he seems to only have one female face he can draw (and he did comment on this in his artbooks quite a few times).
- In his case, though, it should be noted that this is most egregious with his female leads (of which he has quite a few, and they have very similar professions). Secondary female cast members tend to be quite varied in age and appearance (particularly across nationalities, as is the case in Appleseed). His own admission also pertained to his tendency towards women as commissioned officers in police or military forces as the central protagonist, and began making some effort towards that in his later manga (with Leona Ozaki of Dominion: Conflict No. 1 looking immediately different than his past heroines).
- H-manga artist Shunjyo Shusuke is a heavily blatant case of only one face and body for either gender (and it's only a matter of effort in eye-shine to make one into the other). However, this is excusable with the variations in personalities and the fact that both models are detailed enough to stand out compared to more typical anime styles.
- Aside from Shouko, Shoya, and Tomohiro many A Silent Voice characters look alike. It's especially common with background characters, to the point where there was a fan controversy about the final chapter revolving around whether a new female character was a previously seen male character.
- Earlier art for the Slayers novels have fairly distinguishable characters; as the Art Evolution set in, though, each character, moreso the females, become more and more identical facially and body-wise (both the anime and the books avoid using the same exact body types for the major female characters), leaving only their hair (and eyes, but very sporadically compared to before) as a distinguishing mark. Pick up the first Slayers Special novel, then pick up the latest Slayers Smash (a continuation) and be amazed. Most of the females look like Lina, with Lina's new distinguishing mark being her nipples sticking out everywhere.
- Strike Witches characters exhibit a rather remarkable similarity with each other◊.
- Despite its distinct costume designs, hairstyles, and height, many of A-1 Pictures works like Sword Art Online and Aldnoah.Zero tends to have this problem, especially when it comes to its plethora of female characters, with only slight variations on eye-shape.
- Megumi Tachikawa's works seem to have only one face, leaving the reader constantly looking back to the character index. This was lampshaded in Kaitou Saint Tail, where Seira, who has different coloured hair and eyes from Meimi, dresses up as her seamlessly and needs to be pointed out with an arrow and note to the audience.
- Manga artist Sho-U Tajima tends to recycle a small handful of not just faces, but complete character designs over and over again for all of his different projects, resulting in characters that reside in completely different games and comics that wind up looking identical to one another in every way. For example, Rion Steiner of the game Galerians seems to be a clone of Hisashi Shimazu, a villain from MPD Psycho, right down to the single hoop earring.
- Rumiko Takahashi gets accused of this a lot with the rounded style of her characters' faces. This is especially noticeable in anthologies of her early work, where the heroes of different stories tend to look almost identical.
- Inuyasha. It's funny when everyone says how much Kagome looks just like Kikyo when both look equally similar to Sango, and almost every other woman. In fact, the difference between Kagome's and Kikyo's hairstyles and skintones makes them look less like each other than any other two characters of the same age and sex you could compare. And while their resemblance is a plot point (due to reincarnation), there is no excuse for why every other young woman looks the same.
- There was one episode involving a young priest and his three sisters, all of whom (well, the sisters) looked just like each other and Sango.
- Inuyasha is essentially Ranma ½'s Ranma Saotome with a wig, contacts, and fangs (and they look even more identical during the one day a month that Inuyasha becomes an ordinary human), and Rinne Rokudo is Ranma in a track suit and red hair.
- And Kagome is Akane, when she had long hair. And Yura of the Hair was Nabiki. And Myoga is absolutely indistinguishable from Happosai.
- Ranma and Inuyasha even have the same voice actor. In Japanese and English.
- Little kids (or characters who look like them) tend to suffer from this in her work too: Jariten (Urusei Yatsura), Shippo (Inuyasha), and Rokumon (RIN-NE) might as well be triplets.
- Age and sex are what make her characters distinct. All children are Shippo, all young men are Miroku, all young women are Sango.
- The constant hiding of Onigumo's face becomes hilarious when you consider that, as a young man before his injury, anybody who's watched that far knows what he must look like.
- Scott McCloud (Making Comics, p. 123) gives a slightly different perspective on this by pointing out that Takahashi is one of a number of artists who "have a narrower range of features for heroic or beautiful protagonists, but a wide range of face and body types among supporting characters."
- Random villagers tend to have more elongated faces than her main characters, though. You can tell who's going to be important to the episode by the presence or absence of the basic faces — if he looks like Miroku, you're either going to have to save him or kill him.
