Crippling Overspecialization / Non-Video Game Examples

Examples of Crippling Overspecialization in other forms of media besides Video Games.

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Anime & Manga

• The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You: Terano's "Tyranno Cannon" pitch is so powerful that just connecting with the ball will hurt the batter, but it's the only pitch she can throw and at the same angle every time. Even the weaker members of the opposing team can get by just by bunting it.
• The Fang Regalia in Air Gear, a set of A-T wheels can be seen this way as it deprives the user the ability to jump. Instead, it allows the user to release Razor Wind from their A-Ts.
• The Versian Kataphrakts in Aldnoah.Zero are infinitely more advanced than the Earth's mechas and tend to appear completely unstoppable at first glance. However, each one is custom-built with a very powerful but extremely specific weapon or gimmick, so a crafty, analytic tactician like Inaho can find and ruthlessly exploit the hole in its defense or combat style. The Kataphrakt pilot is unable to adjust when this happens, because their mech can't do anything but the very specific combat strategy it's built for. The problem is aggravated by the fact that Vers has a Feudal Future society where the Royalty Superpower required to pilot these super mechs is only bestowed upon nobles, who as a general rule are elitist, overconfident, and want to take all the credit for any victory instead of sharing it with others. The typical noble Kataphrakt will attack the heroes single-handed and unsupported, making them much more vulnerable than if they attacked in groups of multiple Kataphrakts that could compensate for each other's weaknesses, or in combined arms units with mooks that would prevent the heroes from exclusively focusing on taking out the Kataphrakt.
  • To wit - the first Kataphrakt fought, the Nilokeras, has a powerful barrier that renders it Nigh-Invulnerable by erasing all matter and energy that it comes into contact with. However, this also means that the Nilokeras has two weaknesses. First, its barrier is not active on its feet, or else it would sink through the ground. Second, due to the barrier absorbing visible light, the unit is forced to rely on drones to see, as well as have a small hole in its barrier to receive the data transmitted by the drones. Inaho's response is to destabilize the ground beneath its feet while also taking out the drones to render the unit blind.
• Assassination Classroom has quite a lot of this, going in hand with Assassin Outclassin' and It Only Works Once. Once someone's full plan or main skills are revealed, it's easier for Koro-sensei and others to guard against them.
  • Irina is a infiltration-assassin who seduces people to get close and then kill them. Once she's found out she's in trouble, as her combat skills aren't so good. Her former teacher even tries to have her removed from assignment in Class E once her cover is blown and she only managed to stay by subverting the trope at the last second, using her seduction on someone she knew it wouldn't work on to get his guard down about her trying something else. Averted in the Island arc, as the kids were so used to her they did not expect a betrayal.
  • Ritsu is an AI inside a terminal that has gun ports. She can reshape the guns and change their ammo and targeting as much as she wants, and her programming is good enough so that she gets better with each try at assassinating Koro-sensei, who is not allowed to impede her. She is defeated by the students wrapping duct tape around her terminal, forcing the gun ports to stay closed, because she was interrupting their studies.
  • Itona is a human boy with tentacles that can match Koro-sensei's. But they take up so much brainpower that he cannot even compensate for an alteration in a plan on his own, requiring the aid of Shiro both in fully plotting an assassination and ordering him on what to do when his target does something unpredictable.
  • Takaoka. From what's seen of him, it's clear he's a soldier, not an assassin. This makes him a poor teacher for Class 3-E, because their task is to assassinate Koro-sensei, not just kill him. Takaoka's Training from Hell would not just be ethically wrong but would also be pointlessly detrimental in the long-run, since assassination relies more on timing and wit than it does on skill and overall physical abilites (though the latter certainly is still important). This is perfectly displayed during his first duel with Nagisa — he views it as a fight, and thus is completely caught off-guard when Nagisa treats it as an assassination instead, which leads to his defeat. This also helped Karasuma and Koro-sensei identify him as the mastermind of the Assassination Island arc: he had the assassins he hired work as lookouts and guards, hampering their effectiveness significantly as well as indicating to the former two that he wasn't an assassin.
• While Misa from Asteroid in Love may act like a Cool Big Sis Teen Genius, she is incapable of handling things that can't be expressed in numbers, have poor communication skills, and bad at housework.
• In Attack on Titan, the nation of Marley is revealed to rely extensively on its use of Titans in military warfare. However, the rest of world is now adapting to the Titans and developing weapons capable of defeating Titans. It was surmised that if Aircraft technology continued development, than enemy nations would simply rain down bombs on the Titans: the epitomized "Devils of The Earth" who could do nothing more than watch the skies. And when the attack on Liberio happens, Marley ends up fighting against The Survey Corps: a branch of the Eldian Military of Paradis that already specialized in directly fighting against the Titans with nothing more than gas-powered, grappling hook harnesses and swords^note and now had the advancements of modern technology and firearms on their side; Marley was quickly and utterly wrecked. It's telling that the major change to the Marleyan strategy when they initiate the Second Battle of Shinganshina with liberal use of airships, rifles, and machine guns actually had them winning against the Scouts. If it wasn't for Zeke's intervention they probably would have won.
• Early in Bakusou Kyoudai! Let's & Go!!, the main characters' machines suffer from this on the competitive level: Magnum Saber is too fast and too light it can't take corners properly; Sonic Saber is good at tackling curves, but loses time on straights and zig-zagged roads; Spin Axe is only superior at chicanes; finally, Tridagger X dominates the straights, but it is too aggressive on cornering it slows down greatly.
• Bleach:
  • Wonderwiess plays with this as part of Min-Maxing, as Aizen removed all forms of speech, intelligence, memory and reasoning so as to have the ability to seal Ryujinjakka's flames, but he also has reiatsu comparable to those of the Espada and when Yamamoto proves he can kick ass with his bare hands, Wonderweiss also shows he has powerful hand-to-hand skills himself. Not enough to win, of course.
  • Several of his opponents thought this about Aizen, believing that if he didn't use his sword's powers, he'd be easier to take down. He quickly proves them wrong.
  • Soifon is a downplayed example in the second Filler Arc. The inexperienced Ichigo manages to hold her off without too much trouble until she drops her sword and switches to hand-to-hand combat and utterly schools him.
• Katsumi Morikawa, the resident Butt-Monkey of Cardfight!! Vanguard. He is a genuinely good player, but he is so obsessed with powerful Grade 3 monsters that his deck balance is ridiculously top-heavy.
• Eosinophil in Cells at Work! excels at slaying parasites, but is completely incapable of slaying even a single bacterium (which appear in the body much more frequently). This is to the point that she's given All of the Other Reindeer treatment by other body cells. This actually is Truth in Television for much of how cells in the body's immune system work. See the Real Life page for more.
• Clare starts out as this in Claymore. She's ranked as the weakest warrior in the Organization because she neglected the standard youma fighting skills to specialize in fighting Awakened Beings. Initially, Awakened Beings are rare enough that the other Claymores consider her to be The Load, especially as her base power is still very low at that point. By the time the Time Skip rolls around, Awakened Beings are coming out of the woodwork, and regular youma are little more than mooks.
• In Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, Zenitsu Agatsuma is a demon hunter who utilizes Thunder Breathing. While this particular art has six forms, Zenitsu only ever managed to learn the first and most basic form. Downplayed in that Zenitsu has honed this single technique to a level of absolute mastery.
• The Devil is a Part-Timer!: Downplayed with the archangel Sariel. He does have other powers, but relies very, very heavily on his Gaze of the Fall which allows him to nullify Sacred Energy with a mere look. Obviously this makes him quite a dangerous opponent to users of sacred power, and allows him to easily capture Emi Yusa. Of course, it's only Sacred Energy he can nullify. It doesn't do anything to a demon like Maou, and Sariel's other combat skills are pretty mediocre at best, resulting in him getting utterly Curbstomped by Maou, even despite Sariel being fully empowered by moonlight at the time.
• Dragon Ball:
  • In Dragon Ball Z, while preparing to fight Cell, Trunks comes up with a variation of the Super Saiyan transformation that involves large, bulky musculature. He hides it from his father, Vegeta, fearing that it would cause him shame to see that his son has surpassed him. It's not until he brings it out in battle against Cell that he realizes his mistake: in focusing on raw strength and muscle mass, he's made himself slow and easily tired. All the punchy-punchy in the world doesn't make a difference if he can't land a hit, and as he is handily defeated he reflects that his father, a seasoned warrior who would know better, likely considered developing himself along the same lines and decided against it for exactly that reason. Ironically, Cell forgets this when Super Saiyan 2 Gohan pushes him into a Villainous Breakdown and he ends up bulking up.
  • Inverted and played straight in Dragon Ball Super. As an inversion, Goku and Gohan form Universe 7's team for the Tournament of Power around a combination of power and skill, thus allowing weaker warriors like Master Roshi, Krillin and Tien to fight through their smarts rather than any sort of strength. Conversely, the other teams are built around one major idea: punish and defeat Goku. Thus, many of the teams are totally and completely blindsided when someone else proves to be much stronger than Goku.
    • Universe 4 stands out in particular. The majority of the team consists of Combat Pragmatists, who rely on gimmicks and trickery to fight rather than raw power and skill. However, they have nothing else to fall back on beyond their individual gimmicks. The only ones to show any kind of power or fighting skill are Ganos, Caway, and Majora, all of whom are defeated quickly. The final three fighters of Universe 4 (Gamisalas, Xiangca, and Damom) are all defeated within one episode, with the team as a whole only managing to take out one combatant (Piccolo).
  • Played With regarding Dyspo. Dyspo's signature ability in combat is his Super-Speed, but that's all; he lacks raw power, and his fighting skills are noted as being basic and predictable. Hit nearly defeated him twice through superior tactics and his time powers. Later on, however, it's revealed that when pushed to its limits, Dyspo's speed allows him to threaten both Ultimate Gohan and Golden Frieza. Gohan has to pull Taking You with Me in order to defeat him.
  • Super gives a subversion with Hit. As a Professional Killer, tournaments with a no-killing ruling hinder his abilities, but Hit proves to be an effective fighter nonetheless. He's only such a good assassin due to his speed, strength, knowledge of the body's weak-points, and his technique that stops time for a fraction of a second. He also shows enough skill in combat to analyze his opponent's moves and come up with counter strategies. These abilities prove Hit to be one of the best fighters in the multiverse; he's just an even better assassin.
• Eyeshield 21:
  • Monta, the Deimon wide receiver, is only good at catching. This makes him bad at his original favorite sport, baseball, but good at American football. Sena is dazzlingly fast, but had no strength to push another in power games. Takami, thanks to his build and training, is a quarterback with precise and high-altitude pass, but thanks to injury in his legs, can't move quick enough to avoid sacking. Kurita is obscenely strong and unmovable, but also can't run to save his life. And Yukimitsu, all that he had is ability to deduce possible pass route on the fly and sheer determination, and that's all. Fortunately, the team is directed by a psychotic genius who knows exactly how to make all the specializations form a coherent, powerful whole. Hiruma himself actually defies the trope when Sena asks him if a player being overspecialised is a problem, with him and Kurita explaining that American Football is a very specialised game where they want guys who are really good at one thing in particular- while the best players are still those who are a Master of All, an overspecialist is still more valuable to a team than a Jack of All Stats.
  • Some of the named teams, in general, follow a specific specialization that limits their effectiveness in the field. For example:
    • The Deimon Devil Bats advocated an all-offense strategy and not just because Hiruma likes it. With its limited number of players, most of them were rookies and/or people coerced into joining, Hiruma had to make do with the pieces he had. Most notably, their initial lack of a kicker meant they'd almost never be able to make conversions after touchdowns, so the all-out offensive strategy allowed them to cover for the point difference with more touchdowns instead.
    • The Ojo White Knights, the team's primary rival, was the best defensive team in Kanto, owing to its coach's defensive philiosphy and the presense of Seijirou Shin, Japan's best linebacker. This. however, comes at the expense of the team's offense which was mediocre at best. After some training by Sakuraba and development of new strategies involving using Shin on offense, they managed to overcome this to become offensively devastating as well.
    • The Taiyou Spinx were renowned for having the heaviest line that gives them an edge over other teams in a contest of power. However, their backfield doesn't have a lot of talent and the only decent secondary player they have is a cornerback- and even he focuses entirely on perfecting his bump technique above everything else.
    • Finally, no other team is more specialized than the Bando Spiders. Once one of the best teams in Kanto, it was reduced to just the kicking team after the Offensive and Defensive teams were recruited by another school. Even after their best player comes back to the team and drastically improves their chances of winning, the fact the team relies on field goals to score makes them a one-trick pony, although that trick is still devastating enough to almost carry them all the way to the Kanto Tournament before the Devil Bats stopped them.
• All the characters in Fairy Tail have one type of magic that they use, and frequently run into opponents with powers custom tailored to trump that one specific magic, most notably one of the Vanish Brothers, whose power was to nullify fire magic, and he just happened to have been fighting the fire mage. Or Yuta, who can nullify magic, but only one type at a time. Only a few mages show spells outside the speciality, such as Ultear who possesses two schools of magic or the Thunder God tribe who possess eye magic aside from their main magics, though many mages do make up for lack of magic variety with hand-to-hand skill, weapons like Lucy's whip, or using their magic in unorthodox ways. Erza is a subversion, since while she uses one type of magic, her magic involves changing her armor and weapons to suit the situation.
• Mito of Food Wars! is cripplingly overspecialised towards cooking meat. When compelled by cooking contest rules to present a don (rice bowl), her dish, while technically well executed, is disharmonious and overemphasizes the expensive cut of meat used. Soma gives her a humiliating defeat by using a cheap cut of meat prepared using a trick to make it taste like a higher quality one and flavoring the rice in a way that complements the meat. A large part of her development post-Heel–Face Turn involves her overcoming this, and she's later shown having learned how to make her dishes more balanced while still focusing on meat.
  • Nene, on the other hand, can cook her recipes to perfection, but is incapable of tweaking them on the fly.
  • Completely averted by Satou Soumei. He openly mocks the idea that his focus on sushi has made him incapable of cooking other dishes, and proves that his mastery of sushi has made him expert at combining the flavor profiles of rice, fish and accents in other contexts too. Even Soma, whose ability to cook by the seat of his pants is rapidly becoming the stuff of legend, is disconcerted at the quality of the dish he produces when asked to cook a Japanese-style seafood dish with butter as the key ingredient.
• Fullmetal Alchemist:
  • Roy Mustang is possibly the only master of flame alchemy, which makes him a borderline Person of Mass Destruction. He kills Lust, and while Envy survives their fight, it's only by a paper-thin margin, especially since Roy was so driven by rage that he was letting Envy regenerate just for the sick pleasure of killing them again. The downside is that Roy is so focused on flame alchemy that when his ignition gloves are damaged, lost, too wet to function or meets someone who his fire doesn't work on, he's so inferior to a more generalised alchemist that at least once a sign reading "USELESS" physically manifests and lands on his head...at least until he can get his gloves working again, at which point you are in trouble. At the very least he's aware of this and tends to carry extra gloves and a pack of matches just in case, which Ed learned the hard way during a sparring match of theirs.
  • Riza Hawkeye. A deadly accurate markswoman with mastery of every gun from a pistol to a sniper rifle, but has fairly limited skill in other combat disciplines. Also, Homunculi are borderline Immune to Bullets. You do the math.
• The main page quote comes from Ghost in the Shell (1995), in response to Togusa's question of why he, a non-augmented former police detective and family man, was recruited as The Team Normal for Section Nine, which otherwise is staffed by ex-special forces cyborgs. Motoko reasons that his presence helps round out and close up potential weak spots in their team, defying this trope before it can sabotage them. The Puppetmaster also believes in this, which motivates his ploy to approach Motoko and ask her to merge their ghosts, in order to create true digital offspring with variety, a la evolution, since A.I. copies will remain only stagnant and unchanging.
• The eponymous character of Goblin Slayer is monstrously effective at butchering regular goblins using ambush tactics and pragmatic tricks, having spent nearly a decade training specifically to hunt them. However, this strategic bottleneck also means he's terrible in direct combat and almost useless against any other types of opponents, including stronger forms of goblin he can't take down in one hit; he was once stalemated by what was essentially a Halfling rogue fighting from the front.
• Gundam:
  • Mobile Suit Gundam: According to the backstory, when Zeon was developing a machine to match the Gundam, their choices were the Gelgoog and the Gyan. The Gyan was melee-focused, armed with a beam sword and a shield full of mini-missiles and short-range bombs, and intended to work in concert with the Dom (which was, surprise surprise, manufactured by the same company). This extreme focus caused it to lose out to the more self-sufficient Gelgoog, which had both a melee weapon and a beam rifle as powerful as the Gundam's, meaning only three Gyans were ever made, and one shows up as a Monster of the Week while Gelgoogs appear as Mooks from that point on.
    • The Gelgoog, in turn, added its own overspecialization. It was designed to Char Aznable's own standards, as Zeon's most influential ace. This meant that anyone who wasn't as skilled as Char couldn't make a Gelgoog work the way it should. A lot of pilots died to technically-inferior opponents as a result.
    • Zeon mobile suit design went along the path of highly specialized machines, with some corporate competition to sell the most esoteric designs possible. This partially explains the one-off mobile armors that were fielded, but an entire line of aquatic mobile suits were rendered useless once the Federation pushed Zeon off Earth and the rest of the conflict was space-bound.
    • The Earth Federation were easily put on the backfoot early on the One Year War. The Salamis and Magellan battleships were made for ship-to-ship battle as they had dismissed Mobile Suits as a viable war weapon. However, the Zeon Zaku proved to be much more agile and threatening and weaved through their opponents with ease. Even more, most of the Earth Federation's equipment used incredible state-of-the-art technology, which was rendered useless due to heavy usage of the Minovsky Particle.
  • In Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin this is what ruined the Guncannon: the Federation's first mobile suit was intended to take on enemy starships with its immense firepower at the cost of speed and manouverability, making it embarrassingly vulnerable to Zeon's Zaku (and later its successor the Zaku II) intended to take on mobile suits first. The Zaku avoided this weakness thanks to having no integral weapon but simply relying on handheld ones, that depending on the mission could include nuclear bazookas to take on starships.
    • Avoided by the Gundam: the beam weapons give it even greater firepower than the Guncannon, but the vehicle is intended to take on mobile suits first, the beam weapon capability being simply a side effect of Federation reactor and beam weapon technology being so much more advanced than Zeon's they could pull it off.
  • In Mobile Suit Gundam SEED the Buster Gundam was a purely ranged suit with no close-range options, while the Duel Gundam is almost pure melee with very little ranged options (ZAFT corrected that quickly with the "Assault Shroud" Mecha Expansion Pack). Interestingly, the Strike Gundam manages to be both this and Jack of All Stats since it can change its loadout; in Sword Strike mode, the closest thing it has to a ranged weapon are beam boomerangs and rocket-propelled anchors which can draw a target into closer range, while in Launcher Strike mode it has the same problem as the Buster, its only close-range weapons being a small pair of barely-used daggers. Most other suits, despite having clear specialty, manage to avert this, and the five Gundams were meant to operate as a team to cover for their individual weaknesses.
  • Crossbone Gundam has the Jupiter Empire try to counter the eponymous Gundams with a trio of mobile suits that excel in one area exactly: the Quavarze is a Glass Cannon, the Abijo a Fragile Speedster, and the Tortuga a Stone Wall. This comes back to bite them when Tobia manages to circumvent their advantages and exploit their weaknesses (grabbing the Abijo so it can't dodge his attacks, attacking the Tortuga in the joints where its thick armor and beam shield can't protect it). Earlier on, Kincaid Nau bests the trio in a similar manner (not dodging the weak attacks of the Abijo, closing range on the Quavarze, and flanking the Tortuga before it can deploy its shield). With a Gundam whose arms had already been sliced off.
  • In Mobile Suit Gundam 00 the Sadalsuud's unwieldy nature made it useless for anything other than long range combat and even then only as a sensor. The Abul Hool literally had no arms and had to make do with its quasi-jet mode.
    • The units used by the Innovades also have a habit of being like this. The Gadessa has no real ranged weapon other than the Mega-launcher. When it gets blown up, suddenly your opponent is a LOT harder to hit. The Garazzo is of no different in that it replaces the Mega Launcher with beam claws, leaving it without any effective ranged weapon ever.
  • Gundam AGE's Age-1 Titus. It overspecializes in strong melee attacks, but it is dropped off just a few episode after its debut because its heavy armor and lack of range weapons makes it unable to hit any faster unit in space combat.
  • Gundam Sentinel has the FAZZ units, a trio of Mobile Suits designed to test out the Full Armor pack for the ZZ Gundam. Had plenty of ammo, but lacked any means to defend itself in melee range, which gets all three suits destroyed when they go up against the Gundam Mk. V.
  • After War Gundam X meanwhile has the Correl. It's designed to be so fast that it can inflict Death of a Thousand Cuts on most enemy mobile suits it fights with a beam knife. On the other hand, it can't use any weapons other than said beam knife due to the speeds involved. Not to mention stripping off so much armor to achieve that maneuverability renders it very vulnerable to Vulcans.
  • Gundam Build Fighters Try first gives us Team Angelfish, who is a team comprised of all marine Mobile Suits — a Z'Gok, a Gogg and an Zock. In the water, they're unstoppable. Yuuma wonders what they'd do if they went up against opponents in another terrain. They'd self-destruct rather than get involved in a Curb-Stomp Battle.
    • Then, there's Teams SRSC, who used three EZ-8s designed to combat the Build Burning, the Lightning and the Powered GM Cardigan. Their synergy is completely thrown off when Fumina brings out the Winning Gundam instead of the Cardigan as they had no information on it.
    • Ultimately Fumina's Winning Gundam and Yuuma's Lightning Gundam proved to be this. Winning Gundam is so focused on being the super-awesome support for the Lightning and Sekai's Build Burning that Fumina's never bothered to actively familiarize herself with her own weapons, making her crumble when forced to fight. The Lightning Gundam is a sniper unit, despite being based off of the Re-GZ, and is also a manifestation of Yuuma's desire to keep others away from him, thus he crumples when others get close. The Star Winning and the Lightning Full Burnian fix these problems.
  • Gundam Build Divers has force Build Divers be the inversion as their team has a wide variety of Mobile Suits for any situation^note 00 Diver Ace/00 Sky as the melee unit, GM III Beam Master/Jegan Blast Master as long range support, Momokapool for underwater attacks, Galbaldy Rebake as the tank and heavy hitter and the RX-Zeromaru for stealth and random Newtype-y things, which screams in defiance of other forces who uses themes. The idea of basing a team around a theme is what ends team Le Chat Noir, who was an all-SD Gundam team who had early success but lost it big time when people started learning their techniques and started crushing them.
  • Mobile Suit Gundam Wing:
    • The Mercurius and Vayeate were a pair of Mobile Suits designed by the Gundam engineers that went to the utmost extreme in defense and offense, respectively. The Mercurius had eight Defensor drones that could block virtually any attack, but had no offensive capability (though Heero does turn pairs of them into makeshift bolas at one point), meaning the Mercurius was stuck with a dinky machine gun and a combo shield/beam saber as its only weapons. The Vayeate, meanwhile, had an absurdly powerful beam cannon that could vaporize just about anything... and nothing else. The two were obviously meant more as proof-of-concept designs than serious weapons, but that didn't stop OZ from deploying them in actual battle, hoping they could cover each other's weaknesses.
    • Subverted with the Epyon, which is the only mobile suit without any ranged option whatsoever, perhaps the only one across the whole franchise. ^note It even lacks the machine guns used to shoot down incoming missiles, which is standard issue even for Mook Mobile Suits. This doesn't stop it from being the most powerful Mobile Suit of the series (tied with Wing Zero) thanks to the Zero System.
• In Heavy Object, Elites have specialized training and genetic modification so they can pilot Objects, but the regimen is designed for a specific Object. They cannot pilot any other type of Object which means if they are defeated in battle it could be years before an appropriate replacement becomes available. Milinda in particular has concerns early on due to being trained for the increasingly out-dated First Generation Objects.
  • Second Generation Objects are designed to dominate a theater of action. Within that theater they have a massive advantage, but outside of it they are likely to be at a disadvantage to even a First Generation Object.
  • The enemy support unit in the first Alaskan campaign relied almost entirely on their Object and radar installations. The entire unit consisted of armed technicians, lacking any tanks, planes, or even actual infantry. When their Object was destroyed the survivors were wiped out by Froleytia's tanks and infantry.
• In Hunter × Hunter, this happens during a tournament arc when Hisoka fights an opponent who had a grudge against him, Kastro. Kastro had basically dedicated himself to mastering a nen technique that was so absurdly complex that it left him completely unable to use any other nen techniques, and even limited his ability to learn other non-nen based techniques, so that the opponent only had one (admittedly pretty strong) martial arts move. Worse, once this ability Doppleganger was dispelled, Kastro is completely powerless.
  • Kurapika is a victim of this as well. He mastered both the use of nen and special abilities insanely quickly, but tailored his offensive abilities towards fighting the Phantom Troupe and can't use them on anyone else. If he does he'll die. Fortunately, Kurapika has a mix of non-offensive skills and abilities to work around this limitation.
  • Nen users, in general, can apply restrictions upon themselves if they want to strengthen their abilities. This comes with the caveat of the user must willingly risk something should they break the restrictions. The more severe the risk, the stronger the ability becomes. Kurapika, as mentioned above, strengthened his nen abilities this way. Another character, Komugi, unknowingly developed nen abilities that allowed her to become unbeatable at a specific board game because she's vowed that the moment she loses, she will die.
• This is the premise of I Couldn't Become a Hero, So I Reluctantly Decided to Get a Job. Raul was training to be a heroic knight to fight the demon lord. However, somebody else killed the demon lord before he had a chance. Raul's combat skills are impressive, but they can't pay the bills when the world is at peace, so he has to settle for an entry-level job as a store clerk.
• Infinite Stratos:
  • Ichika's IS is a close-ranged fighter, so in a ranged fight he has to dodge or absorb shots thrown at him until he can get close enough. Unless another IS user allows him to use their ranged weapons. Averted with Rin, who has a weapon that has some medium range capabilities.
