I think that people underestimate the usefulness of the tonberry in FFVIII. The combination of item refinement, haggle, and sell high allows for an infinite money loop, which can be translated into an infinite number of stat up items, thereby allowing max stats at any level.
Compared to the others, though. I would argue it’s the least useful. That says, I’d put him on the bottom of the list because he has good out of combat utility.
But Carbuncle has to take the cake over Tonberry, right? Can't cure yourself unless you use potions or, later in the game, Recovery. And some enemies benefit from Reflect because they heal from their own magic.
FFVIII money is hardly something you need to obtain or can really use enough to need an infinite loop all you need to do is the SEEDs test and get to LV30 then leave the game on your SEED rank will decrease but so long as you do the test again or other things it would rise again eventually
@@ChaosMechanicaCarbuncle provides a lot of help in battle if you know when to use it. Cast magic the enemy is weak to on your party to reflect it back multiple times on the enemy. Wonderful way to kill undead enemies, use party wide heal spells with reflect on.
For FF8, I would have personally ranked Carbuncle as being more useless than Tonberry. Tonberry was decent enough at dealing non-elemental damage to bosses. Carbuncle just made it impossible to cast Cure on your own characters, and likely helped enemies heal themselves by absorbing their own elemental spells.
I was thinking Cerberus would be the worst due to casting magic that was junctioned could lower stats mid battle, so casting 3 times the magic at once would lower stats faster.
@@leonsk1787 use magic that isn't junctioned then. You can put mag 60% to boost your mag to max value and then have some unjunctioned meteor. Cast meteor 3x with max magic to decimate a lot of enemies. If you don't like how it used up 3 magic, use Eden's expend x3-1 so it would only use 1 per triple cast.
Even that's worthless by games end I'll never use a SINGLE attack spell besides Angel Wing using Meteor which won't drain her stock of drawn spells so yes Cereberus is pure crap for IN battle its only useful for Alert so that Cactuars can't back attack you.
Tbh Cerberus is not just offense. It's also buffs and healing (and debuffs but who uses those). And i know you might think buffs as useless, but they are not (outside of ff9 at least). Also while Carbuncle is niche, it has its uses against Edea or Cerberus, or really any magic heavy boss.
Here's an obscure one: Bahamut in Final Fantasy Record Keeper.... sort of. For the game's second anniversary in the global version, every player was given Bahamut for free. This was a big deal--it was a 5-star ability, the highest available at the time, and getting enough of the items required to create those ranged from extremely difficult to literally impossible. Unfortunately, DeNA screwed up, and the version of Bahamut that was given to players was accidentally a not-intended-to-be-for-players one used in an early game tutorial, and it was EXTREMELY weak. Its damage multiplier was a mere 5, meaning it could be outdamaged by 3-star summons like Shiva, or even the 2-star Chocobo summon if it was a single target. Their response was to rename the pre-existing, obtainable Bahamut in-game (whose multiplier was 16.5, for comparison) to Bahamut (V) and let players keep the wrong version, which ended up being colloquially referred to as Bughamut. Incidentally, this ended up being the only "ability" that was unique to the global version of the game--the JP version had different rewards entirely for its second anniversary. (I might have messed up some of the details here, since it's been a long time since it happened, but that's the gist of it.)
@@the_exegete- Same! I wa proud of my little error lizard. Also, I adored that game and played it faithfully until shutdown. I let the game expire with my party initiating the Gilgamesh fight. It was a nice sendoff for a game that spanned several significant years of my life 💗
Reflect in FFT was not only not random in its targeting, but incredibly useful in extending caster's ranges, and did not double reflect nor go back to the caster. It took into account the distance and orientation of the caster to the target with Reflect, and plotted a target on the far side from the caster in the same range and orientation to decide what panel to hit. Think of it like plotting points on a graph. If your caster was 3 squares away from the Reflect holder, then the Reflect would bounce the spell 3 panels away in the opposite direction, effectively continuing in a straight line. If someone was in that panel 3 squares away, they're getting hit with the spell, even if they also have Reflect. Just like Arithmancy, Reflect worked in a very specific way, but it worked that way every single time, and if you know what you're doing, it can be used to extremely devastating effect. FFT Carby does not deserve this slander.
I was hoping someone was going to post this. I thought the same thing as I was listening. The job Calculator worked wonders with this mechanic. You could cast a spell for ZERO MP and reflect it off your team, placed around the map, to have it reflected into enemies for stacking dmg on one target.
That's an interesting concept for sure... and it would be one hell of a supercut as there are over 200 different Summons. One to think about though! :D ~Darryl
You're just wrong about the Tonberry GF in VIII. His Luck and Eva bonuses are often the biggest boosts available to those stats in the game, and his Level Up/Level Down (which he knows by default) are the primary way to manipulate enemy drop tables (and possibly draw-able spells, can't remember). It's shop abilities also allow for infinite gil cycles and remove the need to backtrack for missed books for more casual players. Carbuncle is worse by far as Recov Med RF isn't particularly useful, Auto-Reflect is double edged, and Counter is only alright since it requires physical attacks and most mid and late game challenging enemies tend to use more magic attacks.
Disagree on Tonberry being near useless compared to Carbuncle, Cerberus or Siren. At least he gives you the shop abilities which is incredibly convenient when trying to get the final weapons later or just getting supplies in the field.
Bro cerberus was still much more useful than tonberry in battle, mass triple makes you able to have boosted damage potential or mass aura early, not like you'll use guardian force for damage anyway after disc 2.
The Spirit Moogle from DFFOO when Summoned, he only gave 1 Free turn. He also didnt damage the enemy or heal your party either. His ability was that he "removed any debuffs on Terra" while his blessing was "increasing Terra's Love by 10" a stat that doesnt even exist. However, he was meant to be bad due to being given as an April Fool's event
It was valentines if I recall, and I think the stat did actually translate into something but it was still pointless, especially when you only get one turn.
How dare you say Tonberry is useless. Granted his attack is average but his animation is funny and cute. Not to mention the abilities he brings to the table are some of the best, haggle, sell-high, familiar and call shop.
So i like to shout out the "spirits" from ffxi. the way summons worked in 11 was they drained a certain amount of mp a "tick". You could unlock the avility to summon spirits verse traditional summons for each of the 8 elements. they be able to cast any spell from there element at random. If them casting spells at random wasnt bad enough they cost more mp per tick then the traditional summons. Leaving them largely unused aside light (since it could cast cure) and dark (since it did cast sleepga occasionally which was great for crowd control.
Oh good callout! I played ffxi for so many years and completely forgot about these because no one ever used them. How did they not make it into this video haha
It's true the cost was rarely worth it, especially since they were always stupid about what spells they cast. Since we can't control what they do, It'd be nice if SE gave them basic Trust-level intelligence and updated their spell set from the 75 era, but alas. So they're just used for Elemental Siphon, but that's pretty important.
Tonberry wasnt very useful in combat but his shop abilities were top tier, could help in CD4 a lot, and make you a ton of gil if used in tandem with other GF abilities, also for the cost you could always kill cactuars with Squall since he has a fixed rate of 255% hit and Selphie with Strange Vision, each Cactuar gave about 20 AP so wasnt too hard to farm
In FF4 the Mindflayer was SUPER useful. It did crap damage but it inflicted a GUARANTEED Paralyze against the enemy if it could be effected by the spell. This allowed you to trivialize some of the strongest monsters in the game. Typically you needed to this spell several times to get the effect. But with the Mindflayer you can just spam it and an enemy like the red dragon can't do anything, free exp.
I actually just...randomly fell into getting the Goblin summon in my game, didn't know anything about it, but thought it was neat so I used it a lot. Ended up being my favorite summon.
The only reason I'll let mentioning the Cockatrice in FFIV slide is due to the rarity. I was lucky enough on one playthrough to get it literally the first time I fought a Cockatrice on the mountain between Damcyan and Fabul, and it became a staple for Rydia during the climb, and even after she came back from the time skip, it was still useful for clearing weaker mobs of enemies. For a subsequent video, I'd recommend the Minimog, Moomba, or Chicobo summons from FFVIII, purely due to how they were originally unavailable in the US thanks to the PocketStation being a Japan-only exclusive accessory.
I was so happy to have a mod chip that doubled as a GameShark. Allowed me to get the items to summon those three without having a pocket station. I used them a fair bit early game because I didn't want my GFs to take damage :(
Mindflayer isn't useless imo, it makes traversing Lunar Subterrane a breeze against anything that can be paralyzed like Behemoths. Very handy for your first playthrough.
BUT the problem with the 4 FF4 summons is that the ITEMS like Mindflayer almost NEVER drop in EVERY VERSION save for the SNES game where they don't even exist in that one.
@@veghesther3204 Oh, they're in the SNES version. I got Goblin a few times, Cockatrice once, and I once rented a game with someone else's save that had Mindflayer on it.
The odds that you get it in your first playthrough or really in any given playthrough are minuscule. Even if you know where to get it, the amount of time it'd take to get one to drop would be better spent just leveling up for better and more consistent results. Especially because if you know how to get it, you should already know good places to level up and how to deal with the tougher enemies (for example, don't use holy elemental spells against Behemoths, and Meteor is a holy elemental spell in FF4).
On the AMERICAN SNES version I NEVER got the 4 to drop ever so I believe those on the SNES version are possibly only on the JAPANESE import of the game not the American version.
@@veghesther3204 Nope, this was the American version, I played that sucker through like 20-30x because it was the only RPG I had for like a year, and I was 12.
so the way reflect functioned in tactics was quite different then you explained. yes, because of the combat system it didn't just bounce the spell back on the caster, but there was a precise formula for where the spell landed. it would continue an additional distance from the caster to the target, past the target. For example, if the caster was standing 3 tiles on front of you, the spell would bounce 3 spaces behind you. this was actually a tactic for reaching enemies across distance beyond the range of the spell. likewise, you could still cure allies in this fashion if for example, you places another ally with reflect equidistant between you and them. yes, it required extra thought, but it wasn't just random.
about ff8, tonberry is actually very useful by the time you can get it the earliest, particularly when doing a no level run since you can use its lv up ability to either steal or draw some magic, not to mention all the shop passive abilities. in my humble opinion cactuar is the least useful by the time you obtain it since there's nothing new you can learn and its most powerful attack can be outranked by pretty much everyone's limit breaks
I think people can slightly underestimate the usefulness of Bomb in FF4. There are a couple of fights where it comes in handy, notably the CPU, since it can bypass reflect and only hit a single target. There's better ways to deal with the CPU, but it's still a valid strategy for lucky low level characters.
Would've been cool if Goblin had a scaling effect with how often it is used based on Rydia's level. It should evolve into the stronger goblin variants up to the Trickster that deals massive lightning damage and haste on the party.
So, I'm going to say Kjata from 7 was pretty useless, if only because by the time you received it a lot of enemies could absorb elemental damage, and if one of kjata's attacks was absorbed All of Them Were, which usually made it not useful to summon. To add insult to injury, you couldn't even junction it on armor with an elemental materia to any effect. Sure would have been nice to have tri-elemental resistance, but no, we can't have nice things.
