History Main / LowTierLetdown

* ''Franchise/{{Pokemon}}'' has it's [[LowTierLetdown/{{Pokemon}} own page]].

* LowTierLetdown/{{Miitopia}}

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As is common to most games with any degree of gameplay, some characters are bound to do other characters' jobs better than others. As the {{Metagame}} of any competitively-minded game is formed, some characters are bound to be either too good at their jobs and get similarly hated on as Sandbox/HighTierScrappy characters, for either being too good for the health of the game's balance, or simply being unfun to fight against. Single player games with large casts -- such as RolePlayingGames -- will also often have that one dude who carries the entire party on their back.

Relatively more common to single-player games as a whole, a Low Tier Letdown is a character who [[AvertedTrope may not be]] [[TheScrappy widely-hated]], but they're oftentimes [[MemeticLoser infamous within their own fandoms]] for just straight-up ''especially'' sucking in gameplay terms. They might be the [[NiceGuy nicest person in the world]], but if they're solely known within even the confines of the gameplay as TheLoad, their fate is decided.

For characters hated for being too strong, see Sandbox/HighTierScrappy.

* ''Franchise/{{Pokemon}}'' has it's [[LowTierLetdown/Pokemon own page]].

** Armor Knights get this status ten times worse than [[Franchise/FireEmblem that series]] - while Armor Knights were largely seen in its home series as a low-tier class, there ''have'' been good Armor Knights (namely [[VideoGame/FireEmblemTheBlazingBlade Oswin]], [[VideoGame/FireEmblemRadiantDawn Gatrie, the Black Knight]], [[VideoGame/FireEmblemFates Benny and Effie]]), and the gap the class tends to demonstrate tends not to be unsurmountable - they're a good recepient for Boots, can become a LightningBruiser if things go well for them, and not only is their semi-low Move not a problem if the player doesn't go full speed ahead with Mov, they may otherwise have a lot of potential utility if the player really seeks to use them. Armor knights in Tear Ring Saga have none of these boons, and they're bad for for much the same primary reason, if not worse - an abysmal 3 movement, which is even lower than the usual home series standard of Armor Knights having at least ''5 or 4 move!'' Combining this awful movement with the generally large maps in this game and a frequent emphasis on reaching objectives on the map quickly, means getting them to even see combat can be misery. Norton suffers from this slightly less than Billford and Zachariah, as he can promote into a mounted class at level 10, but even getting him to see enough combat to level him up that much can turn the game into a slog.

** Pretty much everybody on the Capcom side in ''VideoGame/MarvelVsCapcom2'', especially Roll and Servbot. Some of the most beloved characters in video game history... and nobody wants to play as them because the Marvel side has all the most dominant fighters, except for Captain Commando, Tron Bonne, and Strider Hiryu. Fortunately, after learning from her mistakes in ''VideoGame/MarvelVsCapcomClashOfTheSuperheroes'' and ''VideoGame/MarvelVsCapcom2'', Roll manages to toss aside her original Tier Induced Scrappy status and becomes a LethalJokeCharacter in ''VideoGame/TatsunokoVsCapcom''!

** For a short time, White Mage fell short to their healer brethren in ''Stormblood''. They do their job well, but they were shunned for not bringing enough to the table in utility, Scholar having shields and Astrologian having cards. What did the White Mage have? Just healing, raw damage, and a single-target shield on a cooldown. Coupled with a class mechanic that went practically unused in high-end content (and in early cases, was completely ''counter-intuitive''), there were plenty of parties that wouldn't want a White Mage. Thankfully, when ''Shadowbringers'' came around, White Mage left scrappydom behind with a reworked class mechanic that rewards the player with an extremely powerful spell, making their destructive power one of their big selling points.

** In general, most of the Teladi vessels count thanks to their poor top speeds and weak energy gun generators, only subverting their Scrappy status by having much bigger-than-normal cargo spaces than the other races' vessels (which makes them really good candidates for MacrossMissileMassacre) and having surprisingly improved performance in a few variants of their certain fighters on a mild scale. The Kestrel is the exception to this rule, being the only Teladi vessel with unusually high top speed and earning the distinction of being the fastest armed craft in the games (whose speeds top out around 600 m/s), [[FragileSpeedster though it is an [=M5=] scout vessel]].

* Sister Miriam's faction in ''VideoGame/SidMeiersAlphaCentauri''. There are four ways to win the game: control enough money to buy every other faction, gain enough votes from each faction to be elected the Supreme Ruler, advance so far in technology that you ascend to another plane of existence, or you can just conquer the entire world. While some factions are more tuned to attempt one victory condition over another (CEO Morgan has the best chance of buying the world, Commissioner Pravin Lal has a bonus to being elected world leader, etc.) Sister Miriam's faction only has one viable strategy: devote all resources to conquering everyone else as fast as you can. This is because Sister Miriam's faction has a technology research penalty that means all other factions will eventually out-pace you in weapons technology, and achieving the "ascend to another plane of existence" victory condition is very hard if not completely unattainable. Their only hope for winning is to conquer everyone else while the playing-field is still relatively even, and hope they get enough technologies from conquering to make up any deficit. Most human players make it a goal to destroy her faction as quickly as possible, especially if another human is playing as her. Compounding the scrappy-factor is that two other factions (the Spartan Federation and the Human Hive) already fulfill the role of being 'warlike' while still being varied in their possible strategy options.

** Armor Knights get this status carried over from [[Franchise/FireEmblem that series]], and for much the same primary reason, if not worse - an abysmal 3 movement, which is even lower than the usual home series standard of Armor Knights having at least ''5 or 4 move!'' Combining this awful movement with the generally large maps in this game and a frequent emphasis on reaching objectives on the map quickly, means getting them to even see combat can be misery. Norton suffers from this slightly less than Billford and Zachariah, as he can promote into a mounted class at level 10, but even getting him to see enough combat to level him up that much can turn the game into a slog.
** There is a worse class in the game, however - the Wood Shooter. It shares the same 3 movement and vulnerability to armor-slaying weapons as the Armor Knight, but with the additional detriment of being locked to bows, meaning they can't counterattack at melee range, and unlike Armor Knights, they have no promotion to increase their movement or improve their stats. They could see some use with access to special long-range ballista weapons that only they can use... but not only are these rare, they also ''stop the Wood Shooter from moving for the remainder of the map'' while lowering their high Defence. Of the two, Hagaru has the worse reputation, as not only does he join very late in the game with terrible stats, but he first appears as an enemy reinforcement on Turn 10 of Map 34, meaning you have to waste time on [[ThatOneLevel an already very difficult map]] to get him.
** Of the four units who can join at Verge before Map 2, Luca is by far the most disliked. He suffers from being bow-locked as an Archer, with awful base stats aside from Skill and Speed, iffy at best growths, and having 4 movement on this game's large maps. Even getting a unique Wooden Bow with +30 crit on Map 4 does little for him, as critical hits in ''[=TearRing Saga=]'' only double the unit's Attack before Defence is applied, and his damage output is so low anyway that it won't help him out much. Recruiting him also means missing out on two of Narron, Lee and Lionel, all of whom are considered excellent units. He can do one additional thing later in the game, however: [[spoiler:if you allow him to die at the end of Map 26, Raquel's inability to kill human enemies will be removed.]]

Relatively more common to single-player games as a whole, a Low Tier Letdown is a character who [[AvertedTrope may not be]] [[TheScrappy widely-hated]], but they're oftentimes [[MemeticLoser infamous within their own fandoms]] for just straight-up ''[[UpToEleven especially]]'' sucking in gameplay terms. They might be the [[NiceGuy nicest person in the world]], but if they're solely known within even the confines of the gameplay as TheLoad, their fate is decided.

** The Ranger and Bard in 3rd Edition both landed headfirst into this. 3.5 players recognize the Bard as a DifficultButAwesome skillmonkey and supportive caster, while the Ranger is a capable JackOfAllStats leaning slightly toward GlassCannon. This wasn't so much the case in 3rd Edition. Both classes received only four skill points, which made it hard to do their jobs. The Bard spell list had few to no unique spells and couldn't be cast in armor, while the Bard's signature Inspire Courage gave an absolutely piddly bonus that didn't even scale[[note]]For bonus shinanigans, its Bardic Music ability was keyed off your ranks in Perform, not your level. Thus the best Bard was a Bard 1/Rogue X, as it's only other notable class feature was its (at the time) mediocre casting and Bardic Knowledge, none of which were as useful as Rogue levels.[[/note]]. The Ranger was limited to DualWielding, which was [[UpToEleven even more subpar]] in 3rd Edition, their Animal Companion was a walking liability, their Favored Enemy maxed out at a +5 bonus, and outside of a weak selection of spells, they received ''nothing else.'' [[TookALevelInBadass Giving these two a buff]] was a big motivator behind creating 3.5 in the first place (well, that and [[GameBreaker Haste]]).

** Armor Knights get this status carried over from [[Franchise/FireEmblem that series]], and for much the same primary reason, if not worse - an abysmal 3 movement, which is [[UpToEleven even lower than the usual home series standard of Armor Knights having at least]] ''[[UpToEleven 5 or 4 move!]]'' Combining this awful movement with the generally large maps in this game and a frequent emphasis on reaching objectives on the map quickly, means getting them to even see combat can be misery. Norton suffers from this slightly less than Billford and Zachariah, as he can promote into a mounted class at level 10, but even getting him to see enough combat to level him up that much can turn the game into a slog.

*** Every single unit on this list is dwarfed by one in particular, however: '''Bantu.''' While all the other units that are notoriously bad enough to qualify as a LowTierLetDown (by virtue of having no MagikarpPower to speak of whatsoever), they at least have some merits to them. Bantu has absolutely none - he can't reclass, his growths are awful, his bases are awful, his class is utterly gimped for the game it's at, he has 4-Move that he can't reclass out of, and is seen as strictly inferior in every conceivable way to Tiki, a unit who in this game is not seen as worth it in the slightest. The fact him being capped out in every stat and he'd ''still'' be bad should say a lot about him.

* Most characters in ''VideoGame/LegoStarWars'' are either [[JokeCharacter completely worthless]] (i.e. the Pit Droid or Boss Nass, which can't even attack) or completely outclassed by other characters (Jango and Boba have two additional abilities compared to average blaster characters like Padme and Han), but fans don't usually mind that much due to the massive size of the roster and the fact that plot-mandatory characters tend to be at least competent. However, Yoda and Chewbacca get a fair bit of dislike for being required in certain parts of the game despite being much more awkwardly-designed than other characters in their archetype--Yoda is hilariously slow unless he's jumping, and Chewbacca's melee attack animation is unusually long and cumbersome (though it's also funny to watch) and he's a big target.
* From ''VideoGame/QuestForGlory'', the Fighter class is this because of ThePaladin being introduced as a playable class since ''VideoGame/QuestForGloryIII''. Everything the Fighter does, the Paladin can do better. The former has no special abilities while the latter has a FlamingSword, [[HealingHands can heal injuries]], [[SpiderSense can sense danger]] and has magic protection. To add insult to injury, a Fighter that is too honorable becomes a Paladin later in the game. There's no way to refuse the title, forcing the Fighter to keep his KarmaMeter in check. ''VideoGame/QuestForGloryIV'' is even worse. The Fighter only gets an exclusive magic battle axe, while every other class meets unique individuals and have quests only they can solve. ''VideoGame/QuestForGloryV'' balances things better however. The Fighter gets multiple choices of weapons, can solve quests better to his tastes and his Strength and Offensive skills are superior to all.

** A couple blocks got a lot of hate, especially when they were Standard legal:

* Two of the four stat types in ''VideoGame/CrashTeamRacingNitroFueled'' have fallen under this for different reasons. Both are actually inherited from [[VideoGame/CrashTeamRacing the original game]], but is a more important factor in the remake because of the presence of online play. This has become such a problem that the developers eventually added a Driving Style option, which lets players to select stat types independently of characters, so the online matches won't be dominated by characters from the other two types.
** Turning Class is considered terrible due to the poor design: the main draw is supposed to be great handling allowing for better cornering than the other classes, but this is usually more of a hindrance than a benefit as this ensures they can't snake effectively on straightaways[[labelnote:*]]Snaking, as in Mario Kart, is getting Turbos by Power Sliding on straights, so wider turns are actually ''desired''[[/labelnote]], and thus struggle to retain their turbo reserves. In addition, they're the slowest of the four classes, meaning that if they do end up leading, they're likely to be overtaken anyways, with their only niche being on tight tracks that heavily utilize Ultra Sacred Fire[[labelnote:*]]The fastest Turbo level in the game that is hard to maintain[[/labelnote]] such as Oxide Station, Cortex Castle and Drive-Thru Danger. It got to the point where Turning characters are not only the least-used class online, but fans were actively ''dreading'' the idea of their requested characters being Turning (luckily, this last concern no longer exists thanks to the introduction of the aforementioned Driving Styles).
** Balanced Class doesn't fare that much better. This is mostly due to the fact that the stats listed for Balanced Class is [[TheComputerIsALyingBastard deceptively low]]: although the speed stat is stated to be one point higher than Acceleration Class, [[https://www.reddit.com/r/crashbandicoot/comments/ca2ywb/followup_to_the_in_game_stats_in_ctrnf_being_fake/ they're actually slower than them]] and have worse acceleration than the already-slow Turning Class, resulting in them being heavily outclassed by them in everything they can possibly do. Even their comparatively better turning is considered a flaw: due to a technique called u-turning, which allows players to turn incredibly fast without losing much speed by braking while hopping, the turn stat is often regarded as a redundant DumpStat by experienced players because u-turning compensates for it, and an active detriment at worst due to tighter turning making snaking more difficult (as explained above), so that a ''low'' turn stat is considered a GameBreaker online. Balanced characters are considered so terrible that there's active demand to buff them to actually reflect their in-game stats, as they [[MasterOfNone can't even function]] as the JackOfAllStats they're supposed to be.

** Karts in general, as their advantages over bikes (faster natural speed, second tier of drift boost) are completely insignificant. The faster natural speed doesn't mean a thing because bikes can just do wheelies at any time to outspeed them, and the second tier boost, rather than make karts better at U curves to contrast the bikes' (intended) superiority on only straightaways, is far too situational to even use at all (to the point where you may even only see it once per lap without outright going for it), let alone compete with what bikes offer. To make it worse, bikes have a DumpStat in handling as seen above because their handling is just that good, whereas karts offer no similar substitute.
** Another low example is the heavyweight bike [[StoneWall Phantom]]: while it has the best off-road for its size, it's an outside drift vehicle with the ''worst'' drift stat in the game. Like the Jetsetter above, it's likely going to be the final vehicle unlocked, for winning Mirror Special Cup.

* ''VideoGame/NeedForSpeed'':
** In ''Carbon'', the best cars are American muscle cars for the first stage, tied between muscle and exotics in the second and third stages, and European exotics for the last stage. Notice how Japanese tuners are never mentioned here...
** ''Underground 2'' was the first game in the series' second era to involve muscle cars, and amidst one of them was the Mustang GT. It boasted powerful acceleration, but steering it was an absolute nightmare, with many players preferring the other muscle, Pontiac GTO. Eventually, [[RescuedFromTheScrappyHeap the developers listened to players' complaints about the car]], and it was fixed into a beast machine in ''VideoGame/NeedForSpeedMostWanted''... to the point of it outbesting the Pontiac GTO, which now proceeded to be the new scrappy.
** The Austrailian release exclusive vehicles, (Ford Falcon GT and HSV VT GTS) are this in ''Need for Speed III'', with easily the slowest acceleration and top speed stats ''they could barely keep up with the vehicles in the class''. Similar to the Mustang GT above, the Australian counterparts (Ford Falcon AU vehicles, the HSV [=SV99=] and Coupé GTS) were improved in the next games. While each car is not the best in the class they were put, they are certainly more capable to outperform each class' opponents.

** As of ''Chronophantasma'', Bullet is now seeing hate for being badly put together as well. Criticisms range from her Cutting Shear looking like a command grab but not functioning as one, to her situational and mostly useless Rage Aggressor move, her dash-step hindering her mobility heavily despite her being meant to be a rushdown character and even her Drive receiving criticism that it completely holds her back and requires actually hitting to become any bit useful. Its gotten to the point when some are calling for Bullet's playstyle to be completely remade from the ground up so that she can actually stand a chance.

** Makoto Nanaya gets bludgeoned with the nerf bat again, reclaiming the dishonour of being one of the worst characters in the game. She has very short reach and a very predictable approach game that can be easily countered by a lot of characters, and her damage isn't exactly stellar compared to a lot of characters who have far superior reach. Her assist moves are lacklustre, she has the worst sweep in the game, and a lot of her moves can't convert into combos at max range.

** ''VideoGame/MarvelVsCapcom3'' has some very strong contenders for Low-Tier Scrappydom.

** ''VideoGame/MarvelVsCapcomInfinite'':
*** The Mind Stone: Its Storm (which simply refills your Hyper Combo Gauge) is widely seen as underwhelming and almost useless compared to those of the other Infinity Stones. Also, its Surge (a basic, dizzying, telekinetic slam), while better-regarded and seen as actually useful, nevertheless suffers from mediocrity in comparison to what the other Stones can do.
*** [[VideoGame/ResidentEvil5 Chris]]: On top of having limited mobility compared to other characters, his projectiles are ineffective and easy-to-reflect via push-blocking.
* Caster in the ''VisualNovel/FateStayNight'' fan game ''Crucis/Fatal Fake''. She has the lowest HP of any Servant in the game, has the slowest frame rate for her melee attacks and as a kiter, she is generally inferior to Gilgamesh, who has more HP and can combo into Enkidu purely through kiting.
* ''VideoGame/DissidiaFinalFantasy'':
** The [[VideoGame/FinalFantasyIII Onion Knight]] gets a lot of flack. He has the smallest movepool in the game, having only two Bravery attacks for air and ground, one each melee and ranged, making him very predictable. Said attacks also have a long recovery time so it's easy to counterattack if you dodge them, all of his Bravery attacks can be blocked, and they don't do much damage when they hit forcing you to fight with a DeathOfAThousandCuts strategy.
** [[VideoGame/FinalFantasyXI Shantotto]] has a fighting style entirely reliant on HP attacks. Her Bravery game is virtually non-existent, and they're meant to act as support to set the opponent up for her HP attacks, which are slow to start with long recovery time and poor hitboxes. About all she had going for her was her EX Mode ability Manafont, which let her keep her Bravery after using HP attacks so she could spam them as much as she wanted (normally, Bravery depletes after using HP attacks). ''Dissidia 012'' buffed her HP attacks, increasing their execution speed, decreasing recovery time, and letting them power up at lower Bravery amounts. Unfortunately ''012'' also changed Manafont's effect, thereby removing Shantotto's greatest strength. In the end, her Bravery game is still horrible, and unless you're good at mind games with Bind and Stun, her HP attacks are still difficult to hit with.
* In ''VideoGame/DragonBallZBudokaiTenkaichi 3'' Videl is one due to her lack of anything but rush Supers and Ultimate. Because rushes leave a character wide open to other types of supers and can easily be avoided in various ways it's pretty impractical to use Videl. Worst of all is Giant characters are completely immune to rushes, therefore Videl lacks any real ability to damage or stagger them, in such a situation she's even inferior to her JokeCharacter of a father Mr. Satan.
* ''VideoGame/GuiltyGear'' has a few examples across the series:
** Axl Low went from a quirky powerhouse in ''Guilty Gear: The Missing Link'' with the ability to chain combo an opponent from half a screen away and had a legitimate (if character-specific) infinite combo consisting of nothing but standing Punch and Kick repeated ''ad nauseam'', to a lackluster Dhalsim clone with an easily punishable gimmick moveset, mediocre keepaway tools and a somewhat unintuitive Gatling Combo setup in ''Guilty Gear X.'' The only things going for him at the time were his above-average damage potential and the DifficultButAwesome [[CycleOfHurting Axl Bomber loop]], but it didn't keep him from earning the derogatory nickname "Axl Low Tier" due to struggling against most of the cast. Thankfully the sequels have since alleviated his status as a JokeCharacter, even earning him a High Tier spot in ''Accent Core +R''.
** In ''Guilty Gear Xrd'' we have Potemkin, who's recently become the butt of more than a few jokes because of his standings on the tierlist. He's slow, has a number of terrible match-ups, and has many highly punishable moves. The latter wouldn't be so bad if he didn't also have a huge hitbox rendering him vulnerable to a number of character specific strategies and combos. Even FAB, a professional player who mains him and is considered to be a top player considers him to be the weakest character in the game.
** Also from ''Guilty Gear Xrd'' Baiken was hit heavily with the nerf hammer. Despite her damage output, her low HP and low guts are just the beginning of her problems. Her counters have been changed and are now hard to use and now too risky to use, plus her new parry move is easily countered and thus is very unsafe. Her chain grab has been made easier for opponents to escape from making it unreliable. She's become a shadow of her former self, going from her high tier status from ''Accent Core +R'' to a handicapped badass without the badass.

