Arthur's Quest: Battle for the Kingdom, at least according to the Something Awfulreview: "You start out in....some town, somewhere. But this is a special clone town, one that's populated by about 12 people with about 3 or 4 unique looks. You'd think they would have at least bothered to make a few more models, or at least position the people so that identical twins aren't standing right next to each other."
In Backyard Baseball and other Backyard Sports games, all characters, besides the 30 main ones, are based off of a few models.
The girls of the hentai Bible Black are not only limited to a single face, they all have the same body figure, and CGs featuring more of them will clearly show that they all have the same heights. It's like they are all clones with different hair and accessories.
The anime series mostly attempts to avert this, as the character designer seems to have done their best at making the women as distinguishable as possible from one another. Character models show that, at least for the named characters, they attempted giving each male and female different figures and body types, and all of them are different heights. This is not completely averted however, as certain characters do look quite a bit alike and un-named background characters are sometimes identical to others.
Bioshock 2 has this with the little sisters in the final cutscene (good ending).
All 26 Cyber Grannies have the same, gourd-shaped head. They do have different hairstyles, and in some cases, different skin tones, but their faces are all still basically identical.
It's an awfully common thing for the awfully generic products that fill 90% of the Dating Sim market. This is visible in almost everything, stock character designs, stock plots, stock character types, stock Photoshop glowing pink, etc. This YTMND animation gives a really good example.
The characters featured in that animation are all designed by Naru Nanao; a couple of them even come from the same game. Her later designs vary a bit more.
This also follows with anime based on h-games (AIR, Kanon, etc.) which tend to have only one face — well, maybe two, one for boys and one for girls.
Possibly the worst offender is Aoi Nishimata, possibly best known as one of the character designers for SHUFFLE!. (Examples: One◊, Two◊, Three◊, Four.)
Forget stock 'designs', the game Otoboku - Maidens Are Falling For Me uses the same three character pictures for any random students who aren't part of the main cast. This includes several named characters who are part of the Student Council during Takako's plot.
The guys of Dead or Alive are easy to tell apart, but the girls all have the same vaguely-childlike face, and the same build. It gets even more noticeable when you look at Team Ninja's fanart of Chun-Li and Cammy, though they tone down the former's Hartman Hips. Close inspection reveals that there are, in fact, two female models in the game, the tall, incredibly well-endowed Caucasian, and the petite, yet still incredibly well-endowed Asian (or half-Asian).
Curiously, the older DOA titles used a 'trick' to get around this to a limited degree: character heights that varied (particularly among women) much more than other 3D fighters, where women overwhelmingly tend to be the same height. In particularly, shorter fighters have a handy advantage of ducking under attacks more easily, since their reach is rarely affected as well.
Dead or Alive 5 (and afterwards) made a point of giving the female cast different face models, which siblings most closely resembling each other, finally catching up, and advertised the fact. It also introduced Marie Rose, who, being a Token Mini-Moe (a first for the series), looks noticeably different from everyone else.
Save for Campbell, Dr. Betruger, Counselor Swann, Theresa Chasar and Sergeant Kelly, the NPC's in Doom³ have all the exact same Asian, middle-aged white or young white male faces. There are two black males in the first level, though, but that could be Hand Wavedas them being twins.
The NPCs in Epic Mickey, if they're plot-unimportant, will tend to look like clones of Dippy Dawg, Horace Horsecollar, or Clarabelle Cow. This is justified in that they're unused concept art and non-final character designs for the same characters. This is here because there were plans and potential to use a number of forgotten Disney characters and stands out more because the plot-important characters look wildly different from each other.
Lampshaded at one point in Fallout 2. An NPC in New Reno describes a man the Chosen One has to find. Chosen remarks that he keeps seeing the same faces everywhere. The NPC hypothesizes that such poor genetic diversity is the result of the nuclear war. Fallout 1 and 2 have around 5 sprite sets for unarmoured townsmen.
In Fallout Shelter, all dwellers look the same except color and hairstyle, even those from the other Fallout games. This is because the game's art style is based on the in-universe Vault-Tec cartoons, where almost every human character looks like a variation of Vault Boy.
