Crippling Overspecialization / Video Games

Examples of Crippling Overspecialization in Video Games.

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Action Game

• Being a pure gunner is a trait in a number of old '80s games, including Nightstalker from the Intellivison and Tutakhamen for the Apple II. These games have you start off with nothing. So you must find your gun which is strong enough to kill most enemies in one shot and has unlimited range but has only a SMALL number of bullets. You have no melee ability so once you run out of ammo, then the game becomes a race to avoid your enemies until you find another gun or reach the next level.
• BattleTanx: Global Assault:
  • The Rhino is a dedicated tank-hunter, sporting a gun on par with, and armor superior to, that of the Goliath tank, the original heavyweight champion of the first game - but its gun is a Fixed Forward-Facing Weapon and all that armor is concentrated on the front like a shield, hence its name. Anything that can flank it, especially the Inferno flamethrower tank, can take it out easily.
  • The Inferno tank itself suffers from this because it's the only tank to use a primary weapon with a hard range limit built into that weapon, whereas everything else only needs to lead the target to engage at any range at which they can see that target. The Inferno holds a huge amount of primary ammo that it burns through relatively slowly, but that relies on it getting the target within its pathetically-short range - engaging threats from beyond that distance forces it to use up its much more limited supply of other special weapons, so when those run out, its only options are trying to get close while the enemy shoots it to death or running away.
• While a strategic game at its broadest gameplay level, Cyber Empires was more of a top-down brawl shooter, and features a small assortment of Humongous Mecha to choose from. The two most notably overspecialized units are the Dragon and the Crossbolt. The Dragon can kill other cyborgs single-handedly by covering them in napalm but is otherwise small and weak beyond close range. On the other end of the scale, the Crossbolt trades speed and close-range firepower for a quad-rack guided missile launcher, making it excellent at long range but less than useless at close range. When either unit is unable to play to its strengths, they can be destroyed en masse by more flexible units such as the Achilles.
• Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening: Doppelganger is the last Style obtained by Dante over the course of the game, and summons a doppelganger of Dante on command to fight with him. While the extra Dante takes a load off your back (and even unlocks a 2-player mode), it forces you to use the clone frequently while relying on the non-specialized movesets, causing it to become a hindrance in boss fights where faster dodging, enhanced swordplay, better ranged combat, or blocking would work better.
• In the old SSI game Gemstone Warrior, your character is only armed with a crossbow and a small number of One-Hit Kill fireballs. He can find a dagger in the game but it's purely decorative and can't be used in battle, so if you run out of ammunition then your only option is to run away until you find more.
• In The Legend of Zelda game Hyrule Warriors, "VS" Weapon Skills will only give you bonus damage when used against a specific class of enemy; e.g., "VS Legend" increases damage against Link, Zelda, Ganondorf, and Young Link (and Toon Link and Linkle in Legends). The most overspecialized of all is "VS Ganon", which solely affects Dark Beast Ganon, who is easily the least common giant boss in the game. In Legends and Definitive Edition it also works on Phantom Ganon and Yuga, but that's only a mild improvement.
• Metal Warriors: The Prometheus has extremely powerful weapons but moves slowly and can't jump at all.
• Path of Exile features energy shields, in addition to the usual armour and dodge commonly seen in this kind of game. This provides a barrier that takes damage before health is harmed, except for chaos damage which penetrates straight through and always hits health. The Chaos Inoculation skill makes the character immune to chaos damage but at the cost of reducing health to exactly 1. Characters that stack energy shield tend to have low health, and so this skill can prevent them from suffering in areas that have lots of chaos damage. However, any character not planned and built entirely around this skill will likely become unplayable, since once their shield is gone they are guaranteed to die in a single hit.
  • In the Trial of the Ancestors league some players made characters with Chaos Inoculation and no energy shield at all. At high ranks in the trials enemy damage and toughness scaled so much it was arguable whether it was worth trying to survive being hit and generally agreed killing them was a waste of effort, resulting in builds that invested solely in defenses that avoided damage entirely, with no investment in life or energy shield. Others focused heavily on health and damage reduction as well as avoidance, but both got skills that would hinder their opponents with knockback and slow instead of dealing meaningful damage. These characters were extremely good at the trial's team battle game mode, but little use anywhere else. As the only limit on attempting the trials was a tradeable in-game currency, nothing stopped them from using another character to acquire the silver coins or buying them with the income from winning trials.

Adventure Game

• In the first and fourth Gobliiins games, the player controls three goblins whose specializations border on the ridiculous. One can only pick up and place objects (only one at a time), another can only punch things, and the third can only cast spells. Apparently, the other two goblins haven't grasped the concept of, well, grasping.
• LEGO Dimensions:
  • Chell is overly-specialized in terms of abilities. The only ability she has is the Portal Gun, which no other character has, but is only ever used to access optional secret areas in the main story.
  • Marty McFly only has one ability: Sonar Smash, an ability the Batmobile in the starter pack can be upgraded to have, and one most other characters have in addition to other abilities.
• In The Lost Vikings, only Eric can run and jump; only Baleog can attack; and only Olaf can defend. Similarly to the Gobliiins series, the premise takes Team Work Puzzle Game aspect up to a ridiculous level.
• In Solatorobo, this is what Merveille says is wrong with Nero and Blanck, as though they live for The Order and can perfectly perform their one duty of controlling Lares and Lemures, once that duty is fulfilled, they have no reason to exist. Those who are imperfect, like their brother Red, are free to grow and develop in any way they choose, not bound to any one destiny.