  • Laura's A.I.C. (Active Inertial Canceler) seems to nullify any attack thrown at her, but she has to stay focused on the attacker for it to work. So if someone else shoots her from behind...
  • Cecilia's IS is designed solely for long ranged combat, so if an attacker can close the distance before she can take them out, she usually seems screwed. Chifuyu also comments in one episode that she's also designed to take on multiple opponents, but in the anime at least, she only ever fights against one opponent at a time.
• I've Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years and Maxed Out My Level: "Haja" combat magic becomes more powerful the more specific the category of enemy the practitioner trains to use it against. Shalsha spends 50 years training to defeat the protagonist Azusa specifically, allowing her to effortlessly overwhelm the otherwise-invulnerable witch... until one of Azusa's friends knocks her out with a touch, ending her Hour of Power and leaving her helpless.
• A running theme in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure has the protagonists being given extremely basic and thus highly adaptable Stand powers that can be adapted to almost any situation, whereas (minor) antagonists have powerful but specialized Stand powers and have no defense whatsoever if the heroes figure out how to avoid said powers. One notable example is Steely Dan from Stardust Crusaders, whose microscopic Stand 'Lovers' was capable of infiltrating Joseph's brain matter and slowly consuming his nervous system while also replicating any injury Dan suffered in Joseph, essentially holding him hostage and preventing the others from fighting. However, when Kakyoin and Polnareff manage to get Lovers out of Joseph's brain, Dan has pretty much no fighting ability whatsoever and folds like tissue paper before Star Platinum.
• Kaguya-sama: Love Is War has Miyuki Shirogane, the only student in the school who gets higher grades than Kaguya. Unlike Kaguya, who's talented in other fields, such as Japanese archery, Shirogane is almost completely hopeless at anything besides his studies and student council work.
• Kengan Ashura
  • One of the many fictional martial arts in the series alludes to real-world martial art cases of this with Suekichi Kanada's fighting style, kujin. The style is meant for an armored samurai on the battlefield, and therefore focuses on knocking the opponent off-balance, disarming them, and delivering a killing stroke with a weapon. It's effective in that situation, but in a case where both combatants are unarmed and unarmored, it's basically useless due to lacking any real striking techniques or ways to finish off an opponent. It's stated to be an absolute miracle that Kanada is able to give his opponent — a heavyweight boxer whose style fits that situation perfectly — any kind of challenge, and that's largely more due to his Awesomeness by Analysis abilities than his fighting technique.
  • Subverted and Defied with Kaolang Wongsawat, the above-mentioned boxer: at first he seems "merely" a monstrously skilled boxer (becoming the undisputed heavyweight champion in spite of being small for a heavyweight) that would have multiple weaknesses due being trained to fight only other boxers. But when someone actually tries to take advantage of his expected weaknesses, they find out the hard way that not only is he actually the strongest Muay Thai practitioner in the world, he learned boxing to cover for the (relatively) poor punching technique he got from his Muay Thai training that left him overspecialized for his main job as the bodyguard of the king of Thailand.
  • Kiozan Takeru runs into this unknowingly. He's a sumo wrestler who believes that modern sumo rules limit the fighter's skills by restricting their techniques to a handful of moves, and so tries to mix things up with illegal moves. As it turns out, though, those moves aren't just off-limits for sportsmanship's sake — a sumo wrestler's bodytype prioritizes strength and speed over stamina, and legal sumo moves tend to be fairly energy-conservative. Though his slaps and charges are a sight to behold, once he starts throwing punches and kicks, he gets winded almost immediately.
• Kinnikuman: Hawaii champion Jessie Mavia had this problem. He was absolutely unrivaled in his ability to counter and reverse attacks, but as a result had no original techniques of his own. Kinnikuman achieved victory in his fight by realizing this, goading Jessie into attacking him, and hoisting him by his own petard.
• All of the three female leads in KonoSuba suffer from this to some degree:
  • Aqua is a goddess whose exorcism abilities make her a Disc-One Nuke against undead, and only undead. She also has water magic at her disposal, but it only comes in two flavors: "harmless party trick" and "massive collateral damage". She also insists on spending all her experience on learning new party tricks when she levels up instead of adding anything to make her combat abilities more flexible, since she likes getting attention for them instead of actually useful attacks... and her stats are maxed out anyway, so she's not able to improve the water magic she has.
  • Darkness is strong enough to shatter rock and can tank pretty much any attack, but her swordsmanship is awful to the point of being incapable of hitting anything. She even fails to hit stationary targets. The reason for this is because she has put every single skill point she has ever earned entirely into her defense attributes, without spending anything on improving her offense. Her reason for doing this? She's a raging masochist who can't resist the urge to throw herself into harm's way to sate her kink, but isn't stupid enough not to invest in protection first; she wants to suffer, not die.
  • Megumin has it worst of all: she's a low-level wizard who's Min-Maxed to the point of being able to cast Explosion, one of the most powerful offensive spells in the setting. This is also the only spell she knows, and she's only capable of casting it once per day before collapsing in a defenseless heap due to it completely draining her energy. Explosion is also equally dangerous to both friend and foe and can't be cast underground or else it'll cause a cave-in (meaning she's completely useless in dungeons, a common destination for adventurers). Megumin's problem isn't that she can't expand her repertory of spells, she just doesn't want to. Whenever she has more skill points to spend, she just uses them to make her Explosion even stronger, instead of smaller spells that won't leave her helpless after a single cast. She's perfectly happy to be this way and any attempts to get her to do otherwise get ignored. It's justified in that she hails from the Crimson Demon/Mage Clan, a Human Subspecies who are all naturally great at magic at the cost of being raging Chuunibyous — and even by their standards, Megumin is kind of nuts.
  • Kazuma meanwhile suffers from the opposite problem by being underspecialized. All of his stats are average except for his exceptionally high luck stat, which is the least useful stat. This forces him to take the generic Adventurer class, which does not learn abilities on its own and instead allows him to copy other classes' abilities. He helps balance out the team and he manages to find clever ways to use his teammates' abilities strategically, making his party far more effective than one would expect given their serious weaknesses.
• In Lord Marksman and Vanadis, Tigre is one of the greatest archers in existence. With a bow and arrows, he's almost unstoppable. However, he only trained with a bow and has no skill in other weapons like swords.
• In The Lucifer and Biscuit Hammer, several of the Beast Knights are somewhat overspecialized for their own good, usually on the scale and speed of the opponents they can fight. Yuki and Subaru need critical time to charge up and aim their Combined Energy Attack, and risk any enemy escaping or tearing into them before they can fire. Yuuhi's fighting style is highly mobile anti-personnel, limiting his ability to directly harm the golems but making him perfect for taking down the other Knights. Hanako's ice attacks rely on having a supply of water to hand, often only as much as she can carry. Fortunately, the other Knights cover for their limits and provide them the opportunities they need to bring their power into play.
• Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS:
  • Nanoha's training of the forwards doubly subverts this. First Nanoha aims the training to sharpen each member on their own unique abilities to the edge, but avoided the "crippling" part by also reinforcing their teamwork tactics in order to cover each other's weaknesses. Then, she reveals that the "overspecialization" part of the training only covers phase 1-2, and once they dominated their main abilities Nanoha proceeds to balance them by giving them experience and alt-modes for their devices that allow them to face battle conditions outside of their main area of expertise by themselves.
  • Hayate, meanwhile, plays this trope straight. She's the resident nuke-girl of the TSAB, evidenced by the fact that they send out evacuation warnings whenever she takes to the battlefield. The only problem with this is that she cannot use any spell other than nuke level ones and she needs assistance to aim said spells. She even admits that Caro would beat her in singles combat even without said girl's dragons because she was trained by Nanoha.
• Mazinger Z: Several Mechanical Beasts had a fighting style entirely based on the weapon or device they were equipped with, and when they lost it, the battle was finished shortly after (even though they usually tried to put up a good fight). Jinray S1 (episode 24) best weapon was its amazing flight speed (Mach 5!) that it used to dive at its enemy, striking it with lightning bolts and missiles and flying away. Since it could hit him and run away before he could even spot it, Kouji got a very hard time... until he blew up one of its rockets. Unable to perform its hit-and-run tactics, Jinray was helpless. Holzon V3 (Episode 17) was armed with huge drills to burrow underground and set off earthquakes, making it deadly... unless you forced it to return to surface, where it was a crappy fighter. Kajimofu T7 (episode 48) combined both its palm blasts and its missile launcher to hit its adversary. It was a very efective, destructive tactic... but when Sayaka and Boss ripped its arms off, the battle was over because its missile launcher was not strong enough on its own.
• My Hero Academia:
  • Hitoshi Shinso's Quirk allows him to brainwash anyone who answers his question into following his every command. While this would obviously be a powerful ability for hero work (think hostage rescue, capturing enemies alive by making them surrender, etc.), the practical portion of the entrance exam involves fighting giant robots, something that Shinso's Quirk does jack shit against. This cost Shinso his shot at the hero course, something he is understandably bitter about.
  • Subverted with Toru Hagakure (Quirk: Invisibility) and Shihai Kuroiro (Quirk: Black): their Quirks are useless against the robots at the entrance exams, but they were far more physically fit (something Shinso struggled even after months of dedicated training following the Sports Festival) and creative enough to destroy enough of them and pass.
  • Lampshaded and defied by Gran Torino in his training of Midoriya. Torino started off his training by fighting against Midoriya, but stopped the fights after a few rounds, noting that if Midoriya only fought Torino, he could pick up tactics that work only against Torino, leaving Midoriya unprepared for fighting anyone else.
• Nanbaka has its protagonist Jyugo, whose only real criminal specialty is breaking out of prison, get a One-Hit KO when facing Prison Warden Hajime early on... and then Jyugo regularly gets destroyed by Hajime during his daily breakout attempts. He has the ability to unlock almost anything instantly except for the strange shackles he wears, but he is completely useless at anything not related to breaking out of prison, to the point that he cannot even take a bath alone without drowning. Until he gets mad enough to activate his shackles, which turn him into a rampaging murdering machine with blade arms.
• Naruto:
  • Members of most clans seem to suffer from this, as they tend to only use the clan's signature techniques even when they could learn others. Plus, their specialization can be found out just by knowing their last name. Teamwork is greatly stressed and teams typically consist of 4 people from different clans or backgrounds, so the "crippling" part is usually guarded against, though they tend to have a specialised theme (eg. Team Gai are all Taijutsu types, but different types of Taijutsu; Team Kurenai/8 specialize in tracking, but different types of tracking, etc.). It is also not uncommon for different teams to work together, or for members to join other teams temporarily.
  • Subverted by the Uchiha clan. Though played straight at beginning levels, where the abilities their Sharingan gives them (move copying, enhanced perception) can only go so far, once they reach a certain point and unlock its evolution, the Mangekyo Sharingan, they've basically won the Superpower Lottery. And in the unlikely event that the Mangekyo doesn't get the job done there's a whole other level, the Rinnegan, which puts the user above basically everything else in the universe, up to and including various Eldritch Abominations.
  • The Senju deserve a special mention as a subversion, as according to Sha no Sho, they've received the nickname "The clan with a thousand skills".
  • Possibly also subverted by the Aburame clan — while they indeed only have a handful of jutsu, the main jutsu is basically the ability to control a swarm of chakra-eating bugs, which is actually extremely versatile and effective, so a lot less crippling overall. Too bad Shino doesn't get more screentime.
  • Also subverted by Naruto himself after the Time Skip; initially his main strategy was to just Zerg Rush his opponents with Shadow Clones which never worked against stronger opponents. However, in Part II he takes the When All You Have Is a Hammer… approach and while he never uses anything other than Shadow Clones and the Rasengan he learns to use them more intelligently, using the Clones to perform Awesomeness by Analysis on enemy fighting styles and developing unique variations on the Rasengan (plus getting a Super Mode helped). By the time of Boruto he's overcome this shortcoming entirely and adopted other jutsus into his arsenal.
  • The Raikage is this in spades. He uses taijutsu and focuses on melee combat using his high speed and strength to overwhelm the enemy. We see that when he tosses Sasuke around like a ragdoll. However, he tries to do the same against the much stronger Madara Uchiha... and it doesn't work too well. He has no long ranged jutsus at all, or even summoning, bunshins displayed, or anything to make up for his style's weaknesses. Thus, he's the only Kage to under perform in the War. Especially against Madara, since he needs Onoki's help to even breach Madara's Susano'o.
  • Similarly, Rock Lee uses taijutsu but that's because he can't do anything else; to top it off, he doesn't bring any weapon and so, he relies exclusively on hand-to-hand combat. This is a world where some people can kill you by staring or can burn you if you touch them, so it's kind of a problem for a ninja.
  • Hidan of the Akatsuki is immortal, which should make him powerful, but it doesn't. He only has one real power, which requires him to ingest someone's blood after cutting them, then create a ritual circle, stand in it, and he becomes a living voodoo doll for that person. He uses it to kill Asuma. Once this technique is analyzed, there are a few weaknesses. If Hidan is removed from the circle, the effect ends. Furthermore, while immortal, he can be chopped up to remove the threat he poses. Finally, he has to attack someone with melee in order for the technique to work. A user of long ranged combat who is powerful enough to disable him will have no problem doing so.
  • Tayuya's powers themselves were fairly versatile: creating illusions and controlling summoned demons with music. But she still suffered from this as she didn't carry a single tool (not even a kunai) besides her flute, which she needs to craft her illusions. So of course, the moment her flute is lost or damaged she's pretty much screwed. It doesn't help that she ends up fighting against Temari, whose fan completely repels the sounds of her flute. Tayuya outright calls Temari her natural enemy for that reason.
  • Doto and his snow ninjas, the villains of the first movie. They have special chakra-armor, small devices that deflect or negate chakra based attacks. This renders many of the team's attacks useless, but in the finale Kakashi points out the big hole in the logic of the chakra-armor: it protects against chakra attacks but does to nothing to protect from normal physical attacks. He then exploits this to defeat The Dragon by piledriving the guy off a small cliff headfirst. If his armor was better, it might have protected him from the impact; but because his armor was so specialized against chakra, he gets killed by the fall.
• Negima! Magister Negi Magi:
  • Early on, the explanation for Negi's need to kiss girls in his class is to give them artifacts. Because a traditional mage is useless in unarmed combat and it takes time to cast and activate offensive magics, so they need a partner to defend them and distract the opposing forces. After a few fights where this was a problem for Negi, he learned kenpo. Evangeline explains that eventually any magic practitioner will reach a point where it no longer matters.
  • Setsuna obsessively trained as a warrior to protect Konoka, but as a result, she has no other skills. When the bad guys are defeated and peace is established, she believes this world has No Place for a Warrior when she notices everyone else is getting jobs and she has no idea how to get one. Fortunately, Konoka is really rich, so when they get married, she is able to support them both.
• Tokyo-3 and NERV HQ from Neon Genesis Evangelion are both parts of a gigantic city with an even more gigantic and extensive bunker underneath it designed specifically for defending against attacks from Angels. However, The End Of Evangelion shows the one thing that NERV headquarters is utterly defenseless against: Other humans. More specifically, a JSSDF invasion, who overtake the facility almost effortlessly.
• One Piece:
  • Monkey D. Luffy is basically unstoppable in a physical battle, since he combines Super-Strength and Super-Toughness with inventively used Rubber Man powers and being too determined to quit or die. But despite all this power, he's also a complete idiot, and in particular his fighting style is based on all-out offense. Correspondingly, he does very well against hordes of mooks or against single opponents who fail to measure up to him in the all-out brawling department... but he also does poorly against opponents who rely on trickery or who have powers that work in a way that Luffy can't just bull his way through. Prior to the time skip, Luffy was at his absolute worst when facing off against Devil Fruit users of the Logia type, since they were impervious to his basic attacks and he was forced to try and innovate his way around their defenses. This stopped being the case once Luffy learned to use Armament Haki, which enables him to hit through Devil Fruit defenses.
  • Even as Luffy becomes somewhat more versatile in terms of fighting, he still falls into this tropes as far as his talents go. Fighting is the only thing he's good at, and while he leads the Straw Hats, he mainly wins people's loyalty with his charisma and being nice to them, while leaving the thinking to his smarter crewmates and allies. During the Arlong arc, Luffy admits that he can't use swords, navigate, cook, or lie, all of which he relies on his crewmates to do... but he can beat Arlong, the most wanted pirate in the East Blue.
  • Downplayed with Zoro. As a swordsman, he's most effective with his three sword style, so if he's missing a sword or two, his combat performance tends to suffer. Like Luffy, fighting is his primary talent, although he has significantly more common sense than Luffy and isn't in a leadership position, so this isn't as much of an issue for him.
  • Story-wise, this is one reason why Logia-type Devil Fruit users survive less in the New World compared to Paramecia users, Zoan users, and even non-Devil Fruit users. Their over-reliance on their powers, which while they served them well in the weaker seas therefore giving them a false sense of invincibility, becomes useless further down the Grand Line because people have learned to harness Armament Haki to bypass Logia Devil Fruit powers and thus are able to damage and kill them.
    Pekoms: (After One Hit KOing Caribou) Logias that think they're invincible have short lifespans.
  • Rebecca's fighting style works wonders in colosseum matches, as it consists of tricking her opponents into fighting her before dodging and pushing them off without attacking herself. However, since it lacks proper attacks, it is completely inadapted to regular fights.
  • After Blackbeard became an Emperor, he and his crew began hunting down powerful Devil Fruits to strengthen his officers. However, as Law points out when they clash, that means all of them have Super Drowning Skills. Blackbeard retorts that the trade-off is more than Worth It.
  • Portgas D. Ace had this issue. His fighting style essentially boiled down to "shoot as much fire as possible until the problem stops being a problem." While this was effective in most cases, it was extremely ineffective against Blackbeard, who could nullify his Devil Fruit powers, and Akainu, whose Magma powers were superior to Ace's Fire Powers. In the latter case, this ends up getting Ace killed.
• In Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt, angel weapons can only kill ghosts, demons, and angels. Against humans and zombies, they are about as effective as BB Guns or Nerf swords. They can kill humans and zombies if used indirectly, like when Panty shot a propane tank next to some zombies to make it explode.
• Parasyte: The parasite who killed Shinichi's mother always goes for a One-Hit Kill by stabbing its enemies in the heart. When Jaw realizes this, he's quick to protect his host's heart in prevision and behead the enemy parasite from behind after playing dead.
• Pokémon: The Series:
  • Lt. Surge evolved his Raichu as quickly as possible, without teaching it any speed-focused moves like Agility or Quick Attack that only Pikachu can learn, instead favouring raw power. It thrashes Pikachu during Ash's first fight against him, but in the rematch, Ash realises how much more agile Pikachu is and has it run rings round Raichu, ultimately tiring it out.
  • Happened to Ash himself during the Sinnoh saga. While his Grotle still won at times, it became absolutely pitiful after evolving into Torterra, never winning a single battle. Ash's team in the Sinnoh saga was mainly based on small, fast Pokémon who can deliver hard hits, as well as take some too. But a damn near immobile tank like Torterra was just not his style, and he never really adapted to it.
  • Ironically Kiawe of the Sun and Moon series was the other way round. When he was introduced, he had gained a comfort zone with his Turtonator and Inferno Overdrive, leading to problems against opponents he couldn't just tank and use raw power on. He managed to rectify this as time went on however, teaching Turtonator Shell Smash to give it a more nimble battle style and utilising other battlers like Marowak and his Ride Charizard to adapt to more head-on tactics.
• The Quintessential Quintuplets: Downplayed as the Nakano sisters' best subjects are still not great compared to Fuutarou's, revealed in Chapter 20, the girls individually passed:
  • Ichika's strongest subject is Maths.
  • Nino's strongest subject is English.
  • Miku's strongest subject is Social Studies, due to her interest in historical generals from playing an online game.
  • Yotsuba's strongest subject is Japanese, though she claims that she guessed some of the answers.
  • Itsuki's strongest subject is Science.
• Most Ranma ½ characters, but especially one-shot practitioners of Martial Arts and Crafts. There's really not THAT much call for the use of Martial Arts Chess, is there? Hilariously, Ranma often makes a point of adhering to their rules and restrictions just so he can learn their style properly, and then incorporate their strengths into his "Anything-Goes" school (based off averting this trope entirely), as well as the satisfaction of beating them at their own game. He only occasionally bends or breaks the rules after he learns what he's supposed to do.
• Rurouni Kenshin: Kenshin Himura is a master swordsman, but is hopeless at unarmed combat and often gets confused by enemy swordsmen that throw in punches or kicks between sword strikes. Less so in the anime. Averted by Saito Haijime, who fights entirely with varying types of stabbing, but is such an excellent swordsman that he doesn't need anything else. Saito is also an expert boxer and is willing to use other weapons like his belt. In one of the last chapters of the manga, Kenshin tells a member of the latest Quirky Miniboss Squad — one who specialized in countering stabbing techniques but was defeated by Saito anyway — that if defeating Saito's Gattotsu was enough to defeat Saito himself, Kenshin would have killed him years ago.
  • Sanosuke runs into this problem as well. He is first introduced as an opponent wielding a BFS, but is defeated easily by Kenshin because he can only do two attacks with said weapon and those attacks can be easily dodged because of how unwieldy the weapon is. Sano ditches the weapon when he becomes an ally and fights using good ol' street brawling, but during the Juppon Gatana Arc, is defeated easily by Saito who, as noted above, is an experienced boxer. Sano did learn and perfect a unique technique during that arc, but he could only use said technique with his right hand, which gave him problems when fighting against the guy who taught him said technique. Not to mention it soon became a Dangerous Forbidden Technique that greatly damaged his hand the more he used it. In the final arc, however, this is averted, as he came up with a new variant that would allow him to hit just as hard but without the drawbacks.
• Saint Seiya: Seiya's master, Marin, taught her disciple this "If you meet someone stronger than you, attack his best weapon. If he punches hard, aim for his arms. If he kicks strong, aim for his legs. After you destroy it, you will be able to win with no trouble." Early on the series, Seiya met Bear Geki, a warrior had focused his training in reinforcing his arms to the point of he could easily throtle grizzly bears. As soon as Seiya managed breaking his arms, Geki was defenseless and the battle was over.
• Silver Spoon: Most of the students of Yezo High agricultural school have severely specialized knowledge relating to the jobs they wish to take as adults or the work their family does, on par with college students in their field. Just don't expect much with other subjects. Hachiken, as an academic Jack of All Trades, often ends up having to tutor his friends but can also organize their disparate skill sets into a cohesive team. (When it comes to pizza, anyway.)
• Sylphiel of Slayers is an extremely skilled White Magician Girl, but has absolutely no talent for offensive magic. Her attempt to cast Flare Arrow produced a weak and Painfully Slow Projectile that was shaped like a carrot. Later subverted when she learns to cast Dragon Slave of all things.
• SPY×FAMILY: Yor is an assassin, and one of the deadliest people on the planet, capable of effortlessly wiping out whole groups of armed combatants. Outside of that, she doesn't really have any skills at anything. As a result, the people she works with as part of her cover think she's The Ditz, and difficulty in being a good wife and mother is a major source of insecurity for her.
• Overcoming this is the main premise of We Never Learn. Rizu Ogata, Fumino Furuhashi and Uruka Takemoto are all unrivaled geniuses in certain fields (maths and science for Rizu; literature and the arts for Fumino; and athletics, especially swimming, for Uruka). However, Rizu and Fumino have average to poor grades in their other subjects (ironically, their worst subjects are the other's best subjects), while Uruka has poor grades in all of her academic subjects. Additionally, Rizu and Fumino want to pursue careers in the fields that they're worst at (psychology and astronomy, respectively), while Uruka won't be able to get the athletics scholarship she wants due to her poor grades. This leaves the protagonist Nariyuki Yuiga in the position of tutoring them so they can achieve their goals.
• Yu-Gi-Oh!:
  • Yami Marik's deck is tailor-made for fighting Yugi and no one else, so duelists like Mai and Joey give him more trouble (especially Joey, whose luck-based cards nullify Marik's control/torture theme; Joey himself may be terrified, but that doesn't change random chance—if Joey could've stayed conscious for 5 more seconds, he would've won).
  • Also invoked when Yugi faces the Rare Hunter who possesses three full sets of Exodia cards; as Yugi observed, the Hunter's reliance on Exodia (which produces an instant victory if all five cards are played at once) meant that he hadn't collected many other cards to use if Exodia wasn't an option. As a result, Yugi was able to defeat the supposedly unstoppable Exodia by preventing his opponent playing certain cards so that the Hunter would only be able to use pieces of Exodia rather than the full set. This gave Yugi time to set up a strategy that would allow him to render certain cards in the Hunter's deck useless and thus prevent him from playing Exodia at all. There's also the issue of having multiple copies of each Exodia piece in his deck; the Rare Hunter's attempt to draw new pieces when Yugi took out the ones in his hand often left him with duplicates, which Yugi exploited as part of his strategy.
  • Gozaburo Kaiba just did a bit of research into Duel Monsters before he challenged his former adopted son Seto to a final duel, and believed he just needed one powerful monster to defeat the second-best duelist in the world on his first game. While his chosen monster of Exodia Necross was powerful, there was basically nothing in his deck to back it up if Kaiba took that monster down, with the result that Kaiba just needed to keep the duel going long enough for him to deliver the vital blow.
  • Odion uses a deck of almost entirely Trap cards that generally works very well for him. Its glaring weakness is trap removal cards and more specifically Jinzo, a monster that destroys any and all Trap cards. Unluckily for him, Joey happens to own Jinzo, as he finds out during their duel.
• In Yuri is My Job!, protagonist Hime Shiraki's one real talent is playing the part of a cute girl. While it makes her very popular with her classmates, she struggles with her job at the Liebe Girls' Academy salon, in which she roleplays as a student at a prestigious all-girls school.
• In YuYu Hakusho The Movie: Poltergeist Report, Kuwabara is faced with a demon capable of copying opponents' Ki Manipulation, including his own reiki sword. Kuwabara pumps all his spirit energy into his sword so that the demon will do the same, then once they've both expended all their energy, the more physically capable Kuwabara puts him down with a simple haymaker.