Perhaps somewhat understandably, Final Fantasy XI does this, with most races having only 8 faces per race/gender combination, and a palette-swapped version of each face to give an alternate hair-color (the Tarutaru race has only 4 faces per gender, offering 4 sets of coloration per face instead of two). This is only a strict limitation on PCs and the quested NPC fellows (who were further limited to a subset of these), but even some story-important NPCs showed very little differentiation from these models (for example, Doctor Shantotto, who is Tarutaru Female face 4-A in relatively common mage gear, with some custom animations), and most general NPCs who are neither very young nor very old use the same faces as PCs. Also, each race/gender combination is identical from the neck down, with both sexes of Tarutaru being thus identical to each other as well.
This is a complaint with quite a few MMOs. Most MMOs without extensive character generators tend to have very few facial choices per sex/race combination. World of Warcraft, for example, tends to average somewhere around eight faces per sex/race combo, and usually only two of each of them look good enough to use most of the time. True, you can change hair color and shape, and facial hair, but that's really barely anything, and most of those favor heavily towards one style. Even one of the rare examples that shouldn't be, City of Heroes, tends to lean towards this; while they have a lot, lot, LOT of options, only a few are really, honestly usable for "normal" looking characters. The rest are a bit too close to Uncanny Valley half the time to be tolerable.
Almost every Final Fantasy after Advent Children, characters in CG movies and other titles like Dissidia Final Fantasy tend to look very similar. This expands to Kingdom Hearts above and Lufia: Curse of the Sinistrals. Averted in Final Fantasy VII Remake which thanks to using realistic graphics is able to give the cast unique facial features, Cloud for instance has different features from other bishes like Reno or Rufus as well as Sephiroth. Tifa and Aerith notably avert this due to Tifa being modelled to have Asian looking facial features whilst Aerith is modelled to look more Caucasian, unlike previous media where they had same face apart from hair and eyes.
The game based on Gods and Generals, being very cheap (it downright rips off much of its interface from No One Lives Forever 2, which was built off the same engine), has the characters be copy-paste efforts only differentiated by their clothes, mockingly described by Gamespot's review as an American Civil War fought by "two armies of brave, brave clones".
Half-Life 2 isn't much better; while there are more unique models for proper named characters, generic citizens share a pool of 15 modelsnote excluding charred corpses and low-poly models, nine male and six female - and what they do have in facial variety is made up for in having everyone voiced by the same two people.
Henry Stickmin Series: Being simple, monochromatic, literal stick figures, the only thing that differentiates characters are the color of their shoes, and their hair, facial hair, and hats (if they have any of those). There's even a moment that acknowledges this, when Henry and and Dave Panpa have to unlock a prison cell, and Henry attempts to do it by switching bodies with the prison cell's guard. Despite them being identical, Dave, along with Henry's other friends, ask "what did you do with Henry?" and attack the Henry-possessed guard. The fail text reads "What, you think all stick figures look alike?"
Hitman: Blood Money has this in spades, due to technical limitations of 2006 not allowing IO Interactive to easily make unique face models for every NPC. Naturally, this makes it incredibly easy to exploit.
TheWorld of Assassination Trilogy downplays this trope, as while guards tend to look identical to one another, civilians are so numerous that it's inevitable twins will start popping up. It's downplayed as there's at least 30 or so face models for each gender, as well as varying textures and models for skin color, hair, arms, you name it, not to mention the different types of clothing and any gear they wear (such as watches or backpacks), meaning even if a face is the same as another NPC in a level, their hair or body likely isn't.
In Hotline Miami, there are multiple different characters who have the same face sprite but slightly altered, to the point where it isn't uncommon for first or second-time players to believe that different characters are one and the same.
The iDOLM@STER: While each game is visually distinct from one another, the girls and boys within each branch are distinguished only by their hair, body types and eyes. The early days of the main branch ran into this problem with its 3D models, but its anime managed to make it less noticeable; unfortunately, other main branch works made afterwards swerve back into this problem in their attempts to mimic the anime's art style.
