Montblanc - FFTA
Ivan - Golden Sun: Lost Age
Final Fantasy II - Maria
Riviera - Cierra
Eliwood, (Just sucks overall, without that glitched lance he sucks.) Wil, Lucius, Nino (eh... hell no, I am not going let Nino solo the entire map while others can make use out of it) - FE "Blazing Sword"

Holy crap, I forgot about him. Edward was such a pussy...he would run and hide during battle when his HP was low, leaving the other party members to their doom. You had to drag his ass back, only for him to run away again. It's a good thing you only had to have him for a short while, the kid mages were far stronger and braver than him.

It's actually sort of funny though, he can have pretty decent stats when actually leveled up, but it takes a LONG time to see results and in a normal game you never really would. In the GBA port though, since you can re-use these characters at the end of the game you can actually see he's fairly decent. He gets great speed to the say the least but most of his levels up til 60 or so seem to just be "filler" levels and his stats boosts don't start rolling in til very late. This has always been the case too, ever since the original release but it was impossible to see without some form of cheating.

Also kind of shitty though that from about 80~99 you can LOSE stats when leveling up in that game so nobody is as good as they could technically be. Never figured out what was up with that.

One of the most useless characters I can recall was Malak from Final Fantasy Tactics. He was the brother of Rafa, and one of the Heaven/Hell Knights. The pair is forced upon your party halfway through the game though neither one is especially worth anything in battle. Their "special" ability was horrible, as it was completely random and would often inflict damage on your own team as often as the enemy.

However, Malak is inherently worse than Rafa. Rafa had a naturally low Brave level, making her very good at the "Move/Find" skill; she was able to locate rare objects better than any character in the game if you spent some time Chickening her into a stronger coward.

Malak, however, wasn't nearly as useful for anything like that. He was just an inferior fighter on pretty much all accounts.

Plus, Malak looked like a total 'mo with that stupid haircut and white Jedi robe.

I totally agree, and I even used him in one play through. I just felt it necessary since I wanted to use Opera (I think that was her name) too. Also reminds me about one of the biggest disappointments in RPG history. Recruiting Dias only to find out that he's mediocre at best. Certainly not worthless, but good lord was he overshadowed by the physical juggernauts that are Claude and Ashton.

Dias is great if you use him right. His normal attack SUCKS ASS though, but by the end of the game you wouldn't really be relying on that anyway. Problem is, you have to control him in battle if you want him to be any good because the AI has no idea how to properly use him. Same for Bowman, cept Bowman is AWESOME when you use him, not just good -- and TERRIBLE when the AI takes control of him.

Which reminds me that SO2s AI is a piece of shit and 3's isn't much better. :(

I forgot how worthless Ernest was. The only reason I usually got him was because it took alot more effort to pair Opera with someone else for the ending if you didn't get him. Opera is the achille's heel of the last boss though so she's more then worth having.

Course offensive casters were also kind of useless near the end since they didn't have multiple hit attacks to break the damage cap. I still used them anyhow though just cause I always wanted to get decent use out of all 8 of the characters I selected.

That's exactly my issue with him. There's no real point in using him when Claude can just equip Eternal Sphere and start infinite chains by himself.

*her

Also, um what. Level her up enough and boost her HP and she has 50,000+ max HP. Coupled with the fact that she can heal the other gears in battle, she's indispensable in the final stages of the game. Goddess Robe + Chuchu Idol + Ether Doubler = Best. Oh and her ether is non-elemental, so she can take out any elemental enemies (read: many) easily.

The shwartz isn't strong with this one. Behold crap incarnate.

http://www.fantasyanime.com/shiningforce/sfpro46.gif

I have to change my vote. I think the most useless party member ever is Soren.

http://www.3audio.com/images/upload/artist/636.jpg

That fucker was just useless.

I'll whaterv'd any notion that Quina is a piece of shit. I meen, I can only imagine the board meeting for designing it and the game mechanics.

I imagine Squinix lost a few good men who, out of utter frustration, jumped out of the windows to escape the rampent stupidity that was going on there.

I think Jogurt was one of RPG's first legitimately bad characters. Literally nothing more than a hamster with a helmet, but so cool at the same time. Having him actually fight and win is something of an accomplishment, though.

