Board 8 > Best of the Trope Season 2: Day 153 - Crutch Character

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Hello everyone, and welcome back to Best of the Trope!

Here are the rules. Each day, I will post a trope from TV Tropes, and each poster can name up to three examples of that trope. Whichever nomination gets the most mentions wins! Posters may also name as many Honourable Mentions as they like, but they are purely optional and will not count towards the running score. You may look at the TV Tropes page for that day's trope for examples, but you do not have to pick all your examples from the page. You can nominate whatever examples you like, as long as they qualify for the trope. Each trope will last around 24 hours before the next one goes up.

Posters may also nominate any tropes they wish to see come up during the series. This is optional, and you don't have to do it every day, or at all. Tropes will be randomly selected from the list each day, except for some occasions where I will pick a thematically appropriate trope that may or may not be on the list.

Here's the list of previous tropes, so if you wish to nominate some tropes, check on here that it wasn't previously done. http://board8.wikia.com/wiki/Best_of_the_Trope

Trope List:
Shrinking Violet
Launcher of a Thousand Ships
Even the Girls Want Her
Even the Guys Want Him
Pop-Cultured Badass
Your Soul is Mine
One True Love
Disc-One Nuke
Beef Gate
Acquitted Too Late
A Taste of Power
Magikarp Power
Joke Character
Lethal Joke Character
Difficult, but Awesome
Tier-Induced Scrappy
Stone Wall
Glass Cannon
Lightning Bruiser
Breather Boss
That One Level
Breather Level
Giant Space Flea from Nowhere
Game-Breaker
Broken Base
Roaring Rampage of Revenge
Cliffhanger
Sudden Sequel Death Syndrome
Evil Cripple
Grand Finale

The Jagen Archetype (Fire Emblem)
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The winner of yesterday's trope, A**hole Victim, was Joffrey Baratheon (Game of Thrones), who got 5 votes.

Previous winners: Day 126 onwards
Shipper on Deck - Genie ships Aladdin and Jasmine (Aladdin)
Shoo Out the Clowns - Mimir gives Kratos and Atreus privacy to scatter the ashes (God of War) / Half the trolls die (Homestuck)
Disc One Final Dungeon - Zanarkand (Final Fantasy X) / Hyrule Castle (Zelda: A Link to the Past)
Back for the Finale - Miles Edgeworth (Most Ace Attorney games)
The Very Definitely Final Dungeon - Cannon's Core (Sonic Adventure 2)
Redemption Equals Death - Darth Vader (Star Wars) / Theon Greyjoy (Game of Thrones) / Doctor Octopus (Spider-Man 2)
Godzilla Threshold - Operation Zero Dawn (Horizon Zero Dawn) / Crossing the streams (Ghostbusters)
One Winged Angel - Safer Sephiroth (Final Fantasy VII)
11th-Hour Ranger - Sonic the Hedgehog (Super Smash Bros. Brawl)
Informed Poverty - The Simpsons
Post-Climax Confrontation - The Scouring of the Shire (The Lord of the Rings)
Death by Childbirth - Padme (Star Wars)
Defeat Means Friendship - Dragon Ball in general / Scotsman (Samurai Jack)
Elegant Gothic Lolita - Celeste Ludenberg (Danganronpa)
The Turret Master - Engineer (Team Fortress 2)
Shear Menace - Scissorsman (Clock Tower)
Infinity +1 Sword - Ultima Weapon (Kingdom Hearts)
Infinity -1 Sword - Fully Evolved Starters (Pokemon)
Poisonous Person - Poison Ivy (DC Comics)
Too Good for this Sinful Earth - Chiaki Nanami (Danganronpa 2)
That One Boss - Ultra Necrozma (Pokemon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon)
B***h in Sheep's Clothing - Matt Engarde and Dahlia Hawthorne (Ace Attorney)
Blue-Collar Warlock - John Constantine (Constantine)
Despair Event Horizon - John Wick's dog is killed (John Wick)

Today's trope is Crutch Character. Here is the link: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CrutchCharacter

Crutch characters are player characters (typically available early on) who start out powerful enough to carry your party to victory on their own, but the player cannot rely on them indefinitely. This could be because they Can't Catch Up with the increased powers of newer enemies or their fellow characters, or because they simply leave the party at some point (possibly because they are The Mole), or they are killed, thus forcing the player to somehow come up with a replacement. Worse, without Leaked Experience, the crutch may actually cripple your party if you lean on them too heavily if they leave, or if their diminishing returns make their levels empty, then you've functionally wasted experience points that could have made other characters powerful. In short, they are the character equivalent of a Disc-One Nuke.

