Sixth Ranger / Video Games

• Baldur's Gate III has two Mutually Exclusive Party Members who join the party in the game's second act, well after everyone else; Halsin the druid in good/neutral runs, Minthara the Drow paladin for evil. Good-aligned players can also recruit Jaheira in Act II, making Halsin completely irrelevant.
• Chroma Squad, being a parody of Super Sentai and Power Rangers, features several Sixth Rangers, most of whom are guest stars in an episode who join your Sentai team for a single battle. Late in the game, you can also recruit a Sixth Ranger, Tammy, as a permanent member of your team's roster.
• Chrono Trigger gives you the option of finishing off Magus shortly after you learn his backstory and reach the game's Darkest Hour. Should you spare him, he joins the party, albeit significantly less powerful than when you fought him before. Magus very much has an "odd man out" feel to him in other ways as well - he has no two-person Combination Attacks, and can only use Triple Techs by finding and equipping special items (and none of them involve The Protagonist Crono). And don't expect him to apologize for trying to kill you earlier.
• In Darkest Dungeon II, the Bounty Hunter is given this role rather than being a full party member. For a fee and as a replacement for another hero, the player can recruit him for one region. He has his abilities maxed out and comes with his own trinkets, making him worth the price of admission, and useful if the party composition struggles with a particular region or to give better odds against a lair boss.
• Depending on how you played the game, you probably went through the majority of Devil Survivor with only 3-5 party members. Cue the final day when the rest of the supporting cast get tired of being NPCs. Depending on the decisions you've made throughout the game, it is entirely possible for your party roster to double in size.
• Dragon Age:
  • Later on in Dragon Age: Origins it's possible to recruit Loghain into your group. However in doing so your Lancer Alistair will leave you for allowing the man who let countless people, including the King and his father figure Duncan to die, into the Grey Wardens. Few people get along with him, particularly Wynne, who insists on calling him out for his former actions whenever possible.
  • Dragon Age II has DLC character Sebastian Vael. His earliest appearance is in the first act along with everyone else, but he doesn't become playable until Act II. If you download the mission in Act III of a playthrough, he's more of an 11th-Hour Ranger.
  • Dragon Age: Inquisition has either Cole or Dorian; you can recruit one of them shortly after the other optional teammates become available, but doing so locks you out of recruiting the other until they show up in the Act 1 finale.
• Dragon Quest:
  • Dragon Quest III: You'll enlist one Merchant late in the game because you will need them for one quest, but you won't want to use one of your team core characters for it.
  • In remakes of Dragon Quest IV, Psaro, the main villain in the original story, will join the party after being redeemed by his resurrected lover, Rose, and discovering that Aamon (one of his subordinates) had orchestrated her murder.
  • Played with in Dragon Quest VIII, as the Playstation 2 version only consists of four members: Hero, Yangus, Jessica and Angelo. But in the 3DS version, Red and Morrie (both NPCs in the PS2 version) can or will join the party, with Red joining after defeating Captain Crow (storyline so cannot be missed) and Morrie joining after beating Rank S in his Monster Arena (optional).
  • After chasing the Luminary and his friends in Act 1 of Dragon Quest XI, Hendrik joins the party in order to liberate Erdrea from the forces of evil and make up for the misdeeds he caused earlier. In order to not spoil his inclusion, many fans refer to him as "Eight".
• In the final route of Duel Savior Destiny Princess Crea takes up a more prominent role, turning what was originally a harem route into one that is still technically a harem route in the end, but one that is centered around her. She even gets to follow the group to the final battle area despite having no combat ability and the scenes not really being written to include her.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Final Fantasy II continues shifting out the fourth party member without the player's control straight up until the final dungeon, at which point one of the main villains joins your team.
  • In Final Fantasy IV, Baigan invites himself into the party at a time when the party limit is five characters, and Baigan joining brings the line-up to six. In a subtle case of Lampshade Hanging, Palom and Porom note that something is suspicious about this. Baigan then reveals himself as a monster and attacks.
  • Final Fantasy VI: Of the non-optional characters, Strago and Relm are the last to join and do so after you feel "done" recruiting. They are both naturally powerful mages who have the misfortune of joining after your existing magic specialists, Terra and Celes, are likely already trained up with Magicite and shortly before the party is scattered in the World of Ruin, meaning they can easily suffer a fate of Can't Catch Up if you don't go out of your way to develop them.
