Loads And Loads Of Characters - Television Tropes & Idioms

The anime Bleach, once it got into its "Soul Society" arc, suddenly introduced about 30 new characters, with a dozen or so added each subsequent arc.
- Word Of God seen elsewhere on the wiki is that apparently, creation of characters en masse is the authors method of dealing with writer's block.
- One of the gag preview sequences lampshaded this, with Ichigo complaining that some characters would need to be killed off soon because there were too many.
- parodied wonderfully with an image macro,
NEED MORE CHARACTERS
(picture of Kubo's face)
WEAPONS ARE NOW CHARACTERS
- Which becomes Hilarious In Hindsight when it turns out one of the Espada uses a Loli instead of a sword.
Ranma 1/2 had a core cast of around 15 to 20 characters, with several dozen more who popped up from time to time.
After the Chunin exam arc begins, the central cast of Naruto expands to nearly two dozen. Several were later developed within the filler episodes.
By the final season of Sailor Moon, the main cast became so big (including three distinct groups, the Inner Senshi, Outer Senshi and Starlights, along with two characters Put On A Bus) the cast almost never appeared all together in the same episode. This was lampshaded in a late episode where a Monster Of The Week is fought in Usagi's house, but they and the monster spend most of the time jostling for elbow room. The dub has a similar joke, when Eudial's minion becomes indignant after being told to hold them off, angrily complaining there are over a dozen of them.
In Mahou Sensei Negima and its Alternate Continuity Negima!?, the cast starts with 31 girls, the teacher, and about a half-dozen supporting characters. It builds from there. And, in the manga, builds, and builds, and builds... It's well past 20 volumes, and its been introducing at least five characters per volume or so since the fourth one. Sometimes more.
- You can categorize the cast herds into herds of herds (herd herds, technically), there are so many herds of characters!
  - And now the word "herd" has ceased to look like a word.
  - Agree. Unless you happen to be fond of Mudkip.
By the time Beyblade ended, it had about 30-some characters who frequently appeared. And that's not counting the ones who disappeared without explanation.
Fruits Basket - as well as Tohru and the fourteen Zodiac members, there are friends and family for nearly every character. The manga goes overboard with this; even minor characters are named and - naturally - have their own tragic back-stories, to the point where over half the cast don't appear in any given volume, and even Tohru is often put in the background.
By the middle of it's third season Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha boasts 20+ powered characters, and just as many Bridge Bunnies, admirals, technicians, civilians, etc - all named characters that the viewer is somehow supposed to remember exists.
In One Piece, especially during the attack on Enies Lobby, there are a very large number of side characters unique to each story arc that play significant roles within, and there are several characters whom appear very little yet are supposed to be important and are expected to be remembered, such as Shanks and members of the Shichibukai.
- Although the only characters who consistently appear in every story arc are the members of Luffy's crew, the show's monumentally huge supporting cast can sometimes play tricks on you. In most cases, a character will be important to the current storyline and then never show up again after the Straw Hats leave his/her native island (though they might get the occasional random cameo.) But every now and then, one of them will make an unexpected reappearance and suddenly become part of the plot again. For example, Hatchi a villain who appears early in the series, reappears over NINE YEARS AND FOUR HUNDRED AND FIFTY CHAPTERS LATER, does a Heel Face Turn and becomes crucial to the storyline. The author does this absurdly often. In fact-the most recent arc has Buggy and nearly every major villain from the Little Garden/Arabasta story arcs returning in an Enemy Mine scenario of screen-shatteringly epic proportions.
School Rumble, as any good Love Dodecahedron would do, has enough characters to fill 48 pages worth of Wikipedia entries.
Like almost everything about itself, Excel Saga lampshades it quite a lot. In nearly every episode that doesn't feature Iwata, Watanabe and Sumiyoshi (due to its focus on other characters), they are shown just before the end credits watching TV and complaining about that. Eventually, they theorize that there may simply be no room for them.
Eyeshield 21 fits the bill, but it's somewhat justified since the show is about football. The primary cast begins with the Devil Bats team and their peripheral characters (coach, manager, mascot), and then expands exponentially with the introduction of the other teams, each with at least two important characters to their name.
The episodic style of the anime Inu Yasha, combined with the many recurring and throw-away characters in the story (both human and otherwise) and the very long length of the story itself, makes for an enormous cast of characters ranging in the 50's.
Dragonball and its sequels have so many characters (and ran for so long) that its creator can't even remember all their names. Characters have an alarming tendency to drop off the face of the earth. Somewhat infamous is Lunch, who was mentioned to have gone chasing after Tenshinhan (or seen getting drunk in a bar after he died, in the anime) and was never seen nor heard from again (except for a few seconds of Filler, donating energy in the anime's final battle, 100 some-odd episodes later...).
- This trope is especially obvious in the video games; while the classic 16-bit fighting games usually had rosters of 6-12 characters, the latest incarnation has ballooned to a whopping 161 fighters, far larger than any other fighting game roster.
- Once you realize that most of them are related in one way or another you have a recipe for insanity. Hell, the Dragon Ball section of the Summers Family Tree page takes up 1/4 of the page in and of itself.
- Or rather used to, that section of the Summers Family Tree page was nuked by an irate editor who got sick of it, and replaced with a single diagram.
  - Although those characters were divided into their multiple transformations and incarnations, making many versions of the same character.
Mai-HiME has a core cast of twelve Magical Girls, as well as a bunch of other named characters associated with the school, including staff members. About 25 cast members are introduced within the first four episodes... and there are still 22 more to go after that.
- Many of those characters (or, versions of those characters with different last names) make the transition to Mai-Otome, which itself has a handful of new names and faces to memorize.
Mobile Suit Gundam and derivatives just love enormous casts. Probably because "Anyone Can Die" is the modus operandi in these shows...
Shaman King. It has about 50 (or more) characters that appear constantly in manga, almost every one of them receiving a fair share of attention; quite impressive, except when you see that almost half of these characters are spirits that are used by the shamans themselves.
Gantz introduces new characters with every 'round' of Gantz, which is perfectly necessary, as Anyone Can Die, and oh boy, do they ever...
Maria-sama Ga Miteru has a count of about thirty recurring characters that have all kinds of complicated relationships, either as soeurs, friends or rivals for one another's affection. The writer of the series also has the tendency to give full background stories to minor characters, which starts to get really noticeable as she apparently wants to postpone the obviously traumatic graduation of some of the leads.
Legend of Galactic Heroes, whose cast list is often compared to a phone directory. True, it's a record holder for a longest OVA in history, but in four seasons of its main storyline and countless spinoffs it managed to assemble up to 660 named characters, many of them regulars, and about hundred MAIN ones. It reaches the point where the characters names are placed on the screen for the viewers benefit. The picture above only covers a tiny fraction of the cast.
The amount of named characters in Soreike! Anpanman is nearing 2000. The core cast consists of about 20 characters.
Code Geass has sixty or seventy named characters, about half of whom are required for even a rudimentary level of comprehension of the plot.
- As of this writing (episode 39 out of 50 for the whole series), the official website has entries for 55 characters; bear in mind this doesn't include characters who were in the first season and died, and that a few of those are group entries.
- The first season had about 30 characters, but only 7 or so were important at any given time. R2 jumps off the deep end into characters.
The manga of Fullmetal Alchemist is starting to verge on this. What with Ed and Al in separate places, the various allies they've picked up, and the remaining homunculi wandering around, you need a map and pushpins to keep track of them all.
- And that's not even counting the allies their allies have, or the ones their enemies have. Or the ones who are already playing important side roles and haven't even been named yet.
JoJo's Bizarre Adventure is a series divided into seven parts, with the in-story timeline spanning over a century and eventually resetting itself (long story). This results in a huge cast, as at most one or two characters will appear in more than one part. All and all, this results in 179 characters so far, probably more given Wikipedia missed a few
- ...and if you believe the rumors going around, Araki is planning for this to go out to nine parts. Makes you wonder if there is a record for largest number of characters.
Transformers Armada, the Japan-made continuity of Transformers, had a relatively small cast. However, the sequel Transformers: Energon went so overboard in cramming in Autobot characters and using them at any excuse that in certain shots you can't actually tell what's going on. Needless to say, this left all but a few with no characterization at all. This got better in Transformers: Cybertron, but not by much.
- Supposedly the reason for the many accents that the characters of Transformers: Cybertron was that they were so underdeveloped that otherwise they were virtually the same beyond their names and appearances.
Detective Conan, the long runner as it is, has a lot of regulars. The Japanese anime website listed 47 characters in the character list.
Koihime Musou inherited most of the cast from the Romance Of The Three Kingdoms novel.
Axis Powers Hetalia is a series consisting of people that represent countries. It goes without saying that there are a lot of characters.
- Over fifty nations, micronations, provinces, and supernational coalitions given canon face now, with any of the aforementioned that exists now or has ever existed as a candidate for characterization. Not to mention important historical figures like Jeanne D'Arc, Maria Theresa, Friedrich II, Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler.
Angel Sanctuary. Not-fans are complaining Kaori'd just come up with new characters when she doesn't know what to write... with about 30 REALLY important characters and at least the same amount of minors that'd mean she sucks as an author.
Oh, Baccano!, where do we even start with you? How about the fact that the OP alone names seventeen main characters. Or maybe that it doesn't even cover all of the prominant players in the series (like a certain Claire Stanfield who decides to spend the 1931 arc wracking up an utterly massive body count). Or maybe we should point out that the light novels introduce even more characters on a regular basis...
The Prince of Tennis features one school's tennis team as the main characters. Each team they play has somewhere between seven to nine members, several of whom will show up at random times despite not being the opponent of the week; some teams show up in their entirety multiple times. Throw in the coaches, family members, friends, and random extras, and you have a character list spanning over 100 characters, a good 40-50 of whom show up often enough to be considered to be of some importance. Fortunately, they all have their school tennis uniforms.
Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann: While not as bad as many of the others on this list, the characters go from two Blood Brothers to La Resistance in seven episodes, picking up about 50 characters, of which only 20 or so are named. However, the viewers only really need to follow Kamina, Simon, Kittan, Yoko, Nia, and arguably Gimmy and Darry.
This trope is especially evident in 20th Century Boys where the story is still introducing new characters with backstories well into the manga's conclusion. Even the first volume is overloaded with characters.
Although there's a manageable number of humans in Pokemon, there are an awful lot of Pokemon. Especially with Ash, since you actually meet all of his Pokemon (presumably). At least they're fairly easy to tell apart, unless there's more than one important character of the same species.
- Not that kids have trouble knowing them all.
- Interesting in that Ash usually gets only five new Pokemon per season (not counting evolutions) and his friends sometimes get even less. Each episode usually features a new Pokemon, but even then that's not enough to cover every single Pokemon. Some special 'mons get their own movies. It's crazy.
- Manageable number of humans? Well, perhaps compared to some of the other things on this list, but there are still enough humans that the Shipping base is not merely torn into two or three factions as in most anime, but rather just a chaotic web of thousands upon thousands of pairings leading to wars in which you're lucky to meet anyone on the same side as you! If you have that many possible pairings, that's a clue that you have loads and loads of characters.
- There's over 100 human characters. How's that managable? And that's without the minor one-shot characters. Adding the one-shots will bring the total (by my guess) over 300. [1] Also, there's an even longer list of shippings here.
Giant Robo has a huge number of characters despite being only 7 episodes long. Which isn't much of a surprise, given that most of the cast were taken from Misuteru Yokoyama's manga adaptions of Romance Of The Three Kingdoms and Water Margin, both of which are on this page.
Shin Mazinger has a cast of 35 characters and all of them bar a few were introduced in the first episode, in a series of Big Damn Heroes moments. It's no wonder it left some people confused, at least, before they started explaining things.
Hunter X Hunter to a certain extent. Though the story is almost always focused on the exploits of its main character, Gon, and/or the three friends who make up the rest of his Nakama team, they somehow manage to share storyarc time with almost every member of the Phantom Troupe, Killua's family, powerful Chimera Ants, a number of the more succesful Hunter Examinees and a handful of random people they just happen to meet along the way. When they all start meeting each other, it turns into an insanely complicated web that makes you wonder where it's all going...
- This example is comparable to the One Piece example above, except for the "random forgotten character becomes important three thousand chapters later". There's four "main" characters (one of whom we haven't seen in ages). Gon has been in every arc thus far and Killua comes close, but even the other two main characters get pushed aside in some arcs. The plot goes all over the place and one has to one it's going anywhere at all. At least it's awesome.
Houshin Engi, being an adaptation of Fenshen Yanyi, has a huge cast of regulars. The Gotta Catch Em All Houshin List alone is 365 names long.
Dairugger XV and its Americanization, the Vehicle Voltron, was often said to have too many characters to get into. You had the fifteen pilots, the on-ship command staff, the support staff, the top brass back on Earth, occasional non-aligned characters, the odd recurring civilians, the peace-seeking enemies, the blood-thirsty enemies, and characters reffed only in flashback, sometimes more than once. If you add the Americanization's policy, sometimes understandable, sometimes infuriating, to not really verbally kill off characters who died in the original, then the cast never really diminishes. If you use only the Voltron universe, then you must add in the Vehicle Team's classmates/friends/relatives, the Lion Force, their allies, enemies and such, as well. In retrospect, it makes one almost glad the the third, 'Middle Universe' Voltron series never got made.
You could say D Gray Man has a lot of characters, being there's all the Exorcists, the Science Department, the Noah family...
Wouldn't you know, but with 13 different episodes, Boogiepop Phantom manages to have at least 13 major characters (probably closer to 20). Which doesn't help make the mind screw and non-linear storytelling any clearer.
What happens when you introduce about 20 characters per arc over an ongoing series that already has 350 chapters? You get about 200 named characters, most of whom still have some relation to the plot. Welcome to Kenichi The Mightiest Disciple.
Katekyo Hitman Reborn has rather a bad case of this, the sides are generally sorted into sets of seven and each arc adds at least another seven. I would say the latest arc added upwards of 20. Checking it's character page on The Other Wiki it suggests there are upwards of 50 characters and it doesn't list all of them.
Planetes: To roughly the same level as Star Trek Deep Space Nine. 7 main characters (Hachimaki, Tanabe, Fee, Yuri, Chief, Ravi, Edel), and a host of well developed and influential secondary (Clair, Hakim, Colin Clifford, Cheng Shin, Goro Hoshino, Werner Locksmith, Gigalt, Dolph) and tertiary (Harry Roland, Kyutaro Hoshino, Nono, The Ninjas, Lucy), characters.
Monster,which has only a handful of main characters. The others come and go, but many are not necessary to the plot.
Umineko No Naku Koro Ni starts out with eighteen characters stranded in a mansion on an island during a typhoon. Later episodes introduce a cast of witches, servants to the witches, and people living in a Bad Future that brings the cast up to well over forty people.
Saint Seiya (aka The Knights of the Zodiac or Los Caballeros del Zodiaco if you're Mexican) has as many characters as there are named stars in the sky. Initially that's 88-and that's just by the end of the second arc. Then you add in the 'dark' versions of these characters...and then everyone from the Asgard and Posiedon arcs...and then the 108 Spectres of Hades for the final arc...Quite frankly, this troper had enough trouble just remembering the 5 Bronze Saints and 12 Gold Saints to really pay attention to everyone else. Oh, and we musn't forget the filler characters from all 5 movies!
Simoun. Chor Tempest is supposed to have 12 pilots at a time, but a few filter in and out as the series progresses, giving maybe 13 or 14 developed characters in Chor Tempest alone. Outside of Chor Tempest, another 7 or 8 characters get extensive attention. That's at least 20 major characters.
Fushigi Yuugi starts out with the Suzaku Seven plus Miaka. And then the Seiryuu Seven plus Yui. And then we learn about the Genbu Seven plus Takiko, not to mention the Byakko Seven plus Suzuno. And then you've got other people from the real world and other people in the world of the book... let's just at least be thankful that they don't all appear together at once, okay?

