DaFool wrote:
You just gave me a brilliant idea. People often say that the characters by Aoi Nishimata and Tony Taka looked like they just had their faces copy-pasted and their hair colors changed. Why not just literally copy-paste faces and a few different body styles, then the only thing different will be the costumes. I think the character artist for Curse of Slate Rock Manor and The Stolen Diamond Ring was using that technique.
Those ones are actually a set of changeable sprites by a doujin group called
Blue Forest. (Site is potentially NSFW.) I was actually already going to mention that, since it seems appropriate for the topic. I think the sheer variety of options for those sprites means that people don't feel it's too repetitive, even after seeing them in different games. Now, if everyone used them, we'd probably have problems.
As for being all meta with the story, I'd like to see it woven into the main plot more if you're going to reuse the "actors" in such a way. Maybe you could break the fourth wall more often, or have a director interject in parts. Or it could be like Haruhi 0 where you see Itsuki in the background doubling as crew for a bit. In other words, I think it's a clever idea, but I want to feel like you're really building on the idea of actors more than the idea of reusing sprites for convenience (even if you are).