Comic Books

• The DCU:
  • Aquaman: The Atlanteans were incredibly situational throughout most of the pre-Flashpoint continuity — forces to be reckoned with underwater, not so much out of their element. When Geoff Johns took over, they lost most if not all their out of water weaknesses, while their super strength additionally carried over.
  • Batgirl: Cassandra Cain, the second Batgirl, Sacrificed Basic Skill for Awesome Training; the language centers of her brain are dedicated to reading and processing human body language. This means she's a phenomenal martial artist, capable of reading a person's moves before they make them, but it leaves her brain wired wrong for any other kind of language, meaning she can barely speak and is even worse at reading. Several stories involve her roping civilians or less-skilled crimefighters into her cases simply because they involved reading at some point.
  • Doom Patrol: The Brain suffered from this in JLA: Year One, during a storyline that saw the post-Crisis early Justice League — consisting of The Flash, Green Lantern, Black Canary, Aquaman and the Martian Manhunter — and the Doom Patrol join forces to fight the Brotherhood of Evil after the Brain used advanced technology to take the Flash's legs, Black Canary's voice, the Manhunter's eyes and Green Lantern's right arm (and hence his ring) and graft them onto a body for himself. Despite having access to all those powers, the Brain still relied exclusively on the ring, which Aquaman noted was a key weakness as the Brain was unaware of the ring's time limitation and its vulnerability to yellow, to say nothing of underestimating his opponents' ability to work as a team and compensate for their weaknesses.
  • Legion of Super-Heroes:
    • Nemesis Kid has the power to develop a power capable of countering any other person: for instance, if he were fighting Superman, he'd gain the ability to create Kryptonite radiation. However, he can only counter one person at a time, meaning if he fights two people at once, he either gains only one power, short-circuits, or has to run for it. He also can't change the power he's chosen on the fly, which was what killed him: he was fighting the illusionist Princess Projectra and gave himself the power to see through illusions, so she simply used her martial arts skills to beat him to death.
    • Ultra Boy, also of the Legion, has all of Superman's abilities, but can only use them one at a time. This puts him on par with Big Blue, but unless his chosen power is invulnerability, he's no tougher than an ordinary human (and if it is, then he's got another problem).
  • Red Robin: The villain Recluse had replaced his fingers with implanted knife blades. While this made it easy for him to cut people it also explained his lack of a shirt: he literally couldn't put one on.
• Disney Ducks Comic Universe: In the story "The Duck Who Never Was", Donald Duck accidentally releases the Birthday Genie, who grants one wish when his lamp is touched by someone on their birthday. Donald unintentionally uses this wish to wish that he was never born. Fortunately, after he sees how terrible the world has turned out for his friends and family without him, Donald is able to make another wish to undo the first one, as the Birthday Genie clarifies that he doesn't just grant a single wish on a person's birthday but grants a wish each time they touch the urn on their birthday.
• Marvel Universe:
  • Captain Britain: As part of his Training from Hell, recurring villain Slaymaster repeatedly punched boulders with his left hand until his entire hand was covered in a thick callous, which he ground to a deadly point. He described the ordeal as a "ninja trick" and admitted that it had made his hand useful only as a weapon.
  • Daredevil: Zebediah Killgrave, a.k.a. the Purple Man, has incredibly powerful Compelling Voice powers, but that's it: he's otherwise a baseline human apart from being purple from head to toe. In the last issue of Alias, Jean Grey counteracts his powers and Jessica Jones lays him out with one punch, then adds a few more.
  • Shang-Chi: Razorfist had both hands removed and replaced with blades to maximize his combat ability. He now needs servants to feed him and attend to his basic personal hygiene. Plus, every time he's arrested, the blades are replaced with prosthetic hands to which he's unable to adjust, as shown in an issue of Toxin. Averted in the MCU, where he only has one hand replaced with a blade, leaving the other for normal use.
  • Spider-Man: This is the fatal flaw of Overdrive; he has the power to alter, transform, or improve any vehicle near him. This is incredibly useful... as long as there's some vehicles around for him to actually use. He also can't alter any other machines, just vehicles. This wouldn't be a problem if Overdrive knew anything about hand-to-hand combat, but he's a mechanic by trade and isn't very strong so he's useless without a vehicle around. Spidey and other heroes frequently beat him by either forcing him into an area away from any vehicles or simply waiting to ambush him; after all, he can't spend his whole life inside a car.
  • Wolverine is considered one of the best hand-to-hand combatants in the Marvel Universe, however, his Attack! Attack! Attack! style is only effective when combined with a Healing Factor that makes him basically invincible. When he loses it Black Panther, a barely enhanced human with an armoured suit, is able to easily defeat the guy who has gone toe-to-toe with The Incredible Hulk, because he has no defensive moves in his arsenal.
  • X-Men: The Dark Beast — an alternate version of long-time X-Man Beast from the Age of Apocalypse — suffers from this; where his 616 counterpart is an Omnidisciplinary Scientist, Dark Beast specialises in genetics. While this gives him a greater knowledge of genetics than the prime Beast, it hindered his attempts to pose as his counterpart on one occasion, as the X-Men expected him to have a broader range of knowledge than he actually did.
• Mega Man (Archie Comics): The comic features Crash Man, Spark Man, and Needle Man, who have drills, sparking rods, and needle-guns in place of actual hands. This makes them dangerous in combat, but incapable of performing practical tasks like lifting things. It also means that if their weapons are damaged, then they're helpless. They've formed something of an unofficial "No Hands Club" for robots with similarly unfortunate builds. (Fire Man also has no hands, but he seems to handle it better.)
• Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics):
  • The battle suit used by Eggman in issues 175-177 was designed specifically to outmatch Sonic, which it proceeded to do marvelously, even standing up to a Death or Glory Attack from a rip-roaring pissed Sonic that left Eggman worried that he might have pushed his luck too far before the mech managed to tank it. However, this meant that when the other Freedom Fighters, now freed from imprisonment and with no way of getting caught again, took it on working together, it went down in a matter of panels.
  • The various Metal Sonics used to be designed with extremely specific functions, but unfortunately they weren't competent outside of that function. This resulted in some very embarrassing defeats for Eggman, such as a Metal Sonic that was specifically designed to be good at fighting Sonic... only for Amy to come along and flatten it like an empty drink can with her hammer. Robotnik eventually learned his lesson from this; when he made a sentient, unique Metal Sonic, he focused on combining the best traits from all the previous models. He also gave Metal the data collected by previous models, allowing Metal Sonic to react properly whenever the heroes try an old trick. Thus where previous models were ineffectual after the first try, this one is a terrifying Implacable Man who can take on four people at once in a fight and still be strong enough for a race afterwards.

Fan Works

• All Mixed Up!: It's revealed that Odd Squad has many traditional methods that agents are taught and subsequently use to solve cases. This is a good thing if the case involves mathematics in some way or form, but the methods are completely ineffective on any cases that involve language. Likewise, every agent in Odd Squad is familiar with mathematics — it's their specialty, and since Individuality Is Illegal, agents who don't have math as their expertise are expected to have, at the very least, basic knowledge of it in due time. When Mariana Mag begins attacking Torontonians and Precinct 13579's agents, the latter can't figure out who the culprit is, nor can they figure out how the personal anagrammed items that the culprit's victims are turned into correlate with the victims themselves, because neither of them are familiar with the subject of language.
• In Ambition of the Red Princess:
  • Word of God states that Motoyasu, Itsuki, and Ren are hampered by both having just enough knowledge of the world they're summoned to that they don't seek out more information but also how they gained said knowledge. They all dismiss the idea of a tank like Naofumi being useful because of the games they played in their own worlds^note Ren played an Action RPG that encourages stealth, Itsuki only played single-player games and thus doesn't understand group raids, and Motoyasu was a casual who used gaming to have online dates..
  • Weiss is an incredibly skilled fencer. She also is very much unused to fighting people who use weapons significantly different to rapiers or who throw in punches and kicks when fighting. Notably, Weiss executes an impressive combination of attacks, which is stopped by Eclair's crossguard. It shows further when Weiss uses magic to change her rapier into first an arming sword and then a lance. Because she only trained with a rapier, she has almost no ability with her stronger magical weapons and Eclair easily handles each.
• and pins scream as they fall to the floor explains why Tsuna never showed any sign of his inborn Hyper Intuition until his series shifted from comedy to action: Tsuna had Hyper Intuition from the moment he was born, and couldn't turn it off. Hyper Intuition is incredibly useful for fights and avoiding assassination attempts, but it made him useless at school and sports because the unending Sensory Overload made it impossible for him to focus.
• In Atlas Strongest Tournament, Ran Biao trained her flame breath to be strong enough to melt Rarity's metal acupuncture needles; however, her reliance on this leaves her vulnerable to Rarity's diamond backup needles.
• In Avenger of Steel, the Jor-El hologram describes Zod as suffering from this, as Zod is automatically thinking of the repopulation of Krypton in terms of a military operation where he has to conquer territory and defeat an ‘enemy’ because he’s psychologically incapable of considering alternative diplomatic methods.
• The Italian remake of Battle Fantasia Project has the Invaders, powerful aliens whose physiology makes using explosions and fire against them worse than useless, as they multiply (production notes state it's the reason nobody just nuked them: many would die due the overpressure, but the multiplication would end with them being more numerous than before). On the other hand, their physiology offers no protection against magical attacks or even simple kinetic energy, meaning that, when fighting a competent human army, they are massacred by bullets, frag grenades, high-explosive shells detonated high enough they are hit only by the high-speed fragments, canister shots, and thermobaric weapons detonated high enough they are only hit by the overpressure, and a competent magical girl can take on large numbers of them (in fact their first attack was defeated by one single magical girl).
• In The Black Emperor, Nina lampshades that the Guren Mk. II relies so heavily on it's Radiant Wave Surger that said weapon getting damaged would cripple the machine.
• Naruto's clones explicitly state in Black Flames Dance in the Wind: Rise of Naruto that Team 10 is reasonably skilled when they can work together but individually, they can't even manage to be mediocre. Choji is a Mighty Glacier with no ranged abilities, Shikamaru is The Strategist but too weak to implement his strategies on his own, and Ino has horrible tunnel vision, causing her to focus on a single objective and ignore her surroundings.
• In Black Hole Heart, like all Inuzuka, Kiba relies heavily on his partner as part of his fighting style with some of his techniques being outright impossible to do alone. When Naruto scares Akamaru into submission, Kiba's left fighting at less than half strength.
• Blackened Skies has a non-combat-related example with Kaede, the Ultimate Pianist. For years, she was so singularly focused upon practicing music that she neglected other activities and potential hobbies, like watching TV or playing video games. This hampers her efforts to find common ground with her fellow students, despite her natural charm — it's tricky bonding over mutual interests when there's none to be found. This is only made worse by how her experiences in her last killing game transformed piano music into a Trauma Button for her, hampering her ability to use those interests as common ground.
• Noel Vermillion in BlazBlue Alternative: Remnant. She's primarily a gunner and long-range fighter. While she isn't completely helpless in close range, that's only when she has Bolverk, and it's stated that even Ruby, someone who can't fight well at all without Crescent Rose, would completely trump her in unarmed combat if they fought.
• Not exactly 'crippling', but the Stargate SG-1 fic Bless the Children — both the Gen and Ship version- see Daniel Jackson gain a child in the form of Danny, a clone of himself when Daniel was eight years old. When Danny spends time with Sam in her lab, she gives him some lessons in science which Danny affirms he found very interesting. Witnessing how Danny did in those lessons, Sam and Daniel speculate that Daniel's own studies just focused on archaeological-related sciences while he was growing up because he was explicitly following in his parents' footsteps, but he could have learnt more about the sciences Sam is interested in if he had applied himself. Throughout the fic, Jack has joked that Danny would end up doing Daniel and Sam's jobs when he grows up, and it is speculated that Danny could be a Master of All now that he has the resources of the SGC backing his future education compared to Daniel's reliance on scholarships.
• The Back to the Future/ X-Men Film Series crossover "BTTX" makes this a weakness of OC mutant Frieda Stamos, known as 'the Black Hole' for her ability to negate all active mutant powers in her vicinity. As a result of her continued reliance on her powers, she has virtually no hand-to-hand combat experience, and is taken off-guard when confronted by Nightcrawler as her own power only suppresses his ability to teleport while leaving him with his physical attributes such as his athletic abilities.
• Invoked in the Twilight fic Bonne Foi when Edward kills Jane in the final confrontation; with Bella protecting Edward from Jane’s powers, Jane is revealed to have virtually no experience at hand-to-hand combat, being totally dependent on her abilities to stop other vampires.
• Mentioned in The Chains of Youth when Hinata expresses surprise that Ino is on a team with her and Naruto rather than taking part in the usual Ino-Shika-Cho combination her clan is known for. Ino explains that the formation was retired before she was born because it was so famous that numerous groups came up with counters to it. One such group nearly cost Chouji's father his arm.
• Ash eventually realizes his team is too specialized in Challenger on both a whole and individual basis. On the whole, while he has a Pokémon of almost every type, he also doesn't have more than one of pretty much any of them, even though some might not be suited for certain situations. For example, his Charizard is a great flyer but much clumsier on land while also being his only fire type. On an individual basis, almost all of Ash's Pokémon are either Unskilled, but Strong or Weak, but Skilled and he's learned the hard way that neither cuts it once a trainer reaches a certain point.
• Code Geass: The Prepared Rebellion:
  • Lelouch notes that Rakshata's Knightmares tend to be focused on close-quarters combat with little ranged weaponry.
  • Desmond's Geass, rendering everyone in a given area asleep (or even comatose), is almost perfect for assassination missions with its only real drawbacks being that he can only affect one area at a time and sometimes it leaves him blind in one eye or deaf in one ear. But because it's so perfect for assassinations, unlike Rolo, Desmond never developed his skills and his over-reliance on it causes him to struggle when dealing with any significant resistance.
• Contract Labor: During their honor duel in chapter 21, Keitaro gets the better of Motoko by mixing in gut-punches with swordplay, exploiting the fact that Motoko has only been seriously trained in swordsmanship.
• In the Heroes/Twilight crossover "Dark Days", when the Cullens are helping the Volturi deal with a virus that turns vampires into feral monsters, it is noted that with Jane's ability useless against these vampires as they're basically already in pain from the virus, she has such poor combat experience that she has to be saved by Peter Petrelli as as infected vampire nearly kills her.
• Dekiru: The Fusion Hero!: This trope is actually discussed by Aizawa after Izuku goes through the Quirk Assessment Test without using Human Fusion and explains why to him (he regards it as a Dangerous Forbidden Technique and prefers not to use it unless absolutely necessary). Aizawa praises him for this because it shows he can be versatile with his Quirk, rather than a "one-trick pony" who could get potentially killed if there was no one around to fuse with. He further elaborates that if Izuku had used the technique in the middle of the test, Aizawa would've dispelled it and given him the same explanation (just not as nicely); if he had started out with using it, he would've been expelled on the spot, along with whichever friend that enabled him.
• The Hyuga clan in Destiny is a Hazy Thing are completely incapable of using anything but their signature Gentle Fist style due to centuries of inbreeding (according to Daiki, except Hinata's maternal grandmother, no one in the clan has had children with anyone but another Hyuga in at least 300 years), leaving them vulnerable to anyone who can counter their style.
• In Digimon Adventure 02: The Story We Never Told, while it isn’t exactly ‘crippling’, Izzy notes that Yolei is better at hacking computers than he is, as his own strengths focus on research and analysis of the systems they’re working with.
• Adrastia Zabini in A Discordant Note admits that after centuries of specializing, her magic is too geared towards sex and manipulation for her to be comfortable with anything else. Though part of it is her own choosing as she can spend the effort expanding her abilities but she's comfortable with her role and simply doesn't want to. The upside is that, when using her original wand which she'd wielded for centuries, her spells had become almost undetectable even when specifically checking with magic detection spells.
  • The Dothraki are remarked as being near unmatched as light cavalry but have focused so heavily on it that on a battlefield unsuited for cavalry, such as mountain steppes, they're completely crippled as a fighting force.
• DNMC: D'Arg has spent the better part of his life training to fight against Grimm. However, the first time he goes up against a human opponent, it's pretty clear he only learned how to fight against Grimm and not people.
• The Dragon and the Bow: Merida's overreliance on ranged weapons. It's pointed out by several characters (and demonstrated by Mor'du and Astrid) that a bow and arrow isn't going to do much good once your opponent gets within a certain range.
• Torhu and Mineta in The Emerald Phoenix do the worst of everyone during the physical tests due to relying too heavily on their Quirks. Except for Mineta using his balls for the side-hop challenges, the two are among the worst performances on every test. Contrast, some like Camie also have Quirks useless for the tests but still do well through physical conditioning to make up for it.
• In Facing Reality, of Team Cap, both Steve and Wanda focused exclusively on their combat abilities while getting evaluated under the Accords. As a result, they don't see any missions for some time since their only skills on record revolve around fighting. In contrast, Sam, Scott, and Natasha all had multiple other skills evalutated such as negotiating, search and rescue, or planning which gets them sent out on missions much sooner as they have more diverse resumes and thus are considered more viable for non-combat missions.
• In For Love of Magic, the Unforgivables are useful against a single enemy (provided you hit them) but each one can only hit a single target and both the Cruciatus and Imperius curses require the caster maintain them and thus prevents them from casting other spells. Against more than a single enemy, only the Killing Curse has any actual use but only a little.
• In Fractured (SovereignGFC) and its sequel Origins, a whole class of ships falls into this trope. "Aspirations Toward Infinity" (lame names aside) ships are designed around their Reaper-killing guns, leaving them Point Defenseless and very un-battlestar-like compared to more versatile Star Destroyers — no starfighters here!
• Arjuna Belaji in Harry Potter and the Lack of Lamb Sauce is established early on as The Ace when it comes to magical cooking. However, when challenges in the MagicChef competition forbid the use of magic, she struggles mightily. Likewise, Hermione has far more difficulty in any course where simply memorizing the textbook won't suffice. She has an Oh, Crap! moment when Professor Ramsay states that when it comes to NEWT level potions, textbooks are merely a crutch.
• Briefly discussed and averted in Harry Potter and the Nightmares of Futures Past; when Harry starts teaching his friends hand-to-hand combat, Hermione initially specializes in aikido, but after Ginny joins their lessons and manages to outmanoeuvre Hermione in their training fights, Harry encourages Hermione to branch out as her favoured combat strategy wouldn't work on Ginny.
• In Hella Potter and the Reincarnated OC, Treowe leaves Hella tied up in the Room of Requirement with her wand apparently nearby to drive home how much she and other wizards overly rely on their wand. The wand was a fake, but she could have asked the room for any number of bladed instruments to cut herself free or a golem to do it for her. Likewise Hella could have used her Metamorphmagus abilities to shrink out of her bonds or called for Dobby to free her. But because she thought her wand was nearby, she wasted her entire hour trying to get to it, only to realize it was merely a stick shaped like her wand.
• In Horseshoes and Hand Grenades, Sonada's fight against Ohsugi had her use her ponytail (which acted like a poisonous scorpion stinger) to attack. However, Ohsugi's weapons — a finned glove and slippers glued to craft foam) was upgraded by Nadeshiko and SOLU and once he uses them to remove the ponytail, it was all too easy for Ohsugi to punch her lights out.
• Lampshaded in I Still Say it Looks like a Nail when Anise claims to be invulnerable to physical damage while using a Goa'uld personal force field. Jack knows full well they only stop energy-based attacks or fast-moving objects; he once got around such a shield by walking through it and stabbing the Goa'uld using it.
• In Infinity, Yuuno's defenses prove completely impenetrable to anything Tsukuyomi can throw at him (much like as against Vita, in the series), but his offensive abilities are too limited and weak to threaten her, either.
  • Lindy, as you might have gathered from the fact that she sealed the Garden of Time in the original anime, specializes in sealing and energy manipulation, and can do very little with normal combat. Chapter 25 demonstrates how little this matters when you have a plan and you are very, very, angry at someone.
  • Hayate as well, just like in the series.
• In Jaden's Harem: Return of the Supreme King, Zana's deck revolves entirely around using Power Bond to summon Cyber End Dragon then winning before Power Bond's secondary effect activates^note Power Bond allows a player to summon a Machine type fusion monster and double its original attack but during the end phase, inflicts damage equal to the summoned monster's original attack. If someone manages to prevent said combo, such as removing Power Bond from play, her deck is completely crippled.
• Kokuten:
  • Naori Uchiha is a strong sensor type, which is great when it comes to rapidly locating key targets such as kid!Naruto but is disastrous when she has to fend off said target's rescuer. It's stated nobody has seen Naori fight. Ever.
  • Fukurou Uchiha is a specialized tracker. During the coup, her position is one of the safest ones. Downplayed given Fukurou can fare relatively well in combat (she has ANBU-level skills after all); it's just not her strongest point. She's involved in the attack to the ANBU headquarters only because she volunteered.
• When the League of Shadows comes to kidnap the Self-Insert in Legal Crimes because he knows the formula for Super-Speed, their gear is specifically tailored for dealing with speedsters and he's recently given up his Super-Speed for strength and durability. While they do catch him, they're stuck afterwards as he's now glued to a cement floor and they have no heavy machinery to move him.
• In The Lost Kingdom, when the group travel to the kingdom of the Blood King, one of the guards is a fae with Elemental Powers. While this fae can control all four classic elements of Earth, Air, Fire and Water, he admits that he tends to focus on fire in a fight, and so doesn't use his abilities to their fullest potential.
• The biggest weakness of the Pangea Alliance in the Mass Effect story Mesozoic Effect. Their technology is several years beyond what the Council has, but all of their ships and defenses are designed to fight Reapers. They have serious problems trying to adjust their weapons and tactics for conventional battles.
• Metal Gear: Green: The Hero Support Item industry makes support items to heroes. However, each support item is tailor-made to the specific hero, meaning that a support item for Endeavor would not work for any other hero. Combined by the MSF's arms race being largely unopposed means there's several years before they could create something that'll be on par with the MSF.
  • Likewise, heroes largely specialize in melee combat. Against gun-wielding combatants, they are at a major disadvantage.
• The Pokémon: The Series fic More than Meets the Eye invokes this as the reason Misty defeats her ex-fiancé Chris in the Whirl Cup; while Chris specifically prepared to fight Misty's Mega Gyarados with a Totem Araquanid that could take most of Gyarados's attacks and counter them, he was unprepared for her to borrow Ash's Greninja, who is able to evade the larger Pokémon's attacks and strike back with more evasive methods.
• My Hero Academia: Unchained Predator: The Steel Sabers specialize in fighting heroes, which is effective when up against a hero like All Might. Against the Doom Slayer, a man who's policy when it comes to The Legions of Hell and now villains is kill first, ask questions never, they are at a major disadvantage. Especially if the man is clad head to toe in indestructible armor and outguns the whole damn planet.
• Kyoshun Keiji from Naruto: the Secret Songs of the Ninja has "unbalanced" eyes that give him vision like an eagle at long range. Combined with his almost supernatural abilities with shuriken, he's arguably among the best shuriken users in the entire world, despite being only a genin. However, the drawback of this is that he can't focus his eyes on moving objects that are too close to him — on his first encounter with his new teammates, he went to shake hands with Naruto and missed. Predictably, this makes him completely pants at taijutsu and nearly completely incapable of defending himself at close range. Also, he's only good with shuriken, being average to poor with other thrown weapons such as kunai.
• In The Necromancer, during the final battle, Sauron may have regained a physical form, but he has spent so long using his powers to fight that he doesn’t have any actual skill at swordplay, where Aragorn has fought for years.
• In the How to Train Your Dragon fic "Once More Unto the Sky, Dear Friends", when Hiccup and the other Dragon Riders find themselves back in their teenage bodies at the beginning of the first film, Hiccup muses that Berk at this time is so focused on defending themselves against dragons that it’s embarrassingly easy for humans to get to the dragon training arena without being spotted.
• In Opening Dangerous Gates, a demon trio tailors their abilities to serve as a Man of Kryptonite against Laxus. They then discover that they aren't really good at fighting anybody else.
• The Descendants series "Package Deal" focuses on Mal and Evie having a prior relationship on the Isle of the Lost, so when Mal starts dating Ben she eventually persuades him to let Evie join the relationship. While Mal and Evie are each the children of Queens, since Evie's mother focused on teaching her how to please her future husband she doesn't have any real idea how to actually be a queen herself, with the result that when the three take the throne Mal is the one who actually acts as Auradon's queen. However, Evie instead takes on the roles of royal tailor and being the more full-time parent to her and Mal's daughters (Ben and Mal are still involved in raising the children as well, but Evie is the one most regularly available).
• Izuku in A Parable of Talents is a fairly good fighter but focuses entirely on striking, leaving him vulnerable to grappling. Mina lampshades how ridiculous it is that Izuku would have to increase his Super-Strength to throw off the likes of Toga and Camie when both are girls who weigh less than he does.
• Jaune in The Profession ARC spent years as a Huntsman's apprentice, learning pretty much all there is to know about killing Grimm. Besides having little real-world knowledge that doesn't revolve around killing Grimm, Jaune struggles to fight human opponents. His teammates note times when he falls back to defend from a coming attack when it'd be smarter to push through, all because Jaune is used to fighting the far stronger but dumber Grimm.
• Multiple Naruto fanfics, most notably Scorpion's Disciple, have pointed out Sasori's reliance on poisoned weapons as this by having him fight someone completely immune to poisons (generally Orochimaru or Naruto). Whether he lives to learn from such a weakness however varies from story to story.
• It starts out looking like this will be the case for one of the Angels in Shinji And Warhammer 40 K, as it tries and fails to use Eva-focused attacks like venomous spikes on Magnos Tancred (which is basically a tank with feet, and has none of the squishy biological components that were being targeted). Then it disgorges an army of relatively tiny monsters, which kill two-thirds of Magnos Tancred's crew and begin slaughtering their way through Tokyo-3.
• Actively averted by the Genin teams in Son of the Sannin. While each of the graduated teams in the Konoha Ninja Academy specializes in a specific area for missions, none of the teams fall into this when it comes to actual combat. Case in point, Sasuke is placed in a team where every other member is a medic-nin.
• In Spider-Man: Finding Home, it's noted that Clint has no real idea how to deal with street-level crime such as what Spider-Man usually deals with. While he's an experienced ex-S.H.I.E.L.D. agent, Clint’s actions as an Avenger and an agent focused on larger targets, and as Ronin he went after the heads of criminal organisations rather than general street criminals.
• Tangled In Time has Ganondorf Invokes this by focusing on training Link only in magic so that if Link ever goes against him, he has no weapons skill with which to use the Master Sword or other tools to oppose him.
• In A Teacher's Glory the Third Hokage's Fatal Flaw is that he is better with jutsu and war than policy — a bad flaw for a political leader. Similarly, Hiashi and Neji both suffer during the invasion due to flaws in their fighting styles and mindsets.
• In Tealove's Steamy Adventure, Snowcatcher has the special talent of catching snowflakes. When Tealove asks her to come along on her adventure (to find a magic tea plant in a distant mountain range), Snowcatcher is the first to point out that she wouldn't be remotely helpful on the trip. Naturally, she comes along anyway.
• In Team 8, avoiding this is why Kurenai requests to have Naruto in her genin team as opposed to Kiba - the plan for a scout team would have made them very good at that task but visibly worse at other tasks: having Naruto there would give them greater flexibility and fighting power.
• Invoked in The Third Life of Steve Rogers when Steve has a chance to talk with Howard Stark about the super-soldier-serum samples he created. While Steve's knowledge of the five Winter Soldiers that would be created by the serums led him to believe the serums were flawed, as it turns out Howard created the new batches by mapping each bag to the specific DNA of a chosen subject (based on how much they reminded Howard of Steve himself), with the result that administering the serums to someone other than the intended subject caused mental instability.
• In This Bites!, a One Piece fanfic, Straw Hat strategist Jeremiah Cross concedes to a gathering of allied pirates that this is Luffy's weakness, as in canon. His unflagging determination, Super-Strength and Super-Toughness make him an incredible physical threat that few people have any hope of handling, at least outside of the New World. On the other hand, his strength exceeds his smarts, and his tactical abilities pretty much start and end at "punch it" and "come up with new ways to punch it". As a result, he does really badly against opponents who rely on outsmarting people or otherwise using esoteric abilities that Luffy can't just punch his way through. He specifically cites Captain Foxy, who combines dirty tricks with a Devil Fruit that enables him to temporarily freeze people and objects in time, which Foxy knows how to handle very effectively, as an example of the kind of opponent that Luffy struggles against.
• In To Hell and Back (Arrowverse), Barry Allen at one point expresses concern that his new foe Zoom has too great an advantage given his superior speed to Barry's, but Iris encourages Barry to instead consider it a weakness, as Zoom only has his speed as an asset where Barry has his training from the League of Assassins and his allies in the Justice League to counter Zoom's raw speed.
• In Valkyrie on Fire, it is often noted that Katniss relies so much on her archery skills that she's basically useless when she has to rely on hand-to-hand combat, although she learns enough from Glimmer in particular that she can at least hold her own for a few minutes so long as she has allies.
• Vow of the King:
  • Zommari admits that he focused so heavily on his speed and Amor that his more basic skills such as Cero and Bala are far weaker than they should be. This comes back to bite him when facing an enemy who can keep up with his speed and has a way to negate his Amor.
  • Toshiro learns the hard way that he let his basic skills atrophy when he's temporarily unable to use his zanpakuto's ice powers. Since he gained his bankai faster than most shinigami attain shikai, he ended up using it as a crutch and found himself without the solid foundation most captains possess.
• In The Way of the Apartment Manager, OC Yukiko is highly skilled with genjutsu for a mere genin, more so than most chuunin. However, she's so pathetic with ninjutsu that she can't even manage the easiest fire jutsu which is designed to function like a match. The best she usually manages is blowing unusually dry air. Meanwhile her temporary teammate Naga is a powerful taijutsu user who utterly demolishes a chuunin specializing in taijutsu but has no real skill in ninjutsu, genjutsu, weapon use, or strategy.
• You know how Hayate's mentioned about in Anime and Manga? This comes back to bite her in the ass in White Devil of the Moon: since she's no good in close quarters single combat, Queen Beryl easily curb stomps her and steals the Jewel Seeds Hayate was holding.

