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I've been wondering this for a while, but never really had an answer thought up for this...
How do you know if the ideas you've thought up aren't taken yet? Is there a way to check? I find that some of the ideas I innovate tend to already have been taken by some other writer/artist. When that happens, I have to restart my whole story plotting/concept from scratch again. :/

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There's nothing new under the sun.

Whatever you come up with, someone has thought of something similar at some point. Restarting from scratch is a waste of time, you'll just run into the same problem again eventually if you look hard enough. Most of the time, however, even if the underlying idea is similar, the specifics of the games will come out very differently. (For instance, the guy who wrote Academagia talked to me during development and discovered that I was also writing a wizard school sim... but 'Academagia' and 'Magical Diary' are very different games.)

It can be a problem if your idea is *too* similar to someone else's idea, but that doesn't often happen by accident, and if it does, usually a few tweaks are enough to push your idea off in its own direction.

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Well, many ideas are obvius.
If I make a story of a girl falling in love with a guy way above her, then make some stuff happen (including a heartbroken best friend and a guy who will be shortly her boyfriend simply because he can) and in the end they will be a couple.

I don't even want to count how many games, mangas, movies, novels and whatmore excists with this very plotline.

To create something totally new is very hard, since everything must have been used already at least once. But some aren't that overused.
When I once made a manga about two rangers in Africa, people told me they never saw a manga about this very setting.
So it helps just thinking yourself "Have I ever seen something exactly like that?"
Somehow simliar to someything, sure, will be almost impossible to avoid. But it is a difference if you watch Matrix and make a game about a guy saving the world from robots by diving into a simulation while the real world people start a war OR if something like the anime "Paprika" or the movie "Inception" comes out from such input. They are simliar, but not identical. And that is what makes it interesting.

I also think, stuff that has never been used can have the opposite effect and make people avoid it.
They don't lmow whats going on, can't relate to the happenings and (depending on the theme) are maybe even grossed out by what happens or at least totally shocked and irritated.

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True. Nothing is original anymore. Earth have more than 6.000.000.000 people in it, even more if you count the people from past. So anything you think of, someone else have probably think about it (and make game/anime/manga/comic out of it).

But what's important is not originality of idea. But rather the execution and the whole things. If you take a look carefully, most of popular products aren't that original. Some even doesn't have anything original at all... but it still sells.

Gears of Wars, for example. Or Halo. They did nothing original. But they refined their own genre of FPS and people love them. Final Fantasy is another example.

For manga, Hikaru no Go and Kurogane share some similarities. Both features ghost from the past that can't just let go of their dream, so they're haunting the present, possessing a boy to achieve their goal. The difference is Hikaru no Go is about go while Kuragane is about kendo.

So don't be afraid to finish your game even if there are already plenty out there that share similar idea. Plagiarism on the other hand... is bad.

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I just find it offensive at times when people say "Oh, your story reminds me of _______________".
I'm exaggerating about the starting from scratch part because I usually end up combining my other ideas with the current one or taking out a few pieces. This never satisfies me though, because it seems like I'm copying someone else's work although some portions of it may be different. It also indicates that I'm not original enough to create my own ideas, leading me to think I'm only capable of borrowing, combining, and tweaking other people's work.
But after reading your guys' post... I see why people don't make such a big deal out of similar concepts between stories even when the specifics are very different from each other.

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People drawing connections between things isn't necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it's a part of our nature, it's how we understand things that are new or unusual. It's the reason why stereotypes and tropes exist. Our brains are hardwired to interconnect concepts so that we have points of reference, otherwise we would wander around being confused every time we ran into something we didn't recognise.

Your mistake is presuming it is possible to be original when it is impossible. However there is a difference between similar concepts and something you know is pretty generically copied and that difference is experience. People who have only experienced limited amounts of something and only like certain things are far more likely to come across as copying because they are drawing from such a small pool of references. The people who have only ever read Bleach and Naruto, their manga ideas ARE going to sound similar because they don't have enough exposure to other stories and ideas. The best way to be 'original' is to simply make your pool of references as large as possible, so that when you pull different concepts out of your mind you are drawing from many, many places and you know of many different ways of doing the same thing.

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I know this article has gone around a lot, but I think it's pretty relevent:
how to steal like an artist

If you look at a list of the best stories, there's almost always one thing in common: they are almost completely unoriginal. Almost all of Disney's "classic" movies are based on an existing story. Avatar is almost a complete rip-off of Dances with Wolves. Star Wars is just a generic fantasy set in space.

The difference between those stories and other, mediocre ones are in the execution. It also helps that all of the creators had a passion for the story that they wanted to tell, and had to work their butts off to even start the process of creating it.

Although, I'll say that "remixing" your previous stories isn't bad if you aren't satisfied with them. There's a story that's been in my head for the past 4 years or so and I swear it goes through a new iteration every 3 months. Now I just have to work on actually bringing the story out of my head. Unfortunately, that's the hardest part

Star Wars is also a prime example of "The Hero's Journey" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monomyth) a story structure that has existed since...pretty much forever. Some people use the structure on purpose, but many just fall into using it because it is kind of part of us as a culture (or the collective unconscious).

Other examples that use a Hero's Journey structure, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, The Matrix, Avatar: The Last Airbender, even Happy Gilmore (and a ton more!). Some people even call the story of Jesus Christ in the Bible to be one version of The Hero's Journey. There is a reason we tell the same stories over and over again, they are the one's that move us as people. Nothing wrong with that. Just make sure your characters make it authentic and the details are your own and it will be original...enough.

Sorry if that got a little academic, I love this subject matter.

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It depends on what you mean by "ideas".

If you mean "premise", then you can make your story different by picking a different theme, or a different tone. Swiss Family Robinson, Lord of the Flies, Gilligan's Island, and Lost * are all about groups of people trapped on an island, but there's no way you'd confuse them.

Even if you've got the same theme and tone, you can get very different results just by playing with the characters. Stop me if you've heard this one: A teen gets supernatural powers and has to balance saving the world with school and his/her personal life. Am I talking about Sailor Moon? Buffy Summers? Kim Possible? Maybe a young Spider-Man? All of them have the same basic premise, and a very similar theme and tone. But the casts are very different, which makes them very different stories.

* And my current project as well, which is why that list came to mind.

Sometimes similarities are a feature. In one of my current projects, Slumberland, we see a guy searching for his father, who disappeared when his son was a child. This guy discovered that his father seems to have left some clues behind... some things that only his son would notice, and some things that only his son would know how to deal with. When this guy talks about this to a friend, this friend tells him the story of king Uther Pendragon and his son Arthur... and then the story of greek hero Theseus and his father Aegeus. All these stories are basically the same, but they have their own meaning. And it doesn't matter who wrote the story for the first time.

In my opinion, it's not the idea but the execution that's important.

I say don't go looking for similar ideas; because then you'll be spending forever trying to create something truely unique. Just do what comes naturally, because sometimes even the cliche can be a fun time.

It's the little things that set us apart.

This is very good advice. The more you consume influences, the better chance you have of putting something out that will seem more original. (Remember, true originality is impossible!) People will still draw comparisons... in fact, people like drawing comparisons. I just recommended a movie in another thread in terms of what I found it similar to. Now anybody who is a fan of the compared works might have a better idea if they will enjoy the new work.

By the way, if you have fully developed characters, even if you end up with the same premise as another work and a similar message, the results can still be radically different. The setting can be different, and so can the way the characters interact and function in their world. Even your personal style of writing can make it different.

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"It is [the writer's] privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart,
by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride
and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past."
— William Faulkner