7 Spells That Ended Up Being Almost Completely Useless

Death in FFX. Deathstrike is a great auto-ability early game like with Fatal Cait Sith, but the actual spell is useless by the time you likely get it. Everything's immune to it.

Esuna in ff9. Way too many of the statuses needed specific items and couldn't be cured with esuna

FF2 Ultima is the embodiment of "It's not a bug, it's a feature".

I used immobilize to kill that contract Turtle at a low level… that sword it gave crushed everything for hours lol

You know who made them useless? Chaos, that's who. He ruins everything.

Just as a side note: in the original release of FFXII, in order for Exodus to use Meteor, you had to be inflicted with the Immobilize status. I kinda liked and disliked those conditions, they add certain flavor to the Espers, but made them really confusing sometimes.

On one hand, that explanation for FF2 Utima being underwhelming does make sense, and honestly it's something that more stories involving some sealed ancient powerful technique should at least consider. On the other, c'mon dude, the damage calculation was obviously not working as intended and it was your job to fix it, assuming the story is true.

AMUT in FF1 is a deceptively useless spell. It cures silence, but only 4 enemies in the entire game cast MUTE, MUTE targets the entire party so the white mage is probably silenced too, and silence wears off after the fight is over anyway.

11:32 Fun fact Meltdown is actually one of the most if not THE most broken magic in FFVIII. I mean reduce the defense of all ennemies (bosses and superbosses included) to 0. It makes every fiends in this game really pathetics, i'm not even talking about it's junctionning stat....

For FF6 Merton/Meltdown is the most busted and OP spell in the game. Equip everyone with fire shields and not only does it damage the enemy pretty heavily, but it fully heals your entire party every time it's casted as well. You can basically just cast it over and over again and you're near unkillable while simultaneously doing some pretty nice damage

I remember the FF2 Ultima on the PSP. It had a weird calculation where instead of using your magic stat to calculate damage it used the collected levels of all spells in a character's spellbook. With my normal party it was pretty useless, however this version of FF2 has an after-game mode called Rebirth Of Souls where you play several characters who died during this adventure and have to fix trouble in Heaven. Minwu is part of this group and can learn Ultima here and he comes with a sizable number of high-level spells. For him it was probably the most powerful spell there was.

FF7 - the 1997 version, Haste and barrier because you could get the enemy skill "big guard" way before you got the 2 materia and it only takes up 1 slot vs the 2 and gave haste, Mbarrier and Pbarrier

I disagree with Daze being a useless spell. It was great for interrupting enemy attacks, stalling the enemy so you could heal up and cast defensive spells, and great for using against large groups so you'd only have 1 attacking you at a time. It's tricky at first but not hard to get the hang of using it.

Pretty much everything in FF8. At a certain point, even something like Ultima only mattered because you could use it to pump your stats.

Lastly, daze in FF13 had it's use on those giant turtles and a few other enemies. It gave you time to reapply buffs and heal... but more importantly... It DOUBLED the damage of the next hit that landed. Many more attacks could deal insane amounts of damage through daze.

Correction, in FFIX you could trade 10 ore and another item to make all the OTHER gemstones to power up all the other summons. So you needed 10's of thousands of ore if you wanted to max out the rest of them. Or just max out one of them if you're not crazy

The lore the programmer gave behind why he didn't fix the Ultima bug is kinda cool but also like what the heck.

Float in FF8. It had only 1 very specific use. It junctioned averagely for the part of the game where you acquired them (not counting min - max runs). After that Float was more of a toy spell than anything else.

I would argue that Daze is actually pretty useful if used correctly. Yeah, the AI may be a little clumsy with it, as spamming any debuffs deals damage to accidentally remove it. But there are certain strats using Snow, who has a limited spell list other than Daze, so he's actually really helpful against some of the turtles with Daze spam. If you have a dedicated COM and SAB paradigm, you can Daze lock certain turtles, and it's safer than the traditional stagger strategy, since turtles like Shaolong Gui can just throw out Ultima whenever. Edit: I also just remembered Daze is really useful in the 3 Tonberry mission. If you don't crowd control them, they go crazy with knife attacks, and eventually grudge you to death. If I remember correctly, there's not a lot of enemies that resist Daze, so you can actually use it in a lot of battles. Immobilize, while useless in melee range, actually has a couple of applications, also coincidentally on turtles of that game. I specifically would use it against the Rocktoise in Lhusu, since it doesn't have any ranged attacks, and I would just kite it with guns and bows. For roaming, and especially higher level, debuff resistant enemies, yeah it kind of falls in practicality. But as someone else said, Vanish is probably even more useless. Vanish isn't guaranteed against all enemies, and the high level areas where it might be most useful, it isn't. A lot of enemies can still detect and attack you. I have never used Vanish in any practical playthrough.

I found using jewel in ff9 to be sort of like a side-grind similar to how you farm steals on zidane to increase his thievery damage. Ores can be used to synthesize specific jewels to increase your eidolons damage and used to trade for aquamarines in daguerro to increase leviathans damage. I always found it useful to grind out ores so i can have 99 stacks of amethyst to basically allow atomos to do max damage everytime.