Surprisingly Useless Characters

[FallenJellyDoughnut]

Final Fantasy (roman numeral colon the adjective) is your resource of useless characters that serve little to no purpose, ever.

Each title in the series has no less than two of them and sometimes as many as all of them.

Because when you only had the four warriors of light two of them were completely useless.

OT: Ashley Graham because with all the guns you have she could at least use one of them.

Yeah but she was a plot device, not actually useless, I think the OP meant Jar-Jar Binks type characters that don't advance the plot or contribute in any way.

 

[Erja_Perttu]

Final Fantasy (roman numeral colon the adjective) is your resource of useless characters that serve little to no purpose, ever.

Each title in the series has no less than two of them and sometimes as many as all of them.

In FFX I only saw Kimahri as really useless, until you got to the Omega Ruins and had the chance to make him learn the Nova Overdrive. That was massively overpowered. Rikku is actually extremely useful in bttle if you take some time out to level her up in the Moonflow and the Thunder Plains, after you leave Guadosalam. Plus, her Mix Overdrive is also stupidly overpowered, if you can get the Trio of 9999 Mix later on it's really invaluable against the later bosses, especially Braska's Final Aeon.

All the others are pretty much massively powerful in their respective fields. Wakka's great for the whole status effect thing, and great if you take time out to power up his Strength attribute. Auron and Tidus go without saying, once Lulu masters anything above second-level elemental spells you're guaranteed victory against element monsters like Flans, and Yuna can summon aeons so you're in a really good situation with her. Curaga's always useful, too ;D

Nah, if you're talking about FFX, they were all useless once you got Anima. Overpowered? Beats the second to last boss (read: last real boss) in the least amount of possible hits? Uh, yeah.

 

[Amnestic]

And there's none of that "If you get the celestial weapon" bullshit. Anima (I think) and Bahamut can break the 9999 limit without it. As can the Magus Sisters. But they're kinda annoying to use.

Bahamut, Yojimbo, Anima and Magus Sisters all have Break Damage Limit without needing a Celestial Weapon.

And Magus Sisters have the potential to be the highest damaging of them all thanks to one of the little bee one's attacks as I recall, which can do crazy damage - like as much as Anima's Overdrive or something stupid like that.

 

[gim73]

Dual classed characters in anything D&D related. You're way better playing an all or nothing, which is no prob for me because I'm always the fighter.

WOAH! Somebody obviously has never played baldurs gate 2 because Jahira is the best multi-class fighter/druid of all time.

And for pure dual classing fun, Icewind dale is the king of the pack because you can min-max all your characters for maximum carnage. I never stop importing/exporting on higher difficulties until I get a fighter/thief with 18/00 str and grand mastery in shortswords. He's my personal destruction reconnosance dude, stealthing into enemy territory and backstabbing for explosive damage. Yes, I pop the enemies with most of those attacks.

As far as useless characters go:

Shadow Hearts 1 and 2 have about half the cast as useless. Yuri is always good. The vampires are great. Alot of the other characters feel like a chore and do pathetic damage. Tarot girl? Puppet dude? Kid with slingshot who is kid of kouldelka? The dog is kinda fun, but doesn't provide much input as a character.

All the characters in SH: to the new world are useless. Once they kill off yuri the series was pretty much over but they continued anyway. It just never reaches the level of it's predesesors in any way.

Shall I mention that Cait Sith is a worthless turd that never should be used? Fanboys cry about Aerith dying but Cait Sith sacrifices one of his bodies and comes back, and people don't really care because nobody plays him anyways. Aerith is a decent healer and is useful to the plot somewhat. Yuffie is rather useless but you can still play with her. Vincent is fairly fun though entirely optional, plus he has his own game.

Now let's go pretty darn old school back to early ps1 games and pull out a game called Beyond the Beyond. This game is a complete worthless piece of horse dung, but I endured playing through part of it to finally get a big, strong looking fighter in my party who immediately is cursed and every time he tries to attack he takes damage and does crap to the enemy. It was bad enough that the entire game was bad to begin with, but cursing the one guy that might make it worth playing is unforgivable.

Now I'm gonna touch on breath of fire as a series. In the first few games you get a character who can morph into a dragon and a girl named nina who can turn into a bird for fast travel. Pretty good concept. 3 had some weird stones that changed what type of dragon-human hybrid you were gonna turn into, which wasn't bad either, and 4 was decent as well but we were straying too far from the original concept that made it great. Then breath of fire V came out and ruined the franchise with a lame random dungeon system and your main character is completely useless. It just stopped being fun.

Most characters in ff games are not surprisingly useless, they are as useless as they look. Take Realm from FF6 for example. A little girl with a brush as a weapon who paints the enemy. Her underwhelming special and lame character puts her in the 'useless' group. Let's keep going with six. Gau can seem like a powerful character because he can take the aspects of beasts, but ultimately he is beserk and uncontrolable, which is pretty lame. Mog has the same deal where he does his dance but you don't really have control of him. The Mime character is a weak watered down version of your other characters, so why would you bother playing with him? Your Yeti Umaro might be good except he is another beserk wasted character with a lame special. These characters also suffer from weak character as well. Celes has a pretty weak special that I only use one place in the game but I use her way more because she has a good story and is well balanced. Other characters are overpowered with great specials, and we call those the figaro brothers.