Speaking of summons. I pray to all that is good and holy that Knights of the Round is not obtained through Chadley in the next instalment of the FFVII Remake series. I want to actually pick up the materia from the Round Island.
I have a feeling that we will have to go to a special place to fight them like we did with Gilgamesh in FF7 Rebirth. So don’t worry. I doubt they’ll just make KOTR a Chadley combat simulator summon. The devs have already said they aim to deliver on KOTR in the next game. And judging by what they did with Gilgamesh in this game, I have high expectations
Yeah he had to stretch it to make Tonberry seem bad. VIII doesn't actually have any bad summons. Atomos for IX isn't even the worst summon in IX either, that's Carbuncle.
@@s-wo8781 Eh i'd argue a case for Minimog, since that just heals your GFs and its rare that you'd ever need to do that. Plus it requires its own command slot to even summon it
In fairness, every Summon in FF8 is pretty much useless in battle, since with proper junctions Zell's Armageddon Fist (or any of his other simple loops) will outdamage any summon with minimal effort. Tonberry King for Lvl Up/Dwn or Diablo for Mug might get the most mileage, and even then, not that important except for getting Flare and Meteor from Red Dragons after you get the mobile Garden. Using Irvine's AP ammo against Tonberrys is the fastest way to kill them. Three shots each, as I recall.
Odin is pretty much the "Disk One Nuke" in Type-0 - once you get him you can use him to clear those goddamn Expert Trials without constant reliance on Breaksights. And the death ranking doesn't matter unless you care about S-ranking it, and you won't care about S-ranking Expert Trials on your first playthrough.
It's always a little disappointing to have to set aside or sometimes never even use summons I love, due to their lack of utility. One thing I'd love to see in the next FF is a growth or evolution to each summon's utility as we progress through the game. Especially if that can be incorporated into character building. Maybe it's just me, but I felt like XVI missed a great opportunity for a greater depth and variety of character building, and synergy between Eikon abilities. Would love some type of fusion and progression of V and FFT style character building, along with VIII's junctionining, so we can really get some interesting variations with each playthrough.
If you get super lucky and get one easily those early Rydia summons are quite useful during the child dungeons since they cost so little mana. I actually managed to get one naturally on my last playthrough.
Don’t forget Sylph from FFIV. Concept is cool, but it does WAY too little damage to ever actually be useful. Considering it does little damage or healing, you would always summon Asura for healing and pretty much anything else for damage. Still, I always do the sidequest for them, even though I never actually end up summoning them
CRUSADER! My favorite summon in the series. *Sigh.* FFT Reflect doesn't bounce spells at random. It changes the spell's target to double the distance from the caster as the original target. Which admittedly is still pretty useless.
Tonberry in FF8 suffered from being a VERY SHORT attack animation!! and i would say Carbuncle is more useless than Tonberry, as Tonberry can do damage and Carbuncle doesn't
I actually got Goblin on my first playthrough of Final Fantasy IV without even knowing about it. I never got it again even with grinding or the other two.
@@Vayne_Solidor I just used an elixir and then went ham with my physical attacks. I know what you mean.. they don't help because they remove the other members of your party though.
Grauda was only summon came to my aid in ff15. Ramuh may have popped up one or twice. Post game, Shiva would pop from time to time. I was curious about the other summons. So, guess who watched a video to see them? Me. They sure didn't show up in my game. 😅
I actually found the Remake summons quite helpful for my Hard mode playthrough where MP cannot be restored at benches and no items are allowed. In the last stretch of boss fights especially and with magic at a premium, it was actually optimal to use your ATB on summon abilities and save MP for healing or anything else you need.
Definitely more of an honorable mention, but I wanted to mention both Chapter 3 light side eidolons in Final Fantasy Dimensions. In a job game where the jobs as a whole are kinda low power compared to those of other job games like Bravely Default, the summoner job and the eidolons under its control maintained its trademark destructive power and was one of the best jobs in the game as a result. It can easily carry both light and dark parties through their chapter 2 segments, and keeps doing that for dark in chapter 3 and the full party in endgame. Chapter 3 light side, though, got Phoenix-strong with a powerful support side effect, but with an absurd MP cost to balance-and Unicorn, a purely support summon. Neither of these are bad on their own, but getting them back to back so late on kneecaps the summoner job for the light side.
It just means you shift to other jobs and have a Summoner act as your main support. You can also fall back on Fusion Skills, since summoner can get quite a few of those, like Grand Delta.
Atomos really was such a disappointing eidolon, because that FMV was quite horrifying and what it ends up doing in battle is such a whimper compared to that... Not sure why they didn't just make it a nom-elemental summon. Could have been one of Garnet's top summons if it had been more reliable, if for the animation alone.
There should be no entries from FF 8, any summon has utility because of the junction system... Sure you might not summon them but they're still a core part of your team!
Odin in FFXI is pretty useless even if you land the low chance to kill a regular enemy and absolutely pointless on bosses. Not to mention that it can only be once every 1 to 2 hours depending on era, and you have to choose between that or nigh invincibility from Perfect Defense via Alexander since they shared a cooldown/use.
Odin was useful once: in worm parties during Abyssea. You could bring him up to 1-shot a bunch of worms then revitalize with a 2-hr chest and do it again. Super fun. Atomos is useless too, but considering the 1-hr cooldown / loss of Alexander and the fact that Abyssea parties are no more, it's gotta be Odin. Which is a shame, because it's really cool to summon him.
Most of the summons from Explorers, especially after you gain access to ones like Cloud, Bartz and Phoenix. The first 2 for damage and Phoenix for free revives and minor damage.
shoutout to kujata and typhon in vii. given the way multi-elemental attacks were handled in the original game, a lot of enemies would resist or even absorb their attack, to the point it usually wasn't worth the gamble.
Wasn't Terra's dad some kind of leader among the Espers? Weird because he was weak gameplay wise... Wait a minute. If Terra's dad was a leader, does that make Terra royalty among the freaking summons? Now when I thought she couldn't get any better ❤
I don’t think she was royalty as Terra’s dad wasn’t the village elder. He seemed to be a regular Esper like the rest in the village. She’s still awesome in my book.
I’m sure he won’t mention it, but pre-Endwalker Titan from the SMN job - you had to choose between three summons, Ifrit, Titan, and Garuda. Iftit did more damage on single target, Garuda on AOE, and Titan sacrificed had, instead of two charges of one of its attacks, two charges of applicable shields. Thus, its damage output was super low, and in order to actually use it defensively, you had to use a move summoning it, waiting for its summon animation to conclude, and then use the skill, after which you had to wait for it to apply - all in all, about 8 seconds between you deciding you need some defensive utility and actually getting it - by which point whatever was gonna hit you already did. So you had to either take a MASSIVE damage loss, or foresee an emergency almost 10 seconds in the future.
R.I.P. third tank Titan. I heard some interesting stories of people passing content without tanks because they had, like, one or two SMNs in the party during SB (or was it HW) and they used Titan instead.
Still better then the FF15 ones which typically required you to put yourself at risk and they were just random based on where your location was and more cinematic fluff then actually useful. Granted, some of us are likely spoiled by summons that work more like powerful allies like FF10, FF12, FF11, FF14 and so on. Which often let you in some games, use them as a secondary wall to chip down strong foes and soak attacks, to get a useful head start before your team got hit hard.
I actually found the Remake summons quite helpful for my Hard mode playthrough where MP cannot be restored at benches and no items are allowed. In the last stretch of boss fights especially and with magic at a premium, it was actually optimal to use your ATB on summon abilities and save MP for healing or anything else you need.
I would say the Chocobo from FF3 is a very weak one if you are an evoker or sage it does either flee or...nothing but if you are a summoner it deals insultingly low damage instead. Also carbuncle from FF15 it does a full heal but apparently only shows up on easy mode
IIRC, FF’s, reflect was not completely random. What it counts is the range, direction, and height of how the spell was cast and bounce the spell again that range, height, and direction. So, if a fire spell goes up 3 and to the right 1, hitting a reflected target, the reflected spell will bounce another 3 up, 1 to the right before resolving. In theory this reflect could double the range of spells. …in practice it works best by the computer who can determine where the spell is going far better than you.
I didn't know about the ice Hockey players in FF8. Researched it and they didn't even had an TT card. Can't believed I missed out on this. Really can't believed it. :( thanks for this so much
In any final fantasy game both atmos and carcuncle you probably use once to see what they do then never use them again as there are usually far more powerful/useful sommons at your disposal
Except XI, where Carbuncle used to be a beginning summoner's only avatar until at least level 30, and the only one that didn't eat all your MP in seconds. If you meet an old XI summoner, they'll have a soft spot for Carby. But Atomos can go swallow himself.
I find this to be the case with status ailments too. Weirdly, the only solution ive found in practice is gimmicky fights like in Chrono trigger. It's not perfect and some skills remain unused, but it forces you to use a greater variety of abilities that you wouldn't otherwise.
Tonberry is probably the most useful GF you got call shop and its very handy Diablos whilst having ENC-None is most useless as his attack is gravity based and can miss or be immune and with remastered with encounter rate Diablos is most useless GF in my opinion.
I feel Crusader was not ment to be a good summon on its own. It was meant to be a warning about using magicite recklessly. What the game to that point was trying to say. Since the magicite item could summon any esper in the game randomly, and some could theoretically get you out of a tight scrape or win a fight for you early game when you get the most access to the item version of magicite and your stats were no where close to being able to survive the summon it. Thematically it works for the story, and only after you beat the dragons do you get access to it proper, but also are tempered enough with experience to handle it. Power with temperance of knowing when to use thay power rather than power for the sake of it. Fitting for the story.
In FFVI, Crusader teaches Meteor and *Merton*, not Meltdown. The super-hot fire spell Merton is especially great with Paladin and flame shields, since you can both harm the enemy and heal yourself.
@@gneissisnice100 Merton is better. It's a ton of Mercury air. Cut-scene bad guy screaming out "Meltdown!!!" is pure yuck, just not the same as "Merton!!!"
I would add the Chocobo summon from FFIII to this list. Although summons work a bit differently in the game, they are still summons none-the-less, and Chocobo is easily the most useless of them all. For those unfamiliar, there are 3 different “abilities” that summons have in the game; a white magic ability, a black magic ability, and a summon ability. There are only three job classes that can use summons in the game (evoker, summoner, and sage). When an evoker uses a summon, it will randomly use either the black or white magic ability and never the summon ability. Whereas when a summoner or sage uses it, it will always be the summon ability. For Chocobo, the white magic ability would make you attempt to escape from battle, but with a higher chance of success than just using the escape command. The black magic ability was a physical attack, however, it always missed. Thus, when used by an evoker, it either did nothing or made you escape battle. The summon ability did very low non-elemental damage to a single target; which is better than the white or black magic abilities, but still very underwhelming. Pretty much every other summon in the game does much higher damage to a single target with their black magic ability (unless an enemy is strong or immune to that elemental type) and their summon ability does damage to all enemies, are far stronger, and will do way more damage even if an enemy is strong against that element and not immune. Even the white magic abilities of all the other summons are more useful than Chocobo.
