Arbitrary Headcount Limit / Eastern RPG

Dragon Quest

• Dragon Quest IV:
  • Parodied at the beginning of chapter five when the hero first enters Branca, and a four-person team is leaving the town. If you talk to them, one will tell you that their party is full and that you'll need to find another one to join.
  • By the time you have more than four characters in your party in chapter five, you'll have the wagon, which the inactive party members ride inside of. When you enter places that the wagon won't fit (like most caves and dungeons), the reserve characters stay with the wagon to keep your party size at four. Presumably, they're watching over your stuff and making sure monsters don't eat the horse or something. When the wagon is present, you can swap out party members at any time in battle, and if your whole active party gets wiped out, the reserves will leap out to continue the fight.
• Dragon Quest V oddly reduces the active party size to three (with an additional five in the wagon), despite the game's introduction of Mons meaning that you could end up with dozens of potential party members to choose from. The DS remake brings it back up to four active members... but also greatly expands the number of monsters you can recruit. Given that the wagon will be with you when you fight the final boss, there's no logical reason why shouldn't just dogpile him, but naturally the game won't let you.
• Dragon Quest VII, is absolutely horrible about this, sticking to the series' usual four-person party… when there's only about six main characters anyways. Leading to more than a few Contrived Coincidences to keep the "extra heroes" busy until it's time to rotate them into the plot again. Made worse when one dungeon guest characters count toward this maximum party size.
• Averted in Dragon Quest VIII since there are only four playable characters. And when a Guest-Star Party Member joins, he exists in a fifth spot on the roster lineup (which is a very good thing, since he's The Load and you would not want to send one of your main party members into reserves to accommodate him). The 3DS version, however, adds two more proper party members without increasing the party limit beyond 4 when Charmles is not with you and 5 (counting Charmles) when he is.
• Dragon Quest XI: Seven with one more joining in the second arc playable characters, four slots. At least the rest can be tagged in manually, or automatically, if the main party dies.

Final Fantasy

• The early Final Fantasy games have very obvious caps on the enemies you can face at once. Nine in Final Fantasy (arranged into a square, even), eight in Final Fantasy II, and - in the DS remake - three in Final Fantasy III (except for that one time with the frogs).
• Final Fantasy IV, as stated on the main page, is a prime example of RPGs that explain the party size limit with plot. However, the GBA remake brings just about anyone back to the party before the final dungeon (and the added bonus content), allowing the player to pick his favorites like in most of the later games. There is no real explaination as to why they can't just all go and bash the Big Bad in the head with superior numbers, though...
• Final Fantasy IV: The After Years takes this one step further in chapter 10 (or the first part of the final chapter on the Wii): Assuming you played all the previous chapters and kept all characters susceptible to being Killed Off for Real alive, you will start the chapter with ten characters. As you complete mandatory quests, six more will join you on your airship (again, assuming you played all the previous chapters). However, the game will not let you swap characters (yet) at all: your team is Rydia, Edge, Luca, and the Man in Black, which isn't even a full five characters, with no explanation given as to why you can't at least pick someone on your airship to fill that empty fifth spot. Later on, you get to pick your team of five (out of twenty-two), which is more standard.
• Final Fantasy VI:
  • When the party is attempting to land on the Floating Continent from the airship, you are puzzlingly told that you can only take three people along, even though the party limit is four. You find out later that Shadow is down there waiting for you, and his presence is required at the end of the Floating Continent sequence, but still. At the time you can't help wondering what part of this whole plan would be messed up if one extra person went with you.
  • Before that, on the haunted train, you may recruit ghosts to have up to four party members, but if you try for a fifth member, Sabin objects that too many members would slow you down.
  • Later on in The Very Definitely Final Dungeon, though you still have the same party limit, you need to form three parties in order to reach the Big Bad. The 3 parties merge upon reaching the Big Bad into a party of 12, while you still fight in groups of four, once the ones in battle are all KO'd, they would be switched with the next in the line up.
• In Final Fantasy VII, near the beginning of the game when the number of allies travelling with the main character exceeds the 'recommended' number, they split into two groups and arrange to meet up at the next plot-relevant location because, technically, they are all wanted terrorists. It is essentially decided that, since the antagonists are searching for a group of 5 people, they wouldn't stop to question a group of 3 and a group of 2 moving separately.
  • Normally, the player controls one group of 3 characters during a battle, but when fighting the Big Bad the player is allowed to equip ALL 8 characters and may cycle between them at any point in the battle, if it seems like one group is struggling to make progress alone. Not unique, but certainly unusual among RPGs to allow the entire cast to take part in a fight.
  • Then, you have the Fort Condor proto-RTS sequences. The gist of these, according to the inhabitants of the fort, is that they have to hire mercenaries in order to repel attacks by the Shinra. Naturally, they ask you for your monetary contribution. Eventually, you are forced to take an active role as commander, and this involves buying the services of various units and placing them around the battlefield. Arbitrary Headcount Limit rears its ugly head here, because you are limited to placing a maximum of twenty. By the time you reach this sequence, it is entirely possible that you have enough money to fill every square foot of the battlefield with units.
• Final Fantasy IX deals with this trope in several different ways. At the very beginning, you only have three or four characters in the party at a time, with the guest character getting a bridge dropped on him to make room for the fourth. Later on, when the fifth main character appears, the party splits up into two groups, each of which can accommodate the limit. When the two parties reunite, some of the characters are Put on a Bus for the rest of the disk to make room for the final party members. When the entire party unites at the start of Disk 3, they are frequently seen gathering in various dungeons, sometimes offering explanations as to why they split up again, but by the final few dungeons it's assumed that the entire party is travelling together, and the fact that whichever four characters the player isn't using don't seem to be doing anything is pretty much Hand Waved.
• Final Fantasy X limits you to three characters at a time. The game uses a Lazy Backup tag system where you can swap characters mid-battle, but if all three active characters get KO'd, you're screwed.
• Final Fantasy XII also limits you to three characters at a time. Unlike X, XII allows unconscious characters to tag out at any time.
  • Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings however makes the arbitrary headcount 5 but that is because it is a real time strategy game. One does wonder however why the other 4 characters are not allowed in battle when your army size can be maximized to theoretically 45 members.
• Exaggerated in Final Fantasy XIII. You have a party of six that are all traveling together after they reunite. However, you're still only allowed to have three of them in a battle team at any time and you can't switch out party members during battle at all, not even when someone is KO'd.
• In Final Fantasy XIV, there's a maximum limit of four players in dungeons, eight in trials and normal raids, and twenty-four in alliance raids, with eight also being the limit for parties outside of instanced content (though given the game's nature as an MMO, a limitless number of players can participate in open world content). When the Trust system was introduced in Shadowbringers, these limits were retained for NPC allies. Even with seven of the Scions lined up to enter a dungeon, only three can actually join you, and even then the party must consist of a tank, a healer, and two DPS. Especially egregious as when you complete the dungeon, the NPCs you didn't pick run into the final boss room. Which is all of them, if you decided to run the dungeon with other players.
• In Final Fantasy: All The Bravest, you start with an astounding 12 party slots, and as you level up or post to Facebook or Twitter through the game, you gain more party slots, until you end up with a grand total of 40 party members. All of your party members fight with you at once. (Shame they all die in one hit...)

