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Tuesday’s Trope: Lethal Joke Character

[Tuesday's Trope is a weekly department highlighting an amusing video game trope from TVTropes. Aggrogate is not affiliated with TVTropes.org in any way. All trope examples come from TVTropes and are shared via the Creative Commons license.]

Almost every fighting game has a character nobody wants to play because he's too weak, too strange, or too useless. That same character inevitably turns out to be completely unstoppable in the right hands. They might be extremely difficult to master, but once you figure out how to take advantage of their unique abilities they're absolute monsters in the ring. They are Lethal Joke Characters.

Tournament fighters aren't the only games to have lethal joke characters. Many RPGs feature seldom-used characters that can be grinded or equipped properly to turn them into invincible killing machines. Blue mages in Final Fantasy games are often lethal joke characters, because it's so difficult to get their best abilities. If you can expose them to just the right magics, though, they easily become the most powerful members of your party.

Examples of lethal joke characters include:

• Voldo in Soul Calibur, or as we like to call him, Mr. Freaky Guy, is either useless or invincible. A good portion of his "Special Moves" are simply to change his physical orientation to his opponent, backwards crab walk FTW.
• Speaking of Capcom versus games, Roll in Tatsunoko vs. Capcom has been improved upon. She still has a low stamina (with Karas being the lowest), but she is tiny, has a disjointed hitbox thanks to her broom, and has a fast air-dash. Her ground combos can lead to her Roll Sweep-Sweep special move, which can hit a grounded foe and CANNOT BE ESCAPED! She has a LEVEL 1 hyper move that recovers her health decently too! Her attacks also deal good amount of damage!
• Pokemon has a few characters that work like this, the most famous being Wobbuffet. When it was first introduced in Pokémon Gold and Silver, its gimmick of only being able to counterattack and a tiny movepool of only 4 moves left it quite difficult to use without prediction. However, with the advent of its ability Shadow Tag, which prevents the opponent from switching out against it, and expanding its movepool ever so slightly (by 3, but only one of them is really needed), it made the huge jump from never-used tier to the uber tier. As it is now nearly impossible to take one out without losing a Pokémon. People are even considering placing it in a tier of its own.
• In Tekken 3, we got Gon... which despite being a bit slow and short (or due to being short), cannot be attacked by high attacks, cannot be thrown, and has unblockable projectiles.
• Cait Sith from Final Fantasy VII. When you first get him, it's hate hate hate hate. Then he gets his final Limit Break, which has the possibility of ending the battle. Period. Get the best result on his "Slots" Limit, and you win. Against anything. Even Bosses. Even the Final Boss. Even the Bonus Bosses. (Still, hate hate hate)
• Quina, the Blue Mage from Final Fantasy IX looks really goofy and probably seems pretty useless to most new players. However, he has several attacks that are devastating in the right hands and can be obtained early in the game. For example, L5 Death instantly kills certain enemies (including dragons in the first disc who are supposed to be too powerful to beat) and Limit Glove is guaranteed to do 9999 damage (as long as Quina is at 1 HP).
• Shingo Yabuki of The King of Fighters '97, who is less effective in terms of technique but still has lots of damage potential in him, thanks to his ability to do random critical hits. Basically, it's a bit hard to have him hit you, but when he does hit, he'll break your defenses more than once. Yeowch.
• Mortal Kombat's Nightwolf was originally a parody of Thunder Hawk from Street Fighter. Except that he could run faster than a character was being thrown, and he had a fast recovery time, so you could set up a throw combo. He's still pretty good even in subsequent games, but no unblockable 100% combos.
• Speaking of T.Hawk and throwing, he almost epitomizes this trope in Super Street Fighter II Turbo. He's laughably bad and has nearly unwinnable matchups against half the cast, and at a disadvantage against another quarter. However, if at any time, he achieves a knockdown in the corner, he can start a loop of safe-jumping (attacking with his jumping weak punch, which strikes on a blocking opponent, but whiffs and allows him to land against somebody attempting to reverse him), and following this with a negative-edge (button-released) Typhoon throw. This pattern allows him to do a completely unbreakable sequence of throwing somebody over and over again in the corner until they die, making him the only character in any iteration of Street Fighter II with an instant-win tactic, provided he can set it up.
• Carl Clover from Blaz Blue seems like a pretty terrible character at first, with a difficult style of play (you have to simultaneously control two characters, or else play as one character who's notably weaker than each other one in the game) and little in the way of obvious strengths. He also has the game's only infinite loop, which, while difficult to master, can easily win a match. Carl currently sits 4th or 5th (out of 12) on the game's tier lists, having initially been consigned to bottom-tier status.