Odin is always useless, since Zantetsuken rarely works when it matters, but the Odin in FFVIII gets special mention because he summons randomly and never actually works. And then he gets replaced by Gilgamesh, who actually works on occasion, but the one occasion where he never fails is when he will totally kill Rinoa.
Uh what? Its rare to find anything immune to Zantentsuken in FF8 that isnt a boss, and Odin never shows up against bosses aside from Seifer 3. When he shows up he WILL kill anything you're fighting 100% of the time lol. I think probably the only things it might not work on are undead, but its not like there's a lot of those in this game.
@@ThundagaT2 No, FF8 Odin works on undead since what he does is not technically instant death. But yeah, FF8 Odin is pretty much the best Odin in the series because if he shows up the battle is just over, there's like three regular enemies he can't kill, and none of the three are particularly dangerous.
@@Kruggov Yeah i looked it up it was Cactuar and Tonberry, for some reason i assumed it was undead he doesnt, but i rarely get to see him show up against them lol.
@@ThundagaT2 Cactuars and Tonberries are Eject immune, so naturally Odin won't appear there. Other eject immunes are Grat, Lefty, Righty and Vysage. Everything else, including Malboros, Behemoths and Ruby Dragons, Odin dices up.
About the enemies Odin can't kill Degenerator limit Quistis won't either and only Tonberries are the hardest to kill that are immune Lefty Righty Visage Gnats and Cactuars even at lv 100 are TOO EASY to kill.
One time I was playing Final Fantasy 6, and I was in a real bind (this was back when I was young, and bad enough at RPGs for the game to still provide me a solid challenge). I was on the brink of defeat, and needed a miracle to make a comeback. So in an act of desperation, I used a magicite item. Rolling the dice, and hoping for something that would turn the tide. It summoned Crusader. Ever since that day, I've held great personal spite towards that particular summon. Even more than I already did for how useless it was. Edit: As for Ultros in Dissidia. Assuming this would've even been possible, a much more interesting and unique way to implement a blind status effect would've been to have the status temporarily dim the other player's screen to the lowest brightness setting.
@@veghesther3204 I don't think I've ever had that happen. But I've also only ever seen that slot result a handful of times in my life. 99% of the time I get either Prismatic Flash, Chocobo Stampede, or Mysidian Rabbit.
I played FF2US a lot back when in the 90s, and for the longest time, I had no idea these 4 summons actually existed. One time, however... on a new playthrough on the way to the Mist Dragon I got the "Imp" summon (what Goblins are called in FF1 and 2US), and for the low, low price of 1 MP, Rydia could one shot a regular enemy and it was pretty efficiency if you can get it immediately at the start of the game. (In fact, I now have a permanent save file I load up when I start a new game). I mean i still use Ice-1 and Lit-1 when it can kill all enemies and Chocobo is still MVP for Octomammoth, but Goblin sure isn't useless... Then again the others... Mind Blast, weak chance to paralyze one, and you don't get until dark Elf. THAT is what I would call useless. The other two is a single target petrify and a self-destuct move that kills Rydia (its based off her HP and she's by far the LOWEST of the five....) and Rydia can stone enemies herself (or you know you can just kill most of them with single target Virus. Of the four Goblin/Imp is still good if you get lucky and it drops before Mist.
In Defense of FFT Carbuncle: Calculator/Arithmetician spells aren't reflected. And with in memory only seeing like 5 or 6 Calculators in Main Scenario Fights, You can have high Faith characters (to have higher firepower of their own magic) be defended with Carbuncle reflecting up your party, heal/buff with Math, but Black/Time Magic/Yin Yang Magic to attack. A high Faith Melee ranged fighter can bounce the damage they would've taken to friendly fire onto enemies instead, if you aim it right.
Every Esper in the original FFXII is pretty much completely useless, since you give up two party members and can't directly control them. For IZJS on, you can now control them and have them perform their ultimate attacks at any time, but I still think that only Shemhazai, Zeromus, and Zodiark are worth using.
Some espers have ways to trigger their ultimate attack immediately. In that case, they become a massive one time hit. That makes them worth the usage if you plan in advance. I would argue Odin from 4 was the most worthless. By the time you could get it, you likely had Leviathan. And since Odin didn’t work on the moon, the only area he was useful was possibly the giant. But again, Leviathan and perhaps Bahamut were better because they didn’t miss.
@@BlakeAustin2011 Yeah Zodiark in the original has a pretty easy way to trigger his ultimate attack. I don't think the others are worth it, though. And it still uses up all your MP to use Zodiark in the original.
Actually the rank 1 espers had a use in the vanilla game, you could summon them, syphon their MP (you'll get back more than you spent to summon them), dismiss, repeat, you'll eventually get all your MP back lol
In Final Fantasy IX against Ozma. If Ozma fail to kill anyone with Meteor Get Vivi to Trance, Eiko summon Carbuncle then Vivi double cast Doomsday with everyone have Shadow Immunity or Absorb will guaranteed you an instant kill again Ozma because Doomsday can't be countered with Curaga because it will be cast in total of 10 time for 9999 damage (due to Ozma weak against Shadow) 2 Normal Doomsday and 2 reflected by each character
While the summon attack itself was rubbish, That spell you dismissed: Merton/Meltdown was part of my strat in late game. I would do a quick dip to kill the dragons, then collect the rest of the party [or just hunt for Merton & Quake in the randomizer], teach Merton and Quake to 4 characters, who are equipped with flame shields [or the paladin shield] and Gaia Gear. Merton sweeps the enemies that fly, Quake sweeps the fire immune, I don't recall an enemy in Kefka's Tower that was immune to both Fire AND Earth. Both spells ignore reflect and due to flame shields and gaia gear, heal the party with every cast.
@@slayeyegaming7629 And it carries through to kefka since some of the tower bits also cast merton, Lady [the angel in tier 3 that heals Rest, the lounging kefka] is the only part that absorbs fire and earth, but is pretty weak, so meteo or flare should make quick work.
I say we should bring back the 'mundane' summons. Bring back Chocobo, Goblin as regular attacks for summoners, rather than have summoners whack enemies with their little rods.
I thought reflect in FFT bounced spells the same way they were cast. For example, you cast a spell 3 tiles ahead of you on a reflected character, the spell bounces on them and affects the tile 3 ahead of them. It’s not random, is it? Anyway, still quite useless. Enemy characters could use it to their advantage too easily and could calculate the bounce to hit your characters from farther away. Especially since once it was reflected, it wouldn’t be reflected again on the next character it hit.
If you built your team up to use Reflect, your team wouldn't give enemy casters much of a chance to make use of it. It's all about Speed control of your team. Specifically the Speed stat of the units to be Reflected. You want them to move faster than your Casters just enough to always go before them, but have their turns come up after the charge times of those Casters spells are done. Also having units that can bind enemies in place to cover for discrepancies is also useful. Just like Arithmancy, you gotta know what you're doing, but the spell is far from useless.
While I am not surprised FF8 made this list since FF8 has been in EVERY "7 X That Ended Up Being Almost Completely Useless" list, I am surprised Tonberry was chosen instead of Gilgamesh. Tonberry's shop abilities were so useful in the endgame since shops was only available through Tonberry and I never used GFs for damage at that point, except Eden. Also the LV Up and LV Down abilities made my low level runs so much easier for farming spells. It more than proved its worth except for speedrunners. Gilgamesh on the other hand only arrived at the end of Disc 3. By that point I did not do much random battles anymore. So it only a small percentage chance of appearing in the few boss battles before Ultimecia. I think I only seen him once in my many playthroughs and he used Excalipoor. Thanks for the 1 damage bro!
Gilgamesh was also terrible because he would end any Angelo farming session at random, while Odin would only show up at the beginning of the fight or not at all. So he was worse than useless. He'd also interrupt your Aura farming of of Seifer in his first appearance. Just a nuisance all around. And just to make things really nasty, in the kind of completionist run that would involve farming with Angelo Search you would also still want to get Gilgamesh because, well, he's there. You gotta get him to be complete. And you can't put him off until the end. Greg is the true villain of FFVIII.
In FFIX, Odin is also useless like Atomos, until you get the Odin Sword ability (which also eats up a lot of Ability points, which I would rather put on Boost.). it's like tossing a coin if it hits or not.
You leave Tonberry alone. Tonberry was plenty useful and worth the cost of entry. Know who's useless in FFVIII? Gilgamesh. He can't be Junctioned and appears randomly, replaces a better randomly appearing GF (Odin) who was already difficult to obtain (but worth it), but then also has an attack that is randomly effective. By that I mean he might wipe out all enemies in a single shot like Odin did, or he might do some damage, or he might do exactly 1 point of damage. Gilgamesh can go away. Odin is far better.
No, Reflect in Tactics wasn't "random," it would simply bounce the spells the same distance and angle away, forwards instead of back. This was *worse*, because the AI knew how to use the bouncing effect of Reflect to, say, cast Unholy (Dark Holy in some translations) on your units who were otherwise completely removed from the fight, like a Bard or Dancer who was just hanging out in the corner, supporting from "out of combat," probably one-hit-killing them, and leaving the player with no way to get there in time with a Raise or Phoenix Down (it was common to train Dancers and Bards as Ninjas for a long time, in order to boost their speed stat, which made them move between selecting songs/dances faster, but also made them crystallize faster if killed). This ended up making using Reflect Mail (a Heavy Armor with Auto-Reflect and higher hp buff than Crystal Armor) potentially a run-endingly bad decision.
Bard Songs and Dances don't depend on the Speed stat at all. They have fixed CT. Speed only determines how fast or how often the character can select a new Song orDance.
@@orelas167 Sorry, I misspoke. I meant to say they can move more often, in order to keep distance from the enemy. I was very tired, that day. You're correct, though, thanks for catching it.
I'm going to have to push back a little on FF4. The hidden summons in FF4 are not useless at all. Goblin is great if you want to farm monsters that use summon or alarm to bring in other monsters. Regular attacks kill the summoner or alarm too fast but Goblin keeps that fight going so they can keep bringing more enemies to the battle. Cockatrice can instakill. Bomb is based on your current hp, so if it's high it's a great low cost spell. Mindflayer is probably the most "useless" out of them all. Now, you could argue that because of the RNG involved and the grinding it takes to get almost anything in this game, that ALL summons are useless because your characters are so OPed from the grinding.