Shin Megami Tensei/Persona

• Shin Megami Tensei games typically have a limit of 4 or 6 party members, including the protagonist. This is explained by the device you're using to summon your allies being only able to keep so many demons manifested at a time.
• Shin Megami Tensei proper:
  • For the first quarter of Shin Megami Tensei I, the hero's computer can only summon three demons at a time, but it's not a problem because he and two human allies fill up the other three slots. Shortly after the party is permanently stuck at two humans, Stephen shows up and fixes the Demon Summoning Program so that he can summon four demons.
  • Shin Megami Tensei II has no such excuse; Aleph can summon five demons at a time, but won't summon more than four if Beth or Hiroko are in the party.
  • Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse allows only one human ally to participate in any given battle.
• In Devil Survivor, you can never have more than four humans on the field (counting the main character). In the sequel, while this is played straight in most occasions, there are points in the plot where the limit is justified by the characters splitting up into teams as part of a strategic operation.
• Devil Children/DemiKids series has only two demons available in battle, and this time protagonist doesn't fight.
• Persona sub-series:
  • In Persona, there are eight possible party members aside from the protagonist. Depending on which quest you are on, two to three of those slots are locked in. The remaining slots can be filled at key points in the story, but once your party is full, additional party members are immediately sent to safety.
  • The Persona 2 duology has a cap of five, but you don't get to select which party members will fill those slots (with a single exception in Eternal Punishment, based on which reality-warping rumour you decide to spread). However, eventually your temporary companion will leave the party for the "true" fifth party member, and it's not really explained why you can't have all six.
    • Justified in Innocent Sin however Jun loses his ability to summon personas and need Yukino to transfer her ability to him thus causing her to leave the party, even further justified in a depressing example in one story route where Yukino essentially becomes brain dead after her shadow commits suicide.
  • Persona 3 justifies this by having the party be an exploration team. That way, if the entire team bites it, SEES won't be wiped out (...Well, the world will end if the protagonist is killed, so they won't really get a chance to use the backup. But it's a nice thought). Reload also explains that whoever stays behind is tasked with protecting Fuuka from any Shadows that enter the main lobby. During the Final Battle, when all of SEES is present at the boss arena, the limit is enforced when Fuuka detects a large number of Shadows climbing up towards them. Mitsuru commands the rest of the party to Hold the Line against these Shadows and defend the main group while your group fights the final enemy.
  • Persona 4 looks like it has a similar set up as the previous game... but then the entire party inexplicably shows up in the final room of each dungeon. There is, admittedly, a portal leading there from the lobby. It's at least partially explained when you revisit a dungeon. Occasionally, members of your party that aren't actually with you can randomly appear in an empty room of the dungeon. It's implied that they've formed an independent B-team and fight Shadows in other parts of the dungeon; sometimes, if you talk to them, they'll even hand over items they've picked up in the process. Golden makes it so anyone who isn't actively in the party can occasionally show up (riding a scooter/bicycle/roller skates) and launch a support attack. Oddly, this only happens if their Social Link is far enough along that they could perform follow-up attacks as part of the active party.
  • Persona 5 only lets you take 4 party members into a fight, despite recruiting up to 9 members into your Badass Crew. The remaining members follow at a distance, join to perform follow-up attacks, and can be switched in and out of battle with a certain Confidant skill. The explanation is that the party is an infiltration team, and sneaking becomes difficult with too many people.

