Games with 100+ characters

[Kuiper]

The only games I can think of that have close to that many characters are the Fire Emblem games. I believe that Fire Emblem 10 (Radiant Dawn) is the biggest of them, as it's a sequel that basically expanded the cast of the game preceding it; Fire Emblem 10 sports 72 playable characters, 42 of which are returning characters from Fire Emblem 9 (Path of Radiance). Fire Emblem 10 is divided into four acts and 45 chapters long.

It's probably worth noting that for most Fire Emblem games, manyof the named characters are villains who appear as a boss character for exactly one level (they get introduced at the start of the chapter and then killed at the end of the chapter), delivering only a few lines of dialog in the short time that they appear on screen. Also, the large cast of characters is naturally supported by the type of game that Fire Emblem is: it's a game about war, where you'll dump as many as 12 characters onto the battlefield at once, and your army has to be quite a big bigger than that as certain maps are specifically designed to hinder certain types of units. (For example, you're discouraged from using horseback characters on maps with lots of sand, flying units are weaker on indoor maps, and so on, so you'll probably consistently use 15+ characters even if you can only deploy 12 of them at a time.) So you're raising an army of units, which you'll often segment into smaller squads organically as a part of gameplay, and one of the reasons that Fire Emblem 10 is so large is that you're waging multiple campaigns across the land with different armies.

I think one of the main reasons that Fire Emblem gets away with having such a vast cast is that all of the characters have unique gameplay distinctions based on their class, stats, and so on. When I think about a lot of Fire Emblem characters, a lot of them aren't very memorable in terms of story impact. I can't exactly tell you what role Gerrik had in the story of Fire Emblem 7, but I can tell you that he was a mercenary who could promote into a hero or a ranger, and that he had great starting stats and great growths that caused me to use him a lot, so I remember his name and his sprite and some vague things about him like the fact that he had a scar on his face that he got when he was a young mercenary. But...I can't really give you any significant biographical details about him. (I don't even remember what region of the continent he's from.) That's true about a lot of Fire Emblem characters, and in a lot of cases the character's class reveals all of the biographical information I can recall about them. Natasha is a cleric, and Moulder is a monk, but I remember that because they used staves to heal people, not because I recall ever meeting them in a church or monastery. The game's support system also does a good job of coding character relations into gameplay.

The class system naturally separates most Fire Emblem characters into distinct archetypes, so it's easy for me to remember that all of the Pegasus riders in Fire Emblem 7 are sisters, for example. Sorting characters into "archetypes" like this helps somewhat with distinction, because when it comes to distinguishing features, it's really only necessary for each of the cavaliers to be distinct from each other, rather than the entire cast of dozens of characters, because there's no way that I'd get the armor-clad cavaliers mixed up with the robe-wearing mages or hooded thieves/assassins. In fact, if you group the Fire Emblem characters like this, you'll see that the game goes out of its way to make sure that if the game has multiple characters of the same class, they'll all have differently styled or differently styled hair, or differently-shaped faces, which is how you wind up with a lot of characters sporting green, purple, or blue hair. The game is also very liberal about color coding hair to signal relations; the sister/brother leads in Fire Emblem 8 both have blue hair, the cavalier brothers both have blond hair, Joshua and his mother both have red hair, the pegasus sisters in Fire Emblem 7 have similar (yet distinct) shades of violet/indigo hair, and so on.

In a way, the character designs (which include the animated combat sprites as well as the character portraits that deliver the dialog) are one of the most distinctive things about Fire Emblem's characters; I know this partly because when I started playing Fire Emblem with combat animations turned off, the characters became a lot less memorable. I don't really remember what Guy's personality was like, but I do remember the way he would fly all over the screen when delivering a critical hit. The game's aesthetic gave the characters a certain amount of personality that in a way was more enduring than a lot of the dialog.

Looking at everything I've said about Fire Emblem, I don't know how you replicate any of that in the context of a visual novel.

[RotGtIE]

Looking at everything I've said about Fire Emblem, I don't know how you replicate any of that in the context of a visual novel.

It occurs to me that there are a few manga/anime series which have massive character lists if you count all of the extremely minor characters who barely get any screen time but still play a part in every chapter. Upotte and Girls und Panzer are examples of this - the tank crews of the latter participate in every battle, though most of them are minor characters who only appear to fill bodies during scenes that include the whole club during their downtime or in the midst of battle. It's even more extreme in Upotte, where almost every variant of every weapon gets its own personification, most notably the AK family, but they all only show up for very brief skits before they're completely forgotten.

However, this starts to venture into the realm of what "counts" as a character in a story. Including extras and minor characters makes for one hell of a fine print under the headline of "100 characters."

[FriendlySenpai]

1. Let's say 5% are main characters, 15% are bad guys, 40% are characters who could be anywhere in between somewhat important to very important, 40% are fire fodder used to develop other characters, both good and bad. (To clarify how the characters would contribute to the story, the story would revolve around all 100+ characters trying to not die, so the contribution would be how the characters life or death effect other characters.)

That's still a ton of writing. Like... Just imagine how many lines of dialogue you'll have to write, how many backstories you'll need to come up with, the different deaths, how their deaths impact the story, and so on.
You're essentially trying to write, like, a hundred different variations of the same story.
It's like if Battle Royale was a choose-your-own-adventure novel.
Even if they're not all important characters, do you really think you can manage that much work without burning yourself out or recycling concepts?

2. What if there were multipule routes that focused on different lesser characters without excluding the main characters involvement from the route.

This is something I can get behind, if only because it's kind of a unique take.
However, I would suggest not making these into entire routes.
The main character is the main character for a reason, and the story would bet way too convoluted if you started sharing the limelight with too many people.
Maybe just limit it to bonus scenes from the side characters' perspectives?

3. What if the characters could be saved by the player character and characters lived or died based on who you choose to save or not save. Ultimatly 30% of all characters (give or take 10% or so) would have to survive, but the characters that survive would be diffrent in each route and/or playthrough. Example: You chose to Steve in your 1st playthrough thus he's one of the 30% who survived, but in your 2nd playthrough you chose not to save Steve thus he's one of the 70% that died in that playthrough. (The choices would be more complex than just save or don't save Steve. It would be more like, "Should I sacrifice characterA and characterB for the slim chance of saving characterC.")

Just the idea of trying to program all of that is making me want to blow my brains out.
As daunting of a task that is just as a writer, converting all of that into code would be miserable.