Final Fantasy, while being a beloved franchise, does feature a host of completely useless characters. The fascinating thing about it is, though, many people can make an argument about every single character on this list, barring perhaps one or two.
There are situations where some of the characters can be overpowered. That’s the problem, though. In 9 out of 10 situations, they’re worthless. That doesn’t make a character fun or even interesting.
There were a few that almost made this list, but for a variety of reasons did not. One example is Setzer Gabbiani. His Slot Skill is miserable chaos, and is only really a great character if you have tons of Gil and Gil Toss, or you have Genji Glove+Offering and Fixed Dice.
The trouble with that is you get Fixed Dice in the final dungeon. However, here are our picks for the 7 most useless party members in Final Fantasy.
The most useless party members in the Final Fantasy series
1) Edward Chris von Muir (Final Fantasy 4 — Vanilla)
I want to make it clear that the only really useless version of Final Fantasy 4’s Edward Chris von Muir is in the vanilla version of the game. His songs do almost nothing, his stats are laughable at best, and you barely have him in the game long enough to level him up to attempt to change that.
If you use Mist Skip (a glitch where you bypass the normal entrance to Mist and use the back entrance), you can get him the overpowered Dancing Dagger — but that requires a glitch. Edward’s greatest contribution to the party is when he’s bedridden and saves the team from the Dark Imp’s spell. Future versions of him are fantastic, but this one? Hard pass.
2) Cait Sith (Final Fantasy 7 — Vanilla)
Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth’s Cait Sith is remarkably fun to play, but FF7 on PlayStation is more than useless. Again, he can be great — if you’re using manipulations and have mastered using his Slot skill to one-shot everything in the game. But why should you have to master that kind of nonsense for a character to be good? Technically, anyone in FF7 can be good, with the right materia and skills.
You can also accidentally wipe out your own party with Slots, and if you haven’t saved? Well, then hope you don’t mind potential hours of backtracking. From a character perspective and background, I love Cait Sith. But his gameplay is miserable, and he’s never in our party.
3) Kimahri Ronso (Final Fantasy 10)
What’s with Final Fantasy’s trend of making Blue Magic such a miserable, borderline useless game feature? After Final Fantasy 5 and 6, every other Blue Mage seems to be a chore to power up.
Suddenly, it requires you to use a Limit Break, or something like that, just to use one spell! At least there are good things about the hornless Ronso in FF10. But making his most powerful moves a Limit Break, and also giving a kind of lame selection of them on top of that, was not the best design choice.
There’s a lot of discussion around him being a “jack of all trades”, too. He has the smallest sphere grid and is positioned in such a way that he can be anything. That’s a cool idea, don’t get us wrong — but it also means he has no real combat identity of his own outside of having a cool spear, and occasionally using Blue Magic.
4) Rafa Galthena (Final Fantasy Tactics)
Rafa and Malak are both quite frankly useless in Final Fantasy Tactics, thanks to their miserable Heaven and Hell Magic. Their attacks take up a decent amount of space, and have the potential to do tons of damage to one or two units — if it hits anything. That’s right, it’s not guaranteed you’ll hit anything!
On top of that, Rafa’s AI when you are unlocking her is pure torture. There are so many times we’ve played through that stage, and she just walks out, gets killed, and you have to reload from your last save. Her only saving grace is that she’s an amazing Move-Find Item character, but that doesn’t make her truly worth using.
5) Leon (Final Fantasy 2)
If you asked, “Who’s Leon?”, then we wouldn’t be too shocked. The short answer is, he might actually be the most useless Final Fantasy character of all time. If we were ranking them, he’d be at the top (or bottom) of the heap. Despite having cool character art, he shows up at the beginning of the game and comes back at the very end to break free and be a party member again.
He has terrible stats, mediocre equipment, and almost no decent learned skills or abilities. He’s outshone by (literally) every single guest character in the entire game. It’s misery incarnate. You have to then take the time to grind him out and make him useful, or just beat the game in a three-person scenario.
6) Umaro (Final Fantasy 6)
Umaro is easily the hardest hitter in Final Fantasy 6, but that doesn’t stop him from being incredibly useless. His one redeeming factor is that he’s godlike in the Coliseum, but other than that? Having a party member who might accidentally start healing your enemy for hundreds, or thousands of damage because of what he’s equipped with (and you can’t stop it short of a reset or running away) can be pure misery.
Now, we love Umaro around here. He’s powerful, can ignore damage resistance, and it’s honestly hilarious to watch him throw your party members for 9999 damage. However, he still requires effort, and if you aren’t a fan of the Berserker archetype, he’s going to be a miserable experience. You can’t even equip him with Espers to enhance his stats.
7) Selphie Tilmitt (Final Fantasy 8)
Selphie Tilmitt might be the most hated character in Final Fantasy 8 by the community at large, but we don’t really get that. Her actions and personality befit her age, but our problem with her comes from her uselessness in combat. Her stats again aren’t really much to write home about, and her weapons aren’t really that great.
She’s another character — one of several on this list — that has something incredibly powerful about her, but you have to get lucky enough for it to happen.
The End is her ultimate limit, and if you land it on her Slots, it means any enemy in the game will die instantly (except bosses with multiple phases). However, that requires luck or manipulation. Otherwise, hope for Triple Aura or something, so you can spam better Limit Breaks.
Again, you could easily make an argument for almost any character on this list as to why you should put them on your team. Almost every Final Fantasy character has something to be glad about. Vincent may have uncontrollable limit breaks, but he also has never-miss weapons, making him the Deathblow GOAT.
Just because a character is “useless” in most situations doesn’t mean they don’t have something that could mean the difference between victory and defeat for your party.