Star Ocean

• In Star Ocean, four are required (meaning you only get to pick the other four, compared to six in the second game) and only one can be booted. The Enhanced Remake also gives you the chance to not exactly boot one character, but get a better one instead who is hidden. In addition, one is fairly difficult to find without an FAQ, while another will only become available fairly late in… at which point you've probably already filled up all seats.
• In Star Ocean: The Second Story, you can have up to a party of eight characters, but only four appear in combat. The rest never show up unless you transfer them into the active party, even though they're present whenever the player initiates a Private Action (and the eight-person group is seen splitting up to do their own thing at a town's entrance).
  • The player usually gets a choice of 6-7 characters on average (on top of the two mandatory ones), but you can also miss or fail to recruit certain hidden or optional characters. Notably, Chisato will refuse to join Claude/Rena's party if it's filled with the maximum eight party members, even though she's been trailing the characters throughout the gameworld and wants to help them. There's no explanation of why she can't join anyway as a support helper.
• In the Director's Cut of Star Ocean: Till the End of Time, 2 mandatory characters were added, preventing you from recruiting all of the original 8 party members. One of three of your previous companions joins you, depending on if you've completed Roger or Albel's sidequests or not. If you want one of the other two as well, then you have to refuse Peppita's offer to rejoin you on the Moonbase.
• Star Ocean: The Last Hope: While all eight party members can be in the party at once (there are nine playable characters, but two of them are Mutually Exclusive Party Members, and you don't get the choice who to keep during your first walkthrough), there's still only four avilable in a battle.
• Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness is a notable aversion to this trope. There are a total of seven playable characters, and once you recruit then, all seven participate in battle at once.
• Star Ocean: The Divine Force goes back to four people on the field at any time. You can switch them at any time, but not in battle.

Tales Series

• The entirety of the Tales Series has four as this number, with the actual party size ranging from five (Original Phantasia) to ten (Updated Re Release of Destiny). What, if anything, the extra members are doing while the others are fighting is never explained, barring a fight in Abyss where the two extra members have to secure an escape route.
  • Tempest, Innocence and Hearts, as well as Keroro RPG, made by the same people, have a limit of three. Narikiri Dungeon 3 for GBA also had four parties of three each, but since the actual party size was every character in the first five games…
  • Three now-inaccessible Tales of Moblile games (Breaker, Commons and Wahreit) actually had limit of two party members per battle, despite actual parties being four to six people. This time, all the blame goes to hardware limitations.
• Played with in Tales of Symphonia when after defeating the Summon Spirit Gnome, he complains that the party took him "four against one", while his previous summoner Mithos took him one-on-one. This when your party consists of eight people, half of which apparently stood aside and let your main group fight him alone, and when nearly every other plot fight acts like everyone jumped into the melee.
• Tales of the Abyss does give some justification: the only thing preventing your allies' fonic artes from doing just as much damage to you as to the monsters are marks laid on the team by your spellcasters, and they can't mark too many people at once. Essentially, up to two of your party members are getting left out because they can't be made Friendly Fire Proof.
• If you go a long time without switching party members in Tales of Vesperia, you may get a skit where the inactive members complain about being left out of the action. Yes, the others really are just sitting on the sidelines.
• Hearts also averts it by introducing the "Link Attack" system, by which characters in the back party can be summoned in to use attacks or spells. Since characters Linked in can't be damaged or interrupted, it's useful for calling out a Raise Dead or Last Disc Magic with a charge time of "eternity".
• In Tales of Xillia, you can only have four party members onscreen during a battle... but you can swap an inactive party member with an active one mid-battle.
• Tales of Xillia 2 plays this straight again, only allowing four party members when you are out and about. The plot forces circumstances, so that only four members (three, since Ludger must always be in the party during the main arc) are in a location.
• Tales of Zestiria justifies this due to the unique nature of your party: namely, most of them are actually spirits, and require a human partner in order to fight most effectively, and you only have two playable humans max at any time. ^note Sorey, who is The Hero, and either Alisha or Rose, depending on where you are in the plot. This is especially true when one of the core mechanics of the battle system is Armatization, which triggers a Fusion Dance between the human and the current spirit partner into a new spirit-dependent form with unique abilities. Also, for the same reason, the spirit partners actually all travel within Sorey's body, meaning that you can freely switch them out at any time in battle, and that technically, everyone is in battle at the same time, just not always actively participating. This is also justified by the game's premise. ^note The Spirits use Sorey as a vessel to protect themselves from the malevolence, which could irreversibly turn them into Dragons if they fully succumb to the corruption. As you can tell, this game does its damned best to integrate its plot with its gameplay quirks.
• Tales of Berseria goes for a similar effect to Zestiria, albeit less arcane. While only four of six party members appear in battle at once, the other two can be hot-swapped in mid fight (or even mid-combo), making it clear everyone is participating. Backup will even jump in to replace critical or KO'ed part members automatically, averting Lazy Backup. The only reason you're limited to four at all is the characters acknowledging that six at once would result in getting in each other's way, and having a back line allows injured members to recover (yes, HP does regenerate while benched).
• Tales of Arise allows only four people on the battlefield, but the other two can use their special attacks, participate in Combination Attacks, and can be manually tagged in. No mid-combo switches this time, though.