When a character's major contribution to the plot is chasing animals, eating people, and speaking complete nonsense, you'd *think* they'd be awesome, but Quina... well... Quina's okay. Blue Mages are inherently useful for Mighty Guard and White Wind if nothing else, plus Quina fulfills the Final Fantasy requirement of at least one zany, oddball character per game.

I always found Zell and Selphie pretty useless. The only time Selphie came in use for me was fighting the Omega Weapons, where I'd try and let her get The End to end the fights. Zell, I don't think I had much use for him.

Sampson from Beyond the Beyond (well that whole game was useless...) but when he gets cursed as soon as you get him and stays cursed throughout the entire game... yeah. Worthless piece of shit.

I dunno, I kinda like Quina from 9. Definately not as cool as Freya or Vivi, but I always enjoyed having Quina in my party when I did. (Although that Eat/Cook/Digest/whatever skill sometimes could just go diaf.)

MODERN. MODERN Final Fantasy requirement of at least one zany oddball character.

I remember the days when that shit didn't happen.

You stupid kids and your rap music.

Except that I think 50% of the FFIX roster can be safely discarded as useless and unnecessary. Quina, Freya, Amarant and Eiko were relatively pointless in the grand scheme of the game. Eiko fulfilled the role of Summoner, which is obligatory in a sense, but plotwise, she was still superfluous. But having a summoner was never a crucial element of success in FFIX.
On the same note, at no point were Amarant, Freya or Quina necessary for anything; Steiner, Vivi, Garnet and Zidane could carry you through every single scenario.

Heh, I guess you're right (unless you count Gau as oddball, which he was, but not in a Jim Henson-esque muppet sort of way). This is a trait that seemed to start with Nomura doing the designs. My guess would be his early days as a monster designer constantly come back to haunt him and he just *has* to make a weird character or two to satiate his odd creative urges. Final Fantasy XIII is going to have a talking potato with wings for feet and a Napoleon hat, If not as a playable character, then certainly as a supporter. I'm calling it already.

Quina is a pokemon chracter in a world that has no pokemon.

"Ok guys, we need to reinvent the Blue Mage class, how do we do it?"
"By not implementing a stupid pokemon system and just doing it like we always had, that being that we simply have the monster attack the player with the spell?"
"What's that? Implement a stupid pokemon system? Have the blue mage be a complete jackass? Make geting spells so arbatary that by the end of it, players will want to eat thier controllers? Brilliant! PARTY HATS FOR ALL!"

Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure had a plethora of enemies you could have join your party. All of them worthless. There was no point and they where ridiculous.

Then again that game is pretty awful, so maybe that gives them an unfair disadvantage.

Kimari FFX, sure he was an important friend to Yuna and Auron, and sure in time you can get all the characters in the game to the same skill and stat level ( if you are a moron,)
but while playing through the story he's just a waste of hard earned AP, he can't hit a thing, slowest guy in Spira, crappy overdrive and when Auron enters the scene he becomes completely useless.

Carbunkle + mass casting on the whole party = dead bodies everywhere. Bouncing spells off the party effectively doubled the attack power of Vivi's magic. Once I figured this out my permanent party for the last leg of the game was Zidane, Vivi, Garnet, and Eiko.

Of course, the funny part was that it was actually Garnet filling the role of summoner. She got all the summons, while Eiko was the hardcore white mage. Naturally this doesn't make any damn sense, but nobody said FF9 was a particularly good entry in the series.

This thread is pretty much about how to competely break every game by exploiting the "useless" characters now, isn't it?

Awww... I liked it. But it was baaaaad...

And talking about useless stuff, If I remember well... when the monsters on you party were killed, they were royally erased from the game... with items included.

I think it's amazing how many games have characters that would be much less useful if not for exploits or extreme over-leveling. A bad character's best friend is an apathetic programmer.

I'm gonna add another one: Mogu from Breath of Fire. Let me preface: I love Mogu to death; best turban-wearing mole-guy in an RPG to date, but otherwise the least practical character in the game. Lowest HP stat by far, light armor, kinda slow; has pretty decent attack power, but it's out-shown by just about everyone else late game. Can't even merge with Karn. His one technique: Dig. Let's you escape from battles for no MP, but only works outdoors, so not very useful considering the game's myriad of dungeon crawls, plus Bleu learns a better version as spell.

The mole was alright. The party members on BoF is pretty balanced.

I hated the dog from BoFII :gonk: most useless party member, I started to use less and less of him... and his attaks, crowbow? ._.