The old Infinity Engine games, Baldur's Gate, Planescape: Torment, Icewind Dale, etc, were all full of color Palette Swaps and identical-looking NPCs. Even many quite-well characterized NPCs were virtual clones of a stock model. Protagonists were frequently not exempt, with one build, one basic outfit, and one face for the male and female of every race. Customization came down to hair, skin, and clothing colors. Despite this, major characters often had impressively detailed rich portraits.
A lot of Mortal Kombat games (even later ones like MK9) suffer from this, as it’s extremely hard to differentiate human characters by their faces except by their skin colour, whether they’re wearing a mask, hat, glasses or have some kind of face marking or unique eye colour. Female characters in particular allhadthe same pouty faces, which bleed over in other NetherRealm games like Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe and Injustice: Gods Among Us. Even MKX got criticised for this, with Cassie and Jacqui looking exactly the same save skin colour. Mortal Kombat 11 thanks to photorealistic graphics goes very far to avert this with female characters (apart from Sonya and Cassie) and the rest of the cast having different features from each other.
Many, many Kairosoft games are guilty of this, in order to keep the size of their games down, to fit with their 16-bit retraux theme, and the fact that there's only 9 employees in the company including the boss.
Their game Pocket Stables is the perhaps the worst offender of this trope, by having every guest that visits your farm appear indistinguishable from the others of their class type. All students look alike, as do all gardeners, salarymen, etc.
The Legend of Spyro: Dawn of the Dragon: Plus or minus some recolors and outfit swaps, all cheetahs, whether background extras or named characters, use the exact same model.
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: It was recently discovered by reverse engineers and modders that the game uses a more advanced version of Miis for generic humanoid NPC characters (referred to as "UMii" in the game's files), likely done to streamline the process of creating multiple different NPC models to populate the game's towns. The modders that made this discovery have found ways to actually convert regular Miis into this format, though it does have limitations (not all hairstyles and facial features like moles are supported).
Mass Effect had many alien background characters cycle through the same small number of faces. It was actually justified in-universe, when a Turian that didn't have much prior contact with humans couldn't tell what gender Shepard was, and later commented that humans "all look alike". The sequels brought more depth to character faces, but background characters still appeared with stock faces.
The books provide an in-universe explanation for this; apparently, as civilizations grow more advanced and globalized, increased interbreeding causes racial identifiers to begin to disappear as the gene pool becomes more evenly spread out. Advanced civilizations like the Turians and Asari have become so genetically homogeneous, there are very few physical differences between them. This is one of the reason why most Citadel species tattoo their faces — to make it easier for members of other species to differentiate between them. Humans are still young enough to show some racial diversity, but it's mentioned several times in the books that they are definitely becoming less visibly diverse than they once were.
Knights of the Old Republic was little better. There was only one face for each race, and only a couple for humans. Even the player character could only select from a few stock faces, and could quite possibly run into a face clone. The second game also had as a plot point the fact that The Handmaiden looks different from her five otherwise identical sisters (given a Hand Wave as being a trait of her species that makes all same sex siblings look alike) is a sign of her illegitimacy, not that you can tell since they all use the exact same model.
The Matrix: Path of Neo has this for all the minor NPC characters; those who are more important get a slightly different face along with different hairstyle/color and/or such.
In the Mega Man Battle Network series, this trope is in full effect. If you see an NPC or a Navi with a unique sprite, said Navi/NPC will either be important to the story and/or provide a Boss Battle.
All the moles in the Mole's World series (with the sole exception of the villain, Kula) have the same basic face design, with two oval-shaped black eyes, a red nose, and a mouth with one tooth visible when opened.
Neverwinter Nights does this oddly. There are dozens of unique character portraits... but with each random NPC getting one from this selection, they get repetitive anyway, with it not helping that the portraits are always the same, not modified slightly the way characters in a work with this usually can be.
Neverwinter Nights 2 had it worse. While you got some variance in character models and faces, any time you talked with someone who got a voice (as opposed to simply using a text box), the camera would zoom in on you and the other character. There was only a single set of animations for all characters, so everyone in the conversation would go through the same pattern of head-tilt, eye-roll, hand-wave, head-tilt, eye-roll, hand-wave...