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The Legion of Super-Heroes comic has even more characters than its animated counterpart. Over the entire run, there have been more than 80 distinct members of the team. Because of frequent Re Boots, who is actually on the team varies from time to time but the core group is generally the size of 20-30 or so members at any time.
- They aren't called the "Legion" for nothing
- And since the recent mini-series is called "Legion of Three Worlds", well, you do the math...
- Hilariously spoofed in Valentino's Normalman, where the Roll Call for the "Legion of Superfluous Heroes" has to be spread out over several whole issues!
The current JSA is growing to Legion-size for some reason, too.
- And it's all the more epic for it, thanks to Geoff Johns. There's roughly twenty-four members of the JSA at the moment.
The X-Men have so many characters that there's two separate books just for the core team, another one for the Junior Team/Reserves, and when you get into the various spin-off groups...
- And that's not counting the various characters that have been Put On A Bus, had a bridge dropped on them, got Stuffed In The Fridge, or (most recently) got depowered, or just plain old forgotten about.
- For a better understanding, just look at the gatefold cover of X-men #200, which features everyone who had been part of the core team, even those who only hung around for a year or so.
The Sonic Archie comics take every character from the already "loads and loads" game canon, and mixes them with all the characters from the Sat Am T.V. show, plus loads and loads of original characters. The final roster numbers in 3 digits.
The Transformers Generation 1 and Generation 2 comics are notable for featuring somewhere in the region of 300 named characters over the course of their ten-year run. Of these, over 120 are permanently killed off, some for dramatic effect to drive the story, but mostly because there were simply too many of them for the writer to keep track of, and because their toys had come off the shelf and no longer needed to be "sold" through the comic. They often went out in large batches (for instance, in issue #19, Omega Supreme offlines nearly every Decepticon from the first year of the series in about two pages), with the most famous instance surely being issue #50, in which a cosmically-powered Starscream unceremoniously kills almost every other surviving character from the first three years of the series with a few waves of his hands. This is without even bringing up the unnamed background characters, such as the entire population of San Francisco.
The Avengers have issued "Avengers Assemble" calls to the entire roster several times, resulting in anywhere from 30 to 100+ members showing up. After Heroes Reborn, when the team was assembled to fight Morgana, the issue after showed 30 Avengers attempting to take down one B-list villain, with disastrous results. Typically these assemblies also show one time Avengers Hulk, Spider-man, or the Fantastic Four making an excuse not to tag along. (Although Spider-man later became a full time member)
Usagi Yojimbo had a big group photo of all its featured characters (good and evil, living and dead) as of vol. ~15, roughly about three-dozen characters.
The Western record probably goes to the DC and Marvel universes themselves, as evidenced by various Crisis Crossover events. Crisis on Infinite Earths put together every version of every major hero at once while throwing in a couple of unique characters. That's just counting the main story line, side stories eventually pulled in virtually every single character in DC history.
Elfquest characters all have distinct personalities and appearances, and varying, unique, pretty outfits.
Disney Comics hits this trope pretty hard just the family trees of Mickey,Donald and Goofy alone are really big not to mention the long number of other supporting cast members
Kingdom Come to the point that a guide book had to be published.