Fighting Game

• Dissidia Final Fantasy:
  • Poor, poor Firion. On the ground, Firion is a monster: a Mighty Glacier with deadly mid to close range moves that chain into HP hits—three of them—a projectile, one of the hardest HP attacks in the game to dodge (that doesn't belong to a Boss character), a defense and counter move that is a practically guaranteed HP hit, and the ability to ground dash, which handily helps remedy the speed problem. ...Once he leaves the ground, though, he has none of that. Once he is in the air, he is in a bad way. This overspecialization happens to be crippling because in his game, most everyone else is at least competent in the air (with at least three explicit specialists in air fighting), and many of the stages are fragmented enough that staying on the ground exclusively is not possible and the game flow tends to naturally take fighting to the air.
    • They went so far in the sequel as to design stages that punish people for jumping into the air to give Firion a chance, as well as minor overhauls of the game making ground-fighting more viable and interesting for more characters, adding new characters with an eye to making them more balanced for ground vs airplay, and removing the 'infinite air jumps' oversight of the first game with the result that now staying in the air is much harder. Interestingly, they decided the answer to Firion's overspecialization was to overspecialize even more in his niche, adding a highly powerful and dangerous new attack to his ground arsenal, which, combined with better functionality on his air game (he can chain his weak air attacks together more easily, and aerial swordslash will now floor-crash the opponent back into Firion's turf) makes him a monstrously tough opponent except on stages where ground combat is just hopeless period.
  • Terra has a slightly crippling specialization-only a few of her Bravery attacks chain directly into HP Attacks, and the ones that do are so laughably easy to dodge that even the dumbest computer opponents can do it. The remedy to this is that her actual HP Attacks are very difficult to dodge, especially in EX Mode where she can cast them twice in rapid succession. Still causes her issues with the extremely reactive AI opponents-most of Inward Chaos comes to mind.
  • Cloud of Darkness has the most different HP attacks in the game, able to hit at any range, has good options in the air and on the ground, as well as dodge-and-counter or block-and-counter moves, making her HP game extremely versatile. However, she starts out with predictable Bravery attacks and never learns any more, requiring her to stick to HP attacks. Thus, her strategy leaves little room for experimentation, and most players can figure out how to avoid her Bravery attacks quickly.
  • Exdeath is built almost entirely around counter moves. When he successfuly counters something, his follow-up moves are lightning fast and hit extremely hard. He has the non-counter versions of these moves, but they are extremely slow and predictable. His moveset had a problem of having low utility outside of those counter moves, being limited to awful Bravery attacks, a teleport, and just okay HP attacks. He had very little to do against enemies that choose to not attack. Exdeath mirror matches were an extreme example of Padded Sumo Gameplay. Duodecim made him more versatile by letting him cancel all his other moves into counters to bait attacks, and gave him a new HP attack that lets him do something against opponents that just run away.
• In Gundam Extreme Vs. Full Boost, the Gundam Epyon is generally considered such a weak mobile suit that it actually has its own level in the game's Character Tiers, despite being ranked at 3000 points (the highest possible in the game, which gives it high HP and attack power). The reason for this is that Epyon wields only melee weapons (a large Laser Blade and a Whip Sword), meaning it has no way of attacking beyond short-range and must weather its opponent's guns and missiles in order to do any damage. When Epyon appeared in the earlier game Gundam vs. Gundam Next, it had the advantage of an Assist Character that provided a Deflector Shield, but the Full Boost version lacks this, which puts it at an incredible disadvantage even before you factor in the fact that Full Boost is biased towards ranged combat.
• A number of characters in Marvel vs. Capcom 3 suffer from this. Top tier characters are typically Jacks-of-All Stats and often Flying Bricks. Other potent characters, such as Iron Fist and Ghost Rider often find themselves in low tiers simply because their overspecialization, well, cripples them.
  • Iron Fist is a Lightning Bruiser. He practices Confusion Fu, transitioning seamlessly between kung-fu moves to mixup opponents. He can even cast Status Buffs to adapt to his enemy. His weakness? MvC 3 features Super Jumps, Double Jumps, Teleport Spam and Flight. It's remarkably easy for any enemy to wage High-Altitude Battle. But because Iron Fist has no Anti-Air attacks, he is unable to effectively reach anyone airborne. And because two of his most important moves — his Launcher and his Dragon's Touch — are only effective on standing enemies, he can't effectively damage airborne fighters even after he catches them.
  • Ghost Rider is a Long-Range Fighter, through use of his chain whip and Hellfire. In theory, he should be able to prevent his enemies from ever approaching him. It turns out, however, that Ghost Rider's one-dimensional strategy is rather predictable, which renders him easily approachable. And once that's done, he's nearly completely unable to cope with enemies in close proximity to him, especially just above and behind him. It doesn't help that many teleports put characters in exactly this location.
• For a non-gameplay example, El Fuerte from Street Fighter IV is a really good chef... as long as he's making Mexican food. Anything else turns him into a Cordon Bleugh Chef.
• Super Smash Bros.:
  • Ganondorf, a Mighty Glacier, is focused almost entirely on raw power. His attacks tend to be the strongest in sheer damage and knockback, letting him rack up damage in a few moves and then take stocks extremely early...on paper. The problem comes from the fact that practically all of his other attributes are given up for this power - no projectiles, no fast movement or escape options, a lackluster recovery, and few safe attacks to pressure or combo with make it too easy for skilled opponents to wall Ganon out, send him offstage, and KO him just as early due to his poor disadvantage and recovery. It's this overspecialization that's kept him bottom-tier in every game since Melee, even in Ultimate which gave him devastating sword attacks and a faster jumpsquat while doing little to fix his fundamental flaws.
  • Little Mac is a Boxing Battler, with powerful ground game, moves with super armor, very fast-moving speed and a one-hit KO punch. However, since boxing doesn't ever get off the ground, Mac's air game is extremely poor both in strength and in ability to get back to the battlefield. Notably, his crippling weaknesses are spelled out in his character trailer for all to see, which has never happened for any other character before or since. So, good job Mac? Another often overlooked flaw is that Mac is also overspecialized as a Close-Range Combatant and lacks good tools against fighters with ranged attacks or disjointed hurtboxes, so his two major flaws combine to make him even worse than if he had just one of those weakness. While Mac has been given some improved abilities intended to strengthen his air game a little, this trope arguably no longer even applies as Mac has been massively nerfed in almost every area, even hampering his one good area of expertise, his strong ground game.
  • Palutena is underwhelming in almost every aspect that is not named Lightweight or Super Speed (both of which are custom specials and thus cannot be used in with anyone mode). This alone makes Palutena easily one of the biggest Low Tier Letdowns in the Wii U and 3DS versions. In Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, she got several buffs and was pulled out of this status, but in her debut game, she still remains one.
  • In Super Smash Bros. 64, the 1P-only bosses could historically only be used through the Debug Menu, but they have started to see more use through Game Mods like Smash Remix making them fully Promoted to Playable. However, they're not nearly as effective as they look.
    • Metal Mario has absurdly high damage resistance due to his weight. Unfortunately for him, it also makes him the fastest-falling character in the entire series to such an extreme degree that it prevents him from having any functional recovery capability; it may take a bit longer to send him off of the edge of the stage, but if you manage to even once, he isn't coming back. On top of that, while most aerial combos don't work on him because he falls too fast for the opponent to follow up, he can't perform many aerial combos of his own either.
    • As Giant Donkey Kong's name implies, he's DK except he's bigger, faster, and stronger, too, but in practice, that exaggerates DK's weaknesses much more than his strengths. Most of the draw for competitive Super Smash Bros. 64 is the game's globally high hitstun giving it absurd combo potential, and he's the biggest target to practice those combos on. Making matters worse for him is that the hitboxes of his attacks are much more spread-out than normal DK's, which makes what would be perfectly ordinary-feeling dead zones on the normal one seem miles away in the giant one, which makes it more difficult for him to attack anyone who gets up close. He may have technically better damage resistance and recovery ability than DK, but that doesn't matter much when he can be brought to damage levels still lethal for him very quickly anyway and his recovery is very easily interrupted.

