Even the first time I ever played this game, I did not find Edward useless at all, despite finding his Auto-Hide very annoying.

Edward's in your party for a substantially short period of the game, and during that time he possesses the ability to either put enemies to sleep or confuse them by means of a basic attack, depending on his current weapon. And during that time, you've got a lot of enemies that take more than one hit to kill, so when Eddie confuses/sleeps them, they are not a threat to your more useful characters (ie Rydia and Rosa). And unlike characters who have to cast Sleep for 12 MP as a black spell or Confuse as a white spell for whatever it costs, this is free. The spells can fail, and waste MP. Edward's attacks can simply not have the effect, and NOT waste MP (mainly because he has none but still).

I leave both him and Yang dead and naked during the Fabul invasion as Cecil's the only character who will benefit from it in any way whatsoever... and even then he's about to get leveled down to 1, so there is absolutely zero point in caring who's alive during that sequence.

And after that he and everyone else gets Leviapwned so he no longer gets used.

So what's everyone bitching about? He's a temporary character whose "useless" abilities happen to work perfectly on every enemy during his tenure as a party member. Sure he can't damage for crap and takes hits like a schoolgirl, but the same goes for Yang and nobody has a problem with that. Oddly enough, Yang also gets weapons that induce confuse! What, is Yang just a direct replacement designed to look more useful?

Last time I proclaimed something useless in an FF game, people claimed I didn't know how to play it, so I'm therefore telling all those Edward-haters out there that they do not know how to play FF. *raspberry*

I'm playing the US SNES version at the moment, and I'm really missing that Potion-splitter-thingy he can do.