Close Comic Books

The Guy Ritchie movies (at least Lock Stock And Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch and Rock'N'Rolla). And most characters get killed throughout the movie.
Oceans Eleven and sequels.
- This video parodies the phenomenon.
  - As does this Robot Chicken sketch.
The film Cradle Will Fall was a traffic jam of different characters and groups of characters, with very few clues given.
Disney's 101 Dalmatians. As well as the obvious titular canines, there are about a dozen characters who only appear for a scene or two.
One word: Nashville. The director pointed out that the real main character is not a person, but the city of Nashville.
Richard Linklater's episodic, non-linear Slice Of Life film "Slacker" has over a hundred nameless credited roles, none of whom appear more than once, and none who really take precedence over the others.
Bobby takes place at the Ambassador Hotel on the night of Bobby Kennedy's assassination. From what I can recall, Lindsey Lohan marries Frodo, Sidney Poitier works for hotel manager Anthoney Hopkins, the coach from Mighty Ducks (who also directs) and the kid from Rushmore manage Demi Moore, and the young undertaker from Six Feet Under gives Morpheus Dodgers tickets. Other characters are Shia Lebouf as a buzzed democrat, Charlie Epps and Emile Hirsch as drug-dealing hippies, and Helen Hunt and Michael Sheen as a Happily Married couple.
Recount, an HBO TV Movie about the 2000 presidential election, has many characters on both sides, with the Democrats being led by Kevin Spacey and Dennis Leary (with help from Winston Smith). Oh, and they're all based on real people. Tom Wilkinson leads the Republicans.
Mortal Kombat: Annihilation tried to shoehorn most of the characters who had appeared in the games so far into a 90-minute movie, with little to no background or explanation. Yeah, Video Game Movies Suck.
Tombstone has 85 speaking roles (averaging one new character every 90 seconds). It follows the band of good guys, the band of bad guys, the good guys' wives, and the townsfolk, developing characters in all of these roles.

