Ragtag Bunch Of Misfits / Video Games

This trope shows up a lot in Video Games (particularly RPGs), because it makes things much more interesting. Interestingly, this can also be true when it comes to the players behind the screen in a MMORPG. No matter what everyone does for a living in Real Life, together you still managed to bring down that big dragon.

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• The backstory of A3 is that the theater the main character's father used to work for is in massive debt and about to go under unless she can somehow produce and direct a successful play for it in just one month with a troupe of woefully inexperienced actors. Of these five "actors", only one of them starts with something vaguely resembling basic acting skills and he's a surly Emo Teen who joined the troupe only because he has an obsessive crush on the main character. The other "actors" are: a high schooler who's never stepped foot onto a stage until literally yesterday, a homeless drifter who hasn't taken a single theatrical class before, a video game addict who cares more about having space to play his games than his acting practices, and a Funny Foreigner who regularly mangles common phrases and idioms. Oh, and did we mention that the main character/director, despite being the daughter of a famous theatrical actor, can't act her way out of a wet paper bag?
  • As the series goes on, there are former delinquents, a Yakuza member and his boss' son, former spy agents, an eccentric poet, among many things. Also, the aforementioned Funny Foreigner is revealed to be a runaway prince.
• Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown has the player character, Trigger, end up as part of a misfit gang in the form of Spare Squadron, a penal unit, after he was framed by Erusean drones for killing President Harling. Right from the get go, it's clear that Spare's a pretty traditional example of this trope, only with much more arguing and snark towards the company leaders.
• Air Force Delta Strike: Delta Squadron is where all the EDAF losers are assigned.
• Boots and his buddies from Anachronox certainly qualify: a stripper, a toy robot, two scientists, an alcoholic ex-superhero, and an entire planet, which you at several points were exploring.
• Most parties in Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura seem to end up like this. In addition to the hero, a poor schmuck who just happened to survive a blimp crash, you can have a monk who doesn't know the first thing about his religion, an overly proud dwarf with no idea what dwarves are really like, a half-drunk half-ogre, the world's smartest "orc", an elven princess, a necromantic fop, and even the guy you set out to kill in the first place. Oh, and a dog who kicks more ass than the rest of the party combined.
• Played with in Baldur's Gate and its sequels; yes, you can include deranged rangers, badass paladins, angsty or depressed elves, psychotic dwarves, insane necromancers and even a former Big Bad in your party. But they do all have their own goals and agendas, and if you violate their beliefs or make them work with people they detest, they will eventually leave your party or worse.
  • Lampshaded in Baldur's Gate III by the vampire Lovable Rogue Astarion. When discussing the possibility of a Spot the Imposter in Act III, he exclaims in frustration that he wouldn't be able to tell anyone apart as "this group is full of weirdos" to begin with. Said party consisted of an Amnesiac Hero with inexplicable homicidal impulses, a Scary Dogmatic Alien, a cleric for a Religion of Evil, the aforementioned vampire, an eccentric wizard who's a walking Fantastic Nuke, a Fiend warlock, a Cyborg tiefling, and an elven hippie with the build of an orc.
• The defenders of Kosigan in The Bastard of Kosigan can consist of a bastard half-orc trying to reclaim his heritage, an elf taking revenge for her abuse at the hands of the heir to the county, a prepubescent boy appointed second-in-command of the Grey Guard for no good reason, and an extremely loyal career soldier in charge of the army, all led by whatever you decide the player character is. You even get to lampshade this if you side with Mordred and Alex at the end of the second module, wondering if "two bastards and a little elf" stand a chance against the might of Burgundy.
• From Battleborn:
  • Pretty much every faction has been reduced to this, thanks to the stars darkening.
  • On an individual faction level, the Rogues exemplify this the best. Made up of those who don't exactly fit elsewhere and preferring individual freedom over uniformity, they're a completely incohesive collection of individuals that fits the trope to a T.
  • The Battleborn are a group made up of individuals from the different factions who have put aside their factions' petty squabbles with one another over the last scraps of the universe to come together and fight the actual enemy destroying the universe.
• This is pretty much the entire point of Battlefield: Bad Company. B Company is apparently a dumping ground for anyone the Army deems a troublemaker, making them expendable. Plus, the squad featured pretty much qualifies in and of itself: a demolitions man who blew up the wrong latrine and loves to go in depth on his philosophical non-sequiturs, a cowardly comm specialist who looked up porn and wound up giving the Department of Defense network a nasty virus, a chopper pilot whose boredom and subsequent recreational drug use led to an accident that then led to his reassignment, and a weary sergeant who just wants to get out as soon as possible and is willing to take a transfer to the highest mortality rate company in the Army to get it.
• BlazBlue: The legendary Six Heroes who saved the world from the Black Beast consisted of a cybernetic white knight piloted by the soul of an asshole, a talking bipedal cat samurai, a sophisticated werewolf butler, an evil ghost-like Humanoid Abomination, a sexy pink-haired witch, and a Magical Girl with split personality disorder. The whole playable cast would also count.
• Borderlands: Vault Hunters, step up and take a bow. Set as the series is on Pandora, a hellish planet no sane person would visit of their own free will, the people who make their way there are distinctive, combat-ready, and extremely morally dubious - but they get along, generally speaking.
  • Borderlands: A stern ex-soldier once employed by the villains who's generally the Only Sane Man, an alcoholic and colorblind sniper with a pet alien bird that changes gender from male to female as it gets older, an egotistical woman with quasi-mystical powers and moderate-to-severe pyromania, and a gigantic berserker whose solution to all problems is punching them to death.
  • Borderlands 2: Another ex-soldier with way too much self-regard and a romantic attachment to his sentry gun, another woman with quasi-mystical powers who's really very sane and only somewhat bitter, a gratuitously mysterious assassin who might be a robot or an alien or something and talks using haiku and emoticons, a guy who can use two guns at once and has a history of steroid abuse that left him capped at three feet tall, a teenaged prodigy in robotics and her attack-bot on the run from the law, and a completely insane escaped lab experiment (and the slightly more sane voice in his head) who reacts to everything by screaming nonsense or going on a bloodthirsty rampage.
  • Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel!: A sword-wielding assassin trained from childhood who was forced to murder her whole family (she's the sane one), a cyborg mercenary who just wants to get paid and is addicted to getting cybernetic implants, a viciously sadomasochistic cowgirl out purely to hurt and kill stuff, an irritating helper robot hastily made combat-capable but hopelessly pathetic nonetheless, a surgically-altered Body Double of the boss who's really just a scared guy with student debts, and a wealthy heiress and Egomaniac Hunter who treats the whole thing as a personal safari. Notably, two out of these six become enemies of the previous Hunters and the man they're working for becomes the Big Bad.
  • Tales from the Borderlands: A corporate middle-manager and his nerdy accountant buddy, a con-artist and her gun-obsessed sister, the holographic ghost of the above-mentioned Big Bad, and two Robot Buddies: one adorable and childlike and the other dry and sarcastic (with an optional third robot that does nothing but scream like the damned). Taken up to ludicrous levels in the finale, when they can team up with any combination of: the two assassins mentioned above, a Mad Scientist who doesn't like it when you talk shit about his cat, a Mama's Boy of a gangster (whose mom was also his crime boss), a mechanic with a passion for writing children's books but no talent for it (she's also dating one of the assassins), a Gadgeteer Genius grifter who was a father figure to the con artist and her sister, and an irritating helper robot who is no longer combat-capable but still just as hopelessly pathetic.
  • Borderlands 3: Another ex-soldier whose closest companion is her Mini-Mecha, another woman with space-magic powers whose crimefighting antics made her the bane of criminals in her homeworld, a semi-retired corporate hitman who shares lineage with various villains of previous games and another Egomaniac Hunter, this time a robot who commands various cybernetically-enhanced beasts.
• Born of Bread: The team to save the world consists of Loaf, a child made of bread, bread determined to help his father, Lint, a nervous yet talented literary-skilled raccoon, Yagi, a headstrong goat who knows kung fu, Chloe, a Deadpan Snarker but Great Detective of a Snowfling, and Dub, a hard working yet clumsy dragon who, while not fighting directly, acts as a streamer who is a saver. broadcasts and saves your progress. Eventually, Alfie, one of Jester's cronies and his closest friend who was abandoned by him, decides that she can't let him go through with his evil plans, joins Loaf and the others to stop him as well.
• BoxxyQuest: The Gathering Storm puts the fate of the Internet in the hands of some very unlikely heroes. There’s Catie, a young amnesiac queen. Anonymous, a faceless trickster from the Planet of Steves. Til, a Tsundere archer with social anxiety. Eddie, the world’s most inexplicably badass librarian. Shift, an ineffectual thief whose personal quest is only tangentially related to the one everyone else is on. Tyalie, a game-obsessed Genki Girl with hidden Medium Awareness. Shrimp, an ambiguous Author Avatar and the group’s Only Sane Man. And Cornelia, a sweet-but-self-loathing artificial intelligence. In spite of all their differences, they manage to make it work –- when they’re not snarking the hell out of each other, that is.
• In Breath of Fire I, we have The Hero destined to Save the World, a princess with wings, a half-wolf hunter, the world's best thief who can somehow fuse with other people, a greedy fish-man, a literally bull-headed strong man, the world's most powerful sorceress and a mole-man.
  • Really, most of the games are like this. Breath of Fire II has said Hero and winged princess, a dog-man with a crossbow, a giant armadillo-man, a near-naked tiger girl, a flower man and a monkey. Breath of Fire III has The Hero once again, the two orphans he ends up living with (one of whom is a tiger-person with Lightning Magic and is a weretiger, the winged princess once again, an inventor/librarian dog person with a bazooka, a mutated ONION and what essentially looks like some kind of Gargoyle. IV is slightly more organised as we start out with a Princess and her (tiger-man) bodyguard who encounter the Hero, but they are soon joined by a Cloudcuckoolander in a robot suit that turns out to be empty and "possessed" by Deis, a stuttering (or in Japan, alcoholic) dog-samurai and a gun-toting soldier woman.
• Child of Light has a child princess, a firefly fairy, a coward dwarf mage, a money-minded mouse merchant, a monster guard who's banished from his clan, an orphaned fish folk child, a Golem, and two jesters—one who's permanently depressed and the other can't even rhyme properly.
• The vast majority of Computer Role Playing Games, for that matter. In Chrono Trigger, for example, who's going to defeat the world destroying monster? Why, a teenage boy with Anime Hair, his childhood Mad Scientist friend, a sheltered Rebellious Princess, a cursed knight, a robot, and a prehistoric cavewoman (and possibly a misanthropic sorcerer, depending on if you spare him or not). They needn't bother recruiting any trained soldiers or acquire any heavy artillery.
• Circus Electrique: When the Maddening breaks out across London, Intrepid Reporter Amelia Craig sets out to determine just what caused so many people to turn Vicious. While she's accompanied by her Loyal Animal Companion Leonidas, her uncle insists that she take more protection along with her... in the form of the various performers working at his circus. Starting with a clown, a strongman, a fire blower and an escape artist, and building up an increasingly eclectic and eccentric roster the further you progress.
• Every team in City of Heroes (and many other MMORPGs, really) except particularly coordinated ones, given the Fantasy Kitchen Sink nature of the superhero genre, and also the casual-friendly nature of the game where it's not uncommon for the fate of the world to be in the hands of a team that may include one or more of the following: A 13-year-old, a 60-year-old, a drunk, a furry, a hopeless powerlevelled newbie, and maybe a Munchkin if you're lucky.
• The Commandos consist of a Fighting Irish Blood Knight with a propensity for Good Old Fisticuffs and knife play who was convicted of striking an officer, an aristocratic Cold Sniper, an alcoholic who swam the English channel on a bet, a Mad Bomber, an American criminal who joined the British army to escape the US authorities, a Master of Disguise, a thief and Russian seductress.

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• The full party in A Dance with Rogues definitely qualifies. You have a deposed princess leading a group that (depending on your choices and your persuasiveness) consists of (at various points) a sweet, innocent female bard; a chivalrous ranger; a psychotic mercenary/assassin; a pair of barbarians out to hunt down the guy who killed their entire tribe; an exiled Drow; a heavily-stereotyped alcoholic dwarf; and a gender-flipped dead paladin.