Trails/Kiseki Series

• You can have only up to 4 active party members in the Trails Series with several variations among different arcs. All of them have segments where several party members are mandatory.
• Liberl Arc (FC, SC and the 3rd) strictly limits your active members to four and you are mostly forced to bring two main characters (Estelle and Joshua in the first two games and Kevin and Ries in the last), leaving you little room for party member building.
  • FC starts out with Estelle and Joshua travelling the nation as their training to become a full-fledged bracer so helpers in each branch they visit (in this case, chapter) come and go until they are fully availabe during final dungeon.
  • SC increases the total to 12, but three of them are available only in the game's final dungeon. There are also two guest star party members who is available only in prologue and certain segment in one chapter and the other one only available in latter. The game this time allows you to customize the party earlier. Estelle is still mandatory since she's the main character and the second slot depends on your choice at the end of the prologue which eventually be filled by Joshua after chapter 6.
  • By the end of The 3rd, you have 16 switchable party members you will all use by the final dungeon. Two main characters of this game (Kevin and Ries) cannot leave the party most of the time except during several part of the story until they both can be switched out late in the game.
• Crossbell Arc (Zero and Azure) increases its limit to six; Four active party member and two others you can switch in between battles. The two standby members can occasionally help by casting exclusive support/attack crafts when their turn come comes during combat, although they are pretty much controlled by AI and appears only during that time. You can't switch during battle however.
  • Trails from Zero has 4 permanent party members; Lloyd, Elie, Tio and Randy. Others are only available during small portion of the game, but eventually will come back during sequel except for two characters.
  • Trails to Azure has a total of 8 endgame party members; You begin with four people, two join midgame and two become mandatory temporary members who eventually join. In arranging the party, you have to bring the four permanent members from the first half.
• Erebonia Arc (I, II, III, and IV) turns it into seven; Four active party members and three other you can switch in and out of so far has one thing in common: You will almost have Rean, the main character, in your party and you can't switch him out. Of course in certain parts, several party members become mandatory.
  • Cold Steel I has a segment where you travel to various parts of Erebonia as part of curriculum called "Field Study". The party has been assigned by default and you can't change during the segment. However, you can choose your team when exploring old schoolhouse building.
  • Cold Steel II has 18 members after the finale^note You end up with 11 party members at the final dungeon, but there's a playable epilogue which consists of your core members and helpers during the game. There are also 5 secret playable characters that can be used by "replacing" your members.
• Reverie gives players a whopping 40 playable characters in the main story with an additional 10 playable characters at the True Reverie Corridor. In battle however, players are only allowed four characters in the main party, four in reserve, and two characters in the EXTRA slot if players have unlocked this option. This isn't an issue when the three routes (Rean, Lloyd, and "C") are split but becomes an issue when the three routes converge.