Let's move on to FF9. Amarant looks cool but he's rather useless. Freya is another weak character that you don't need to use. I'm not gonna mention the cook, because you shouldn't be fighting with cooks in your party anyways (looking at you Suikoden!). And why did they feel the need to divide the summons between TWO characters? Making one a little girl is too lame for words.

Moving down to FF8 we see a gunman who is rather useless. On first glance you might think that your teacher is the most useless, but her overlimit is so broken it makes alot of things in the game trivial. Hell, the idea that you can cancel out with lower health until you hit your limit is rather broken in and of itself.

FF4 is perfect. Your final party is solid gold. Anybody who was worthless and weak was left back on earth either broken, dead or stoned. Spoony bards included.

FF12 has Vaan and Vanille holding it back. The game really meant to have Basch as the main character and threw in the street kids because they couldn't have all cool characters. I mean if we didn't have some normal kids thrown into a revolution without a clue about what is going on it wouldn't be star wars...

 

[Alakaizer]

Final Fantasy (roman numeral colon the adjective) is your resource of useless characters that serve little to no purpose, ever.

Each title in the series has no less than two of them and sometimes as many as all of them.

Because when you only had the four warriors of light two of them were completely useless.

OT: Ashley Graham because with all the guns you have she could at least use one of them.

Yeah but she was a plot device, not actually useless, I think the OP meant Jar-Jar Binks type characters that don't advance the plot or contribute in any way.

No, I meant something like Vader joins Luke at the end of Empire, instead of slicing off the hand, but once he gets into battle, turns out his Force growth was stunted and Luke easily surpasses him in nanoseconds. That's what I mean by the surprisingly bad character. Binks was comic relief, ergo, unsurprisingly shit.

We all know about the characters who, at first glance, appear to be shit walking around like people. That's not really what this thread was about. It was about the awe-inspiring, fear-commanding, pants-tighteningly awesome characters who, once they turn good/become playable, reveal their true shittiness.

 

[Iron Lightning]

I'd say Geno in Super Mario RPG was kinda bad, he did pretty good dps with his stronger moves, but he is quite frail. This wouldn't really be a problem, but because his high dps attracted aggro he fell down quite a lot. Another fairly underpowered character in that game is Mario, I remember quite wanting to replace him with a different party member.

Then again I wouldn't exactly call either of those characters useless, Super Mario RPG is a pretty well balanced game.

Mallow was useless. Geno was a glass canon, Bowser was the requisite heavy hitter and peach was the healer. Mario was just an all-around average guy. Mario, peach and either geno or bowser made for some of the best parties really since Geno and Bowser were pretty much interchangeable, bowser had high physical attack and defense while geno went down with a few hits but did ridiculous damage with his specials.

Sir, please keep in mind that this thread is about surprisingly useless characters, and I think that no one was surprised to find how useless Mallow is. In addition, I meant to say that I would rather have Bowser or Geno in my party than Mario, if I was given the option. I'm not really all that big on glass cannons, which is why I do not find Geno to be as useful as Peach or Bowser. That said, Super Mario RPG is quite well balanced and really has no surprisingly useless characters although it does have surprisingly underpowered ones.

 

[SniperMacFox]

I'm a bit unsure whether or not these are surprisingly useless characters, but any final boss in a beat 'em up game. When you fight them, they're usually the one that gives you the most grief with their power moves and insta-kill special powers.

But as soon as you unlock said characters, you find that these moves are so complicated to press and the computer manages to counter them so fast, it's pointless playing as them.

I'm mainly looking at Tekken here, staring intently at Ogre from Tekken 3.

 

[Fallen-Angel Risen-Demon]

Snow in Final Fantasy XIII. He looked like Basch from XII and Auron, event spouting crap about being the hero. Then out of no where Hope ends up a bad ass (I hated him so much and wanted to drown him in his own blubbering tears) and I never bother using Snow again.

when i had the choice I always had snow as leader 'cus he has the highest helth the way I specd him and his strength was pretty high so i got hope to do all the magic stuff and altenated between the girl (can't remember name but not lightning or fang) and the other guy to buff and debuf.

OT: i find jin of tekken is underpowerd for my fighting style that is.

 

[sougo13]

Because once you get bahamut every character in FFX is useless.

And once you Get Anima, Bahamut is useless (although double casting Ultima with Yuna is a very legitimate strategy).

OT: companions in Morrowind/Oblivion/Fallout 3, they either just get in your way, kill everything for you and cause you to get less experience, or ruin your attempts at stealth.

Also, most RPG main characters, if you think about it, most of the bad things that happen stem from their mistakes or interference and they spend most (if not all) of the game fixing what is essentially partly their fault. I suppose it makes for easy story progression.