• Nippon Ichi loves this trope. Disgaea certainly qualifies, even if the 'heroes' aren't very heroic. You have the orphaned son of the demon king, his sidekick of debatable loyalty, an assassin angel (don't ask), Captain Gordon, Defender of Earth and his two sidekicks, the gorgeous scientist and the funky robot, various defeated enemies, and the souls sewn into demonic penguin bodies in the Prinny Squad. You can recruit a ton more weird characters via the post-game, as well as create your own squad of wacky generics. The same goes for all of the sequels, in which you can also recruit previous game characters and cameos from other Nippon Ichi cameos, usually in the form of DLC.
  • The same goes for the pretty much all of the other Nippon Ichi games (La Pucelle, Makai Kingdom, Phantom Brave, etc.). Even the shockingly dark and edgy Soul Nomad & the World Eaters gives you two sets. The traditional version in the normal route and a completely Ax-Crazy set in the Demon route.
• Divide and Conquer:
  • Enedwaith's campaign basically revolves around uniting a bunch of primitive woodsmen, fisher, and fowler clans into something that half-resembles a military power. You see this in their unit progression: starting out with unarmoured barbarian axemen and falxmen, and eventually upgrading to armoured spearmen and halberdiers, barbarians no longer.
  • Bree's roster is mostly made up of a motley array of what are essentially militia, ranging from hobbits armed with farming tools to merchants with better equipment than training; when even your starting faction leader is just a forgetful innkeeper (Barliman Butterbur himself), you very much qualify for this trope. As such, most of their best units are either mercenaries or come from other factions.
• Doodle World sees you, the player, and various other Doodle Tamers you meet along the way forming your own ragtag bunch. A blue-blooded Sheltered Aristocrat, a Meta Guy who is from another timeline, and a Manic Pixie Dream Girl who doesn't enjoy candy despite coming from a town addicted to it and is a surprise bookworm. Other temporary additions really scale it up.
• Dragalia Lost: The main gang, big time. A young prince who’s unjustly branded a traitor and can turn into a dragon, a Paladyn girl with a weakness for cute things, a seasoned mercenary who’s secretly of Blue Blood, a 400-and-something year-old Sylvan who serves as the Team Mom, a Brilliant, but Lazy Sylvan prankster, a lovestruck dragon in human form, an atoning Tyke Bomb assassin, a 300 year-old combat android with two hearts, an alternate future version of the prince’s twin sister, the prince’s elder sister who’s a master of manipulation, and that’s just the main characters. Don’t even get us started on the supporting characters who live at the Halidom!
• Dragon Age: It's a BioWare RPG after all.
  • Dragon Age: Origins: The group starts with two Grey Wardens, who are an entire order of ragtag misfits. One is a Hidden Backup Prince and former Templar apprentice, and the other is you (of course). The rest of the bunch consists of a deadpan-snarking shape-shifting witch from the forest; a redheaded fantasy French bard who was a priest but joined you after a vision; a stoic Qunari warrior; a stone golem with an intense hatred of pigeons; an alcoholic dwarven berserker; an elven assassin with very few sexual inhibitions; an elderly Dead All Along mage; and possibly, toward the end of the game, a villainous noble champion. Oh, and your dog, who's, believe it or not, the Only Sane Man of the group. The ex-Templar is actually a bastard who was shipped off to a religious life to keep him out of everyone's way; the witch had a rough and isolated childhood and so has No Social Skills; bard in this context means spy and assassin who sings; the Qunari you free from prison after he killed eight innocent people; the dwarf joins you after you help him find his wife who abandoned him to search for an Artifact of Doom; and the elven assassin was hired to kill you and makes no secret of it at all. Incidentally, the reason that It's Up to You to save the world is because all of the other Grey Wardens in the country are wiped out shortly after the prologue. Despite being the senior Warden by default, your ex-Templar friend doesn't want to lead due to confidence issues and also because he's suffering from a Heroic BSoD caused by the deaths of his father figure and the rest of the Wardens, whom he regarded as his family. So despite whatever trauma you bring from your own Multiple-Choice Past, you have no choice but to run the show.
  • Dragon Age: Origins – Awakening continues this. The alcoholic dwarven berserker returns plus a failed marriage, and the new members are a snarky rogue mage with an obsessive Templar out for his blood, a murderous elven hippie, a bitter rogue whose father is the noble who killed the Human Noble's family in the first game, a member of the Dwarven Legion of the Dead who failed to die when she should have, a Fade spirit of Justice trapped in the body of a dead man, and a very nice Grey Warden recruit who dies the second she takes her Joining.
  • Dragon Age II continues the tradition with your younger sibling who is either a warrior jealous of you or a rogue mage who wants a normal life; the widowed daughter of an exiled Chevalier; a dwarven merchant from an exiled noble family with a fondness for storytelling and a crossbow named Bianca; a Cloudcuckoolander elf exiled from her clan for practicing Blood Magic; the snarky rogue mage from Awakening who is now much less snarky and willingly possessed by the spirit of Justice from the same expansion, whose life in the timeless Fade has made them quite unused to concepts such as patience; a promiscuous pirate captain with a very large number of enemies; and an escaped elven slave with Identity Amnesia, a bad case of the broods and Power Tattoos. If you get the DLC, you can also add a prince/priest whose entire family has been murdered, your (other) dog, and a female Qunari elf with a tendency to either kill or flirt with anyone she sees.
  • Dragon Age: Inquisition has an ex-Seeker (Templar Internal Affairs) who begins the game with the intention of executing the player character; the same dwarven tale-spinner as above with some added trauma; an elven apostate unusually knowledgeable about the magical Rifts opening all over the place due to secretly being an elven trickster god; an elven archer/criminal with a perverse sense of both humor and justice; a Qunari spy who immediately tells you he's a spy and runs a mercenary company of similarly weird people; an affably vain Tevinter mage who fled his homeland seeking a way to improve it; a weird spirit (or possibly demon) who looks like a young man desperate to help people; a fashionable and ruthless Orlesian First Enchanter; and a Grey Warden with almost excessively high moral standards who is actually a wanted war criminal and not a Warden at all. Then you have the three advisers, who round off the Inner Circle: the fantasy French bard from the first game, who is now The Spymaster with a lot of added trauma; an ex-Templar who watched two Circles collapse around him; and a cheerful Antivan noblewoman who serves as The Face of the entire Inquisition. And they're all are led by you, the Inquisitor, who has been marked by the Fade and is worshiped as the Herald of Andraste whether you want to be or not.
    • There's even Ragtag Bunches entirely of NPCs! There's Bull's Chargers, led by the aforementioned Qunari spy, his transgender Tevinter-born second-in-command, a former city elf, a dwarf sapper, their surgeon and healer, a man who speaks only in grunts, and a Dalish "archer" with the "aiming crystal" on her "bow". A line of War Table operations revolves around Sutherland, who eventually ends up joined by an elven mage, a human archer, and a dwarven squire, as if they're his own player party.
    • Justified in that the Inquisition is assembled on a very short notice to deal with the crisis threatening the world, initially with next to no support from governments and the Chantry, so they can't afford to be awfully picky. Its founders are already unorthodox despite technically being in the Chantry, and then, as the Inquisition is branded heretical but is the only real power actually doing something about the hole-in-the-sky thing, it attracts attention of people feeling wronged by the current system and desiring change, who tend to be a rather diverse lot.
• Dragon Quest:
  • Dragon Quest IV: If it wasn't for the fact they all oppose the same evil and are hunting the same villains, it would seem very odd that a soldier, a priest, a princess, a magic tutor, a merchant, two Romani entertainers, and some young boy/girl are all traveling together.
  • Dragon Quest V: Depending on how you recruit your monsters, can very quickly become this when you have your Hero accompanied by a one-eyed, fanged apple, a shroom wielding a hammer and a long-tongued cat... and that's just when you first learn to recruit monsters, it gets weirder from there.
  • Dragon Quest VI is also a fairly notable example. the entire team consists of an amnesiac Crown Prince, a carpenter turned Martial Artist, a young girl implied to have previously been a sex slave, the spirit of a teenaged sorceress, a monk, a village hero who can transform into a dragon, the first girl's brother who decided he had to become the greatest fighter in the world after being unable to protect his sister, a dragon and 8 different slimes.
• Your group in Drakengard is led by an Ax-Crazy "hero", a useless bard friend deeply in the friend zone with the hero's sister, a conflicted paedophile, a batshit crazy child eating elf, an ageless boy whose sister is a cult leader, and an old man making ominous prophecies. Not to mention most have pact partners, which include a snarky dragon that hates humans and a hilariously sociopathic fairy.
  • But it has been noted that since this party contains a child killer, a child eater, a child molester, and a child, they are the perfect team for taking on the Watchers, which resemble gigantic winged infants.
• Zero's party in Drakengard 3 consists of a boyish sadist/necrophiliac, a burly masochist, an ageing pansexual, a dashing young man who loves to make up random trivia, and a child dragon. Their leader is a breathtakingly vicious woman with the physical and magical power to crush armies and the blossoming seed of those same Watchers lodged in her eye, patiently waiting to consume her so they can drown the world in blood. It's also worth noting that the men are actually her harem as well as bodyguards.
• Eien no Filena. The party that saves the world consists of a transvestite, a prostitute, a dog, and a writer.
• The Elder Scrolls
  • Throughout the series, this is a very common trait of the Dark Brotherhood, an illegal organization of assassins whose membership mostly takes a sadistic glee in killing and who practice a Religion of Evil. As long as you're willing to kill on command and have some skill in doing so, the Dark Brotherhood will welcome you. Notable members have included vampires, werewolves, heavily armored and axe-wielding Orcs, pyromaniac mages who believe in No Kill Like Over kill, and all other manner of misfit. The Dark Brotherhood is damned effective in what they do, right up to having assassinated the Emperor of Tamriel himself.
  • In the backstory, after urging from his son and fellow Ansei ("Sword Saints"), the legendary Yokudan/Redguard hero Frandar Hunding reluctantly led the forces of the Ansei against the corrupt Yokudan Emperor Hira, who was attempting to wipe them out to consolidate his power. Despite their abilities as swordsmen, they were few in number (Hira's forces outnumbered them thirty to one) and woefully unprepared to form into an organized army. Ever the Guile Hero, Frandar devised a strategy which allowed the Ansei to come out on top.
• The End Times: Vermintide: In the first game, the team is formed when a Witch Hunter and his hired ex-soldier bodyguard escorting a rogue wizard to Ubersreik for trial need to release their prisoner and join up with a dwarf ranger and wood elf Waywatcher who happened to be in town to fight off the Skaven invasion.
• Ensemble Stars!: All characters have their quirks, but for the most part the units are pretty cohesive and manage to round each other out well. Then there's Ryuuseitai, a unit which is incredibly earnest and dedicated but is not very good at actually being an idol unit. Members include:
  • Chiaki, the Pollyanna Cuddle Bug leader who adores Tokusatsu and revolves the unit around Super Sentai to the extent that sometimes he forget to include actual idol components into his concert plans
  • Kanata, a massive space case who is perpetually relaxed, talks like a child, and is obsessed with sea creatures
  • Shinobu, a massive ninja fan who talks strangely and spends most of his spare time practicing ninja moves, who also happens to be a very shy Shrinking Violet who gets nervous about being on stage
  • Tetora, a competitive Dumb Muscle jock who actually applied to the number 2 ranked unit Akatsuki and only joined Ryuuseitai when he failed to make the grade, and was pretty bitter about that for a while
  • Midori, the unit's Only Sane Man who never even wanted to be an idol and only accidentally ended up in this course, and just keeps getting dragged around everywhere by Chiaki despite wanting as little trouble as possible.
• The Crew of Evolve definitely qualify, being described by the official site as "an elite group of war veterans, psychopaths, heroes and expendables". The team members are a Death Seeker cyborg Martian, a spy who blew her own cover so it wouldn't be a problem later, the Sole Survivor of a world destroyed by the monsters, the sole survivor's pet, an expert in demolitions and asteroid mining, a Blood Knight veteran with a love of fire, a professional hunter, a medic from the same war who brings people back from the dead rather than heal them, an ex-cop british robot whose brain is in the ship, a member of a failed super-soldier military unit who tried to do some good, a Bounty Hunter who used to work with the aforementioned super-soldier, the youngest leader of a xeno-biology team ever, and an ex-cop who runs the group and used to be partners with the robot. During the Fall of Shear the group expands to include a Cyborg seeking vengeance on the monsters, a Half-Human Hybrid from the other side of the war with the pyromaniac and the necromedic, a loner who lived alone in the wilds of Shear for his retirement, an expert engineer and pilot who used to work with the bounty hunter and super-soldier, the architect of the colony in a set of Powered Armor, a teenage Gadgeteer Genius with a superhero alter-ego he uses to cope, a medical robot with a commando droid's logic core crammed into his head, and a scientist who fused herself with the monsters to better understand them.