Crusader isn't a fair summon to add to this list. As you pointed out, by the time you're able to obtain him, meldown and all the other abilities he offers are obsolete. So there's no reason why your Magic Defence would be too low to summon him. if you've put enough time into the game to make Meldown obsolete, you'll be strong enough to use him, so hes not useless. His power level makes him tempting to depend on, just like Odin Yojimbo and Gilgamesh. If there was no drawback to summoning him people would summon him every time they got stuck on a boss, making the game no challenge at all. Same with Odin Gilgamesh and Yojimbo. If Odin didn't have a 50/50 chance of hit or miss, hed be the only summon anyone would use. Hence the reason they made his appearance so random on FFVIII, because they made him 100% chance of instant death. Yojimbo too, if he wasn't so expensive to summon none of the other summons would ever be used because Zanmato would be all anyone would ever use. Crusader risks killing the unprepared when summoning him. The reason is simple, if you're strong enough to survive summoning him then you can beat the boss without depending on him making you worthy of using him to defeat it for you. You could argue whats the point of that. The point is simple, as i said, the devs didn't want you to depend on the summons to beat the game. The summons are there mostley for support, and every one of them are just a alternative to using magic. Every one of them use the same magic as the Black mages use the summons are just a cool FMV that uses the same spells. Crusader is no different, a cool fmv you can watch when you're strong enough to summon him. As for FFVIII tonberry summon, hes not useless either. You just dont know how to use him. For Example, his level up and level down abilities are very usefull. Level up is good to use if you want to power level up to level 100. His level down comand is extremely handy for 1 simple reason (making battles easy not included), it allows you to obtain dragon famgs for Squalls Lionheart in the end game section. Dragon famgs rarely drop. Only a few monsters drop them, including Grendal and Blue dragon, but they only drop them between levels 35-45. Since monsters scale to your level on 8. The moment you get to level 46 you can no longer obtain Dragon Fangs for Squalls Lionheart making Tonberry your only hope of obtaining them. Its easier to farm them using tonberry in the late game, than trying to farm them from blue dragon before you hit level 46 in trebia forest. He is also handy for peopoe who want to do a low level run of tye game. Many streamers try not to go above level 10 or 20 when trying to complete it. Level down helps with that too. Making tonberry very usful to anyone who knows what they are doing. Atmos afain is unfair, Gravity spells are him and miss effectivness at the best of times, so why would Atmos be any different. If the spells are either very effective or nullified depending on the situation, why would Atmos be disappointing considering that he can be made a power house gravity spell by farming Amathysts? That is a completely stupid thing to complain about, especially when your a fan of the series as a whole. As a long term fan you should already expect the gravity spells to either fail or be total devastation. I am surprised that you chose tovadd Tonberry to the list instead of the only summon on 8 who is completely usless without the pocket station, and that is Chocco. On the original FFVIII choco was completely useless because he required you to own a pocket station to level him up. He was designed to be a type of Tamugochi that required you to download him from your FFVIII save file using the memory card slot. Youd stick your memory card with the 8 save file in slot 1 them put the pocket station in slot to and transfer him into the pocket station,from your save file. While he was uploaded into your pocket statioj, he was unuseable in game but it was the only way to level him up. If you didn't own a pocket station he was completely useless and only do 1 damage when summoned making him, not tonberry the most useless summon of FFVIII. You may not like me rubbing that in, but i find it hard to believe that someone who expects people to pay money to support their channel while claiming to be a master at the game, fails to acknowledge they usefulness of Tonberry and failing to acknowledge the uselessness of Choco. Dont call yourself or make yourself out to be a ff master if youve only masterd some of the games. Mastering some of them is impressive, dont make yourself look likecan idiot buly pretending to have mastered them all.
TLDR - Ultros is not useless, it's just there are only very niche uses and can easily be seen as useless. He does fit on this list Ultros causing blind in Dissidia works as intended. Yes, you can still see it, but that does mean having to look in a specific spot to note the colour change in bravery. Much less of a concern for caster type characters, Ultimecia for example with her held bravery attacks offering time to look, but fighters and brawlers are played in fractions of a second, not second by second, so taking that time to look can mean not seeing an incoming attack. Is it an optimal summon? Absolutely not. Could an Iai build completely ignore it? Lv1 Sephiroth spamming Scintilla certainly doesn't seem to care. To say it's useless would be wrong. It would only really matter at a competitive level (which could be negated due to various builds) assuming you could overload someone's mental stack. Compared to alternatives and more obvious 'big number generator' summons, yes it could be comparatively useless.
I'd say some of the most useless ones was FF7's Typhon and Bahamut ZERO, both of witch dealt maybe 6000-7000 hp in damage. However, by the time you get them, your regular attacks wold deal at least 3000 hp (with no mp cost). I mean hades deals status effects and knights is, well, knights; witch leaves Typhon and Bahamut ZERO in a sort of awkward position.
Ragnarok? I never really found it useful for its transformation ability in FFVI, but it did teach Ultima without having to be worried about the cursed shield PITA, but still. Maybe there's a way to get ol' Raggie to transform enemies into useful items, reliably?
NOPE the Vanish + Doom trick from the SNES/PS1 version of FF6 does NOT worth with the Ragnarok Esper which is why the Esper is PURE CRAP and even on the GBA version where you can get BOTH it and the Sword I still chose the Sword over the Useless Esper on the GBA version of FF6. Besides the only good items you can get via Ragnarok requires to NOT ever summon it in the first place.
Happy to see all the Tonberry love in the comments but wanna point out that Crusader is *much* better than given credit for here. It was Fire elemental so if your party was set up to absorb Fire then it acted as a nuke against enemies and a full heal for you at the same time. You could even see it healing people in the footage shown lol. Considering there are several other *actually* useless summons in FF6 this is a bit unfair. Cait Sith in particular was practically useless in every way. Unicorn not great either aside from teaching pretty decent spells.
It would be cool to see an origins lore video for Steiner in ff9. A relic of a bygone era under the Alexandrian Kings rule, and forced to accept changing views (similar to Wakka)
Shoutout to FFXIV's Titan Egi, at least during Shadowbringers, when they removed the possibility of pets attracting aggro. Titan-Egi was essentially designed to be a tank, and at times when pets were still targetable by enemies it could still function as one. But once that capability was removed there was pretty much no reason to use titan-egi
About that I won't even fight them on DISC 2 lv 50+ for the NORMAL ones WITHOUT the Lionheart equipped in fact I had it equipped on disc 1 and NOT via the 20x Elnoyle cards method.
Probably the worst versions of Carbuncle are the ones that cast Reflect, which is sadly most of them. The most useful one would probably be in FF9 since it can cast Vanish, Haste, or Shell on everyone depending on the accessory Eiko has equipped - that is to say, something not Reflect.
Even that's not worth it Vanish in FF9 is crap Auto Haste even that sucksa unless your running the PS4 remaster AT 3x speed and Shell on Everyone not worth it WITHOUT summoning Carbuncle for it,.
I feel like the Cactuar was the worst summon in Final Fantasy 8. It dealt very low damage, and could only increase damage by leveling up in increments of 10. Something about Final Fantasy 8 however is that enemies scale with the party's levels, so the higher level party members get the more powerful the enemies become. This leads to Cactuar's damage meaning nothing at later levels because the enemy's HP stats have grown too much for it to matter.
For Final Fantasy 8 I believe the Choco-world summons should be on this list instead. They're actually horrible to obtain even in the remaster and they suck. Tonberry is actually totally useful. 1. There are plenty of other GFs for stat junctions, you only have 3 characters at a time anyway + you can use greens and learning items if you really want. 2. Tonberry has the LV-Up/Down abilities which can actually be super useful for acquiring specific loot and draw spells (either early via Lv-Up or after it's "too late" via Lv-Down). Initiative and the shop-related abilities further justify getting Tonberry. Also when you factor in its long animation + boost and the crappy framerate of the Remaster, its single-target damage output is comparable to Bahamut's.
I give bonus points to the Tonberry summon for being so fun to watch over and over...That doink!.
I love how he says it out loud.
I think that people underestimate the usefulness of the tonberry in FFVIII. The combination of item refinement, haggle, and sell high allows for an infinite money loop, which can be translated into an infinite number of stat up items, thereby allowing max stats at any level.
I hear ya, but the stipulation was effectiveness in battle. He said not for their utility. So.. with that caveat... it is pretty accurate.
Compared to the others, though. I would argue it’s the least useful. That says, I’d put him on the bottom of the list because he has good out of combat utility.
But Carbuncle has to take the cake over Tonberry, right? Can't cure yourself unless you use potions or, later in the game, Recovery. And some enemies benefit from Reflect because they heal from their own magic.
FFVIII money is hardly something you need to obtain or can really use enough to need an infinite loop
all you need to do is the SEEDs test and get to LV30 then leave the game on your SEED rank will decrease but so long as you do the test again or other things it would rise again eventually
@@ChaosMechanicaCarbuncle provides a lot of help in battle if you know when to use it. Cast magic the enemy is weak to on your party to reflect it back multiple times on the enemy. Wonderful way to kill undead enemies, use party wide heal spells with reflect on.
For FF8, I would have personally ranked Carbuncle as being more useless than Tonberry. Tonberry was decent enough at dealing non-elemental damage to bosses. Carbuncle just made it impossible to cast Cure on your own characters, and likely helped enemies heal themselves by absorbing their own elemental spells.
Lol noob
I was thinking Cerberus would be the worst due to casting magic that was junctioned could lower stats mid battle, so casting 3 times the magic at once would lower stats faster.
@@leonsk1787 use magic that isn't junctioned then. You can put mag 60% to boost your mag to max value and then have some unjunctioned meteor. Cast meteor 3x with max magic to decimate a lot of enemies. If you don't like how it used up 3 magic, use Eden's expend x3-1 so it would only use 1 per triple cast.
Even that's worthless by games end I'll never use a SINGLE attack spell besides Angel Wing using Meteor which won't drain her stock of drawn spells so yes Cereberus is pure crap for IN battle its only useful for Alert so that Cactuars can't back attack you.
Tbh Cerberus is not just offense. It's also buffs and healing (and debuffs but who uses those). And i know you might think buffs as useless, but they are not (outside of ff9 at least).
Also while Carbuncle is niche, it has its uses against Edea or Cerberus, or really any magic heavy boss.
Here's an obscure one: Bahamut in Final Fantasy Record Keeper.... sort of.
For the game's second anniversary in the global version, every player was given Bahamut for free. This was a big deal--it was a 5-star ability, the highest available at the time, and getting enough of the items required to create those ranged from extremely difficult to literally impossible. Unfortunately, DeNA screwed up, and the version of Bahamut that was given to players was accidentally a not-intended-to-be-for-players one used in an early game tutorial, and it was EXTREMELY weak. Its damage multiplier was a mere 5, meaning it could be outdamaged by 3-star summons like Shiva, or even the 2-star Chocobo summon if it was a single target.
Their response was to rename the pre-existing, obtainable Bahamut in-game (whose multiplier was 16.5, for comparison) to Bahamut (V) and let players keep the wrong version, which ended up being colloquially referred to as Bughamut. Incidentally, this ended up being the only "ability" that was unique to the global version of the game--the JP version had different rewards entirely for its second anniversary.
