Reused Character Design / Video Games

• Several of the characters of Anarchy Reigns are borrowed from previous PlatinumGames title MadWorld, the most obvious being protagonist Jack Cayman. This also includes the Black Baron (now the Blacker Baron), Mathilda, and even bosses like Rinrin.
• August, a Japanese visual novel studio (whose works are NSFW), does this, as demonstrated in the image on the main page.
• Cygames loves reusing character designs in their franchises:
  • Summons like Lucifer, Bahamut, Twin Elements and Poseidon are reusing their designs from Rage of Bahamut with the same sort of role they served in the world of Granblue Fantasy and different backstories to fit the world of Granblue Fantasy.
  • A majority of the cards in Shadowverse have artworks originating from their original incarnations from the two games mentioned above. Likewise, in the case of collaboration events (which also applies to Granblue, there are two cases of reusing an artwork: First, a character's design gets reused, but with noticeable changes in the art style or the facial features of the character to match the theme of the game hosting the collaboration. Otherwise, the exact art style from the originating franchise is used without any changes.
• Kenji Eno did this with the video games of the D trilogy (D itself, Enemy Zero, and D2). All of the protagonists are named Laura and have the same design, but are different characters with different surnames. The idea here is that Laura is a digital actress, portraying a different "role" with each new installment.
• Dragon Quest:
  • Dragon Quest III: The female Merchant's hair style makes her look strongly like Marle, and her clothing is almost identical to an outfit worn by a young Bulma. Akira Toriyama designed all of them.
  • Dragon Quest VIII: Angelo greatly resembles Future Trunks, another character designed by Akira Toriyama.
• In Fallout Shelter, all Dwellers look the same except color and hairstyle, even those from the other Fallout games.
• Chickenleg, the pink dragon from Golden Axe, was reused as an enemy in the arcade version of fellow Sega title Altered Beast (1988).
• Hideo Kojima likes to play with this.
  • Meryl Silverburgh (a female soldier with a hidden feminine side) was originally a character from Policenauts, but a younger version of her is also in Metal Gear Solid as Snake's love interest.
  • Pettrovich Madnar, a Russian mad scientist who develops robots, was ported from Metal Gear to Snatcher and back again to Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake.
  • Peter Stillman in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty was originally supposed to be Ed Brown from Policenauts, but Kojima decided against it at the last moment (although their character designs and personalities remain extremely similar), and instead had Ed and his partner Jonathan as soldiers backing up Meryl in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots.
  • There's also Metal Gear itself, which is a huge nuclear robot in Metal Gear, gets ported to Snatcher as Gillian's sapient Robot Buddy, Metal Gear Mk. II, which was then taken back to its home canon in Metal Gear Solid 4 where it acts as backup for Snake, controlled by Otacon. To play into the joke, there's a sequence in MGS4 in which Kojima dresses Snake up as Gillian.
  • Jonathan Ingram shares the same body as Gillian Seed. This is poked when Napoleon mentions this.
• Done for convenience's sake in The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, as that game had a very short turnaround period after Nintendo finished work on The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. The game takes place in a mysterious parallel world to Ocarina's Hyrule and features repurposed character designs, such as a beggar being reused as a banker, a guy who runs everywhere becoming a postman, two versions of a farm girl becoming a sister-sister pair, and most famously, an unnamed chicken lady becoming a tragic bride-to-be and hotel receptionist.
• LEGO Dimensions: Morpheus from The LEGO Batman Movie Story Pack uses Barry Smith's character model from LEGO City Undercover but slightly altered.
• Kyousuke of Little Busters! is a clear reference to Yoshino Yuusuke from CLANNAD, down to general appearance, hairstyle, voice actor, and charismatic hammy personality. The characters are totally distinct, though, if only in their place in the story — Kyousuke is one of the most important characters in all of Little Busters, second only to the protagonist and main girl, while Yoshino Yuusuke is a one-note minor character.
• Some of the LucasArts point-and-click adventure games tend to reuse animated character sprites in different games, sometimes across franchises. The Stuckey's store clerks from Sam & Max Hit the Road are all Bernard Bernoulli clones, for instance. Day of the Tentacle actually used it in-universe to indicate an implied family resemblance across a few centuries.
• maimai's Kotonoha Project series keeps all the original designs they did for the first "season" and uses them for the second, Black Rose. The first was an Urban Fantasy that took place in Japan, while the second was a mystery/fantasy hybrid taking place in England, causing some strange anachronisms handwaved by half the "new" characters now being demons.
• Marvel Puzzle Quest has the same characters in different tiers, so at first they just reappeared in different clothes/hairstyles. And given the initial theme was Dark Avengers, there are a few copies — Black Widow◊, Hawkeye/Bullseye, the console-exclusive Iron Patriot — and at first, both Wolverine and his son Daken were the same before the former received a new look.