* ''VideoGame/TheKingOfFighters'':
** Chin in ''[[VideoGame/TheKingOfFighters98 '98]]''. He has some nice anti-air attacks, but that's it. Chin gets steamrolled by most of the cast and he doesn't have the tools nor damage to keep up with the high or top tiers in the game.
** Elizabeth in ''[[VideoGame/TheKingOfFightersXIII XIII]]''. In the initial arcade version, she was [[TierInducedScrappy/HighTiers the opposite of this trope.]] However, when ''XIII'' hit consoles her two strongest points, meter gain and damage output, where severely nerfed without anything to compensate leading to her being totally absent from competitive play.
** Vanessa got hit with his in ''[[VideoGame/TheKingOfFightersXIV XIV]]'' thanks to being DifficultButAwesome and leaning more on difficult. She has to burn ''a lot'' of meter to do any damage, and even doing optimal combos won't finish most characters off. Since she has to use meter to get any respectable damage if she starts with one or zero bars she has a huge hill to climb to make a comeback, especially if she's last and if the opposing team has more than one character remaining.
** ''VideoGame/TheKingOfFightersXV''
*** As per tradition (since [[OlderThanTheyThink it wouldn't be the first time]] she's gotten the short end of the stick), Whip is unfortunately considered to be one of the weakest characters in ''KOF XV's'' initial launch. Common complaints include, but aren't limited to: poor damage potential, very inconsistent (or outright non-existent) range on some of her normals, her stance cancels having extremely slow recoveries ([[VideoGame/StreetFighterV Poison]] she is not), and, on top of having [[SomeDexterityRequired an execution barrier]] to her moveset, she's simply outclassed by other zoners in the game like Ash or King, who can both do what Whip does, but better and without as much effort.
*** Ramon is almost unanimously considered to be the weakest character in the game. Despite being a very agile luchador, his movement and attacks are painfully slow and lack range. Combine this with low damage and poor offensive and defensive options and you have a very weak character.
*** Surprisingly, Iori himself qualifies this year. With severe nerfs to most of his good tools, and very low damage output, he comes up very short compared to the rest of the cast. Many players believe there's no reason to play him over characters like Robert, Terry and Athena.

* While ''VideoGame/{{Skullgirls}}'' is actually pretty tightly balanced to the point where most characters can stand on even footing with the right team combination, that doesn't stop Painwheel from attracting some flak because of her schizophrenic playing style centered around a somewhat convoluted armor gimmick. Painwheel herself isn't ''bad'', per say, but suffers heavily from being DifficultButAwesome with significant emphasis on the difficult.

** Despite being an obvious JokeCharacter (and sometimes a {{lethal|JokeCharacter}} one), poor [[Franchise/StreetFighter Dan Hibiki]] still catches a lot of hate from some fans. He is sometimes called a "waste of space" that could be given to another character, especially in crossover games and ''VideoGame/StreetFighterIV'' and ''[[VideoGame/StreetFighterV V]]''. Poor guy just can't catch a break. Ironically, he becomes an actually competent fighter in ''Street Fighter IV'' and onward despite still being treated as a joke character by the game.
** ''VideoGame/StreetFighterIII'':
*** Twelve is not just bad, he's ''dysfunctionally'' bad. His combos are pathetically weak and don't put his opponent at a disadvantaged state, he can't convert any of his decent normals into a combo, his specials have so much end lag that they're punishable ''on hit'', two of his supers are gimmicky as hell and the one that isn't doesn't even connect properly, and his damage output is so low that even if you make as little mistakes as possible, he will get bodied as soon as he guesses wrong once. He does possess a somewhat decent neutral game due to his high mobility and great reach on a lot of his normal moves, but the problem is that while he may not struggle with getting in hits, he has no ability to actually capitalize on those hits, meaning his only real gameplan is to slowly poke the opponent to death and hope they never get a chance to punish him.
*** Sean was a bit of a monster in ''Second Impact'', and was, consequently, given a smack with the nerf bat in ''Third Strike''... which, unfortunately, turned out to be more of a hammer-blow. He's a {{Shotoclone}}, which means sharing a lot of properties and even most of his animations with Ryu and Ken, but that results in him essentially having all the worst attributes of both and the strong points of neither. His hitboxes are bad, to the point that he has few ways to combo his Tackle, and Dragon Smash, his Shoryuken equivalent, exclusively hits above his head. The Tornado, his HurricaneKick equivalent, looks flashy and strong, but its recovery is so bad when used meterless that it leaves him wide open ''even if he hits''. The result puts him in pretty close competition with Twelve for the game's worst character, and even relatively good appraisals of him will admit there's almost nothing he does that Ryu and Ken can't do better. Notably, this was intended on the part of the developers, who believed that Sean being superior to Ken would be GameplayAndStorySegregation--and not expecting the game to have the longevity it did, they paid little heed to balance.

* The missions where you play as Billy in ''VideoGame/CallOfJuarez'' were rather reviled. The [[VideoGame/CallOfJuarezBoundInBlood prequel]] replaces him with his stepfather Thomas, who fulfills a bit of Billy's FragileSpeedster properties with a more Sharpshooter-based gameplay than Ray.
* Jones from Clive Barker's ''VideoGame/CliveBarkersJericho'' ([[WebAnimation/ZeroPunctuation by Clive Barker]]). In spite of his fairly decent weaponry, his lack of combat-worthy supernatural abilities (they're mainly used to pass through areas, and as a plot point) means that he tends to get ignored a lot by those who play the game.
* While Oddjob [[TierInducedScrappy/HighTiers benefits from a short height]] in ''VideoGame/GoldenEye1997''[='=]s multiplayer mode, Jaws suffers from the opposite, being a big target compared to all other playable characters.
* Templar in the first ''VideoGame/{{Killzone}}''. Where all of the other characters have useful special attributes (Luger is the fastest, has night vision, and a decent SMG with a very useful alternate fire that turns it into a SniperPistol with ton of ammo; Rico is the toughest and has a very powerful machinegun exclusive to him; Hakka is more accurate with the very common Helghan assault rifle and can use his Helghan nature to open alternate paths.), Templar has none beside the ability to climb ladders (which Hakka can also do). He does start with the ISA assault rifle which is a good weapon, superior to its Helghast equivalent, but it's ammo-starved for most of the game.

* ''VideoGame/TeamFortressClassic'''s Pyro is largely an inferior Soldier, with a Napalm Launcher and Incendiary Grenades that are mostly straight-up worse than the standard equivalents. In exchange, she has a flamethrower, which plays VideoGameFlamethrowersSuck as straight as an arrow: its afterburn damage is a whole 8 points, in a game where most characters have ''at least'' 75 max health before taking armor into account. It may [[InterfaceScrew obscure the opponent's vision a bit]], but other classes can do the same thing by just, you know, ''killing'' the enemy. There's something gone wrong when the dedicated short-range specialist struggles to kill someone while using their primary weapon on them at point-blank range...

[[folder:Idle]]
* ''VideoGame/ArmoryAndMachine'': The Inventor Class tree is generally seen as the worst of the three class trees by far. All its attacks are [[CripplingOverspecialization adept at destroying shields but don't do much at all to health]], and you need to reduce enemy health to zero to beat them. Furthermore, it's overshadowed by the Hunter Class Skills which [[ArmorPiercingAttack outright penetrate the shields]], while the Soldier skills deal enough damage to both shields and health. The only worthwhile Inventor Skill is Stun Baton, due to the immediate stun/interrupt without a casting time and relatively short cooldown.
* ''VideoGame/IdleBreakout'': Scatter balls aren't bad in theory, the idea of one ball splitting into others that deal 50% damage and go away after a hit is good, but the split balls (up to 10 for each ball bounce) cause so much lag slowing down your progress people don't bother buying them, sticking to Plasma and Sniper balls instead.
[[/folder]]

** Several champions (such as Soraka, Poppy, Heimerdinger, and Olaf) are generally kept at least somewhat weak in order to make sure that frustrating mechanics they utilize stay out of the game (at least until they receive a [[AuthorsSavingThrow rework]] to make their mechanics less frustrating to face.) This has led to hate from the fanbases of those champions--especially when other first-type Tier Induced Scrappy champions are given more careful nerfs and stay in the spotlight longer.

* ''VideoGame/CityOfHeroes'' had Defenders sit in this seat for a while. Their poor damage and ally-focused abilities made them virtually impossible to solo. Their array of supportive and debuffing abilities made them useful in groups, but Controllers had access to the same powers (just as slightly later levels when early level powers tend to be the most often used) and in most cases they were just as effective. Most archetypes had two useful powersets, whereas Defenders damaging powers were considered dead weight. The Vigilance ability made them somewhat more soloable, the secondary disabling effects on their offensive powers were increased above the Blaster's, and the numbers on their powers were tweaked to make some of them better than the Controller's, but in general there's still not a whole lot of reason to pick a Defender over a well-built Controller.
** Stalkers were generally regarded as low tier due to being mostly focused on ambushes and single target attacks. The problem was that while they did have a strong opening attack their overall damage lagged behind that of Scrappers and Brutes which combined with the fact that single target damage just wasn't that useful compared to [=AoE=] damage.
** Several individual powersets also held this seat at one time or another. Some notable examples include:
*** Electrical Blast, due to it not really being very good at much of anything and its secondary effect of draining endurance wasn't any good unless you drained an enemy's endurance completely, which you needed enhancements to accomplish most of the time, which in turn took up slots that could have been applied to accuracy or damage.
*** Storm Summoning, because its high number of knockback and scatter effects were unfriendly towards groups, in a power set revolved around supporting teammates. They have one of the best debuffs in the game, Freezing Rain, but it causes enemies to run away from the center of the effect...in a game where [=AoE=] damage is king, this is a bad thing. Oh, and the later added Cold Domination took Storm Summoning's debuffs, so Storm Summoning lost its good powers to a vastly easier set.
*** War Mace and Axe for Tankers, until it got a long awaited buff. They lacked a powerful single target attack, instead relying on stunning or throwing their foes around. Other Tanker powersets either had a powerful attack that also stunned their targets, or the powerset used a rarely resisted damage type (Energy Melee was KING with Fiery Melee close behind) compared to smashing and lethal.
* In ''VideoGame/EverQuestII'': Which classes are low tier tends to change with expansion packs, as each one usually comes with a whole bunch of new skills that may balance (or unbalance in the opposite direction) the classes.
** Brawlers in general. They don't tank as well as warriors or crusaders and they can't DPS as well as Shadowknights (evil crusader). Bruisers (evil brawler) are favored over Monks (good brawler) because their DPS is better, and raid battles requiring a brawler are common enough that most raid forces stock exactly one Bruiser, leaving Monks out of luck.
** Druids in general, due to being frailer than clerics and shaman. Most raid forces stock one Fury (evil druid) for its buffs, but Wardens (good druid) are just out of luck.
** Defilers (evil shamans) tend to be favored over Mystics (good shamans) because Defilers have stronger base heals, and although Mystics have stronger base DPS their DPS output is still a drop in the bucket in a raid. They're also better at curing detrimental effects and debuffs than Mystics. There was a brief period shortly after the ''Destiny of Velious'' expansion was released in which Mystics had far better DPS than Defilers, leading to Mystics becoming the favored shaman subclass - but statflation brought Defiler DPS back in line with Mystic DPS, and their stronger heals and better cures put them back in favor.
** As shown above, character classes come in "sub-classes" (originally a Good version and an Evil version). Frequently one of the subclasses is highly favored over the other. A relevant example: Berserkers specialize in being able to tank multiple targets. Guardians can get hit by a truck and live through it. The latter is much more useful than the former in most situations, and Guardians are much more likely than Berserkers to find a raiding guild.
* ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyXI''
** [[DragonKnight Dragoons]] did not fare well on their debut. They had some great ideas, such as specializing in piercing weapons, increased accuracy, and having a Wyvern as an ally that attacks alongside the Dragoon, effectively giving extra attacks. The problem was, the Wyvern could only be summoned once every two hours, and could very easily be killed, leaving just a sub-par spear-user having to wait for its Wyvern to be summonable again, coupled with the fact Dragoons have one of the worst equipment pools in the game for a melee damage dealer. What this ended up doing was caused Dragoons to be the least popular of the melee classes, with them easily being passed over for Samurais and Dark Knights instead. Fortunately, a patch changed the Dragoon's ability so that it had a better 2-hour ability and could summon their Wyvern every 20 minutes, but even so, it took ''years'' for the Dragoon to climb out of the scrappy-hole the early game placed it in.
** [[TheBeastmaster Beastmasters]] were this when first introduced. Their pets, which made up most of their damage output, were classed as party members which meant that the game took them into account when calculating experience gained from defeating enemies, meaning experience parties with one in had much slower experience gain. This was later patched to only apply if their pet is a higher level than the master but the stigma stuck for a long time. However, even after the patch players tended to level up in higher-level areas meaning there were usually no pets for them to use in the zone anyway. This was later fixed by introducing summonable Jug Pets however by this time [[PlayerKilling they had gained a much more sinister reputation]] so many players outright refused to invite them to groups out of principle on top of their old stigmas still being present.

* While mesmers in ''VideoGame/GuildWars'' are quite good in PlayerVersusPlayer, where shutting down a single character is very potent, they are generally unpopular in PlayerVersusEnvironment where it's much more useful to kill entire groups while the tanks keep them busy. A change to the skill Panic that turned it into an area affect spell that shuts down whole groups by has somewhat fixed this, but they are still much better for harassing healers or single opponents as elementalists and dervishes will ''always'' nuke groups faster than a mesmer ever could.
* ''VideoGame/StarTrekOnline'':
** The light cruiser is this. Many remember this as the USS ''Reliant'' from ''Film/StarTrekIITheWrathOfKhan''. However, compared to the KDF's B'rel Bird of Prey and the Romulan Republic's T'liss Light Warbird, the Light Cruiser has nothing special to it. Klingons and Klingon-allied Romulans usually fight these things as mooks as well. What makes this worse is that, for five dollars real money, you can either get [[Series/StarTrekTheOriginalSeries The TOS Constitution]], [[Series/StarTrekEnterprise the NX-01]] or an ''Oberth''-class Light Science Vessel. All three net you special items and can get you set up for the class of ships you want to take up.
** The other is the Exploration Cruiser Retrofit, its Fleet variant and the Dreadnought Cruiser. All three are essentially the U.S.S. ''Enterprise''-D from ''Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration''. All three are amazing tanks... and that's it. They have poor turn numbers (which especially hurts the Dreadnought Cruiser, as it can utilize heavy hitting, but narrow ranged, Dual Cannons) and lack in DPS-granting skills and items. This is even more apparent with the release of ships like the ''Avenger'' Battle Cruiser, which does the things the two ships can do, but so much better. It's no wonder players have been trying to get Cryptic to change it.
** Thanks to power creep, outside of premade PVP teams healboats and tank builds basically have no role because A) even the flimsiest tacscort can usually pack in enough self-heals to last well enough against {{NPC}} attackers, and B) DeathIsASlapOnTheWrist. Thus, if you aren't meaningfully contributing to DPS you're basically just slowing down the team. This is at the core of the PR problems of the ''Galaxy''-R and Star Cruiser, both of which are engi tanks with limited tac powers.
** The KDF ''Bortasqu[='=]''-class got dumped in the "fail" column mostly because it's altogether too different from the rest of the KDF lineup. The Klingons tend to build smaller, faster ships that can use dual cannons well, but despite being called a "battle cruiser" like the Vor'cha and its cousins the Bort is basically a Starfleet engineering/tactical MightyGlacier with the serial numbers filed off. It can mount [=DCs=] but on launch couldn't turn well enough to use them properly[[note]]this was later mitigated by the addition of the fleet dilithium mine, which contains high-grade turn-boosting consoles[[/note]], so the majority of KDF players used to the faction's many zippier options found they often had to reskill to use it competently. The Romulan ''D'deridex''-class has a similar issue, especially since the free one comes right after the much zippier ''Mogai''-class. In the hands of a skilled captain, though, the double-D proves DifficultButAwesome.
** If someone is at that point, a player can consider the entire Tier III set of ships this by the reasoning that by the time they reach Level 20, "Temporal Ambassador" is available and you can obtain the ship from those missions there instead. However, they don't mesh with everyone's playstyle: The KDF's ''Kamarag''-class in particular is more of a tank than the DPS boats that make up the rest of the lineup.
** The Romulan and Reman Prototype space set. Nine times out of ten, if you see any piece of this active, it's only the shields and that's because it's an item you earn for completing a certain mission. Most players use either the four sets from the Omega Task Force set or the two that can be earned by missions (Jem'Hadar and Breen). However, the ship weapons are loved by all, especially the Hyper-Plasma Torpedos mentioned above.

** Melee tanks for the bulkier classes like Bounty Hunter, trooper, Sith Warrior, or Jedi Knight. They are already bulky and can take hits well -and may even be tanking. Ranged tanks at least can put more damage before dying, so simply put, it may be better to just use a damage or healer companion.

** The steward droids, C2-N2 and 2V-R8 for all Republic and Empire classes respectively, universally are hated all around, and are only useful for sitting in the ship as crafting mules.
* The JU-87, aka the Stuka in ''VideoGame/WarThunder''. Also known as a free kill, these planes are slow, have weak armor and can't climb. The dive bomber versions have pitiful guns and at best they get to drop their bombs before the much faster fighters swarm them. The tank hunter variants, while armed with a pair of devastating 37mm cannons carry very limited ammo.

