I agree with the last posts of
@WisperG, honestly there are too much similarities between the TN's character and Honoka fron Long Live for being coincidences: same sound of the name, a very close hairstyle, a similar main schoolgirl outfit, and even the same iconic pose for both of them.
I don't doubt that the characters make use of generic elements for the Japanese fictions and sometimes even used in different context (as the pose for DoA's Honoka used even for squeezing the breast as typical cliche of ecchi works), but it's very unlinkely that was a coincidence to put together all these. More has to be considered that Honoka from Long Live is the main character (and not a comprimary) of a very popular series in Japan, something that could make sense to use as inspiration for the key character of Last Round's launch (just for increasing the popularity of both the new fighter and the title in a strategical time before the release).
Then of course I'm not saying, and neither I saw do it from other users, that the 2 characters are the same owning the equal personality or appearence: the same fact that not everyone agree on it for absurd could be considered an evidence of it so that, even if one was inspired to the other, this is again not enough for assuming that one is the copy of the other. After all something similar could have already happened:
@David Gregg said that beween the panorama of all the gothic loli in the JPN works, he noticed various peculiar similarities to Marie Rose with Ekaterine Kurae character from "Seikon no Qwasar". And of course, considering the high popularity of Serah from the "FF XIII" series (maybe even more than the main character Lightning) I don't discard that, reference or less in the DoA' storyline of an half sister bond with Ayane, TN could have been inspired even from the Square Enix character to give a such pink hairstyle to Honoka (just as Tyaren or other are saying).
PS: I know that the circumstances are different being both of them charas related to TN, by the way even for Raidou I always seen his cyborg version has an answer to the people asking not only for the DoA1 Boss, but even for Yaiba's inclusion in the roster of DoA (the cyborg parts of both the ninja characters are very close in the placement).
If that someone at Team Ninja was actually inspired by Love Life's Honoka, why would he give the DOA version the exact same name as well? It makes absolutely no sense at all, to literally spell out for everyone, that DOA's Honoka is just a knock off. XD A high profile publisher would never be that stupid and take that risk. (Koei Tecmo is right now already dragged into a lawsuit for copyright and patent infringement by Capcom...) I'd go even further:
Because DOA's version is also named Honoka, we can be sure, it is just a coincidence.
I suppose that what you say is right, I don't know the laws for the copyright infringement (so the extents for something being considered plagiarism or less), but I think that to use the same name could be considered outside (so a breaking) of them. Anyway the mistake is that you are seeing the matter from a Western perspective, where the names that reach us are the romanized version based on the speaking sound in the native language. Actually the two Honoka have two different names with the DoA's character getting the own written in Hiragana (ほのか) and the Long Live's one in Kanji (穂乃果).
So not only the two names are actually different ones, but this resemblance between the two characters through a such pun, the association of two different things through the same sound for indicating them, is perfectly in line with what the Japanese love to do continually in their works (often, but not only, for creating comical reliefs that of course are lost during the translation in foreign languages).