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Each book in theKushiels Legacy series by Jacqueline Carey has an index of characters running four or five pages long.
The French Romantics made this trope. The Count Of Monte Cristo begins with a reasonable group of six or so...then fast-forwards twenty years to when each of them has his own distinct family and social circle. There are at least 38 named characters.
- Les Miserables is just as bad.
The Star Wars cast of main characters isn't that huge (in the original trilogy, Luke, Vader, Leia, Han, Chewie, Obi-Wan, Lando, Yoda, Palpatine, R2 and 3PO, with honorable mentions to Boba Fett, Tarkin and Jabba), but the Expanded Universe takes it to ridiculous extents. Practically everyone shown in the movie has A Day In The Limelight book/short story/comic...
- Even that "R2 Unit with a bad motivator" from the first movie wound up being a secret Jedi robot in a dubious-canon side story.
- There was a comic where Han Solo told a bedtime story starring Luke's severed hand.
- Ever been to Wookiepedia? It's an education. Do you remember that guy in "A New Hope" who said, "Look, sir! Droids!" Me neither. He has his own page, though.
- The X Wing Series in the Star Wars Expanded Universe. Consider: One squadron is composed of twelve pilots, optimally. Each pilot has one astromech droid which potentially has its own quirks and personality. The squadron also has at least one named mechanic and one quartermaster, as well as at least two higher-ups outside of the squadron. Main characters also have love interests, friends, and enemies. When a pilot dies, he or she is replaced by a new pilot with a new astromech. There is more than one squadron.
- There is a name for pretty much every friggin' character in the Star Wars universe. Even the most unimportant characters have names. Even the ones in the video games who we might not even see. Star Wars is probably the best example of this trope.
The Chinese epic The Romance Of The Three Kingdoms is infamous for having too many characters to count; the most recent video game based off the book and using the name (Romance of the Three Kingdoms XI) had about 700 playable characters, as there are many characters who appear very briefly or are literally only mentioned once; about 100 of these recur frequently. The Dynasty Warriors series had around 47 characters playable in the same game at one point, though.
The Water Margin, which the below mentioned Suikoden is very loosely based on, has One Hundred And Eight 'heroes'. The term 'heroes' is used VERY loosely here. By the end of the series, though, a Bus Crash has happened and the list of the dead is depressingly long.
Dream of the Red Chamber, another Chinese epic, also has a ton of characters, largely female.
The ever-growing cast of characters in Lisanne Norman's Sholan Alliance series
J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord Of The Rings. There's Frodo, Sam, Merry, Pippin, Gandalf, Aragorn, Arwen, Elrond, Gimli, Legolas, Boromir, Faramir, Denethor, Gollum, Theoden, Eowyn, Eomer, Bilbo, Galadriel, Saruman, Grima, and Treebeard all have their pictures in the ending credits of the Return of the King movie. And then there's plenty of more minor ones, such as Gamling, Lurtz, Haldir, Celeborn, the Witch-king, Gothmog, and Isildur. Oh, and Sauron.
- The fact that every character has at least two or three names makes it even worse. And let's not get started on the geography, which also tends to give natural features multiple names.
- The Silmarillion is worse than The Lord of the Rings, and rightly so in that regard, as it covers more time of the history of Middle-earth. In the first forty pages alone, you have Eru, the fourteen Valar, and Morgoth. And then, in the main part of the book, you have around another thirty or so main characters fighting for the limelight, including Feanor and his seven sons, Ungoliant, Thingol, Melian, Hurin, Turin, Niniel, Fingolfin, Finarfin, Finwe, Galadriel, Sauron, Carcharoth, Beren and Luthien, Earendil, Finrod, Morwen, Huor, Gothmog, Indis, Eol and Aredhel, Idril, Glaurung, Glorfindel, Elwing, Beor, and Haleth. That's just off the top of my head, and it's been a while since I've read it. And then, just to top it off, you have the history of the Numenor, which adds another half dozen (including Elrond and Elros), and then a retelling of the story of the One Ring, which adds another half-dozen on top of the Fellowship.
  - To be fair, The Silmarillion wasn't exactly intended to be a novel. Although even the individual chapter/tales have Loads And Loads Of Characters.
  - Of course, half the characters listed for The Silmarillion end up dying a couple chapters after they're introduced. Eg: Feanor didn't live long after he left Valinor, Glorfindel only shows up for a couple pages, Beren and Luthien are hardly mentioned after their tale is finished, etc.
Robert Jordan's Wheel Of Time series is the absolute king of this trope. Wheel of Time encyclopaedia has a list of 1880 characters. The original main group introduced in the first book has not been in one location since the fourth book, out of eleven so far with three to go. Only the main character Rand manages to appear in every book, and he is nearly absent from a couple. From there the biggest male characters Rand, Mat, and Perrin have each acquired love interests (three at once in Rand's case), personal armies, and their own Cast Herds of supporting characters. In Rand's case this includes dozens of characters from numerous factions. The two biggest female characters (Egwene and Elayne) have done the same thing. The Big Bad has a dozen mini-boss characters with the Forsaken, as well as numerous Darkfriends. And almost every faction adds dozens of identifiable characters to the mix, sometimes with distinct subfactions within that which might as well be separate groups. And all these characters intermingle in an absolutely dizzying array of interactions.
George R.R. Martin's A Song Of Ice And Fire includes numerous characters, to the point he had to separate his fourth novel into two books to tell the stories of all the characters.
- Again, it somewhat compensates for its large cast with a large attrition rate.
- The series currently counts well over 1,200 individual characters, and is currently only a little more than halfway finished. The total character tally is on course to pass Wheel Of Time's nearly 2000 characters before the end.
Peter F. Hamilton tends to put an absurdly large amount of major characters in his novels which tends to be why they end up as doorstoppers.
Steven Erikson's Malazan Book Of The Fallen series fits this trope. Each book has about four pages devoted just to listing the characters that appear in it.
- Uhh... this really doesn't do the absolutely overwhelming nature of these books justice. Book 1 throws at least 100 names at you to remember as well as an INCREDIBLY complicated (and intentionally not very clearly explained) backstory, and then Book 2 introduces a whole new cast the same size... This goes on.
Tamora Pierce's cast of characters continues to grow. Although the Tortall series is worse, needing character indexes in her more recent books.
Terry Pratchett's Discworld. Even allowing for the fact that the series comprises several sub-series with little character crossover, the "City Watch" and "Rincewind/Wizards" series still have Loads And Loads Of Characters.
- The author even once said that it's the overpopulation that may one day kill the series.
  - That'll never happen. I'm sure Lord Vetinari has a contingency plan for overpopulation. It possibly involves renting out apartment space on the river.
  - Well, unfortunately, we'll never know. Pterry's due for an Author Existence Failure before the Disc overpopulates. Here's hoping he somehow contracts Immortality.
Mark Z. Danielewski's House Of Leaves, by way of multiple literary agents and scrapbook storytelling, is able to cram an impressive array of characters on multiple levels of narrative into its plot. The grand majority of them have a one-shot presence as an academic commentator on the film in the book or a one-night stand with the protagonist Johnny Truant outside the book, but many are referenced again later on as the narrative(s) continue.
Piers Anthony's Xanth series tries to keep track of every character in every book of the series, to the point that later books are merely the new characters making a tour of the place and meeting every other old character to see how they're doing.
Homer's The Iliad. Most of them die. Older Than Dirt.
- The character sheets for "The Odyssey" run to several pages, however most of them only appear in one or two books.
- This is a Justified Trope because every Greek family claimed to have some ancestor who fought in the Trojan War. Every character, even the throwaways, would have been hugely important to someone.
- Virgil's The Aeneid is just as bad.
The Gaunts Ghosts series of Warhammer 40000 novels have lots of various named Guardsmen. However, as these are the Imperial Guard, they die. A lot. And for real.
The incomprehensible number of recurring characters in Neal Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle.
Harry Potter. A good fraction of them are Chekhov's Gunmen.
- JK Rowling has actually stated that she intentionally fleshed out 40 or so classmates (10 in each house in Harry's year plus presumably some that are not in Harrys year like Luna Lovegood and Katie Bell) before she even started writing.
- Jim Dale, who recorded the American audio books of the series, did 134 different voices just for Order Of The Phoenix, earning him a Guinness World Record for creating the most character voices in an audio book. He later beat his own record with Deathly Hallows, for which he did 146 voices.
The ancient Hindu epic Mahabaratha, part literature and part mythology, defined Loads And Loads Of Characters for possibly the first time ever, and then redefined it just for fun. For most of the story, it's just the five heroes and their wife having wacky adventures. In the final year of the story, the cast suddenly balloons as the heroes are boarded up with a royal family, which naturally includes the extended family and several orders' staff and servants, all named. Then you get to The War Sequence, and it's the main heroes, miscellaneous friends and political allies, their extended families, and sons and nephews in the double digits each, against the enemy force of one hundred named villains and their allies, cousins, sons and nephews. This is just the named characters — mooks are in the thousands. And each named character gets his own story. This, kids, is why the Mahabaratha is the longest poem ever written by an incredibly wide margin.
Honorverse certainly worth mentioning, as the simple length of the series (thirteen novels and four anthologies as for now) inevitably leads to it acquiring cast measured in the hundreds. Anyone Can Die, of course (and they do, especially in AAC), but given the number of badasses in the series, who often enjoy all the benefits of the Plot Armor, characters still tend to accumulate...
Battle Royale starts with forty-two students, most of whom get their own backstory.
Colleen McCullough's Master's of Rome series of historical novels. For the uninitiated the seven book series covers Ancient Rome from 110 BC to 27 BC and has dozens of major characters and hundreds of minor characters, covering as it does several generations.
The characters featured in the movie The Wizard of Oz are just small fraction compared to the number of existing Land of Oz characters. There's dozens of characters from all 40 canon books, with the most popular non movie characters being Princess Ozma, Tik-Tok, Polychrome, and Patchwork Girl.
The Illuminatus trilogy has at least three main protagonists (and possibly more), each of whom has their own supporting cast, with only a few overlaps. Just try to try and keep track of all of them on your first read through without taking exstensive notes.
LA Confidential. The already complicated movie contains maybe 20% of the book's story. Ellroy's other books feature it as well, but none to quite that level.
Warriors has a section at the beginning of each book that lists most of the characters as of the book's first few chapters. There are so many of them that the author will actually forget that she killed a character the book before and list them anyway. Two notable examples: Smokepaw, a ShadowClan apprentice whose death was a pretty big event in Dawn, somehow came back in the next book and has since become a warrior, and Heavystep, who has been around since the beginning and has "died" more than once. Of course, most of these characters never even appear in the books and are added on a whim (and then disappear—anyone remember Splashpaw? Robinwing? Oatwhisker), but, still.
- The Allegiances sections in the most recent books list over one hundred characters.
- There are also the characters who make it into the books but aren't in the Allegiances, most notably Rosetail from the first book who died attempting to protect the kits from Shadow Clan but is never listed among the Thunder Clan elders.
The Dragon Jousters ends the first book with a mere seven named characters. The next book introduces a love interest, her family, eight new riders, all their dragons, a mage for the group, enemy mages, a rider's sibling, and two other love interests. It only gets worse, and the writing starts to suffer.
Much of the best work of Charles Dickens features this trope. In Bleak House the count hits thirty by Chapter Ten; Great Expectations is comparatively restrained, with only eighteen distinct characters in the whole book.
- Dickens got paid per word, so putting in a lot of characters and writing about them would get him the $$$. Or maybe he just liked it that way.
Perry Rhodan. Running for almost fifty years, covering a time line of over a million years and several different universes, the number of characters is correspondingly huge.
- To put a number to this: the far from complete Perry Rhodan Wiki Perrypedia has over 7000 entries in the persons category.
James Clavell's Shogun, which frequently switches character viewpoints without warning as we get to know everyone involved in the real life Thirty Xanatos Pileup going on in Japan in 1600.
Phillip Jose Farmer's Riverworld series has so many named characters that take an active part in the story that you have to read the books with a cast roster next to you. By the end of the last book, there are over twenty characters (most of them real-life historical figures) to keep track of.
Thomas Pynchon's tomes are notorious for this. His masterpiece, Gravity's Rainbow, has over 400 named characters spread over 750 pages. Even more confusing, characters can disappear, or even die, early in the book, only to resurface at the very end as a key plot element.
Stephen King's The Stand contains sixteen to twenty main characters (heroes and villains) whose inner lives we follow, and dozens of supporting characters. As a result, the book switches to different story arcs in different parts of the country several times in each chapter.
- Actually, a good deal of Stephen King falls under this trope especially since a great number of his books and stories are within the same universes as each other. He may in fact be the KING of this trope!
Just try keeping the scores of dragonriders (and their dragons!), harpers, Lord Holders (and their spouses and kids!), weyr ladies, and various other characters straight in Anne Mc Caffrey's Dragonriders of Pern series. The abbreviated names don't help either, they tend to blur together, and several have even been subject to Name Drift.
Honoré de Balzac's La Comédie Humaine series has the combined cast of 2472 characters, at least 40 of which appeared in more then one novel.
Emile Zola's Les Rougon-Macquart is similar (not too surprising since Zola was influenced by Balzac), with over another couple of thousand characters, the vast majority named. Of these a good hundred appear in more than one novel and the members of the titular family that show up come up to 30 or 40. Made even more confusing by a strong case of Chekhovs Gunman as most of the family members are briefly mentioned in passing thousands of pages before they show up as main characters.
Fiona Patton's Tales of the Branion Realm series is extremely dense. The series is historical fantasy, emphasis on historical, and not only are there lots of characters, most of them have titles and family trees. The depicted society is patterned on medieval Britain, and there are a dozen different knightly and religious orders for the characters to be members of. All these orders have their own officers, priests and assorted hangers-on.
Melanie Rawn is famous for this trope. At the start of the last book in her Dragon Star series she lists off some 50 different named characters who have died in the previous two books. Then she lists off some 75 "major" characters who managed to survive. She leaves some people off.
Almost every Redwall book introduces literally dozens of new characters. Luckily, most of them don't stick around for longer than one book.
The Bible. Each book has a whole new array of characters, and it even goes into their family trees for a bunch of generations. Not to mention that several characters have multiple children who then proceed to have their own children.
The number of significant characters in any specific Christopher Moore book is relatively small but since they're all loosely connected it adds up to a universal cast of scores.
Catch-22. 42 chapters, almost all named after characters, and only four are repeats. But that hardly scratches the surface. Keep in mind that about half the characters don't have names, so you have Nately, Nately's father, the old man who reminds Nately of his father, Nately's whore, Nately's whore's kid sister, and so on.
The character lists in front of Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's jointly written ~~Doorstoppers~~ works aren't absolutely mandatory, but they sure as heck help keep everyone straight.

Close Literature

The Harry Potter fanfic Witches' Secret series eventually ends up with a core harem of hundreds, and an extended one of thousands. Not to mention the Owls, Dragons, Horses, and other animals.
- Damn whoever referenced this to hell. I was curious, and read it... it is one of those things that is god-awful but sucks you in... future readers, do not look up this fanfic!
Tiberium Wars has loads of characters, to the point where the author has hinted that he has a separate text document just to handle force organization. The only thing keeping it from getting too mind-boggling is the fact that the author gleefully kills characters left and right.
The Avatar: The Last Airbender fanfic "The Order of the Avatar Slayer" starts out by throwing about 15 characters out to the readers in the first 10 chapters. By the end of the series, there's a total of at least 60 or 70.