Films — Animation

• In Batman: Soul of the Dragon , King Snake is capable of fighting while blindfolded. However, this is all he does in his fighting. As such, he can misinterpret mundane sounds as someone trying to sneak up on him, such as when Richard Dragon threw stones on the ground to make it sound like he's trying to directly sneak up on him. He's then promptly killed by Richard Dragon in the pond when he mistakes splashing stones for a sneak attack while his actual sneak attack came from above.
• Krushauer from Incredibles 2 is established to have the power to crush anything using his telekinesis. Mr. Incredible asks Krushauer to un-crush the hallway he blocked off before, which perplexes the hero, who says asking him to un-crush something is like him asking Mr. Incredible to "un-punch" something.
• The emotions of Inside Out are great at making Riley express the emotions they represent... but are incapable of making her express other emotions. That's what the other four emotions are for. This becomes a problem when Joy and Sadness are absent from the control room: the other three emotions attempt to cover for them but are completely incapable. On a larger note, the whole movie is about the ramifications of this. Joy is generally Riley's dominant emotion, to the point where she often naively shoves the other emotions, and especially Sadness, aside. Because she can only manifest one emotion, she tries to keep Riley happy even in upsetting situations, which doesn't allow Riley to process things like disappointment and loss. Joy's Character Development across the movie involves realizing that the other emotions are equally important and allowing them to perform their proper roles, which in turn allows Riley to become more honest and function in a mentally healthy way.
• In The Lion King (1994), Scar believes he should be king of the Pride Lands on the grounds that he was far more intelligent that his brother, Mufasa. However, while he did prove cunning in his scheme to murder Mufasa without anyone knowing of his involvement, that was as far as his intelligence went as he didn't think to put any thought into being an actual ruler, with the Pride Lands falling into ruins within the few years under his reign. It appears there's a vast difference between intelligence and wisdom.
• Wreck-It Ralph:
  • Combined with Blessed with Suck, the fact that Felix's hammer can fix anything. The problem is, fixing is all it can do. When he tries to use it to break loose prison bars, he simply makes them stronger. With his hammer as his only weapon, Felix is at more than a bit of a disadvantage by the climax of the movie, where he's outside of his game (i.e. is perfectly capable of dying) and being attacked by mindless killing machines. Luckily he never has to find out a way to protect himself as he's with Calhoun, who has a gun, and not long after she runs out of ammo, Ralph saves the day.
  • Ralph has the opposite problem; he can only wreck things, which in his own game makes him dangerous to be around and unpopular with the Nicelanders. Once thrust into the plot of the movie though, wrecking becomes very useful.
• Zootopia: The ranks of the ZPD are filled with animals of various sizes. Extra Large (elephants, rhinos, polar bears), Large (lions, tigers), Medium (rams, wolves) and Small (bunny, fox). The trope comes into play when the responding or assigned officer is inappropriate for the task at hand. During the Weaselton chase, Judy is clearly better suited for pursuit than Officer McHorn. Yet later in the movie, Judy is shown struggling to provide crowd control at Gazelle's peace rally. The city also has large Extra Small (mice, lemmings) communities where even Judy is several stories tall and which have seemingly been abandoned to mafia control.

Films — Live-Action

• Bird Box: The creatures can drive anyone who looks upon them to suicide, but despite seemingly being physical beings, they can't so much as break a normal glass window to get to their prey. This forces them to rely quite heavily, intentionally or not, on people with mental disabilities who upon seeing a creature become psychotically compelled to force others to see them as well.
• Chickens in the Shadows: After Toasters takes off, Moose gets drafted into (barely) playing keyboard bass with a Chopin cover band. The other keyboardist—the only one playing for most of their set—suggests that they broaden out to Mozart and Mendelssohn, but he gets shouted down.
• In The Gamers: Dorkness Rising, Joanna creates a fighter character for Dungeons & Dragons with feats for winning initiative, making high-damage critical hits, and getting extra attacks every time she fells an enemy. As a result, her character is excellent at cleaning out hordes of minor enemies before anyone else can move. However, she has low armor class and hit points, so tough enemies who can weather a critical hit or two, like bosses, can take her out easily. In fact, there is exactly one combat encounter in the adventure against anything that isn't totally immune to them. Note that this example is not presented as crippling overspecialization within the movie, but rather as a really clever build with which the newbie proves her worth and abilities. The downside is not touched upon until near the end of the movie, where she is nearly taken out by one hit by the mini-boss.
• Happy Gilmore: The titular character, in both his sports. His hockey suffers when he builds his slapshot to the exclusion of all else, and his golf game suffers when he refuses to train his short game and relies on his extremely long drive. He gets better at the golf side and accepts training, though.
• In Quigley Down Under, Marston assumes Quigley's refusal to carry a backup weapon to his extended rifle and dismissal of revolvers as something he "never had much use for" mean that he's only effective at sniping. Averted. Quigley is actually a damn good shot with a revolver as well as a fantastically quick draw. He just prefers the rifle, and is good enough with it that it's been a long time since anyone with a weapon and a mind to use it got into revolver range.
• Man of Steel: This trope comes into play for Kryptonians the moment they’re born. With the exception of Kal-El/Clark, all Kryptonians are genetically hardwired into the role they’re placed in, making it impossible for them to pursue another goal in life if it’s unrelated to that role. General Zod and his followers were born to protect Krypton, even orchestrating a rebellion to ensure the planet’s survival. After seeing the remains of their destroyed homeworld, they set their sights on making a new Kryton to protect. Zod ultimately decides to turn Earth into a new Krypton by terraforming it, killing all life in the process. The moment Zod is left with no way to fulfill his life purpose of protecting Krypton after Superman ruins his terraforming plan, he snaps.
• The Replacements (2000): Clifford Franklin has this problem. He has amazing speed, but terrible hands.
• Clubber Lang of Rocky III. His boxing style relies solely on hard, crushing hooks. Which is why when Rocky gets a little training and makes him go a few rounds, he's completely exhausted by round 3. Leading to his defeat.
• Star Wars:
  • Invoked by the Separatist Droid Army: given there have been many droid rebellions in the past, almost all Separatist droids were designed to excel at exactly one job and suck at everything else while the B1 was made versatile but very fragile and so easy to take out it's almost impossible to only partially damage (as if it was only partially damaged it could have got ideas). As such, if the droids started rebelling and the other precautions failed they could be still taken out with relative ease by just targeting the most fragile ones and then picking apart the others.
  • Master Qui-Gon Jinn's death in The Phantom Menace was the result of this. Like Yoda, Jinn specialized in the Ataru lightsaber form, a fast-paced and physically taxing form utilizing acrobatics to overwhelm an opponent's defenses. As such, prolonged combat, confined spaces, and compromised defense were the form's weak points which Darth Maul took full advantage of, as well as Jinn's advanced age lessening his stamina. As a result of this, Obi-Wan dedicated himself to mastering the Soresu form and overcoming its weaknesses in order to learn from Jinn's mistakes.
  • Master Kit Fisto's death in Revenge of the Sith was a mix of this and trying to punch way above his weight. Fisto specialized in the Shii-Cho form, the most basic style which was best suited for defending against multiple opponents rather than one-on-one combat. While his mastery of the form made him highly unpredictable, its poor utility in single combat led to him almost getting killed by Ventress in The Cestus Deception before being finished off by Darth Sidious at the war's end.
  • Star Wars: The Last Jedi has the Mandator IV Siege Dreadnought, the enormous flagship of the First Order (bar the Supremacy, which is more like a mobile space station). It's eight kilometers long with over a hundred times the volume of a standard Star Destroyer. Almost all of that goes to the massive Wave-Motion Gun situated on the ship's underside, which is capable of outputting 85 megatons a second, or literally thousands of times stronger than standard capital ship weaponry in Star Wars. Poe says it could demolish entire fleets alone. However, this comes at a hefty cost: the ship devotes almost all of its power to that one gun, so it has no shielding whatsoever (especially bad when it has a massive weak point over a mile in diameter that will destroy the whole ship if it hit with just about anything), can't maneuver, and has no other weapons besides a bare handful of (ineffective) anti-fighter guns. Also, the gun is too big to be turreted, so the entire ship has to be turned to aim it. As a matter of comparison, a standard Imperial-class Star Destroyer 1/100 its size can output nowhere near that much firepower, but is maneuverable for its size, has shielding that can take a few hits from its own weapons, has a much more comprehensive point-defense suite, and has 135 heavy cannons mounted throughout its profile, mostly in broadside mounts on either side.
  • Similarly is the Xyston-class Star Destroyer from Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker which, due to its glaring weakness, is only good for destroying a planet. Since even a humble X-Wing can destroy one of these monstrosities in one or two shots to the massive unprotected cannon on its hull, they are the Glassest of Cannons and utterly useless in a firefight or really for anything else than coming in hot and taking out a planet. During the Battle of Exegol these things are taken out by the dozens and the only reason they are in any way a threat to the Alliance fleet is due to the absolute sheer number of them.
  • Emperor Palpatine can only shoot lighting at Rey at the climax of the movie. Despite "being all the Sith", he has forgotten all about his other Force powers.
• Tremors 2: Aftershocks: Burt Gummer, Crazy Survivalist par excellance, unintentionally inflicts this on himself; he came to Mexico expecting to fight the subterranean Graboids, and his loadout favors penetration over ammunition capacity. When the smaller, faster, and much more numerous Shriekers enter the scene, he is caught flat-footed and barely escapes an ambush. Being the kind of guy he is, he takes it rather hard.^note  This is explained and hand waved by the fact that Graboids are creatures that predate the fossil record and likely have been relegated to myths by the time written history was becoming a thing so no one could have possibly known anything about their life cycle.
  Burt: I am completely out of ammo. [Beat] That's never happened to me before.

Jokes

• A man was working in an office overlooking a park. Over the course of a day he saw two city park workers — one would dig a hole, and then the other would fill it in. This went on all morning, so the man wandered down on his lunch break to ask about it. "Well," said one of the workers "I dig the holes, Charlie puts the tree in, and then Bob here fills them in. Thing is, Charlie's sick today."
  • Funnily enough, this is a bit Truth in Television at times: sometimes union rules make it so that the guy who drives the truck isn't allowed to take the box off the truck and must wait for the one who can to arrive — useful to keep people from being pressed into doing a ton of work that is outside what was agreed to, for little or no further compensation, but sometimes in certain situations it can get crazy nitpicky.
  • Less charitably, some unions and other organizations invoke this trope to create jobs. The term is feather-bedding.
  • This can even be as specific as the type of joints/connections used in a desk or other furniture. This can lead to situations where the first worker disassembles the desk partially, then finds a joint he's not certified to work with; they then call in someone else to undo that joint; the first worker comes back and finishes disassembling it; then another worker packs it up and moves it to the new location; the first worker starts to reassemble it; the second worker assembles the problem connection; and finally, the first worker finishes assembling the desk. That's seven steps to move a single desk, involving at least three different workers. And they wonder why costs are so high...
• Finnish joke: Why do the Finnish police officers always go on pairs? One can read and the other can write.
  • Subversion: Why do the Soviet militsiya go in three? One can read, one can write and one watches those dangerous intellectuals.
• An old Russian joke: what's narrow medical specialization? Two nurses giving a person an enema; the first one knows how and the second one knows where.