• Fallout 2 demonstrates the ensemble dynamic more clearly by letting the player travel with many of them at once (instead of leaving them on display in a hotel, never to interact with each other). These include a one-eyed old man with a metal plate in his head, the son of a slaughterhouse operator who is your potential husband (regardless of your gender), his sister who is your potential wife (again, regardless of your gender), four dogs (two of which are cyborgs), a super-intelligent deathclaw, a ghoul former doctor, a super mutant, an obnoxious racist sexist teen drug genius, a military AI called SkyNet traveling in a robot body of the "Danger, Will Robinson" variety, a tribal warrior with a Jamaican accent and multiple body piercings who talks to the bone in his nose, and a trader of dubiously valuable goods with a missing daughter and a habit of calling you "Boss".
• The Fallout 3 DLC Mothership Zeta plays this trope straight. You have to take over the alien mothership with the help of the somewhat unprincipled mechanic Somah, the pre-War combat medic Lt. Elliot Tercorien, the cowboy Paulson whose family was killed by the aliens and the little girl Sally whose repeated escape attempts net her solitary confinement and fairly good knowledge of the ship's systems. Oh, and Toshiro Kago, a Japanese samurai (in full armor complete with a katana) who can't understand a thing the others say (and vice versa).
• Fallout: New Vegas, includes a Cold Sniper with trust issues, a wandering Eyebot, a cyborg dog in need of a brain transplant, a grandmotherly Super Mutant formerly in the employ of The Master from Fallout, an Enclave scientist who has left the organization to try and support a medical clinic, a Brotherhood of Steel scavenger with a thing for pretty dresses, an always-drunk caravan owner being muscled out of her own business, and a 234 year old Mexican ghoul Vigilante Man-turned-mechanic suffering from depression due to feeling useless in his old age.
  • The quest "Flags of our Foul-Ups" consists of the player trying to make such a squad (called The Misfits!) actually combat effective. They consist of a small team of NCR troops with a severe attitude and discipline problems; an ambitious young woman who washed out of the Rangers but is still desperate for glory, a bloodthirsty former raider who'll recommend the squad dose up with the in-universe equivalent of PCP, a lazy and immoral snob who is only holding out until they can move him to a cushy desk job, and a huge but soft-spoken and pacifistic hick. They can be properly mobilised with the right choices and skills, demonstrated during the final attack by the Legion on the Dam, when your Misfits defeat a Legion assault.
  • The First Recon Sniper Team also qualifies. Professional leader, Shell-Shocked Veteran, Naïve Newcomer, Butch Lesbian and a traumatized tribal. They are also the best snipers and scouts in the whole NCR army.
  • Exaggerated based on the ending you take. You could easily wind up leading an army consisting of NCR, Khan, Securitron, BoS, and Enclave forces, while a reclusive group of tribals bombs out the Legion camp.
  • In the Dead Money DLC, your character is forced to work together with a Super Mutant with two personalities: Dumb Muscle and Control Freak, a mute Brotherhood of Steel assassin hell-bent on vengeance and a narcissistic Ghoul with a very fragile ego. Once you get into the Casino, your actions determine whether or not the group survives or you kill one another.
• In Fallout 4, it could be said that the Railroad are a colourful bunch of characters, and that's putting it lightly. Desdemona really does seem like an Only Sane Man between their top field operative Deacon, their mechanic and engineer Tinker Tom, their resident doctor Carrington and their top heavy Glory. Justified of course as the Railroad are idealistic wastelanders from all walks of life united on the issue of synth liberation and nothing else. The Minutemen would also qualify, as they're described as citizen-soldiers and it shows from their equipment: Minutemen squads can be made up of guys toting the faction's trademark Laser Musket and wearing uniforms, guys packing laser and plasma guns and wearing some leather or metal body armour, and the poor sods who make do with rags and baseball helmets and wield crude guns made from scrap metal and piping.
  • All your companions qualify. In no particular order: a wasteland dog, your British robotic butler, a soldier with a laser musket dressed like an American revolutionary, a snarky and outspoken reporter, an ancient synth detective, a Synth-hating Brotherhood Paladin who turns out to be a Synth himself, a breezy compulsive liar and Railroad operative, an Irish pit fighter and drug addict, a robotic scientist's assistant with a cute French accent, a stoner who turned into a ghoul after a bad trip and modeled his new identity on John Hancock, a flirty but surprisingly kind-hearted mercenary, a psychotic barely-restrained Super Mutant, and an Institute Courser. With DLC, they can also be joined by a homemade robot bodyguard, a grizzled old hunter, and a Card-Carrying Raider. They have absolutely nothing in common besides their loyalty to the player character. Because of their different backgrounds and outlooks, some of them only barely tolerate each other.
• The party of four in the Co-op Mode of Far Cry 3 qualify as this: Leonard, a rule-bending Irish-American policeman forced to turn in his badge for shooting a couple of rapists In the Back; Callum, a Violent Glaswegian-turned ship's cook; Tisha, a Sassy Black Woman and former soldier dishonorably discharged on forged accusations of PTSD; and Mikhail, a Russian hitman declared Persona Non Grata who's trying to find a way to support his family. When the captain of the ship they're all on sells them out to the Ruthless Modern Pirates living on the Rook Islands, they team up to take revenge and get back all the hard-earned money the captain stole from them. Gunfights ensue.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Final Fantasy VI has one of the biggest ragtag bunch of misfits. It consists of the Easy Amnesia, Half-Human Hybrid, Magic Knight and Action Girl Terra Branford, the Loveable Rogue Locke Cole, the Chivalrous Pervert King Edgar Roni Figaro, the Bare-Fisted Monk and Boisterous Bruiser Sabin Rene Figaro, The Atoner and Action Girl Celes Chere, the Badass Ninja, Blood Knight and Disappeared Dad Shadow, Failure Knight and Samurai Cyan Garamonde, the Raised by Wolves, Wild Child, Cloudcuckoolander and Badass Adorable Gau, the White Hair, Black Heart Badass Longcoat Setzer Gabbiani, the Squishy Wizard badass Mega Manner Strago Magus, the other Squishy Wizard, Glass Cannon (she's got the highest magic stat), Art Attacker, Kid-Appeal Character, Tagalong Kid, Genki Girl Relm Arrowny, the Badass Adorable, Cute Bruiser, Dance Battler, Pint-Sized Powerhouse and Killer Rabbit (he's got the highest defenses in the game and has enough attack to make him the best tank, being both resistant and strong as a dragoon) Mog, the Berserker, Bigfoot, Sasquatch, and Yeti, Dumb Muscle and Team Pet Umaro and, last but not least, the Secret Character, literal Heroic Mime, Jack of All Stats and Ambiguous Gender Gogo. There you go, 12 people and 2 animals, most of which had absolutely nothing to do with each other before the beginning of the game and only half are actually trained fighters.
  • Lampshaded early in Final Fantasy VII when, upon hearing the party introduce itself, one member at a time, Rufus Shinra shrugs and replies, "What a crew." Said crew consists of a Super-Soldier mercenary who used to work for Shinra's private army (Cloud), two members of an eco-terrorist organization - one being an Action Dad with a gun for an arm (Barret) while the other's a martial artist bartender that grew up with The Hero (Tifa), a street savvy White Magician Girl that's the Last of Her Kind (Aerith), an Intellectual Cartoon Creature (Red XIII), a fortune telling cat that gets around by riding a giant stuffed Moogle and is later revealed to be a robotic spy controlled by the Token Good Teammate of Shinra's Board of Executives (Cait Sith), and a foul-mouthed, chain-smoking pilot who dreams of going into space (Cid). There's also the two Optional Party Members: Yuffie Kirasagi, a spunky teenage ninja who aspires to return her homeland to its former glory, and Vincent Valentine, an undead Gunslinger who shapeshifts into monsters during his Limit Breaks.
    • Final Fantasy VII Remake reworks the scene slightly, mostly because some of the characters from the original scene aren't present. Heidegger (head of Shinra's military) asks "So then — what is this rag tag group of misfits I see before me?", prompting Barret, Aerith, and Red XIII to proudly introduce themselves as "AVALANCHE!"^note The aforementioned eco-terrorist group, "Local florist!", and "Lab rat dog!" respectively. Heidegger's response is a look halfway between disbelief and I Need a Freaking Drink.
  • In Final Fantasy IX, we have ourselves a thief who works for a band of thieves in disguise as a theatre trope, a princess who seeks to escape her kingdom, an innocent Black Mage who gets caught in a grand conspiracy, a narrow-minded knight who's only concern is protecting the princess, a lone dragoon looking for her lost lover, a gluttonous frog-being that devours their enemies, the last living summoner who lives with Moogles, and a mercenary who was framed by said thief.
  • Final Fantasy X-2 takes the cake with this one. The group who set out to stop the Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds and his big machina are a Stripperiffic sphere huntress, her two goons, a Death Seeker with a fake arm and leg, a wiz kid in a gas mask, a Large Ham with a crush on his cousin, his buddy, an Al Bhed with a BFG and their go-to girls are Spira's answer to the Charmed Ones.
    • Not that the one before was much better; Yuna's team of Guardians consists of a retired blitzball player, a snarky Black Mage, an exiled Ronso, a guy who claims to be from the sacred city of Zanarkand, a Grumpy Old Man who's also a legendary guardian of her father, and a member of a race of people who are considered heretics by the rest of the group. And yes, saving the world is a thing they do.
  • Also invoked in Final Fantasy XIII according to Word of God, who wanted to invoke a feeling similar to Final Fantasy VII: Your party consists of a soldier, an airline pilot trying to save his son, a leader of a group of anarchist do-nothings turned freedom-fighters, some kid on vacation, and two girls whose reasons for being in the party are too spoilerific and complicated to post here. In fact, FFXIII can be regarded as a Deconstruction of this trope, seeing how the party members quite naturally spend over a half of the game hating each other's guts and blatantly violating the Never Split the Party principle because of that.
  • Final Fantasy Tactics: Being branded as a heretic early on in the story results in Team Ramza collecting all sorts of unusual characters, not including the mercenary generics he can pick up at the bar or monsters.
  • Dissidia Final Fantasy: Almost all the heroes who make up the Cosmos Warriors have nothing in common, expect that their heroes. Their ranks include a knight with Chronic Hero Syndrome and Identity Amnesia, a Hot-Blooded resistance fighter, a very young Kid Hero, a king who's also a Knight in Shining Armor, a cheerful adventurer, a powerful young girl who's also a Shrinking Violet, a former soldier, a former mercenary, an actor who moonlights as a Gentleman Thief, lover of women, and a light-hearted, cheerful athlete. In the 2015 release of the game, they are also joined by tiny woman who wields power magic and rhymes, a dashing Sky Pirate, a female resistance fighter, a Cat Girl and powerful mage, a Warrior Prince who had been on a road trip, a gold-hearted heretic who follows his ideal, and a human weapon from unwanted but special class.
  • The mobile game Final Fantasy Brave Exvius isn't much better. Two step-brother Knights one with heavy daddy issues and a heart of golf while the other is a stoic Deadpan Snarker-ish swordsman with a promise to protect said brother, an amnesiac White Magician Girl and (most likely) The Heart to the blonde brother, the Dark Magical Girl version of the former, a passionate tsundere-ish airship mechanic, a serious water priest, the estranged son of a warrior country's emperor and leader of The Resistance, and the child looking thousand-year-old country founding, ex-member of the Big Bad band thunder mage. And that's only the first season.