(I might have messed up some of the details here, since it's been a long time since it happened, but that's the gist of it.)
I still had the broken Bahamut ability in my box when the game was shut down. RIP
I miss that game
I miss that game too.
@@the_exegete- Same! I wa proud of my little error lizard.
Also, I adored that game and played it faithfully until shutdown. I let the game expire with my party initiating the Gilgamesh fight. It was a nice sendoff for a game that spanned several significant years of my life
💗
I love the FF fan base for reasons like this, always sharing curious tidbits for each other. Thank you!
Reflect in FFT was not only not random in its targeting, but incredibly useful in extending caster's ranges, and did not double reflect nor go back to the caster.
It took into account the distance and orientation of the caster to the target with Reflect, and plotted a target on the far side from the caster in the same range and orientation to decide what panel to hit. Think of it like plotting points on a graph.
If your caster was 3 squares away from the Reflect holder, then the Reflect would bounce the spell 3 panels away in the opposite direction, effectively continuing in a straight line. If someone was in that panel 3 squares away, they're getting hit with the spell, even if they also have Reflect.
Just like Arithmancy, Reflect worked in a very specific way, but it worked that way every single time, and if you know what you're doing, it can be used to extremely devastating effect.
FFT Carby does not deserve this slander.
Hey Aaron, thanks for the comment and the incredible insight! Much appreciated ~Darryl
I was hoping someone was going to post this. I thought the same thing as I was listening. The job Calculator worked wonders with this mechanic. You could cast a spell for ZERO MP and reflect it off your team, placed around the map, to have it reflected into enemies for stacking dmg on one target.
So what you're saying is, Reflect is useless for casual playthroughs specifically.
@@stevenbart2375 Not at all. It can still provide protection from enemy spell casters.
Timing it with a Jump and reflect armor is pro.
At some point you will have to make a supercut of all summons from worst to best.
That's an interesting concept for sure... and it would be one hell of a supercut as there are over 200 different Summons. One to think about though! :D ~Darryl
@@FinalFantasyUnion im up for a 3 hour video 👍
I'd like to say that Odin is the best... but we all know that it's Yojimbo.
I just want to add that learning about Eggman in this video has made my day happier
You're just wrong about the Tonberry GF in VIII. His Luck and Eva bonuses are often the biggest boosts available to those stats in the game, and his Level Up/Level Down (which he knows by default) are the primary way to manipulate enemy drop tables (and possibly draw-able spells, can't remember). It's shop abilities also allow for infinite gil cycles and remove the need to backtrack for missed books for more casual players. Carbuncle is worse by far as Recov Med RF isn't particularly useful, Auto-Reflect is double edged, and Counter is only alright since it requires physical attacks and most mid and late game challenging enemies tend to use more magic attacks.
Disagree on Tonberry being near useless compared to Carbuncle, Cerberus or Siren. At least he gives you the shop abilities which is incredibly convenient when trying to get the final weapons later or just getting supplies in the field.
He said outside of "utility" which everything you say is great about Tonberry is. In battles, useless.
Bro cerberus was still much more useful than tonberry in battle, mass triple makes you able to have boosted damage potential or mass aura early, not like you'll use guardian force for damage anyway after disc 2.
@@CrnaStrela Triple Double to be precise. I loved Cerberus for that
I almost NEVER use spells in FF8 so MOST GF's are NOT worth summoning for IN battle after disc 1 ends not even EDEN is worth summoning it.
@@mistahkrazy805 Carbuncle literally casts 1 spell and does no damage tho lol
Atomos was perfect for grinding on Yans in FF9. They’re not immune to gravity and if they’re asleep, Atomos won’t wake them up.
Good to know I never use the summon that much
The Spirit Moogle from DFFOO
when Summoned, he only gave 1 Free turn. He also didnt damage the enemy or heal your party either. His ability was that he "removed any debuffs on Terra" while his blessing was "increasing Terra's Love by 10" a stat that doesnt even exist.
However, he was meant to be bad due to being given as an April Fool's event
It was valentines if I recall, and I think the stat did actually translate into something but it was still pointless, especially when you only get one turn.
Wow I don't think I ever heard about this Eggman summon! I'm not sure about Crusader either but definitely Eggman.
The fact that Ultros was incredibly useless in Dissidia is probably the most accurate thing i've ever seen. Lol
How dare you say Tonberry is useless. Granted his attack is average but his animation is funny and cute. Not to mention the abilities he brings to the table are some of the best, haggle, sell-high, familiar and call shop.
So i like to shout out the "spirits" from ffxi. the way summons worked in 11 was they drained a certain amount of mp a "tick". You could unlock the avility to summon spirits verse traditional summons for each of the 8 elements. they be able to cast any spell from there element at random.
If them casting spells at random wasnt bad enough they cost more mp per tick then the traditional summons. Leaving them largely unused aside light (since it could cast cure) and dark (since it did cast sleepga occasionally which was great for crowd control.
Oh good callout! I played ffxi for so many years and completely forgot about these because no one ever used them. How did they not make it into this video haha
It's true the cost was rarely worth it, especially since they were always stupid about what spells they cast. Since we can't control what they do, It'd be nice if SE gave them basic Trust-level intelligence and updated their spell set from the 75 era, but alas.
So they're just used for Elemental Siphon, but that's pretty important.
Tonberry wasnt very useful in combat but his shop abilities were top tier, could help in CD4 a lot, and make you a ton of gil if used in tandem with other GF abilities, also for the cost you could always kill cactuars with Squall since he has a fixed rate of 255% hit and Selphie with Strange Vision, each Cactuar gave about 20 AP so wasnt too hard to farm
Doomtrain is pretty useless if Sabin is around.....
In FF4 the Mindflayer was SUPER useful. It did crap damage but it inflicted a GUARANTEED Paralyze against the enemy if it could be effected by the spell. This allowed you to trivialize some of the strongest monsters in the game. Typically you needed to this spell several times to get the effect. But with the Mindflayer you can just spam it and an enemy like the red dragon can't do anything, free exp.
It's not a vanish plus X-Zone but we will take advantage of it 😜
I actually just...randomly fell into getting the Goblin summon in my game, didn't know anything about it, but thought it was neat so I used it a lot. Ended up being my favorite summon.
The only reason I'll let mentioning the Cockatrice in FFIV slide is due to the rarity. I was lucky enough on one playthrough to get it literally the first time I fought a Cockatrice on the mountain between Damcyan and Fabul, and it became a staple for Rydia during the climb, and even after she came back from the time skip, it was still useful for clearing weaker mobs of enemies.
For a subsequent video, I'd recommend the Minimog, Moomba, or Chicobo summons from FFVIII, purely due to how they were originally unavailable in the US thanks to the PocketStation being a Japan-only exclusive accessory.
I was so happy to have a mod chip that doubled as a GameShark. Allowed me to get the items to summon those three without having a pocket station. I used them a fair bit early game because I didn't want my GFs to take damage :(
Tonberry? Are you mad! The learnable abilities were amazing.
Mindflayer isn't useless imo, it makes traversing Lunar Subterrane a breeze against anything that can be paralyzed like Behemoths. Very handy for your first playthrough.
BUT the problem with the 4 FF4 summons is that the ITEMS like Mindflayer almost NEVER drop in EVERY VERSION save for the SNES game where they don't even exist in that one.
@@veghesther3204 Oh, they're in the SNES version. I got Goblin a few times, Cockatrice once, and I once rented a game with someone else's save that had Mindflayer on it.
The odds that you get it in your first playthrough or really in any given playthrough are minuscule. Even if you know where to get it, the amount of time it'd take to get one to drop would be better spent just leveling up for better and more consistent results. Especially because if you know how to get it, you should already know good places to level up and how to deal with the tougher enemies (for example, don't use holy elemental spells against Behemoths, and Meteor is a holy elemental spell in FF4).
On the AMERICAN SNES version I NEVER got the 4 to drop ever so I believe those on the SNES version are possibly only on the JAPANESE import of the game not the American version.
@@veghesther3204 Nope, this was the American version, I played that sucker through like 20-30x because it was the only RPG I had for like a year, and I was 12.
so the way reflect functioned in tactics was quite different then you explained. yes, because of the combat system it didn't just bounce the spell back on the caster, but there was a precise formula for where the spell landed. it would continue an additional distance from the caster to the target, past the target. For example, if the caster was standing 3 tiles on front of you, the spell would bounce 3 spaces behind you. this was actually a tactic for reaching enemies across distance beyond the range of the spell. likewise, you could still cure allies in this fashion if for example, you places another ally with reflect equidistant between you and them. yes, it required extra thought, but it wasn't just random.
I came here to say this. It was all about position. And a reflected spell hit the space regardless of height. You could turn a mage into a mortar.
about ff8, tonberry is actually very useful by the time you can get it the earliest, particularly when doing a no level run since you can use its lv up ability to either steal or draw some magic, not to mention all the shop passive abilities.
in my humble opinion cactuar is the least useful by the time you obtain it since there's nothing new you can learn and its most powerful attack can be outranked by pretty much everyone's limit breaks
I think people can slightly underestimate the usefulness of Bomb in FF4. There are a couple of fights where it comes in handy, notably the CPU, since it can bypass reflect and only hit a single target. There's better ways to deal with the CPU, but it's still a valid strategy for lucky low level characters.
Would've been cool if Goblin had a scaling effect with how often it is used based on Rydia's level. It should evolve into the stronger goblin variants up to the Trickster that deals massive lightning damage and haste on the party.
I think the reason tonberry had to be nerfed was due to its original attack having the same effect as odins (instant death)
So, I'm going to say Kjata from 7 was pretty useless, if only because by the time you received it a lot of enemies could absorb elemental damage, and if one of kjata's attacks was absorbed All of Them Were, which usually made it not useful to summon. To add insult to injury, you couldn't even junction it on armor with an elemental materia to any effect. Sure would have been nice to have tri-elemental resistance, but no, we can't have nice things.
I agree, Kjata could randomly use an element instead of all
Speaking of summons. I pray to all that is good and holy that Knights of the Round is not obtained through Chadley in the next instalment of the FFVII Remake series. I want to actually pick up the materia from the Round Island.
I think we’re all hoping Hojo deletes Chadley 🤭
@@franimal86 true..
I have a feeling that we will have to go to a special place to fight them like we did with Gilgamesh in FF7 Rebirth. So don’t worry. I doubt they’ll just make KOTR a Chadley combat simulator summon. The devs have already said they aim to deliver on KOTR in the next game. And judging by what they did with Gilgamesh in this game, I have high expectations
@@dammyoyesanya4656 Fingers Crossed
@@LEE-337 how did you find the Gilgamesh fight and summon in Rebirth btw?
Idk, I’m playing FF8 currently and that LV Up and LV Down from Tonberry has been great for my magic stocks lol
Yeah he had to stretch it to make Tonberry seem bad. VIII doesn't actually have any bad summons. Atomos for IX isn't even the worst summon in IX either, that's Carbuncle.