  • Final Fantasy VII has Cait Sith, who is recruited into the party after the majority of the main cast (although he is actually the 6th party member after Cloud, Tifa, Barret, Red XIII, and Aerith not counting players who recruit Yuffie 'early') but does almost nothing until he is revealed to actually be a bad guy who then turns to the good guys' side for real later on.
  • Towards the end of disc 3 of Final Fantasy VIII, you get Edea, who has just been freed from being Brainwashed and Crazy as a party member. She stays with the party until you go into space.
  • In Final Fantasy XIII you have Oerba Yun Fang, who joins the party during their encounter at Palumpolum. She first appeared in Chapter 3 when she captured Snow for being a L'Cie, but later helps Snow escape and they both catch up with Lightning and Hope. This could have been rather well done and unexpected, if Square Enix hadn't given it away within a week of first announcing the character.
  • Final Fantasy XIV has two unique examples in G'raha Tia and Estinien Varlineau. Both originally appear in specific questlines in A Realm Reborn: G'raha in the Crystal Tower raids, and Estinien in the Dragoon's job quests. At the time of their introductions, G'raha is an acquaintence of the Scions of the Seventh Dawn, while Estinien is a dragoon tied to Ishgard. G'raha would not be seen again in the story after the Crystal Tower questline until the events of the Shadowbringers expansion, officially joining the Scions in the endgame MSQ. Estinien, meanwhile, plays a bigger role in the story of Heavensward, and would continue to be an ally of the Scions until officially joining their ranks in Endwalker.
• Galaxy Angel: Chitose Karasuma is of the allied type, as she joins the Moon Angel Wing (already with five members) at the start of the second game, Moonlit Lovers.
• On the Galaxy Angel II trilogy, Princess Natsume Izayoi starts off as an enemy due to being manipulated by the three Marquis, but she later joins the Rune Angel Wing.
• Golden Sun: The Lost Age has an interesting variant - the heroes from the first game will join the party as Fifth through Eighth Rangers after a certain point in the story.
• Golden Sun: Dark Dawn ratchets the party size up to four from the starting two over the course of the opening act, then adds a fifth member almost immediately after the prologue concludes and a sixth about a third of the way through the game who acts as the functional main character due to being massively important to the entire rest of the plot. A seventh member gets added slightly past the three-quarters mark to provide the rest of the characters with a Global Airship, followed immediately by an eighth who never says or contributes anything of note after her introduction and seemingly joins just so there will be two characters of each element.
• Glory of Heracles III has two examples: Heracles, the only non-amnesiac hero of the party; and the Hero, the final party member and a fourth amnesiac immortal who joins the party after they learn there should be only three human immortals. The Hero is one of Prometheus's three immortals, while the Fourth Ranger immortal is in fact the Protagonist.
• Serena Corsair in Guardian Heroes. Although she technically joins forces with Han and his friends at the very beginning of the game, she doesn't become a playable character until the player completes the game once on Normal.
• SPARTAN-B312, a.k.a. Noble Six from Halo: Reach, is the newest addition to Noble Team and completely fits the trope, up to and including surpassing the rest of the group.
  Carter: Six! That AI chose you. She made the right choice.
• Kingdom Hearts III: The need for a sixth ranger fuels the motivations of both the heroes and villains in this game. Riku and Mickey spend most of the game looking for Aqua, who is also the only person who knows the last known locations of Ventus and Terra, in the Realm of Darkness. Sora, meanwhile, is traveling through various Disney Worlds seeking to regain his lost strength so he can go and help them. Most of the time when Organization XIII is terrorizing Disney Worlds, they're either looking for a sixth ranger of their own or keeping tabs on the Seven New Hearts for use in their plans in case the heroes don't get their sixth rangers.
• Iori Yagami in The King of Fighters, who was initially introduced as Kyo's rival (to the point that Iori was trying to kill him most of the time), and then became his reluctant ally when Orochi showed up.
• Lufia: Curse of the Sinistrals has an interesting case with Dekar, who first joins as the fifth member but rejoins as the Sixth Ranger after he returns from his apparent Heroic Sacrifice. He also holds this role in Lufia: The Ruins of Lore.