• Basically any player's party in every Fire Emblem game. The recruitable casts usually do include a fair number of experienced, professional knights and soldiers, but they're rounded out with an assortment of new recruits, peasant militia fighters, inquisitive scholar-mages, wandering Warrior Poets, Blood Knights, bored mercenaries, thieves, pirates, assassins, defectors, and often a shapeshifting dragon girl. Not to mention a whole bunch of nobles and their retainers. Across the series, a lot of the straight-laced soldier units that are well-regarded in story that aren't Crutch Characters are Overrated and Underleveled.
  • Things get even more absurd with the Game Boy Advance trilogy. In The Binding Blade, Roy's army recruits orphans, a cowardly mage and his badass grandma, a resistance leader, retired badasses, a trio of Etrurian Generals, and even entire mercenary groups. The prequel has Eliwood recruit a mage general, a girl and assassin who were part of the bad guys, a defector from said bad guys, a deserting wyvern rider, a tag-along scholar, two half-human half-dragon performers, villagers, and even one of the two surviving members of the legendary Eight Generals. Lastly, in The Sacred Stones, your army can also have literal villagers, a Cloudcuckoolander mage girl, traitors, and three young trainees.
  • Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn's Dawn Brigade, justified as they are a group of resistance fighters, rather than a formal military group, but that justification goes straight out the window when they become the core of a full-blown rebel army.
  • Even Old Hubba lampshades this trope word for word in Awakening's Rogues & Redeemers 3 Xenologue.
  • In Fire Emblem Fates, Nohr's retainers are this trope compared to Hoshido's retainers, who despite their eccentricities, are nobles, Ninja and samurai whom one would expect to serve under the royals. Some of the retainers are criminals; Beruka is an assassin, Niles is a thief and Peri is so deranged she doesn't seem to understand that casually murdering people is wrong. Three of them are powerful warriors who come from parts unknown- the womanizing Laslow, the Tsundere Selena and the Large Ham Odin(in actuality, Inigo, Severa and Owain from Awakening). While Elise's retainers aren't in either group, she still has Effie, a muscle-obsessed Big Eater, and Arthur, a man with a strong sense of judgment and spectacularly bad luck.
  • Fire Emblem Heroes is particularly crazy about this due to the Massive Multiplayer Crossover nature of the game. Your army can include noble princes, despotic warlords, ordinary villagers, amoral mercenaries, people who are archenemies with each other, bloodthirsty lunatics, and a Voodoo Zombie.
  • The majority of the houses in Fire Emblem: Three Houses fit this. The exception is the Blue Lions, who are the most "knight-like" of the factions and the "quirks" of the individual members aren't nearly as pronounced.
    • The Golden Deer. It's led by the illegitimate grandson of the leader of the alliance who has a self-admitted and proud reputation as a schemer and is also an Almyran prince, and consists of a lazy girl who lives in her talented older brother's shadow, a pompous noble, a Child Prodigy, a tomboyish and stingy hunter, a muscle-headed Big Eater, an aspiring artist and a noblewoman with severe depression stemming from her supposedly cursed Crest.
    • The Black Eagles, despite mostly consisting of the nobility of Adrestria, aren't what many would consider the definition of an elite fighting force. It's led by the heiress of the Empire who often has a hard time just relaxing and is secretly planning on starting a continent-wide war, and consists of her brooding retainer who is almost comically sinister, a Hot-Blooded pugilist, a neurotic shut-in despised by her father, a Brilliant, but Lazy pacifist with no interests in fulfilling his aristocratic obligations, a pompous noble too obsessed with noblesse oblige, an otherwise-well-put-together young foreign princess still having troubling mastering the language, and a flirtatious opera singer. And in a later update, if you choose to side with said heiress in the mid-game moment-of-fate decision, your party will have another member — a former fellow teacher at the academy with a Blood Knight streak and a need to channel his Superpowered Evil Side into service to the imperial princess.
    • And then there's the Ashen Wolves, the unofficial "fourth house". Its ranks include a former criminal who serves as The Don of the Underground City the house is based in, an Alliance noble who is on the run because he is up to his ears in debt, the scion of a disgraced Imperial noble family with a severe case of Split Personality, and an emotionally restrained young woman who can summon monsters by sighing.
• Like Fire Emblem, the recruitable casts found in all Shining Force games (and many side games) have a large degree of variation in occupation, nationality, class, motive, and even race. It is not uncommon to wound up with an army full of Humans, Halflings, Centaurs, Elves, the token Joke Character, beastmen, and many other fictional races towards the end of the game. Hell, some games even have Ninjas and Samurais joining the force seemingly at random.
• Freedom Force, being a typical superhero team, consists of unlikely people brought together by extraordinary circumstances... and Energy X. These include an alien fugitive with Psychic Powers, a nuclear physicist obsessed with patriotic ideas, a hot-headed Latino from the barrio, a playboy atoner forever trapped in a metal suit, a Southern Belle/witch, a "Shcottish" fisherman with scales, two teens, a reprogrammed evil robot from an alternate future, a high-school nerd with an insect obsession, a former Air Force pilot now a Speedster, a rookie cop and a blind witness joined into a single being, a strange plant lady with a bikini made of leaves, a washed-up British boxer, an ex-thief, and one who is either an alien or an experiment.
  • The sequel adds a half-dead widower, a guy who really loves his Shakespeare, the daughter of a powerful sheikh, an Aztec god in a teenage body, a British inventor with a penchant for poisonous cards, a French fencing champion, and an actor with a jetpack.
• By the end of Freelancer, the Order includes a rogue captain guilty of Grand Theft Cruiser, a former security officer wanted for murder, an odd-jobs pilot wanted for murder and artifact smuggling (you), two archaeologists, and two noblemen disillusioned with their respective governments. Additionally, your alliances include a by-the-book destroyer captain, your character's father figure (an eccentric mechanic), and a gang leader.
• In FTL: Faster Than Light, the only hope for the galactic federation lies in the hands of an underequipped spaceship, its motley crew and whoever they can recruit, which can include mercenaries hired from stores, "liberated" slaves, rescued prisoners, castaways (some of which act so just to play trivia games with passerbys), Insectoid Aliens with delusions of humanhood, runaway brides, envoys who wish to test your diplomatic skills, notorious thieves and possibly a mysterious alien resurrected from a damaged stasis pod.
• The kids of Fuga: Melodies of Steel are idealistic farmhand boy and his energetic preschool-aged sister, a somewhat dorky and playful Team Mom, a grouchy and aloof City Mouse, a Gentle Giant that can't stop thinking about food, a timid and nerdy Cute Bookworm inventor, a pair of precocious pranksters, an overly-quiet and overly-polite Mystical Waif, a deep-voiced and very aloof mechanic, a plucky brat who's seriously convinced that she's the one in charge of the team, a melancholic ex-Child Soldier and most recently a showoff-ish Blue Blood. All of whom fight together to fight back against whatever forces are threatening their homeland and disrupting their peace.

G-K

• Delta Squad in Gears of War fit the trope perfectly - though everyone on the team is a soldier, they argue amongst each other constantly, are generally a collection of jerkasses, and the (newly promoted) squad leader is an actual ex-convict freed literally minutes before the mission began.
• In the Golden Sun games, this was lampshaded twice:
  • First done by Agatio in Golden Sun: The Lost Age: "They look like an unlikely bunch of ragamuffins."
  • And then Obaba in Golden Sun: Dark Dawn, although in a positive light: "So who are the rest of you? Probably a ragtag group of scrappy heroes out to stop this nasty eclipse, eh? Good."
• The Player Character of Granblue Fantasy takes up anyone who wants to come along with his adventures. The main story cast alone includes the Player Character, their dragon companion whose size leads him to be constantly mistaken for a lizard, a Mysterious Waif who's life-linked to the protagonist, a former knight of The Empire who defected to free the aforementioned waif, an airship helmsman, an apprentice mage, an old mercenary, a mysterious woman who clearly knows more than she's willing to share and is a God in Human Form, and a member of the setting's sky-wide police force. And it's possible to recruit tons of crew members from all different careers, races, and social standings.
• Grand Theft Auto V: Ignoring the possibilities in Online multiplayer (in which you can have a tweaked-out methhead, a businessman, a fitness guru, and a party animal all working together for a big heist), you have the main characters from the storyline: Michael, the ex-con who sold out his team to secure his safety; Franklin, an up-and-coming petty thief who wants a bigger, more respectable score; Trevor, the tweaked-out psychopath with a whole slew of personal and personality issues (including cannibalism and Not Giving A Shit) and a grudge against Michael; Lester, the reclusive, paranoid tech genius responsible for organizing the heists; Lamar, Franklin's gang-banging friend whose criminal eyes are much bigger than his stomach; and Dave, a dirty cop who's actually way cleaner than the rest of the force. Additionally, each heist gives the core team (Michael, Franklin, Trevor, and Lester, generally) a chance to become even more of a ragtag bunch by hiring other teammates.
• Hyrule Warriors, by virtue of crossing over multiple The Legend of Zelda games, has this. The heroes' ranks include (but are not limited to) a mute hero, a Warrior Princess, said princess's bodyguard, a White Magician Girl, a Boisterous Bruiser from Death Mountain, a fish-girl princess, a mischievous Imp, a girl with a love of bugs, a sentient sword, a chicken farmer who thinks she is the hero, and a giant murderous chicken.
• Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity has quite the bunch as well. It has yet another mute hero, a princess who would rather be a scientist, her ninja advisor, another boisterous bruiser from Death Mountain and fish-princess, a bird-man archer with an overinflated ego, a desert amazon and a giant forest spirit for starters. Later on you get to recruit four time-displaced heroes from the bad future, a villain undergoing a Heel–Face Turn, and finally the BFS-wielding king of Hyrule. To top it of, the optional characters include a faerie goddess, a 10,000 years old undead monk and a miniature version of the Killer Robots you have been fighting. The DLC expands this further with a full-sized version of the killer robots you have been fighting, and the as yet unreleased second DLC promises to add two Mad Scientists to the roster.
• Inazuma Eleven series' protagonists are middle-school soccer players who are either overwhelmingly optimistic and determined, angsty pretty boys with Anime Hair, midgets, or giants. Given the game's availability to recruit numerous characters, the list of crew expands toward even more bizarre characters like kids who think they are gods, senior citizens, cavemen, ninjas, samurais, Arthurian knights, Chinese warlords, or even aliens. Again, this is a soccer genre.
• Infinite Space starts out rather normally: a boy who seeks to unravel the mystery of the Epitaphs, his little sister, a "launcher", and an ex-thug. As the game progresses, you can hire mercenaries and have some normal citizens on board, which don't seem too bad, but later on, you can also have military officers (who join you for various reasons), ex-pirates, and even princesses.
• Jade Empire features, as the last hope for a fantasy world based on East Asian mythology, a martial artist who is secretly the last of a group of monks who served the goddess of rebirth; his/her childhood friend who is troubled by vague prophetic visions; a former assassin; a hobo seeking revenge for his dead daughter; a loud, outgoing, sociopathic mercenary; a Mad Scientist with a fondness for explosives and flying machines who happens to be an amnesiac god; a little girl possessed by a benevolent demon and his Evil Twin; a henpecked Drunken Master; and a Rebellious Princess who dresses like a cross between a ninja and a belly dancer.
• Oh boy, we could go on about Killing Floor's teams for ages. A sampling of the various playable characters who have to work together: a poster boy for Police Brutality, a poster boy for the Sociopathic Soldier, a weird and psychotic day trader in a gas mask, a half-mutated security guard, a neo-anarchist punk rocker, a thinly disguised parody of aggressive footballer Duncan Ferguson, a chav, one of Her Majesty's Royal Guards (hat and all), a Badass Preacher, a wannabe Youtube-star urban ninja, at least two crazy people in chicken suits, two Indiana Jones Expys, a Bad Santa, four World War II reenactors, and the Pyros.
• How about Knights of the Old Republic? With one game developed each by Bioware and Obsidian, this series is absolutely overflowing. Common to both games are a Mandalorian Blood Knight, a bloodthirsty assassin droid who suggests murder as the solution to any problem, and an astromech droid that controls the ship and is quite capable of lying by the second game. Each one comes back Darker and Edgier the second time around.
  • Characters specific to the first game include an ex-pilot with major trust issues due to a past betrayal, a Jedi trying too hard to be perfect and scared to death of failing, an exiled Wookee, a smart-mouthed teenaged Twi'lek, a redeemed Jedi with a powerful temper and a sad history, a Jedi who's either verging on senility or pretending to be specifically to annoy you, and leading them all is an amnesiac Sith Lord.