Close Fanfiction

Lost has had twenty-five credited cast members so far, having sixteen at one time at its peak. That's not even counting the large stable of important secondary characters, nor the dozens of smaller recurrers.
- To give a example: season four starred sixteen people. There were twenty two important recurring characters, some of whom appeared in nearly every episode, and numerous recurring, named Red Shirts and Mauve Shirts like Keamy's team. That's not even counting the sheer number of important one-off characters who will probably come back later or the random friends and family members of the Oceanic 6 who came back in the finale or the dead characters who appeared in flashbacks or visions or the stranger ones like Jacob.
- Lost has reached the point that it's nearly impossible to jump in to the show having missed a few episodes. Even if you followed the story from the beginning, if you miss 3 or more episodes you'll come back to the show to find a brand new character referencing another character you've never heard of before. Even once you figure out this new character, eventually (probably during a season finale) another character you've never heard of will show up accompanied by dramatic reveal music as the main characters look at them in awe...it turns out that the new character was introduced in a dream sequence in the episode you missed and is crucial to the plot.
24 has a vast number of recurring characters. But then again, it needs to, given how often new cast members are needed.
Babylon 5.
Battlestar Galactica is notable not only for the size of its cast (with knowledge of over 20 characters required for even basic comprehension) but for the sheer number of named recurring minor characters, many of whom have been with the show ever since the miniseries. This may be a function of the show's premise: as replacement officers are in perishingly short supply, the Galactica naturally has a very low staff turnover rate.
- Tricia Helfer in herself plays Loads And Loads Of Characters. All the Significant Seven Cylons have many copies, such as Number Eight's Boomer and Athena, but Number Six has more distinct and/or significant copies than any other model. Yet Tricia only gets one salary.
The Bill, as of the timeslot change July 2009, has 23 regular characters, although will probably drop a few more of these due to budget cuts. The police station is arguably number 24. See here for a list.
By its third season, Deadwood had at least thirty "regular" characters, most of whom actually did appear in every episode.
E.R. accumulated quite a few over it's 15-season run, with the main billed cast never going under 10 or so.
- Although they were pretty good about writing characters out and in properly, except for Ramano where they Dropped A Helicopter On Him. Literally.
Farscape had accumulated so many main characters by the third season that the writers had to split the crew into two parties, both of which had a copy of the protagonist John Crichton.
Heroes. Aside from the impressive number already in play, there are plans for dozens more Heroes from "The list" to become main cast members. But much like Lost, Heroes also has a high character attrition rate.
To some extent, Law And Order Special Victims Unit has become one of these during the seventh season and beyond. Even the actress that plays the medical examiner receives high billing.
Oz. During any given season, there are about 15-20 recurring characters that are prisoners, and that's not even counting the prison staff.
Star Trek Deep Space Nine had a cast of 7 regulars (Admittedly, Ciroc Lofton AKA Jake Sisko didn't appear that much later on) all of whom were very well developed. However, the show had an enourmous set of secondary and tertiary characters, many of whom were just as developed, if not MORE developed than the main cast. Gul Dukat and Garak in particular were very deep characters despite not being part of the main cast.
By the time The Wire reached its fourth season it had 29 regular cast members who appeared in every episode; they were split between the police, the gangs, the Baltimore City mayor's office and a local high school. The show also featured about 20-30 other characters with recurring roles.
Steven Bochco was famous for making TV shows that had a large ensemble cast, including L.A. Law and Hill Street Blues. He also had a few clinkers including Cop Rock.
The Greys Anatomy cast got so big that recurring characters like Nurses Tyler and Olivia and the Chief's secretary completely disappeared. They even killed off Mer's mom, George's dad and put several main characters on buses in order to cut down on the amount of people we have to keep track of...
Scrubs has a huge expanded cast of recurring characters, the most famous one being Janitor who was technically a guest star every episode of the first season. Among the major guest cast is Nurse Laverne, The Todd, Keith (who managed better than most of Elliot's long-time boyfriends), Doug, Ted, Lonnie and a few more that aren't quite as frequent like J.D.'s brother Dan.
- Then there are the "Third Tier" of characters, who literally started the show as background extras or crew cameos. Listen to the commentaries on the Season 2 and 3 DVDs, and one can hear jokes about the crew nicknames given to recurring extras, like Dr. Beardface, Snoop Dogg Intern/Resident/Attending and Colonel Doctor.
- The show also regularly expands its cast every year, with new interns. The newest, as of Season 8, are Howie, Katie, Sunny and Denise.
Upstairs Downstairs has more than 20 recurring characters and great use of Cast Herds.
The original Brady Bunch had 9 main characters. The Reunion Series The Bradys had all of those plus each of the six kids in the original had wives/husbands/ boy/girlfriends/ kids of their own added to the mix. No wonder it was an hour-long show!
Generation Kill Representing nearly the whole of First Recon at the onset of the Iraq War.
The Mighty Boosh is an interesting example. While they do tend to have a large supporting and recurring cast, these characters always seem to be played by the three or four main actors of the series. The small troupe/big cast approach fits the show's do-it-yourself vibe (the creators also tend to use friends and family in supporting roles), while in an interview Noel Fielding paraphrased the BBC’s reaction to the show's popularity thusly: "It's like the Beatles. It's amazing! You're getting less money!"
Numb3rs fits the bill. While the core duo of Don and Charlie appear in every episode, and characters like Colby, David, Alan, and Amita are almost always present, there's a revolving cast of other characters who are so known to the audience that their appearance is nothing special, but who still don't make it into every episode.
Spoofed by the sketch comedy show The State which presented a fictional TV program called "Just the 160,000 of Us." It was presented as a soap opera where the aforementioned number of people all somehow shared a house, and all of them had their own subplots.
- Similar in the German comedy Switch, with the fictional soap "Alle und wir" ("everyone and us"), which seems to have hundreds, if not thousands of characters... although we only see six of them, and a seventh one (Robin) is mentioned.
Power Rangers. There are somewhere around 130 people who count as the eponymous Rangers alone, then add in at least 15 distinct sets of allies, supporting characters, and villains. If you count the 17 years of weekly monsters, you quite literally have a cast of thousands.
Buffy The Vampire Slayer usually kept a good rotation of older characters being killed or otherwise taking a bus, but the last season saw an influx of potential slayers and that number came to about 25 or so.
- As of the comic continuation Season Eight, there are around 500 Slayers in Buffy's expanded group.
The Stargate Verse has many, many more characters than the writers can keep track of. They occasionally try to stem the tide with Bus Crashes and dropping bridges.
Jim Henson and his cohorts did this on a regular basis. The Muppet Show, Fraggle Rock and Sesame Street have all featured core casts of at least seven to ten main characters, another ten or fifteen secondaries, and dozens of recognizable recurrers.
Third Watch. There are seventeen main characters listed on their trope page, alone.
Any Reality TV show where the producers think it's a good idea to introduce new competitors half-way.
- Such as the 2007 UK series of Big Brother, which, thanks to a mix of poorly-planned twists, disqualifications and walkouts, had a total of twenty four housemates.

Close Live Action TV

Bionicle, definitely. The main cast comprises over 200 characters, and there are countless Red Shirt villagers scattered all throughout the islands that the story hasn't covered.

Close New Media

Large casts are especially rare in newspaper comics, due to new papers constantly picking up the series and almost no reruns to catch up with, but Doonesbury is a famous exception. At one time a Sunday strip ran that was just one big panel with a group-photo-style picture of the entire cast. Along the side of the panel was a Six Degrees Of Kevin Bacon-style chain of how they are connected to one another.
- A previous strip, published about five years earlier, Lampshaded this by doing a similar chart and having Zonker explain that this was being done because "most 19th century Russian epic novels have fewer characters than this feature." Since then, the cast has only GROWN (as this was before everyone started having kids.)
- This was lampshaded in the comic strip Foxtrot once. A tossed-off gag in the middle of a Sunday strip involved Jason downloading the cast list of Doonesbury, and the file was many megabytes in size.
Peanuts, a notable Long Runner, contains about twenty principal characters (Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, Lucy, Rerun, Schroeder, Woodstock, Sally, Marcie, Frieda, Peppermint Patty, Franklin, Pig-Pen, Spike, Shermy, Eudora, Molly Volley, Crybaby Boobie, Patty, Violet, 5, Peggy Jean), not to mention the unseen Little Red-Haired Girl, Mrs Othmar, and all the parents, and a sentient schoolhouse.
Tumbleweeds has a good thirty characters in its main cast, split between members of the town and the surrounding lands' Native tribes.
For Better Or For Worse has a core family of five, plus friends, relatives, and pets. And then the kids started having families of their own...

Close Newspaper Comics

Pro wrestling promotions, by their very nature, tend to have Loads And Loads Of Characters. After all, ideally, you want the fans to care about every match, and when the shows run 3+ hours, that's a lot of matches.

Close Professional Wrestling

There are seven billion people in the world. Kind of puts everything else to shame, doesn't it?
- Speak for yourself, multi-cellular scum. We are legion and we are in your digestive tract.
  - "We"?

Close Real Life

The Laramie Project has over seventy characters, all of whom are regularly played by eight people.
- Same goes for Angels In America, though there aren't quite so many characters.
The Crucible has about twenty parts, all of which are given, if not deep character development, then something to do at least.
Urinetown has a number of supporting roles, and most are doubled, which means quick costume changes for some cast members.
Given that most musicals have several leads and a large ensemble, it's rare to find a musical with so many distinct parts as Into The Woods.
- Of course, Stephen Sondheim isn't fond of writing regular choruses anyway, so a lot of his shows are filled with lots of small parts instead. Like with Merrily We Roll Along and Assassins.