• In Lunar 2: Eternal Blue, the party is in flux for most of the early part of the game, gradually picking up additional characters, eventually stabilizing on 5 members (not including Lucia, who is not always player-controllable, and is occasionally abducted and must be rescued by the party). One of the antagonists, Leo, joins then leaves the party several times as a Sixth Ranger, both as himself, and as his blatantly obvious alter-ego "Mystere" (the absurdity of his disguise is lampshaded by the other characters).
• Mass Effect:
  • Thane Krios and Samara of Mass Effect 2 are amongst the last of the recruited members of the team. Tali might also count, though she fits more into The Smart Guy. Legion would also count as an 11th-Hour Ranger.
  • Mass Effect 3 has DLC squad-mate Javik. He's not necessarily the last guy to join you, depending on when you do his mission, but everyone else in your team is a returning character except James, who's with you from the start of 3 and fits The Big Guy better anyway.
  • Mass Effect: Andromeda has Jaal. He's the last recruitable squadmate, and the only one actually native to the Andromeda galaxy - everyone else on your team came as part of the Initiative.
• Mega Man:
  • Mega Man (Classic) has this in Proto Man, who first appeared in Mega Man 3 as a recurring miniboss. The end of the game reveals that he was the first of Dr. Light and Dr. Wily's Robot Master series and, consequently, Mega Man's older brother. From that point on Proto Man would become a mainstay in the Classic series, even being Promoted to Playable in Mega Man 9 and 10.
  • Mega Man Star Force: Ace, a newcomer in the third game, is a mysterious, super-talented Wave Battler who frequently crosses paths with Geo's Five-Man Band (while privately revealing that he's privy to both Geo and Sonia's secret identities) in the early portions of the game. Interestingly, he plays with the formula a little: Instead of being invited onto the protagonists' team, he invites the protagonists onto his – which happens to be the resident international peacekeeping organization.
• In "My Singing Monsters": there are a few islands that started with 5 monsters: Wublin Island, Celestial Island, Mythical Island, & Ethereal Workshop. Wublin Island added a new monster every month from April 2016 until August 2017, Celestial Island added the rest of the Celestials for a range of 8 months, & Mythical Island got updated six times in random dates. Ethereal Workshop is still being updated as it is still a new island.
• NEO: The World Ends with You has Shoka join the party at the end of Week 2, and while it's revealed she did so to spy on the Wicked Twisters, her guilt and sympathy for the Wicked Twisters made her fully defect from the Reapers and join the party for good.
• Nicktoons Unite! has Tak from Tak and the Power of Juju serve as this for the rest of the Nicktoons heroes. While the first game in his series predates Nicktoons Unite! by two years, he doesn't join Jimmy Neutron, SpongeBob SquarePants, Danny Phantom and Timmy Turner until the third game Nicktoons: Attack of the Toybots, his inclusion mainly serving to promote the cartoon based on his games and resurfacing as one of the included Nicktoons protagonists in the final game SpongeBob SquarePants featuring Nicktoons: Globs of Doom when Timmy Turner was left out and replaced by Zim.
• Persona:
  • Persona 2: In Innocent Sin, Jun Kurosu is the last member to join the party, only doing so after he has a Heel–Face Turn. In Eternal Punishment, Tatsuya Suou, the protagonist of Innocent Sin, only joins the party when he's finally forced to accept their help.
  • In Persona 4, Naoto Shirogane is the last character to join. Given that Naoto is also an actual Detective rather than an Amateur Sleuth like the rest of the Investigation Team, it also marks the point where they are finally able to make some headway into the murder cases.
  • Persona 5 has Goro Akechi, who like Naoto is a detective who is the final character to join the party. He only does so briefly and leaves after the protagonist is arrested. In the game's Updated Re-release Persona 5 Royal, he comes back during the third-term events alongside seventh ranger Yoshizawa provided the player has done the necessary steps to obtain the True Ending.
• Planescape: Torment has Vhailor, The Big Guy (with a serious case of Black-and-White Insanity) who can only be recruited after making significant progress through the main questline. Recruiting him is a Guide Dang It! because while convincing him to join you is simple enough, if you have a full party when you meet him, either him or one of your other companions will be left behind in an area you can't return to and gone for good.