  • In the second game, you get an old woman whose near-sociopathic dedication to self-reliance has led her to attempt to destroy the Force, a maniacally-depressed and heavily mutilated (mental and physical) former Sith, a former wisecracking Jedi-killer with a lot of blood on his hands, another psychotic droid (but this one has such an intense control complex it's out to rule the galaxy), a Zabrak mechanic trying to make up for all the deaths caused by the superweapon he designed, depending on your choices either an insane evil Wookee bounty hunter or an overconfident and rigidly honorable female human bounty hunter, and depending on your gender either a Badass Bookworm with a few secrets or a soldier whose culture interprets dueling as flirting; and all of these are led by a hole in the Force that feeds off their living spirits.
  • In Star Wars: The Old Republic, each character gets a crew of eclectic individuals who join them. For the Republic, the Jedi Knight gets an idealistic astromech, a rebellious padawan, a womanizing medic, a doggedly determined soldier, and a centuries-old Sith Lord who was responsible for imprisoning and killing the previous protagonists of the series. For the Empire, the Sith Warrior has a smartmouthed Twi'lek slave girl, a patriotic Imperial soldier who takes protocol as seriously as possible, a former Padawan who's either psychotically insane or disillusioned by Jedi hypocrisy, a rough-and-tumble Black Ops soldier, and a psychotic Talz obsessed with murder. With the Fallen Empire expansions released, your Player Character is recruiting whoever is willing to show up to fight an Omnicidal Maniac who is curb-stomping the Republic and Empire, and the two superpowers are too busy squabbling with one another to do anything about them. Your base recruits include a very Affably Evil Sith turned spymaster, the Republic spy she teamed up with (the Jedi Grandmaster's estranged son), the ex-consort of said omnicidal nut (and mother of his children), a soldier turned pirate, and a Voss Mystic (who rarely, if ever leave the planet) who just shows up Because Destiny Says So. The roster gradually grows by adding a mix of returning characters from of the original eight crews and other characters from all across the game's history.

L-N

• The Lamplighters League: A gang of evil cultists are trying to take over the world, and you have to build a team to stop them. However, to quote the game's description, "Unfortunately the best of the best are all gone, so now it's up to the best of the worst."
• The survivors from either Left 4 Dead game count. In the first, a Vietnam vet, a Badass Biker who hates everything, an office worker who had no clue what's going on, and a Gamer Chick who's flunking out of college. In the second, an overweight, middle-aged Team Dad, a ditzy Butt-Monkey with an accent thicker than pea soup, a snarky conman in a white suit, and an Intrepid Reporter and token chick.
• In LEGO Minifigures Online, you can assemble a team of a chicken suit guy, a fortune teller, a mermaid, a bumblebee girl, a plumber, an Aztec warrior, and a cyclops—and that's just the beginning.
• Like a Dragon
  • Yakuza: Like a Dragon turns the series from a brawler to a JRPG, with the protagonist Ichiban being a former Yakuza thug with a fanatical love of Dragon Quest that colors his perception of the world. Along for the ride is a former nurse turned smelly hobo, a disgraced cop turned DMV employee, a hostess, a Korean assassin who was formerly a villain in Yakuza 6, the leader of the local Chinese mafia and potentially a secretary and heir to a failing rice cracker shop. Together they take on a criminal conspiracy that goes all the way up to the Tokyo Governor, as well as such things as tigers and giant roombas on the way.
  • Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth finds Ichiban, once more, front and center among a group of misfits from every walk of life. In addition to some of his old friends from Yokohama, his new Hawaiian adventure is joined by a local taxi driver, a housekeeper under the employ of his long-lost mother, the leader of a Korean gang from back in Yokohama, and Kazuma Kiryu himself (who is unfortunately dying of cancer).
• Over the course of LISA: The Painful RPG, Brad can recruit around 30 party members to aid him in his quest. Potential party members include…
  • A middle-aged loser in a cheetah print jersey who’s obsessed with hints.
  • An old man who may very well be the personification of a Rambling Old Man Monologue.
  • An energetic luchador with a propensity for headbutts.
  • An alcoholic bowsman.
  • A man with a chicken comb who only joins thanks to Brad holding his prized hen hostage.
  • A guy in various pelts who was Raised By Animals.
  • A possibly insane barbarian who’s implied to have killed his son.
  • A fat shirtless trucker with depression who was posed as a woman.
  • A pushover with IBS.
  • A sad guitarist who joins to look for his brother.
  • A severe drunkard who saw the death of his two sons.
  • A cross-dressing man with a baseball bat who leads a brothel.
  • A walking anchovy with a questionable law degree.
  • A Tattooed Crook with a fish mask that speaks only in Fishman noises.
  • A middle-aged party animal that role plays as a Power Rangers Expy.
  • A Dry Crusader with a snazzy turban and multiple flavors of Finger Poke of Doom.
  • A crazed hobo with an obsession with his “Duffie”.
  • A self-centered man who claims to be the most handsome man left alive.
  • A silent gunman with a bucket on his head and two pistols.
  • An Affably Evil Serial Killer who speaks in rhymes and pecks people to death with a plastic beak.
  • A pornography-obsessed Mad Artist with an Expressive Mask.
  • A young traveling magician.
  • A guy with a love for cats and a katana.
  • A man in a tiger mask (or a tiger head) who challenges all the dojos he can find.
  • A guy in a fly costume who was the cart racing champion of an island made of trash.
  • A very greasy, very anxious, very fat man with a ton of debt.
  • An Expy of the Shockmaster.
  • A crazed pro-wrestler who wears the pelt of a dead dog and talks to it.
  • A warlord/football quarterback with Patriotic Fervor.
  • A gay swordsman who wields six blades like Wolverine Claws, joining only because Brad holds his lover hostage.
• In Live A Live, the only people who stand on the Omnicidal Maniac's way to destroying the world are a caveman who can barely speak, a petty thief (either a frail boy, a rowdy girl, or a portly guy depending on your actions) trained in martial arts, a Ninja, a cowboy who put up a bounty on his own head, a wrestler, a psychic teenager and a Robot Buddy that was built by a starship mechanic as a pastime project.
• The Hero of Lufia & The Fortress of Doom is accompanied in his quest to stop the Sinistrals by his girlfriend, the Badass Normal Commander of the Lorbenian army, and a bratty half-elf girl. Oh, and said girlfriend is one of those Sinistrals, reincarnated.
  • Lufia: The Legend Returns has quite the cast of misfits. You have a valiant (but stupid) warrior of Maxim's bloodline, a traveling fortune teller, a noble thief, a vengeance-seeking monk, the bodyguard of a princess, the aforementioned princess, a bear-like animal, a virtuous (but stupid) pirate who is the aforementioned princess's brother, a flippant gambler, a mad scientist, a spoony bard, an elf, and potentially a legendary dragon. Oh, and said fortune teller is also the reincarnation of the same Sinistral.
• Hiro and the gang from Lunar: Eternal Blue qualify as they, strangely except for the main character Hiro, have some problems hidden from others. In fact, Big Bad Zophar explicitly refers to them as "the ragtag party of misfits."
• While Raze's group in Mana Khemia 2: Fall of Alchemy is more-or-less a well-oiled group, Ulrika's group fits this precisely, consisting of a fairy(?) larger than Ulrika and far more timid, a guy in an animal suit/ball which said suit carries who can switch at will, a young boy with a machine obsession (and an abusive sister, but that's on Raze's side), a girl who believes curses are "incantations", and finally, Ulrika herself. In-battle, Ulrika's side is a bit more powerful than Raze's, due to tactical considerations and better overall abilities.
• Mass Effect:
  • In Mass Effect the fate of the entire galaxy rests in the hands of a war hero/ruthless commander/Shell-Shocked Veteran, who is backed up by a telekinetic tech put through brutal training as a child, a religious Marine with an infamous family history she's desperate to redeem, an angry cop with an estranged dad, a Proud Warrior Race Guy mercenary with species issues who killed his own father, an alien mechanic desperate for her father's approval, and a blue-skinned scientist recruited to fight her own evil mother. Big, happy family, right? Even Shepard isn't immune. Depending on which past you choose, s/he either grew up without a family and was raised by gangs and violence (Earthborn) or is the sole survivor of a pirate raid on his/her home planet (Colonist) and either watched his/her whole platoon except for him/her being annihilated by an alien monster (Sole Survivor) or sent the 3/4 of his/her platoon to death to capture a bunker from slavers (Ruthless).
  • Mass Effect 2 brings this trope to even Darker and Edgier territory. Shepard's suicide mission team appears to consist of nothing but thugs, sociopaths, and ne'er-do-wells. Specifically, the party includes: a quirky scientific genius/ruthless spec ops soldier with deep regrets, a homicidal test subject with psychic powers tortured from babyhood, the cop from the last game turned into a vigilante with a pile of Survivor Guilt and an intense need for revenge, a berserk vat-grown alien supersoldier with existential issues, a cynical ex-Marine with daddy issues (and the Only Sane Man, mind you), a human-supremacist test tube baby femme fatale with daddy issues, an alien mechanic from the last game now accused of betraying her race to a robot horde, a quasi-hive-minded robot from said robot horde motivated by religious zeal (with no issues!), an alien warrior driven by a rigid code of honour to hunt down her own family, who you can replace with her homicidally-insane sex-crazed daughter, a deeply spiritual alien assassin estranged from his son, and, in downloadable content, a sociopathic mercenary out for revenge and a galactic-class cat burglar with a dead boyfriend. You can get a total party kill — yes, including Shepard — if you don't do any of these characters' side missions, all of which solve at least some of their many personal issues. (And yes, that many characters have family issues in Mass Effect.)
  • Both games take some effort to justify such choices in the crew. In Mass Effect, Shepard is a Spectre, a self-sufficient field agent flying a ship that is technically on loan from the Alliance. The situation with Saren isn't seen as that much of a threat, and Shepard simply picks anyone who offers to tag along; the six party members are the best Shepard could gather on short notice. In Mass Effect 2, the authorities outright ignore the problem and don't provide any help, and Shepard is forced to seek out criminals and social outcasts who are nevertheless insanely talented in their fields. Recordings from Cerberus' base in Mass Effect 3 shows the Illusive Man actually invoked this when choosing potential team members. Knowing Shepard would feel more comfortable with such a team rather than a task force of soldiers.
  • Basically, this trope is what you'll see just from browsing through the War Assets list of Mass Effect 3. Even by the franchise's previous standard, there are groups that you'd never imagine on the same side before Mass Effect 3 hit shelf. Shepard's party also qualifies, as most of her crew over the previous games return to action, including: either the telekinetic soldier or the religious marine from the first game; the sexy scientist from the first game, now a Dark Action Girl; the aforementioned alien mechanic, who is now one of the go-to people regarding the Robot War on her homeworld; the aforementioned Vigilante Man, who is his people's go-to guy on fighting the invading Reapers; the AI of your ship, who now inhabits a sexy Robot Girl body (and has become the pilot's girlfriend); and a relatively fresh-faced marine who now serves the role of the Only Sane Man (although he has his own fair share of baggage). With DLC, Shepard's squad can also include a member of a long-extinct race of soldiers who has a fondness for having whatever he doesn't like Thrown Out the Airlock. Some DLC also give Shepard temporary allies that include the Proud Warrior Race Guy from the first game, and The Don of the galaxy's Wretched Hive.
  • Mass Effect: Andromeda has the Andromeda Initiative's hopes of success relying on, in order: Someone who got their job on account of their father dying on Day One in Andromeda saving their life (who's either a former bodyguard (Sara Ryder) or former Alliance soldier (Scott) who got blacklisted thanks to their dad), a hot-blooded cop turned crisis response officer, an insanely powerful biotic who identifies more with asari than humans, a good-natured turian smuggler, an asari academic with a troubled past and severe emotional issues, a positively ancient krogan ex-pirate (or, ex-anything remotely related to fighting), and one of the locals, a sniper Desperately Looking for a Purpose in Life assigned to them by La Résistance to see if the Initiative's on the level. While they're off fighting, their ship is maintained by a Street Urchin turned starship mechanic, an absent-minded scientist with strong religious beliefs, a salarian pilot with an unusually strong memory even by his species' standards, and a doctor who grew up on Omega.
