5 Characters who Suck at EVERYTHING

Some games have total badass characters.  Good guys or bad guys, they're the guys who have to love, even if you hate them.  I have to respect an upscale businessman who, when challenged to a duel, calls, "Panther," as his weapon.  Video games are littered with them.  Link is always a total badass.  Sephiropth and Cloud are the opposing forces of good and bad for their world.  Gary Oak has a determination that is just plain unsettling.  N, goes as far as to actually catch the legendary Pokemon and pretty much conquer the world until 8 gym leaders barge into his castle just so you have a shot at getting to him in time to stop him (not to mention having a frickin' Zoroark in his party!  That's not even in the game!).

But some characters just have nothing going for them.  They're not compelling, they're not badass, and they usually only make things worse.  Let's take a look at a few characters whose only purpose in existence, like the ugly girl at the bar, is just to make other characters look better.

Waluigi -- Super Mario Bros. series

This is what pointlessness looks like.

Mario has a foil.  His name is Luigi.  He has a nemesis.  His name is Bowser.  In fact, there are tons of extra characters who also fit into the diverse relationships in the Mushroom Kingdom.  Donkey Kong, Wart, Birdo, Magikoopa, Bowser Jr., a slew of Koopa Kids... yet somewhere along the line, Nintendo decided Mario needed one more bozo to fight and his name was Wario.  Then they spat out his obnoxiously dumb little brother.  Due to an obsession with symmetry, Wario wasn't enough, and Luigi needed his own pointlessly opposite antagonist.  And that's where Waluigi comes in.  He's got no goals of his own, no talents, and clearly no fashion sense.  At least Wario had his own line of motivation that grew in Wario Land and other titles, but Waluigi only seems to even have the concept of self as defined by being Luigi's opposite.  Congratulations, you're the pale imitation of the second-stringer.  His existence at all is a classic case of taking the foil antagonist concept too far, and it's just... it's just sad.  With Waluigi's most impressive appearance being Mario Party 3 as someone to just toss around, he really deserves his own VH1 Where Are They Now? special.  It wouldn't be pretty.

Meg -- Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn

See those stats?  That's Meg losing half her health to cannon fodder.

Don't remember Meg?  Here's why.  She's useless.  The daughter of Brom, Meg follows in her dad's footsteps by donning a suit of armor to live out her life as a meatshield.  But where Brom was good at taking hits for you and even better at throwing power-heavy hits right back, Meg has one of the lowest defense scores in the game.  Seriously!  There are mages with higher defense than her!  If you're trying to perfect the game, the best use for Meg is to take her out of battles, as she's such a liability that it's a better strategy to just leave her slot empty if you don't have any other characters to fill it.  She has no special abilities, she can only get poked once or twice with a sharp pointy before she drops, and if an enemy mage gets anywhere near her, you'll just have a melted tin can.  But then again, she's the fat chick everyone makes insensitive jokes about behind her back, so it might be an improvement.  I'd forgive her or even try to train her if she was one of those frustratingly cool characters who happens to suck in battle, but her subplot isn't cool, either.  In fact, it's not tragic, not melodramatic, not intense, not witty; she's really just awkward.  Meg left her home to go find mercenary swordsman, Zihark, because Brom had once quipped, "Hey, y'know who'd be a nice guy to marry?  Zihark.  Yeah, one of you girls should marry him."  So she dragged her stupid ass across 3 countries to find the guy and be greeted with, "... Yeah... so that's not happening."  That's where I smashed my head against the table.  I'd say that Meg should just stay in the kitchen, but she has to suck at that, too.  After all, she left home to go to another country on a lover's errand months before the game starts and her own father doesn't even realize she left until he bumps into her as part of the same army.  I guess Brom didn't want to use her for the household chores any more than I wanted to use her on the battlefield

Female -- Shin Megami Tensei series
(specifically: Yuzu Tanikawa -- Devil Survivor)

It's a demon.  Try killing it.

Every Shin Megami Tensei game has one: a girl who says, "Oh, I'm a total badass.  Yep, I sure am!  Oh nooooooeeeessss!  There are monsters and I'm one of the few in the world with the power to fight them!  I just want to give up all this power and run away from them and live with you, Main Character, alone on an island in the middle of nowhere popping out babies and snuggling for eternity!"  Ugh.  She's the girl who not only wants to give up her crazy cool super powers, but she wants you to give yours up, too, and sometimes she wants the entire cast of the game to give up its super powers.  Yukari, Chie, Zelenin -- all these femme fe-fails have moments of fighting tooth and nail to avoid anything fun, awesome, or inspiring about their adventure, but none is worse than Yuzu Tanikawa from SMT: Devil Survivor.