@@s-wo8781 Eh i'd argue a case for Minimog, since that just heals your GFs and its rare that you'd ever need to do that. Plus it requires its own command slot to even summon it
@@s-wo8781 Excuse me? Mf do you think Carbuncle on party into Vivi aoe magic on party is a joke?!
In fairness, every Summon in FF8 is pretty much useless in battle, since with proper junctions Zell's Armageddon Fist (or any of his other simple loops) will outdamage any summon with minimal effort.
Tonberry King for Lvl Up/Dwn or Diablo for Mug might get the most mileage, and even then, not that important except for getting Flare and Meteor from Red Dragons after you get the mobile Garden.
Using Irvine's AP ammo against Tonberrys is the fastest way to kill them. Three shots each, as I recall.
Pretty much any summon in Type 0 since you had to sacrifice your battle party to call them. I don't recall ever using a summon in that game.
If you use Rem you can cast auto-life so you don't die-die but it still counts as a death in the end mission screen
Me either. I think maybe i did it once to see the effects, but overall... I forgot that they existed.
Odin is pretty much the "Disk One Nuke" in Type-0 - once you get him you can use him to clear those goddamn Expert Trials without constant reliance on Breaksights. And the death ranking doesn't matter unless you care about S-ranking it, and you won't care about S-ranking Expert Trials on your first playthrough.
@Kruggov that could be true. But I just used Trey and made him an archery God, then wiped the floor with all of them. 🙂
It's always a little disappointing to have to set aside or sometimes never even use summons I love, due to their lack of utility. One thing I'd love to see in the next FF is a growth or evolution to each summon's utility as we progress through the game. Especially if that can be incorporated into character building. Maybe it's just me, but I felt like XVI missed a great opportunity for a greater depth and variety of character building, and synergy between Eikon abilities. Would love some type of fusion and progression of V and FFT style character building, along with VIII's junctionining, so we can really get some interesting variations with each playthrough.
It’s Friday baby!!! New FFU
Saw Carbuncle in the thumbnail and was about to start a war in the comment section.
I'm glad none of the summons from Final Fantasy x made the list. I'm very attached to all of them.
If you get super lucky and get one easily those early Rydia summons are quite useful during the child dungeons since they cost so little mana. I actually managed to get one naturally on my last playthrough.
I'm loving the videos, are the character origins ever gonna come back? I miss those
I think they said in a recent update video those origin videos are on hiatus.
We need a Celes Origins video. The Opera Floozy deserves some love.
As a Summoner in FF14 ,I can tell you Carbuncle is not useless.
Don’t forget Sylph from FFIV. Concept is cool, but it does WAY too little damage to ever actually be useful. Considering it does little damage or healing, you would always summon Asura for healing and pretty much anything else for damage. Still, I always do the sidequest for them, even though I never actually end up summoning them
CRUSADER! My favorite summon in the series.
*Sigh.* FFT Reflect doesn't bounce spells at random. It changes the spell's target to double the distance from the caster as the original target. Which admittedly is still pretty useless.
Tonberry in FF8 suffered from being a VERY SHORT attack animation!! and i would say Carbuncle is more useless than Tonberry, as Tonberry can do damage and Carbuncle doesn't
I actually got Goblin on my first playthrough of Final Fantasy IV without even knowing about it. I never got it again even with grinding or the other two.
Every summon in FFXII, FF XV and FF VII Remake... they never want to help.
Zodiac Age Espers are controllable. Exodus and Zodiark are useful in Pharos (magic pot) or the trials.
@@Vayne_Solidor I just used an elixir and then went ham with my physical attacks. I know what you mean.. they don't help because they remove the other members of your party though.
Grauda was only summon came to my aid in ff15. Ramuh may have popped up one or twice. Post game, Shiva would pop from time to time. I was curious about the other summons. So, guess who watched a video to see them? Me. They sure didn't show up in my game. 😅
I played FFXV twice through and never once was able to summon Titan. Between his summonable area and trigger condition, he was never going to help me.
I actually found the Remake summons quite helpful for my Hard mode playthrough where MP cannot be restored at benches and no items are allowed. In the last stretch of boss fights especially and with magic at a premium, it was actually optimal to use your ATB on summon abilities and save MP for healing or anything else you need.
Definitely more of an honorable mention, but I wanted to mention both Chapter 3 light side eidolons in Final Fantasy Dimensions. In a job game where the jobs as a whole are kinda low power compared to those of other job games like Bravely Default, the summoner job and the eidolons under its control maintained its trademark destructive power and was one of the best jobs in the game as a result. It can easily carry both light and dark parties through their chapter 2 segments, and keeps doing that for dark in chapter 3 and the full party in endgame. Chapter 3 light side, though, got Phoenix-strong with a powerful support side effect, but with an absurd MP cost to balance-and Unicorn, a purely support summon. Neither of these are bad on their own, but getting them back to back so late on kneecaps the summoner job for the light side.
It just means you shift to other jobs and have a Summoner act as your main support. You can also fall back on Fusion Skills, since summoner can get quite a few of those, like Grand Delta.
Atomos really was such a disappointing eidolon, because that FMV was quite horrifying and what it ends up doing in battle is such a whimper compared to that...
Not sure why they didn't just make it a nom-elemental summon. Could have been one of Garnet's top summons if it had been more reliable, if for the animation alone.
There should be no entries from FF 8, any summon has utility because of the junction system... Sure you might not summon them but they're still a core part of your team!
Odin in FFXI is pretty useless even if you land the low chance to kill a regular enemy and absolutely pointless on bosses. Not to mention that it can only be once every 1 to 2 hours depending on era, and you have to choose between that or nigh invincibility from Perfect Defense via Alexander since they shared a cooldown/use.
Odin was useful once: in worm parties during Abyssea. You could bring him up to 1-shot a bunch of worms then revitalize with a 2-hr chest and do it again. Super fun.
Atomos is useless too, but considering the 1-hr cooldown / loss of Alexander and the fact that Abyssea parties are no more, it's gotta be Odin. Which is a shame, because it's really cool to summon him.
Most of the summons from Explorers, especially after you gain access to ones like Cloud, Bartz and Phoenix. The first 2 for damage and Phoenix for free revives and minor damage.
shoutout to kujata and typhon in vii. given the way multi-elemental attacks were handled in the original game, a lot of enemies would resist or even absorb their attack, to the point it usually wasn't worth the gamble.
Wasn't Terra's dad some kind of leader among the Espers? Weird because he was weak gameplay wise... Wait a minute. If Terra's dad was a leader, does that make Terra royalty among the freaking summons? Now when I thought she couldn't get any better ❤
Makes perfect sense. Most managers don't know how to do anything.
I don’t think she was royalty as Terra’s dad wasn’t the village elder. He seemed to be a regular Esper like the rest in the village. She’s still awesome in my book.
@franimal86 Even if he's not royalty, he's a human with semi-canine features. You don't need to be royalty when you got that dawg in you.
Royalty is a dumb idea in real life
No, Maduin was just respected in the community. He held no actual authority
I’m sure he won’t mention it, but pre-Endwalker Titan from the SMN job - you had to choose between three summons, Ifrit, Titan, and Garuda. Iftit did more damage on single target, Garuda on AOE, and Titan sacrificed had, instead of two charges of one of its attacks, two charges of applicable shields. Thus, its damage output was super low, and in order to actually use it defensively, you had to use a move summoning it, waiting for its summon animation to conclude, and then use the skill, after which you had to wait for it to apply - all in all, about 8 seconds between you deciding you need some defensive utility and actually getting it - by which point whatever was gonna hit you already did.
So you had to either take a MASSIVE damage loss, or foresee an emergency almost 10 seconds in the future.
R.I.P. third tank Titan. I heard some interesting stories of people passing content without tanks because they had, like, one or two SMNs in the party during SB (or was it HW) and they used Titan instead.
@@soxirhtribal1414the glory days! lol I remember tanking Ravana EX with Titan-Egi back in HW 💀
I'd argue the FFVII Remake summons are all kinda useless since the game hardly ever lets you use them.
I was thinking the same about XV. I think I only got a non-story summon once in 3 playthroughs.
Yea I don't really use them either. Did a little more in rebirth but still seldom
Still better then the FF15 ones which typically required you to put yourself at risk and they were just random based on where your location was and more cinematic fluff then actually useful.
Granted, some of us are likely spoiled by summons that work more like powerful allies like FF10, FF12, FF11, FF14 and so on.
Which often let you in some games, use them as a secondary wall to chip down strong foes and soak attacks, to get a useful head start before your team got hit hard.
I actually found the Remake summons quite helpful for my Hard mode playthrough where MP cannot be restored at benches and no items are allowed. In the last stretch of boss fights especially and with magic at a premium, it was actually optimal to use your ATB on summon abilities and save MP for healing or anything else you need.
I would say the Chocobo from FF3 is a very weak one if you are an evoker or sage it does either flee or...nothing but if you are a summoner it deals insultingly low damage instead. Also carbuncle from FF15 it does a full heal but apparently only shows up on easy mode
IIRC, FF’s, reflect was not completely random. What it counts is the range, direction, and height of how the spell was cast and bounce the spell again that range, height, and direction. So, if a fire spell goes up 3 and to the right 1, hitting a reflected target, the reflected spell will bounce another 3 up, 1 to the right before resolving. In theory this reflect could double the range of spells.
…in practice it works best by the computer who can determine where the spell is going far better than you.
It's not fair to call out tonberry like that, he's just a means of accessing shops thru time KOMPRESSION
I didn't know about the ice Hockey players in FF8. Researched it and they didn't even had an TT card. Can't believed I missed out on this. Really can't believed it. :( thanks for this so much
you could only encounter them while crossing the ice rink while raiding galbadia garden!
In any final fantasy game both atmos and carcuncle you probably use once to see what they do then never use them again as there are usually far more powerful/useful sommons at your disposal
Except XI, where Carbuncle used to be a beginning summoner's only avatar until at least level 30, and the only one that didn't eat all your MP in seconds. If you meet an old XI summoner, they'll have a soft spot for Carby.
But Atomos can go swallow himself.
@@AtariSwitch i never played any of the online ff games so i had no idea carbuncle had a use
I find this to be the case with status ailments too. Weirdly, the only solution ive found in practice is gimmicky fights like in Chrono trigger. It's not perfect and some skills remain unused, but it forces you to use a greater variety of abilities that you wouldn't otherwise.
Tonberry is probably the most useful GF you got call shop and its very handy
Diablos whilst having ENC-None is most useless as his attack is gravity based and can miss or be immune and with remastered with encounter rate Diablos is most useless GF in my opinion.
I feel Crusader was not ment to be a good summon on its own.
It was meant to be a warning about using magicite recklessly. What the game to that point was trying to say.
Since the magicite item could summon any esper in the game randomly, and some could theoretically get you out of a tight scrape or win a fight for you early game when you get the most access to the item version of magicite and your stats were no where close to being able to survive the summon it.