• In Master Detective Archives: Rain Code, this is the Nocturnal Detective Agency in a nutshell. The agency is owned by a cowardly, clueless chief, and the employees he manages include an amnesiac trainee detective, a greedy, yet attractive cynic with a sense of compassion and an Ambiguous Gender who can see the state of a crime scene when it was first discovered by a third party, an egotistical and perverted Casanova Wannabe who can disguise himself as absolutely anyone, an completely airheaded heiress to a family that runs world-standard time who can also rewind time, and an aloof, apathetic, death-obsessed Bookworm with spiritual affinity and the ability to see the dead.
• In Mercenaries 2, a five-person team composed of a revenge-driven merc, a snarky computer geek, a lecherous helicopter pilot, a perpetually drunken jet pilot, and a snarky mechanic, destroys the Venezuelan government, and defeats a superpower-backed army as nothing more than a means to that end.
• Every faction in Mordheim: City of the Damned. The Mercenaries are a bunch of self-interested lowlifes taking insane risks to collect a dangerous substance for quick cash, the Cultists are deranged mutated psychopaths gathering Wyrdstone to try and appease the thing that fell in with the meteorite, the Skaven are all monsters, the Witch Hunters are religious crazies who want to kill everything and everyone in the city because they believe nothing can be saved, and the Undead who consist of a vampire and his sires, an insane outcast pledging his loyalty to a bloodsucking fiend because he wants the protection, a conniving necromancer following for power, and the ghouls who just want some meat. The Sisters are the only ones who don't really qualify.
• In Mortal Kombat X, Team S-F consists of a Shirai Ryu ninja whose master was a formerly undead ninja, a Shaolin Archer who hails from the legendary Kung family, and two Army enlistees. Add the fact that Johnny Cage is not only training this group, but one of the enlistees is his own daughter with his ex-wife.
• In the Mother series, where most adults are useless, the fate of the world against evil aliens lies upon a group of preteen kids, who would be perfectly normal (if a bit colorful) children if not for their Psychic Powers and/or unusually high intelligence.
  • Special mention goes to the third game: The only people fighting to prevent the world's corruption and subsequent destruction are a sensitive preteenage shepherd boy who can't quite get over his troubled past, his loyal dog, a teen girl raised by freaky cross-dressing fairy things who has been locked away in a castle all her life, and a smelly, ridiculed thief in his 20s with a crippled leg. Yet somehow, we're not doomed.
• Neverwinter Nights: Hordes of the Underdark qualifies, as your possible companions include a gentleman tiefling with a frenzied demon side; a reformed drow assassin; an either vengeful or reformed ghost of a fallen paladin; and a kobold bard turned Red Dragon Disciple. And all of you are Epic-level. Even the kobold.
  • Especially the kobold. The Big Bad tries to persuade your allies to turn on you. Most of them will stay if you're nice to them at various points, or discovered certain things about them. Deekin will stay no matter what.
• While the team in Neverwinter Nights 2 is a walking bunch of racial stereotypes, the expansion, Mask of the Betrayer, has you spend the game travelling with a wizard who is a product of some other person dividing their soul; a hagspawn Casanova; an exiled half-angel crusader with plans to tear down a major feature of the foundation of the universe; and, depending on the choices you make, either an undead construct of countless souls of thugs and criminals or a giant fuzzy spirit bear god. It's worth mentioning that the hero him/herself is the manifestation/victim of a spirit-destroying curse with the potential to devour gods.
• Though the original party was done to death, they still fit under here. You have a Blood Knight dwarf who wants to become a monk, a Loveable Rogue tiefling whose entire life has sucked, an elf who's stalked you since birth, a kindly but very weird gnomish bard, a pyromaniac sociopath who thinks she's the center of the universe, a cold elven mage who used to work for your enemies, a paladin having a moral crisis, an angry and bitter ranger with a Chronic Backstabbing Disorder, a Farm Girl who has nothing left after lizardmen burn her farm down, the Well-Intentioned Extremist who kills her, a Stripperiffic Obi-Wan figure from another dimension, and the Team Pet golem.
• The heroes of NieR include a single-minded Knight Templar Parent/Big Brother dedicated to saving his daughter/sister, a surly floating Spell Book, a potty-mouthed half-shade Swordswoman, and a soft-spoken young boy who turns everything he looks at into stone.
• No More Heroes III: Earth's best chance against the Galactic Superheroes is an otaku assassin, a Cyborg ninja, a formerly-deceased Psycho for Hire, the father of said psycho (and all three of the latter have tried to kill the former at some point!), a game developer who used the otaku to raid the CIA, a supernatural figure from an earlier Grasshopper game, one of the Galactic Superheroes making a Heel–Face Turn, a heavyweight wrestler who's a real superhero, and the otaku's cat.

O-Q

• Octopath Traveler: Ophilia is a cleric on a sacred pilgrimage. Cyrus is a scholar in search of a missing book. Tressa is a young merchant in a journey to see the world. Olberic is a fallen knight on a quest of justice to find a traitor in his past. Primrose is a fallen noblewoman on a quest to kill the men who killed her father. Alfyn is a young apothecary out to see the world. Therion is a thief who gets blackmailed into helping a noble house. H'aanit is a huntress in search of her missing master. These are the eight main characters of the game. Start with any of them, and the others can be gathered as one travels from location to location. Working together, they stop minor criminals plaguing towns, crime syndicates, wild monsters running amok, and worshipers of a Fallen God, and much more. They don't seek greatness but have it thrust upon them by the end of the game.
• Operation Darkness: the Wolf Pack combines this with Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot. By the end of the game, the Pack consists of three werewolves, including the protagonist and the squad commander; a female pyrokinetic; The Big Guy, who is eventually revealed to be Frankenstein's Monster, a top heavy female sniper; the world's most transparent Expy of Herbert West; Jack the Ripper; Abraham van Helsing's professor sword wielding granddaughter and finally, if you follow a bunch of unclear steps, a Nazi zombie cyborg.
• Subverted in Pathologic. The first scene in the game shows the three healers meeting up, arguing with each other, then deciding to strike out separately to fight the plague. Throughout the game, they never really team up, and occasionally work against each other.
• The Persona series loves this trope:
  • Besides the protagonist, the teenage heroes of the original Persona comprise of a Delicate and Sickly girl who looks suspiciously healthy (because she's only a fragment of her real self), a mischievous artist, a snooty rich kid, a delinquent transfer student, the class clown, an eccentric rich girl, a rather rude Gyaru Girl, and a former delinquent turned Team Mom. Not only do they start off barely knowing each other for the most part, but several outright hate each other for much of the game.
  • Persona 2:
    • Innocent Sin: The largely dysfunctional cast consists of an antisocial delinquent (you), a perky journalist, the popular foreign girl (who's also a martial arts fanatic), a freelance photographer, a Hot-Blooded gang leader, and a Cultured Badass who's the Big Bad for most of the game. That said, while they start off as mostly strangers to each other, it's later revealed that most of them were close friends as children, though none of them remember it until near the end.
    • Eternal Punishment: The heroes are mostly dysfunctional working adults. There's the journalist from Innocent Sin, her lingerie saleswoman roommate, a police detective, a shady information broker, a fashion model, the heir to one of Japan's biggest corporations, plus the antisocial delinquent from Innocent Sin (who also happens to be the detective's younger brother). Several of them wouldn't be caught dead next to each other in normal circumstances.
  • S.E.E.S. in Persona 3 is comprised of a New Transfer Student, a spirited woman, the Class Clown, a Boxing Battler, the Student Council President, a Shrinking Violet, a Tag Along Kid, a Bruiser with a Soft Center, a Robot Girl, and a dog. Despite the team not being particularly close to each other at the start, they are expected to save humanity from The End of the World as We Know It.
  • The Investigation Team of Persona 4 consist of the new transfer student, the awkward son of a department store manager, a kung-fu-obsessed tomboy, the local innkeeper's eccentric daughter, a tailor with a Face of a Thug, a perky Idol Singer, a cross-dressing Kid Detective, and a weird teddy bear thing who becomes a handsome flirty blonde, who all need to work together to solve a supernatural murder mystery.
  • Persona 5: The thieves are a bunch of high school students (and a cat), that include a boy on probation for assault, a self-styled Japanese Delinquent, a quarter-white part time fashion model, a painter's apprentice, the Student Council President, a recovering Hikikomori, an eccentric rich girl, a teenage Great Detective, an accomplished gymnast, and, again, a cat who insists that he is not a cat. Not the best material for becoming famous Phantom Thieves (except arguably the cat) or fighting a well-funded criminal conspiracy, but they pull it off anyway.
• Pillars of Eternity gloriously continues Obsidian's love for this trope, the Sole Survivor of a soul-consuming disaster being driven insane by visions of a past life and the spirits of dead people as its protagonist and the story companions they can encounter are just as screwed up, if not worse. It's so bad that the Big Bad right before the final battle will accuse them of only following the Watcher because they were a bunch of failures in need of direction in their lives. Considering how quickly and how easily they latch on to the Watcher, the Big Bad arguably has a point. To elaborate your party members (besides the aforementioned Sole Survivor) are:
  • Edér: A pet-loving, slightly airheaded war veteran not welcome in his hometown because of his religion and worship of a dead god.
  • Aloth Corfiser: An elven wizard aristocrat that has a Violent Glaswegian female split personality, and turns out to be a former lackey of the Big Bad.
  • Durance: A fanatical and extremely racist/sexist priest of the setting's war goddess with a tendency to verbalise his many prejudices and one of the people who killed aforementioned dead god.
  • The Grieving Mother: A cipher-former midwife with a Dark and Troubled Past that forced her to run, and constantly hides behind her Perception Filter.
  • Hiravias: An orlan druid with weird habits (you can get him to eat raw deer when you first meet) and a rude mouth that got exiled due to his primary druid form being a bad omen.
  • Kana: An aumaua (semi-aquatic giant humanoids with colored skin and shark teeth) chanter-scholar Naïve Newcomer seeking a tablet lost by his people. The resident Nice Guy, who's probably the Only Sane Man.
  • Pallegina: The Paladin of the group, who happens to be an avian godlike, who was sold by her father into her order of all-male knights because she could not be his heir (godlike are sterile). If you bring her to meet the goddess that touched her, she will verbally rip that goddess a new one.
  • Sagani: A boreal dwarf ranger that pretty much defies Our Dwarves Are All the Same with a vengeance, who's searching for the reincarnation of their dead village elder. What makes her so weird? In Naasitaq, not only do the women do all the hunting, the diet is primarily raw meat.
  • The Devil of Caroc: A rogue ex-serial killer that went on a rampage for revenge after her village got razed to the ground. To make her even more of a misfit, her soul now inhabits a bronze construct (the alternative was a noose — and she's still not sure she made the right choice).
  • Zahua: A Ixamitlian philosopher-monk who's near constantly high as a kite; this is pretty much standard procedure of the monks of Ixamitl. Well, that and enjoying the suffering in life as part of its beauty. He's also a former chieftain that escaped his tribe's destruction.
  • Maneha: Another aumaua, this one a surprising amiable barbarian. Turns out, she's Awakened too, like Aloth and the Watcher, and her memories of her past life are haunting her conscience.
• Piratez: Your initial crew consists of runaway experiments who decided to stick together. While you can employ professional soldiers later, much of your new hires will be random volunteers and rescuees of varied backgrounds and profiles.
• Planescape: Torment has an iconically bizarre assortment of characters to make up the party. Of course, considering most of the game takes place mostly in Sigil, it would have been weird if the group wasn't a bunch of randomly selected and mismatched people and other creatures. It's that sort of city. Indeed, Nordom and Annah are both perfectly mundane for the setting, Fall-From-Grace is odd mostly for the fact she's both an agnostic cleric (there's an entire faction full of these) and an Ascended Demon (spiced by her being a Succubus who's taken a vow of chastity), as the latter is rare but far from unheard of. Dak'kon is mostly unusual for his zerth blade (and, in fact, the githzerai as a whole were redesigned to be more like Dak'kon). Morte, Ignus, Vhailor and the Nameless One are all on the weird side even for Planescape, though.
  • The Nameless One: An amnesiac immortal trying to find out who he is and how to die while he still can.