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• In Arc Rise Fantasia you can field only three party members, despite having up to six people in your party. To make matters worse, there is enough space, both in UI and of the battlefield, for the fourth person, but it's only used by various Guest Star Party Members, and thus vacant most of the time.
• In Brave Story: New Traveler, you can not control more than three people in the party, one of them being your character.
• Breath of Fire II only allows four characters in the main party at once (out of a possible nine, one of which is technically optional), while the rest remain in Player Headquarters. III does the same, allowing only a party of three out of six. The rest of the games, however, avert both this trope and Lazy Backup by allowing party members to switch during combat (and in IV's case, some of your party members have an auto-ability triggered in the back row), or in the case of Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter by only having three characters in the first place.
• Celestian Tales: Old North limits you to three people in the active party, although the total party count is six all throughout the game. An NPC at the beginning of the game explains the reasoning behind this.
• This is especially bad in Chrono Cross, as there are forty-five recruitable characters, but only three people allowed on a team - and one of them has to be Serge (until New Game Plus). This simply does not leave much room for experimentation.
• Hand Waved in Chrono Trigger: When you gain a fourth party member (the maximum number of people allowed in your party are three), one of them has to stay behind to hold open a door, later on, when you're all together and travel through a time gate you end up at the End of Time. There you learn that no more than three people can travel through a time gate without getting redirected, so the remaining party members have to stay while the others are adventuring. You can't travel in two groups, because you only have one Time Key, the device Lucca made to allow usage of the gates. However, you can switch party members at will, and anytime you go to the End of Time, you can find them standing there.
• Conception 2: Children Of The Seven Stars limits each dungeon dive to Wake, paired with a heroine, and three teams of three Star Children. While eleven seems like a lot, that's out of seven heroines and up to ninety Star Children. It's implied 10 is the maximum number of people that can accompany Wake without over-taxing his ability to provide them with ether energy.
• Cthulhu Saves the World has a limit of four characters in the active party out of eight total. Beating the game unlocks the Highlander mode which exaggerates the limit to the point where there can be only one active party member.
• Dyztopia: Post-Human RPG: Normal and Easy mode allow for a traditional party size of four, but Hard mode only allows an active party of three.
• In Endless Frontier, your entire party can participate in battle, but only four are active and fit on the screen. The non-active characters can use support attacks during the fight, up to certain limits, with some characters only capable of participating through support attacks. The sequel shows off how arbitrary the limitation really is, with a lot more support-only characters, one character who has a partner, and still the same four-character headcount limit.
• Emerald Dragon has a party size limit of five, and as you progress through the story characters will often find reasons they need to leave so they can free up a slot in your party for new characters.
• Etrian Odyssey:
  • The series allows you to have a decently sized Guild, but you can only have up to five members in your adventuring party at any given time. Word of God admitted that this was meant to make players feel their parties were always "incomplete" somehow; six-member parties were simply too well-balanced for a game striving to be Nintendo Hard.
  • Etrian Odyssey III: The Drowned City: The game keeps the usual limit of five active characters at a time, even though there's enough space for a theoretical sixth active character. This time, however, that slot can be taken advantage of: Two classes in this game, the Ninja and the unlockable Yggroid can cast temporary units during battle; specifically, the former class can summon a duplicate of themselves, while the latter can cast a mechanical dummy that performs elemental follow-up attacks. Since both require a slot to perform those skills, a player that has both a Ninja and an Yggroid has to think strategically of how to manage both of them. However, if the player has fewer than five characters, then it'll be possible to use the extra slots for more than one duplicate/dummy.
  • Etrian Odyssey IV: Legends of the Titan: In each of the major dungeons you can encounter an NPC who will increase your party to six (there are six slots to place five characters, the NPC will take up the sixth slot). However, the NPC will only join for that dungeon, and the last floor of that dungeon. And once you beat the boss of that dungeon, the character joins your party permanently, and you're back to only five characters.
  • Etrian Odyssey V: Beyond the Myth:
    • The default cap of party characters at a time is five as usual, but Lili joins them as a temporary sixth character for the boss battle against the Undead King in Fetid Necropolis; the remaining instances don't happen until the Playable Epilogue, when a supporting character joins the fight against one of the Superbosses (even then, only the first time in each case; afterwards, it's a classic 5 vs. 1 fight).
    • Interestingly, the units that can be summoned in-battle by certain classes don't affect the party cap, as they use a different one suited for said units: The Wraiths (from the Necromancers) and the dogs and eagles (by Rovers). Up to three slots are available for these units, so a player who has both a Necromancer and a Rover has to learn how to strategically manage the slots for both classes and win the fights efficiently.
  • Etrian Odyssey Nexus: The five-member limit is justified due to the presence of the Hero class. Heroes can summon Afterimages who replicate the performed attacks so enemies receive more damage per turn; but if a party already has five characters, then only one Afterimage can be created (and will occupy the extra sixth slot). Since Ninjas can cast duplicates called Mirages (like in the third game), they're also subjected to this restriction (and if the player has both a Hero and a Ninja on board, the two replica creations will be mutually exclusive unless there are four or fewer characters). This brings in an additional caveat in the boss fight against Narmer in Waterfall Wood, because Charis will offer you to help in the battle, meaning she'll occupy the sixth slot and thus no Afterimages or Mirages can be summoned unless, again, there are fewer than five standard characters.
• Exit Fate had a party limit of eight out of... seventy-five. Also, two of those eight occupy the entourage, and cannot fight, but any of the other six may spend an action to trade places with them. Exactly why two people who are officially employed soldiers decide to cheer from the sidelines instead of aiding their teammates is not clearly explained.
• Completely averted by Steven Universe fangame Flawed Crystals. You don't have to leave any gems behind; they will all join your party when they're healed, leading to a gradually increasing party size. Of course, enemy groups will also get bigger to match. According to the game's creator, this was intended as a form of Gameplay and Story Integration by demonstrating The Power of Friendship.