Close Theatre

The Elder Scrolls series has, on average, over a thousand named NPC's in every game. Admittedly, not all of these characters have anything resembling character development, plot relevance or even different voice actors, but they are still characters regardless.
Squaresoft's (now Square-Enix) Chrono Cross featured a cast of 45 playable characters - requiring the player to play through the game at least three times to get them all. Alas, the game only allows 3 characters to fight at a time. That also leads to ending up with a core group you like to use in battle all the time during the later parts of the game to the exclusion of most of the rest of the characters you collected along the way. And it makes outfitting the redundant characters an expensive proposition.
- This large cast list is a common complaint from those who don't like the game, saying that most of the characters are shallow, poorly-developed and have almost no relation to the plot compared to the small, well-developed cast of Chrono Trigger. (Of which Chrono Cross is the remake of the sequel to.)
By the time you get to the end of the final chapter of Final Fantasy IV The After Years, you'll have a party of 22 characters to choose from, although nearly half of them won't join you if you skip their chapters, up to 6 of those can be Lost Forever or Killed Off For Real even if you don't skip their chapters, and 2 of them have next to no dialogue to begin with.
- The sheer number of characters means that by the time you finish the game, you'll find that the total number of Combination Attacks between them exceeds even that of Chrono Trigger.
Fire Emblem. This is offset by having lost units unrecoverable, which means the total size of your force is limited by how well you play. In addition, the support conversations allow for development of secondary characters without interrupting the main plot.
- Particularly egregious in Shadow Dragon, where the game practically throws two to five new units at you every chapter up until halfway through the game. If you manage to recruit everyone, the Where Are They Now Epilogue will last nearly two minutes longer than the game's actual credits.
- Though if you go for Gaiden chapters by killing off characters, the epilogue ends up looking like a mass funeral...
- A simple example is the "relations" chart put together in Radiant Dawn, which showed the given relations between most of the major characters. It also served as the titular scorecard by which you could know the players. Warning, MASSIVE spoilers here◊
Shining Force. There is a limit of how many soldiers can be sent into any given battle, which leaves some of your forces perpetually on the bench.
Every Suikoden game has One Hundred And Eight characters you can acquire. This does not take into account the many named characters that are not part of the 108.
Any given Super Robot Wars game uses the cast from a good number of Humongous Mecha anime(typically in the double digits), then adds in a few original characters of their own. The Original Generation games then take all those original characters, puts them together, then adds even more characters, both playable and supporting.
- The Super Robot Wars spinoff Endless Frontier takes things even further- it's an RPG developed by Namco, taking the characters from the Original Generation universe, and crossing them over with various Namco characters, including original characters from their crossover strategy title Namco X Capcom (Who were, according to the developers, based loosely on original characters from Super Robot Wars, completing some sort of cycle)
Sonic The Hedgehog. To be fair, most of those characters only appear in the spinoff titles and the count that's actually appeared in multiple games or forms of media is only about 3-5.
Mortal Kombat Armageddon tosses in almost every character from all of the games in the series, including the boss characters, giving you over 60 playable characters.
Final Fantasy Tactics was really bad about this. Almost any character that could go from a computer controlled ally combatant to a controllable character later would immediately stop being important to the plot after you finally gain control of them. This was because you could refuse to let them join, or later dismiss them, but it's still kind of jarring.
- The PSP version throws fans of these characters a bone by including bonus missions (which flesh out the plot, but have no influence on it) where they take center stage again (as computer-controlled "Guests," natch.) However, since the player is free to refuse or dismiss these characters, it's entirely possible to never participate in their bonus missions.
Radiata Stories had 176 recruitable NPCs in addition to the main Player Character, which were split into two groups based on whether you sided with the humans or nonhumans in the middle of the game. Fortunately, it averted the upkeep problems that normally plague large parties (keeping them properly leveled and equipped): 1) you can't change their equipment, and 2) it's actually simpler to recruit new characters than level up old ones. (Especially since there's no Magic stat. Spells which do 300 damage at Lv.1 will still do 300 damage at Lv.100.)
Pokemon games may fit this trope. With the latest games' additions to the cast, there's almost 500 of the various critters. Many of these cannot be brought onto your team (caught, traded, or otherwise) with only 1 cart. In theory, you're supposed to have enough friends so that at least one of your friends owns each game. In truth for many, however, you buy all the games yourself (Fire Red, Leaf Green, Sapphire, Ruby, Emerald, Diamond, and Pearl being in the active generations). This is less of an issue with the newest games gaining online play, however.
- This is complicated by the fact that some of the characters aren't collectible without going to a real life Nintendo event — some of the so called "Legendary Pokémon" can only be unlocked by seeing a Pokémon movie on release day, or by going to the official Nintendo store in Tokyo, for example.
  - Or busting out a cheating device such as an Action Replay. In recent versions, on the other hand, they may have actually been somewhat catering to people who do this. Before, event Pokemon would be downloaded directly to your game, so getting the Pokémon by hacking would require hacking in the character itself, which would of course tempt people to make it the best they possibly could. Now, however, rather than just giving out Pokémon, Nintendo gives out items which open up new areas where you can catch the Pokemon, so you can just hack those items and catch them "semi-legitimately".
- While there are only 500 or so Pokémon species, each Pokémon has six base stats (Health, Speed, Physical Attack, Physical Defense, Special Attack, and Special Defense), which are determined not only from the Pokémon's species, but from six stat adjustments called "Individual Values", which are static and function like a Pokémon's DNA (numbers between 0 and 31 in each stat). Then there are six dynamic stat adjustments based on the enemies your Pokemon fought while leveling up (0 to 255 in each stat, although never more than 510 total). Finally, there's the Personality Value (a number between 0 and 4,294,967,295 determined for each unique Pokémon), which determines a Pokémon's gender, color (out of two for each species), physical shape (for species who have multiple, like Unown and Spinda) and its actual Personality (called Nature in the games). In the end, each particular Pokémon ends up being rather unique — in addition to giving the multiplayer mode a surprising amount of depth.
- On the other hand, the Anime mostly averts this trope, as Ash&Co keep releasing, giving away or just storing their critters anytime they get too many. Way to go for someone who wants To Be A Master...
- Don't forget the important game characters, and random NP Cs.
King Of Fighters has, over the years, acquired a enormous cast. KOF XI for PS2, for example, has forty-seven playable characters.
- The Updated Rerelease of The King Of Fighters 2002 one-ups it: it has 66 playable characters, quite possibly the largest roster of any 2D fighter.
In Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops, you can recruit up to 200 different soldiers over the course of the mission. However, except for the bosses (most of whom can only be recruited on a second playthrough), only one aside from Snake has any plot relevance, and that's only for two scenes in the game.
- The series as a whole has this as well. Counting the dead characters who are actually being impersonated, the first game has 16 different characters, almost all of which have a unique look and a deeply thought out backstory. Here's a fan-created list of all the characters - it has 126 different characters.
Baldurs Gate features 25 NPCs who can join your party. The most you can have with you at any one time? Five. The sequel made it better by limiting it to 16 NPCs, then made it worse by making their individual storylines more involved, with almost every NPC having a major personal quest, some having two.
- Alignment restrictions may make a portion of the cast unplayable if your reputation is too good/evil. Add onto this the fact that your main character can be from any class (meaning you may require certain characters to fill party roles), and the large number of characters are necessary to actually make a decent party.
- The other Infinity Engine games avoided this on two fronts. First, the Icewind Dale series had no premade NPCs—you created the entire party, top to bottom. Second, Planescape Torment had only seven NPCs (of which you could put five in your party), several of which you had to solve elaborate and by no means mandatory puzzles or look behind the obvious in order to get.
Collecting the 28 playable characters (each with their own elaborated backstory) is a relevant part of the gameplay of Valkyrie Profile. These characters very soon become so numerous that the it's hard for the player to feel attachment for any one of them.
- Valkyrie Profile 2 ups the ante by having 13 main characters (in various guises) and forty einherjar. You'll need to have at least three save slots to have every character, since each "relic" has a list of one to three characters, of which only one is obtainable at a time. You can also lose einherjar permanently. On the other hand, unusually there's only a single bad guy and a tiny smattering of NP Cs who aren't playable at some point (not counting one-off bosses who have no scenes).