Thematically it works for the story, and only after you beat the dragons do you get access to it proper, but also are tempered enough with experience to handle it. Power with temperance of knowing when to use thay power rather than power for the sake of it.
Fitting for the story.
In FFVI, Crusader teaches Meteor and *Merton*, not Meltdown. The super-hot fire spell Merton is especially great with Paladin and flame shields, since you can both harm the enemy and heal yourself.
Merton is the same as Meltdown, it's just a poor translation that got changed in later remakes.
@@gneissisnice100 Merton is better. It's a ton of Mercury air. Cut-scene bad guy screaming out "Meltdown!!!" is pure yuck, just not the same as "Merton!!!"
I would add the Chocobo summon from FFIII to this list. Although summons work a bit differently in the game, they are still summons none-the-less, and Chocobo is easily the most useless of them all. For those unfamiliar, there are 3 different “abilities” that summons have in the game; a white magic ability, a black magic ability, and a summon ability. There are only three job classes that can use summons in the game (evoker, summoner, and sage). When an evoker uses a summon, it will randomly use either the black or white magic ability and never the summon ability. Whereas when a summoner or sage uses it, it will always be the summon ability. For Chocobo, the white magic ability would make you attempt to escape from battle, but with a higher chance of success than just using the escape command. The black magic ability was a physical attack, however, it always missed. Thus, when used by an evoker, it either did nothing or made you escape battle. The summon ability did very low non-elemental damage to a single target; which is better than the white or black magic abilities, but still very underwhelming. Pretty much every other summon in the game does much higher damage to a single target with their black magic ability (unless an enemy is strong or immune to that elemental type) and their summon ability does damage to all enemies, are far stronger, and will do way more damage even if an enemy is strong against that element and not immune. Even the white magic abilities of all the other summons are more useful than Chocobo.
Odin is always useless, since Zantetsuken rarely works when it matters, but the Odin in FFVIII gets special mention because he summons randomly and never actually works. And then he gets replaced by Gilgamesh, who actually works on occasion, but the one occasion where he never fails is when he will totally kill Rinoa.
Uh what? Its rare to find anything immune to Zantentsuken in FF8 that isnt a boss, and Odin never shows up against bosses aside from Seifer 3. When he shows up he WILL kill anything you're fighting 100% of the time lol. I think probably the only things it might not work on are undead, but its not like there's a lot of those in this game.
@@ThundagaT2 No, FF8 Odin works on undead since what he does is not technically instant death.
But yeah, FF8 Odin is pretty much the best Odin in the series because if he shows up the battle is just over, there's like three regular enemies he can't kill, and none of the three are particularly dangerous.
@@Kruggov Yeah i looked it up it was Cactuar and Tonberry, for some reason i assumed it was undead he doesnt, but i rarely get to see him show up against them lol.
@@ThundagaT2 Cactuars and Tonberries are Eject immune, so naturally Odin won't appear there. Other eject immunes are Grat, Lefty, Righty and Vysage. Everything else, including Malboros, Behemoths and Ruby Dragons, Odin dices up.
About the enemies Odin can't kill Degenerator limit Quistis won't either and only Tonberries are the hardest to kill that are immune Lefty Righty Visage Gnats and Cactuars even at lv 100 are TOO EASY to kill.
One time I was playing Final Fantasy 6, and I was in a real bind (this was back when I was young, and bad enough at RPGs for the game to still provide me a solid challenge). I was on the brink of defeat, and needed a miracle to make a comeback. So in an act of desperation, I used a magicite item. Rolling the dice, and hoping for something that would turn the tide.
It summoned Crusader. Ever since that day, I've held great personal spite towards that particular summon. Even more than I already did for how useless it was.
Edit: As for Ultros in Dissidia. Assuming this would've even been possible, a much more interesting and unique way to implement a blind status effect would've been to have the status temporarily dim the other player's screen to the lowest brightness setting.
Not just that the random 3 bar slot for Setzer will RANDOMLY summon Crusader only to still have IT DO 9999 damage TO A LV 99 party.
@@veghesther3204 I don't think I've ever had that happen. But I've also only ever seen that slot result a handful of times in my life. 99% of the time I get either Prismatic Flash, Chocobo Stampede, or Mysidian Rabbit.
I played FF2US a lot back when in the 90s, and for the longest time, I had no idea these 4 summons actually existed. One time, however... on a new playthrough on the way to the Mist Dragon I got the "Imp" summon (what Goblins are called in FF1 and 2US), and for the low, low price of 1 MP, Rydia could one shot a regular enemy and it was pretty efficiency if you can get it immediately at the start of the game. (In fact, I now have a permanent save file I load up when I start a new game). I mean i still use Ice-1 and Lit-1 when it can kill all enemies and Chocobo is still MVP for Octomammoth, but Goblin sure isn't useless...
Then again the others... Mind Blast, weak chance to paralyze one, and you don't get until dark Elf. THAT is what I would call useless. The other two is a single target petrify and a self-destuct move that kills Rydia (its based off her HP and she's by far the LOWEST of the five....) and Rydia can stone enemies herself (or you know you can just kill most of them with single target Virus. Of the four Goblin/Imp is still good if you get lucky and it drops before Mist.
In Defense of FFT Carbuncle: Calculator/Arithmetician spells aren't reflected. And with in memory only seeing like 5 or 6 Calculators in Main Scenario Fights, You can have high Faith characters (to have higher firepower of their own magic) be defended with Carbuncle reflecting up your party, heal/buff with Math, but Black/Time Magic/Yin Yang Magic to attack. A high Faith Melee ranged fighter can bounce the damage they would've taken to friendly fire onto enemies instead, if you aim it right.
Every Esper in the original FFXII is pretty much completely useless, since you give up two party members and can't directly control them. For IZJS on, you can now control them and have them perform their ultimate attacks at any time, but I still think that only Shemhazai, Zeromus, and Zodiark are worth using.
Some espers have ways to trigger their ultimate attack immediately. In that case, they become a massive one time hit. That makes them worth the usage if you plan in advance.
I would argue Odin from 4 was the most worthless. By the time you could get it, you likely had Leviathan. And since Odin didn’t work on the moon, the only area he was useful was possibly the giant. But again, Leviathan and perhaps Bahamut were better because they didn’t miss.
@@BlakeAustin2011 Yeah Zodiark in the original has a pretty easy way to trigger his ultimate attack. I don't think the others are worth it, though. And it still uses up all your MP to use Zodiark in the original.
Actually the rank 1 espers had a use in the vanilla game, you could summon them, syphon their MP (you'll get back more than you spent to summon them), dismiss, repeat, you'll eventually get all your MP back lol
In Final Fantasy IX against Ozma. If Ozma fail to kill anyone with Meteor
Get Vivi to Trance, Eiko summon Carbuncle then Vivi double cast Doomsday with everyone have Shadow Immunity or Absorb will guaranteed you an instant kill again Ozma because Doomsday can't be countered with Curaga because it will be cast in total of 10 time for 9999 damage (due to Ozma weak against Shadow)
2 Normal Doomsday and 2 reflected by each character
While the summon attack itself was rubbish, That spell you dismissed: Merton/Meltdown was part of my strat in late game. I would do a quick dip to kill the dragons, then collect the rest of the party [or just hunt for Merton & Quake in the randomizer], teach Merton and Quake to 4 characters, who are equipped with flame shields [or the paladin shield] and Gaia Gear. Merton sweeps the enemies that fly, Quake sweeps the fire immune, I don't recall an enemy in Kefka's Tower that was immune to both Fire AND Earth. Both spells ignore reflect and due to flame shields and gaia gear, heal the party with every cast.
Brah that's a top tier set up!! I just spammed vanish and X-Zone like a lil B
@@slayeyegaming7629 And it carries through to kefka since some of the tower bits also cast merton, Lady [the angel in tier 3 that heals Rest, the lounging kefka] is the only part that absorbs fire and earth, but is pretty weak, so meteo or flare should make quick work.
I didn't know about egg man! Cool to learn something new.
I thought Ultros’s ability would have been Tentacle Slap considering unlike Octopus Ink can only be used by him were other enemies can also use Ink
I say we should bring back the 'mundane' summons. Bring back Chocobo, Goblin as regular attacks for summoners, rather than have summoners whack enemies with their little rods.
I thought reflect in FFT bounced spells the same way they were cast. For example, you cast a spell 3 tiles ahead of you on a reflected character, the spell bounces on them and affects the tile 3 ahead of them. It’s not random, is it?
Anyway, still quite useless. Enemy characters could use it to their advantage too easily and could calculate the bounce to hit your characters from farther away. Especially since once it was reflected, it wouldn’t be reflected again on the next character it hit.
If you built your team up to use Reflect, your team wouldn't give enemy casters much of a chance to make use of it.
It's all about Speed control of your team. Specifically the Speed stat of the units to be Reflected. You want them to move faster than your Casters just enough to always go before them, but have their turns come up after the charge times of those Casters spells are done. Also having units that can bind enemies in place to cover for discrepancies is also useful.
Just like Arithmancy, you gotta know what you're doing, but the spell is far from useless.
While I am not surprised FF8 made this list since FF8 has been in EVERY "7 X That Ended Up Being Almost Completely Useless" list, I am surprised Tonberry was chosen instead of Gilgamesh.
Tonberry's shop abilities were so useful in the endgame since shops was only available through Tonberry and I never used GFs for damage at that point, except Eden. Also the LV Up and LV Down abilities made my low level runs so much easier for farming spells. It more than proved its worth except for speedrunners.
Gilgamesh on the other hand only arrived at the end of Disc 3. By that point I did not do much random battles anymore. So it only a small percentage chance of appearing in the few boss battles before Ultimecia. I think I only seen him once in my many playthroughs and he used Excalipoor. Thanks for the 1 damage bro!
Gilgamesh was also terrible because he would end any Angelo farming session at random, while Odin would only show up at the beginning of the fight or not at all. So he was worse than useless. He'd also interrupt your Aura farming of of Seifer in his first appearance. Just a nuisance all around. And just to make things really nasty, in the kind of completionist run that would involve farming with Angelo Search you would also still want to get Gilgamesh because, well, he's there. You gotta get him to be complete. And you can't put him off until the end.
Greg is the true villain of FFVIII.
@@the_exegete Villain is so harsh! Gill tries to be helpful.🥲
In FFIX, Odin is also useless like Atomos, until you get the Odin Sword ability (which also eats up a lot of Ability points, which I would rather put on Boost.). it's like tossing a coin if it hits or not.
was expecting to see Bahamut from FF15, dude flew around in a VERY epic cinematic, and missed EVERY SINGLE of his devastating attacks XDDD
You leave Tonberry alone. Tonberry was plenty useful and worth the cost of entry. Know who's useless in FFVIII? Gilgamesh. He can't be Junctioned and appears randomly, replaces a better randomly appearing GF (Odin) who was already difficult to obtain (but worth it), but then also has an attack that is randomly effective. By that I mean he might wipe out all enemies in a single shot like Odin did, or he might do some damage, or he might do exactly 1 point of damage. Gilgamesh can go away. Odin is far better.