* ''VideoGame/WorldOfWarcraft'':
** Mechanics and changes to balance have rendered nearly all classes and specs functionally useless at some point or another. For example, changes to how healing worked and the rate at which players do damage at the beginning of ''Cataclysm'', which tended towards players taking heavy damage in relatively short periods of time and heals being weaker overall rendered Restoration druids, who are built around heal-over-time effects, completely unfeasible in [=PvE=] until the first patch.
** Classes and specs whose mechanics have a large luck component, such as Fire mages, can be this. Blizzard has made steps in recent expansions and patches to make them more reliable, but the difference between a player performing well or poorly in one of these classes can still easily come down to how generous the random number generator feels during that particular encounter.
** When the game first came out, ''most of the specs in the game'' were this. Each class was typically pigeonholed into one spec or point combination (Druids into Resto, Paladins into Holy, Mages into Frost, etc), simply because many of the specs either didn't work properly or were completely broken and had awful mechanics. It didn't help that the gear available in raids typically wasn't kind for caster classes, and the wonky threat mechanics for bosses meant that only certain classes and specs had a chance to tank and not get everyone instantly killed. Fortunately, most of this was patched out.
** Mentioned in High Tiers, Covenants in ''Shadowlands'' generally have Kyrian and Night Fae as the dominant choices for most specs, to the point that it's easier to list the ones that ''aren't'' good or decent paired with the latter. Meanwhile, Necrolords and Venthyr both have decent Soulbinds, but less versatile Signature Abilities and several Class Abilities that are underwhelming or situational at best (pre-9.2 Vanquisher's Hammer, Deathborne, Adaptive Swarm, Death Chakram, Flayed Shot, Fallen Order) or useless at worst (pre-9.0.5 Conqueror's Banner, pre-9.0.5 Fodder to the Flame, pre-9.2 Impending Catastrophe) that pale in comparison to what other Covenants have to offer.

** The bonus characters (awarded for purchasing other games by the same developer) tend to be looked down on, due to them being tiered considerably lower than their non-bonus (that is, only require buying ''one'' game) counterpart. The only exception is QP Dangerous, who is considered only slightly worse than regular QP but still usable. The absolute worst bonus character, though, is Aru Scramble, who desperately relies on her hyper card to be able to do ''anything'' of interest over regular Aru. Like Flying Castle above, her hyper isn't even good, and because of the nature of the game, it's entirely possible she'll simply never get it - in which case, her role is basically a punching bag for the other players. And like Flying Castle, she's unanimously considered bottom tier.

[[folder:Pinball]]
* Whenever ''Pinball/GameOfThrones'' comes up in tournament play, you're not going to see that many people picking House Baratheon or House Lannister. House Baratheon allows the player to more easily reach Wall Multiball--in that it requires lighting both of the rollover switches on the upper-right 5 times instead of the other houses' 6, by far the smallest benefit of any of the houses. House Lannister, however, is a case of CripplingOverspecialization: it gains Gold faster than the other houses, but Gold is used only to redeem for bonuses in the shop, which is only occasionally open and the goodies available are [[RandomNumberGod randomly chosen]]. All of the other houses have substantial benefits that extend over the entire game or multiple smaller benefits.
[[/folder]]

* Diddy Kong certainly gets the short end of the stick in ''VideoGame/DonkeyKongCountryTropicalFreeze''. Dixie Kong's abilities outshine Diddy's in every possible way, since Dixie Kong's ponytail hover can actually increase height like a delayed double jump while Diddy's jetpack only maintains height. Meanwhile, while Diddy's jetpack can increase swimming speed underwater in short bursts, Dixie's ponytail spin allows her to push against strong currents (the only way to reach some secret areas). And while Dixie Kong's [[CombinationAttack Kong Pow]] yields Gold Hearts, and Cranky Kong's Kong Pow yields Banana Coins, Diddy Kong's provides...[[MeaninglessLives Red Balloons]]. Which are usually rendered moot when the former two increase your Life Meter and can be used to purchase items including balloons, respectively.

* ''VideoGame/JazzJackrabbit 2'' has three playable characters with all the expansion packs. Jazz had a super jump that would let him reach high areas. The same command for Spaz was a flying kick, so Jazz's helicopter ears were replaced with a double-jump to compensate. Lori had Jazz's helicopter ears and Spaz's flying kick...meaning she had no way to bypass certain areas where a normal jump wasn't quite high enough. Players were not pleased.

* Oddly, ''Franchise/SonicTheHedgehog'' himself is sometimes considered the scrappy amongst his woodland friends, if only because he doesn't have any truly unique abilities like the others. This is particularly prominent in the ''VideoGame/SonicAdvanceTrilogy'', where the levels are really designed to take advantage of the other characters' abilities, and Sonic's ability to grind rails feels mostly tacked on. To give an example, in ''VideoGame/Sonic3AndKnuckles'', we have Knuckles' ability to glide and climb walls, Tails' ability to fly/swim, and Sonic has the ability to use extra shield abilities. The elec shield's double jump and bubble shield's bounce jump give you more height, but are inferior to Tails' flight, the fire shield's air dash is inferior to Knuckles' glide. And in case you think this might at least make Sonic the jack-of-all-trades of the game (which isn't a bad guess at first, since he jumps higher than Knuckles), the fire and elec shields instantly break on contact with water, or after one hit. Sonic has the ability to become invincible for a few frames in midair, but it's DifficultButAwesome at best, since the timing is very precise. Inverted in ''VideoGame/SonicRush'', however, where it's Blaze the Cat who can't keep up with Sonic due to her lower top speed and weaker boost; she has a much longer mid-air dash, but it kills her momentum and the stage design doesn't have enough shortcuts in high-up places to make up for those shortcomings.
* Patrick in ''VideoGame/SpongeBobSquarePantsBattleForBikiniBottom'' suffers from the lower end of the spectrum in terms of playability. While [=SpongeBob=] has a wide arsenal of versatile abilities to use and Sandy has excellent platforming abilities, Patrick is considered gimmicky due to his moveset being mostly focused on throwing things. His default attack (a belly bump) has a small range and hitbox, making it impractical to use, and Patrick is the only character to lack any jump assists, which makes him a poor choice for platforming in general. His only useful ability is his GroundPound attack (a ShockwaveStomp that insta-kills smaller robots and stuns larger ones, which makes the latter able to be picked up and thrown) but many players prefer to opt for the simple solution of just killing them while they're down. It doesn't help that most of the levels that Patrick's playable in either barely utilize his abilities or utilize his abilities in the worst ways possible (like the Kelp Forest), which makes most players play as [=SpongeBob=], who can clear obstacles where Patrick isn't needed. The ''Rehydrated'' remake addresses this by giving Patrick the same jump assist ability as the others, though his moveset as a whole is still fairly unimpressive in comparison.
* Wario is the least useful character in ''VideoGame/SuperMario64DS'' as he has mediocre jumping and running abilities in comparison to the rest of the playable cast, and good speed and jumping ability is a must for a platform game like it. His only real advantage above everyone else is his raw strength that's required for certain stars, though that doesn't really mean much as other characters can take out most enemies just as fine, making him very situational.
* Michaelangelo and Raphael are this in the NES ''VideoGame/TeenageMutantNinjaTurtles'' game due to their short range. Leonardo's wide swings excel at fighting small enemies and deflecting projectiles, and Donatello's powerful attacks are good for tougher enemies and bosses. The best use for Mikey and Raph is taking shots so the other two don't have to.
* As mentioned in WebVideo/TheAngryVideoGameNerd's review, the Tin Man is this in ''Literature/TheWizardOfOz'' SNES game. You see, despite having some decent attacks, he has one fatal flaw. He can't jump, at all. In a platformer, aka a game that's almost entirely about jumping. This means with the exception of the battle against the WickedWitch (where his attack can JUST about reach her), he's pretty much entirely useless for at least 99% of the game.
* While cute, Mouse-Man in ''VideoGame/WonderBoyIIITheDragonsTrap'' can be a painful experience as his hit-detection radius is, appropriately tiny, and this problem is made even worse if you [[NotTheWayItIsMeantToBePlayed accidentally bring him across the Underground and into the Samurai castle]] instead of Lion-Man. The enemies, especially green Oni monsters, will make mincemeat out of you.

[[folder:Puzzle Games]]
* ''Videogame/MarvelPuzzleQuest'' has loads of characters, and quite a few are hated for not stacking up. Many are remnants of the first year(s) of the game who were either nerfed or never improved, while others are new additions that don't warrant being in the highest power levels (while the game still receives new characters, often two a month, the last time they weren't 4* or 5* was in 2017).
** One-Star has both Venom (who can only stun with his Symbiote Snare ability when it's maxed out, otherwise it does nothing more than creating Web Tiles), and Yelena Belova (has only two abilities, which are too expensive to justify her a roster space of her own). Although they're quite annoying in the computer's hands, as the characters are scaled to levels the player itself can't achieve.
** Two-Star has Bag-Man, who's for all intents and means a JokeCharacter - Spider-Man in a humiliating costume with three expensive and mostly useless powers. Along with the above mentioned Yelena, he's not retrievable through tokens, as players often complained on them being a waste of recruiting chips.
** Three-Star has Sentry, which ever since he was nerfed to reduce damage became an unreliable two-edged sword, as all of his abilities damage either himself or his teammates. (Iron Man Model 40 used to be hated before the devs reworked his attacks to cost less and drain less friendly AP; and Spider-Man Classic was well-liked at first, became outclassed once his stun and ally healing became more widespread, but returned being useful once he got a hard-hitting attack in place of his healing ability)
** Four-Star has both Emma Frost (expensive abilities, two of whom don't even work right away, for being multi-turn repeaters, and another which just boosts her damage and fortifies special tiles) and Talos (one useful but expensive stun, and two useless abilities that don't deal direct damage).
** The least liked Five-Stars are Hulk (Bruce Banner), and Wasp, deemed as gimmicky and hard to properly use.
* In ''Pokemon VideoGame/{{Picross}}'', the Fairy type becomes this, in stark contrast to most other games in the series (where it's a high-tier scrappy instead). Their diamond-shape reveals wind up revealing almost nothing, will never clear rows, are completely outclassed by the abundance of other reveal types, and if the RNG decides to drop a Fairy-type reveal in the corner, it'll lose as much as ''three quarters'' of its already low efficiency. Tellingly, the only Fairy-type {{Olympus Mon|s}} (Xerneas) is outclassed by Flygon in Picross, and Flygon isn't even close to the best Ground-type in the game, and Ground isn't even the best reveal type - that honor goes to Fire. In the main games, while it's not a JokeCharacter by any means, Flygon is nowhere near the PurposefullyOverpowered level of the likes of Xerneas.
* In ''VideoGame/{{Tetris}}'', the I piece is highly valued and can be used in almost any situation effectively. This, however, is not the case in ''VideoGame/TetrisTheGrandMaster'' and ''Tetris: The Grand Master 2'', where the I becomes the most hazardous piece to use in the game. When the game reaches maximum gravity (that is, pieces effectively spawn already on the stack), in order to be able to rotate an I in a horizontal orientation, the space underneath the third block from the left must be clear, or else it cannot rotate. This means if you set up a shaft on either side of the playing field to put the I in so you can score a Tetris, but forget to give a horizontally-oriented I some room to rotate, you'll probably end up plugging the shaft up with the piece instead. Many a Master run that surpasses level 500 or T.A. Death run has been ruined by a player who thought they could rotate the I into a vertical position to make Tetrises, but couldn't. You can see some graphical elaboration [[http://tetrisconcept.net/wiki/TGM_Guide#Uses_and_misuses_of_the_I_piece.2C_parti_I:_rotations here]].

[[folder:Real Time Strategy]]
* ''VideoGame/TotalWarWarhammer'':
** To a lot of players, the Dwarfs are without a doubt the weakest army in [=PvP=] because they suffer from CripplingOverspecialisation. Their entire schtick is heavily armoured, high leadership and good value-for-money heavy infantry (and some decent artillery and gunners to round them out and give them some reach) in a game where taking advantage of TacticalRockPaperScissors is a premium. Nearly every faction has a great armour-piercing anti-infantry unit who will carve through a Dwarf battle line like a chainsaw through tapioca - basically any infantry unit with great weapons, savage orc units for the Greenskins, wraith units for the Vampire Counts, etc. To make things even worse for the Dawi, their only anti-cavalry unit are the Slayers, who are still slower than cavalry and may even die first from being counter-charged because they have no armour at all, meaning your only option is to hope your gunners and artillery can soften up the enemy cavalry enough to repel them. They were ''heavily'' buffed, however, in a Mortal Empires update, which not only gave them truly ridiculous staying power by heavily increasing every one of their unit's mass, a new elite Slayer unit that's ''far'' more effective at anti large, and a general increase in stats. They are still not top tier, but there nowhere near the bottom anymore.
** Empire Pistolliers are almost as notoriously poor as Slayers. Whereas Marauder Horsemen [[DemonicSpiders are widely and rightly feared]], Pistolliers have laughable range and killing power, and not only that but the [=AI=] is seemingly incapable of using them; they rarely even get any shots off. Later patches (and the second game) boosted their damage output to something more reasonable, and now they're a solid mid-tier unit, especially for their cost.
** The worst candidates for Legendary Lords are Gelt (Empire) and Kemmler (Vampire Counts). Not only are they both terrible in melee combat (being wizards) but Gelt's unique Lore of Metal is the worst spell list in the game, and with Kemmler costing an extra 200 gold and having an almost identical spell list and statline to a regular Master Necromancer, and at least the Master Necromancer can take a Barded Nightmare mount to help keep his squishy wizard behind out of melee; you really may as well take the Master Necromancer and put the money elsewhere. A later patch alleviated this issue by reworking Lore of Metal to be better and giving Gelt a few powerful campaign bonuses, plus Gelt is still popular with players because of his AwesomeEgo: the same cannot be said for Kemmler, who is still waiting for a promised campaign revamp(ire) and has the ''Old Friend'' feature to summon Krell as a stop-gap (but then people are much more scared of [[HeroKiller Krell]] than they are of Kemmler).
* ''VideoGame/TreasurePlanetBattleAtProcyon'': The Warsloop is considered the worst ship in the game; it has less firepower than the Procyon Sloop, less armour than the Pirate Sloop (despite the Pirate Sloop being a modified civilian Sloop), and is more expensive and slower than both. To top it off, the Royal Navy's own Torpedo Boat is faster, much better armed and is less than half the price of the Warsloop. For these reasons, the Warsloop is rarely ever selected in open skirmishes by players.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Roguelikes]]
* ''VideoGame/TheBindingOfIsaac'':
** Eve and Samson get hit with this the most (especially Samson, who's even less popular than [[spoiler: ???]], the actual JokeCharacter of the game.) Both are built around powering up by taking damage, in a game where taking damage is something you usually want to avoid at all costs, and Eve's most powerful initial ability, Whore of Babylon, doesn't kick in until you're at half a heart of red health, and the game forces you to use it by giving her an abysmal attack stat otherwise (fortunately, if you amass a ton of Soul Hearts, you can try to find a Blood Donation Machine and drain your red health until Whore of Babylon kicks in, but it's a rather annoying method of safely using it.) Samson, meanwhile, also starts with a terrible attack stat, but it beefs up when he kills an enemy... and then reverts when he leaves the room, making him worthless against most bosses. Even worse, he starts out with only one red heart and one soul heart, pretty much making him a worse Judas. Fortunately, ''[[UpdatedRerelease Rebirth]]'' buffed the two by making Eve's Whore of Babylon activate at one red heart, and giving Samson more starting health and reworking his attack boost, making it trigger on taking damage instead of when killing an enemy and extending its duration to the entire floor.
** Invoked with ''Rebirth'''s [[JokeCharacter secret unlockable character]]. [[spoiler:The Lost, who can fly but is a OneHitPointWonder that cannot upgrade his health in any way]]. He was, above all odds, ''{{rescued|FromTheScrappyHeap}}'' in ''Afterbirth'', which allowed the player to unlock [[spoiler:the Holy Mantle as a starting item for him, letting him take one hit per room]] and making him into a LethalJokeCharacter.
** Lazarus is rarely picked out of preference, due to sharing a fate similar to pre-''Rebirth'' Eve and Samson, starting off with low stats and his only saving grace being starting with an ExtraLife. The post-resurrection stat boosts only serve to bring Lazarus' stats actually only up to par with Cain, and the Devil counterpart of Lazarus' Rags, Judas' Shadow, gives vastly superior boosts upon resurrection and most players aim for Devil Rooms instead of Angel Rooms. While his revive doesn't kick you out of the current room, he revived with one heart container, which means making a comeback is hard anyway if you saved it for later, so many people would just kill themselves as fast as possible while they had little heart containers to lose. He finally received a major buff in a ''Repentance'' patch, now letting him revive once ''every floor'' while only losing one heart container each time, and giving his risen form a higher damage multiplier than [[GlassCannon Judas]].
** The secret character added to the ''Afterbirth'' DLC expansion, Keeper. His gimmick is centered around having "coin hearts" where all forms of normal health are converted to friendly blue flies and he instead heals by coins. The problem with this is that, with the exception of one item (that was not added until the ''Afterbirth+'' expansion), he never has more than two coin hearts. This places him close to death at all times, and due to the way health works in this game, many items are rendered useless or unbuyable[[note]]the latter is in the case of deals with the Devil, which permanently remove heart containers until a health upgrade brings them back up. In Keeper's case, he'll either be killed outright or left a OneHitPointWonder[[/note]]. He also starts with a really bad firing rate, and unlike most other characters, has no real interesting starting items or abilities aside from a triple-shot to make up for the large number of setbacks. ''Repentance'' buffed him significantly: his max HP has been increased to three, taking damage no longer lowers his chances of devil deals, and devil deals in question are bought with money rather than taking away his heart containers.
** Lilith's main mechanic is that she is supposed to be a [[TheMinionMaster "summoner"-type character.]] She's blindfolded, which is normally only in Challenges and shuts off tears, and she relies on familiars to do damage, which she can duplicate with her starting active item Box of Friends. She starts with the familiar Incubus, which fires what would be a character's regular tears and can be duplicated along with other familiars. Unfortunately, for every good synergy Incubus has, there are plenty of bad ones -- Mom's Knife is a boss-shredder as everybody else but with Lilith it's much harder to aim, Maw of the Void loses its black ring attack and instead just becomes a damage up, some items flat-out do not work, etc. And most of the familiars in the game just aren't very good, to the point where one is better off ignoring them, as they would make breaks in the Incubus chain and make it harder to hit enemies with multiple Incubi. Box of Friends can also only be used on average once every four rooms, meaning that outside of those rooms -- and if the player swaps out Box of Friends for another active item -- she's effectively left as a regular character who just fires tears from an awkward set back location and can't make use of certain items, making hitting enemies annoying. [[ThisLooksLikeAJobForAquaman She's wonderful in Boss Rush and in Greed Mode because the waves there fill the active meter, meaning that she can flood the room with familiars,]] but outside of those situations and certain rare synergies she is at absolute best divisive.
* ''VideoGame/FTLFasterThanLight'':
** The Slug B ship, [[AwesomeMcCoolname The Stormwalker]], which is a boarding-oriented ship. The catch? It has no starting medbay, and all three of its starting crew are Slugs, which are average boarders at best. The idea is to use Healing Bursts to recover your Slugs so they can keep fighting, but Healing Bursts use missiles, happen to be your only means of recovery (which means post-battle recovery will consist of wasting ''another'' missile), if your Burst misses you will have to beam your boarding team out, and if your missiles run out, you're screwed. Early game tactics involve making a mad dash for the nearest store so you can purchase a Medbay, which costs 60 scrap.
** The Engi B ship, the Vortex, starts with one Engi crew member, and its weapons consist of a Heavy Ion and a Heavy Laser. You can depressurize every room except the cockpit to stop fires and hold off boarders (especially in conjunction with your Anti-Personnel Drone), but if you get boarded in the cockpit (especially if the boarders happen to be Mantis), you are in a ''lot'' of trouble, as Engis have halved combat damage and leaving the cockpit will drop your evasion to 0% unless you have the cockpit upgraded to have an autopilot, and even then your evasion will remain nearly nonexistent unless your engines are maxed out (though the Advanced Edition improved the autopilot). As for the weapons, the Heavy Ion takes a long time to charge, and if it misses, you won't be able to use your Heavy Laser on anything unless you're up against an unshielded Auto-Scout or are in an asteroid field with a one-shield ship. The slow recharge rate of the Heavy Ion also means that if you don't find another gun to help supplement it, you're basically dead when you start facing enemies with 2 shield blocks, since even with maxed out gunnery skill, the ion damage on shield will dissipate before another ion shot hits. It also starts out without sensors and, unlike the other ships in this category, doesn't even have a real late-game advantage in form of a great weapon or special ship-property.
** The Stealth B ship, DA-SR12. Like the Stealth A ship, it starts with a cloaking device and the shield system must be purchased separately for 150 scrap. Its main differences are that it has only level 2 engines instead of level 4, has level 2 cloaking, and its only weapon is the [[AwesomeButImpractical Glaive Beam]], a beam that does 3 damage per room, but takes ''25 seconds'' to charge (about 23 if you have a zero-level gunner) and uses 4 bars of energy. Even the Federation Cruisers' Artillery Beam fires faster when maxed out. If your weapons and/or your cloaking get hit in the early game, your best choice is simply to restart.
** The Stealth C ship, Simo-H. ''Unlike'' its sister ships, it lacks a cloaking device, instead opting for a special version of the Shield Overcharger that takes less power and charges up slightly more rapidly, an Anti-Drone, and a third slot for drones, being the only non-Engi cruiser with that many slots for drones. However, the Shield Overcharger+ only puts out 1 bar of Super-shielding, the ships that only have one weapon are few and far between, and you can't keep both the Shield Overcharger and the Anti-Drone powered at the same time without spending precious scrap to upgrade the Drone Control and your reactor, and you obviously need that to buy a set of Shields for the ship. It can be powerful later on, but the other Stealth Cruisers can reach that same level of power much more easily.
** The Federation Cruisers. Their Artillery weapon (beam or flak) takes a long time to charge (making it often useless until fully upgraded) and occupies a valuable system slot, especially when compared to Advanced Edition systems.
** As far as crew examples go, [[PunyEarthlings humans]]. They trigger no blue events, [[MasterOfNone have no special abilities]], and are only effective in combat when against Zoltans or Engi. Slugs have the same stats as humans, but also have telepathy (which was further improved in Advanced Edition) and can trigger blue events. The Advanced Edition mercifully gave them [[HumansAdvanceSwiftly slightly faster skill progression]] and a new blue option.
[[/folder]]