  • Morte: a flying talking skull with the libido and vocabulary of a frisky teenager and a distinct lack of honesty, able to curse so obscenely that he can make a millennia-old demon-witch or a Fallen Angel forget about their magic to instead try and smash him to pieces with their bare hands.
  • Dak'kon: a githzerai (sort of scaly, yellow elves with a serious grudge against slavery) and the last warrior of an ancient order who wield blades attuned to their minds capable of destroying anything, but who was long ago broken in spirit.
  • Annah-of-the-Shadows: a tiefling (fiendblooded mortal) thief and corpse-collector.
  • Fall-From-Grace: a chaste agnostic cleric succubus who has given up on being Chaotic Evil.
  • Ignus: a pyromaniac mage who's perpetually burning and loves it.
  • Nordom: a being embodying geometric order cut off from the Hive Mind of its brethren, accompanied by a pair of semi-sentient spirits who have shaped themselves into its crossbows.
  • Vhailor: a haunted suit of armor kept together by his refusal to abandon his duty to Justice.
  • Justified in that the Mark of Torment etched into the Nameless One's flesh draws troubled souls to him. Furthermore, sometimes past incarnations of the Nameless One helped make them the way they are.

R-T

• In Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal, the Q-Force is this thanks to Captain Qwark's extremely questionable recruitment choices. They include a trigger-happy Lombax who's the last of his kind, a defective Warbot who was supposed to serve the villain of the first game, the President's daughter, an army of robots too cowardly to defend the galaxy without a good leader, an absent-minded pro Hoverboarder assigned as a Black Ops Specialist, a nerdy repairman with an unhealthy interest in video games, Qwark's own fitness trainer, and Skrunch the one-eyed monkey. There's also Captain Qwark himself, a cowardly washed-up superhero who was previously the villain of the first two games, with a massive ego and terrible skills with a set of crayons.
• The main cast of Resident Evil: Outbreak consists of eight people at the same diner when the outbreak happened, not highly trained police officers as in the others.
• By a similar vein to Outbreak, the Survivors of Resident Evil Resistance consist of a retired boxer, a hacktivist, a mechanic, a park ranger, a firefighter, an Umbrella intern, and Jill Valentine. None of them have anything in common, save the fact that Umbrella wants them dead.
• In Rimworld, the default start gives you three unwilling planetary colonists who can have two of over 130 possible backstories (100 child backstories and 30 adult), along with other traits and eccentricities. Depending on who you roll up, you can have people who are ridiculously incompetent or even completely incapable of even basic survival skills.
• Rogue Galaxy could also qualify. By the middle of the game the super-elite pirate ship's crew consists in: a legendary pirate, a Second-in-command cat with a bad attitude, a bad-tempered jungle girl, a clueless young boy mistaken for a skillful hunter, an actual skillful hunter, a cheerful girl, an extremely polite fighting-machine robot with the spirit of a dead child inside, a depressed Ex-soldier, a police-wanted, fired-from-his-job computer genius, and a... something that can fire missiles from his back and speaks with a Scottish accent, plus a couple of normal human pirates and a talking frog who eats weapons. Insanity ensues.
  • It is stated by several of the characters however, that Marcus's trial was a sham and before it he was an extremely skilled soldier.
• Averted in the first Saints Row, but brought into full force when the series took a turn for the Denser and Wackier in Saints Row 2, where you, a gangbanger who survived being blown up on a yacht, lead a gang alongside the plucky young gangster who helped you bust out of prison, a Sociopathic Hero who considers mass murder a weekend hobby, a lieutenant who is smart but constantly ignored and who can't sing to save his life, and a girl who does every kind of drug you can imagine, along with half of the men in the city. Later sequels followed suit and added an antisocial ex-FBI hacker, an ex-KGB Genius Bruiser, an unmasked luchador, an aging pimp with a voice synthesizer, an ex-MI6 super spy, and an ambiguously genocidal floating robot (among others). When Satan's own daughter joins the crew in Gat out of Hell, nobody so much as bats an eyelash at the prospect.
• The Sakura Wars franchise is all about the player bringing together disparate women from across the world to protect humanity from demonic invasion.
  • The Imperial Combat Revue of Tokyo consists of a fresh-faced Imperial Navy ensign, a Cute Clumsy Girl who is also an aspiring swordswoman (as well as the daughter of a war hero), a business mogul's daughter, a Hot-Blooded Okinawan martial artist, a stoic veteran of the Russian Revolution, a French child with powerful psychic abilities, a Chinese Mad Scientist, a half-Italian woman with daddy issues, and a German Emotionless Girl.
  • The Paris Combat Revue is led by the aforementioned Imperial Navy ensign, and consists of a Cute Clumsy Girl who works as a nun, a Blue Blood, a Crusading Widow, a Vietnamese animal tamer for the circus, and an Italian-Romanian convict serving a Longer-Than-Life Sentence.
  • The New York Combat Revue is led by the nephew of the previous games' protagonist, and consists of a cute and clumsy Occidental Otaku from Texas, a Harlemite biker-turned-lawyer, a Delicate and Sickly girl who also works as a nurse, a Big Eater bounty huntress from Mexico, and a non-binary Japanese supergenius.
  • In the reboot, the new Imperial Combat Revue consists of another fresh-faced Imperial Navy soldier, as well as a Cute Clumsy Girl who was inspired by the Cute Clumsy Girl from the original Revue, a Hot-Blooded Miko, a Ninja Child Prodigy, a Grecian actress, and a Luxembourg-born scholar who is also a Lady of Black Magic. In addition, the business mogul's daughter from the original Revue is now the commander.
• Mental's army from Serious Sam could be considered a villainous example of this, as the majority of his army are either science projects or just drafted from various conquered planets (and sometimes even death doesn't prevent conscription) and slapped together into a hodgepodge of headless zombies, alien skeletons, giant bulls, scorpion centaurs with gatling guns and biomechanical chicken walkers with rocket turrets. Said hodgepodge is still strong enough to overwhelm and annihilate the Earth.
• Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun has a boisterous Samurai of common origins, a Ninja of the fallen Iga clan, a cute but loopy Street Urchin, a female spy who kills people with her hairpins, and a Cool Old Guy Friendly Sniper and gunsmith with a sniper rifle that folds up into his cane and prosthetic leg. Oh, and his pet tanuki.
• In Silent Storm, the composition of the Special Operations-SE2 (Allies) or Abwehr Section 2 (Axis) squad is entirely up to you. You are presented with an array of colorful dossiers on different specialists from various countries. The stand-alone expansion Silent Storm Sentinels has the titular organization composed of former members of both the SE2 and Abwehr Section 2. This is even more a case in Hammer & Sickle taking place during the Cold War where the Player Character is a Soviet spy infiltrating Western Europe and gathering a team that perfectly fits this trope.
• Skies of Arcadia fits this trope to a tee. You've got a Lovable Rogue, a Fiery Redhead, and a mysterious waif as your main party members. You pick up lots more along the way to join your crew. Not to mention all the 3rd party characters that come when Gondor Calls for Aid near the end.
• The Cooper Gang in the Sly Cooper series. In the first two games it just consists of Sly, Bentley, and Murray; but by the third game its ranks include the Guru, a mystical koala dreamtime master, Penelope, a mousy RC expert ^note Who turns against the team in the fourth game, and two old enemies; the Panda King, a stoic with a hidden love of theatrics and explosives, and Dimitri, a literal lounge lizard who talks like a Jive Turkey. Sly actually refers to this trope while thinking about them.
  "Gang… more like a pack of misfits…"
• The various teams that congregate in the Sonic the Hedgehog series. Special mentions go to Team Dark and Team Chaotix.
  • Team Dark consists of a brooding loner who also happens to be the series's Ultimate Life Form, a gorgeous, opportunistic thief who really has a thing for jewels, and a psychotic robot, who, motivated by revenge, seeks to destroy all of his creator's other robots. The only reason said robot doesn't blow up everything is because he's kept in check by the other two.
  • Team Chaotix is allegedly a troop of detectives who consists of a loud-mouthed rough-and-tumble leader who's secretly brilliant but always having money troubles anyways, a super-serious and stoic master of stealth who acts as though he should be in a different genre, and a Bratty Half-Pint who is on the team for no real reason.
• Depending on whom you recruit in your pack, Spore has elements of this trope. It's possible to end up with someone with his cilia from the Tidepool, and yet he can last longer than the others.
• Invoked in the original Starcraft and its sequel. The original Terran campaign has Jim Raynor shepherding anyone who will follow him across the sector. In the expansion, UED Commander Stukov calls Raynor's forces in the ongoing civil war in the sector a "Rag tag peasant militia," and isn't really wrong (especially with Arcturus Mengsk having taken the title of "Emperor" over the "Terran Dominion."). The sequel plays this aspect up, with Raynor recruiting a nerdy young scientist, an ex-con who's been welded into his Powered Armor, a portly cyborg mechanic, a surprisingly normal First Officer, and the occasional omen from a cold, alien Psychic ascetic.
• Starcraft II — Raynor's Raiders: An ex-marshall turned into a freedom fighter, an idealist, an ex-lifetime convict (who's actually a mole) a mechanic with a modified arm, a nerd, a colony doctor (who doesn't hang around at some point) and a psychotic assassin with mystic tendencies. Phew...
  • Raynor actually refers to them as a ragtag bunch of misfits at one point.
• Star Ocean: The Last Hope: By the end of the game, the crew of the Calnus consists of a Wide-Eyed Idealist, his bow-slinging Action Girl girlfriend, a Space Elf technician, a creepy demon-summoning vaguely-autistic girl, a sophisticated intellectual combat cyborg, a cheery Cat Girl, an enigmatic scantily-clad sorceress, a scatter-brained girl with wings, and a badass Super-Soldier with a laser scythe.
• Star Shift Series: The Order of Restoration is made up of various survivors of the Purge, as well as people who time-traveled to the post-Purge era or people who ended up in that era due to a black hole's time dilation. Their shared goal is to prevent the Purge by traveling back to the past to prevent the causes of the event.
• Because Destiny Says So, the hero of the various Suikoden games must battle The Empire and optimally gather together a force led by 108 very, very diverse individuals. A minority of them are seasoned troops. Most are crossdressing tea fanciers, elevator operators, cape-wearing squirrels... it just gets weirder after that.
  • Lampshaded in the Gaiden Game Suikoden Tierkreis. After recruiting a certain character, Sieg comments on how people he meets from time to time gets weirder.
• In Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars, your party consists of a mute everyman plumber with superhuman jumping ability, the monster king who is typically his worst enemy, the princess he has to save just about every other week, a talking cloud that can control the weather, and a possessed doll.
  • The Paper Mario games make that lot look organized. Thousand Year Door in particular has the abovementioned plumber, a Valley Girl archeology student, a timid breakdancing turtle, a White-Dwarf Starlet wind spirit, an aggressive infant dinosaur, a redeemed living shadow witch, and an old sailor who blows himself up.
    • And a flirty mouse thief in high heels.
    • In Super Paper Mario Count Bleck plays this straight by calling your crew this in the opening scene.
  • Paper Mario 64 has a Mario Fanboy, a wannabe archaeologist, a Valley Girl pink bomb, a bumbling postman, a bratty female ghost, an infant light bulb, an overbearing fish who somehow breathes and walks (okay, flops) on land, and a punk Lakitu with an Embarrassing First Name.
• Every single party throughout the Tales Series.
  • With the partial exception of Tales of the Abyss. While still a bit ragtag in that they stem from different parts of the world and came together somewhat randomly, every party member is either a professional soldier or a member of the nobility with a significant degree of political influence, which makes them well-suited to dealing with the situations which arise within the plot. In fact, the fact they are all suited for dealing with the problems they are facing is lampshaded early on, making them wonder if it was written in the Score that they would all come together. It wasn't, which is perfect as their goal is ultimately to Screw Destiny to avert The End of the World as We Know It and the Big Bad destroying the world in a misguided attempt to Screw Destiny.
  • Tales of Vesperia is the stand out example though; except for Childhood Friends Yuri Lowell and Flynn Scifo and their Heroic Dog Repede, there is absolutely no reason a group made up of a snarky Swordsman, a heroic knight, a Heroic Wannabe kid, a hot tempered Tsundere mage, a sheltered princess, the only Krityan that fights, a fishy old man, and an eccentric Pirate Girl would end up together and as a team. And yet, they do and work well enough to save the world.