Tetsuya Nomura is often accused of succumbing to this trope. At least there's an in game excuse for all the characters that resemble each other in the Kingdom Hearts games. In Kingdom Hearts Sora, Kairi and Xehanort, each have several look-a-likes for various reasons. You can be certain that every single time you notice someone bears a physical resemblance to someone else, it will be significant. This is so rampant in the series that it almost wasn't a surprise when we found out Vanitas looks like Sora. So far, Riku is the only core member of the main cast to not have a doppelganger, unless you count the Riku Replica.
Octopath Traveler: The more detailed character art (as seen for each character's story) and the end of each characters' tales show that most of the female characters have nearly identical facial design, with their hair being the main point of difference. H'aanit and Ophilia share almost identical faces, as does Ophilia with Lianna (seen in Ophilia's end screen) and with Cordelia Ravus (seen in Therion's ending screen).
The Puyo Puyo series' artstyle as of 20th Anniversary uses one head shape for every single humanoid, non-anthromorphic character, regardless of age or gender. Most of those characters have the same eye shape as well, resulting in faces that vary only in eye color and whether or not the character has Blush Stickers or "whiskers" like Arle, Amitie, and Ringo. Hairstyles and other accessories go a long way toward hiding this, but even then a few characters still stick out. (Quest's Rebecca essentially being an off-colored Witch, for example.)
Rise of the Tomb Raider is a glaring example, and it's especially grating when contrasted with the rest of its otherwise awesome graphics. The game's female cast has exactly three members (Lara, Ana, Sofia), none of them related by blood, all of them from wildly different backgrounds and origins, and yet all of them look so alike one could be forgiven for thinking they were sisters. The only things that really tell them apart are their clothes and their hair color. The men fare slightly better, with the main cast having unique faces and most of the mooks wearing masks anyway, but Jonah's likeness is recycled for Trinity's soldiers on a regular basis, and the Remnant fighters also tend to look like a nearby cloning facility left its doors open.
Former SNK and current Capcom artist, "Shinkiro", possesses an almost photo-realistic (if slightly creepy) art-style. The thing is, all his characters have more or less the same face and their expressions seem limited to "serious", "creepy grin" and "manic grin".
In The Sims, there are only about 8 faces and 3 skintones (dark, medium, light) to choose from for each gender and age group (adult or child). In The Sims 2 and 3, this is changed and the "Create A Sim" options are greatly improved. However, in The Sims 2, the NPC's or Townies often only have faces from the pre made faces in CAS, leading to various nicknames by fans (e.g. the mailwoman Dagmar Bertino has "Face 1", which is considered to be the prettiest face).
Players sometimes invoke this by only allowing Face 1 and Face 2 townies to marry and breed with their playable sims, leading to challenge families where You All Look Familiar.
The Mario series is a big offender when it comes to non-human characters. All characters who are Toads, Goombas, Koopa Troopas, etc. tend to have exactly the same face and body, sometimes being distinguished by their clothes or facial hair (or, in some Koopa Troopas' cases, shell color). And all Yoshis look exactly the same except for their color scheme (and many times, even the colors repeat). While all members of a species looking the same makes sense when they're enemies, it gets annoying when you're dealing with actual characters: It's impossible to tell if you're looking at the "main" Toad or a generic one, or whether the green Yoshi Mario rides through the different games in the series is always the same one. And the fact that the names of the "main" Toad and Yoshi are just "Toad" and "Yoshi" respectively doesn't help, either. Another example would be Kamek, who exactly looks like every other Magikoopa, with the only difference that he has a broom.
The saddest part regarding the Toads is that there was an attempt to avoid this trope in the first two PaperMario games that boast a fair share of unique designs. Unfortunately, Sticker Star and Color Splash did not follow, and Origami King even turned it into a plot point. Olly took a well-wishing message from his creator as an insult because he couldn't read it, saw his creator in the face of every Toad in the kingdom, and wants to fold a thousand origami cranes to exterminate the entire species.
Ufotable's work for the Tales Series suffers greatly from this, even with non-affiliated artists creating the character designs. Look at Alvin and Zaveid, or Milla and Velvet, for example.
Toontown Online: Most cogs have unique head textures, and some have unique head models as well. The Yes-Man, Glad Handler and Mr. Hollywood are a noticable exception, having the same pale gray/white hexagonal head with closed eyes and a wide mouth with teeth baring.