• Most veteran players in Pokémon will have one 'mon in their six-slot party learn nothing but Hidden Machine moves, which are needed to get through various environmental obstacles. The reason why these moves are given to one Pokémon is because they cannot be replaced by newly learned moves, and typically range from mediocre to useless in battles. As a result, trainers will end up with a Five Mon Band for matches and a utility knife who will never see the next level-up. In such cases, the player will usually pull out and raise a brand new replacement 'mon for the HM slave (usually a late-game catch, such as a plot Legendary or the Red Gyarados) so as to have a full team for the Elite Four and Champion. This is an interesting case, as it was the player, not the plot, that added the Sixth Ranger to the team. However, the HM system was retired in later entries, allowing players to organize their party however they wanted.
  • In terms of Pokémon Power Trios, in Pokémon Black and White, Keldeo is the D'Artagnan to Cobalon, Terrakion, and Virizion's Three Musketeers.
  • Ho-oh and Lugia round out the bird trio, providing fourth and fifth rangers in Gen II. In Gen VIII, Galarian forms of the original trio (which have different primary types) complement this even further.
  • Many legendary trios have a Fourth Ranger; in addition to the above cases,^note though Ho-oh is usually counted among the three beasts of Pokémon Gold and Silver, the Golem Trio has Regigigas from Gen IV and Regieleki and Regidrago from Gen VIII, the Creation Trio has Arceus, and the Forces of Nature have Enamorus from Legends: Arceus.
  • Also, the Eeveelutions; we began with Normal, Water, Electric, and Fire, added Psychic and Dark in Gen II, added Grass and Ice in Gen IV, and then a Fairy-Type in Gen VI.
• In Saints Row: The Third, Viola Dewynter joins the Saints shortly after Killbane kills her sister Kiki.
• In The Simpsons Hit & Run, Apu is the only playable character who isn't part of the family.
• Knuckles started out as Sonic the Hedgehog's enemy only to eventually team up with him and Tails to form a Power Trio.
• Krystal from Star Fox Adventures starts off as the lone wolf Decoy Protagonist before Fox takes over the player character role. After he rescues her during the game's climax, Krystal joins the Star Fox team out of gratitude (among other things) and by Star Fox: Assault an elderly Peppy resigns to Mission Control status while she takes up Peppy's position as Fox's third wingman.
• In Super Robot Wars W, the Golion team actually asks Guy of GaoGaiGar, an old friend of theirs from the space academy, if he wants to be their Sixth Ranger. Although he politely declines, he occasionally ends up playing the role anyway, especially considering that in this game, both Ghaleon and Golion have the same origins. The game actually references the Sixth Ranger trope a bit; when Guy points out that Ghaleon can't combine with Golion, Kogane comments that the sixth member of such teams typically has a special Humongous Mecha that tends to overshadow the other five in terms of power.
  • The GoLion team helps out Guy, too. During the battle between Guy's GaoFighGar and an enemy repli-GaoGaiGar in the FINAL storyline, another Replijin of GaoGaiGar's own Sixth Ranger, King J-Der, shows up to make things worse... at which point the Hundred Beasts King appears to even the odds.
  • In the Original Generation series, the crew of the Kurogane is a team of Sixth Rangers. In the first two games, it was made up of reformed Anti Villains and Stealth Mentors, and they consider it their duty to operate independently until it's time to join the main cast halfway through the latest game's plot. The leaders of the crew, Sanger and Elzam, could also each be treated as a Sixth Ranger in his own right to one of the protagonists' sub-teams (Sanger to the ATX team, Elzam to the SRX team).
  • Speaking of the SRX team, Mai Kobayashi, aka Levi Tolar, starts off being an enemy, but after switching sides, she unlocks the SRX's most powerful attack, which in some games is a OHKO Wave-Motion Gun.