Literature

• All The Skills - A Deckbuilding LitRPG: The lower a card's rank, the more overspecialized it is. Common cards, in particular, tend to be either weak, high mana cost, or have extremely limited effects—or all three. However, Arthur repeatedly reminds himself that every card has a use, and finds a few. For example, a card that can activate or deactivate any card, but only in its user's Heart Deck, sounds useless. Unless you happen to have a Trap card with an annoying activation.
• Animorphs:
  • The Arn were masters of bioengineering and genetics, even able to quickly alter their own physical structure in a matter of days to ensure that the Yeerks couldn't take them as hosts and create the Hork-Bajir to essentially be their planet's gardeners, but they were apparently useless in virtually every other field of science. Quafijinivon, the last known Arn, had to steal a Yeerk ship to fly to Earth to get help, since his race never had the technology to build more of their own, and he has no ability to scan for the Hidden Supplies left behind by Aldrea and Dak, the last leaders of resistance on the planet.
  • Visser Three is an unmatched battle commander, but completely out of his depth when directing a stealth invasion. The Animorphs have such success largely because of Visser Three's incompetence in trying to do things subtly. Tellingly, things get much harder for them in the end run as the war gets more and more open.
  • Visser One is the exact inversion of her rival Visser Three's overspecialization. Put her in charge of a stealthy invasion, as she initially was with Earth, and Edriss will deliver results every time. But put her in charge of a military campaign, as the Council of Thirteen idiotically decided to do twice, and all the cunning wit in the world won't save her. Ironically, this serves to heighten her role as an evil Foil to Marco (the son of her host body), who gladly serves as The Lancer of the Animorphs because he knows himself well enough to know he doesn't have the chops to lead the team.
  • In Book 37, Rachel at one point orders the team to all use polar bear morphs for maximum shock and awe. She soon realizes the problems with this, first that none of them use the polar bear as their primary morph so none of them are overly skilled with it. More importantly, there's no variety to their morphs, ultimately allowing Visser Three to drive off them all with a single morph perfectly suited to counter them: one that gives off great heat and stench.
• Beast Tamer: Fairies are masters of magic but, unlike dragons, are Squishy Wizards. It is for this reason that a Shadow Knight, a mid-level monster that possesses "Complete Magic Attack Nullification" as an inherent trait, is a particular threat to them when it otherwise wouldn't pose much trouble to one of the Strongest Species.
• In The Book of Five Rings, Miyamoto Musashi criticizes at great length schools who teach only one weapon, or whose style relies on the use of a specific weapon. This overemphasis leaves the fighter unable to use the most advantageous weapon(s) available for the circumstances. He even discouraged over-reliance on the nitouken form, which he had formulated.
• The Book of Swords has three primary examples. The first being the sword of heroes, which if not used against dragons just acts like a very well crafted sword. The second is the sword of siege, which if not used against earth or stone, acts likewise. This is from a series of books where comparatively speaking, the most powerful of these swords had the power to kill deities. Since every sword has a Necessary Drawback, Overspecializing also seems like not too big a deal after a while... until the wielder of Shieldbreaker needs to fight unarmed opponents.
• The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant: Happens to some Insequent in The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. They gain their powers through knowledge, so an Insequent who studies only one or two specific things may be powerless in situations not involving them. For example, the Harrow has made a study of the Demondim and related creatures, meaning he can tear through them like wet tissue paper all day — but he goes down like a chump against a Kastenessen-powered Roger Covenant.
• The Camp Half-Blood Series: This is a general problem for half-bloods (demigod children of mortals and gods); their brains are hard-wired to read Ancient Greek and with extra-sensory perception on the battlefield... which leads to problems when they need to read something other than Ancient Greek and concentrate on a single task at hand.
• Cradle Series:
  • The Sacred Valley tests children to determine their affinity for sacred arts, and then they train only in those types of arts their entire lives. Yerin says she'd like to kill all the elders in the Valley for that garbage. In the outside world, you're considered a child if you haven't mastered techniques from all the types.
  • The Blackflame royal family cultivated Iron bodies that would improve the already incredible offensive power of the Blackflame Path. This backfired as the flames ate away at their minds and bodies; in a world where a sacred artist can still be in fighting shape at age one hundred, they were practically paralyzed at age sixty. Part of the reason Eithan gave Lindon an Iron body with such an overpowered Healing Factor was to handle the black flames.
  • Pure madra, the kind everyone is born with, is highly effective at disrupting other forms of madra… but can't be used for anything else, which is why almost everyone aligns their madra to a Path almost as soon as they can walk.
  • A double example with Yerin. Training under the Sword Sage made her one of the finest swordfighters in the world (which is saying something), but all he taught her was swordfighting and the absolute necessities for day-to-day survival. She doesn't even know how to read. In addition, her Path Of The Endless Sword, though powerful, is entirely dependent on proximity to swords: she is much less effective if her enemy doesn't have an edged weapon, and if she doesn't have a sword she is crippled.
• Isaac Asimov's The Dead Past: Nimmo used to give his nephew, Foster, lectures on how studying one specific field of science has made for a culture of narrow focus, praising the idea of being a science writer (like him), because it means you must learn a bit of everything. Foster's counter to this idea is that such specialization is needed to advance in a field since there's too much to learn. The climax reveals that this overspecialization was a deliberate effort on the part of the world government to make suppressing certain fields easier.
• Domina: The McDowell gun company is known for absolutely bizarre design decisions, such as a collapsible sniper rifle with the stopping power of a BB gun, a pistol with enough recoil to break the shooter's arms, and a shotgun designed for firing rockets. The original owners are referred to as crazy by absolutely everyone, even their surviving heirs. However, their weapons have apparently found popularity among monster slayers, who often find a niche where they are useful.
• The Dresden Files:
  • In the novel Proven Guilty, Daniel escapes from Hammerhands by climbing into the treehouse, figuring his handless pursuer can't follow him up a ladder.
  • This is one of the reasons why Harry was able to defeat Hannah Ascher in Skin Game even though she is far better than Harry with fire magic. While she is strong and having her magic capabilities buffed by Lasciel she is both inexperienced and is, most importantly, only thinking offensively. This is in contrast to Harry, who is both experienced in magical combat and experienced in fighting both offensively and defensively which means he is able to block and redirect Hannah's magic towards the roof of the cave, resulting in several tons of rock falling on top of her. This is partially subverted in that Harry is explicitly stated to have more raw power than Hannah Ascher, her inexperience and overspecialization creates a problem for her only because they're fighting indoors and she's throwing around crazy amounts of fire. Harry beats her by taking advantage of that but he also demonstrates that he can just blast her out of his way with magical brute force.
  • People with more minor magical talents often fall into this category:
    • In Skin Game, Harry explicitly calls Binder a one-trick pony. He has the ability to to summon a number of identical demons referred to as "Suits" from the Nevernever. They follow his orders and can use firearms, which makes Binder a very effective mercenary, able to provide a squad of handy, disposable troops on relatively short notice. However this is the only magic he can perform and he is otherwise a totally average person, meaning he personally isn't much of a threat to the average monster or wizard.
    • The werewolves in the series have only one ability: turning into a wolf (or something close enough to a wolf). They can switch back and forth at will, and still retain human intelligence, but have no other remarkable abilities to speak of. That said, being able to turn into a very large, intelligent wolf is a pretty effective trick, at least when dealing with the lower end of supernatural monsters.
    • Mortimer Lindquist is an ectomancer, a conjurer of spirits. Harry mentions (and Ghost Story proves) that Mort could go toe-to-toe with Harry in a contest of raw power, and Harry is considered one of the most powerful wizards of his generation. However, Mort has no real abilities outside of his ability to commune with the spirits of the dead.
    • The Paranet Papers mention a certain minor talent with X-Ray Vision. However, it only works on drywall.
• Dungeon Crawler Carl encounters a large party that is entirely based on the charisma of its leader, Hekla, and her magical unlimited-ammunition semi-automatic crossbow. The more women join the party, the faster and stronger the crossbow becomes, until it's a case of "point it and bosses die." As a result, Hekla has rocketed up to number two on the top ten crawler list, but the party has almost no other serious combat-ready members, just some underlevelled healers and mages. When Hekla is killed by surprise and the crossbow looted, the party quickly falls apart.
• Discussed in Jean Auel's Earth's Children series. Woolly mammoths, by becoming so specialized and adapted to such a narrow climate range, ensured they'd survive and exploit a unique niche on the dry, cold ice age tundra, but such specialization also meant that warmer, wetter climates would be utterly devastating. Furthermore, the Neanderthal Clan was in danger of becoming extinct because the men could not learn how to gather and cook food and the women could not learn how to make weapons and hunt, which was why they had to live together in groups. A lone Neanderthal was a dead Neanderthal.
• Three examples from The Elenium and The Tamuli by David Eddings:
  • When the Zemochs first encountered The Church Knights and their heavy armor in combat, they didn't understand that the purpose of it was protection; they simply knew it made the enemy look fearsome, so they made their own armors with serrated blades and other imposing-looking additions. This caused two problems: it still didn't provide any protection, and all the protrusions served to help guide weapons to vulnerable spots.
  • In The Sapphire Rose when the hero's party are approaching the villain's stronghold, they come across a rank of warriors in armor in formation. Upon engaging them, they figure out that they're actually animated suits of armor and are scarily effective at combat, but never break formation, leading them to figure out that they've been enchanted to guard the flagstone they're standing on. One careful trip through and one errant shove to send the armors into each other and the way was clear.
  • In The Tamuli, the Cyrgai were a proud warrior race that pretty much stomped everyone they came across until they ran into the Styrics, who soundly defeated them and then cursed their land so that any Cyrgai who left their borders would die. The Cyrgai had access to half-breeds that got around this limitation, and the leaders ordered their soldiers to focus on producing more of them, which they did...to the exclusion of producing more of their own. Their women were too old to bear children by the time this was figured out, leading to them having bred themselves out of existence if not for divine intervention.
• Forest Kingdom: In book 3 (Down Among the Dead Men), Giles Dancer is a Blademaster, a warrior so incredibly skilled with a broadsword as to be nigh-unbeatable in melee combat. He's also incapable of laying out his own bedroll, saddling his own horse, or cooking anything more complex than cheese on crackers.
• The Future is Wild has a quite literal example with the Terabytes, termite-like insects. They're divided into separate castes which are very good at what they do (gum-spitters trap the Garden Worms the Terabytes harvest algae from, water-carriers store water, rock-borers do the burrowing, transporters carry stuff, queens lay eggs), but almost all of them save the transporter caste either have no legs at all or vestigial legs, and require the transporters to carry them around. Transporters have it less overspecialized since they're also capable of cutting off the algae appendages of Garden Worms.
• The Tanith First-And-Only of Gaunt's Ghosts are scarily effective in their specialties of stealth, scouting, and infiltration, with the events of Traitor General being the most comprehensive example of their skill. Unfortunately the Imperial Guard mostly just throws people in the meat grinder and hope they come out with fewer casualties than the enemy, with the Ghosts frequently getting slaughtered because they're otherwise just standard Guardsmen outside of their specialty. This is most apparent in the trench warfare in Straight Silver, and the siege battle in Only In Death.
• Ronnie Cheung of The Gone-Away World stops just short of this trope:
  Ronnie had made a choice about how far down the road of becoming a human killing machine he was prepared to go, and allowing his training to warp his body to the point where he was in some measure only suited to that task was exactly where he drew the line.
  • The narrator notes this when he discovers that Humbert Pestle did not stop short of this trope, having broken and re-broken his hand in training until it became a knotted lump of gristle and bone that was effectively an organic Power Fist... and also completely nonfunctional as an actual hand. Unfortunately, he discovers this when Pestle attacks him, so it's not as helpful as it might be.
• Good Omens: "The Nice And Accurate Prophecies Of Agnes Nutter" were indeed both "nice" (which meant "precise" at the time) and accurate, but are either focused on Agnes Nutter's descendants or completely inapplicable for most of the book's existence. For example "Doe Notte Buye Betamacks" would have been very useful advice for an adult with disposable income between 1976 and 1993 but utterly useless otherwise; her entry for November 22nd, 1963 contains no mention of the assassination of John F. Kennedy because none of her descendants were in Dallas that day; and her insistance on the importance of a high-fiber diet was a bit of a slap in the face to people of her own time and place, whose primary concerns were that their diet be existent and low-gravel. Her descendants have spent more time trying to determine just what Agnes is even talking about in the prophecies than actually being helped by them.
• The cruiser Honor Harrington commanded in the first book of her series had been refitted as a testbed around a nigh-unstoppable weapon, however the reduction in normal weapons load and extreme short range of the prototype weapon meant the only way the ship was effective in combat against an equal or larger opponent was to either somehow to sneak in close enough to fire the weapon, or pray the ship could hold together long enough on a near-inevitable suicide run to get close enough to fire the weapon. But then, Fearless was intended to be used as a testbed for additional development and testing work. It was not intended to be used in an actual battle until BuWeaps had worked out enough of the bugs to make it practical. Too bad the First Space Lord didn't get the memo...
  • This is stated to be the problem with the jeune ecole, who believe that any new development completely changes the paradigm of warfare, instead of simply shifting it (mirroring the Real Life Jeune Ecole, who insisted on building only small torpedo ships instead of heavily-armored cruisers).
• In The Hunger Games, Katniss notes that while Careers are bred and trained for the actual combat, which is why they have a disproportionate number of victories, their Fatal Flaw is that they're from the wealthier districts that don't have to use basic survival skills very often and thus they are completely incapable of surviving without supplies, almost always losing when the supplies at Cornucopia are destroyed. Naturally, Katniss decides to use this fact to her advantage and does the same.
• The Last Horizon: Varic takes a job training new combat mages. He demonstrates how completely useless the curriculum of "teach them a bunch of combat spells then send them out" is when his class proves utterly incapable of protecting themselves from rain. He tries to teach them how to use their current spells to be more flexible, but the school's director has him suspended for straying from the curriculum.
• In Lensman the overspecialised ships are frequently either laden down with defence shield generators ("I can't hurt you but you can't hurt me") or all weapon (frequently one big Wave-Motion Gun style weapon) and tend to accompany each other in large groups. The fleet flagship, Directrix, is all combat-management and defence shields but never goes out and about without an englobing escort of Maulers.
• In Philip José Farmer's The Lovers, the main character is a professional Jack of all Trades (JOAT). His whole job is to make sure that medical research specialists know about advances in other fields that can be applied to their specialty.
• In Mademoiselle de Scuderi, Cardillac's method of killing is a single precise stab in the heart. The moment he sets on a target smart enough to use armor, he’s got a problem.
• In the sci-fi book Matched this is one of the main tenets of the Society. Nobody learns anything but what they have to know, including of the past. The Society chose 100 of the best of everything from the past for everyone to know about. They also even extended this to choice, in that nobody should have to choose anything that they don't know about.
• My Dark and Fearsome Queen: Thalia is a goddess of unimaginable power. The only catch is, to use her power she has to chant an incantation, and the more precision required, the longer the chant becomes. In a rapidly changing battlefield situation, she's practically useless unless you want to crush everything in a mile radius.
• Mary Renault has Alexander the Great griping a little about this in The Persian Boy. He says he's not inviting athletes to the autumn festival because, while in former times athletes used to be all-around experts (useful in war), now they were training themselves to be machines for winning only one event. "It's not good for the men to see such people beat them. Nor for the boys^note sons of soldiers by wives/girlfriends/etc from all over his empire, he was forming them into their own unique outfit, "The Successors" to see it."
• Primal Wizardry: Sorcerers gain new instinctive powers as a reaction to dangerous situations. However, Kole's first such power was a cheap and effective form of invisibility — which has proved so potent at getting him out of danger that he hasn't come under enough stress to gain any other powers. Meanwhile, being a primal grants him a greatly enlarged pool of Will to fuel his spells, but he's also bound to the Font of Illusion, so the costs of any other kind of spell are tremendously increased to the point where he effectively can't use them at all. He can become invisible at the drop of a hat, but struggles to go past cantrip level with anything else, which isn't helpful when his dream is to become a wizard.
• The book version of The Princess Bride notes that Inigo has a case of this. After his father was murdered by the six fingered man who claimed to be a Master Swordsman, Inigo trained obsessively to become a great master and to be able to defeat the six fingered man. However, Inigo put virtually no effort into learning anything except swordsmanship, so while he's one of the greatest living swordsmen, he's hopeless at pretty much anything else, including basic math. Without someone like Vizzini to do the thinking for him, Inigo is clueless about how to function in society. The fact that his Ultimate Blacksmith father was a half-mad recluse before being killed is another reason Inigo lacks a lot of basic skills and knowledge.
• Benedikt of The Quartered Sea is the best damn Singer of water in all of Shkoder, but he can't sing any other quarter at all, which has severely hampered his career and left him socially isolated from his fellow bards. But it makes him a natural choice as a crew member for a seagoing exploration ship.
• The Ripple System:
  • Tyrann's Cult of Information worships a god. No god, no cult. Furthermore, his entire Renown path is built around his religion, so without it he's severely weakened. Ned and Omen successfully kill the god before it becomes permanent, leaving Tyrann cut off at the knees.
  • Ned's build only does magic damage. Defensively, he has a few more options (the fact that he's specced into Dexterity works surprisingly well for him), but he tends to struggle with people who have a lot of magic resistance. Ersatz prepares his entire kit as a hard counter to Ned's build, anti-magic and elemental resistances included. In their duel, Ned only wins because he had recently picked up a bleed ability, which is a physical effect. It's still close.
  • The guild Corruptia is the top PvE guild in the game, led by the genius strategist Ersatz... but since Ersatz is a giant asshole, it is predicated entirely on the idea that Ersatz always wins. When he starts losing, his guild immediately loses faith in him. Compare to Omen, where no one even mentions leaving when they have a few bad runs.
• In Skulduggery Pleasant, the eponymous character goes up against an opponent with ridiculously overdeveloped fire magic. After that opponent fell into a river during the fight and literally dissolved due to an extreme weakness to water, Pleasant explains to the protagonist that becoming strong in one area of magic necessitates a corresponding weakness to its opposite. Could also count as a case of Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors.
• A North-Going Zax and a South-Going Zax meet head-on in the story The Zax from Sneetches and Other Stories by Dr. Seuss. Since both stubbornly refuse to take even a single step to the East or West, both are still stuck in place at the end of the story, which is at least long enough for a highway overpass to be built over them.
• A Song of Ice and Fire:
  • Dragonglass (obsidian) is lethal to the White Walkers. Unfortunately for the Night's Watch, that's all it does; the undead Wights are completely immune to it.
  • This is the reason why the Slaver Cities of Astapor and Yunkai immediately turn on Daenerys Targaryen and reinstate slavery after she leaves. Their economy is completely dominated by slavery, because their natural resources have been depleted during the Ghiscari-Valyrian wars thousands of years ago, and they have no alternative income. Some former slaves who cannot find jobs even willingly sell themselves back to slavery, because at least they will be fed that way. Daenerys eventually has to make a compromise when she comes to rule Meereen as queen: although slavery is still abolished, she allows the fighting-pits (lethal gladiatorial games that originated as a religious tradition) to continue providing income for the city.
  • The Targaryens' pride as a dragonrider haunted them after the dragons went extinct during and shortly after the Dance of the Dragons. Dragons were, after all, the sole reason they managed to conquer Westeros. Although the Targaryens ruled the Seven Kingdoms without dragons for longer than they did with them, things were simply not the same afterwards. There were a lot more rebellions that lasted longer because the Targaryens no longer had superweapons, and the monarchy was virtually always beset by problems (there was no golden age like the one under Jaehaerys I). The Targaryens recognized this and desperately tried to do all they could to revive the magic of the dragons back, but it apparently went away with the passing of the last dragon, as all of their attempts either ended up in failure at best or utter chaos at worst (e.g., the tragedy at Summerhall, which killed the king and his heir).
• Spider-Man: The Venom Trilogy: In Spider Man The Octopus Agenda, Doctor Octopus unwittingly ruins his own plan when he tries to imprison both Spider-Man and Venom in a cell that he had prepared for Spider-Man, with the intention of forcing his enemy to watch as Octavius's plan to decimate global civilisation unfolded. As the cell had been designed exclusively to contain Spider-Man, the wall-crawler realised that there may be a loophole in the cell's design that Venom could exploit, which allowed them to stage a fight so that Venom could find a weakness in the cell's force field and break out.
• The Lancer-class frigate from the Star Wars Expanded Universe was specifically designed as a counter to the starfighter-heavy Rebel Alliance/New Republic fleet. It's a 250-meter ship bristling with laser cannons, intended as a flak boat to protect other capital ships. Unfortunately, in addition to being too expensive and manpower-intensive, it had no heavy weaponry for fending off capital ships, so most admirals eschewed it in favor of expendable TIE screens.
• Star Wars Legends featured several styles of lightsaber combat that tended to overspecialize in one area at the expense of others. For example, the lightsaber form Soresu was purely defensive, with virtually no built-in attacking or offensive moves. While this gave the Soresu user a nearly unbreakable defense, it also gave them no real means of actually winning a fight and in some cases, it was "merely delaying the inevitable" as one character described it. Other forms are similarly overspecialized, like the Makashi form, which focused on finesse, precision, and speed at the expense of strength and power, as well as focusing on dueling at the expense of defence against blasters. Another example is the Djem So and Juyo forms, both of which focus on strength, offense, and raw power at the expense of defense. The only exception is the Niman form, which combined elements of all forms to make the user a Jack of All Trades.
  • Subverted by Obi-Wan Kenobi who's recognized to be the ultimate master of Soresu, having both the endurance and the concentration to last until the opponent (finally) shows a weakness in their defense and is said in Revenge of the Sith to be able to protect himself from up to twenty strikes per second.
• The Stormlight Archive:
  • Every individual Order of the Knights Radiant had its own role, and stepping too far outside that role could cause them to lose their powers. In Words of Radiance, Kaladin wants to punish Amaram (and to a lesser extent Sadeas), but Syl repeatedly points out that Windrunners protect the innocent — punishing the guilty is a job for a Skybreaker. Unfortunately, there aren't any Skybreakers around, so Kaladin keeps trying to find ways to justify striking back, both to himself and to Syl. This limitation comes from the fact that Radiant powers are directly tied to maintaining oaths made when powering up. The Windrunner oath to "Protect even those I hate" is directly at odds with punishing those who deserve it.
  • When the world was still fighting the Voidbringers on a regular basis, every nation had a specific role it played in the conflict. The Voidbringers have been gone for over four thousand years now, and the nations have stopped cooperating with each other, but they have still largely retained their historical roles, even though this causes them problems without the support of other countries. Alethkar is the nation of soldiers, so their first thought is always war and combat. When Dalinar discovers that he has a Knight Radiant with Healing Hands, it takes him a while to realize that he can be used to heal the sick and injured. He had assumed that ability was only useful for helping soldiers get back on their feet in the middle of a fight.
  • On an even larger level, Roshar's entire ecosystem and architectural culture is built around the Highstorms that regularly blow through the land, east-to-west; most structures are triangle-shaped with a point aimed east to reduce wind drag. When the Everstorm is summoned, it blows the opposite way, west-to-east, and a world designed with the idea of storms coming from the east gets utterly eviscerated.
• This is a point in the central premise of the Tantei Team KZ Jiken Note franchise. The main cast were sent to a special class in their Cram School for learning issues, with three of them falling into this trope: Aya is good in languages, but she can't go much further (especially math), while Uesugi and Kozaka are Teen Genius-level good in math and biology respectively, but are bad in Japanese.
• In Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, Humpty Dumpty is an expert on words and definitions, so much that he claims to be able to assign definitions to words and make them mean anything he pleases (literally). However, he seems to be very bad at math; when Alice tells him that 365 minus one equals 364, he asks her to do that out on paper so he can be sure. (Contrariwise, it could be Alice and the readers are wrong about the sum's total in a world running on dream logic. We don't get to find out.)
• Robert A. Heinlein's Time Enough for Love contains the opinion that specialization is sub-human:
  Lazarus Long: "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
• Used in Philip K. Dick's short story "The Variable Man": the eponymous man is a jack-of-all-trades tinker picked up from the past by scientists in a highly specialized future. They need him to fix something that no one has the specialization for.
• The Wheel of Time:
  • This is Aginor/Osan'gar's main obstacle towards being an effective villain. As a channeler he's overwhelmingly powerful (among the Forsaken he's behind only Ishamael and maybe Lanfear), but he's really only good at doing one thing — using magitek to make monsters. Problem is that while this made him essential to the Shadow in the Age of Legends, in the modern world the necessary magitek no longer exists, and every time he's in a straight fight he tends to attack a lot ineffectively before getting curbstomped. He ends up dying having been one of the least effective Forsaken.
  • Subverted by the minor character Androl Genhald. His talent at magic is very weak, with one exception: he can create larger gateways than much stronger channelers could with ease. Many of the other magic-users mockingly name him "Pageboy" since all he's good for (that they know of) is carrying messages over long distances. However, this turns out to be an incredibly versatile skill with many offensive applications. Besides Tele Fragging and Portal Cutting enemies, being able to open a portal leading to a subterranean reservoir of pressurized magma with a thought is at least as useful as being able to cast Fireballs.
• A number of the superpowers in Wild Cards count. Even aces and jokers who get really useful powers often find that there's only so many situations they actually use them.
  • Veronica, who has the power to induce crippling fear and weakness in men... but only in men. Cue her getting the shit kicked out of her by a female supervillain who's also a trained fighter.
  • Sewer Jack is a shapeshifter. A shapeshifter who only has one other form. Said form is the form of a big alligator. He doesn't find many uses for his power beyond swimming and biting things.
• Several Characters in A Wild Last Boss Appeared! suffer from this:
  • Aries' main weapons are his Flames of Mesarthim, which are a Percent Damage Attack. Although he can use them in a variety of ways, their intended use is to do damage over time through contact with the flames. In a world where the vast majority of potential foes have comparatively negligible health, his trump card is barely more than a glorified fire spell most of the time.
  • Libra's Brachium is an incredibly deadly Fixed Damage Attack which unavoidably deals 99 999 damage to everything targeted and trapped within its radius. Although there aren't that many cases in the present, anything with 100 000 HP or higher will unquestionably survive Brachium. Additionally, Libra can only use it once every 24 hours, so Libra can potentially find herself without her greatest asset at a critical juncture if she misuses it.
  • Karkinos' only offensive skill, Acubens, is a Counterattack. Granted, it's a very powerful counter as it adds the damage he takes to it, but without Acubens Karkinos can only use normal attacks to fight, and as a Mighty Glacier, Karkinos is far and away the slowest and least maneuverable of the Twelve Stars. If the party is on the offensive, Karkinos effectively has no role to play. He often finds himself either with nothing to do or being used as a glorified meatshield instead of being the guardian he is meant to be.
  • Pollux's main ability is to create temporary bodies for the souls of fallen warriors, allowing them to unleash their full might even beyond the grave. However, Pollux herself completely lacks any form of ability for battle. She has her stats, but no offensive, defensive or support skills of any kind. She doesn't even have the capability of commanding the spirits she summons. Her twin, Castor, is the one with battle ability and is also capable of leading the spirits she summons as a commander — his own battle ability is actually inferior to his ability to command. As a result, the Gemini Stars are at their best when Pollux is protected at all costs, allowing her to create and maintain an army for Castor to lead into battle.
  • Dina is level 1000 and has insanely high magical stats, high enough to leave even members of the Seven Heroes at their prime in the dust, multiple elemental affinities and a slew of unique and powerful abilities. The problem? Their HP and physical abilities are low and they're bad at handling melee fighters, so if someone is capable of outmaneuvering them, they stand a very good chance of subduing Dina even through the magical onslaught that they can bring to bear.
• World War Z this appears to be one of the reasons the initial outbreak wipes out human armies, shown with the US Army specifically. Modern military thinking is no good against an enemy that can be neither shocked nor awed, and their standard tactics like targeting center of mass, dropping bombs, and setting targets on fire betray them. However, more detailed analyses by readers with actual military knowledge reveals that the zombies happen to be coated in Plot Armor, and Brooks nerfs standard weapons against them. Also, he has the military hold off on weapons that can effectively turn most squishy targets to paste from miles away until the Zacks are in visual range. Not to mention the military suddenly forgetting everything it knew about the Zacks from the black ops they mentioned, and not learning about their resistance to explosives from the Israelis either. The military also does a number of things that just stupid, like setting up their fire base without making any attempt to secure it (and sure enough the entire area is infested). In reality, the military would've rolled right over the Zacks.