* While nearly every NPC in ''Franchise/BaldursGate'' has some kind of utility, there are a few characters who are lower tier by virtue of being inefficient in their roles, and are outclassed by better options:
** From the [[VideoGame/BaldursGate first game]], [[SpoonyBard Garrick]]. Bards are a niche class in general, but Garrick has very poor stats on top of this, with poor Intelligence and Constitution and mediocre Strength and Dexterity. This hurts his utility as both a front line fighter and supporting mage. Even if you desperately want a bard (and don't feel like rolling one yourself) he's outclassed by Eldoth, who also isn't fantastic but has a extremely useful niche in his ability to craft poison arrows for free. By contrast, Garrick's unique niche [[SacrificialLamb is being a good choice to get chunked by Drizzt]] as part of a bug to get him stuck in a pond, [[GoodBadBugs making it easier to kill him for his equipment at low levels]].
** From ''VideoGame/BaldursGateII'' there's Cernd. For starters, recruiting Cernd is tedious, since he's only accessible as part of a long quest in an out of the way locale that you can only find by talking to a fairly non-descript NPC. He is a [[OurWerewolvesAreDifferent Shapeshifter]], a druid kit that grants the ability to change into a werewolf, normally a very powerful enemy. Unfortunately the werewolf that Shapeshifters turn into is weaker than normal ones, and lacks many of their special abilities. So not only is his werewolf form not all its cracked up to be, but even if you ignore this ability and leave him untransformed, he's still pretty bad. Shapeshifters cannot wear any armor, AT ALL, and his stats are also extremely bad, with positively atrocius Dexterity and Constitution. His AC will be absolutely terrible as a result, meaning he's toast if he draws any sort of aggro. He can end up being a powerful caster at later levels, but many players just don't feel the need to bother with him.
** The Enhanced Editions added some new characters to both games. One is Rasaad, a monk. Monks are hard going at lower levels, but with some potions and equipment he can be made usable. He's better in ''VideoGame/BaldursGateII'', as characters begin at and can reach higher levels in that game, but he's still seen to be more trouble than he's worth due to needing a lot more special equipment to be effective than other damage dealing classes. To add insult to (literal) injury, he can't wear helmets, preventing him from protecting himself from critical hits. On harder difficulties, critical hits can "chunk" characters, making them explode into chunks and killing them off for good. Unless you save scum a lot, prepare to replace him on many a playthrough.

* Half the party in ''VideoGame/BreathOfFire'' would count; you'll find very few players who don't use Ryu, Nina, Bleu, and fused Karn as their party all game, unless you need one of the other party members' field abilities briefly. Bo suffers due to CantCatchUp - his spells are very useful when he joins, but they eventually become obsolete and he never learns any more, leaving him with only his physical attacks (which pale in comparison to those of Ryu and fused Karn). Gobi has mediocre stats all around, and his spells [[CripplingOverspecialization only work underwater]], and there's barely anything to even do underwater once the Prima sub-arc is over. (However, he can at least set up shop in Prima and Tunlan, which is the only way to obtain some of the best equipment in the game, so he at least has some out-of-combat utility.) Ox hits hard and can take a lot of damage, but is [[MightyGlacier very slow]], so the rest of the party has likely killed the enemies before he can move, and he has almost no AP to get any use out of his few spells. Mogu is the worst-off of all - he starts off with poor stats and severely underleveled, and while they do grow decently well, his HP will always be lousy, and he never learns any spells except Dig; even his physical attacks don't compare to Ryu or Karn's. And unlike the other three previously mentioned characters, who are all at least part of Karn's fusion forms, Mogu can't even do that, leaving him sidelined for good.
* Nina and Garr are often considered the weakest characters in ''VideoGame/BreathOfFireIII'', mostly because the other four characters are just that much better. TheHero Ryuu has powerful dragon transformations and excellent all-around stats. Rei has simply insane speed and decent attack stats and can [[spoiler:turn into a weretiger]] whose damage output rivals other characters spamming their best attacks with no AP cost and his main weakness in this form (increasing chance to attack party members instead of enemies) can be countered with a UselessUsefulSpell. Momo is extremely versatile and can be easily set up as a powerful physical attacker AND support mage. Peco is NighInvulnerable due to having the highest HP and defense and an innate HP regeneration, plus he has respectable attack power and an insane counterattack rate, making him the ultimate tank. This leaves the other two characters in the dust. Nina's specialty is attack magic, which is nearly useless against bosses in the second half of the game, due to their high magic defense and elemental resistance as well as the fact that all attack magic has a set damage range and never gets any stronger, and she's also the frailest character in the game. Garr has the highest base attack power in the team, but he also has almost no [[ManaPoints AP]] to work with; the other members of the team can more than make up for their lower strength by using powerful skills like Shadowwalk and Aura to hit much harder than Garr can with normal attacks. He is also the character with the lowest AGL stat in the game, which translates to never getting any extra turns, although that can be remedied to a degree with the Chain formation. His hidden Accuracy stat is tied for second worst with Peco (at 90), while Momo's hidden Accuracy stat is the worst (at 70).
* ''Videogame/ChronoTrigger'' has two characters who are low tier Scrappies. This does ''not'' include Marle - she's over in Mixed Tier.
** Magus. Sure, he's totally badass in-universe, his stats start out high, his spells all really ''look'' cool, he can hit all four elements, and he's got great Magic and Magic Defense. But he gets no Dual Techs at all, his two Triple Techs are merely okay, and all of them just deal damage as opposed to having any other effects. There's lots of other ways to tickle the damage cap that don't involve three characters. On top of that, each of these Triple Techs requires one of the party members to sacrifice their accessory slot for an item to merely enable use of the tech. So if you like making heavy use of dual and triple techs, Magus' utility is surprisingly limited. Players who do use Magus like to equip him with a Golden Stud and cast Dark Matter constantly, trusting that he'll have an easier time staying on his feet than Lucca - those who don't point out that the damage multiplier for Dark Matter is lower than the multiplier for Crono's Luminaire and Lucca's Flare, meaning that if all characters are at maxed out magic power he'll be the weakest of the nukers.
** Robo has three main drawbacks - he's slow compared to the other tanky characters (Crono, Frog and Ayla), his magic defense is the worst in the game[[note]]technically, Ayla's is worse, but she can equip the Prism Dress for a big magic defense boost and Robo can't[[/note]], and his magic power is weak as well. This is especially glaring late in the game, where bosses spend the majority of the fight using powerful full party magic attacks. If Robo is buffed up with Speed and Magic Tabs, he can be a powerhouse, but his low magic defense is still an issue and some players just don't like to bother with him.
* ''VideoGame/ChronoCross'', having many characters, naturally has a few of these. Or rather, it could be said that only a relative few of them ''aren't'' these.
** There are a few plot important characters who, when you finally get them, turn out to be surprisingly average, and thus useless. Lord Viper, Radius and even the deuteragonist Kid are the main examples here - they're entirely mediocre across the board.
** The amount of energy a character gets when waiting for other actions is a prime factor for who gets sidelined, simply because it means that they need to wait longer to act again. The standard is to get back one action point for each action point someone else spends. However, some slow characters get 0.9 instead of 1.0 - and without a speed-improving accessory they're pretty much dead weight unless you can guarantee that the other two characters can do a complete combo after - and that is hardly guaranteed. For some reason, this hits red innates more frequently. There are a few characters with a faster than average speed of 1.1 - but compared to being slower than average, being faster than average is pretty useless.
** As a rule of thumb, for each of the six innate colors, there's going to be a character with great attack, and a character with great magic, and other than those two, most characters are going to be on permanent bench warming duty.
*** Take Green innate for example: Glenn has spectacularly high physical attack and solid magic, and assuming you have him, he's going to be your go-to green innate. Razzly has poor physical attack but great magic, and if you need magic more than physical attack, she's your go-to. Of the other Greens, Karsh is the definition of OvershadowedByAwesome - he's one of the better characters in the game with high attack and adequate magic, but still worse than Glenn in every way. Sprigg's utility is that any monster she finishes becomes available for the monster fighting minigame, but she's not that great a character. And then Radius is average at best and Van, Turnip and [=NeoFio=] are three of the worst chracters in the game with both their attack and magic being sub-par.
*** Yellow as a color suffers from having fewer good options than other colors. Norris is a solid choice with above-average attack and adequate magic, but nothing spectacular. Zoah and Leah are both powerful but slow physical attackers - they both fall afoul of the 0.9 thing mentioned above - with terrible magic. Lord Viper, Funguy and Poshul are mediocre across the board. Sneff has above average magic and a good magic grid, but he "balances" that out with below-average attack and a terrible Level 5 Tech that randomizes one teammate's hitpoints to anything between 001 and 999. Mel is one of 3 characters who can steal items, but has low attack and a weapon with low accuracy. She's also never available at a time when you don't have one better thief in the party. Mel could have been the much-needed Yellow mage since she has the highest magic stat of her color, but is held back by having very few slots on her element grid.
*** Blue on the other hand has more good options than most colors. Orlha is arguably the 3rd best character in the game behind Serge and Glenn, with physical attack on par with Serge and no speed reduction. Fargo is almost as good, plus he can steal. Marcy has above average attack and magic, Leena and Irenes are both great mages. Pierre is a FakeUltimateHero who spends most of the game as a ''deliberate'' low tier, but in the end game, should the player find all three Hero Artifacts and equip them on him, he suddenly becomes a powerhouse. Korcha is the only other blue low tier scrappy, and he's more average than bad, he just gets a lot of fan hate because he's annoying and wears speedos.
*** Red in general has no great options ''or'' terrible options. Zappa, Draggy and Greco are all powerful but slow physical attackers who fall afoul of the 0.9 speed thing. Deuteragonist Kid is surprisingly mediocre with average at best magic and below average attack. Janice, Orcha and Macha are, like Kid, just mediocre. [[MsFanservice Mikki]] is probably the best red character, with good magic and decent attack, but she's still not much compared to the really good characters.
*** White's issue is that main character Serge is so much stronger than every single character in the game, having S+ tier attack ''and'' magic, that he overshadows all the other white innates. Steena and Starky are both solid choices and Riddel is a great mage, but excluding a plot-important boss fight for Riddel there's no reason to have them in the party when Serge is around. Doc, however, would be low tier anyway, with below average attack and mediocre magic.
*** Black has Skelly and Mojo, two of the worst characters in the entire game. Luccia has below average attack and above average magic so she isn't terrible, but if you have either Harle (better attack and magic) or Guile (way better magic) in the party there's no reason to use her. Then it has Grobyc, who has great attack and awful magic, and Guile, the only mixed tier character in the game due to his magic grid getting bigger as he gains levels. Also during the time Lynx is in your party he overshadows everyone the same way Serge overshadows the white innates.
* The Demon Hunter has become this in recent patches of ''VideoGame/DiabloIII''. High-damage weapons are rarer and weaker than they are for other classes and the damage boosts from skills are fairly modest[[note]]The damage boosts for the Demon Hunter's skills have been largely unchanged from the initial release, while most other classes have seen theirs doubled or even tripled. [[/note]], so actual damage per second is artificially low. A lack of synergy between skills, two separate resource pools, and a nerf to Dexterity[[note]]Dexterity is the demon hunter's main and highest stat; it dictates dodge chance for all classes as well, but changes to dodge mechanics mean that even a high dodge chance isn't that useful[[/note]], means the Demon Hunter dies easily and has very few usable builds.
* ''VideoGame/DragonAgeOrigins'':
** Sten is considered the worst companion because he'll only have one [[PrestigeClass specialization]] while the other humanoid characters get 2, and he has nothing to make up for it like Shale and the dog do. Bottom line, it's best to bench Sten the second his Approval maxes out.
** Oghren wouldn't be here if the deck wasn't stacked against him. You must complete "A Paragon of Her Kind" to unlock him as a companion, which is usually agreed to be the hardest main quest in the game, so most players don't get him early enough to keep his skill and talent points from being spent in unwanted areas. Because he can't be optimized as well as the companions you get far earlier, this leaves Oghren undesirable as a party member come late game. ''VideoGame/DragonAgeOriginsAwakening'' averts this by introducing a purchasable SkillPointReset tome, allowing every companion to be optimized no matter how late they're acquired.
** The SecretCharacter, [[spoiler:Loghain Mac Tir]]. He's built to be a defensive shield-using warrior, but because he comes so late in the game, his stats will inevitably be allocated poorly just like Oghren and he'll be a substandard tank in comparison to Alistair who you've had throughout the game [[spoiler:and whom Loghain will replace if recruited.]]
** The Shapeshifter specialization is agreed to be the worst because the animal forms disable the use of other spells, leave you a sitting duck because you take precious seconds to transform anyway, and the forms use a stat formula to determine their power. Compared to the Fade Sequence's instant transformations with useful powers and stats based on the form itself, Shapeshifter looks even worse. Even taking this into account, it'll be difficult to compete with the healing spells from [[WhiteMage Spirit Healer]], and the GameBreaker spells from [[CastFromHitPoints Blood Mage]] and [[MagicKnight Arcane Warrior]].

