10 Terrible Video Game Party Members Always Left Warming The Bench

One of the many great things about RPGs is the freedom they allow players to create a party molded in their own image, stocked with teammates tailored to their own interests.

Now, you might let a party member stick around because they just look too damn cool to ditch, but more often than not the reason for keeping or benching a teammate will be down to their stats and abilities.

The party members you pick can mean the difference between a decisive stomp and getting your proverbial handed back to you, and so it's little surprise that all players end up having their easy faves.

But to that token players will also end up avoiding certain possible teammates like the plague, because all RPGs have characters that, when players are given the choice, will be kicked to the curb as fast as humanly possible.

And so, these 10 party members are the ones who, whether just mediocre combatants or additionally super annoying to be around, offered no incentive whatsoever for players to retain them as active fixtures in their teams...

Though there's a ton of potential squad members to choose from throughout the Mass Effect franchise, Kaidan Alenko is by some measure the lamest of the lot.

A prototypical "generic white guy" party member, Kaidan is also a painfully nothing teammate on the battlefield, incapable of doing much with anything more than a passing adequacy.

Really the only solace is that players are able to dispose of him in the first game, letting him sacrifice himself in order to save Ashley Williams, rather than just benching him for the rest of the game.

In an ironic twist, though, those who let Kaidan live in the first game finally get rewarded for their mercy in Mass Effect 3, where Kaidan returns with a more useful, beefed-up set of biotic abilities. Whether it's worth the wait, though, is debatable.