Live-Action TV

• In the 2019 adaptation of The Demon Headmaster, the idea of Crippling Overspecialisation is used against the Headmaster during a school inspection; as the Headmaster has created a system where the students don't 'learn', but are just programmed to go along with their designated 'specialities', Lizzie Warren and her allies are able to disrupt the Headmaster's planned presentation by switching the students' relevant material, such as essentially arranging for the rugby team to perform Swan Lake and a Shakespearean 'expert' to recite an insulting poem.
• Game of Thrones:
  • In the Season 3 Blu-ray Histories and Lore, the beholden to Realpolitik Littlefinger reasons that the true cause of the Targaryens' downfall was their reliance on dragons and, with a few exceptions, their obsession with reclaiming this advantage wasting the time, energy and lives of kings after the dragons died out, with the resulting failure driving many of them mad, though Varys counters that they continued ruling quite stably for more than a century, with long periods of stable Targaryen rule even without dragons. Still, dragons helped a lot.
  Daenerys: [The dragons] were terrifying, extraordinary, they filled people with wonder and awe — and we locked them in here. They wasted away, grew small... And we grew small as well. We weren't extraordinary without them. We were just like everyone else.
  • The Unsullied are supposed to be heavy infantry without peer, famed for their utterly impenetrable spear walls on open battlegrounds. When they're deployed patrolling city streets however, especially when scattered in small groups, they are at at disadvantage. It also means that their below-average size and strength become a much bigger issue. They're easily overcome by untrained guerillas with daggers.
  • While he's perfectly cunning and intelligent for a warrior, Jaime has built his entire life, career, reputation, and self-respect around being one of the best swordsmen in the kingdom... who then loses his sword hand early in Season 3.
    Jaime: It's a good thing I am who I am. I'd have been useless at anything else.
  • As long as they are at sea, House Greyjoy are formidable. On terrain combat, their individual competence varies, but they're largely ineffective due to a lack of numbers and poor discipline. They also suffer from being specialists in raiding; they can launch devastating surprise strikes but they are terrible in stand-up fights or holding captured territory.
• On Good Eats, one of host Alton Brown's real pet peeves is "unitaskers" — kitchenware with precisely one use, which he dislikes for wasting space and usually having larger price tags. Alton's said that the only single-purpose item he'll allow in his kitchen is the fire extinguisher...and then during the 10th Anniversary Special, he finds another use for it: making (carbonated) smoothies.
• The Hexer: Witchers are made for killing and nothing else. That makes them unable to adjust to changing circumstances or just think in broader perspectives. Geralt is special, because part of his human nature was left intact despite going through mutations.
• Unlike previous Super Sentai, the team in Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger have no inherent special powers, instead relying on the powers of their predecessors via the Ranger Keys. This came to bite them in the ass when, in the first movie, the Keys were stolen from and used against them, leaving the Gokaigers to fend for themselves. It was only fortunate that their direct predecessor team, Tensou Sentai Goseiger, were able to help get their powers back. (For the uninitiated, the Gokaigers' basic arsenal only consisted of a Gokai Saber and Gokai Gun each at the time.) Later averted in the series itself when the keys were stolen again, but the team got them back themselves, even beating copies of their suited forms in the process.
• Kamen Rider:
  • Kamen Rider Kuuga has the ability to specialize from his usual red form into three others specializing in different abilities, with his green Pegasus Form featuring incredibly powerful Super-Senses that it uses to locate its target from afar and then kill it with a powerful silenced crossbow. However, the source of his powers was developed thousands of years ago, long before modern noise pollution, and the result is a form more likely to leave Kuuga rolling on the ground in agony than able to actually find his target. Even once he gets a better handle on the ability, he has less than a minute to find and shoot his target before being overwhelmed.
  • Kamen Rider Double: Subverted with the Big Bad, the Terror Dopant, whose primary power is to manipulate fear using hallucinogenic acid. The party's evil mentor spends years manipulating the heroes and their predecessors to produce someone who will be immune to this power so that they can kill Terror, who promptly reveals that he was holding back an extra superpower the entire time just in case someone thought they could take advantage of his specialization: namely, his Cool Crown is also a dragon.
• The fact that the Lexx has no other weapons or defenses apart from its planet-shattering Wave-Motion Gun have caused plenty of trouble to the protagonists over the course of the series. Could be justified, if His Divine Shadow wanted it easily re-taken if it ever fell into the wrong hands. (Which, in fact, it did.) Presumably it would've had escort ships along to defend it if it'd ever been used as intended.
• In Odd Squad, those who work in the eponymous organization are split up into various departments, with implications set in place that agents-in-training have a choice of which department they wish to go in upon graduation from the Odd Squad Academy. However, there have been a few moments where those in one department fail to perform well in another department due to their lack of expertise and skill.
  • "Olive and Otto in Shmumberland" has Orzack, an agent working in the Investigation department whose primary job is to go out onto the field and solve cases, fixing various oddities and helping clients with their odd issues. Throughout the episode, he is presented as a Leader Wannabe who mistakenly believes that Ms. O is promoting him to the position of co-Director so the two of them can run Precinct 13579 together. By the end of the episode, he ascends to the position temporarily while Ms. O goes to the world of Shmumberman (a comic book character who is a parody of Batman) and has adventures with him, but turns out to be horribly incompetent in his new department, to such an extent where he can't even get inside Ms. O's office. Olive and Otto, who are also Investigation agents, refuse to listen to his orders (presumably because he wasn't officially promoted to the position).
  • "High Maintenance" involves two Maintenance workers named O'Mary and Obby swapping departments with Olympia and Otis, who work in Investigation. While O'Mary and Obby avert the trope and perform well in their new department, managing to stop giant textbooks from appearing around town, Olympia and Otis struggle to keep Headquarters running efficiently due to those working in Maintenance having the job of constantly fixing things with nary a moment of rest (as opposed to Investigation agents, who do get some time to rest after cases are solved). As a result, Headquarters nearly self-destructs due to a popcorn flood that they neglected to fix earlier, and they admit to O'Mary and Obby that their jobs are harder than they appear to be.
  • "Oscar of All Trades" serves as an Origins Episode for Oscar as he explains how he cycled through about sixty departments and jobs before becoming a Scientist. While only nine of them are seen, it's revealed that he didn't fare well in any of them due to his lack of expertise as well as his general ditziness. As Ms. O finds out, his true strength lies in building, inventing and repairing gadgets for Investigation agents to use while out on the field, and in order to put his skills to good use, she creates the Science department just for him, which causes a ripple effect in other precincts to create labs in their own Headquarters so those whose strength lies in handling gadgets can also work in that department. The same episode also showed that before Oscar became a Scientist, Investigation agents built and repaired their own gadgets. However, due to their specialty being solving cases and fighting oddness head-on, none of them are skilled at doing so, with Olaf in particular having been at work building a Potato-inator for 3 years. This deficit is what spurs Ms. O to create the Science department and designate Oscar the go-to agent for all things gadget-related.
  • "Trading Places" has another example with Oscar volunteering to face down Odd Todd and get the Flip-Flop-inator gadget back from him after he attacks Olive with it and turns her 21 years old from her previous age of 12. Despite his advantage of being 11 years old and thus immune to the gadget's effects, he is shown to be very timid when confronting Odd Todd — not just because Odd Todd is an effectively terrifying villain, but also because Oscar isn't used to confronting villains in general, since it's something that Investigation agents do. Even Odd Todd himself has to remark on how strange it is seeing Oscar over seeing another Investigation agent. True to Status Quo Is God, however, Oscar does manage to get the gadget back and ages Olive back down to 12.
  • "Jinx" features Oscar and Dr. O being tasked by Ms. O to retrieve the Jinx Cube from a villain named Jimmy Jinx in order to cure a large group of agents of the titular disorder. While Oscar is (naturally) timid and inexperienced at being an Investigation agent, Dr. O, who is part of the Medical department, plays with the trope — she is used to staying indoors and treating those with injuries and odd diseases as a doctor, and as such, she initially refuses Ms. O's order to retrieve the cube, citing her inexperience as the reason why she can't succeed. When asking Baby Genius where Jimmy Jinx lives, Dr. O resorts to yelling at him for an answer, when most Investigation agents know how negotiating with him works. Despite this, however, she is shown to be confident and has some grip on what Investigation agents do, in contrast to Oscar. At the end of the episode, both of them feel confident that they can go out onto the field and solve another case, but the case that Ms. O assigns them is handling an angry laser chicken, which they are shown running away from in fright.
• In Power Rangers in Space, this is the most significant weakness of the Psycho Rangers; while each Psycho Ranger was able to scan the minds of their relevant Ranger counterpart and thus acquire full knowledge of their opponent’s combat style, they are only uniquely suited to go up against that specific Ranger. As a result, once the Rangers have managed to defeat Psycho Pink when the entire Space team faces her solo, TJ has the idea of the entire team disguising themselves as the Blue Ranger so that they can go up against the remaining Psychos using an Opponent Switch without the Psychos being able to tell which Ranger is which. With Psycho Blue’s defeat, the remaining Psychos are outnumbered two to one (as there is no Psycho Silver), allowing the Rangers to more easily put their opponents on the defensive.
• After RuPaul's Drag Race weeds out the least impressive queens, the next queens eliminated tend to be the ones who are so specialized in a certain skill, such as lip-syncing or stunning fashion, that they usually stumble in areas outside their expertise. The winners of the competition as well as the most popular ones with the fans are queens that tend to have a variety of skills, but still have a specialty.
• On The Sing-Off, after the least technically proficient groups have been weeded out, the groups that are very skilled in one particular style of music and have a hard time adapting that style to incorporate other influences are usually the next eliminated, as versatility is something the judges value very highly.
• Star Trek:
  • The Defiant from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was classified as an Escort ship by the Starfleet, only so they wouldn't call it a Warship. Most Starfleet ships are designed to be more Jack of All Stats, all have decent weaponry but are equally equipped for science, diplomatic and exploration missions. The Defiant was developed to be an overpowered weapons platforms to fight The Borg, but being a large set of guns on a small frame it was ready to tear itself apart just doing routine operations. It took a lot of trial and error to weed out the design problems and it became known as one of the most advanced and dangerous ships Starfleet had to offer, but it still lacked any versatility in mission specs.
  • In an episode of Star Trek: The Original Series, the away team investigate a dead planet and are attacked by hot female constructs which can only kill one specific person each. After she picks off the Redshirts Kirk, McCoy and Sulu realise they can stop her by simply having the other two stand in front of whichever one of them she's after. Unfortunately the computer creating them figures this out and just creates one for each of them.
• In Thunderbirds, Thunderbird 3 is the only one that can go into space and Thunderbird 4 is the only one that can go underwater, but that's all they can do, and while underwater rescues happen far more often than they really should space rescues only happen two or three times in the entire series. In most rescues this leaves Scott and Virgil in Thunderbirds 1 and 2 to do almost all of the work while Alan and Gordon mostly just assist them.
  • Somewhat downplayed in Thunderbirds Are Go; Thunderbirds 3 and 4 are still the only ships normally capable of going into space or underwater, but key episodes feature Thunderbird 4 being modified to carry out non-aquatic rescues due to it being the only vehicle capable of enduring high-pressure environments (with "Deep Search" seeing it modified to be taken into space in Thunderbird 3 for a rescue on Europa), and the rescue in "Long Haul" required Thunderbird 2 to be augmented to travel into space when Thunderbird 3 was occupied with another part of the rescue.
• In Van Helsing: Axel has rigged up numerous defenses for the hospital. The final one is a corridor filled with UV lamps, something no vampire can pass. A human, specifically a former vampire turned human by Vanessa, however can easily walk down the hall and smash the lights, allowing the vampires to safely advance behind him.

Music

• The Vocaloid voice banks Prima, Tonio, and Sachiko were made to specialize in only one genre (opera in Prima and Tonio's case, enka in Sachiko's case), and thus, are notoriously difficult to tune and make sound right in any other genre. However, when used in their intended genre, the results are often highly realistic.

Newspaper Comics

• The main glaring issue in Dave Hamper's basketball career in Safe Havens: while he's amazing at passing the ball in ways the opponent can't predict, it means he's vulnerable to strategies that involve crowding him and he's bad at scoring himself. This poor scoring cost Havens University one championship and earned him the ire of most of the student body for a few months. Even years later. after established in his career, he feels his overspecialization may make him a liability when he tries out for the men's basketball team for the Rio Olympics. Ironically, the only way it did become a liability was because Italy's team consisted of many of his former teammates (Dave having played in Italy instead of the NBA) who, being so familiar with his passes, could predict and intercept them, forcing him to start using more mundane passes to win against them.

Sports

• Baseball has the concept of the "Mendoza Line", a minimum level of batting average competency below which a player's presence in the major leagues is very difficult, if not impossible, to justify no matter how good defensively he is (pitchers are exempt because their trade is extremely specialized, and in the DH-rule American League they don't normally bat at all)^note Starting with the 2022 season MLB has adopted the universal DH, in other words National League pitchers don't hit anymore either. The most common cutoff is .200, though definitions can vary from .190 to .220^note For comparison, someone batting .300 is considered an excellent hitter and .400 is legendary (the last MLB player to hit .400 in a season was Hall of Famer Ted Williams in 1941). It's named after Mario Mendoza, who played in the mid-1970's to early 1980's and was a very good defensive shortstop but was definitely not good at the plate (several seasons saw him with sub-.200 averages, though in the last couple of years of his career after the term began gaining traction in baseball circles he did get a little better and by the end his career average was .215). Anyone with a more extreme imbalance in defensive and offensive capabilities is going to fall into this trope and isn't likely to remain in the big leagues for long.
  • Major League Baseball made a rule change in 2020 to eliminate the "LOOGY", or "left-handed one-out guy." Pitching staffs had become so overspecialized that mediocre pitchers, especially left-handers, could made a career of being difficult in specific situations. Also, frequent pitching changes were making games less enjoyable for fans. Under the new rule, each pitcher is required to face at least three batters, or complete their inning.
• For decades, the Indian National Cricket team had a crippling over reliance on spin bowling. The pitches in India were made to contain ample crevices that would aid a spin bowler, the warm climate and dusty conditions ensured that these crevices only got more pronounced, aiding spin bowlers even more. Spin bowling required skill but not necessarily endurance, so the lithely built usually vegetarian upper caste Indians who played the sport could successfully be trained in the technique (unlike pace bowlers who need a regimen of strength and endurance training). Indian teams would typically have a token pair of medium pace bowlers who would bowl until the shine on the ball wore off (a new ball is used for every professional match and a new ball swings further than an older one), after which the spin attack would be brought on. This made the Indian team extremely difficult to defeat at home, but away games in other countries would instead be difficult for them, due to those pitches being not as helpful to spin bowling. Due to an abundance of good incisive spin attacks at even regional, state, district or city level teams, Indian batsmen became superb players of spin - but they struggled a lot against pace bowling.
  • During the 1970s the Indian spin attack was quite literally overly reliant on a cripple - leg spinner Bhagwath Chandrasekhar, who was born with polio, and was cured, but it left his arm capable of movements while bent, that were outside the range of motion of regular healthy arms. But the arm wouldn’t always bend that way. And when it didn’t, Chandrasekhar got almost no spin. Sports writers would preface their write ups of important games with a simple phrase - “If Chandra …”
• In gridiron football, the sharp transition between college and pro schemes has led to a large number of draft busts, and many can't-miss prospects flaming out. In short, college offensive and to a lesser extent defensive schemes rely on wider hashmarks (these are where the ball is spotted if the ball carrier is tackled outside of them; with wider hashmarks, the entire team is much closer to one sideline than the other, leaving much more open field on the opposite side) and exploiting much larger mismatches (the gap between the best and worst pro player in any position is much, much narrower than the gap between the best and worst FBS-level player). Arguably, the most humiliating example would be Florida coach Steve Spurrier trying to bring his "Fun n' Gun" passing offense to the Washington Redskins; veteran defenses would consistently shut his teams down, sending Spurrier back to the college ranks once and for all.
• In tennis, the French Open a.k.a. Roland Garros takes place on clay courts that favor defenders due to their slowness and high bounce giving players more time to reach the ball and return it in ways difficult for their opponent to hit. Because of this, it was historically considered to be the hardest Grand Slam to win with many great players' tactics being ill-suited for the clay surface... and many French Open champions are clay-court specialists who have performed poorly at other Slams, until more recent times. A good example is Rafael Nadal, who has won Roland Garros 13 times (as of 2020) but has had far more irregular performances on other surfaces.
• Formula One driver Jarno Trulli was notorious for being a qualifying specialist — his one-lap pace was insane, but his race pace was considerably slower. It wasn't uncommon for him to qualify much further up the grid than his car should have allowed, and then spend the race holding up the faster cars behind him — a phenomenon dubbed the "Trulli Train" — while those in front vanished into the distance.
  • The Haas team have historically had a similar problem, as over the years they've developed a reputation for producing cars that heat up their tires very quickly. This is great for qualifying, when being able to get your tires up to working temperature quickly is critical, but not so great in the race itself, as the sustained running causes the tires to overheat. The result is that Haas tend to produce cars that qualify well on Saturday and then sink like a stone on Sunday. They managed to avert this in 2020 and 2021... by producing a car that was also terrible at qualifying.