• miHoYo is fairly infamous for this. Ignoring the fact that they have reused the exact same characters in at least four different games with slightly differing continuities and backstories, several characters in both Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail are visual copy-pastes of previously existing characters, such as Raiden Shogun and Yae Miko from Genshin being dead ringers for Raiden Mei and Yae Sakura from Honkai Impact 3rd, or Acheron in Star Rail also being a visual clone of Raiden Mei. This would be later justified in-universe — all three games are officially part of what is known as the "Hoyoverse", with Star Rail being set in a parallel universe to that of HI3 and Genshin existing in a more distant "branch" of the same multiverse (as evidenced by one scene in HI3 briefly showing Stormterror, the boss of Genshin's prologue chapter). Furthermore, Star Rail features alternate versions of several members of the HI3 cast (along with at least one character from HI3 who crossed over to the Star Rail universe and therefore notices these similarities), implicitly suggesting that the lookalikes found in Genshin are likewise counterparts to the Honkai characters.
• Paper Mario: The Origami King: A lot of the game's sprites are slight modifications from Paper Mario: Color Splash. Some characters with more unique designs also get re-used here; for example, the chef at Tangerino Grill in Color Splash is identical to the chef at Overlook Tower in The Origami King. As none of these characters even have names, it's ambiguous as to whether they're meant to be the same or it's just a recycled design.
• Rhythm Heaven manages to do it in its own series by having mini-games in later games feature characters from previous games, as though it were a cast of characters performing different mini-games.
• Samurai Warriors 3 ended up being this for both Pokémon Conquest in general, and Toukiden in the case of Akechi Mitsuhide specifically.
• Skip Ltd. has Tao the dog. He's a dog with a black-and-white face, and he appears in various roles in Skip games — from the family pet in Chibi-Robo! to a lazy Big Eater in Captain Rainbow. He even has a cameo in the Skip-developed WiiWare game Snowpack Park as the first mask you find! He was based on a real dog owned by the company founder, but the real dog, sadly, died in 2009. (He lives on in games, though.)
• The Flicky birds in Sonic the Hedgehog are an odd example of this. The first few Genesis Sonic games borrowed spites of the titular character from the game Flicky, who was a mother bluebird. Nowadays, Flickies are a species of bird within Sonic that has a few different subspecies, one of which resembles the character Flicky. The other kinds of Flicky bird were introduced in Sonic 3D: Flickies' Island — a game in which Sonic spent his time rounding up Flicky birds in much the same way that the character Flicky did with her chicks.
• Square Enix:
  • Tetsuya Nomura reuses designs occasionally. Sora (from Kingdom Hearts), Lann (from World of Final Fantasy) and his version of Onion Knight (from Dissidia Final Fantasy) follow a similar template (Sora himself is a variation of Final Fantasy VII's Cloud but In the Style of Mickey Mouse). Axel (from Kingdom Hearts) is a variation on Reno from Final Fantasy VII, and Nomura has made it clear that he considers them equivalents of one another, although not literally the same character.
  • The earlier versions of Lightning from Final Fantasy XIII used the same face model that had been used for Cloud Strife in Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, but with slightly softer lines, more arched eyebrows and a rounder eye shape (to say nothing of the lipgloss and mascara). While this is intentional (Lightning was intended to resemble a gender-flipped Cloud), both characters diverge from this template in their later appearances, and the Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII Lightning and Final Fantasy VII Remake Cloud look somewhat more different.
  • For a more direct example, compare this concept art of Cloud Strife◊, to this one of Aya Brea (slightly NSFW◊).
• Game director Swery65 does this with the character of Forrest Kaysen, who always sports roughly the same general appearance and name in each game ^note a fat man with glasses, looking more like Wayne Knight in his first appearance and more like John Goodman in his second, but an entirely different personality and background in each.
  • He's a minor villain and Expy of Dennis Nedry in Spy Fiction (2003), a jolly sapling salesman and potential murder suspect in Deadly Premonition who later becomes a major participant in the investigation when main character York goes missing, and a full-on co-star in D4, as the steadfast ex-partner of main character David Young. The name actually first appears in Extermination on the PS2, where all the computer systems are from Forrest Electronics.
  • Other than Forrest Kaysen, there's General Douglas Lysander, a Vietnam vet who debuted in Spy Fiction as a Revolver Ocelot Expy, then appeared again in Deadly Premonition as a scrapyard owner with a secretive past — calling himself a general, but wearing a sergeant's stripes. Said past does not involve the events of the game at all, and turns out to be old war stories about "Crybaby Timothy", a bumbling sergeant the General hated, but who later saved Lysander's life at the cost of his own, which is why the General wears a sergeant's uniform in memory of him.
• Many of the characters in the Tales series end up looking very similar to each other between games, like Dhaos and Richard, Genis and Fulein, Rutee and Velvet, or Leon and Jude, to name a few.
• The Urbz: Sims in the City uses the exact same character model for all the district clubs' bouncers, even though they are quite obviously not meant to be the same person.

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