• In Golden Sun: The Lost Age, you eventually acquire a party twice as large as the cap of 4 in battle, the result is the ability to switch a single character from the team in battle with one in the 'on hold' team per turn, and should all 4 of your party get knocked out they would instantly be swapped with the back team. ^note The most likely explanation for this is that because there are so many large and powerful spells being thrown around, Unfriendly Fire would be an issue if more than four members are attacking at once. The sequel follows in the same footsteps, with the only caveat being that you obtain your fifth to eight party members gradually rather than all at once like in The Lost Age. All the other mechanics still apply.
• Played straight in Grinsia as the group reasons that having more than four active party members would be too conspicuous and they'd get in each other's way during battle.
• Heroes of the Seasons: The player party can only contain three mercenaries, which forces the player to plan around the three combat roles and the three damage types. Enemy formations can have up to eight in their numbers.
• Inazuma Eleven has an amazing number of 100 members allowed on the team at any one time, but given its Cast of Snowflakes, arguably even that number isn't enough. As for the matches themselves, since it's soccer, 11 members are on-field while optionally 5 are on bench.
• Infinite Undiscovery allows 4 characters, or 3 if one of them is Gustav. Out of 18. And some of them are arbitrarily forbidden from being in the same group as the Player Character, restricting their use to Let's Split Up, Gang!-situations — without much explanation beyond the few that won't join your party because they hate you.
• Kingdom Hearts:
  • Most games only allow you to use three characters at a time... which seems more than a little pointless, given you never have access to more than four at a time anyway, and given that all experience is leaked.
  • In Kingdom Hearts 3D [Dream Drop Distance], you can have a maximum of 99 dream eater allies, but are only allowed to have two active ones and one reserve at any given time.
  • Kingdom Hearts III averts this, having no restriction on how many party members you are allowed to have active. The Kingdom of Corona, the Toy Box, and Monstropolis all have two Guest Star Party Members each without removing Donald and Goofy, bringing the total party count to five people including Sora.
• The Last Remnant has an extremely generous limit that increases over time.
• Last Scenario only lets you use four characters. This is made even weirder because the cutscenes make it clear that the whole party is traveling with you.
• The Legend of Dragoon, despite having a party of up to seven at once, will not let the battle team be more than Dart and two others. Moreover, if all three active members are defeated, it's still game over even though there may be up to four reserve Dragoons fresh and ready to keep up the fight. This makes particularly little sense against certain Climax Bosses, such as the Divine Dragon or Lloyd, where you would want to deploy your full strength against them.
• Lost Odyssey has a limit of 5. Even though the formation interface has 10 positions, you're only allowed to fill half of them.
  • The crazy thing is, you don't even have that many people. You could theoretically stuff every character on the field and still have a slot empty.
• Lufia series:
  • Lufia: The Legend Returns has a max-party size of nine out of thirteen members. One aspect of the game's battle system is that only one member of each of the three columns can attack per turn. This averted with Mousse and the Egg Dragon, who attack automatically every turn without taking up that column's allotted member, or confused characters.
  • In Lufia: The Ruins of Lore, you can have up to eight party members—the three main characters, two other human(oid) characters, and the three heroes' Mons. You can only have four in battle at a time, and only two can be monsters. (This may be because We Cannot Go On Without Humans.)
• Lunarosse is notable in that the limit is raised to five instead of the usual three or four of RPG Maker games. Still played pretty straight, though.
• During the strategy game-esque Liberation Missions in Mega Man Battle Network 5, the player isn't given a choice in which characters to use in a specific mission (unless it's in the DS' Updated Re-release, where characters are interchangeable with their version counterparts), but the number of characters can only go up to five out of seven heroes. Like Chrono Trigger, some Liberations give an excuse for why the other two characters have to sit the mission out.
• Monster Girl Quest! Paradox RPG has a limit of four for the active party and four for the reserve party (the latter expands to six and then eight after certain events), with the rest staying in the Pocket Castle. The arbitrary nature of these limits is highlighted by the fact that many "characters" are actually multiple people who act together as one group.
• Monster Hunter:
  • The games allow only two large monsters on the map at any one time. This is a good thing, especially when fighting Qurupeco, because otherwise it could just summon large monsters ad infinitum and fill the map with Rathians, Deviljhos, and the like.
  • Up to four players can participate in a public hunting quest (bringing a Lynian, be it a Felyne, Shakalaka or Canyne will also occupy a slot), and a player can bring up to two Lynian supporters (only one in Freedom Unite and Tri) in private ones. The former is justified in-universe due to a mandate from the Guild after a tragic backstory regarding a Lao-Shan Lung hunt that killed a fifth hunter.
• Neptunia:
  • The series traditionally limits you to four characters on the field, each with one partner they can tag out with. Out of a party of many, many more than that number; Re;Birth 3 has a whopping 26 party members in the postgame. Most damningly, cutscenes make it clear the whole crew is always traveling as a pack. Since this is Neptunia, with the universal Medium Awareness and optional fourth wall that implies, it's lampshaded at least once a game.
  • This is most damning in Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth1 where the battle headcount is limited to three. This appears to be a technical limitation, and the game still lags slightly during particularly flashy attacks even with the reduced model count. Later Re;Birth games, which use a better-optimized version of the engine, are back up to a party of four.
  • Downplayed in Megadimension Neptunia VII. The same limit is there, but the game is reluctant to give you enough characters to fill it out - by about the halfway point, yo can count the number of battles where you've had four party members on one hand, let alone anyone to put in reserves. Played straight when those barriers fall, though less ridiculous then in R;B3; at most, you'll have 16 characters, but that's still enough for two full teams.
• Octopath Traveler: A total of four party members can be on the team at a time, while reserve party members can be swapped in at any town's tavern. Within battle, Ophilia and Primrose's abilities allow for a maximum of six party members, with the additional two being NPCs controlled by the AI.
• Octopath Traveler II follows a similar paradigm... at least at first: once the final chapter is opened, you gain the ability to swap party members at any time instead of in taverns, and for the Final Boss fight the game gives up on arbitrary restrictions and lets the full party take on the God of Darkness all at once.
• Phantasy Star series:
  • Phantasy Star II, unlike both its predecessor and successor, randomly limits amount of party members to four out of eight. Rolf's solo adventure spinoff clarifies that he dislikes working with others, and would prefer a small team to a large if he has to bring one along. Apparently he's also totally cool with letting a bunch of complete strangers crash at his house for weeks at a time. Spoofed by fans:
    "No no no, you don't understand. You see, I only had one ring left to protect my teammates from being in the Edge, so I had to leave the rest behind. I mean, what kind of idiot goes into battle with half his team behind? How stupid would you have to-... R-Rolf, why are you beating your head against the wall like that?"

