Most pointless Final Fantasy character

[Cat Rage Room]

Umaro is literally the most useless FF character in all of the modern frandchise.

Prove me wrong.

 

[trash panda]

quina

and possibly salamander

Quina has some really awesome blue magic. I ALWAYS use Quina.


Irvine is the most pointless character because HE MISSED THE SHOT and there's really no point for him to stick around after that. Also, his limit break sucks and it doesn't spare him from falling into the pointless character category.

 

[LicoriceAllsorts]

He is useful for slash fic though.

 

[Strangelove]

i have changed my mind on quina, since she helps vivi's story

but salamander, forget you, you mop-headed goon

 

[Clement Rage]

Penelo is the commoner perspective, one that's not blinded by revenge like Vaan. She's lost all her family to the war, but still keeps her head, working for her keep and trying to stay alive without wasting time with stupid stuff like killing rats. And she's a pretty good mage, without Fran's annoying habit of dropping dead at inconvenient moments.

Irvine didn't miss his shot, the barrier was in the way.

As I've said before, the cast is the primary reason that FF7 gets the edge over FF9 for me. love all of FF7's cast (when considering Cait Sith to be Reeve) and find they all have an important role to play.

Hmm... I actually found the reverse to be true, FF7 is structured very much as 'alright, this is Barret's dedicated mission for character development, now back to the plot.' In 9, every character has something to do interwoven naturally with the plot, Vivi, Garnet, Freya and Steiner's plots are intertwined into Brahne's actions for natural reasons, and the ATEs gave them stuff to do all the way to Bran Bal. They get dedicated scenes in Memoria, not just two lines of conversation and 'here's an item'.

The rest of Amarant's plot was cut, I think.

 

[Super Mario]

Why did they cut Amarant's plot out? He looks kinda cool but from what I see on these posts, he falls flat at the end of the game or something?

 

[Cat Rage Room]

Also, his limit break sucks and it doesn't spare him from falling into the pointless character category.

Irvine is 2nd behind Zell for having the highest potential damage per second in the game by far.

 

[Lex]

I think we should take battle usage into consideration as well, seeing as "killing bad guys" is kinda the point of all Final Fantasy characters. Quina is the most powerful character in Final Fantasy IX, and there's really not much room for debate.

S/he can learn Limit Glove and do 9999 damage per hit before you get to Gizamaluke's Grotto on disc one. That's enough to kill half of the game's bosses instantly, and it costs only 10 MP. Later on, she learns Auto-Life, which is an easy way to get her to have the 1 HP she needs for Limit Glove, making her virtually invincible. You can also power up Frog Drop to do the same amount of damage without having to keep Quina on 1 HP if that makes you nervous.

Other characters have guaranteed 9999 abilities too (Thievery, Dragon's Crest), but they take considerable time and effort to power up. Limit Glove is instant power.

Quina also gets the Needle Fork early in the game, which can petrify enemies and therefore end battles very quickly. It's invaluable in both level 1 games and speed runs (or a combination of the two, the Excalibur II Perfect Game challenge).

Have I told you lately that I love you? <3

I am no longer on the Quina is useless train, Quina is awesome .

I will agree to Amarant being pretty useless after a certain point. If I had to pick one character from FFVII it would be...............ugh this is so hard. For characters that are super central to the plot? Probably Red XIII beyond Cosmo Canyon maybe? Or Yuffie.

In fact all of the characters in FFVII kind of have their own episodic personal drama parts, which is something I love about the game. Red has Cosmo, Barret has Corel, Yuffie has Wutai, Cid has the Rocket and Space thing, Cait has (at a stretch) the Gold Saucer visit prior to Temple of the Ancients and plays a central role as Reeve during disc 2, through Vincent we find out how Sephiroth was born and what kind of guy Hojo really is, Cloud has the whole game (really though he does), Tifa has all her plot moments with Cloud, Aerith is central to the Holy materia/ Cetra story.

Really the only characters you can chop out without missing much are the optional characters, and I feel like Vincent beats Yuffie in relevance to the main plot due to Lucrecia and the Hojo relationship etc. Yuffie is just kind of there to knock everyone's materia (although we do get background on the Wutai/Shinra war... is it really all that valuable though?).

 

[Flintlock]

<3

This topic has really stirred some opinions, so I'll make a front page post about it soon, probably tomorrow. And it's going to be fun to discuss it on a podcast

 

[Strangelove]

yuffie is (possibly by nature of being an optional character) a good example of a character you could take out without there being anything seriously missing from the game. what you learn from her subquest is basically that shinra are jerks and wutai isn't great now. the state of wutai isn't a major aspect of the story (nor would it require yuffie to tell) and shinra's jerkness isn't something new to the player at that point, having being through both corel and gongaga iirc by then.


i would say that the cast of type-0 is the size it is (14 playable characters) mainly to have different play styles available than the character's importance to the story. except for machina and rem, i think only ace and cater have a unique link to the main story (and even then cater's is kind of small). that is probably a risk of having such a large number of main characters, or perhaps they planned to flesh them out more in supplementary materials like novels and comics (you shouldn't do that, square, that's a bad game company)

 

[Ghost X]

I can't really think of the most pointless character in the FFs I've played. I cheer for the underdog .