In Devil Survivor, you get thrown into a battle between demons over the fate of Hell itself (and by extension, the human world, since they have a tendency to try to conquer it), and characters urge you towards three possible endings: Take up the sword in God's name and throw down the demons, find a way for humans and demons to coexist, or side with the demons against this jackass God fellow.  Yuzu's opinion?  Cry in a corner and talk about the upcoming English test until the world ends.  She constantly urges you to just wait and see if the world gets better and tries to avoid the issues at hand.  There's only one silver lining to Yuzu Tanikawa -- if you make the right choices within the game, you can force her out of your party for good.  Thank God.  Ironically.

Big the Cat -- Sonic the Hedgehog series

I've seen this face on 3-year-olds and aneurysm patients.

Big debuted in Sonic Adventure, and was the worst thing to happen to the franchise since they forgot Robotnik's name.  And that's a title he still proudly holds!  Sonic Adventure was innovative, because you could choose from any major character and play out a different version of the story in order to see the fully intertwining plot.  Awesome.  Until you met this autistic house cat.  Big spends his entire adventure looking for his pet frog, the aptly named Froggy, by having a (thankfully small) handful of levels dedicated to running around and finding the ever-escaping amphibian.  That's right, cat, he's your only friend in the world and even he wants nothing more than to escape your presence.  The truly frustrating thing about Big, however, wasn't his dopey demeanor or his sheer pointlessness in both the plot and his own charm.  It was the fact that Big's levels were sometimes as large as the levels that other characters would play, but the only purpose was to find whatever pond had Froggy in it and start a fishing minigame to find him.  This usually required running around the level like crazy and jumping in the lake yourself to try and get the spastic camera to glimpse Froggy swimming by because there was absolutely no indication within the minigame itself as to whether or not you were fishing in the right spot.  I suppose Sega wanted you to feel satisfied when you finally caught Froggy and somehow that helped you defeat (ugh) Eggman and Chaos, but really, you just felt like scrubbing off the shame of being forced to use someone so lame to advance the story.  I'd rather just read Of Mice and Men to get my fill of mental deficiency.

Sora -- Kingdom Hearts series

Sorry, did I post a pic of Riku by accident?  That's because
he's the badass one.

I know I'm going to get some heat for this, but let's face facts.  Sora sucks.  He's such an bland, one-track-minded boy scout that when he temporarily ceases to exist, the empty shell of himself gets up and develops more of a personality than he has.  In only 3 hours of game play, Roxas becomes a more compelling character than Sora does over the entirety of the 2 main line titles in the KH series.  Sora is the Disney version of any naive anime hero, but he lacks the charismatic panache they all have in their naivete.  Instead, he often relies on swinging his keyblade wildly at enemies that can pound him into the ground until the dramatic moment (a training montage and level later) when he can take them out.  In fact, he needs a lifeline constantly, and the only reason he goes about his adventure as far as I can tell is to find the much cooler, much more competent heartthrob of the series, Riku, who he has a massive crush on.  Then again, if that were the official story reason, I might be able to forgive him, but you only get to see that one on Y-Gallery.  During Kingdom Hearts 2, you actually find out that Riku has been going on the same exact journey as you, but doing a better job of it and actually accomplishing things, whereas Sora has only managed stopgap measures in the war against the Heartless.  Riku is actually the protagonist of the game and you were only ever watching from the sidelines.  Plus, Riku gets the cooler lines.  I'm sorry, Sora, but you just plain suck.

There are plenty of other characters I wanted to get in here, but I just couldn't subject myself to thinking about that much suck at once!  I'm going to go enjoy a tasty Sephiroth vs. Cloud fight scene to cleanse my pallet, but if you think I made a bad call or have another suggestion, leave a comment and let me know!


PARTY NEWS!

Hardcore @Vlada is going to be extra awesome this month!  It's my birthday party, so I'm having plenty of surprises ready to go!  Bring your Skylanders, get ready for some Brawl action, and Champions Return to Arms!  Also, cake!  Mmmm.... cake.