- Valkyrie Profile Covenant Of The Plume has about 19 playable characters (20 if you include Ancel the Guest and Jeigan Character), and you have to play through the game three times on all three paths to get them all, since one playthrough will force you to take a path that will recruit two characters but also fight another as a boss. This also does not include the optional characters in the game that you get in the New Game Plus, many of which are either series characters or had appeared in Covenant of the Plume's story.
Ogre Battle has a lot of important figures in its storyline.
Tactics Ogre: Let us Cling Together has quite a bit. And like in Covenant of the plume, you can't recruit them all since taking one path will bar recruitment of some named characters while taking another one may actually result in that character becoming a boss for that chapter or only showing up. And even in Chapter 4, small variations on what you did may cause a character or someone related to show up.
- But there are also some characters who join all the time, but have different roles or methods. For example, Haborym and Guildus will always show up in Chapter 3, but Haborym shows up in different roles, either being rescued or run into. Seleye will either join by an event or need to be rescued in battle, and in chapter 4, Kachua will either be hiding or actually in the battle against you.
- Tactics Ogre: The Knight of Lodis is similar, but much more simplistic. Taking the "A" path makes Shiven and Cybil join, while Orson becomes a boss and Rictor also is fought twice. Taking the "B" path makes Orson and Rictor join, Rictor is only fought once, and Cybil becomes a boss. No clue where Shiven is, as he doesn't show up until very late on that path.
Harvest Moon has 200+ different characters over its various continuities (many of whom are expies of one another). The Nintendo DS-original entries (Harvest Moon DS and HM DS: Island of Happiness) have over 100 characters by themselves.
Most fighting games could be accused of this, but thankfully these characters rarely have any serious plot role. It is actually good, since in these games the relevance is in characters/opponents over levels generally.
- Also, while there is a "sure" crew, many of the minor chracters are scripted in and out in the blink of an eye... well, rather between games.
Touhou has accrued a substantial list of characters, and adds at least seven more in almost every game (the fighting games and Shoot The Bullet being the exceptions). (This is a rare exception to the Expanded Universe rule because the Doujinshi culture surrounding it more or less leads to the canon and the EU being one and the same and much "official" fleshing out of the characters is done by Fanon.)
- This is a picture of every character in the games and side material. Tremble in fear, puny human. (Picture is work-safe, ads may not be, rest of the site is not.)
F-Zero has had new characters in every game, with a huge jump from F-Zero to F-Zero X (30) and from F-Zero X to Maximum Velocity, though the number of new characters in each game has decreased after Maximum Velocity.
- F-Zero GX has 41 playable characters, each with their own mini-biography, and theme song.
For only being one game, the cast of Psychonauts is monumentally gigantic. This is especially remarkable given that they're all named and given voice-acting. 26 distinct characters at the camp, 9 at the abandoned asylum, and lord knows how many within the mental worlds—though some of them are admittedly nameless NPCs.
The Mario series has a whole ton of characters in the series, with about 1300 + counted at present. Of course, in a similar way to the Sonic The Hedgehog series, most of the games and spinoffs put most of the characters on a bus after their first appearances, and the count that's actually appeared in multiple games or forms of media is probably about 1/15th of the total character count. That and the obvious Cast Herds where most characters are only found in one sub-series or media type.
Pop'n Music, a Rhythm Game series with 16 main aracde releases so far, introduces about 15-20 new characters with every new installment.
Marvel vs. Capcom 2 features 56 playable characters, probably the record for any beat 'em up prior to the release of KoF 2002 UM (To be fair though, 95% of the roster is recycled from all of the previous games and it has two Wolverines.).
Tekken 6 is catching up with around 41...which would possibly be the most number of characters in any 3D Fighting Game
Infinite Undiscovery has a total of 18 characters, though most times only 3-4 at a time can be in the active party. There are instances of Lets Split Up Gang where more of your characters will be active, though even in those cases you don't have direct control over more than just your party. Some of your characters are explicitly never able to join the main party and can only come out for combat in those instances of multiple parties. Some of the characters are more plot relevant than others, but most of them get at least a little development.
While Disgaea 1 and 2 were stretching it with about 8-9 playable story characters per game, Disgaea 3 takes the cake with sixteen through the main story and playable epilogue. If that weren't enough, nearly every previous Disgaea character is downloadable, as well as a great number of characters from other Nippon Ichi games.
- The Updated Rerelease of Disgaea 2 is looking to beat Disgaea 3. Alongside the returning playable twelve (From both the main story and optional bosses), all the originally unplayable bosses are now playable, many of whom ended up appearing in Disgaea 3 as downloadable characters and adds half of the Disgaea 3 main cast. And if that weren't enough, the port will be getting the other half of the Disgaea 3 cast as well as characters from the other Nippon Ichi games as Downloadable Content.
Although Skies Of Arcadia has only 6 main party members, the 22 recruitable crewmembers for the Cool Ship bring the count way up.
That's to say nothing of Valkyria Chronicles, made by the same team. While only four of them (Welkin, Alicia, Rosie and Largo) are main characters, Welkin's squad consists of 50 playable soldiers, all of them named and with backstories and personalities of their own, which may make it hurt a little bit more if any of them should die in the line of fire.
Guild Wars currently has 26 heroes (customizable NPC party members). Despite this, you can only use three of your heroes at a time, the rest of the party being filled with human players or henchman (who are similar to heroes, but they aren't customizable - and the skills and equipment they do have kinda suck).
Super Smash Brothers Brawl currently 35 characters and 41 Stages. Including several who are unlocked only for completions sake. The running joke when they were being revealed during development was "Which Nintendo characters aren't in Brawl?"
- If you count Shiek, Zero Suit Samus, and each of PT's 3 mons as characters of their own, then the character count goes up to 39.
Kingdom Hearts is crammed with Disney and Final Fantasy characters, though it's usually easy to keep track of them if you were at all familiar with either universe. Chain of Memories and Kingdom Hearts 2 introduced the Organization XIII whose names all contain the letter X. Only a handful among them get any memorable screentime, making it hard for new players to remember who is who, especially when they all run around in the same black coat...
Street Fighter definitely falls under this, although expect only Ryu, Ken, Akuma and Chun Li to appear in most games. Even if this editor only owns the Super edition of Street Fighter II and has played Street Fighter IV, he has trouble remembering everyone (Zangief, Blanka and E. Honda seem to be his most-forgotten characters). Some characters even appear for only one game, and if not, one or two editions of that game.
While it doesn't have many characters in comparison to other games, Team Fortress 2 has a total of nine playable characters (ten if you count the civilian), plus the announcer, all with distinct personalities (except the civilian). Most online shooters give you five, at most, and those five would have no personality at all.
- What about the Unreal Tournament series? While admittedly most characters of each clan in-game had personalities indistinguishable from each other, there were typically more than five groups, and more than five members per group, resulting in casts of well over thirty.
The Time Splitters series has made considerable increases in its multiplayer character roster, shooting up to 150 with the release of Future Perfect.
Impossible Creatures has all of these games beat, with 127,392 different possible creatures. There's an unfortunate amounts of Character Tiers despite the amount of creatures - on some water maps, Moosobsters are the only level 5 melee creatures worth using.
The Legend Of Zelda has an insane amount of characters as the series spans an enormous time period. Of course, most of these characters are actually expies of each other (there are five different Fairy Companion characters, who are mostly indistinguishable from each other, and 10 different Links).
The Dynasty Warrors game series introduces more and more playable characters with each successive generation, culminating in Warriors Orochi 2, which has over 92 playable characters. That's not including all 30+ generic characters running around.
- Dynasty Warriors 6 was a significant step backwards, however.
- The Dynasty Warriors Gundam series not only drew on the loads and loads of Gundam characters, there are also loads and loads of Mobile Suits available for the characters to pilot (the second game topped out at 62 suits).
City Of Heroes, being a MMORPG naturally needs lots of characters, but many of them are remarkably fleshed out. However, its casual-friendly nature, immense customisation and many character slots cause many players to fall into this trope, creating far more characters than they can handle. We call it 'Altitis', and it's actually somewhat encouraged.
World Of Warcraft, with all its characters from the precedent series and the Expanded Universe. Just look at this list of major characters.
In the Backyard Sports series, there are 30 (now 22) main characters, each with their own theme song, personality, and abilities. And I'm not even mentioning the commentators, the secret kids, and the hundreds of NP Cs in the game, who all have a name.