    — Chaz, Conversations Within Elsydeon
  • In Phantasy Star IV, until the end of the game there are only five characters in your group at any given time, and when everyone finally gets together to fight the Big Bad, there are only five artifacts of power that'll let their wearers go into the lair. Of course, this is somewhat moot, as the fifth of those artifacts (the Rykros ring) is not actually equippable by any of the characters; no matter who you picked, your fifth party member doesn't get one anyway.
• The main Pokémon games only allow you six Pokemon at a time, while the rest are kept to the PC. The Pokémon Adventures manga justifies it as a recommendation by the Pokemon League due to the fact it would be difficult for a single trainer to care for more Pokemon than that at a time, and Crystal is seen carrying far more than six when the PC servers go down and she can't deposit them.
  • Various spinoffs have other limits. Pokémon Ranger gives you a limit of seven. Pokémon Mystery Dungeon gives you a limit of four as well as an overall size limit that can't exceed six stars, even if it's just two Pokemon. Pokémon Conquest has six Warriors to a kingdom; and each Warrior has their own limit of how many Pokemon partners they can have, from one to eight, but they can only use one per battle.
• Rakenzarn Tales caps it at four, partly due to the engine limitations and the fact that if you somehow managed to get all 90 party members on the field at once, you could steamroll pretty much anything via sheer numbers and Limit Breaks. You do gain the option to switch party members mid-combat early on, but there's a cooldown period to avoid abusing the feature.
  • Rakenzarn Frontier Story, by the same creator, also caps it at four with a party-swapping combat feature with a cooldown.
• Explained in The Reconstruction by Wadassian law restricting your guild to six armed combatants at a time. But then Wadassia is reduced to ruins, and you're still using six characters to fight the final boss and save the world.
• Rise of the Third Power: The active party can only have three members at a time. However, inactive party members lower their exhaustion percentage while active party members gain exhaustion.
• Riviera: The Promised Land states that going into battle with more than 3 members would make things too crowded, but this does not explain why battling party members can't tag out.
• SaGa Frontier does this twice over. You can only have five characters in a party, and only fifteen characters total. The character screen is divided into three parties of five, which you can rearrange at will. Only one party can fight in a given battle. The Remastered version lifts the latter limit, putting any characters obtained after the first fifteen into a sub-menu where they can rotated in and out as you choose.
• Sands of Destruction limits you to only three people in battle at once; the rest are Lazy Backup. The entire party shows up in cutscenes, and you can switch characters any time outside battle, so you know they're all there; there's no explanation as to why only three fight at once. Those who watch instead of participate in fights only get 1/3 to 1/2 the Experience Points of the active party, and get no Customization Points.
• Secret of Mana and Trials of Mana have this for the enemies, only allowing up to three on screen at once. NPCs also count against that, so there's one mountain trail where Neko will sometimes appear, but only if there are two or fewer monsters currently active.
• The original Shadow Hearts has three-person party out of six playable characters, while Shadow Hearts: Covenant and Shadow Hearts: From The New World bump it up to four out of eight and seven characters respectively.
• In Shining the Holy Ark, only four characters can appear at a single time in battle. However you could freely switch characters over, so if a character is killed you could replace them provided you had another character to take their place.
• In Skies of Arcadia, the four-person party is mostly explained by the plot — the main trio are bestest friends and stick together, while the fourth slot is occupied by whoever's present for the plot at the time. The game really runs into an Arbitrary Headcount Limit towards the end, however — you can pick who to take with you into The Very Definitely Final Dungeon, but taking more than one of the fourth-slot characters is forbidden. The crew of your Cool Airship is also limited. You can recruit 2 crewmembers for each position but only one can be on duty, even if the job is in no way exclusive like "sailor" or "merchant".
• START AGAIN START AGAIN START AGAIN: a prologue has five heroes, but only four of them fight. Mostly because The Kid has been deemed too young to face the Sadness lurking within the castle, so they've been given snack duty.
• Succubus in Wonderland only lets the player have one companion (or be on their own). The game seems to act as if you almost always have Lewis with you (and when you're separated from her, you can't have any of your other companions), and Carroll and Alice are included in this treatment once those characters join the party. This is quite noticeable in the boss battle with the Queen of Hearts, since two of the aforementioned characters talk to this boss to try and make her return to her senses, even though only one of them can actually accompany you for this battle.
• Played agonizingly straight in the Suikoden series. You have an entire army (including several dozen character available for use in your party), but you can only take six at a time. Suikoden III added a seventh slot for 'support' characters.