And once you get Yojimbo, nothing else matter. 'Oh sorry Dark Bahamut, did you just do 9999 damage to me, k' Yojimbo, here's 200,000 gil. Cut that sh*t down.'

Also Selphie from FFVIII is pretty useless. I know her limit break are suppose to be good but I'm not going to cycle through magic while monsters are chopping me to pieces.

 

[Tallim]

I don't really understand how "all" of the characters in a game could be useless, since you're bound to end up playing as some of them if you play the game at all. This smacks of mindless anti-fandom, which I suppose is a step up from mindless fandom.


Still, one example I can think of off the top of my head is Fran in Final Fantasy XII. She's presented as this powerful but mysterious woman, spouting cryptic nonsense about Mist and The Wood and whatnot, but she's actually quite weak. There's never any reason to use her in battle, except in situation where everyone else is dead.

Actually all the characters in XII were pretty much interchangeable unless you were really trying to fully optimize your party. But most gamers wouldn't even notice.

Fran was a fun character but what made her annoying is that she is the *worst* character in the game at using bows, suposedley her default weapons. She actually had a handicapped active time bar when using a bow which made her much slower using one than the other characters.
She is however a monster with a Katana.

 

[DarkPanda XIII]

Final Fantasy (roman numeral colon the adjective) is your resource of useless characters that serve little to no purpose, ever.

Each title in the series has no less than two of them and sometimes as many as all of them.

In FFX I only saw Kimahri as really useless, until you got to the Omega Ruins and had the chance to make him learn the Nova Overdrive. That was massively overpowered. Rikku is actually extremely useful in bttle if you take some time out to level her up in the Moonflow and the Thunder Plains, after you leave Guadosalam. Plus, her Mix Overdrive is also stupidly overpowered, if you can get the Trio of 9999 Mix later on it's really invaluable against the later bosses, especially Braska's Final Aeon.

All the others are pretty much massively powerful in their respective fields. Wakka's great for the whole status effect thing, and great if you take time out to power up his Strength attribute. Auron and Tidus go without saying, once Lulu masters anything above second-level elemental spells you're guaranteed victory against element monsters like Flans, and Yuna can summon aeons so you're in a really good situation with her. Curaga's always useful, too ;D

lol, Yep, that's how I felt, so it was starting to annoy me when I found out I had to use Kimahri by himself that one major time, and never really used him again.

FFXII: Really, just really, I know people like saying that they wouldn't spend the time to building all six and just focus on three, but I know well enough to know that I'll never be able to protect my butt long enough for the three to survive, so thus, I level them all up enough....sadly I got to 72 with all of them (though I haven't actually faced....the hell is his name, Yiamat?)

 

[Daipire]

Drak was pretty useless.

And now it's the ladder guy who's useless

 

[sougo13]

FFXII: Really, just really, I know people like saying that they wouldn't spend the time to building all six and just focus on three, but I know well enough to know that I'll never be able to protect my butt long enough for the three to survive, so thus, I level them all up enough....sadly I got to 72 with all of them (though I haven't actually faced....the hell is his name, Yiamat?)

Actually, Yiamat was pretty easy. I made it so that all my characters buff the hell out of Vann, restore their HP/MP when they're low and went to sleep. 30 mins later, dead Yiamat.

I'm not kidding.

 

[SonOfIkaros]

I'd throw Zevram in there from DA:O. Maybe others had some use for him, but I never used him once in the entire play through.

I played a rogue myself so I had no use for him at all. Didn't even use him a single time. At least Leliana (spelling?) could take some damage, and she was decent with a bow, so she was still to some use. But I suppose Zevran could be useful if you have no other rogue on your team.

He isn't really a very good rogue though, I easily surpassed him with my own character. And it's weird, 'cause he's trained with some of the deadliest assassins in the world and all that. So yeah, a surprisingly useless character; a deadly master assassin who isn't really very deadly.

 

[Hawkeye16]

Surprising usesless eh? Well how bout this: There the most elite fighting force in the galaxy. The've probably got years of combat experience. They have high-tech powered armor and weapons. AND THERE STILL UTTERLY USELESS. See if you can figure out what I mean.












Stormtroopers.



Also Big Pete.

 

[Ultress]

Naoto of P4: She looks useful with her high level physicals,death/light magic and almighty damage then you realize that her magic is easily depleted and her insta kill magic doesn't always hit(Never on Bosses).Physical attacks while having the advantage of working on bosses aren't as effective(unless your Chie) on the bosses as say the elements. AS some one said before: She's a queen of Random battles and that's about it.

I agree completely, it just sucks that Naoto is the last person you get and she's just crap. I always used MC, Ted, and Yosuke. Or when I got bored, I switched Yosuke off for Kanji, and I switched Ted off for Yukiko.

I hardly ever used Teddie not because he was useless but because of that annoying squeaking sound he made when he walked.I just used Yuki as my healer and covered Ice magic myself.