• Team Fortress 2: A drawling More Dakka engineer. A big, somewhat dimwitted-sounding Russian. A psychotic delusional soldier. A mouthy, trash-talking speedster. A German Mad Doctor. A smooth-talking French spy. A laid back Australian professional killer. A drunk, manic-depressive Black Scottish Cycloptic nutcase. A demented pyromaniac of Ambiguous Gender. They Fight Their Other-Coloured Clones (and robots)!
  • The end of "The Naked And The Dead" has Classic Heavy lampshade this in fury as he lays dying. The team is seen as a bunch of lunatics, ineffective and rejected, by the mercenary community. The Classic Team had wiped a good chunk of that community as they tore through the Administrator's hirelings. And yet this team of freaks destroyed the Classic Team. He goes to his grave wondering how the hell it happened.
• Used in several games of the Telepath RPG universe.
  • In the Chapter 2, the more optional party members you have, the more your roster fit this trope.
    • Gamblin' Jack is an enslaved psy academy guard you brought into your team, also he's a gambling addict. It is notable that he will stay with you even if you choose to go against the academy in the end, so he's also a potential traitor.
    • Niven is just a knife thrower Shadowling who joins you for celebrity.
    • Dorgon is an energy golem you simply stole from the mechanics.
    • Helena is a traitor to the mechanics who joins you for money. Flint follows her everywhere.
    • Grotius is a teen Spriggat who join you just because he's bored, despite the fact you are working for the Shadowlings, the Spriggats' ennemies.
  • In the single-player campaign of Telepath Tactics, your party mostly consists of whoever Emma happens to come across during her trek. She isn't terribly picky about who she picks up, and ends up with a pretty diverse bunch of people who just happened to be in the right place at the right time. This can lead to a lot of tension between characters who are philosophically opposed, such as self-righteous Scarlet and Con Woman Louise. Somewhat deconstructed in the ending, where the group mostly falls apart and splits ways once they no longer have a reason to work together.
• Third Age: Total War: The Fellowship of the Ring is the obvious one, but in the main campaign, Eriador is a whole faction of this. Leading a bunch of wandering Dunedain rangers, woodsmen, settlers, Breeland militia, hobbits, and a wizard to kick the Followers of Melkor's black-plated evil arses is gratifying as hell even if you don't reforge Arnor.
• The central characters of Three the Hard Way consist of a selfish and greedy bartender-turned-bounty-hunter protagonist, his more noble Martial-Arts loving best friend, a strong-willed but sheltered Duchess who always bicker with the protagonist, a wandering monk/martial artist/pit fighter/whatever who knows more about the ongoing conflict than he initially lets on and a Really 700 Years Old alchemist with a suspicious agenda and knows the Big Bad quite well. Other playable characters include a senior bounty hunter who is constantly at odds with the protagonist, a Lovable Rogue/thief who happens to be his niece, a bandit queen, and a former captain of the Big Bad's army. Duke Salem and (especially) Duke Winston appear to trust them more than their own soldiers.
• The Wasteland crew in Tony Hawk's American Wasteland. Unofficial leader Iggy van Zandt is explicitly called "the king of the misfits" for a reason. And with friends like the player character (a clueless farmboy who just got off the bus), Boone (a violent screw-up who couldn't even cut it as a gang member), Murphy (every slimy agent ever minus the money), Useless Dave (whose endless knowledge of pointless minutiae never fails to bore)... yeah, that's ragtag.
• Trails Series: The series' various parties come from wildly different backgrounds:
  • The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky: By the end of The 3rd, the party consists of an energetic tomboyish girl, her calmer love interest, a flirty Cool Big Sis, a polite girl who is revealed to be royalty, an eccentric wandering bard who is also revealed to be royalty, a young Gadgeteer Genius who is the granddaughter of one of the setting's most famous scientist, a cynical member of a We Help the Helpless organization, a cool-headed guy who is good at martial arts, a Badass Preacher with a Dark and Troubled Past, and a scythe-weilding Ax-Crazy girl who turns good and is later adopted by the energetic girl and her family.
  • The Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero and Trails to Azure: The SSS consists of a rookie detective, the granddaughter of the setting's mayor, a snarky hacker girl, a flirty man who was once part of one of the most dangerous mercenary groups in the series, a vehicle-loving police woman and a charming man who is revealed to be a Church Militant member.
  • The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel has Class VII which involves a Nice Guy swordsman with a Superpowered Evil Side, a Tsundere archer whose mother is the head of the country's MegaCorp, a violin player, a nomad from the far reaches of the country, a nobleman's daughter packing a BFS, a man with a chip on his shoulder about the nobility, the son one of the said nobles, a former Child Soldier, and a witch. Later in the game, you are joined by a girl with a Robot Buddy and a gun-toting slacker. The guest party members involve a hard-drinking Bracer and a lesbian biker Kung fu fighter.
  • The Legend of Heroes: Trails through Daybreak: By the end of Daybreak I, the Arkride Solutions Office include a pragmatic man who can transform into a beast-like creature, a high schooler who is the great-grand daughter of the one behind the setting's One-Man Industrial Revolution, the little daughter of a mercenary group, a hot-headed delinquent, a calm lady in a Meido outfit, a Teen Genius, an actress who lives a double-life as a Robin Hood-like figure, and an old man who is the now-retired member of a Church Militant initially thought to be dead.
• Torment: Tides of Numenera is a Spiritual Successor to Planescape: Torment, and has an equally strange group of characters following the player.
  • The Last Castoff: The player, whose body was previously used by a man called the Changing God who has cheated death by switching bodies over millenia.
  • Callistege: a dimension-shifting nano who pierces realities, and is always surrounded by multitudes of other versions of herself from other dimensions that she calls "sisters".
  • Aligern: a hardened nano who fights with his demons, who used to be a priest and fights enemies with living, writhing tattoos all over his skin.
  • Tybir: a cagey jack who knows how to take care of himself, a retired soldier who often finds himself on the wrong side of the law.
  • Matkina: a furtive jack who murders, a fellow castoff like the player called the White Death, both for her white skin and history as an assassin.
  • Erritis: an overly-impulsive glaive who is as heroic as he believes himself to be, a young adventurer who doesn't seem to notice the golden glow he is constantly surrounded by.
  • Rhin: a lost child who talks to gods, she carries a stone around at all times which she believes contains her friend and god Ahl.
• Tyranny continues the trend for Obsidian, where a judge and executioner of the Overlord Kyros leads an elite fighter in the brutal Scarlet Chorus, an honorable soldier in the elite Disfavored army, a savage Beastwoman who is the last member of her tribe, a woman weary of battle with control over water, a Sage who uses magic to meticulously chronicle history, and an young, but powerful Archon who serves the leader of the Scarlet Chorus.

U-Z

• In Unavowed, we follow the New York chapter of the titular secret society who defend civilian society from hostile supernatural forces. It consists of the Player Character, who was the involuntary vessel for a demon and is a wanted criminal as a result, a Fire Mage with a background as an accountant born into the Silent Generation, the several hundred-years-old half-human daughter of a Jinn and a Irish pirate, a hard-nosed, Hot-Blooded cop on involuntary leave from the force, and a soft-spoken spirit medium who is a recovering alcoholic and is followed around by the ghost of a ten-year-old Plucky Girl.
• Valkyria Chronicles:
  • The Gallian Militia from Valkyria Chronicles are like this, Squad 7 even more so. Notable in that they're not as ragtag-y as most other examples.
  • And then we have the 'Edy Attachment' in the DLC, which is the Ragtag Bunch of Misfits of a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits.
  • Valkyria Chronicles II gives you a group of misfits more ragtag than the militia: Class G of the Lanseal Academy, filled with the laziest, worst-performing rejects the crop has to offer, and Darcsens.
  • And then Valkyria Chronicles III outdoes them both with the Nameless, a literal Army of Thieves and Whores thrown together and forced to fight as cannon fodder as punishment for past crimes.
• Wild ARMs: Rudy, Jack and Cecilia are all lonely and isolated individuals in their own ways. Rudy is an outcast because people fear his ARM abilities, Jack tends to distance himself from others due to what became of his hometown, Arctica, Cecilia is the Princess of Adlehyde, and fears her role means she will be treated as a symbol, rather than as her own person.
  • This even extends to the supporting characters. Emma is an Mad Scientist, who deals with ancient technology in a world where it is considered taboo. Jane is a bounty hunter who collects money to keep her father's Orphanage of Love afloat, her butler Mc Dullen/Magdalen caused a fatal accident, resulting in him protecting Jane as a debt to her family for taking him in. Bartholomew is a drunken sea captain and overall Chew Toy. Mariel is the last Elw on Filgaia. Asgard is the last of the golems and the only one with any free will. In the remake, Emma and Jane join your party permanently, alongside Zed, the Token Good Teammate among the demons, who decides he'd much rather fight to protect, than be treated like a nuisance by his fellow demons.
• WildStar ups the anti by having an entire FACTION of misfits. The individual personalities are just as varied as the races that compose the Exiles.
• In World's End Tevoran and Company gains such members as a local thug, elderly drug dealer, lewd nun, axe-wielding mysterious girl, amateur percussionist brawler, cunning former gang leader and an idealistic prince.
• XCOM: Enemy Unknown started off completely averting this trope by having all XCOM recruits come from the combat branches of various armed forces, but the DLC added distinct characters that end up joining: Shaojie "Chilong" Zhang, a former Chinese triad member who turned on his bosses, Annette Durand, a French civilian rescued from forces trying to tap her immense psychic potential, and "the Furies," three alien abductees (two from Egypt, one from the USA) who are all gifted psionicists.
• XCOM 2 plays the trope straight from the very beginning. After twenty years of a Vichy Earth scenario, XCOM's Lowered Recruiting Standards make soldiers with actual military experience quite rare. Some of your soldiers' randomized biographies may describe them as escaped prisoners, survivalists who went off the grid after the invasion, once-ordinary people who snapped one day and started hunting aliens for sport... or someone who once rammed a security tower with a car. With the War of the Chosen expansion, these oddballs can take to the field with grizzled survivalists who literally eat aliens for lunch, half-alien hybrid soldiers fighting for their freedom, and power-mad psionic cultists.
• XCOM: Chimera Squad has the titular elite rapid response unit. Its eleven members consist of five humans who fought with or supported the Resistance during the campaign to liberate the planet, a human who was one of the aliens' psionic slave-soldiers, two alien ex-POWs who are now fighting alongside their former enemies, an alien who fed intelligence to the Resistance before openly defecting, someone who was converted into an alien hybrid only to rebel against her masters, and a five-year-old half-human clone who was recovered from his stasis tank after the fighting was over. They can have clashing personalities and histories that put them at odds with each other, but together they're capable of feats that a normal SWAT team couldn't hope to achieve.
• Xenoblade Chronicles 1' party consists of a small-town guy with a legendary BFS, his Large Ham best friend, his Back from the Dead Robot Girl-turned love interest, a Big Brother Mentor with a crippled arm, a Lad-ette who's a big Mama Bear toward her little brother, a Rebellious Princess who wishes to avenge her father, and a Ridiculously Cute Critter who cares about food more than fighting.
  • And then there's the sequel, in which you have a very notably young scavenger, a former terrorist Cat Girl who's actually a Blade who gained proper humanity, an absent minded (and rather perverted) mechanic, the leader of a mercenary crew who mentors the main cast albeit temporarily, the high inquisitor to The Empire, and a runaway prince who's as ridiculous as he is dangerous. And that's without mentioning their Blades, which include an Apocalypse Maiden with multiple personalities, a panther-like creature with healing powers, a Robot Girl, a bird whose gender is the number four, the Crown Jewel of said Empire, and a green-haired girl with lightning powers.
• In Zenless Zone Zero, reality-distorting pocket dimensions called Hollows are everywhere, with untold riches and treasures abounding for those willing to risk going into them, and New Eridu's government is not nearly large nor influential enough to control and secure all of them. Hence, the people illegally entering these spaces to raid them can be from some very varied backgrounds. At any given time, you could have a trio of a chainsaw-wielding maid-for-hire, a violent, explosives-obsessesed construction worker, and a Consummate Professional soldier working together while being guided by a brother-sister team who usually run a movie store.

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