* The ''VideoGame/DragonQuest'' franchise has several:
** ''VideoGame/DragonQuestII'' had the Prince of Cannock. In the NES version, his lack of gear selection had him as the worst character in the game. His stats were quite poor as well, often dying in a few hits. This no longer applies to him in the SFC remake onward, as his gear selection and stats have considerably improved.
** ''VideoGame/DragonQuestIV'' has Borya. While he has decent buff moves, he fits the SquishyWizard trope to a tee. His low ranking is ''not helped'' in the NES version: due to ArtificialStupidity, he will spam ice spells on monsters who are already resistant to ice instead of buffing his party members. This problem was rectified in the remakes, as he can now be manually controlled by the player.
** ''VideoGame/DragonQuestVIII'' features this with some of the weapon skill points:
*** '''Fisticuffs''': Available with everyone, but aside from Yangus and Jessica, it's considered an absolute ''waste'' of skill points. Fisticuffs is really the only way you can make Morrie, Angelo, and the Hero useless, but:
*** '''Yangus''': Scythes and Clubs. For most of the game, Axes are the only reliable weapon for Yangus, and the abilities lag behind in performance. Humanity as well, which gives him a hilarious attack at the end but in general, he's better off just punching or chopping enemies up.
*** '''Jessica''': ''Knives''. Jessica's the weakest attacker in the game, and Knives gives her access to swords but doesn't give anything with stupid-high multipliers (like Twin Dragon Lash, but only in the [=PS2=] version). Why train her to use swords and stab things when she can deal way more damage casting Kafrizzle or twin-dragon lashing?
*** '''Red''': Whips. Sure, Twin Dragon Lash was super overpowered in the [=PS2=] version, but the 3DS version gave it a significant {{Nerf}}. She may be more equipped to use whips than Jessica, but why would you ever [[OvershadowedByAwesome do that when you can give her what is essentially a free Multithrust/shot attack]] instead? And since Fans let her be able to resurrect someone (Very great as she's the fastest party member), there's really no reason to pick this over Fans or Roguery. (Even though [[AwesomeButImpractical Fire in the 'ole really isn't worth it]].)
* The ''Franchise/FinalFantasy'' series usually has at least one of these in each game, and sometimes many more:
** The Thief in ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyI''. With no Steal ability and no Magic, with weaker attacks than both Fighter and Black Belt, significantly worse defense than both, and not enough of an evasion boost to compensate, he's the least useful Hero of Light to hold an Orb. He can be upgraded into a Ninja and gain some Black Magic, but even that isn't as useful as the White Magic gained by the Fighter's upgrade into a Knight. His main function is to serve as a means of easy escapes in low-level runs due to the game's bugged and exploitable running calculation.
** Every GuestStarPartyMember character in ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyII'' besides the legitimately useful Minwu, due to the game being designed such that the party members join at low levels, and that the game's EXP gain requires micromanaging of individual battle actions and is complicated and time-consuming. This especially affects the Dragoon Ricard and the Dark Knight Leon, who join the party so late and are with you so briefly that they never get the time to be anything other than a corpse for your by-this-point-total-death-machine permanent party members to drag around.
*** Fixed somewhat in the remakes. There is some added endgame content, which allows you to visit more locations and net each character's ultimate equipment. Thus, you have more time and opportunities to properly build Ricard and Leon. Ricard also appears in the ''Dawn of Souls'' spin-off, alongside other [[spoiler:deceased]] characters from the original game, and he shines in comparison with relatively weak Minwu and Josef.
** The Geomancer class in most appearances. Geomancers can cast decently powerful magic without cost, but their spells are [[LuckBasedMission determined by the terrain you're standing in]], so half the time they're worthless. A notable exception to this rule is the Geomancer job in ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyV'', which levels easily and provides multiple passive perks, and includes the "Gaia" command, which is much more often than not a powerful attack. The same also applies to the DS version of ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyIII'', but both are quickly OvershadowedByAwesome.
** Berserkers are about as unlucky as Geomancers. TheBerserker's gimmick is usually that they start in permanent Berserk state, increasing their stats but limiting their options to AttackAttackAttack Generally, the damage a Berserker deals isn't that much better than various other combat jobs, and it doesn't make up for the loss of control. In ''V'', for instance, Rapid Fire invariably deals a lot more damage than a Berserker could ever hope to, especially when combined with Spellblade or similar skills.
** ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyIII'' has the addictive-but-bad-for-your-health Scholar class, with the lowest Vitality in the game, and therefore the lowest HP growth. The class is pretty effective in battle, with surprisingly good elemental books as weapons and the ability to read enemy weak points, which makes it all the more annoying that using it for anything other than brief periods of time can permanently screw up your characters' HP growth and make your characters useless by late game.
** ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyIV'':
*** Edward, the TropeNamer for SpoonyBard, fits right in here. He's very underpowered in combat due to his low strength and reliance on {{Useless Useful Spell}}s. Even in the GBA remake, where he can get a lot more levels and more powerful songs, he is still the least useful character to have along in any given situation. Does not apply to the DS or PSP remakes, however.
*** In the remakes, you can swap out anyone but [[TheHero Cecil]] with any of the former {{Guest Star Party Member}}s (excluding the one who actually died). By the time you're delving into the post-game BonusDungeon, Cecil himself is a MasterOfNone who lacks the versatility of your spellcasters and has slower speed and/or lower strength than the other non-casters. It isn't helped by how his InfinityPlusOneSword can have its damage absorbed by some enemies or have its random Holy spells reflected right back at your party.
*** Rydia's Goblin, Mind Flayer and Bomb summons have a tiny drop rate and virtually no utility.
** ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyIVTheAfterYears'' has quite a few examples. The Eblan Four are all sub-par compared to Edge and have extremely limited Band abilities. Calca and Brina are even weaker and their abilities are entirely random. Harley's abilities are {{Useless Useful Spell}}s, her stats are abysmal, and most of her limited Bands require poor party combinations.
** ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyV'':
*** The bonus classes added in the Advance port. They're obtained very late, at the point in the game when you've probably long since switched your characters to Freelancers. Their best abilities are excellent, but take hundreds of AP to learn. The Oracle is particularly useless, with no ability to equip elemental-boosting weapons and his/her Predict ability having the potential to kill your party. The Cannoneer's Combine is excellent, but with three types of ammunition, 400AP of grinding before you unlock it and very little game left to experiment, you'll never get to play with it very much. The Gladiator's ability to equip any type of blade is handy, but your Freelancers can do that happily already.
*** The Dancer can definitely quality. It has the worst stamina and HP, very low strength and agility, has little in the way of weapon selection as they can only equip knives, which is not a very good weapon at that, and they don’t have enough armor selection for justifying their low defense stats. The only upside is they are the ''only'' job that can equip ribbons, but few players bother.
** ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyVI'':
*** Cyan is slow as molasses, has the worst magic stat in the game, and his Bushido techniques require you to sit and wait several seconds while you charge up the meter, during which time the fight is still ongoing and the rest of your party can't enter commands. While some Bushido moves deal decent to strong damage, most are various [[UselessUsefulSpell status effects]] and a low-power LifeDrain, which are only moderately useful in general and worthless against bosses. [[GoodBadBugs Psycho Cyan]] aside, he's mostly useless. He ''can'' be made more useful with a few specific strategies (saving his turns until you've selected moves for the other characters in the party, charging Bushido while the [[OverlyLongFightingAnimation animations]] happen, partnering him with characters who do not require command inputs, play the iOS version where you can give commands while he charges Bushido) but few players bother.
*** [[OptionalPartyMember Gogo]] can't equip Espers. In [=FF6=], having an Esper equipped on a character gives an additional bonus stat growth when that character levels up -- a bonus that Gogo can't take advantage of. His stat growth will fall further and further behind the rest of the party as their levels increase. In essence, Gogo is a textbook MasterOfNone; the only skill he has to have is "Mimic," and he can be given any other command, even character-specific ones. But because his stats are so low, and there's no reliable way to increase them, no matter what you have him do, he'll do it badly.
*** Umaro, whose only strategy is AttackAttackAttack. As he's in a permanent Berserk status, Umaro randomly selects one of three standard attacks with varying damage output, or uses an ice attack that hits all enemies. He can't learn magic, can't change his equipment except for Relics, and his two better attacks are each unlocked only if he equips a specific relic in one of his two Relic slots, so once you have those he can't change his equipment at all without weakening him.
*** Setzer's a MasterOfNone whose Slots ability has the potential for a lot of useful effects, but in practice has odds so skewed as to allow him to summon a [[ConsolationPrize useless Lagomorph]] roughly nine times out of ten. Even if you're cheating by rapidly pausing and unpausing the game until the slot shows exactly what you want, the wheels are generated by RNG and so useful combinations are usually not possible. (Unless you know enough about how to exploit the glitch-riddled RNG to set up the wheels to allow for unblockable instant death spells every battle, after which he becomes more useful... but ''FFVI'' provides more convenient glitchy instant death spells that take a lot less trouble to set up. And [[TheGambler Setzer would not approve]] of being [[GameplayAndStorySegregation made into a cheat]], anyway.) You can give Setzer a relic that changes his Slots to an attack based around literally throwing money away, which makes him more useful but at the cost of giving up a slot (and at the cost of, well, your money). He's not as good at magic as the mages, not as strong as the physical fighters, not as fast or as useful as Locke (who shares his ability to equip full-damage-from-back-row weapons), and not as powerful a JackOfAllTrades as Terra and Celes. He's useful in some gimmicky situations like using his random-damage Dice weapons to hit evasive enemies (Cactuars, mainly), but that's it.
*** While Strago's magic stat is good and his Lores can be useful, they're not as good as the equivalent spells, and one of which can be ''able to glitch Shadow's helpful and adorable CanineCompanion out of existence''. Acquiring the skills requires extensive, irritating backtracking, as recruiting him is the last thing you do before the DiscOneFinalDungeon and TheEndOfTheWorldAsWeKnowIt. On top of that, his stats aside from the aforementioned magic are poor across the board.
** ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyVII'':
*** Cait Sith has poor stats apart from his good Magic and only learns two Limit Breaks, as opposed to the seven that most other party members can learn, severely limiting his utility compared to them. Both are based on gambling, meaning they're very unpredictable. The first, Dice, is decently powerful when you first recruit Cait Sith, but all it does is attack a single target for a mediocre-to-decent amount of physical damage. The second, Slots, is a lot more powerful, but also has a non-trivial chance of causing unblockable instant death for your entire party, something many players prefer to avoid. However, once you fully grasp how Slots works, they destroy any pretense of balance the game has. Unfortunately, this is DifficultButAwesome and something most players don't even fully know is possible.
*** Vincent's stats are lousy, even worse than Cait Sith's, although the ability to keep him in the back row compensates for his fragility somewhat, and he has one of the better Magic stats in the game. Unfortunately, his Limit Breaks turn a back row SquishyWizard into a physical attack-slinging Berserker. He is only capable of learning four Limits as opposed to seven, and all of them transform him into a monster, leaving him uncontrollable and slinging one of two attacks at random. It doesn't help that you have to set up his transformation in advance due to the way the Limit charges, meaning that despite each one being associated with an element, you can't respond organically to ElementalRockPaperScissors in each battle. And now you can't use any of the spells you've loaded him up with - have fun if you were using him as your only healer. A particularly cruel application is that the signature attack of Vincent's first Limit is a Fire-element attack, and that Fire is absorbed by the boss encountered immediately after the point in the game where you recruit Vincent. Many a player decided to test out their cool new character's cool Limit Break for the first time on the Materia Keeper, only to discover Vincent now healing the boss for thousands of points of damage every turn, and it not being possible to make him stop. In spite of this, he still manages to be one of [[EnsembleDarkhorse the most popular characters in the FF series]].
** ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyIX'': While the characters themselves ''are'' good, some take a lot of work to make useful:
*** Eiko, a BrattyHalfPint combined with a SquishyWizard that in the long run isn't very useful. Of the two summoners in the game, Eiko has only half as many potential summons as the other option, [[TheChick Dagger]]. Worse, Dagger has most of the best summons, including the GameBreaker summon Ark (if you know how to get it), so Eiko doesn't even have quality over quantity. This also means that Eiko needs the Boost ability to compete, which costs a whopping twelve ability orbs -- and she has the lowest orb gain in the game (and, as a result, the lowest overall orb total), which means buying Boost leaves her lagging in almost every other area. Even though she's the only character to get the [[BackFromTheDead Full-Life]] spell, there are plenty of easier ways to revive characters, such as Amarant's Revive and Dagger's Concentrated Life (has almost same effect as Full-Life). The sequences where you are forced to use her are basically just so you ''will'' eventually use her, instead of ignoring her altogether. The only thing Eiko has over Dagger is that she learns Curaga sooner, and two of her unique summons (Carbuncle and Phoenix) can be quite effective and practical. Plus she gets Holy - a pretty effective nuke, but really, Vivi and even ''Dagger'' are more consistent nukers than Eiko.
*** Amarant, who [[LateCharacterSyndrome is the last character to join you]] and as a result, will be pretty far behind. His strength, while high, lags behind Steiner's, and unlike Freya, Zidane, or even Quina, does not gain an ability whose damage you can cheese through other actions. He has advantages in the forms of Chakra (free MP restoration), Aura (auto-life and regen), and a stellar Trance that allows him to do this to the entire party, but coming so late means a lot of people will pass him over. At least he also learns his abilities much faster than the other party members, which helps make up for his late joining time.
*** Freya and Steiner. While you get a good amount of use of them through Disc one and two, they leave for an extended period of time - meaning they will be ''far'' behind Zidane, Dagger, and Vivi (who you use the ''most'') in terms of abilities&level. On the other hand, they ''do'' pay off when they rejoin permanently in Disc 3.
** ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyX'':
*** Kimahri usually falls into this trap. He doesn't have ''bad'' stats, but every other party member is highly specialized, and the game's combat system takes this specialization into account in terms of difficulty, which leaves poor Kimahri a MasterOfNone. And since the game allows the player to swap in characters from the bench at will, if you run into a situation where a specific type of ability is needed, the character who specializes in it will always be available (unless the character is actually absent for plot reasons). This makes Kimahri's flexibility completely unnecessary until the post-game.
*** Once Yuna has traveled to the end of her part of the Sphere Grid and starts going into Lulu's, Lulu ends up being sidelined by many players, since Yuna has the stats necessary to cast the black magic spells that Lulu is supposed to specialize in ''and'' is the only character who can cast summons, effectively making Lulu redundant until the post-game. Not helping matters is that Yuna’s ultimate weapon is ''much'' easier to get than Lulu’s, adding for more reasons for her to be in the list.
** ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyXII'': In the original version, Fran falls into this for some, due to being a MasterOfNone. She has the lowest stats across the board, and unlike the rest of the party (and MasterOfAll Vaan), she lacks a single stat in which she particularly excels, so both her physical damage output and magical abilities will be average at best. It doesn't help matters that, despite using bows as her default weapon, she has the slowest action time with them out of the party. In ''The Zodiac Age'', likely in response, Fran's stats are tweaked to be better (she actually grows to have the highest Vitality of all the party members at level 99) and she mostly loses this status.
* In general, pregen characters in ''VideoGame/FreedomForce'' are built around what makes thematic sense rather than what avoids giving characters glaring weaknesses. This doesn't work out too bad for characters like [[SuperSpeed Bullet]], who even when nerfed for the sequel just gets a "fast metabolism" that makes him weak to acid and radiation. However, it absolutely ''screws'' [[RecklessSidekick Liberty Lad]], who has both the melee focus you'd expect from a kid with something to prove and the pathetically low HP you'd expect from, well, a kid. The sad thing is that, rather than making him a GlassCannon or giving him a high dodge rate, the designers decided to let him use ''grenades'' as well as punches--and then they gave him a horrible hit rate that usually meant those grenades exploded harmlessly against a wall thirty feet behind the target. It's not surprising that, despite being a fairly interesting character, he went from being plot-important in several missions in the first game to being the first, easiest-to-get, and admitted weakest of the optional characters in the second game.
* ''VideoGame/FrontMission3'' had the character of Linny Barilar. He might count as a joke character, though, since his introduction specifically shows him as pretty weak and even the other characters view him as dead weight.