- Rumiko Takahashi's use of Only Six Faces is most present in Ranma ½. As most of the characters are teenaged martial artists, they tend to be built the same and differences in body type (such as Akane's A-Cup Angst) tend to be implied through words rather than the illustrations themselves. With Mousse, Ryōga, and Ranma, if you cut all of their hair and got rid of Ryōga's bandana, they'd be virtually indistinguishable (aside from Ryōga's fangs and pale eyes). Same goes for Shampoo, Akane, Ukyō, Girl-Ranma, and the most of the other female characters. The adults mostly seem to be more distinct, though: Sōun and Genma don't have any almost-twins running around, for example.
- Inuyasha. It's funny when everyone says how much Kagome looks just like Kikyo when both look equally similar to Sango, and almost every other woman. In fact, the difference between Kagome's and Kikyo's hairstyles and skintones makes them look less like each other than any other two characters of the same age and sex you could compare. And while their resemblance is a plot point (due to reincarnation), there is no excuse for why every other young woman looks the same.
- Ignoring the expy nature of most of the side characters from Sailor Moon — imported from Codename: Sailor V — Naoko Takeuchi really only has about six faces for all her series: The deep male, the innocent male, the mature female, the innocent female, the cheery female, and the nondescript either. And even the mature vs. innocent looks are often blurred during mature moments, and vice-versa. A good example is this◊ — everyone's wearing similar facial expressions and a face swap should lead to near identical results. Male characters do look very similar, this is more blatant with Ao no Sapphire, who not only has the standard young male face, but his hair is almost the same in style and color as Mamoru's, just a with a very slight wave and stylized more bluish. In some parts of the manga, where the hair of both guys in black (the manga is in black and white) is very hard to distinguish them if it wasn't by Sapphire's black moon mark in the forehead. It's also why Haruka's Bifauxnen look is so convincing, as she's given the "young man" facial structure.
- All of Arina Tanemura's main heroines have a similar face, gigantic-eyed and all, with eye-size variations and her male characters only occasionally bear different-sized eyes and pupils. She is fond of long hair so most heroines also have long hair, though she does style it differently from character to character.
- Osamu Tezuka deliberately chose to embrace this trope, Lampshade Hanging it by calling it the "Star System" as though his manga universe were a movie studio using actors; he came up with about forty recognizable character designs (occasionally to the point of Gonk in an effort to make them distinctive) and recycled them — even the instantly-recognizable ones like Black Jack and Atom — in multiple series.
- This was continued by the creators of the movie version of Tezuka's Metropolis (2001) with the character Rock.
- He took it up a notch in the Phoenix series. Not only did he use his major star system, but the primary theme of the series was reincarnation and the eternal struggle in attempting to catch the Phoenix. In the case of one soul, he was always doomed to have a large misshapen nose by the end of the story arc. Arguably the entire star system is these same people reincarnating again and again.
- Taka Tony is well known for being able to draw exactly one sort of face. It is off-set somewhat by the sheer detail put into the rest of his drawings but becomes disturbing when he has more than one character is a picture. He manages to play it straight and subvert it with his work with the Shining Force series: Female characters are almost the same girl wearing different dresses, but male characters (especially non-human ones) are very diverse, apart from maybe the lead males.
- Yuu Watase is particularly bad about this — they appear to have two teenager/young adult faces, male and female, with different hairstyles and the occasional Gonk thrown in for good measure (and other age groups aren't exactly bursting with variety). In Imadoki!, Watase actually had to change a character's hair color in order to make him distinguishable from another after he shaved his goatee. This is made even worse because of the two short stories shoehorned into the last volume of Imadoki!, both starring male and female protagonists who are 100% identical to the ones from the story that just finished... and equally indistinguishable from the lead couples of Shinshunki Miman Okotowari, Fushigi Yuugi, Absolute Boyfriend, and Alice 19th.
- Yamamoto Yoshifumi, another H-manga artist is a funny case in that he started using exactly one face with the only difference between the genders were the breasts making women look like walking letter "Ps" then changed his style to make everyone shorter, rounder and more Moe-like... and it's still exactly one face!
- All of Wataru Yoshizumi's series suffer from this. One can find about 100 Marmalade Boy's Yuu look-alikes across her various works.
- Kaori Yuki was guilty of this during earlier years (the first six volumes of God Child and the first volumes of Angel Sanctuary, possibly earlier work too). There was always a man with slightly longer, dark hair, a blonde/brunette women with long, curly hair, and a line of young boys with blond hair (honestly, could anyone tell Eric, Ariel and that boy from the God child chapter Who killed Cock Robin apart?)
- Zombie Powder: Most of Tite Kubo's female characters tend to have the exact same face, differentiated only by their haircuts.