  • In Suikoden IV, this was downsized to a four-person party, plus a 'support' NPC. After this proved unpopular with players, Suikoden V responded by upping the limit to ten — while you could only have up to six actively fighting in your party at any given time, there were four extra slots you could use to bring along other characters, be they supporting NPCs or other fighters. This helped with Leaked Experience and provided an alternative whenever you had to bring certain characters along for plot-related purposes.
    • There's a bit of missable dialogue with your strategist that actually explains this: when going on land, you have to be careful not to attract undue attention, so a small party is better unless you want the whole Kooluk army (which vastly outnumbers you, to say the least) on your tail. As for the ship, you are restricted to 3 parties (12 people total), but they are freely switchable in battle, and that's because there's not enough space for more to fight on the ship, since the rest of the space is taken up by the currently-attacking monsters and overcrowding the ship's bridge can result in someone getting shoved overboard in the confusion.
    • A major part of what made the reduced party size in Suikoden IV unpopular is that it makes many of the series' signature Unite Attacks less convenient to use...especially the one that has four participants. Since The Hero isn't one of those four, the attack is only available in shipboard combat.
• Sweet Home (1989) has a limit of three members per party, drawing from a pool of five. If you try to have a fourth join, the other character will say that it would be best if the fourth character stays separate. If a character rescues the fourth from a pit, one of the original three will be disconnected from the party. The ability to form multiple parties that could be switched between at any time, in addition to being able to combine parties during combat, lessened the impact of this, however.
• You can only ever be training one Overlord in Trillion: God of Destruction, and they will be dispatched alone to fight the eponymous Big Bad. Discussed and justified by the fact they need to be wearing the Ring of the Tyrant to even get close to Trillion, and and it's this power they're actually training with.
• In Unicorn Overlord, the player has a limit on how many squads in total and how many combatants in each squad they have, starting at only three and two, respectively. One can raise them by spending Honors, but the size of the later is capped by the Renown rank of your army. This caps out at 10 squads of 5 members each.
• Valkyrie Profile always has quite a bit of playable characters but only three manifest at once. This is explained with how the Valkyrie only manifests the einherjar that she wishes to train. Except that Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume doesn't actually have a Valkyrie as the main character...
• Wild ARMs series:
  • Wild ARMs Alter Code: F allows only three party members to fight, although rearguard characters can sometimes trigger Combination Attacks. This is a result of the game being a remake of the original Wild ARMs, and all characters but the main trio being Promoted to Playable very late in the game.
  • Wild ARMs 2 and Wild ARMs 5 also use three characters on the battlefield, but this time all six characters join the party over the course of the game.
  • Both Wild ARMs 3 and Wild ARMs 4 avert this, since there are only four main characters in the first place.
• Xenoblade Chronicles series:
  • In Xenoblade Chronicles 1, only three characters can fight at the same time, with the others sitting it out. Even when your main party bites it, there is no option to have the others reinforce your or tag in. Rather egregious when cutscenes pretty blatantly imply everyone is deep in the action. This is presumably in order to reinforce the notion of the Chain Attack mechanic, where the team surrounds one foe and beat it up with their arts in sequence.
  • In Xenoblade Chronicles X, although you can eventually end up with 17 different people to invite into your party, you may only deploy four characters into the field. And one of those must be Rook/Cross. And during most Story and Affinity Missions, you are also forced to bring certain members with you, and may in fact even be forbidden from bringing four people with you! Ironically enough, this doesn't really bother most of the players due to the fact that the Player Character can become strong enough to solo most of the game by him/herself, or that most people will have their party in Skells once they become available.
  • In Xenoblade Chronicles 2 each character can engage up to three Blades, despite potentially bonding with dozens of them. And, on the first playthrough, one of these Blades has to be character's main Blade. The party itself has five permanent Drivers, but you're only allowed to bring up to three in battles. Maybe this one because there already are eight people (three Drivers, three Blades, Gramps and announcer, not counting human enemies) talking at once.
  • Xenoblade Chronicles 3 finally averts it in regards to the main party: there are six main characters, and all six go into battle at once. The game instead generates playstyle variety through a Job System. Things however get iffier with the Heroes, optional seventh party members: you can only have one of them with you at a time, even if they should logically be free to join you together. The game at least tries to offer an excuse, with most of them being colony leaders with their own responsibilities; but Riku and Manana, the party's Nopon support crew and potential Hero choice, are just as mutually exclusive as the rest despite being with the party at all times.

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