* ''VideoGame/KnightsOfTheOldRepublicIITheSithLords'':
** The Disciple, who joins your party if you play as a woman. He's a pretty unspectacular fighter, his "special ability" is making medpacs on request (which is more or less guaranteed to be obsolete by the time you get him, because you will already have access to the Heal power), and the reward for gaining influence with him is 500 XP and training him as a Jedi. By contrast, if you had played through the game as a man, you would have gotten the Handmaiden, who is, bar none, the single best hand-to-hand fighter in the game and who can train you to apply your Wisdom bonus to your Armor Class (manna from heaven if you are playing as a [[GlassCannon Jedi Consular]]). Oh, and you can also train ''her'' as a Jedi, too. Consequently, the Handmaiden has become so popular that later works have established that the game's PlayerCharacter traveled with the Handmaiden, even though the PC is canonically female. This is partly a result of the rushed release of the game: the Disciple ''was'' going to have a proper counterpart to the Handmaiden's granting of the Wisdom bonus to Armor Class perk, but the accompanying quest ended up being unfinished by the time the game was released (and not fully voiced, either, so very few of the cut content restoration projects brought it back in). Additionally, the Handmaiden was [[WhatCouldHaveBeen intended to join anyway]] - and at one point was a counterpart to Visas Marr.
** Bao-Dur... but only in combat. He is useful as a great utility class though. Even though you can train him as a jedi, he can't actually wear Jedi robes (which give the most benefits to the class).
** [=G0-T0=] is easily overlooked by players because of his uselessness. [=G0-T0=] is good with skills? [[UtilityPartyMember T3-M4]] has a higher Intelligence score and is far better with skills. [=G0-T0=] has a personal cloak? Atton has stealth and can have Stealth Run, [[SuperSpeed Master Speed]], Critical Strike and Sneak Attack. [[GunsAkimbo [=G0-T0=] can use two blaster pistols at once?]] So can Mira and she has ranged combat feats [=G0-T0=] can't get AND she can have Force powers. [=G0-T0=] has the unique [[CharmPerson Scramble Droid ability]]? Any Jedi can cast Destroy Droid.
* ''VideoGame/LegendOfDragoon'' gives us Kongol. He has a huge wall of health and hits for a lot of damage, but the problem is, the role of physical attacker and health tank can be accomplished by Dart (who is locked in the party), while just about everyone else except Shana and Miranda can do a good amount of physical damage anyway. Kongol is slow as molasses. What's more, he has only three additions - other characters have four to six - and two of them give so little Spirit Points that he's liable to reach dragoon level three after the rest of the party hits level five. And his ultimate addition has the lowest multiplier of any at only 300%[[labelnote:*]]Most final additions have a multiplier between 400 and 500%[[/labelnote]], holding back his godly attack. He also has ''very'' poor magic defence and his magic attack stat is junk; not to mention his magic is largely worthless anyway as there's only two wind bosses after he joins the party and both are optional. The final nail in the coffin for Kongol is that his dragoon spirit is optional - if a player doesn't know how to get it (and when it first becomes available), they'll go the entire game without getting it and he'll get it [[EleventhHourSuperpower in the last dungeon]] - meaning he has no way to build up his dragoon levels.
* Josette in ''VideoGame/TheLegendOfHeroesTrailsInTheSky'' suffers from crappy stats, being a physical fighter in a game that favors magic/arts (her orbal slot has two branches just like Estelle's), relatively useless crafts and S-crafts unobtainable until players clear a minigame along with its upgrade which requires her to be present in a specific location in storyline.
* Elise from ''VideoGame/TheLegendOfHeroesTrailsOfColdSteel'' also becomes this. While she can be useful with her relatively high arts damage, she has limited usability[[note]]She joined Rean early in the game but then leaves shortly after[[/note]] once every other playable characters becomes accessible late-game since she only has to crafts; one for healing (which Eliott can do) and one for small line damage (which lots of characters can do). People only use her as Phantasmal Mirror holder, an artifact to chance playable character into one of five secret characters.
* ''VideoGame/LiveALive'' has [[PsychicPowers Akira]], very likely the worst character in the final chapter. Stat-wise, he's a MasterOfNone, but that's just where the problem starts. His attacks cover huge areas and inflict status ailments, but they're also far too weak for the area of effect to matter and [[UselessUsefulSpell status ailments don't matter in an RPG like this]]. Worse, those area of effect spells are some of the slowest in the game and his melee attacks do barely anything. Almost no one uses him for anything but his personal dungeon and his mind-reading power to find some extra info. In his own chapter, he seems very strong; it's not until you try to use him in the last chapter that you realize that that was because his chapter has overwhelming numbers of enemy formations with a weak leader surrounded by strong flunkies, the one thing Akira's weakish long-range wide-area attacks are good for. Naturally there's almost none of that in the last chapter.
* Mack in ''VideoGame/LostOdyssey''. He's a hybrid character whose shtick is that he can use [[StatusBuff Spirit Magic]] naturally - implied to be a rather rare ability in-universe. Unfortunately, if you ever need spirit magic, you can just equip an accessory that allows it on a character, thus making him entirely useless once you get more than five party members, as a fifth party member will be able to take hits and give hits better. That said, [[SugarWiki/FunnyMoments the fact that he outdamages several grown-ups at age five]] and even takes better hits than some of them is somewhat hilarious - especially during a particularly [[ThatOneBoss annoying boss]] wherein ''he'' is the main source of damage.
* ''VideoGame/MarvelFutureFight'' has Hulkling, who is often considered the "worst character in the game" due to generally lackluster attack, speed and skills, as well as a measly ''one second'' invincibility frame. His T2 offers a 25% chance to get immunity to all damage when getting hit... and it lasts 2 seconds. But wait, this 25% chance can also allow Hulkling to remove any debuffs from himself... for 5 seconds. And then wait ''20 seconds'' for another 25% chance to get 2 seconds of invincibility and 5 seconds without debuffs. Not exactly efficient, right? As a result, Hulkling even has his own (bottom) tier in the popular Reddit character ranking.
** Elektra used to have a similar reputation. Her maximum physical damage was less than 10 000, she had no uniforms, no 6-star skill and the skills that she did have were terrible. However, in 2017, she marvelously got completely re-worked, including getting a Netflix show uniform eventually. Now she's a decent average character, arguably better than Daredevil himself.
** Gamora. For "the most dangerous woman in the galaxy", her damage is abysmal. Over the years, Gamora got two uniforms, one of which gives her 30% defense penetration. This is impressive on paper, since no other character before has gotten a buff like this, but Gamora is just so weak that even this is not enough to make her good.
** Drax The Destroyer and Blade, two badass bald blade-wielding killers, both suffer from low survivability. They're some of the easiest characters in the game to kill.
** Generally, a lot of early game days characters have fallen behind due to PowerCreep. This is especially prevalent in old villains, like Ultron, Kingpin, MODOK and Red Skull. They have ''some'' use, such as Kingpin's summons, but are still relatively weak compared to the majority of the characters and haven't gotten updates for years.
* ''VideoGame/MarvelUltimateAlliance'' has several characters who CantCatchUp to the other heroes:
** Elektra: no good attacks before level 22 and a FragileSpeedster.
** ComicBook/{{Blade}} in the first game, despite being a badass spike-throwing, [[KatanasAreJustBetter katana-wielding]], gunslinging, vampire hunter: He suffers from horrible energy management issues and never really gains any worthwhile attacks.
** Daredevil in the sequel: never gets any good powers and a mediocre fighter.
** Penance pre-Patch: supposed to be a GlassCannon, but a bug makes his powers stay the same as he takes more damage and he has horrid defense.[[note]]post-patch, he's a high tier in the [=PS2=]/Wii versions and average otherwise.[[/note]]
** Venom in the sequel: powers deal low damage and has low defense.
* From the ''Franchise/MassEffect'' series:
** Kaidan Alenko from ''VideoGame/MassEffect1'', due to being a Sentinel, falls head first into the MasterOfNone trap. He can handle crowd-control and tech-based debuffing, but there is nothing he can do that someone else can't do better. Ashley, Garrus, Wrex, and even Tali are better with weapons. Tali is much better with tech-based debuffs and even Garrus has a valuable one that Kaidan is missing. Liara has access to every crowd-control ability and, along with Wrex, has an extremely useful biotic debuff that Kaidan lacks. The end result is Kaidan frequently getting benched after the first mission in favor of the more specialized teammates. He was [[RescuedFromTheScrappyHeap rescued some]] as the game aged and some players realized that his wide variety of crowd control abilities were more useful than [[OvershadowedByAwesome he was initially given credit for]]. Sentinel was so terrible in ''VideoGame/MassEffect1'' that Bioware boosted it into a near GameBreaker status in the sequel.
** Jacob Taylor in ''VideoGame/MassEffect2'' has been criticized for this. Pull loses much of its usefulness on higher difficulties, his AI uses Barrier all the time even if there aren't any enemies around, his ammo power is shared with Grunt and Soldier / Vanguard Shepard, and he's generally less good at being a StoneWall or MagicKnight than Grunt and Samara, respectively.
** Jack is also given this on the higher difficulties for much of the same reason, although her Warp Ammo is considered extremely useful...to give to Shepard.
** Some of ''VideoGame/MassEffect3's'' multiplayer classes fall into this:
*** The starting Human Infiltrator is virtually never seen. This may have something to with the fact that it is OvershadowedByAwesome in more ways than should be physically possible; most players will agree that every other Infiltrator ''and'' every other default human character is better than it. Not having powers that synergize particularly well together, sharing two of its powers with the sturdier and Sabotage-toting Quarian Infiltrator, and having [[KillItWithIce Cryo Blast]] without a power that pairs well with it are particularly damning.
*** The Drell [[MagicKnight Vanguard]] has excellent mobility and a passive race power that gives higher damage bonuses than any other race. It's also quite fragile and has powers that don't really work together all that well, and does not have any specialized buildups such as the [[StoneWall Krogan Battlemaster]], [[CloseRangeCombatant Project Phoenix Ex-Cerberus]], and [[TeleportSpam N7 Slayer]].
*** The Talon Mercenary Engineer was the least popular of the final classes released in the Reckoning pack. It was built around use of a unique omni-tool weapon, the Omni-Bow, that was considered very underpowered; its special powers were and still are all grenade-based, leaving it dependent on waiting for a recharge and ammo stockpiles. And to add insult to injury, it had not one, but ''two'' infurating bugs attached to it on PC: resetting the players key bindings back to default every time it was chosen for a mission, and preventing the character from picking up thermal clips if the player chose both arrow powers. Granted they had Cain Trip Mines which were considered very powerful but this further underlined how broken in the worst way the character was that its central gimmick got passed over to play minelayer.
* Fefnir and Harpuia fall into this in the final ''VideoGame/MegaManXMavericks'' title. Unlike the other four party members, they lack a Variable Weapon System[=/=]Command Arts System, so they have to purchase their skills instead of getting them from bosses. Since the fourth game has a much greater emphasis on exploiting enemy weaknesses, this leaves them crippled until you buy their strongest moves, which can take quite a while due to their costs.
* Salsa from ''VideoGame/MOTHER3'' has attacks that are quite weak and he relies on the NPC Party member with him to do most of the damage (and the NPC's attacks are completely random), his special abilities are not really that great,[[note]]although knowing about Monkey Mimic can make the Pork Tank a bit easier[[/note]] and he has the misfortune of being placed in what is essentially a full chapter of grinding since he's so underpowered. He is playable briefly later on, but by that time he is [[CantCatchUp tragically underleveled to the point of being useless]]. However, Itoi makes him such a tragic character that most players end up rooting for him anyway, making Salsa something of a deconstruction. His weakness is also a deconstruction, he's enslaved by that NPC and being unable to fight off the random encounters of his own area is meant to show that forced servitude not just because the NPC won't let you get away, but because even if you could get away from him you're in no condition to fend for yourself.
* ''VideoGame/PaperMario'' series:
** Lakilester and Sushie are probably two of the most underused party members in [[VideoGame/PaperMario64 the first game]] due to their rather middle-of-the-road skillsets, particularly for the point that they're acquired in the story, being the last two party members earned. Sushie sees some use in Chapter 5 due to her water skills being effective against the Fire enemies there, and Water Block is a decent defense buff, but she falls out of favor later on due to the difficult action commands her higher-powered attacks require. Lakilester has the unfortunate fate of being badly OvershadowedByAwesome, lacking the attack power to make himself an offensive asset while also having a mediocre defensive skill. Parakarry and Watt both have moves with the same effect as either of his attacks, and Cloud Nine is much less reliable compared to defense boosts, since it relies on the RandomNumberGod being on your side ([[NotCompletelyUseless though stacked with the other evasion boosts on a Danger Mario build...]]).
** This is one of the reasons why Flurrie from ''[[VideoGame/PaperMarioTheThousandYearDoor The Thousand-Year Door]]'' is considered a [[TheScrappy Scrappy in general]]. She starts off with the sole advantage of being able to attack ceiling-bound enemies, but that is later taken by Vivian. Coupled with her lower attack power compared to other partners, many players don't see any point in using her for anything besides a StoneWall due to having high HP and her [[LifeDrain Lip Lock]] attack to keep her alive, [[NotCompletelyUseless even overlooking the potential that Gale Force has in some situations like dealing with Cortez's weapons]].
* Ryuji and Yusuke are both physical powerhouses in ''VideoGame/Persona5'', but Ryuji tends to be used far more than Yusuke for the party's physical hitter because Yusuke lacks Ryuji's optimization for physical attacks. Where Ryuji has a number of direct damage bonuses like Charge and Matarukaja to amp up physical area-of-effect damage, Yusuke only has Masukukaja to buff critical strikes and evasion, and his focus on extra single target damage from Baton Passes isn't strong enough to justify use over Ryuji. While ''Royal'' helped close the gap by overhauling the Baton Pass mechanic to greatly benefit Yusuke and the Jazz Club gives him potential access to Charge and Matarukaja, he's still largely redundant with Joker, who [[CantDropTheHero can't be removed from the party]], and Ryuji, who also received unique benefits like a full-party Charge skill and a passive that randomly boosts the party's physical damage.
* ''VideoGame/PhantasyStar'':
** Hugh from ''VideoGame/PhantasyStarII''. For one thing, he's supposed to be a specialist against biological monsters (as opposed to Kain's WalkingTechBane), but the sad truth is that biologics just don't have the high defense that mechs do, so ''any'' party member can effectively combat them, making Hugh redundant. It gets worse for him, though, because his available equipment is mediocre even compared to Shir, the party's ''thief''. It took the ''Generation:2'' remake on Playstation 2 to finally buff him into a viable combatant, and even that amounts to spamming his LimitBreak.
** Hahn from ''VideoGame/PhantasyStarIV'' before he learns Astral and Vol. Gryz is pretty useless and Kyra is a more mediocre version of Rune/Alys if it wasn't for Medice. Also, Demi despite having Medical Pwr and Phonon. All of those characters are temporary guests in your party until they come back for the final battle. Granted, while they're actually ''in'' your party, they're entirely well-suited for those fights, but at the end of the game you're just going to pick [[WhiteMage Raja]] anyway.
* Gepetto in ''VideoGame/ShadowHearts Covenant'' has the highest magic attack in the game, can boost his elemental power with Cordelia's dresses , and has access to some unique offensive spells. The problem is, nuking and healing is just about all he's good at - buffs are not affected by magic attack. The competition for the magic role is also in Anastasia and Lucia... who may have lower magic than Gepetto, but they ''also'' have higher speed and their unique abilities bring a ''lot'' of utility to the table. Lucia can buff the other three characters (Which ''stacks'' on top of the standard buffs) and increase the strike area of everyone's rings. Anastasia can EnemyScan, and some of the enemies she photographs give her spells that can increase the money obtained from battle, steal items or money, escape from battle, or flat out attack spells. The PowersAsPrograms system in ''Covenant'' also means that you can make just about anyone sans Yuri and Kurando have access to the buffs like Entrance, Gale, Rage, or Heal.

* ''VideoGame/TalesSeries:''
** Chester in ''VideoGame/TalesOfPhantasia'' will rejoin your party at the same level as you left him, likely meaning level 3-4 at best. He also learns very few skills and is overall more of a detriment to the party than anything else. This was fixed in later versions of the game, which have Chester level up very rapidly after he rejoins (due to training alone at night in order to catch up to everyone) and gives him more skills to work with.
** Prince Woodrow Kelvin in the original ''VideoGame/TalesOfDestiny'' started as a CrutchCharacter to keep you alive as you learned the combat system, but never gained any levels after you left the party, meaning he would join at level ''8'' when the rest of your party was around level 20. To make matters worse, his unique mechanic that allowed him to either equip a bow or a sword was poorly implemented and resulted in him only having access to half his skills at any given time. He wasn't even useful for exploiting elemental weaknesses, as Philia learned some wind magic and most of the enemies in the second half of the game resisted all elements besides Sound anyways. This was fixed in the [=PS2=] remake of the game, which gave the prince additional skills and removed the weapon requirement from them and had him join the party at a reasonable level.
** Johnny Sheeden was marred by learning no skills naturally and the AI being horrible at controlling him. However, should the player go out of their way to recruit him, find his skills, and control him manually, he becomes a LethalJokeCharacter as he is the only character who can cast healing instantly and the enemies in the later portion of the game are weak to the Sound element.
** Nanaly Fletch from ''VideoGame/TalesOfDestiny2'' is beloved character-wise, but in terms of combat capabilities was not very useful due to her arrows being hard to hit with and only dealing scratch damage (compared to very accurate and fast melee and very hard-hitting magic), as well as for only having one LimitBreak without relying on GoodBadBugs. This was fixed in the ''VideoGame/TalesOfTheWorld'' games she appeared in as well as in boss cameo appearances, and she is loved everywhere else.
** Colette Brunel in ''VideoGame/TalesOfSymphonia''. Colette, despite being TheChosenOne, is largely useless when AI-controlled due to ArtificialStupidity[[note]]Can be overcome by a creative player ''directly controlling'' her[[/note]].
** In ''VideoGame/TalesOfTheAbyss'', Natalia suffers badly from being OvershadowedByAwesome in comparison to Tear. Her single-target healing and buffing artes can be helpful, but unlike Tear, she doesn't get any multi-target heals without utilising [=FoF=] Changes, and lacks her helpful arsenal of offensive magic and ability to create Fields of Fonons. Her bow techniques have decent damage potential, but won't live up to the damage output or combo potential of the melee fighters. It doesn't help that most of her better artes will empty out her TP gauge very rapidly.
** In ''VideoGame/TalesOfGraces'', there's Richard, who is generally mediocre compared to everyone else due to his [[MasterOfNone lack of strengths]], and no effective way to heal anyone, not even himself. Pascal and Malik also have trouble with groups of enemies, and their strongest spells generally aren't worth the long charge-up times that come with them. Most players prefer to stick with the initial grouping of Asbel, Sophie, Cheria and Hubert due to their skills complimenting each other. Malik and Pascal take another hit from the Nova Barrier mechanic, where an enemy will take scratch damage until it's hit with a nova-element skill, after which it becomes vulnerable for a short time. Malik and Pascal have a single nova skill each, whereas the rest of the party have several, and most of the enemies late in the main story use nova barriers.
** ''VideoGame/TalesOfXillia2'' nerfed multiple characters, compared to its [[VideoGame/TalesOfXillia previous]] installment.
*** In ''Xillia'', Jude was a good back-up healer, an absolute LightningBruiser and could easily take things on himself. In ''Xillia 2'', his status as a good back-up healer was compromised by giving everyone a healing arte now and was made much slower, turning him into a MightyGlacier.
*** Leia is a strange case. She originally was a good single-target healer, a perfect CombatMedic and FragileSpeedster, but ''Xillia 2'' generally forces Leia into your party when you would much prefer [[TheMedic Elize]] at those times and her artes were severely nerfed. Contrary, though, her aerial game is incredibly mean and could keep even the toughest of bosses locked in the air for a good while. Except the AI is [[ArtificialStupidity too stupid]] to do so and learning to effectively control her that way can take a long time. There's also the fact that her Character Episodes are the least combat-focused ones, which gives her even less time to shine with her skills.
*** Then there is Alternate Milla. She controls basically like Milla herself, but lacks the ability to summon the Four Spirits of the Elements. While this makes her similar to how Milla played in ''Xillia'' for majority of the game, this leaves Alternate Milla as the ''only'' character in the party, who has no healing arte of her own. She also does not gain natural access to using a Mystic Arte. The only reason to keep her in your party, is to increase your usage of Spirit Shift for the three titles unlocked by using it a specific number of times.
* Llewelyn and Badrach in ''VideoGame/ValkyrieProfile''. Badrach is seen as being the worst of all the einherjar for his attacks' lousy accuracy, and Llewelyn isn't far behind. The fact that Badrach is a total {{Jerkass}} and Llewelyn is kind of a whiner who keeps reminding you how much he doesn't want to fight doesn't help matters either. Their main martial strength--[[RainOfArrows attacks that]] [[MoreDakka hit multiple times]]--can only really be useful on very large enemies because of the way their projectiles spread out as they attack. Since they spread out in the same set pattern every time regardless of the target, the bulk of their attacks will simply miss all but the largest of enemies. As they're two of the three dedicated archers in the first game (though [[BowAndSwordInAccord Lenneth can be used as one as well]]), they've given the class [[NeverLiveItDown a bit of a bad rap]].
** Badrach takes it one step further by having the lowest Hero Value in the game, at negative 111 points, which makes it difficult to potentially send him up to Valhalla and win Odin's graces (to add to that, an archer is recommended for sending up in Chapter 5, and you can only get Badrach in either that chapter or Chapter 4). Notably, the only other two characters in the negative-hundreds ([[BloodKnight Argrim]] and [[CardCarryingVillain Gandar]]) can't be sent up at all!
** Sorcerers can be utterly devastating in terms of attacks. However, you really only need one, and a large slew of them comes around the second half of the game. At this point, most players either pick Mystina (who's important plot-wise) or just pick someone else. Also, sorcerers partially defy the LinearWarriorsQuadraticWizards trope in that no spell is unique to one person; they can all learn the same spells. And again, some don't realize that the order you get them in is in ascending order of their base magical power, with Jelanda being the weakest and Lyseria and Gandar being the strongest.
** Lyseria and Gandar fall into this primarily due to CantCatchUp. While Gandar has the strongest base power and Lyseria is second, this is mitigated by the fact that Lyseria is recruited in the penultimate chapter, while Gandar is only in the final chapter. As each chapter has only a limited number of turns, this means that it's very difficult to LevelGrind them to the point where they can match the strength of Mystina, who is only a little less powerful but is recruited around the halfway point of the game. This can be avoided by Gandar in Medium difficulty (where he gets recruited at a high level), but Hard stars all recruits at level 1, compounding the problem (particularly for Lyseria, who only appears on that difficulty). They're a little more usable in the BonusDungeon (which does allow for level grinding), but they don't get much use there either because Lezard Valeth, the best mage in the game, is recruitable there.
** [[NiceGuy Kashell]] the heavy swordsman has the weakest [[LimitBreak Purify Weird Soul]] in the game and few combos, while [[TheAtoner Grey]] is weak and can rack up few hits, with his saving grace being high defense. While Kashell's attacks are better with Arngrim (and they can get a DiscOneNuke weapon), it's much easier to just pair Arngrim with a more capable warrior.
** The bow weapons themselves are horrible in the original game, with low attack output. The other two archers that are good (Lenneth and Janus) are only helped by their good attack stat and filling up the Soul Purification gauge. There's a grand total of two good bows in the game, and one of those is only available rather late (when Janus has almost certainly been sent to Asgard due to particular requirements that pretty much only he meets).
** Beating bows are, of all things, katanas. The two samurai you can get are better off equipping western swords.
** The useful(/less)ness of Archers in the series is {{lampshade|Hanging}}d in ''Covenant of the Plume'' - your first additional party member is an archer, who the protagonist tries to ditch. Another character points out she'll make a decent sacrifice if nothing else. She ''does'' end up being useful, however, since the Strategy RPG format makes range a more significant factor than in previous games. Of all the game's party members, it's the lancers who end up falling into this as lances just aren't a good weapon due to low attack power.
* In ''VideoGame/XenobladeChronicles1'', while each character has the potential to be a GameBreaker with a good combination of arts, gems, equipment, skills and player controls, the same can't be said about Sharla. While being a CombatMedic has its uses, her arts are lacking in both Ether and Physical (she only gets a red physical art in the mid-game and Thunder Bullet is the only offensive Ether art she ever has) and her talent art, Cool Off, is basically a reload that makes her vulnerable for five seconds. In other words, what she can do can be done better with [[JackOfAllTrades Riki]] or [[GlassCannon Melia]] and will be benched the moment you got her.
* ''VideoGame/XenobladeChronicles2''
** Shield Hammer Blades, one of the two tank classes, are universally some of the worst Blades in the game due to Shield Hammers having low damage, little access to Driver Combos, and very slow attack animations. The unique Shield Hammers are also given poor skills across the board, with Godfrey not even having useful field skills since all of his field skill slots are taken by his unique skills. Notably, DLC character Shulk uses the animations of a Shield Hammer but at twice the speed, and is one of the strongest Blades in the game.
** With 51 Rare Blades, naturally many of them fall into this category. The low tiers often go to Blades like Perun, whose abilities are built around having allies incapacitated, but don't make her strong enough to help against any opponent who can knock out her allies.
** Tora is the embodiment of MagikarpPower, as while when fully upgraded he can solo superbosses, the upgrade that lets him do this is only available by backtracking partway through the final dungeon to do a sidequest. For most of the game, he's limited to two Blades instead of three, and leveling up Poppi's forms requires spending an enormous amount of time playing a minigame. The payoff is eventually worth the wait, but during the story he's usually the first to get the bench the moment you have another Driver available.
** Zeke is a natural Attacker like Rex, but where Rex is the Driver of the Aegis and thus has a very powerful and reliable mandatory Blade, Zeke's mandatory Blade is Pandoria, whose attacks are powerful but slow. In mob fights he can end up drawing more aggro with his area attacks than he can handle, and against bosses his poor attack speed hinders his usefulness. He's also the last party member to join, meaning he likely won't have as many Blades to choose from. Pandoria eventually gets a SuperMode that makes her one of the game's best Blades and Zeke thus one of the best Drivers, but it takes even longer than Tora's final upgrade, as it's only accessible in NewGamePlus. However, Zeke is an example of MagikarpPower much like Tora; aside from Pandoria's aforementioned "Unleash Shining Justice" upgrade, Zeke is a ''fantastic'' Driver for some of the more elusive Blades like [[VideoGame/{{Xenosaga}} KOS-MOS]], [[VideoGame/XenobladeChronicles1 Shulk]], Corvin, Crossette and Dagas, but aside from Corvin and Crossette, many of them require extensive sidequesting and/or grinding to reach their full potential.
* ''VideoGame/XenobladeChroniclesX'' has Hope and Boze, both of whom have a poor set of arts to choose from. For [[PlayerCharacter Rook,]] you're hard pressed to see anyone stay as a duelist as it only has three passive buff spots. Thankfully once you max out the duelist class you can use it's weapons (the longsword and assault rifle) in other classes.
* Chu-Chu in ''VideoGame/{{Xenogears}}'' is weak, weak, WEAK. It's sort of funny, though, given that the sequence that reveals that Chu-Chu can go super sized has her [[CutscenePowerToTheMax utterly devastating a C-list villain]]. However, one thing that's interesting about Chu-Chu is that she is the only one that can directly heal the other Gears. Too bad it's for marginal amounts and certainly not worth sacrificing a ton of damage in the process. And then you notice that if you [[MagikarpPower feed it enough Drives,]] [[GameBreaker the stat increases carry over to its Gear-sized version...]]
* ''VideoGame/XMenLegends''
** Jubilee: Unlike other energy users, she doesn't have any melee-boosting passive and her powers are pretty lackluster. She disappeared in the sequel.
** Emma Frost: Her powers are never quite as strong as Jean Grey's and she lacks a team boost. It doesn't help that you're forced to use her in a few levels.
** Sentinels are fought frequently throughout the game, especially in the last levels. Unfortunately, all of them are either resistant or immune to psionic attacks, making your psychics less than valuable later in the game, even the game-breaking Jean Grey. This isn't as big of an issue in the sequel.
** Colossus in the sequel as his skills have been nerfed considerably. By the time he finishes his special attack, everyone has already cleared the room.