Tabletop Games

• BattleTech:
  • The BattleMechs are prone to this, as well as subverting this. You can either have a general jack-of-all-trades or a specialized 'Mech that's doomed once someone skips out of its range bracket. Also, under the latest rules, most (not all) 'Mech-scale weapons do only a small fraction of their regular damage to conventional infantry, which can become a problem at those distances where the infantry can actually shoot back. Justified in that 'Mechs are meant to used in concert (IE, fire-support standing behind the close-assault mechs, scouts staying in cover and acting as spotters for long-distance artillery, high-speed mechs flanking while the main assault force holds the enemies' attentions, etc.). Individual 'Mechs are specialists; the military units they make up are intended to be balanced. Then the Clans showed up with their versatile OmniMech designs and the Inner Sphere soon caught up and started reverse-engineering captured Clan BattleMechs in order to compete with their advanced technology. Though OmniMechs themselves also do have their limitations as well, one being that they are not fully modular, which can hamper potential configurable designs for a would-be creative pilot.
  • One of the earliest Subversions of this is the Stalker-class Assault Battlemech, which carries both large and medium lasers, as well as both Long and Short-range missiles, giving it the ability to fight at every range. Ironically, it's the most well-rounded mech of its time despite having no ballistic weapons and relying entirely on energy and missile ones.
  • One sterling example is the Firestarter Battlemech, a 35-ton machine with four flamethrowers as primary weapons. These weapons are short ranged, deal little damage to armored enemies (which means most enemies), and have no meaningful upgrades to support them. In exchange, the Firestarter is a Pyromaniac's dream, quickly setting fire to buildings, forests, and anyone not wearing Power Armor. There are few faster options when you need to raise a smoke screen, raze an obstacle, or commit a war crime.
  • The in-universe example of Crippling Overspecialization is the Charger, an 80-ton assault class 'mech designed for scouting. As such, the Charger has a huge engine for its size, letting it get up to surprising speeds for an assault 'mech, but it only carries 5 Small Lasers, one of the weakest and shortest ranged weapons in the entire system. The idea of using a massive 'mech as a scouting platform, and making that 'mech underarmed at best^note Other 80-ton Battlemechs have at least two big weapons like an AC/10, Long-Range Missiles, or a Particle Projector Cannon, all of which vastly outrange the Small Laser and are capable of doing ridiculous damage before the Charger can get in range to use its Small Lasers, was viewed as insane by every single consumer in the Inner Sphere, and only the Draconis Combine ended up buying the Charger, and only because they needed any 'mechs they could get at the time. They also immediately started changing the weapons loadout to something more sensible. Needless to say, no one ever tried to make an assault class scouting 'mech ever again.
• Chaotic: M'arrilians specialize in Water attacks... and only Water attacks. Out of all their creatures, only 3 naturally have any additional elements^note Nunk'worn and Fal'Makin, AZAIA Inquisitor have Fire, while Lam'inkal has Air. No M'arrillian creatures have Earth. while only 1 has no elements at all.^note Gan'trak, see Mechanically Unusual Fighter below As such, locations like Illusionary Lake or Carnival of Confusion utterly cripple the elemental parts of their attack decks.
• In Chess, conventional Character Tiers rate Bishops as equal to Knights, though Bishops are actually the better pieces in a lot of positions because of their long movement range and ability to defend squares either adjacent or on the opposite side of the board. They are, however, overspecialized in that they can never move through or onto any square of opposite color to their starting place, which can lead to "bad Bishop" positions, in which a Bishop is trapped behind chains of allied Pawns on squares of the same color. Applies to Knights to an extent as well. While they are the only piece that can't be blocked from threatening another piece, they are also the only piece that is unable to ever threaten an adjacent piece.
• Duel Masters:
  • The Nature Civilization focuses on mana acceleration to ramp into massive creatures, which have high power for their cost. However, they have no blockers, meaning that all those big creatures won't really stop the opponent from just killing you. They also have little card advantage generation, which is a problem for just about any deck in any card game. These two things combined make Nature completely unviable by itself.
  • Due to having the best card draw in the game, Water is the most heavily played secondary civilization in basically every format. Ironically though, Water is completely useless by itself, even during Dragon Saga Block which saw an unusually high number of mono-civilization meta decks, because its creatures are just terrible.
• In the Dragonlance mythos, one legend says the wizard Magius fell in battle as the Orders of High Sorcery prohibited mages from carrying any weapon at the time leaving them to rely solely on magic making them defenseless if their spells and items became exhausted. Since his death mages have been permitted to carry a dagger (or staff) for defending themselves.
• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • D&D in general, really. For every single ability in 3.5, there's at least one way to reduce or negate the damage. Fighters who specialise in the longsword will find themselves disadvantaged against an opponent who negates all damage that isn't piercing. A sorcerer that only chooses fire spells will not have a fun time against the monster with fire immunity. Rogues dread encounters against enemies that are immune to sneak attacks (which are many). At higher levels, it's not uncommon for fighters to carry multiple weapons made of many different materials, just so they can be prepared for any situation. This is one reason why Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards is in full effect: spellcasters who prepare their spells from a list can avoid this trap by changing their spells in accordance with the situation.
    • D&D's unofficial Tier System reinforces this fact. The Top Tier classes can either learn every spell of their paradigm they come across, have access to their entire spell lists by default, or can replicate any spell in the game. (The Cleric and Druid can also function as melee on top of all that, hence the CoDzilla term in the metagame). The Tier Two classes are equal to the tier ones in raw power but lack the versatility of their counterparts. As the tier thread puts it: "If the Tier 1 classes are countries with 10,000 nuclear weapons in their arsenal, these guys are countries with 10 nukes. Still dangerous and world-shattering, but not in quite so many ways."
    • Many prestige classes and non-core standard classes in 3.5 edition tended to be extremely specialized, as writers struggled to create new content that wasn't redundant with existing materials. For example, the War Mage and Healer classes were primary spellcasters who could only cast damage-dealing offensive spells and HP healing cure spells, respectively. Considering that flexibility has always been one of the primary advantages of spellcasters, both were ridiculed as being woefully underpowered. Prestige classes that were focused on specific goals, like fighting dragons or undead, also tended to have this issue. Playing a Dragon Hunter was great when fighting dragons, but given that nearly all of its abilities only worked against dragons, it was quite underpowered against anything that did not include the word "dragon" in its name.
  • Many powergamers in all TTRPGS, but especially D&D, who have their pet "broken" builds run into a serious problem when faced with GMs who throw unexpected challenges at them; by relying on shattering the game in one particular place, they are vulnerable when challenged out of their depth by the GM. Unfortunately, this often leads to the player not having much fun with the game, since if the character is so specialized that they effectively can't contribute (for instance, a melee-focused warrior who keeps being attacked by ranged and flying enemies, forcing him to rely on his untrained archery skills, or a pyromancer with dumped Charisma being constantly shoved into social situations that they don't have any spells or skills for), then they might as well just spend the session on their phone. Skilled GMs avoid this by deliberately creating situations where the overspecialized character can shine, without breaking the game in the process.
  • In just about every edition, making a character built for mounted combat turns out to be this. It sounds cool to play an armored knight on a warhorse, but the horse's stats generally only go up very little if at all, leading to them quickly becoming so squishy that they can expect to be killed by a single attack. On top of that, a warhorse can't fit in a lot of places where a normal human-sized character could, meaning that you're stuck without it in places like dungeons and buidlings. It's better for small races like halflings, gnomes, or goblins, since they can ride something like a wolf or pony that fits inside much more easily, but it's still easy to become useless.
• Exalted:
  • Specifically warned against in the character creation chapter of the core rulebook. Creation has a lot of different challenges to overcome, and you'll be lucky if you're just bored if you don't have a charm that's useful to the situation. Also, it's kinda frustrating having to start a new charm tree from the relatively weak and boring prerequisite charms when you've reached the "total powerhouse" stage of your career. (Other advice: buy the "increase your hit points" charm at least once.)
  • In second edition, the Primordials, the transcendently powerful beings that created the setting, each have their own themes, and are absolutely all-powerful, invincible, and unassailable within those themes; Authochthon is the Craftsman, Malfeas is the King, She Who Lives In Her Name is the Organizer, the Ebon Dragon is the Corrupter, etc. The thing is, each Primordial is not only absolutely helpless outside of those themes, but absolutely incapable of even thinking outside of them. For example, Malfeas is incapable of any kind of subtlety, compromise, or anything else that requires him to act from a position of anything less than absolute power and authority, and She Who Lives In Her Name cannot be unpredictable or spontaneous in any way.
  • Applying this and its relative Min-Maxing in the Shards of the Exalted Dream spinoff Burn Legend will get you curb-stomped on a regular basis. The guy with Strength 5 and lots of Grapples — say, a Mugen who invests heavily in Wrestling and the linked Mugen techniques — will get his ass handed to him by a simple Whistling Stone Atemi. Burn Legend is based very heavily on Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors, meaning that showing up as Captain Scissors is begging for everyone else to pull out their cheap, low-ranked Rock technique and smash you into a pulp.
• The adult furry card game Furoticon has BDSM decks. Sadists use them to inflict pain counters that debuff most characters, but masochists treat pain counters as buffs.
• Magic: The Gathering:
  • This is pretty much the entire point of the color pie. Every color has things it does really well, but other things that it does very poorly. White has the most versatile removal in the game and is able to swarm the board with low-costed creatures, but has extremely poor card draw. Blue has near exclusive access to counter magic and the best card draw in the game, but weak creatures and has difficulty removing creatures once they're already on the board. Black is the color that gets hit with this the least, but comes at the cost of a lot of their best cards causing them to lose life which makes them susceptible to being hoisted by their own petard. Red is very good at dealing lots of damage for quick wins, but tends to lose the long game due to having poor card draw. Green has a lot of good creatures, mana acceleration, and good card draw, but its creature removal is severely lacking. The point of all this is, of course, to encourage players to mix and match colors to cover their deck's weaknesses.
  • There's a branch of decks known as Combo decks that fall into this. They aim to do one specific thing using a certain combination of cards. When this thing happens they usually win instantly. If they can't get the cards in or one of them gets destroyed, they're usually left with a sub-par deck. Combo decks tend to be very good against 'raw power'/'aggro' decks because comboed cards will dismantle an equal number of individual cards without synergy (even though said cards tend to be stronger individually), and are vulnerable to control decks that systematically block or remove the components of a combo. These are popular among some casual players, who don't care nearly as much about a reliable win/lose percentage as about the fact that it's absolutely hilarious to use a finishing attack featuring an unblockable attacker whose power and toughness grow by a factor of 32 every turn.
• In the classic Metagaming Concepts game Rivets, the premise is simple: all the people are dead, and the remaining Boppers (Battlefield Orientated Pre-Programmed Eradicator Robots) are fighting it out over the resources they need. The trouble is, these Boppers are pretty stupid, 'average IQ only slightly higher than that of most kitchen appliances'. Each player has to choose what type of unit each type of unit attacks. That's right. You don't program an individual unit, you program a type of unit to go after another type of unit. If you're attacked by a unit you're not programmed to attack, you're screwed. You can, however, reprogram them, but that means bringing every one of that unit type back to your base/factory.
• In Rocket Age, this applies ot the various groups within the Talandri or Craftsman caste. Each Talandri sub-caste can only learn one type of craft-work, and this is passed down through the generations and not shared with others. If you need a brick wall built, you need one group whose entire function is making the bricks, another group to mix the mortar to hold the bricks together, a third group to design the wall, and a fourth group to actually lay the bricks.
• Shadowrun's character creation mechanics have always favoured focused characters by rewarding specialization. It's generally held that a good shadowrunning team consists entirely of specialists who throw nine or more dice at a non-overlapping set of very specific skills instead of made entirely of what usually becomes Master Of Nones.
  • However, with minimal system mastery, it is trivial to create characters who are very good at their desired specialty, and also have decent competence in some secondary skillset, averting the trope.
• This was one of the reasons for Bretonnia's low popularity in Warhammer. It was a faction whose theme can be summarized as "Excellent cavalry, mediocre everything else" (they had okay archers, middle-of-the-road spellcasters, and the rest of their roster was bad). Not only did it make them fairly one-dimensional and thus boring to play, but it also meant that they were easy to counter. It did not help that, due to not being updated after 6th edition, Bretonnia found itself outclassed in its own niche. The Empire had comparable (if not quite as good) cavalry and a fairly flexible roster otherwise while the Wood Elves had better cavalry and archers.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • In the game's fluff, this is the reason why the Imperium has lost so much of its ancient technology and can't easily replicate what is found or what it currently has. During the Age of Technology, many millennia in the past, humanity became completely reliant on the Standard Template Construct system for technological development and proliferation, with no other system being nearly as reliable or easily reproducible. Also, control of the process was ceded to the A.I.s running the STCs so humans could enjoy other pursuits. The Men of Iron took advantage of this in their rebellion, corrupting STC databases and wrecking as much of the actual machinery of the STCs as they could. When they were finally stopped, humanity had only fragments of its technological base remaining and few, if any people who had any knowledge of how to fix anything. The current Imperium is still suffering from the effects of this loss of tech knowledge, and the Adeptus Mechanicus controls the technology that remains with a literal religious fervor. The Mechanicus is generally dedicated to maintenance of technology, not research or development, and creativity is heavily-discouraged (by execution), so it can't develop new technology.
  • The Eldar have this as their Hat. Each Eldar going down the Path of the Warrior dedicate themselves to one Aspect of war at a time; Dark Reapers deal long-ranged death to enemy heavy infantry, Striking Scorpions can unleash enough close combat attacks to cut through hordes of light infantry, and so on. But while each type of Aspect Warrior may excel in its battlefield role, they're usually screwed if put up against a different type of threat, so those Dark Reapers won't last long in close combat, while hostile heavy infantry can shrug off the Striking Scorpions' flurry of attacks. The saying goes that if you pit five Space Marines against five Eldar, four of the Eldar will die while the survivor single-handedly cuts down the Space Marines, because that's what she was trained for.
    • Even more so for the Exarchs. Where normal Eldar dedicate themselves to a path (i.e. a career/posting) for the best part of a human lifetime and then move onto another path, Exarchs are those who got stuck on the path of war and become unable to give it up. A regular Aspect Warrior is highly specialised, but can eventually go on to do other things with their life if not killed in battle; an Exarch is psychologically stuck with their one specialisation forever, becoming even more adept at their path but literally incapable of any deviation from that path's strategy and training.
  • The Tau have some of the best guns in the game, and its military focuses on getting the most out of them, but the race is just pathetic in close combat. The Tau have recognized this at least and can bring in allied alien auxiliaries that are better-suited for melee, but even so, those close combat "specialists" would be considered mediocre at best in any other army and are better at counter-charging and delaying actions than leading an assault.
    • The Tau caste system means that every Tau in the setting is trained to be good at combat (Fire), diplomacy (Water), piloting (Air), engineering/research (Earth) or leadership (Ethereal) — and is not expected (and are very heavily discouraged) to develop skills outside their assigned field. This is particularly notable among the Air Caste, who have been so purpose-bred for piloting aircraft or spaceships that they actually have extremely fragile bones; even if you were going to have them fight outside a fighter or bomber, they would die swiftly from practically any attack they take.
    • One of the Tau's auxiliary species, the Kroot, takes this in a very unusual direction. To make things short, Kroot have LEGO Genetics that allow them to absorb useful genes from consumed prey and incorporate those genes into their own DNA, empowering themselves by replicating those traits. However, they suffer from a form of Power Incontinence that means that if they keep eating that kind of meat, their DNA becomes increasingly like the creature they're eating. For example, continue eating the flesh of non-sapient herbivores, and a Kroot will become a non-sapient herbivore with only a faint genetic legacy connecting it to its former Kroot state. The Kroot homeworld, Pech, has no ecosystem niche that isn't filled by some form of devolved Kroot.
  • The Tyranids ran into this in 5th edition when the Dark Eldar finally got a new codex. One of the Tyranids' trademarks is an array of multiple-Wound, high-Toughness, monstrous creatures that turned out to be highly susceptible to Dark Eldar weaponry causing Instant Death or dealing Poisoned attacks that neutralize a high Toughness value.
  • Within the Chaos Daemons list, each of the gods have a specific vocation: Khorne and Slaanesh are geared towards combat, but Khorne relies on a comparatively smaller number of more hard-hitting attacks, allowing them to bash through medium infantry (such as Tau and Space Marines) and vehicles, while Slaaneshi units have high initiative and a ton of rending attacks, making them more suited to hordes and really heavy infantry. Nurgle units focus on insane durability combined with poisoned weapons to fight against high toughness creatures but lack any sort of armor penetration needed to break through armor. Tzeentch, understandably, focuses on magic but rarely have any units good enough to support with said magic (almost every single one of their units is a squishy wizard). This means that each of the four Gods' daemons were designed to support another god's troops, but for those who prefer playing mono-god lists, this can leave you with one or more areas severely lacking (Slaanesh units, for example, has almost no staying power, so in an objectives match they will quickly die out due to their low toughness and save. Conversely, Mono-Nurgle can't do much if they're expected to annihilate their enemy since their primary purpose is to survive and tarpit). The only exception to this is the Soul Grinder, who can be kitted out to fill several combat roles.
  • This is also encouraged in tournament play. Consider a Space Marine Tactical Squad equipped with a Flamer and a Lascannon. The former is a short-ranged weapon that can be used while moving against a swarm of light infantry, while the latter is a long-ranged anti-tank weapon that can't be fired after moving. If either weapon is fired, the other is probably not in a situation to contribute anything, whereas a dedicated anti-tank or anti-infantry squad would be fighting with better efficiency against its viable targets. The rule Combat Squads was specifically made to resolve this issue; you can now split your 10-man squad into 2 5 man squads and give the melee-oriented Sergeant and assault weapon gunner to the squad most likely to run ahead, while the lascannon dude can sit back with his squad of 4 meatshields happily pounding away at enemy armour.
  • Deliberately invoked by the Imperial Guard, at company level. Any Imperial Guard regiment is deliberately trained and equipped for a single role, be it foot infantry, mounted infantry, mechanized infantry, artillery, armour, whatever. The intention being that a single company has to rely on others for combined arms warfare, and hence won't survive long going rogue.
  • The Adeptus Mechanicus will take a dive into this trope when things get dire enough by actually innovating and building an Ordinatus, a gigantic war machine that is more or less built around a ludicrously huge and powerful piece of armament specialized only to the conflict at hand, and rarely if ever see use again due to fear of losing them because they were used for the wrong problem. Of course, the advantage of building a superweapon around a conflict is that it'll usually be won right afterwards; you may not get to use that fortress-cracking sound-cannon, Titan-melting plasma gun or Drill Tank that can carry entire companies of guardsmen again, but whatever you needed it for will never again be a problem.
  • The Admech deliberately invoke this with their Skitarii armies on the fly. "Doctrina Imperatives" transmitted from distant command centres specialize their troops towards shooting or melee to a greater or lesser degree as conflicts develop. In their case, effectiveness is zig-zagged somewhat. Sure, those Vanguard may fight like old men after you finally push through the laser-accurate volleys of rifle fire for a moment, but fifteen seconds later the second Maniple in line will have popped Hyperaction Protocols and fight better than the daemons of Khorne. Skitarii Primus leaders even throw thousands of their soldiers into the grinder deliberately to gather intelligence about how best to command the actual army following behind. They die gladly, as for the Mechanicus "Survival is nothing, Data is All".
  • The Baneblade and its sisters are all built around tackling a single problem really well: Shadowswords and Doomhammers for killing Titans, Stormswords for urban warfare, Stormblades for cheaper and more mobile Shadowswords, and Baneblades for unleashing eleven barrels of hell on everything. All of them move like a morbidly obese elephant who's pregnant with triplets and can't do anything other than what they're specialized for: if, for example, a Stormsword finds something it's too large to fit through but can't plow through it's dead in the water.
  • In the backstory, the Night Lords Chaos Legion were created as a Terror Hero faction, and then opted to drop the "Hero" part. They are masters at quick, vicious night attacks, relying heavily on psychological warfare, dirty tricks, and extreme sadistic cruelty, with the terror they spread being almost as deadly as any weapon. The flipside? Enemies they can't intimidate into uselessness will shred them, which doesn't help when your most frequent opponents, Space Marines, are heavily associated with the phrase "And They Shall Know No Fear". It doesn't help that the flipside of their incredible night vision is that in bright light, they need the filters in their helmet eyepieces to function.
  • Special Characters have held an odd place in the game throughout its existence; some are Game Breaking, but many more fell victim to this trope in while they could do one thing very well, they were usually ignored by a generic character that couldn't do that job as well but was cheaper and could add additional flexibility to the army. One of the most notorious cases of this was Abaddon the Despoiler for Chaos Space Marines- up until 8th edition, Abaddon was renown for being one of the most deadly single models in the game, capable of butchering entire squads with his high damage output while also tanking all but the most devastating hit. However, he came with noticeable drawbacks- due to being in Terminator armor his movement options were incredibly limited, as he would have to ride in an expensive Land Raider or risk an unreliable Deep Strike. His point cost was also comparable to the aforementioned Land Raider, and that was alone without a retinue of any kind (raising his point cost even higher, where Abaddon and support could cost a third of an entire army). While he was devastating in melee, his ranged attacks were pathetically weak which (combined with his bad mobility) meant that enemies could easily kite him around the board without Abaddon killing anything. And as the final nail in the coffin, Abaddon was good for only killing things in melee- he gave no additional buffs or support for his army or retinue, something that other special characters like Typhus (with his plague zombies and support magic) or Ahriman (who has even more support magic) could do for cheaper. 8th Edition changed the majority of these things- while his mobility and point cost is still an issue, Abaddon gained a number of powerful leadership and army buffs while losing none of his killing capacity, becoming a more flexible unit and a must-have in many Black Legion and Chaos Space Marine lists.
• In Yu-Gi-Oh! you will see some decks that would be Overpowered...only if played against a specific deck. For instance, The Allies of Justice mean certain death to Light Decks but are powerless against anything that isn't Light. In newer Generation, The Heraldic and Heraldry ace monsters (used by Tron in the anime) are the embodiment of Xyz monsters' nightmares, being able to drain their Attack, Effects, and even names. Unfortunately, many players still use Synchros and don't rely on Xyz, making these cards laughably useless against them. (Though the One-Winged Angel form of Number 69 might still be able to put a dent in anything the opponent might summon).
  • Conversely, many trap and magic cards are designed specifically to revolve around a single monster. Cards that appear regularly on the show, such as Dark Magician, Kuriboh, and Blue-Eyes White Dragon tend to have numerous trap and magic cards devoted specifically to them. It's very possible for someone to overspecialize their deck and end up stuck with too many of these cards in their hand without the central monster being available or playable, a folly often demonstrated by AI players in the video games that are based on the TCG.
  • Just like the Rare Hunter in the anime, real life Exodia-centric decks have this problem. A competent (and lucky) Exodia player can draw their entire deck in one turn to get all five Exodia cards, but that means said deck is entirely comprised of draw power cards, and thus has zero recourse if their opponent gets even one turn. A piece of Exodia gets discarded? You lose. Your massive combo string gets interrupted? You lose. Hell, you brick and fail to get all the pieces on your own? Might as well give up right now.
  • Many archetypes, especially after the Extra Deck became central, tend to have their Main Deck focus on getting to the Extra Deck as quickly and often as possible. This results in them being completely unable to do much of anything when the Extra Deck is inaccessible for some reason (for instance, Dimensional Barrier or Crimson Blader), because their Main Deck is so focused on bringing out the materials for their summons that the materials can't do anything. Gimmick Puppets are a good example; the only effect in the entire Main Deck that isn't based on summoning Level 8 monsters is Egg Head's 800 burn damage.
  • The basis of 'anti-meta' decks. Usually, these decks focus specifically on countering whatever the current high tier deck(s) is, often with surprisingly effective results. However, whenever these decks end up facing other kinds of decks such as lower-tier "rogue" decks, they quickly start to fall apart.
• In Rifts, the Glitter Boy power armor at first glance looks like an unstoppable killing machine. It has more armor than most tanks, said armor is also resistant to laser weapons, and its famous Boom Gun can kill a lightly armored opponent in one hit. A closer look reveals how this trope comes into effect. The Boom Gun is so powerful that the Glitter Boy has to literally root itself to the spot, making it completely immobile while it's shooting. Even while moving, it's very slow when compared to other ground power armor. Also, the Boom Gun is the only weapon it has. Take it out, and the pilot is reduced to punches and kicks, which are about as effective as they sound. The gun also deafens anyone within about 100', meaning it effectively debuffs its own teammates, unless precautions are taken.

Visual Novels

• Fate/stay night:
  • The Assassin servant who guards the Mountain Gate of Ryuudou Temple is a man with literally nothing besides swordplay; he was not given a name or taught to read, and lived his entire life practicing a technique that would allow him to cut down a bird in flight. The end result is a man who can use martial arts to warp reality in order to strike from three directions simultaneously. However, imperfections in his weapon can create blind spots in the technique, as shown when Saber manages to damage the blade, and compared to other servants, he is the absolute bottom of the barrel in terms of combat ability aside from this One-Hit Kill attack. To add insult to injury, it's later revealed that Herakles, when in any class other than Berserker, can do the same thing better (his sword can hit from nine directions simultaneously, and with bow and arrow he can deliver hundreds of hits) in addition to his enormous strength and many other skills.
  • This seems to be a problem with the Assassin class in general: Assassins tend to be based around gathering intelligence and/or eliminating specific targets without detection and confrontation, and considered the worst class for direct combat.
  • Shirou discusses how this applies to his Unlimited Blade Works ability during his final battle with Gilgamesh, stating that if he were to go up against any of the other Servants he wouldn't stand a chance, given that all of them have mastered one weapon, whereas Shirou possesses a countless number of weapons without having mastered any of them. However, Gilgamesh is unique among Servants in that he is also a mere "owner" of weapons who hasn't mastered any of them, which puts him and Shirou on a level playing field. Once Shirou gets Gilgamesh inside his Reality Marble and they stand in the Field of Blades, Shirou is able to summon and control any of his weapons instantaneously, while Gilgamesh can't get his at the same speed because they need to pass through his Gate of Babylon. In other words, it just so happens that Shirou overspecialized in how to defeat Gilgamesh.

Web Animation

• Often a deciding factor in DEATH BATTLE!, where often the two fighters are more or less evenly matched from a technical standpoint, but one has more variety to their abilities, particularly when the specialization of the overspecialized one happens to be something the generalist knows how to counter (such as in Link vs. Cloud and Twilight Sparkle vs. Raven) or the specialization is in something not particularly applicable to combat (such as in Zelda vs. Peach and Black Widow vs. Widowmaker).
  • Special mention to Raiden versus Thor, Gaara versus Toph Beifong, Natsu Dragneel versus Portgas D. Ace, and Weiss Schnee versus Mitsuru Kirijo, where Raiden, Gaara, Ace and Weiss were overly specialized in respectively electric, sand (earth), fire, and ice attacks in fights where both parties were more or less immune to their respective elements (and Raiden had a severe strength and durability disadvantage otherwise on top of it).
  • "Johnny Cage VS Captain Falcon" has this as the major reason why Johnny loses: While Johnny has comparable speed to Falcon and plus superior training and enough strength to keep up despite being physically weaker, the Supernatural Martial Arts that he wields are tailored against divine foes and most crucially grant him the ability to No-Sell their attacks. Because Captain Falcon and his Reactor Might are not of divine origin, those defensive abilities can't take effect and Johnny otherwise is much weaker defensively than Falcon.
  • "Blake Belladonna VS Mikasa Ackerman" has this as one of the deciding factors: most of Mikasa's skills and arsenal are tailored for fighting against Titans, who are, for the most part, gigantic Mighty Glaciers, leaving her ill-equipped against an agile ninja catgirl, especially one who was judged much faster than Mikasa herself.
  • "Tanjiro Kamado VS Jonathan Joestar" has this as one of the deciding factors: while Tanjiro is the superior swordsman between himself and Jonathan, his fighting style and Breathing techniques are dependent on his sword while Jonathan can use Hamon with his fists alone, which he's far superior to Tanjiro in as well. This is emphasized in the fight animation: Jonathan loses his sword first but it barely slows him down on the assault, while Tanjiro losing his sword at the climax is the beginning of the end for him.
  • Downplayed in "Deku vs Asta" as while Asta's Anti-Magic has no effect on Quirks (since they're biological mutations rather than supernatural magics), he still has other options given to him to battle Deku. He even muses in battle that if he can't fight someone who has no Magic and is powerful, then what good is he as the Wizard King? Indeed, Asta's judged as being physically more than capable of out-matching Deku, who would end up tearing his own body apart closing the gap, giving him the win.
• RWBY:
  • Ruby is an extremely talented warrior with her weapon being Crescent Rose, but isn't so good without it. She's also a rather short teenage girl, so she can't even fall back on sheer muscle in a hand-to-hand encounter. This has gotten her into more than one situation where she needed to fight, but didn't have Crescent Rose on hand, and so could really only try to dodge. The Volume 5 Yang Short shows that Ruby actually finds fighting with her fists to be completely pointless because she has Crescent Rose and tries to ignore Yang's attempt to train her in fighting hand to hand. Ozpin calls her out in Volume 5 and forces her to train without her weapon. By the start of Volume 9, it's revealed that Ruby still never really trained to do so.
  • Yang appears to be an unstoppable tank in battle but it's only because she has an overreliance on her Semblance; it makes her a powerful fighter because it converts the damage she takes into greater strength. However, it means she has a big ego from her normally-overwhelming strength and doesn't think tactically in battle because being hit by the opponent benefits her; it also tends to activate when her temper breaks, meaning that anger further clouds her judgement. In Volume 4, her father points out that Yang's use of her Semblance up to this point is basically a temper tantrum and spends the volume trying to break her of her bad habit so that she will learn how to fight smarter instead of harder. During the Battle for Beacon, her thoughtless charge into battle to save Blake results in her striking arm being amputated in a single strike. She spends Volume 4 learning how to come to terms with her handicap which opens her mind to her father's advice.
  • Jaune observes that the Humongous Mecha Colossus is most likely designed to fight the larger Grimm that live in deeper water in the ocean surrounding Argus. He concludes that it will therefore be unable to deal with multiple human-sized opponents attacking from different directions. The gang therefore use their numbers, maneuverability, and small size to overcome defenses that would be much tougher for an enormous Grimm to deal with. The fact that the commander intentionally sent the Colossus into a combat situation she knew it wasn't designed for, against a group of teenage Huntsmen, is taken as proof of her rising insanity.
  • Flynt Coal of Team FNKI has only one tactic in battle; blast sound waves. He doesn't even move. When he fights Weiss and Yang in the Vytal Festival, that's all he does. It's a good tactic at first... but it also leaves him open to attacks when they start getting around it. It also relies on him having only one opponent fighting him at a time, which is why his partner Neon taunts Yang into chasing her for most of the match. He ultimately goes down when Yang activates her semblance and overpowers him.
  • Adam Taurus is one of the deadliest fighters in the world... as long as he has a sword to fight with. Adam's Semblance allows him to use any energy absorbed from impacts on his sword, store it up, and release it at will, which can come in the form of highly destructive energy blasts or allowing him to move so fast that he appears to be leaving multiple afterimages behind him as he goes in for an attack. Without a weapon to use to absorb and then channel that energy, however, his super powers are negated, and while he's not a slouch without them, he's not nearly as much of a threat. At the end of Volume 6, Adam loses his sword twice while fighting against Blake and Yang. The first time when Blake manages to disarm him he focuses everything on getting his sword back as soon as possible. When Yang disarms him later and tosses his sword off a cliff, he visibly panics and then is killed almost immediately afterwards.
• Team Service Announcement:
  • Exaggerated for laughs in the Class Balance, where the entire BLU team of Team Fortress 2 is Snipers, all of them oblivious to the fact that they're losing the King of the Hill match to a single Heavy actually standing on the point.
  • In Demoknights and Battle-Medics, the Demoknight is useless against the Sentry nest, but not against performing a double kill to save the Soldier's life from a Scout and Pyro. Battle-Medic, however, is completely useless, and the Soldier rejects him.

Webcomics

• 8-Bit Theater:
  • All the main characters have this to some degree or another, but especially Black Mage and Fighter. Black Mage is one of the most powerful and destructive casters in the setting, but is incapable of dealing with situations in any way other than simply blasting it (and often misses), and Fighter is a swordmaster who is sufficiently skilled to break the laws of reality, but has no idea how to function in all other aspects of life.
  • Sarda does this on purpose with his individual spells so that they can't be used against him. For example, he has a spell that he uses to make Black Mage puke up his innards, and another to rewrite reality according to his whims. When Black Mage uses these spells, he finds out that they are, respectively, specifically a "make Black Mage puke up his innards" spell and a "rewrite reality according to Sarda's whims" spell. Regardless of who is casting them.
    Black Mage: When Sarda casts a spell to hurt you, and you learn that spell, you learn to cast a spell that hurts you.
• 21st Century Fox: Back in her school days, Dr. Cavor was a member of her school's orchestra. Artillery section.
• Avengers… Adventure!!!: Whiplash's build is geared near exclusively towards grappling armored opponents, which naturally causes problems when he's attacking Tony the one time he's without his armor.
• Darths & Droids:
  • Pete, a Munchkin who maxed all the skills he thought that would be useful in a space RPG campaign. As a result, he generated R2-D2, "a short, squat robot with no arms", and in Alternate Universes he generated a bunch of other, equally useless characters.
  • Pete's overspecializing comes back to bite him hard during the Rogue One campaign when he plays Chirrut, a blind monk whose defenses are based entirely around dodging attacks. He ends up in a situation where he can't dodge the threat (a point-blank explosion caused by an enemy's Critical Failure), and completely screwed over by his own character build; he has no armor (it would've slowed Chirrut down), too few hit points to tank the blast (thanks to being a Fragile Speedster), and all the minor flaws he took to get his special abilities ruin all his chances to survive (his hemophilia makes him take even more damage, he can't be revived, Baze dies with him because of their Psychic Link, etc.).
• The Vespiary squad in Girl Genius are trained to efficiently destroy some of the most dangerous creatures in the series. Against anything else, they can be considered noncombatants.
• Combined with Clothes Make the Superman in Necropolis. As a young girl, the main character made a Deal with the Devil to acquire a powerful magic sword in order to take revenge on a group of roving bandits who killed her father and burned down her village. The sword makes her virtually invincible against other opponents armed with normal weapons; we see her cutting through blades of her opponents, and comments made by others imply that charms on the sword protect her from being attacked by armed foes. However, it does nothing to protect her from magic, as a witch points out after casually enchanting the girl, and an unarmed knight beats the girl senseless barehanded. The much bigger problem, however, is that having to learned how to fight with a sword that does all the work for her means that she lacks the basic skills needed to fight with any other weapon. The result is that she's a terrifying force of nature while she's wielding the magic sword, but desperately needs Training from Hell just to be competent without it.
• The Order of the Stick:
  • Vaarsuvius also suffers from this, especially in the earlier comics. V's a spellcaster, but seems to focus on the "blow-things-up" part of magic. V also tends to dump other stats, meaning V has poor physical ability and charisma. As such, when faced with something that can resist direct magical assaults, V's stymied. Which happens quite a bit. Part of their character development is understanding that there are other ways to win besides Arcane power and shows more versatility in later comics.
    Vaarsuvius: Thrice-cursed Spell Resistance! It's almost like the universe is trying to deliberately force some form of arbitrary equality between those of us who can reshape matter with our thoughts and those who cannot.
  • Zz'dtri has fine-tuned his build around countering Vaarsuvius's "blaster-caster" approach to combat. When Vaarsuvius figures out that this leaves him with a weakness to more mundane tactics, and starts fighting smart, the tables quickly turn.
  • Roy encounters a half-ogre who has specialized in a very specific style of spiked chain fighting. Aside from being based on incorrect rules interpretations, he is also restricted to a very specific movement pattern, which Roy uses to maneuver him off a cliff to his death.
  • A spell rather than a person, but Vaarsuvius knows the spell Bugsby's cat-retrieving hand, a spell that summons a giant hand that can pick up cats, and only cats. That being said, it's been useful on two separate occasions. V also knows the spell Bugsby's expressive single digit, which is only useful for Flipping the Bird to someone else.
  • The Order of the Scribble, which took charge of protecting the five Gates that stopped the world from being destroyed by the Snarl, took this approach when it came down to said protection, each taking charge of one of the gates and defending it with their own specialties and beliefs — which causes them to fall, one by one, because their overspecialization means they do not cover many dangers. Lirian's nature-focused protections turn out to have a major Achilles' Heel in the form of not being able to respond to an undead. Dorukan's magical seals prove static to the point that when Xykon lures him out and overpowers him in a Wizard Duel, he basically just moves in and takes over the place. Soon's order of paladins with unbreakable honor codes ends up too hidebound and restricted by poor oaths to act to its full potential, and ultimately sees its finest warrior go mad from misguided conviction. Girard restricting the defense of his Gate to his family makes the Gate defenseless when a spell is cast that targets through family lines, and its focus on tricks and illusions makes it more than possible to simply outsmart. Fittingly, the one gate that manages to actually hinder the villains the most is Kraagor's Gate, assigned to the late barbarian party member, but entrusted to the party's rogue Serini. It combines both Kraagor's belief in physical might along with Serini's belief in tricks and traps to misdirect potential raiders away from the true method of reaching the Gate, and backs it up further with magical defenses on loan from the group's three main casters.
• The three main stats in Problem Sleuth are Pulchritude, Vim and Imagination, stand-ins for Speed/Charisma, Strength/Health and Magic/Intelligence respectively. While Problem Sleuth's non-Pulchritude stats are decently balanced, Ace Dick (High Vim, low Imagination and Pulchritude) and Pickle Inspector (High Imagination, low Pulchritude and Vim)'s stats aren't quite so balanced. In fact, PI lost his Vim gauge entirely upon leveling up.
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal has Bulletproof Man, who is only invulnerable to bullets, and these boxers, who try to solve all problems by punching it. Subverted by this witch who surprises an opponent relying on Anti-Magic.
• In Weak Hero, Rowan's 'Hyper Elbow' is the only good move in his arsenal- if he can't quickly KO his opponent with it, then he's left with nothing else to defend himself. Grape compares him to a fighting game player who can only pull off one move, who becomes a laughing stock when placed against actual opponents.
• Parodied in a scene in We Live In An MMO?!, where the party levels up and are given ten attribute points to distribute as they see fit. Rando, the party's tank, tries to put all of his into his Strength stat, which causes him to talk slower and slower, devolving into Hulk Speak before he's left a drooling, fish-eyed moron who can't even speak, at least until Lu adds a point into his Intelligence. Amirul the spellcaster meanwhile does the same with his Intelligence stat, which grants him "knowledge of everything" while expanding his skull so high into the air the top can't be seen and leaving him so weak he gets trapped in place by a pebble on his robe.

