Every other analysis article on this site ends with "we measured it, and here's the conclusion." That's partly selection bias — we only wrote up the questions that produced a usable answer. This one goes the other way: three things we actually measured that did not produce an answer worth turning into a tip. One was a bug, one showed no real difference, and one we still can't explain.
1. Does the same franchise ever score low?
Question — sequels and spin-offs should obviously score high in similarity to each other. We wondered if there were exceptions.
Measured — pulled every same-franchise pair scoring below 0.60 in similarity. Seven turned up.
All seven were false positives from the franchise-matching logic, not a real content finding.
Two separate causes:
- A length-based prefix match — two titles were flagged as the same franchise if their romanized names shared the first 8+ characters. Common Japanese title openers like "kimi no " or "boku no " happen to be exactly 8 characters, which wrongly merged "Kimi no Na wa (sequel-sounding titles)" with "Kimi no Suizou wo Tabetai," and "Boku no Hero Academia" with "Boku no Kokoro no Yabai Yatsu." Fixed by requiring a word-boundary match covering at least 60% of the shorter title.
- A limit in the subtitle-stripping logic — stripping subtitles reduced both "Kaguya-hime no Monogatari" and "Kaguya-sama wa Kokurasetai" down to the same base string, "kaguya," treating two unrelated titles as one franchise; same issue with "Mononoke" being a prefix of "Mononoke Hime." This one was left unfixed — there's no string rule that can tell the two apart, and the failure mode (wrongly excluding two unrelated titles from each other) is safer than the opposite one (wrongly merging a real sequel pair).
The real answer to the original question turned out to be the unremarkable "same franchise is always close, no exceptions" — and the actual output of this investigation was a bug fix, not content.
2. Does media type affect difficulty?
Question — the intuition that a compressed feature-length plot makes movies harder to place than TV series.
Measured — nearest-neighbor similarity (isolation) by media type: TV, Movie, OVA, ONA, Special.
| Media type | Median isolation |
|---|---|
| Movie | 0.738 |
| TV | 0.731 |
Measured 2026-08-05, against the 800-title / 3,110-entry pool at the time.
No real differentiation. The "movies are harder" intuition doesn't hold up in this data.
A 0.007 gap is well within the range explainable by other factors in the sample, not media type. Not a difference worth turning into a gameplay tip, so it didn't become one.
3. Do lead characters score closer to their own show than supporting ones?
Question — a lead character carries the plot directly, so typing a lead should be a stronger clue than typing a supporting character.
Measured — similarity between each character and its own show, split by role.
| Role | Median similarity to own show |
|---|---|
| Supporting | 0.921 |
| Main | 0.861 |
Measured 2026-08-05, against the 800-title / 3,110-entry pool at the time.
The opposite of what we expected. We went looking for a cause.
In how character records are built, every character belonging to the same show shares identical title, series name, tags, and synopsis text — only the name differs. So this gap may be an artifact of the name string itself, not an actual difference in character content.
But simple checks — name length, punctuation ratio — don't explain the gap either. The actual cause is unconfirmed. Publishing "type a supporting character" as a tip without knowing the cause would mean selling a possible pipeline artifact as fact. So this result did not become a gameplay tip.
4. Why this article exists
Every other analysis piece here also started from measurement, but only the ones that produced a clean "do this, it helps" conclusion got written up. Publishing only those risks making it look like measuring anything on this site always yields a tidy answer. In reality, the same process produced at least three dead ends — one of them was literally a bug, and one we still can't fully explain. Leaving that visible, instead of quietly dropping it, is the point: not every number is content just because it was measured.
Further reading
The findings that did become articles are in Ratings Are Not a Clue, When to Guess a Character, and Which Genres Are Hardest. The main strategy guide has the similarity band reference table and a full walkthrough, and each day's answer accumulates in the past answers archive.