* The Player 2 character (Forn) in ''VideoGame/BlastWind'' is plainly worse than Player 1 (Kyō). Her main shot type is a SpreadShot that wastes its coverage by being much weaker than Kyō's instant homing shot even if the player tries to shotgun enemies ''VideoGame/{{Raiden}}''-style, and her focused shot is ''slightly'' wider (but not to a level where it actually makes a difference) while being less powerful and lacking Kyō's rebounding properties.
* Reco-Abnormal in ''VideoGame/MushihimeSama Futari''. Her shots have a difficult learning curve, and in a defiance of usual BulletHell conventions, her speed when using her focus shot is ''faster'' than her normal speed (it's also the weakest if you haven't locked-on with any of the beetles which requires going in close-range, 2nd strongest if you have). Palm Normal also suffers from this to a lesser extent; his rapid shot's fairly reliable, but his focused shot is quite weak in version 1.5, especially compared to Reco Normal or Palm Abnormal.
* The Captured U-Fighter in ''VideoGame/{{Tyrian}}''. Only playable in a bonus mode, it is so weak and its special moves are so underwhelming that it is practically useless.

* ''VideoGame/DwarfFortress'': With regard to the player's available trading partners, the [[OurElvesAreDifferent elves]]. Your fellow dwarves are obviously essential trading partners due to your exports to The Mountainhomes affecting how often migrants arrive (at last until your population is high enough that this [[AnnoyingVideoGameHelper stops being useful]]), and humans offer decent supplies despite not thinking to bring armor/clothing in your size, elves mostly just bring wood and cloth, plus wooden weapons/armor that are only good if you're really short on metal. On top of that, they don't like being offered wooden goods that aren't made [[GreenThumb the elf-friendly way]]. Elf traders do have the saving grace of pre-domesticated exotic animals, but unless you specifically want to play around with some of them, it's not much to make up for their other shortcomings.

* The Flea from ''VideoGame/MechWarrior 4 Mercenaries'' is incredibly weak and has only 5 weapon slots, none of which can carry missiles. This leaves it with only two loadout options: a mixture of weak lasers and machine guns, or a lone tiny (and still weak) autocannon. It is fast, but there are other, better 'Mechs that are just as fast and still stronger, such as the Osiris. Each weight class has its respective scrappies: the Flea and the Owens for light 'Mechs, the Chimera for mediums, the Argus for the heavies, and the Mauler for assaults. Most of these designs in their stock form have glaring targetable weaknesses, poor loadout options, some kind of maneuverability problem, or relatively low armor (or for the Mauler, ''all four''.)

* ''VideoGame/{{Yakuza 0}}'' features an extensive hostess club management side-mission, and within this side mission Chizu is widely regarded to be the worst hostess in the game. Despite having boatloads of HP for her level and ranking, this is "[[FakeBalance balanced]]" out by her abysmal stats in every other category, meaning that even though she can work for far longer than any other bronze hostess, no customers will ever want her anyway.

* ''VideoGame/CaptainTsubasa 2'' is where [[OvershadowedByAwesome Yuuzo Morisaki]] is considered one of the worst goalkeepers in the series. His catch stat is inferior to the already mediocre Sao Paolo FC's Renato. Due to the NintendoHard of the Nankatsu FC arc, Morisaki is rarely reliable at saving anything and he's easily blown away by special shoots. Worse off, he never gets better because you soon go back to Renato ''then'' get [[GameBreaker Ken Wakashimatsu]] for your troubles. In the end, mocking Morisaki became a [[MemeticMutation Japanese Internet meme]] which is referenced in ''VideoGame/TouhouSoccer'' (Where [[ButtMonkey Hong Meiling]] is forced as Morisaki's stand-in.)
* ''VideoGame/{{FIFA|Soccer}}'' has the India National Football team. Year in and year out, India is included in the FIFA games despite not being a footballing power...and has taken a lot of heat for being the single worst national team in the game. [[note]] Fun Fact: As of FIFA 17, only one player (Gurpeet Singh Sandhu) is part of a Pro team featured in-game [[/note]] Fans of Croatia, Iran, and Japan [[note]] Although Japan's exclusion is justified by their contract with Konami, the creators of ProEvolutionSoccer. [[/note]] are understandably upset that their world-class national teams are not included in FIFA while India's National team is in it. As of FIFA 16 and 17, we have China and Bolivia joining India as the other low-tier National Teams. Fans are up in arms about their inclusion, especially since fan favorites Korea (who are actually an Asian footballing power) were removed and the star-studded Chinese Super League remains unplayable despite the Chinese National Team's inclusion.

* ''VideoGame/TecmoBowl'':
** Minnesota. While they have a couple good players like Chris Doleman and Joey Browner on defense and Anthony Carter on offense, they're bogged down with the game's most awkward attacking schemes. Their blocking game is not much better at all, allowing big runs if even one play is called wrong. Their kicking game is also not that great. Don't be surprised if Tommy Kramer has a bad game because of the offense schemes.
** The Indianapolis Colts and New England Patriots are this in the sequel. Indy was pretty brutal in the first game, and even worse without Eric Dickerson. The Patriots have to deal with Steve Grogan's wounded goose throws (and Marc Wilson is not much better), no running game, one good receiver, and a terrible defense.

** Outside of the core classes, the biggest scrappy class is the Truenamer from ''Tome of Magic''. The Truenamer is great in concept: Someone who uses the language of creation itself to rewrite reality, with the added bonus of backwards enunciation of said language to obtain inverse effects. That is until you realize that not only are their powers rather limited, they also become [[LowLevelAdvantage less effective as they level up]]: the DC of a Truenaming effect equals 15 + double the target's level. This includes allies. Unfortunately, they can only spend one skill point per level to increase their Truespeech check. Yes, it's really that bad. A Truenamer in combat spends most of his time shouting in Truespeech only for it to ''not do anything''. A guide [[http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?214115-In-the-Beginning-Was-the-Word-and-the-Word-Was-Suck-A-Guide-to-Truenamers here]] named "In the Beginning Was the Word, and the Word Was Suck" notes that even if you can overcome this horrible drawback to be able to actually use your abilities on a fairly consistent basis (which is possible, though the effort involved could be better spent doing basically anything else), the class is still full of unclear rules and crippling restrictions on abilities that were not very powerful in the first place. To cap it off, the class simply isn't playable as intended: the intended playstyle is for the character to start the day being able to always use his utterances before the Law of Resistance makes it too hard to continue, but an optimized Truenamer has pushed his skill checks to the point where he always succeeds no matter how much he uses them (in which case he basically plays on-par with a warlock), while an unoptimized beer-and-pretzels Truenamer starts out with his utterances failing a good percentage of the time and only goes downhill from there.
** Rivaling the Truenamer in sheer player hatred is the ''Complete Warrior'' Samurai, essentially a {{Nerf}}ed and more restricted version of the already below-average Fighter. While the Truenamer is mechanically unplayable, the Samurai is just useless. He has weak features, a poor skill list, bonus feats which mainly border on detrimental, and very little versatility. His only real feature is his [[TerrorHero Intimidate-focused]] abilities, and even those come quite late and can be outdone by other classes. His EleventhHourSuperpower, Frightful Presence, is virtually useless from the start and only gets weaker from there. On top of that, he's a [[ThemeParkVersion pretty poor and shallow translation]] of the idea of a samurai, with a [[DualWielding fighting style]] that samurai didn't use and that he really sucks at, and the massively important concept of [[IaijutsuPractitioner iaijutsu duels]] being reduced to two feats. Just about the only good thing about him is he helped bring about the much more well-liked Ronin prestige class, which he's not really needed for. One of the most well-known tier lists places him on the same level as the Warrior, Aristocrat and ''commoner'', noncombatant classes not meant for actual player use. Ouch.

** Another class that's looked down upon for lack of power is the Healer from ''Miniatures Handbook''. It heals better than a Cleric[[note]]by way of adding their Charisma modifier to damage healed by spells[[/note]]... but that's all it can do. No offensive abilities whatsoever (unless fighting TheUndead, because ReviveKillsZombie). Just slinging healing spells to patch up allies (in a game where in-battle healing is nearly completely useless[[labelnote:Why?]]Healing spells past about 5th level don't do enough to keep up with damage, 3.x features enough save-or-lose abilities that hit point damage is not your biggest worry, ending the encounter using your offensive abilities is much more likely to prevent damage than any healing, and even if you do need patching up, there are many ways to get near-unlimited out-of-combat healing at low cost[[/labelnote]]). To add insult to injury, the game contained several much loved "focused casters" (who know their entire spell list, and can cast any of them as long as they have the spell slots), which would have been the perfect system for a support class (limited, single purpose spell list), but it casts ''exactly'' [[VancianMagic like a Cleric]] instead, [[DisSimile except it can't convert other spells]] to raw healing if needed. They do get a Unicorn, though, which provides permanent immunity to MindControl for the entire party.
** The Soulknife occupies the position of being one of the most well-liked and most-hated classes in 3.5e. The idea of creating a weapon out of psychic energy and going to town on your foes earned fans for its [[RuleOfCool cool factor]], but mechanically the Soulknife's main class feature was ''owning a magic weapon'' that upgraded later than weapons you craft yourself and didn't even have the decency to be a LaserBlade. The class was a worse combatant than an ordinary fighter and didn't have much else going for it, dooming it to be an ineffective novelty combatant. But its sheer coolness meant that players would continually try to come up with HouseRules to fix the class and make it more like the awesome warrior they envisioned. Later, TabletopGame/{{Pathfinder}}'s version (via third party publisher Dreamscarred Press) would [[RescuedFromTheScrappyHeap fix the problems with the class]].
** Of course, they pale in comparison to the Divine Mind: weak auras that start with a five-foot range, a mediocre Base Attack, MAD, and crappy psionic powers (this is a class that will finish the game knowing NINE POWERS). It's a casting class that's considered utterly inferior to the Adept, Healer, and Warmage. To make matters worse, unlike the monk or truenamer, a mix of nonsensical fluff (it claims to be a psionic cleric, when psionics had always been a basically secular system) and rushed design (as typical for a Complete Psionic class) mean that there isn't really a divine mind fix out there. Most psionic players consider the class to be an insult.

** The Sorcerer went from a [[TierInducedScrappy/{{Both}} Both "low level High tier/high level Low tier"]] class in 3e to just a general Low Tier class in 5e. Although the class still clings to its 3e identity of trading versatility for quantity of spellcasting, having the smallest "spells known" allotment of any full-caster[[note]]it's on-par with the ''quarter'' casters like the ranger and paladin[[/note]], it's poorly designed to do so; all spellcasters in 5th edition now use the spontaneous casting style originally unique to the sorcerer, and the sorcerer's unique {{mana}} system is poorly implemented, with too few points to spend and no way of recharging points other than taking a long rest, especially considering that the sorcerer has to divvy up its spell points between recharging spell-slots on the fly and using its class-defining unique trick of metamagic. For added insult to injury, the ''wizard'' has a feature that lets it replenish some spell slots every short rest, so it not only has a larger pool of spells it can cast, but will be able to cast more spells per day than the sorcerer anyway! The result is that sorcerer has mostly been relegated to the caster equivalent of a 3e fighter; something optimizing players "dip into" for some added spells for their paladin or warlock rather than something they bother to focus on exclusively. To twist the knife further, only a few spells on the sorcerer spell list don't appear on the wizard spell list as well, but wizards get a bunch of spells they can learn that sorcerers can't.

** Bad archetypes (when a standard class trades some of its class features for other abilities, usually more thematically specific ones) are resented for either taking up space where a decent archetype could have been, or creating an archetype for a concept incompetently, making it less likely that a functional version of the idea will appear.
*** The Fearmonger (Antipaladin) simply doesn't function. It only does two things: it trades the Touch of Corruption feature for the ability to gain a small number of temporary hit points when it frightens people magically, and focuses their Cruelties entirely on scaring people. The problem is that Cruelties can only be applied ''through'' Touch of Corruption, rendering one ability unusable for no benefit and making the other much harder to activate, and resulting in someone not only less dangerous than the standard antipaladin, but also worse at scaring people.
*** The Totem Warrior (Barbarian) does literally nothing (it's just a list of advice for recommended powers to pick if you want to roleplay the concept); so not technically bad, just remarkably pointless. It's not even very good advice.
*** The Ragechemist (Alchemist) grants slightly more strength and durability than a regular alchemist's mutagen at the price of having to make a will save against taking a stacking intelligence and will penalty every turn they take damage - every time they fail the save they're more likely to fail the next one, resulting in the nickname "Comatose Chemist" as their intelligence is inevitably reduced to 0 and they fall unconscious. And the stacking penalty gets ''worse'' as they level up. They also trade away the poisoning abilities that might be useful in melee, while retaining the ranged bombs that gain no benefit from high strength and are weakened by the intelligence penalty.
*** The Scrollmaster (Wizard) is based around the idea of using [[PaperMaster magical scrolls as swords and shields]]. Unfortunately the weapons they create are terrible: a normal magical weapon or shield can have a bonus of up to 10, while their scrolls max out at ''4'', and are almost as fragile as paper - a maximum of 9 hitpoints and no hardness, meaning any sunder will destroy them, and they lose health just by being used (a 1st-level scroll will literally break upon being used at all). A wizard is also about the worst class to hang this concept on due to their inherently poor melee skills, which the archetype does nothing to help. Eventually they do gain a bonus when unrolling their scrolls and casting the spells written on them, emphasizing how stupid it was to try and smack people with them in the first place.
*** The Brute (Vigilante) is designed as an {{Expy}} of [[ComicBook/IncredibleHulk The Hulk]], but retains his weakness without gaining his strength. Every time danger threatens he must make a difficult Will save or transform into his brute form, which he remains in until he makes that Will save to leave it. If he runs out of enemies during this time he'll keep attacking allies or innocent bystanders. Transforming takes a full round (meaning in an unexpected combat he'll use the crucial first round doing nothing) and reveals his SecretIdentity to anyone watching. Making it even worse is that the vigilante normally has good Will and Reflex saves and bad Fortitude, but the archetype inverts these. So for all that his transformed form must be pretty formidable right? Well it's a size bigger than his normal form and gains a minor attack and damage bonus, and an armor penalty. Also it can't use armor or weapons properly without a talent that still leaves both with a minor penalty. And it has good base attack, but only in brute form and can't use it to qualify for feats, unlike the ''standard Avenger vigilante that has none of these drawbacks''.
*** The Warden (Ranger) gives up favored enemy, combat style, and hunter's bond (in other words, the class features the ranger uses to hurt enemies) in exchange for lackluster skill improvements. Time to get excited about hiding in the woods.
*** Universalist wizards, or wizards that choose not to specialize. In 3.x, this was at most an arguable choice, since losing two schools might potentially be a big deal, but some schools were still powerful enough to make up for it. In ''Pathfinder''? It went from "lose the unchosen schools completely" to "they're a bit trickier to use." This miniscule tradeoff in versatility does ''not'' match the massive boost in power that comes from specializing.
*** The "drake companion" archetypes are all quite disappointing. Due to poor starting stats, starting out ''tiny'', and weak progression, the drake is mostly inferior to a regular animal companion, but the archetypes lose a huge chunk of class features in exchange for getting it - as though one person designed the archetypes assuming the drake would be powerful, another designed the drake to be in line with animal companions, and they never talked. It also fails on the "I have a dragon!" front in several ways. Notably, the ability to ''ride the drake'' isn't available until 11th or 13th level (depending if the character is small or medium), and the ability to ride a ''flying'' drake costs four of the drake's total ''six'' powers.

** The Sisters of Battle have received a White Dwarf codex as of late 2011. They are simply terrible, with almost no useful options. Faith, their signature power, has been nerfed to useless ''and'' fails to scale with the game's point size. The Sisters have also been Worf in a WorfBarrage for many factions and been massacred to be used as holy oil in an infamous section of the 5th Edition Grey Knight codex. However, if and when they get a new codex, the Sisters could quickly find themselves pulled out of this status. Their codex is so bad now it's unlikely any metagame changes are likely to save them.
** In fall of 2013, the Sisters got their new codex, which was barely changed from the last one and would have left the Sisters near the bottom of the list in Fifth Edition. Unfortunately, this is Sixth Edition, and the metagame has simply crippled the hobbled Sisters. Sixth Edition is swarming with flying units, whether big monsters or aircraft, and the Sisters have neither fliers of their own nor anti-air abilities within their Codex. Faith scales with the game size, and it's more likely to go off in any given turn, but the Sisters get even fewer Acts of Faith to try. At best, fluffy Imperial Guard armies might splash some Sisters in for flavor. At worst, you have to really love the Adeptus Sororitas and be willing to get stomped in most games even if you play brilliantly to pick the Sisters as your army. As the year 2014 rolled on, the metagame for Imperial forces and Sororitas specifically began to shift. Since most players were aware that Sororitas were underwhelming on their own, most players stopped trying to field them that way, and treated them as a modular reinforcement to be taken with the digital-release Inquisition codex, the updated Grey Knights codex, and Assassins supplemental rules.

*** The 6th Edition codex was also an instance of the Tyranids being ScrewedByTheLawyers. It turned out that Games Workshop hadn't actually bothered to make models for a lot of the better Tyranid choices, including Mycetic Spores and the Doom of Malan'tai. In the absence of any options, third-party company [=ChapterHouse=] made a number of BlandNameProduct models based on these characters, which became rather popular among the fandom. Games Workshop recognized the demand for models and got to work creating their own versions... no, actually they sued [=ChapterHouse=] for everything they were worth. As it turned out, however, GW had [[OutOfFocus neglected these elements of Tyranid canon so badly]] that they ''didn't actually own the rights'' to most of the things they were suing for. Clearly, then, the only option was to completely remove these elements from the Tyranid codex so that fans couldn't use the knockoff models, and replace them with... nothing, really. It wasn't until 7th Edition that the Tyranids finally got substitutes.