No, Reflect in Tactics wasn't "random," it would simply bounce the spells the same distance and angle away, forwards instead of back. This was *worse*, because the AI knew how to use the bouncing effect of Reflect to, say, cast Unholy (Dark Holy in some translations) on your units who were otherwise completely removed from the fight, like a Bard or Dancer who was just hanging out in the corner, supporting from "out of combat," probably one-hit-killing them, and leaving the player with no way to get there in time with a Raise or Phoenix Down (it was common to train Dancers and Bards as Ninjas for a long time, in order to boost their speed stat, which made them move between selecting songs/dances faster, but also made them crystallize faster if killed). This ended up making using Reflect Mail (a Heavy Armor with Auto-Reflect and higher hp buff than Crystal Armor) potentially a run-endingly bad decision.
Bard Songs and Dances don't depend on the Speed stat at all. They have fixed CT. Speed only determines how fast or how often the character can select a new Song orDance.
@@orelas167 Sorry, I misspoke. I meant to say they can move more often, in order to keep distance from the enemy. I was very tired, that day. You're correct, though, thanks for catching it.
Tonberry almost completely useless!? Naaaaaaaaah
I'm going to have to push back a little on FF4. The hidden summons in FF4 are not useless at all. Goblin is great if you want to farm monsters that use summon or alarm to bring in other monsters. Regular attacks kill the summoner or alarm too fast but Goblin keeps that fight going so they can keep bringing more enemies to the battle. Cockatrice can instakill. Bomb is based on your current hp, so if it's high it's a great low cost spell. Mindflayer is probably the most "useless" out of them all. Now, you could argue that because of the RNG involved and the grinding it takes to get almost anything in this game, that ALL summons are useless because your characters are so OPed from the grinding.
Crusader isn't a fair summon to add to this list. As you pointed out, by the time you're able to obtain him, meldown and all the other abilities he offers are obsolete. So there's no reason why your Magic Defence would be too low to summon him. if you've put enough time into the game to make Meldown obsolete, you'll be strong enough to use him, so hes not useless.
His power level makes him tempting to depend on, just like Odin Yojimbo and Gilgamesh. If there was no drawback to summoning him people would summon him every time they got stuck on a boss, making the game no challenge at all. Same with Odin Gilgamesh and Yojimbo. If Odin didn't have a 50/50 chance of hit or miss, hed be the only summon anyone would use. Hence the reason they made his appearance so random on FFVIII, because they made him 100% chance of instant death. Yojimbo too, if he wasn't so expensive to summon none of the other summons would ever be used because Zanmato would be all anyone would ever use.
Crusader risks killing the unprepared when summoning him. The reason is simple, if you're strong enough to survive summoning him then you can beat the boss without depending on him making you worthy of using him to defeat it for you. You could argue whats the point of that. The point is simple, as i said, the devs didn't want you to depend on the summons to beat the game. The summons are there mostley for support, and every one of them are just a alternative to using magic. Every one of them use the same magic as the Black mages use the summons are just a cool FMV that uses the same spells. Crusader is no different, a cool fmv you can watch when you're strong enough to summon him.
As for FFVIII tonberry summon, hes not useless either. You just dont know how to use him. For Example, his level up and level down abilities are very usefull. Level up is good to use if you want to power level up to level 100. His level down comand is extremely handy for 1 simple reason (making battles easy not included), it allows you to obtain dragon famgs for Squalls Lionheart in the end game section. Dragon famgs rarely drop. Only a few monsters drop them, including Grendal and Blue dragon, but they only drop them between levels 35-45. Since monsters scale to your level on 8. The moment you get to level 46 you can no longer obtain Dragon Fangs for Squalls Lionheart making Tonberry your only hope of obtaining them. Its easier to farm them using tonberry in the late game, than trying to farm them from blue dragon before you hit level 46 in trebia forest. He is also handy for peopoe who want to do a low level run of tye game. Many streamers try not to go above level 10 or 20 when trying to complete it. Level down helps with that too. Making tonberry very usful to anyone who knows what they are doing.
Atmos afain is unfair, Gravity spells are him and miss effectivness at the best of times, so why would Atmos be any different. If the spells are either very effective or nullified depending on the situation, why would Atmos be disappointing considering that he can be made a power house gravity spell by farming Amathysts? That is a completely stupid thing to complain about, especially when your a fan of the series as a whole. As a long term fan you should already expect the gravity spells to either fail or be total devastation.
I am surprised that you chose tovadd Tonberry to the list instead of the only summon on 8 who is completely usless without the pocket station, and that is Chocco. On the original FFVIII choco was completely useless because he required you to own a pocket station to level him up. He was designed to be a type of Tamugochi that required you to download him from your FFVIII save file using the memory card slot. Youd stick your memory card with the 8 save file in slot 1 them put the pocket station in slot to and transfer him into the pocket station,from your save file. While he was uploaded into your pocket statioj, he was unuseable in game but it was the only way to level him up. If you didn't own a pocket station he was completely useless and only do 1 damage when summoned making him, not tonberry the most useless summon of FFVIII. You may not like me rubbing that in, but i find it hard to believe that someone who expects people to pay money to support their channel while claiming to be a master at the game, fails to acknowledge they usefulness of Tonberry and failing to acknowledge the uselessness of Choco. Dont call yourself or make yourself out to be a ff master if youve only masterd some of the games. Mastering some of them is impressive, dont make yourself look likecan idiot buly pretending to have mastered them all.
in FF tactics using reflect, you just cast spells on yourself and it always goes to closest enemy, at double damage
TLDR - Ultros is not useless, it's just there are only very niche uses and can easily be seen as useless. He does fit on this list
Ultros causing blind in Dissidia works as intended. Yes, you can still see it, but that does mean having to look in a specific spot to note the colour change in bravery. Much less of a concern for caster type characters, Ultimecia for example with her held bravery attacks offering time to look, but fighters and brawlers are played in fractions of a second, not second by second, so taking that time to look can mean not seeing an incoming attack.
Is it an optimal summon? Absolutely not. Could an Iai build completely ignore it? Lv1 Sephiroth spamming Scintilla certainly doesn't seem to care. To say it's useless would be wrong. It would only really matter at a competitive level (which could be negated due to various builds) assuming you could overload someone's mental stack. Compared to alternatives and more obvious 'big number generator' summons, yes it could be comparatively useless.
I'd say some of the most useless ones was FF7's Typhon and Bahamut ZERO, both of witch dealt maybe 6000-7000 hp in damage. However, by the time you get them, your regular attacks wold deal at least 3000 hp (with no mp cost). I mean hades deals status effects and knights is, well, knights; witch leaves Typhon and Bahamut ZERO in a sort of awkward position.
Atmos was helpful against Yans
Lol i just started FF4 for the first time recently. I acquired Goblin twice without any obscene grinding required
GFs in 8 also have the value of been a shield while they ready for their attack.
Ragnarok? I never really found it useful for its transformation ability in FFVI, but it did teach Ultima without having to be worried about the cursed shield PITA, but still. Maybe there's a way to get ol' Raggie to transform enemies into useful items, reliably?
NOPE the Vanish + Doom trick from the SNES/PS1 version of FF6 does NOT worth with the Ragnarok Esper which is why the Esper is PURE CRAP and even on the GBA version where you can get BOTH it and the Sword I still chose the Sword over the Useless Esper on the GBA version of FF6.
Besides the only good items you can get via Ragnarok requires to NOT ever summon it in the first place.
Unsurprisingly, FFX appears nowhere on this list. No other game had summoning so close to its main mechanic.
Yeah it was essentially Pokémon for 3/4 of the fights
I’m surprised Sega didn’t sue for copyright over the name Eggman.
Happy to see all the Tonberry love in the comments but wanna point out that Crusader is *much* better than given credit for here. It was Fire elemental so if your party was set up to absorb Fire then it acted as a nuke against enemies and a full heal for you at the same time. You could even see it healing people in the footage shown lol. Considering there are several other *actually* useless summons in FF6 this is a bit unfair. Cait Sith in particular was practically useless in every way. Unicorn not great either aside from teaching pretty decent spells.
At 3:24, which version of FF4 is this? I don't recognize that spritework.
That's PSP version.
It would be cool to see an origins lore video for Steiner in ff9. A relic of a bygone era under the Alexandrian Kings rule, and forced to accept changing views (similar to Wakka)
Was more useless GF’S in 8 than Tonberry King, at least what you learned helped out end game.
Shoutout to FFXIV's Titan Egi, at least during Shadowbringers, when they removed the possibility of pets attracting aggro. Titan-Egi was essentially designed to be a tank, and at times when pets were still targetable by enemies it could still function as one. But once that capability was removed there was pretty much no reason to use titan-egi
I literally couldn't make Lionheart without Tonberry king's level up/down ability
About that I won't even fight them on DISC 2 lv 50+ for the NORMAL ones WITHOUT the Lionheart equipped in fact I had it equipped on disc 1 and NOT via the 20x Elnoyle cards method.
Carbuncle in FFIX could cast protect and shell if you have the appropriate add-on/gem equipped!
I don't recall protect, Carbuncle could cast Haste, Vanish & Shell besides Reflect on the team
Probably the worst versions of Carbuncle are the ones that cast Reflect, which is sadly most of them. The most useful one would probably be in FF9 since it can cast Vanish, Haste, or Shell on everyone depending on the accessory Eiko has equipped - that is to say, something not Reflect.
Even that's not worth it Vanish in FF9 is crap Auto Haste even that sucksa unless your running the PS4 remaster AT 3x speed and Shell on Everyone not worth it WITHOUT summoning Carbuncle for it,.
Reflect has its niche if the enemy uses a ton of magic.
And FF9 is one of the worst incarnations of Carbuncle because buffs are fukd in that game.
I feel like the Cactuar was the worst summon in Final Fantasy 8.
It dealt very low damage, and could only increase damage by leveling up in increments of 10. Something about Final Fantasy 8 however is that enemies scale with the party's levels, so the higher level party members get the more powerful the enemies become. This leads to Cactuar's damage meaning nothing at later levels because the enemy's HP stats have grown too much for it to matter.
For Final Fantasy 8 I believe the Choco-world summons should be on this list instead. They're actually horrible to obtain even in the remaster and they suck. Tonberry is actually totally useful. 1. There are plenty of other GFs for stat junctions, you only have 3 characters at a time anyway + you can use greens and learning items if you really want. 2. Tonberry has the LV-Up/Down abilities which can actually be super useful for acquiring specific loot and draw spells (either early via Lv-Up or after it's "too late" via Lv-Down). Initiative and the shop-related abilities further justify getting Tonberry. Also when you factor in its long animation + boost and the crappy framerate of the Remaster, its single-target damage output is comparable to Bahamut's.