 

[LicoriceAllsorts]

yuffie is (possibly by nature of being an optional character) a good example of a character you could take out without there being anything seriously missing from the game. what you learn from her subquest is basically that shinra are jerks and wutai isn't great now. the state of wutai isn't a major aspect of the story (nor would it require yuffie to tell) and shinra's jerkness isn't something new to the player at that point, having being through both corel and gongaga iirc by then.

Not saying this isn't true - Yuffie is probably the most dispensable FFVII cast member, and you can enjoy the game without her.... But you get so much more with her. This isn't true of Amarant or Penelo.

TBh I found Relm Arrowny and that wild boy whose name I have forgotten kind of pointless in FFVI, but maybe I wasn't playing it right. I always felt I ought to use Relm, but I never really wanted to.

 

[Cat Rage Room]

Not saying this isn't true - Yuffie is probably the most dispensable FFVII cast member, and you can enjoy the game without her.... But you get so much more with her. This isn't true of Amarant or Penelo.

TBh I found Relm Arrowny and that wild boy whose name I have forgotten kind of pointless in FFVI, but maybe I wasn't playing it right. I always felt I ought to use Relm, but I never really wanted to.

Yuffie is pretty good. She doesn't beat the 'Dream Team' of Cloud, Barret and Cid when it comes to maximum damage, but her Conformer allows her to do extremely high damage to most powerful enemies and it's the only real way to Morph reliably with regular damage.

Gau from FF6 is a wild card. To the average player he's so-so at best. With the right Rages he can be pretty unstoppable. Not the strongest player in the game, but pretty strong. His Cat Scratch will reliably set him up to do more damage than anyone else early game. What Rages are worth getting used to be a crapshoot, but with a guide (or simply someone telling you, it's not exactly a lot of preparation at all), it's easy enough to utilize him.

Relm is okay. Sketch sucks, and there's no two ways about it. However her Magic stat is the highest in the game, even higher than Terra or Celes, minimizing the amount of time you have to invest raising that stat (considering it's the only stat that she can effectively utilize, really).

 

[ForceStealer]

I never felt Strago or Relm added anything either (and obviously Umaro). I was mostly passing over VI due to the size of it's cast though. The effect of an irrelevant character in a cast of 14 isn't felt nearly as much as it is in a cast of 8 (Amarant) or 6 (Vaan/Penelo).

 

[Cat Rage Room]

Strago can actually be pretty good with the right Blue Magic! Of course herien lies the issue; 'With the right Blue Magic'. If you don't feel like getting it, he's simply another magician.

Of course similar can be said of Quina, considering her Blue Magic being gained is the difference between it being a 'weird thing obsessed with frogs' and 'pretty much the most useful/powerful party member'.

Amarant can be pretty useful too, honestly. Storyline wise he's 'bleh' but his Monk abilities are pretty killer. Definitely more useful in battle than say, Freya's hit or miss situtional Dragon abilities.

 

[LicoriceAllsorts]

I always think of Quina as male.

 

[Skan]

Relm is tied up with Shadow and Strago though, so I'd hesitate to say she's pointless.

Still, I do feel like FF6 has the largest number of pointless player characters. I'm not saying they aren't useful as battlers, but Umaro? Gogo? Gau? Hell, even Mog isn't that important to the plot; his merry band of moogles is, but all four of those characters combined are almost less important than Interceptor.

 

[Kuja9001]

Mog, Umaro, Gogo, Amarant, Anybody that wasn't Squall, and Quina,

 

[null]

My Ctrl-F skills could be illegit, but I haven't seen Gilbert/Edward yet. That spoony turd deserves at least a dishonorable mention.

 

[Lex]

^Barret's Missing Score also ignores Morph's damage nerf if it's filled with mastered materia btw, people often seem to forget that/ don't know about it.

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

Have to defend Yuffie. She may not have Vincent's peripheral connection to the Sephiroth plot (which doesn't tell us anything Hojo himself doesn't, other than the name of "the woman with my child"), but her Limit Breaks aren't shit like his are, there's that Conformer thing, and there's a whole lengthy sidequest you get to undertake by recruiting her.

She's easily more valuable to the player's experience. Infinitely so.

 

[ForceStealer]

^Barret's Missing Score also ignores Morph's damage nerf if it's filled with mastered materia btw, people often seem to forget that/ don't know about it.

...

Dammit, Lex. Quit making me question my knowledge of FF7.

Thanks, though.

 

[Celes Chere]

NO ONE SAID EDWARD FROM FFIV I'M SHOCKED

(and also happy because I liked his character AND found him useful)

I guess I would say... Relm, though she does have a one hit kill attack if the enemy isn't immune to death

 

[LicoriceAllsorts]

I notice nobody's defending Penelo.

(I actually like Penelo; I have fun with her by making her a knife expert and then mixing her up with different parties - Basch, Penelo and Balthier is my favourite. In my mind she's FFXII's twin to FFVII's Elena. My imagination can make something out of Penelo, which is more than I can say for the people who created the game.

 

[Cat Rage Room]

It's hard to defend Penelo, because from a storyline standpoint she is the least important character, and since FFXII characters in gameplay are exactly identical except for minute stat differences, there's no metric there, either.

However Fran has the lowest stats in the party.