Web Original

• Bosun's Journal: The genetically engineered Human Subspecies of the Corpocaste era were often tailor-made for increasingly specific tasks, such as hardware maintenance in low-G or corporate planning. After the collapse of civilization in a disastrous war, most human varieties found themselves unable to thrive outside of their extremely specific niches, as they were typically unable to recreate civilization's complex web of interdependent systems on their own and were often psychologically unable to form stable societies; some, such as the canmen, were entirely unable to survive or reproduce without advanced technological infrastructure. Others went the other way, victims of their own success, as they were so well-suited for thriving in a very specialized niche that they had no incentive or ability to spread outside of it or to retain complex tool use or problem-solving intelligence. Within a few million years, all human strains either died out or regressed into animalistic intelligence.
• Serina: This happens a lot:
  • The womblers are the first megafauna to arise on the planet, being seven-foot flightless birds. Lacking predators, they evolved to have no capacity for fear, causing them to quickly die out once the first predators evolve.
  • The Kyran Islands are an isolated group of islands where the only predators are stork-like avians. As such, most prey animals evolved to burrow to hide from them. However, the Kyran islands eventually collide with the mainland, allowing mammal-like tribbetheres to flood the island: able to follow their prey down their burrows like weasels do, the Kyran birds were all wiped out.
  • Serezelles, a type of quadrupedal deer-like birds, specialized in feeding on softer grasses. This becomes a problem when sharp, unpalatable razorgrass starts crowding out the tender grasses on the plains, and the final nail in their coffin is the arrival of the rodent-like circuagodonts, which are more efficient at eating both razorgrass and soft plants.
  • Merwals, a type of aquatic seal-like tribbethere, are hit by a double whammy of this: unable to efficiently chase fish due to their rigid tail joints (their tail used to be a hind leg), they are outcompeted by swimming birds and relegated to a clam-eating lifestyle, which they specialize very well at. Then come the aquatic molodonts, another tribbethere clade more efficient at eating clams, and unable to eat anything else to ease competitive pressure from the molodonts, the merwals quickly die out.
  • This is what kills off the sapient woodcrafters. They have become so specialized for living in and feeding off one particular species of tree that when an ever worsening ice age makes it too cold for the trees to survive, the woodcrafters become malnourished and unable to reproduce as a result. Some choose to die in their old home while others accompany the also sapient gravediggers to the coast where they discover they can feed off seaweed, however by that point there were too few of them and they were all too old to reproduce, so they decide to spend their remaining time teaching the gravediggers.

Web Videos

• Chef Excellence: excellent at bags, useless at everything else. Just the bags. Keep bags. Keep bags in mind. Bags, Excellence, bags. And everything will be alright.
  An Excellent Breakdown
• In Cracked videos, Dan O'Brien plays an exaggerated version of himself with encyclopedic pop culture knowledge but toally ignorant of real world history, politics, etc., except how they relate to his favoured works of fiction.
• When the Game Grumps play Gundam: Battle Assault 2, Danny spends the whole game playing as Big Zam, a titanic mobile suit who Arin admits right from the start is overpowered ("Guess what your main attack is. Walking.") He spends the whole video literally walking all over Arin when he's not also playing an overpowered boss-level mobile suit, until he finally gets behind Big Zam and makes short work of him while Danny's still trying to figure out how to turn around.
• Mahu: In "Second Chance", that becomes one of the growing fears of the Galactic Commonwealth, as many of their planets focus only on one thing, needing the supplies and resources from the rest of the nation to properly function.
• Alien Biospheres has two main examples.
  • The deinognathans are gigantic ambush predators designed to prey on large organisms, but begin to decline after the forests they once inhabited are mainly replaced by grassland, making it difficult for them to hunt due to their inability to sneak up on prey, as well as being unable to chase after it thanks to their fused limb girdle (think if your spine was a single fused bone rather than a stack of disks) limiting their agility. This was also one of the reasons that led to their ultimate demise in the mass extinction, with only the hybognathans surviving.
  • Most of the species that were overly-suited for rainforest environments died out when the extinction event wiped out the altiphytes and rainforests. These include the phyllophorae, harpactopods, aspidonts and tanybrachids.
• In Something Awful: Dungeons & Dragons Let's Play, Minerelle is a character who relies on her massive Arcana roll to accomplish as much as possible. As a result of this, she isn't particularly useful in situations where she can't just throw Arcana at a problem until something happens. She suffers a bit from overspecializing in combat as well, since most of her attacks target the enemy's Will defense (only getting the one that doesn't relatively late into the LP). As a result, whenever the party goes up against anything with an above average Will, she pretty much has no way to contribute to the battle.
• Dr. Carlos Chronos of The Time... Guys is a brilliant inventor, but can apparently only make time... items.
• In To Boldly Flee, each of Terl's crew is responsible for exactly one aspect of flying his ship, and there is only one crewmember assigned to each task. Therefore, Angry Joe is able to cripple Terl and Zod's offensive capability by shooting the one weapons officer.

Western Animation

• Adventure Time: In the episode "Betty", Bella Noche is a being of Anti-Magic capable of neutralizing the magic of all of the wizards in Wizard City, who have no non-magical defenses and are virtually helpless. It works the other way too, however; when Betty, a normal woman, managed to get to his true form, Bella Noche is taken down with little more than a punch.
• Avatar: The Last Airbender:
  • Combustion Man has the unique Firebending ability to focus his energy through an eye tattoo on his forehead, and release it as explosive blasts. While incredibly powerful as an attack, it lacks any kind of versatility, and while it's shown that he can use more conventional firebending (e.g. to burn Zuko's message), he does not use any in his battles with the Gaang. It also makes him quite vulnerable, as any form of disruption to his chi (such as by a blow to the head) can disable his ability to do it. Or cause him to explode. He is also apparently unaware of it being disrupted until he tries to use it, increasing his risk of being Hoist by His Own Petard.
  • Fire Lord Ozai is the most powerful firebender in the world... and has not developed any way to deal with opposition other than to Kill It with Fire. He is not a Frontline General like his brother Iroh or father Azulon, nor does he have any fighting abilities outside of his Firebending, like his children Zuko or Azula — in fact, during the Day of Black Sun (which marks a solar eclipse that temporarily disables Firebending), Zuko is able to easily hold Ozai back merely by drawing his swords on the latter before Calling the Old Man Out. Fittingly, Ozai's final fate is to be Depowered by Aang via Energybending, exposing him for the shell of a man that he really is, to the point where a gang of teenagers who'd been terrified of him only minutes before are mocking him. After his imprisonment (at the mercy of the son whom he'd tried to stamp that quality out of), he's too weak to break out as Iroh did during the Day of Black Sun.
  • In the Sequel Series The Legend of Korra, pro-benders often suffer from this. While characters like Bolin and Tahno are among the top competitors in their chosen field, their sport's long-range fighting style is laughable when used in real combat. Pro-benders tend to fight as if they're still on the game field and will sling fixed amounts of rock or water at an enemy. Get up close and a pro-bender's defense falls apart. In comparison, someone with Avatar Korra's comprehensive education in the traditional bending styles will move between long- and short-range fighting as necessary and will use the whole environment against an enemy.
  • The reverse was true when Korra first joined the Fire Ferrets. She was literally a last-minute replacement when their previous waterbender no-showed, and started out by thrashing the opposing players with highly effective attacks... that were against the rules, resulting in fouls against Korra. Just like what's good in a pro-bending isn't necessarily good in a fight, what's good in a fight isn't necessarily good in pro-bending.
  • The Metalbending Police of Republic City are shown to be this. The Equalists' tactics and gear were designed to counter the Metalbender's tactics and the police got routed in every open clash between the two and there weren't enough combat-oriented benders of other nations to counter them (at least until the United Military shows up). They also rely on Metalbending specifically to an absurd degree even when classic Earthbending is a better option, a trait shared by most other Metalbenders in the series as well. They learned from this and from Season 2 on, showed a more diverse police force (including firebender Mako), backed up by members of The White Lotus (and later The Airbenders).
  • The Chi-blockers, themselves were examples of this trope for similar reasons as Ty Lee. There was plenty of fire, water, and earthbenders in Republic City to prepare against, but only a handful of airbenders that already use an evasive style that makes Tenzin and his children the hardest to take down as well as having zero experience against a fellow non-bender like Asami, who also has one of their gloves to OHKO them at a more efficient rate than any of her teammates.
  • Ming Hua has what most refer to as Psychic Waterbending because she doesn't have arms, which the water functions as instead. This gives her greater control over water than most other benders and she is far more dextrous with her water-arms than a normal person is with theirs (for example she can quickly scale the side of a cliff with her water arms alone). Ming Hua is later killed because her water arms made a direct conduit to her heart so that any electric attack against her would be instantly fatal. Prior to this, she was completely vulnerable to firebenders who specifically targeted the water around her as she has no combat ability when she can't bend.
  • Kuvira's weapon in the Season 4 finale. The Colossus is a 25-story-tall Humongous Mecha, which Kuvira uses in her attempted conquest of Republic City. The Spirit Energy Cannon mounted on its right arm is a weapon of mass destruction whose beams of spirit energy tear right through even the most massive defenses, so that no walls or armor can protect against it. Furthermore, the Colossus is so thickly armored that seemingly no attack is able to damage it, and metalbending doesn’t work against it because the armor and joints are made from platinum harvested from the dismantled domes of Zaofu. However, there are flaws in both the design of the mecha and Kuvira's use of it. True, it's an unstoppable juggernaut against any large target with limited mobility, such as city buildings, fortresses, battleships, or massed formations of ground troops. The problem is that the Spirit Energy Cannon is its only ranged weapon, and its beam is focused rather than scattershot. That means it's hard to deal with multiple fast-moving attackers that avoid clumping together, especially flyers. Kuvira also squanders the cannon’s second-greatest advantage — the fact that it out-ranges any other weapon on the heroes' side — by walking into the middle of the city to pursue her enemies. The Colossus can try to trample ground enemies with its feet, or to swat enemy flyers with its hands, but these ponderous movements can usually be dodged. The teams of benders defending the city are therefore able to swarm it from multiple directions and avoid its attacks while trying things like slinging paint balloons at the cockpit windows to blind it, or wrapping its legs in steel cables and trying to knock it on its back. While none of these attacks succeed in stopping it, the defenders of Republic City manage to survive and stall for time until Hiroshi Sato identifies its weakness to internal attack and installs his plasma cutter on Asami and Varrick's hummingbird flyer to cut a small hole through the armor. Once this is accomplished the heroic benders are able to cripple and destroy it from the inside just like the Gaang destroyed Azula's giant drill in The Last Airbender. One wonders what would have happened if Kuvira had A) installed a bunch of smaller point defense weapons such as the lightning guns or flamethrowers found on the smaller mecha-suits; B) brought an escort of airships to help shoot down the airbenders; and/or C) retreated to open ground and blasted the heroes into oblivion from a distance instead of wading in among the buildings and letting herself get surrounded.
• Ben 10:
  • Ripjaws is a form that is incredibly powerful underwater, being able to move incredibly quickly and having good strength, which means he can quickly turn the tide of the battle in his favor. The problem? He's almost completely useless on dry land; while he's still got incredibly powerful jaws, he needs water to breathe, which makes for quite a bit of suffering when he's nowhere near a body of water. And it wouldn’t be good for Ben when the timer runs out and he’s still underwater. Fortunately Ripjaws grows out of this as his species becomes amphibious when they get older.
  • Ditto has the potential to make unlimited clones, and that's it. Other than that, he has subpar strength, speed, and power, and is one of Ben's physically weakest aliens. If the problem can't be solved with numbers, then Ditto's practically useless. To make matters worse, Ditto clones share pain and damage.
• In one episode of DuckTales (1987), Big Time assaulted the Money Bin wearing an armored assault suit. Upon breaking into the vault, he's greeted by Scrooge in a tank, but isn't worried since his armor can withstand a 60-millimeter shell... only for Scrooge to reveal his tank fires 61 millimeter shells.^note This is Rule of Funny, because in real life two tank shells can be the same caliber but have vastly different anti-armor performance depending on the size of the propellant charge, the length of the gun barrel, whether it's a kinetic or chemical effect projectile, etc. Therefore, there are many possible comparisons in which the smaller diameter round would penetrate more armor than the larger diameter round.
  Big Time: Whoa! That's one millimeter too many! (Gets blasted out of the Money Bin)
• DuckTales (2017): This is General Lunaris Fatal Flaw. He spent a long time, possibly decades, studying Scrooge, and as a result, he spends most of "Moonvasion!" two steps ahead of him, enough that Scrooge has hit a dead end with his plans for at least a few days. His failure ultimately ends up being because when going up against Glomgold's plan, he keeps trying to approach it from the perspective of Scrooge, thinking it's some elaborate ploy or distraction until Scrooge spells out that it isn't his plan, which singlehandedly upends Lunaris's invasion in minutes.
• The Fairly OddParents!:
  • In one of the Oh Yeah! Cartoons shorts, "The Temp", when Cosmo and Wanda are away and Timmy needs a temporary fairy godparent, he finds that the temp is good at making toys. Unfortunately, toys are all he can make, which doesn't help when a fire breaks out in Timmy's room and it can't be wished away. In the end, the reason for this is because the temp turns out to be one of Santa Claus's elves.
  • In one episode, Cosmo and Wanda give Timmy a shrink suit so he can do a school project. When he tries to return to normal size, he finds out that the suit can only shrink him; it can't reverse the process.
  • When the Tooth Fairy restores Timmy's teeth, he asks her to heal his bruised eye as well, only for her to tell him that teeth are the only thing she can help with. She demonstrates by conjuring a monstrous Oculothorax as an example of what would happen if she tried to work with eyes.
• The Fantastic Four (1978): There’s one hilarious event in which Mr. Fantastic tricks Magneto into surrendering by bluffing that he has nullified Magneto's power over magnetism. He points a gun at Magneto, causing the villain to scoff that he’ll simply wrest control of it through magnetism, but when Mr. Fantastic's gun is unaffected he feels helpless to do anything without his powers. Only after Magneto's in handcuffs does Mr. Fantastic reveal that the gun was a wooden decoy; Magneto is apparently so hung up on the fact that he fell for a trick, he forgets that his powers still work and he could immediately break loose if he wanted to. Note that nowadays, neither man would be defeated that easily.
• Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends had an episode where the home was overrun with Scribbles (imaginary friends conjured up from infants), which as their name implied, were basically floating black line scribbles. Initially thought annoying and bothersome, they were shown as being very adept at doing chores, yet each Scribble could only do one task (such as washing the dishes, but not putting them away) or they "overload" and start shrieking until calmed down.
• Futurama:
  • Bender is a bending unit, meaning he's very good at bending things, but isn't very good at anything else. In one episode, when the Robot Mafia drops an unbendable girder on Flexo, the only solution that Bender can think of is to try to bend it off of him anyway. ("Well, I don't know anything about lifting, so that just leaves us the one option!") Miraculously, he succeeds, but falls apart in the process. On the other hand, Bender manages to pull When All You Have Is a Hammer… moments from time to time, performing non-bending tasks by seeing them as being (in his words) "primitive, degenerate forms of bending".
  • In one of the "Anthology of Interest" shorts, Philip J. Fry says that he's good at video games and bad at everything else. This is actually good because of the premise of the short, being that real life was (quite literally) like a game.
  • Doctor Zoidberg is eventually revealed to invert this trope. After years of being shown to be an inept surgeon who frequently does more harm than good, it's revealed in one episode that he is in fact an incredibly gifted and ''unmatched' surgeon... for aliens. Humans are quite possibly the one species in the universe he doesn't have training for, but it's the species that he's most around.
• King of the Hill: In "Bobby Goes Nuts", Bobby decides to win fights by kicking his opponents in the testicles after attending a woman's self-defense course. He eventually kicks Hank, who tries to ground Bobby and take away his video games, but is still too injured. Peggy eventually goes after Bobby herself, who finds out that women don't have testicles, and is quickly taken down.
• In Mighty Magiswords, the titular magiswords are magical Oddly Shaped Swords that are usually only good for one specific function, and few can be used as, well, actual swords. This gets a lampshade in one episode where our heroes have to train in actual sword combat and are befuddled by regular swords.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • Unicorn ponies find their magical abilities quite limited outside their special talent, as illustrated by their Cutie Mark, such as Rarity mostly being good at magic related to tailoring and illusions. Twilight Sparkle on the other hand, by virtue of having her talent be magic in general, knows a vast variety of spells, to the point where she can levitate the top of a water tower, float it through a barn full of cows (milking the cows in the process) and make the water tower into a makeshift baby bottle, while also causing the wind to play a lullaby.
  • Twilight Sparkle is cripplingly overspecialized in other ways, however. In "Winter Wrap-up" she tries to help clean up winter without her magic (because that's the traditional way), but because she's so used to using magic for everything, she screws up anything she tries to do physically (starting with putting on her saddle). She eventually leans to non-magically contribute with her TRUE strength, that of an uber-delegating Schedule Fanatic.
  • Throughout the series, Princess Celestia and Princess Luna are said to be among the most powerful of Ponies in all of Equestria due to their ability to move the Sun and Moon with their Magic, and while they are indeed capable of turning that Magic on their foes in a fight, despite the fact that they are Alicorns (meaning that they have the Magical capabilities of a Unicorn, the Agility and Flight of a Pegasus, and the Strength of an Earth Pony), they only seem to rely on their flying and their Magic in order to fight, without ever utilizing their Earth Pony strength to try solving a problem. And in most (read as: EVERY) case of this happening in the series, Celestia and Luna end up being defeated or captured because of their overreliance on Beam Spam and Beam-O-War without once resorting to Good Old Fisticuffs or taking advantage of Flying Brick status to even dodge attacks.
  Cozy Glow: That's the problem with you Magic-Types: you're so reliant on all your special power, you forget to use your brains!
• The Owl House: Invoked by Emperor Belos, who forces all of his subjects to join one of nine covens that are each devoted to a single school of magic upon reaching adulthood, with all of their other powers permenenantly sealed away by special sigils. Only the lucky few chosen to join the Emperor's Coven (or those that forgo the coven system altogether and become marked as criminals) can freely use all forms of magic.
• In Rocko's Modern Life episode "Dear John", when Rocko's kitchen needs to be worked on due to a random satellite crashing into it, he and Heffer purchase a Do-It-Yourself kit by home repairman Bucky Barnes (no relation). Unfortunately, it seems that Bucky's only specialty is bathrooms, and Rocko and Heffer don't realize this until they end up turning Rocko's kitchen into a bathroom. To make matters worse, when Rocko calls Bucky to fix the kitchen, he instead turns the rest of the rooms in Rocko's house into bathrooms.
  Rocko: There's too many bathrooms!
  Bucky: Too many bathrooms? What, are you nuts? You can never have too many bathrooms!
• The Secret Saturdays: The Secret Scientists are brilliant and an effective fighting force when working together, but they're still only geniuses in their chosen field of study.
• In She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, Hordak relies on long-range attacks such as hurling objects and firing his arm cannon. He's a powerhouse when attacking opponents from a distance, or besieging large stationary targets such as the Sea Elf Village and the Salineas Sea Gate. However, his lack of agility puts him at a disadvantage in hand-to-hand combat, allowing the much more maneuverable Catra to subdue him twice in Season 4.
  • Bow has similar issues. He's a brilliant archer, but admits he's largely useless when he runs of arrows (which happens a lot, early in the series). You'd think he'd take some martial arts lessons or start carrying a dagger or something...
• The Simpsons:
  • The town of Ogdenville makes nothing but barley; even their history is centered about barley. When the barley got tainted, this caused their entire business to go bust, and sent their town into a depression.
  • When Milhouse tries to get the role of a boy who points in a play, he fails because the direction he's asked to point isn't the same he trained for.
  • In a Treehouse of Horror episode, Homer is standing in a bunker when France launches a 6-megaton nuclear missile at Springfield. Homer is lucky that it was a 6-megatonner because the shelter was designed for exactly 6 megatons, "no more, no less."
• In one episode of SpongeBob SquarePants, SpongeBob was successfully taught how to drive blindfolded. Unfortunately, he could only drive while blindfolded, to the point that when forced to drive without it, he reverted to his usual failures.
• Ahsoka Tano in the later seasons of Star Wars: The Clone Wars adopted the Jar'Kai lightsaber Dual Wielding technique but grew too reliant on having two sabers for defense. Despite being capable of holding her own against Jedi Masters and Sith Lords alike with both sabers in hand, she ended up losing to the corrupted Padawan Barriss Offee when forced to use only one. Her Evil Counterpart Asajj Ventress displayed a similar weakness in The Movie but eventually grew past it.
• Steven Universe:
  • Lapis Lazuli is powerful enough to take control of all the world's ocean water and control it to her advantage, as well as fashion it into various forms for combat...but she's pathetically weak physically-wise (by Gem standards), so in a place where there's little water to use, even a Gem like Pearl could take her down quickly since she's shown no offensive abilities that don't relate to water.
  • Homeworld's shattering Robinoids possess a powerful laser that can easily destroy stone and shatter Gems, but they only attack if they detect an actual gemstone. Creatures that lack gems, like humans, are invisible to them, and they can't fight back if one attacks them because they can't detect them.
• One episode had the titular Super Duper Sumos each facing an opponent who was especially tailor-made to face him, with abilities designed to specifically counter and defeat that one specific sumo. They're getting utterly Curb Stomped until they decide to switch opponents... and effortlessly win the battles in mere seconds. How does having one extra butt-cheek made one able to effectively defeat one specific sumo and nobody else? It's just that kind of show, silly.
• One episode of Teen Titans (2003) has the villain Control Freak create a plethora of gadgets and strategies tailor-made to take down the Titans. Unfortunately for him, his opponents turned out to be Titans East, all of whom have powers and abilities far different from the normal Titans. When he has a chance to regroup, he builds a new set of gadgets designed to beat them and does much better.
• The Venture Bros.:
  • Jefferson Twilight, Blacula Hunter. He's also got plenty of other, support skills, but You Didn't Ask.
    And they haven't been taken by Blaculas. Though I'm not prepared to rule out Caucasian vampires.
  • O.S.I. agent Headshot is a good sniper...and that's it. A rather minuscule skill-set for a secret agent.
• In an episode of Wait Till Your Father Gets Home, Harry drops his car off at the service garage, then comes back later to find they're not finished. Perplexed that a mechanic is standing by his car doing nothing, Harry asks why the man isn't working on it. "I only do headlights," the mechanic explains. "Left headlights."

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