[[folder:Third Person Shooter]]
* The Goo Tuber from ''VideoGame/Splatoon2'' is a charger designed to be able to store its charge longer in ink than other chargers and can even store an incomplete charge, on top of having good mobility and being able to instantly splat an opponent at a 70% charge, making it a versatile weapon. Unfortunately it suffers from CripplingOverspecialization, as the weapon has short range, slow charging time and poor sub/special kits. Its case isn't helped by the Squiffer having similar attributes but with the ability to charge in mid-air on top of having better kits, outclassing the Goo Tuber in every way.
* ''VideoGame/{{Warframe}}'': Wukong's abilities were a random grab-bag of references to ''Literature/JourneyToTheWest'', none of which worked well together, and none of which were that powerful anyway. It says something that his most powerful ability was simply a special melee weapon; while its variable range did make it unique, it was still not as good as many other melee weapons. For a long time, he was considered simply the worst warframe in the game. [[RescuedFromTheScrappyHeap He got a major rework in 2019]], changing his kit to revolve around his new [[MesACrowd Celestial Twin]] ability and becoming a viable 'frame even in the endgame. He's still not in the high-tier with the likes of [[GameBreaker Gara, Octavia, and Trinity,]] but he's just fun to play.

[[/folder]]

* ''VideoGame/AdvanceWars'':
** Flak (and also Jugger who is practically identical), the WarmUpBoss of the Black Hole army. His gimmick is he is a [[LuckBasedMission Luck Based CO]] who can do as much as +25% damage or as low as -10% damage (+30%/-15% for Jugger) with CO powers that further increase these numbers to +50%/-20% and +80%/-40% (+55%/-25% and +95%/-45% for Jugger). Yes, he is the only CO in the game who's CO power has a good chance of ''weakening him''. In the end, using Flak basically boils down to galumphing forward and hoping the RandomNumberGod is nice to you, which doesn't make him a good choice in a ''tactics'' game.
** Grimm, a Yellow Comet CO with a GlassCannon gimmick of +30% attack to all units but -20% defense to all units. On paper this seems fine, especially since this is effectively the daily power [[FinalBoss Campaign-mode Sturm]] had in the first game (minus the unfettered movement), but in practice it falls flat due to the way mechanics intermingle with each other. Firstly, defense is ''far'' more important than attack power as your units getting attacked is inevitable: it's basically impossible to keep Grimm's units around long enough to really take advantage of their attack power since he'll be {{one|HitKO}}-shotted in most favorable engagements taken by the enemy. Secondly, lowered health not only lowers attack but also terrain defense bonuses and luck: a Grimm unit with 5HP will get half the defense from its terrain and only be half as likely to get a lucky shot, which not only completely negates his attack bonus but also makes it even easier to kill. Finally, you'll simply outnumber him: as proven by Colin, [[ZergRush a lot of weaker units]] is more deadly than a few strong ones so what can one Grimm tank with +30% attack do against two regular enemy tanks? Pretty much the only way to win as Grimm is to press your attack really early, avoid enemy first strikes, and overwhelm your opponent before they can do anything... which is a tactic that will work with literally any CO.
** Koal. At first glance, he looks pretty solid, since he has no day-to-day weaknesses and the natural strength of [[GeoEffects a 10% offensive boost on road terrain,]] which gets increased further when he activates his powers. The thing is, unlike the valuable and defensible cities Kindle focuses on or the general rough terrain Lash focuses on, roads happen to be the worst defensive terrain in the entire game, providing no bonus at all (even generic plains terrain provides a 10% defensive boost), so trying to take advantage of this by sticking to roads means leaving your troops wide open to heavy damage. He tries to make up for it with low-cost powers and a movement boost upon activating them (+1 for his regular power, +2 for his superpower), but even in this area, he's outdone by Adder, who has the same movement boosts but drops the road focus in exchange for needing only 2/3 as much charge to activate his standard power, letting him spam it far more freely--and keep in mind, Adder is considered low-mid-tier on a good day. More or less, outside of being an inferior version of a mediocre CO, Koal's only unique selling point is a tactic that ends up being limited and risky by nature.

* The ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyTactics'' series:
** Rafa and Malak in ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyTactics'' (or "Rapha and Marach" in the VideoGameRemake for the PSP) have unique class skills that hit 4 squares out of 5 ''at random'' (possibly including doubles) and normally do pretty lousy damage even when they hit: Rafa's multiply with the target's "Faith" stat (which is essentially Magic Vulnerability) but not enough to be impressive; Malak does increased damage to atheists with low FA, but are aren't a whole lot of those in the game. Rafa is also infamous for an EscortMission in which she can get herself killed ''before you've been allowed to take a turn''. Their redeeming qualities come in their natural Brave and Faith stats: Rafa has low BR, making her good at being a white mage or using Move: Find Item; and Marach's low FA means he takes almost no damage from magical attacks, making it that much easier to turn him into an invincible steamroller. That said, it's a lot of work for marginal reward, compared to other characters (even PlayerMooks). And their unique class skills are still the absolute worst in the game.
** The power of their attacks is quadratic in their magic power, instead of linear like everyone else. It only gets to be impressive when you optimize the build totally for this, using their class ability out-of-class as a black mage, equipped for raw +magic power.
** ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyTacticsAdvance'':
*** Montblanc in is considered a low tier because he starts off as a Black Mage and his magic power pales in comparison to the Nu Mou who are a race of people that excel greatly in magic and have better magic stats than everyone else. Since Montblanc is level 5 when you first get him, several of his levels are wasted in the Black Mage job and even trying to raise him purely as a mage won't get the same damage output as the other races who use magic. Because of this and how he is considered useless in the story, many players choose to [[VideoGameCrueltyPotential kill him off]] so that they can replace him with a better fighter since the game doesn't allow you to boot him out of the clan.
*** Several basic job classes in the game are quickly discarded once the player has access to higher tier classes:
*** Soldiers can only lower the stats of the enemy, which quickly gets useless once you learn abilities that can do high damage or other effects. Soldiers can use some of the best swords in the game, but by the time you get them, you won't even be using the Soldier class. The Warrior class is basically the Bangaa version of the Soldier; stronger but equally useless in abilities.
*** The Animist class used by Moogles have below average stat growth and the majority of their abilities cause status effects, which are more likely to miss than hit if the computer decides it doesn't want you to win.
*** Archers are useful in the start of the game, but they mostly focus in abilities that cause status effects and are quickly outclassed by the more useful and powerful Hunter and Sniper classes. The Archer's saving grace is learning the Concentrate passive ability, which boosts your accuracy.
*** Beastmasters for the Nu Mou tend to be useless when there are no monsters around and many predetermined battles will have no monsters. The Beastmaster class is useful if you are using a Blue Mage to learn monster skills since you can control the monster and use the ability on the mage, but outside of that, any Nu Mou in this class will only gain better physical stats, despite the fact that 99% of the job classes for the Nu Mou race are purely based on magic. The class gets even lower in ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyTacticsA2'' due to being nerfed; the Beastmaster can only force the monster to execute an attack on that unit's turn rather than when the monster's turn comes up.
*** Bishops are the only magic based job that Bangaas can use, but the job itself only has mediocre magic growth and Bangaas are terrible with magic to begin with. They are also a MasterOfNone; Bishops can use Cura to heal, Water, Areo, and Holy to attack, Barrier to give one ally Protect and Shell, Dispel to remove buffs from enemies, and Break to instantly turn the target into stone, but many other jobs can do the same thing with better power and more. The sequel does not change the Bishop at all, thus it's still extremely low tier for an advanced class.
*** Templars in both ''Advance'' and ''A2'' have decent attack and defense growths, but they are one of the slowest units in battle, making them a MightyGlacier. Their abilities are designed to be a counter against magic users (damage MP, inflict Silence, lower speed, and grant allies one time protection against debuffs), but they fall completely flat when you are fighting a group of enemies that don't use magic to begin with. Templars can learn Haste and Weapon Attack + to give their allies more turns and make their own strength better, but they are better used as secondary abilities for a job that is much more rounded out.
** ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyTacticsA2'' has the Chocobo Knight class for Moogles, which have the worst stat growths out of all classes, but the class's speed stat is one of the best in the game. Chocobo Knights rely on a Chocobo's abilities and you have to mount a Chocobo to do so, which means any secondary abilities you have set up cannot be used. If your knight gets knocked out or turned to stone, that Chocobo is lost and you'll have to capture a new one. A Chocobo's abilities and its move and jump stats are also determined by its color, but they are nothing special. On top of everything else, the knight will also gain the Chocobo's weakness to water, lightning, and holy when riding the bird unless they are wearing gear that nullifies the weaknesses. Even with their ability to wield any non ranged weapon in the game, Chocobo Knights are simply too gimmicky to rely on and their poor stat growths make them worthless to level up in.
*** One thing that severely reduces the usefulness of their attacks is the fact that their attacks have the same vertical tolerance as most other magic spells, meaning that you can't restrict the possible target area of their randomized spells to isolated enemies standing on high tiles: however, the Hydra/Tiamat line of monsters have attacks that not only work in the same way as Rafa's and Malak's, but they also have less vertical tolerance which allows you to restrict the target area better, have a larger minimum number of attacks than either of them for all of their attacks, and the best skill of this type they have also inflicts status effects on top of doing damage.

* The ''VideoGame/ShiningForce'' games:
** Archers, while sometimes being the only characters capable of long range attacks, are usually shunned for their low defense, poor movement, and mediocre damage. May in ''2'' is exempt.
** Kiwi. His HP growth is horrible, which doesn't matter much if you only have him engage in melee battles since he has high defense, but in a game where magic attacks bypass defense, you'll expect to see him die often. His promotion adds the ability to fly over water tiles as well as a random chance of a flame breath attack (an obvious {{homage}} to Film/{{Gamera}}), but what's the point if he'll rarely get to use them.

* The AM Gunner in ''VideoGame/SuperRobotWarsOriginalGeneration'' is a unit no player wants to use as its arsenal needs a pilot who has the pilot skill "Hit & Away" [[note]]enables movement after attacking[[/note]] and two weak attacks that can't be used post-movement. However, it does function as a MechaExpansionPack for another pilot using the Huckebein MK III, allowing it to form into the Huckebein Gunner, a more effective unit than the AM Gunner alone. The problem arises when the latest installment ''Second Original Generation'' has no Huckebein MK III for the AM Gunner to dock with to form the Huckebein Gunner since the MK III is removed in the game due to mandatory story reasons.
* Miu and the Painkiller in ''VideoGame/SuperRobotWarsUX''. Compared to other ''Manga/LinebarrelsOfIron'' characters and Machinas, Miu has a nonsensical Spirit Command pool (she has "Strike" [[note]]gain perfect accuracy for one turn[[/note]], "Alert" [[note]]successfully evade the next enemy attack[[/note]], "Accelerate" [[note]]increase pilot's movement range by three upon movement[[/note]], "Justice" [[note]]reduce EN, Magic Points, and ammo costs to zero for one turn[[/note]], and "Love" [[note]]gain the effects of the Accelerate, Strike, Alert, Valor, Spirit, Gain and Luck Spirit Commands for one turn[[/note]]; the latter has the effects of the first three) and the Painkiller has a pitiful "Full Upgrade Bonus" of EN+, even though "Justice" can render EN costs moot. Furthermore, achieve "Ace"/"Super Ace" status with Miu and she unlocks the "Super Full Upgrade Bonus" of Mobility +5 for the Painkiller, which is just as useless since she has "Alert."

** Maerchen seems to be an intentional JokeCharacter, with some of the lowest bases and growths in the game, and the Mug skill, which automatically steals the weapons and items of any enemy he defeats, but also ''lowers the Avoid and Hit of any unit within three tiles by 50''. Good luck ever getting him to defeat an enemy on his own without someone else softening it up first, anyway. (In fact, it's implied that he lowers stats with Mug because your allies can't stand being around him!) That said, he does have Locktouch, so he can have some limited utility in maps with a lot of chests to get like Map 16, and the fact that he can at least do ''something'' with that ability and Mug puts him above a lot of the other chaff units in this game.

* ''VideoGame/TerraBattle''.
** Jaguna is often cited as the worst Adventurer in the game. She's meant to be a [[StoneWall defensive character]] in a game where killing everything first is often more effective. Even then, being a B-rank, she's not even that tanky. What makes her really bad is her ''abysmal'' Attack stat, on par with ''healers''. She also learns some support skills, but the only notable one is a weak heal. She got RescuedFromTheScrappyHeap later though, since you can recode her into Jaguna Λ, who has much better stats and skills that strike a large area.
** Half of Palpa's skillset is centered around curing status ailments. Then for her final skill, she learns Panacea, a skill that cures all ailments, making all those previous skills redundant. Her recoded version, Palpa Λ is more of a MagikarpPower however. She learns nothing but useless passive skills, except at level 80, where she learns the [[GameBreaker game-breaking]] Augment skill, which only a handful other characters have. Combine that with Palpa's other decent buffs, and Palpa Λ is a surprisingly decent support unit.
** Burbaba is a counter-oriented character. Counter skills are borderline useless in this game, since getting the enemy to attack a specific unit is next to impossible. Also, counters don't activate on enemy skills, and most enemies except easily killable mobs prefer using skills. Without his counters, Burbaba is left only with pitiable attack skills. He also has a recode, but even with the stronger skills, Burbaba Λ is only about average.

[[folder:Other]]
* In ''VideoGame/ImmortalSoulBlackSurvival'' Camilio is the worst character in the game. His combat skill isn't bad, dealing an attack with 110% damage and stealing 10% of your opponent's attack and armor, however, his field skill is awful. His ability will randomly allocate 14+ his current level points randomly among his stats of Attack, Armor, Max HP, and Max stamina. This only lasts for 18 seconds before his stats return to normal and any point put into Max HP or Max Stamina is effectively useless. This bonus is fairly small compared to other character's buffing abilites, and to make it even worse it requires a two second channeling time which is enough to gaurentee that your opponent will get a free hit on you if you use it in combat.
* For ''VideoGame/StreetPassMiiPlaza'', there are Dark Green Miis, whose abilities are practically useless in both ''Find Mii'' and ''Mii Force''. In ''Find Mii'', they double your next warrior's level. It sounds nice but unless you have a bunch of level 1's and the Dark Green is in front then it's worthless. In ''Mii Force'', Dark Green gives a bouncing ball which does bad damage unless bounced off an object, has bad attack radius, and offers no defense like Brown or White shirts do.
* ''[[VideoGame/WarioWare WarioWare: Get it Together]]'':
** 9-Volt is easily the least popular character in this iteration of the series due to his control scheme: he automatically skates back and forth and only stops to shoot his Yo-yo straight upwards. Most players find it unintuitive, and he has a much narrower margin of error than nearly any other character in the game.
** Kat and Ana suffer from a similar issue: they ''constantly'' jump up and down, making it difficult to maneuver in the vast majority of microgames. It doesn't help that each of them can only shoot projectiles in one direction, but Dribble and Spitz share that gimmick while being freely moveable and thus much more useful.
[[/folder]]

For characters hated for being too strong, see Sandbox/HighTierScrappy.

In fighting games and [=MOBAs=], they are frequently {{Skill Gate Character}}s who are easy to pick up and do well with and are dominant in lower-level play, but do exceptionally poorly in higher-level play; the Scrappy part often comes from bad players who insist on using them with the same suboptimal strategies and builds and refuse to get better, get destroyed by competent players, and proceed to ragequit, lagswitch (if possible), abuse report functions, send abusive private messages, rage on message boards demanding nerfs, and generally act like incorrigible {{Scrub}}s.

As is common to most games with any degree of gameplay, some characters are bound to do other characters' jobs better than others. As the {{Metagame}} of any competitively-minded game is formed, some characters are bound to be either too good at their jobs and get similarly hated on as Sandbox/HighTierScrappy characters, for either being too good for the health of the game's balance, or simply being unfun to fight against.

Relatively more common to single-player games as a wholesale, a Low Tier Letdown is a character who [[AvertedTrope may not be]] [[TheScrappy widely-hated]], but they're oftentimes [[MemeticLoser infamous within their own fandoms]] for just straight-up ''[[UpToEleven especially]]'' sucking in gameplay terms. They might be the [[NiceGuy nicest person in the world]], but if they're solely known within even the confines of the gameplay as TheLoad, their fate is decided.

It's worth noting that in {{RPG}}s and other sub-genres, characters that start off weak but ''can'' [[MagikarpPower get good and become powerhouses]] should '''''not''''' qualify for this trope, as Low Tier Letdowns by their definition boast ''no'' MagikarpPower to speak of; they're bad from the start of when you get to use them, and they will [[CantCatchUp never get to a point where they can be of equal use]]. Even in cases where they ''can'' in theory get better stat-wise, they have to be [[InherentInTheSystem designed in a way that makes them borderline unplayable to work with]], and they have to be a case infamously known within the fandom of those games. Only then do you have a case of a Low Tier Letdown.

Relatively more common to single-player games as a wholesale, a Low Tier Letdown is a character who may not be [[TheScrappy widely-hated]], but they're oftentimes infamous within their own fandom for just straight-up ''[[UpToEleven especially]]'' sucking in gameplay terms. They might be the [[NiceGuy nicest person in the world]], but if they're solely known within even the confines of the gameplay as TheLoad, their fate is decided.

For characters hated for being too strong, see HighTierScrappy.

It's worth noting that in {{RPG}}s and other sub-genres, characters that start off weak but ''can'' [[MagikarpPower get good and become powerhouses]] should '''''not''''' qualify for this trope, as Low Tier Letdowns by their definition boast ''no'' MagikarpPower to speak of; they're bad from the start of when you get to use them, and they will [[CantCatchUp never get to a point where they can be of equal use]]. Even in cases where they ''can'' in theory get better stat-wise, if the [[InherentInTheSystem mechanics, classes or design decisions offer no actual benefits to combat or stats even at their absolute strongest]], then you have a case of a Low Tier Letdown.

Relatively more common to single-player games as a wholesale, a Low Tier Letdown is a character who may not be [[TheScrappy widely-hated]], but they're oftentimes infamous within their own fandom for just straight-up sucking in gameplay terms. They might be the [[NiceGuy nicest person in the world]], but if they're solely known within even the confines of the gameplay as TheLoad, their fate is decided.

It's worth noting that in {{RPG}}s and other sub-genres, characters that start off weak but ''can'' [[MagikarpPower get good and become powerhouses]] should '''''not''''' qualify for this trope, as Low Tier Letdowns by their definition boast ''no'' MagikarpPower to speak of; they're bad from the start of when you get to use them, and they will [[CantCatchUp never get to a point where they can be of equal use]]. Even in cases where they ''can'' in theory get better stat-wise, if the [[InherentInTheSystem mechanics, classes or design decisions offer no actual benefits to combat or stats even at their absolute strongest]], then you have a case of a LowTierLetdown.

More common to {{RPG}}s, a Low Tier Letdown is a character who is widely hated because they just suck in gameplay terms. They might be the [[NiceGuy nicest person in the world]], but if they're TheLoad in combat or gameplay, their fate is decided. They boast no MagikarpPower; they're bad from the start and they never get to a point where they become worth the trouble or able to hold their own, no matter how much you invest into them, especially when there's other, more rewarding characters on hand.