Akira Toriyama, maker of Dragon Ball(see the Anime & Manga folder), has been the character designer for a number of games, including Chrono Trigger and every single Dragon Quest. And, true to form, nearly every single character in those games has a visual counterpart to be found in Dragon Ball.
They even used the small variations in character designs as a central focus in the character design system of Dragon Quest IX, where players could make hundreds of possible character models... using only about eight faces.
In a couple of rare examples (such as Dragon Quest Swords, where none of the characters have spiky hair/Goku eyes, and a few are wearing decidedly Baroque-era or gothic outfits) he breaks out of the six faces mold, but when he phones it in (such as with Tobal No. 1 and Blue Dragon), it's really obvious that he is.
Touhou Project: Tends to happen with most official art, including ZUN's own character art but also some of the official manga artists, such as Aki Eda (Silent Sinner in Blue) and Makoto Hirasaka (Touhou Sangetsusei).
One step up in the fighting games. As far as Alphes's character portraits go, everyone has the same face. Moe Harukawa's character portraits show this as well, with only one or two characters looking even slightly different.
The 2005 video game The Warriors has all gangs except the Warriors (who have the protagonist cast and 9 "New Bloods) use just 9 different characters, no more. Even then, in a lot of cases, one of the characters will be the gang's warlord who, as you'd expect only appears once, and as a boss, so apart from him/her, there are usually only 8 gang characters; what's more, you can often see several clones of the same character in one fight because you'll be fighting multiple gang members throughout the game.
The Witcher had this bad. A very obvious shortcoming of the game's graphics department was that there were only one or two models for merchants, old ladies, old men, hookers and so on, as a result of which most NPCs of a particular type looked like identical twins. This stands out even more because even named and important NPCs share some of these repetitive models.
World of Warcraft offers about 8 or 9 face options per race/gender. While many of the male faces get used, female faces are rarely used unless they're one of the couple of youthful, smooth faces available for that race, making female characters more likely to look like clones of eachother.
One particular troll female face is known as "cutefase" (note spelling). Whereas other troll faces have wrinkles, deepset lines, and cranky expressions, cutefase is young, smooth, and appears either deadpan or "under the influence." Virtually all female trolls will use this face. The term cutefase is often also applied to an orc female face with smooth features and the forsaken female face that lacks visible decay (the last of which is also called the "dollfase").
Female tauren and worgen faces are notoriously difficult to distinguish from one another. This is further exacerbated by the fact that all female worgen have pale green eyes and the same expression, while female tauren only have four non-death-knight-specific options.
In the X-Universe games, a given NPC is usually generated by picking from a list of roughly half a dozen faces per race and assigning a race-appropriate name from a similar list. Major characters such as Saya Kho sometimes get their own face. Returns in X: Rebirth where there is only about a dozen character models. However, alternate uniforms, attachments such as hats and eyeglasses, and alternate voices and personalities make it somewhat less obvious.
Yandere Simulator's debug builds have only two faces, as a result of having only two character models (Yandere-chan's for the girls and Senpai's for the boys). The dev wants to avert this in the final game, and has given some students unique features (The Student Council members have their own eye shapes, and several attempts have been made to give Mai Waifu Tareme Eyes).
Akihiko Yoshida is notorious for this. Almost every character he designs (particularly in games like Final Fantasy Tactics and sequels, and Final Fantasy III (DS)) has the same face, albeit with a few characteristics. It's quite an accomplishment when even some of the males and females look the same. The biggest culprit here is that he rarely gives the characters noses. It is really difficult to differentiate characters when one of the biggest facial features is just missing.
As crowd sizes have increased in Wide-Open Sandbox games, some PC ports (such as Grand Theft Auto V) have actually included a "Crowd Diversity" setting, allowing the user to choose how much this trope is invoked or averted. This actually serves a purpose, as every NPC model increases the memory requirements of a crowd. Allowing copies keeps up the crowd density but improves performance on struggling machines.
: "You start out in....some town, somewhere. But this is a special clone town, one that's populated by about 12 people with about 3 or 4 unique looks. You'd think they would have at least bothered to make a few more models, or at least position the people so that identical twins aren't standing right next to each other."