• Tales Series:
  • Tales of Phantasia has Chester (Cress' best friend) and Suzu (a ninja kid from the future). Chester starts as The Lancer to Cress, but you lose him early on because he wasn't hit by the time travel spell. He rejoins much later the same way he was when you lost him, when Cress already has a full party stronger from the adventure (it's justified since you time travel back to just after you left him, in order to save him from Dhaos). But if he catches up to the party, he becomes useful on his own right. Later versions of the game give him his own special moves (he was originally the only character without any) and add optional cutscenes where he trains on his own to close the gap. Suzu is a more straightforward example, as she has her own subplot and she joins as the final playable character if you do most of it, but she was only made playable from the PSX version onwards.
  • Sheena, in Tales of Symphonia; her joining the party (formerly a Five-Man Band) marks the point at which the plot begins to twist. Since Symphonia takes place in the same world as Phantasia (but a few thousand years in the past) and both Sheena and Suzu have the same last name (Fujibayashi), it's possible that Suzu is Sheena's distant descendant.
  • In Tales of the Abyss, Asch fits this role perfectly: he's a powerful antihero with ambiguous motives who joins the party for a while (and is much more powerful than the person he replaces). Later you get a second chance to recruit him into the party, only this time he's way behind the power curve, due to being stuck with the same equipment he had twenty levels ago. This is lampshaded with the Abyss Rangers costumes you can acquire: Asch becomes "Abyss Silver", a typical Sixth Ranger colour in Super Sentai.
• Vandal Hearts has what feels like several of these, as the party eventually numbers out at thirteen members. Ash, Clint, Diego, Huxley, Eleni, Zoha'ar, Kira, Grog and Dolan all get their own plotlines, if not development. On the other hand, Sara and Amon just join with Dolan and contribute nothing to the plot though most egregious is Darius, who joins a little before the halfway mark because he was in the same cell, tags along with the party for a reason that's never even given and only has one him-centric scene after he joins where he's revealed to have been from Huxley's village and doesn't like him. After that, he only gets the odd line that anyone could give.
• World of Warcraft:
  • The game has an entire character class being introduced like this: the Death Knight. They were the first new class introduced to the game since launch, start the game at level 55 with equipment that surpasses just about anything that any other character may have by this point, are former minions of the villainous Lich King, tend to act explicitly antisocial (as both non-player characters and death knight roleplayers in-character) and, in a meta example, were considered the overpowered new kid on the block before ultimately being accepted.
  • The Forsaken (and later even the Blood Elf race) faction joining the Horde can be seen as this taking into account that the original Horde races share a history in previous Warcraft games and settle close together whereas the Forsaken not only reside on a different continent, they also start with the lowest reputation toward their allied races in the game.
  • For the Alliance side, there's the Worgen (and later the Void Elf race) who joined the Alliance out of necessity after the loss of their homeland and were only initially welcomed by the Night Elves. Gilneas has shared a turbulent history with the other nations due to their nationalistic and reclusive nature, but nonetheless have taken steps to prove to be worthy allies.
• In XCOM 2, it's quite likely for your Psi Operatives to end up as this for your squads, unless you go hard for the class from the start of the game and get lucky on research inspirations and discounts. This Mechanically Unusual Class is only unlocked with the Psionics technology and requires that you build a facility to train psionic soldiers, who must start as Rookies and can't earn experience on the battlefield, but gain in power as they spend days and weeks in training. Since all of this requires a substantial investment of time, rare resources and base space, in most campaigns you'll only have Psi Operatives by the midgame at the earliest (about when you'll have unlocked the sixth soldier slot for your squads, funnily enough). On the bright side, their unique way of leveling means it's also possible that said Sixth Rangers join the team as a full-fledged Magus possessing every psionic ability in the game.
• Only six Yoshis are playable from the outset of Yoshi's Story, running the usual ROY G BV gamut, but the black and white Yoshis, each more powerful than the other six, are unlockable in various ways. If you die while using one of them, though, it disappears from the Yoshi select screen and you have to unlock it again.
• Watch_Dogs: At the end of act 2, Aiden and Clara discover some encrypted code, which prompts them to track down Ray Kenny, aka T-Bone, who then joins them at the end of Act 3.
  • Ray plays this role again in Watch_Dogs 2; after the team suffer Heroic BSoD following the discovery that Blume had been manipulating them Marcus encounters Ray at Swelter Skelter, a desert festival, after which Ray comes back to San Fransisco to accompany the team throughout the rest of the game.