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Homestar Runner has a small core cast, but add in all the spin-offs that are counted as part of the series' world and the list of recurring characters alone pushes triple digits.

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Last Resort has at least 20 "main" characters to keep up with (12 criminals + 4 volunteers + 4 members of the Vaeo Family), not to mention staff and various other family members associated with them. The main justification? It's a Reality Show — which, in the tradition of most shows, has a huge cast (to start) and then settles down into more important Characters. There's also a few clans starting to emerge, which increase the numbers further.
Sluggy Freelance. Granted it has been running for ten years, but still it has well over 50 characters.
- At last count, 156 or so... according to this website.
  - At least he's pretty good about keeping the size of the core cast to remotely sane proportions. A lot of those 156 characters have been dead or Put On A Bus for years.
Penny And Aggie has almost 30 characters on its cast page and regularly diverts attention from the two female leads to focus on them. Aggie in particular seems to have been demoted to supporting cast in her own comic.
8BitTheater has the Light Warriors, the Real Light Warriors, the Dark Warriors, the Elemental Fiends, the Other Warriors, White Mage and Balck Belt, the kid who's life Black Mage keeps destroying, Akbar and Jeff, King Steve, Princess Sara, The Royal Advisor, Baba, Sarda, The Trickster God, Dr. Swordopolis, The Dice God, and The Evil God. I’m sure there’s more I’m missing here.
Everything you wanted to know and more about the cast of El Goonish Shive.
Something Positive The main cast isn't overly large for a webcomic, but once you get to the past main characters (Jhim, Kim, Monette) to the supporting cast (Cab, Berenger, Claire, Anna, Lisa, Celie, The Teddy-Bear Liberation Front Guy, etc), things get a little crazy. Made worse by the occasional recurrer that only appears a total of five times in six years (Davan's friend Andy), and the fact that often a year goes by between Jhim or Anna appearanaces.
The cast page for Captain SNES lists 120 named characters - and it's incomplete. Including four different Links and the Nintendo Censorship Angel.
- And along the same lines, how bout we introduce Kid Radd here as well? Tons of bit parts (hah) who were nonetheless named, or at least referenced in such a way as to make them notable...
Girl Genius, between the Circus, Castle Wulfenbach, Sturmhalten, Beetleburg, Mechanicsburg, the Knights of Jove, the Jägers, and the assorted wandering types... let's just say there are a big damn lot of people who go in and out of the story.
- Kaja Foglio has stopped trying to maintain a big character bio page, and now just deletes the old page and starts from scratch at the beginning of each chapter, adding in characters as they become relevant. Only 10 pages into chapter 9, there's already seventeen characters up there, and that's not including the "Old Heterodynes" (included on the page for generic backstory) and the author-insert bit characters. Ten pages of comic. Seventeen characters.
Kevin And Kell.
New characters are introduced at a positively frightening rate in ''MagicalMisfits. To be fair, they are usually given distinctive backstories, but it does somewhat lead to a Kudzu Plot.
Drowtales. There are several noble houses, each with its leader, officers, counsellors and soldiers. There is the imperial house - ditto. There are the demon-busting Templars - ditto. There are the renegades and diabolists - ditto. There is the great school, with its staff and pupils. There are Ariel's friends (where not previously covered). And that doesn't even start on the supporting characters, citizens and walk-ons. Plus, they all have long, straight white hair and narrow builds. There is a very good reason why the drow in this universe favour distinctive jewellery, facial decals and hair dye patterns...
Schlock Mercenary has expanded into something of a Cast Herd over the years, and keeps getting steadily bigger.
- While the company grows, we mostly follow the Special Ops squad and the officers, and people die in combat.
Arthur King Of Time And Space. Arthurian myth, being made of various legends and ballads bolted together by Malory, has Loads And Loads Of Characters and AKOTAS includes most of them. (And the others are probably due to be introduced later.)
Order Of The Stick. After the inclusion of notable Azure City paladins and Greysky City thieves, the author seems a little quicker to kill off any new faces.
Irregular Webcomic, anyone? At least each theme are separate, sometimes...
Sins. You've got the Seven Deadly Sins...that's not so bad. Then consider that all but two have been replaced. And some have been replaced twice. And then there's the Seven Holy Virtues, the golems, the Vices, the hosts...and Murdoch.
Get Medieval had the core group of Human Aliens, (Asher, Neithe, Torquel, Iroth, and Oneder), the Earthlings Asher and Neithe landed with (Sir Gerard and his family), Torquel and Iroth's bunch (mostly Duc L'Orleans), plus the bad guys, plus various popular secondary charactes (Jacques the alchelmist, Belle). And that's not even counting those who vanished once the story moved away from them.
The KAMics, although if you eliminate all the one shots & isolate characters who stick to their own series (usually) it seems a little more managable.
Everyday Heroes has a cast page that lists twelve major characters, plus a couple of dozen minors, not including one-episode appearances.
N Fans The Series had practically an entire army of characters. Yes, they were all Self Inserts, but they actually played the trope rather well since most of them weren't afraid to have some pretty bad things happen to them. Sadly, because the plot fixated on a couple, at least half the cast was Put On A Bus or removed from the comic after getting very little screentime beyond their arcs. (Team Lalala was one of the worst, having been left on the same screen for almost a year of real time.)
In DMFA, even the artist has admitted that there are too many characters to keep up with, with at least one of the main characters in the beginning being moved to nearly invisible.
Hazards Wake. So many damn characters! At least the author eventually had the good sense to stick them into one of three groups and rotate them ala Four Lines All Waiting.

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The Whateley Universe is still growing. There are something like 15 Canon authors, writing 20 or so protagonists. Then there are all the other main characters and friends (and enemies and teachers) at Superhero School Whateley Academy. There are supposed to be nearly 600 students, plus dozens of teachers, researchers, security officers, and so on. It seems like we've met about a third of them. Maybe more. Plus the families of the main characters, an assortment of heroes and villains outside the school, ... Since there are now something like 150 novels, novelettes, short stories, novel chapters, and vignettes, it isn't surprising that we've met hundreds of characters. So far.
Broken Saints features about forty speaking roles, over half of which are major players in the plot.
Every season of Survival Of The Fittest has a very large cast, with over one hundred students and several terrorists on top of that. One of the test runs had two hundred students. Of course, by the end of a season only one student is left, but it's still a huge cast.
- Version 3 itself hit the two hundred mark, and that isn't even counting those who didn't get into the game or NPC characters.
AH Dot Com The Series. The AH.com has a crew of about twenty, as do the ships of many of their recurring villains and allies, and then there's all the people they might meet in this week's timeline. Usually an episode will only focus on five or six crewers and the others just get one or two lines each.
Tales Of MU starts by introducing the two dozen girls that live on protagonist Mack's floor and goes from there.
Alternate History timelines can span centuries, of not a millenium or more. Hence, they also tend to have this, like Decades Of Darkness, Look To The West and the Chaos Timeline.
The League Of Intergalactic Cosmic Champions

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That Other Wiki contains expansive entries for forty named characters in Exosquad, nine of them in The Squad alone. And they are not being particularly thorough at that...
Due to its long run, the number of characters in The Simpsons that could be considered regular is at least 30-50, possibly even more.
- There is a poster that actually lists the characters that have had more than one episode, and it was well over 100.
  - The Movie managed to in some way, even if only in a background shot◊, include almost every single character from the series. Some of the crowd shots were clearly intended to create easter eggs for the DVD.
- They sell T-shirts with all of them on.
For Transformers series it's easier to list the exceptions than the examples:
- The Japanese series Masterforce and Victory, which featured all-new, considerably smaller casts in an obvious effort to start afresh
- Beast Wars was limited to a small cast due to the prohibitive expense of creating new CGI models in the mid-to-late '90s, although the creators' Anyone Can Die policy ensured that this cast did have rotating members.
- 2D-animated Transformers Armada kept a relatively small cast. However, when it moved on to CGI in Energon and Cybertron, the problem cropped up again, with some appearing characters getting five lines and never appearing again.
- Transformers Animated seems to also be sticking to a small cast format, with villains/allies/backgroudn characters fading in and out but the main cast remaining intact.
  - Although the main cast is apparently the same, the extended cast seems to be gradually growing, with over a dozen new characters already confirmed to be introduced to the already sizable cast in the third season.
GI Joe is a prime example, due to its Merchandise Driven nature. The action figure line featured dozens of characters, almost all of whom appeared on the TV show at some point.
Justice League Unlimited started with a core cast of seven heroes, and a handful of recurring villains. Starting with the third season, they make it a true league, and at one point state that they have at least sixty members (not counting a few rogue agents like Huntress and Hawkman), plus the villains, plus two of the Cadmus folk. This meant that at the very least, these characters would be seen in the background in the Watchtower, or in fights, and several got moments to shine.
The aptly-named Legion of Super-Heroes is basically the same idea applied to the DCU as seen in the 31st century. Its format, however, tends to be "the core plus one or two guest members," with larger numbers turning out for major threats.
Teen Titans' final season has the team meeting up with other young heroes, typically having one main Titan defending one or more less experienced members from villains. It's a good thing, too, since nearly every villain in the show's history, down to even long-unseen one-shot villains (but excluding most Big Bads) had also teamed up. It all comes together in a two-episode Battle Royale With Cheese. Even being dead when last seen was no excuse for a hero or a villain to not be in on that one.
The Spectacular Spider Man has the obvious ones, Spidey, Gwen, MJ, Aunt May, Norman Osborn, Harry Osborn, JJJ... and then there's three cops, four co-workers at the Daily Bugle, and eight or nine other people at Peter's school, and that's not counting the seventeen supervillains and at least five future supervillains.
Futurama, to the point where one of the last shots of the final Direct To DVD Movie was a massive crowd shot featuring every character except the children (to keep continuity with a line that stated they weren't there) purely as a fan-pleaser.
Gargoyles helped keep track of additional characters through a Cast Herd, everyone is connected through their primary associations. Of the main characters there is Goliath, Hudson, Brooklyn, Broadway, Lexington, Bronx and Elisa; with Xanatos and Fox being second only to them. Then there are individuals like Matt Bluestone, Macbeth and Demona. After that there are the various groups like The Pack, the Mutates, the Hunters, the Avalon clan and the magical creatures like Puck, Oberon and Titania. And then there are the characters that are the lesser seen including the England clan, Matt Bluestone and family members that show up like Elisa's family, Foxs' father and Xanatos' dad.
Total Drama Island, in a way; there are really only twenty-two contestants, plus Chris and Chef, in the main cast with a few very minor cameo characters. But at least at the beginning of the series, any one of those twenty-two could have been considered a main character; there was no way to tell who was going to be "the star." This was quickly remedied, though, since a character is usually kicked off every episode. (Though, since there is still no "official" protagonist, minor characters are still unusually likely to be picked up by the fandom; many fanfictions, for example, will make Ezekiel the main character.)
King Arthur And The Knights Of Justice had twelve knights, nine main warlords, to magic users and those were the main characters. Not suprisingly, Character Development was a sparce resorce.

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