There are six reasons for this trope occurring:

The character is forced to Level Drain.
Weaker enemies give less EXP to more powerful characters, so the character Can't Catch Up.
The character is a Guest-Star Party Member.
The character leaves, and doesn't come back until everyone else has caught up.
The character is meant to be A Taste of Power that lingered for too long, who later leaves or dies.
The character simply has bad stat growth; they don't gain as much from leveling up as the other characters do.

Thus, they are like a crutch you can lean on them to overcome a weakness early on, but eventually, the game will kick the crutch out from under you, and your other characters must have learned to stand on their own two feet by that time, or you are doomed to fail (and if you still have it by the time you're fully healed, it will be much more of a liability to carry around).

TL,DR: A character or item that is available early in the game and is very powerful for when you get them, such that you risk becoming overly dependent on them, and getting into trouble because of that when you lose them and/or the enemies catch up to them.

Nominations:
Vinceborg (Barkley Shut Up and Jam Gaiden)
Salamence (Super Pokemon Mystery Dungeon)
The Angel of Valhalla (Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII)

Aeris (Final Fantasy VII)
Beedrill (Pokemon)
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Sharon (Trails of Cold Steel II) or Claire, I guess
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Georg Prime (Suikoden V)
Flik/Viktor (Suikoden 2) - I'd say they count as a pair as they come as a pair and are both way higher than the rest of the party

Marcus (Fire Emblem 7)
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Marcus (Fire Emblem 7)
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Marcus (FE7)
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The Jagen Archetype/Marcus (whichever one counts, since Marcus is one of several)
Buzz Buzz (Earthbound)
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Hbthebattle posted...

The Jagen Archetype (Fire Emblem)

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Enemy Skill (FF7)

Interesting case because it requires a certain amount of knowledge to use properly, but doing so definitely breaks post-Midgar Disc 1 and mostly loses its OP-ness more and more as the game progresses, except Big Guard.
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The Jagen Archetype (Fire Emblem)
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Going with the former Trope Namer, the Jagen archetype.

(Specifically Marcus if a single character is required.)
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kevwaffles posted...

Enemy Skill (FF7)

Interesting case because it requires a certain amount of knowledge to use properly, but doing so definitely breaks post-Midgar Disc 1 and mostly loses its OP-ness more and more as the game progresses, except Big Guard.

Big Guard, Death Force and Angel Whisper are always useful though and it's never taken away.

Beatrix (FF9)
Minwu (FF2)
Sephiroth (Kalm flashback)

Hbthebattle posted...

The Jagen Archetype (Fire Emblem)

FPBP
But we need to decide if we vote for the archtype or one of the characters
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id say the archetype itself is fine if "Fully Evolved Starters" is allowed
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Fully evolved starters don't really fit except for the Unova starters.

Marcus (Fire Emblem 7)
Sephiroth (Final Fantasy 7)
I'm tempted to put Kiefer from DQ7 just to hit triple 7s, but he wasn't that good, so I'll go
Pankraz (Dragon Quest 5)
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Rankings so far:
Marcus (Fire Emblem 7) - 6 votes
The Jagen Archetype - 5 votes
Sephiroth (Kalm flashback) - 2 votes
Vinceborg (Barkley Shut Up and Jam Gaiden)
Salamence (Super Pokemon Mystery Dungeon)
The Angel of Valhalla (Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII)
Aeris (Final Fantasy VII)
Beedrill (Pokemon)
Sharon (Trails of Cold Steel II) or Claire, I guess
Georg Prime (Suikoden V)
Flik/Viktor (Suikoden 2)
Buzz Buzz (Earthbound)
Enemy Skill (FF7)
Beatrix (FF9)
Minwu (FF2)
Pankraz (Dragon Quest 5)

Marcus
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I voted Marcus specifically because for many of us 7 was the first FE game we played, and if you're like me and were young and dumb and not used to such games, overused Marcus and suddenly found yourself screwed later on when you wasted all your EXP on him.

By the time we got Seth and Titania and the like in other games, we were wiser.
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Marcus is actually strong enough at the start to make it pretty much to the end. FE7 enemies are not that strong. FE6 Marcus is a better fit because he actually does have a true point where after it all hes useful for is rescuedropping
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And FE7 has enough superpowered prepromotes (see: Pent) that you can get through the game no matter what you do.

People have beaten the game without growths at all.
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Plus Seth and Titania never fell off. They weren't crutches because you could field them the whole game and not lose anything.
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