First-Person Shooter

• Alien vs. Predator:
  • This is how the Predators are balanced against the Aliens and Marines. They have the most health and the best gear but lack a general "all-purpose" weapon. Catch one holding the wrong weapon for a task, and you'll win. This is even more so with the Predators' vision modes. Normal vision is, well, normal, so it isn't great in the dark and can't lock weapons on to targets. There is then a special vision mode for each species (human, xenomorph, and predator) which makes that species stand out and get target locks, but makes the others virtually invisible. In single-player this is usually not a big problem — the three "factions" obviously don't cooperate with each other, for plot reasons— but in multiplayer, changing mode at the wrong time is a death sentence.
  • Praetorian Aliens. Yes, they hit hard and can take quite a bit more damage than regular Aliens... but they can't pounce or climb walls. Very bad trade-off.
• Battlefield:
  • Battlefield 2 has seven classes with very specific roles. Anti-Tank and Engineer in particular are fantastic at killing and supporting vehicles, but only have the world's least accurate SMGs and Short-Range Shotguns for enemy infantry, which makes them very non-competitive on the game's huge maps. Ironically, the game's Master of None class, the Assault, is hit hardest by this — he's only good at general combat against other infantry, which several other classes are at least decent at while also packing useful, specialized abilities. This is particularly apparent with the Medic class, which is basically Assault with medical supplies instead of a Grenade Launcher — and which, through unlocks, gets the one of the most damaging and accurate weapons in the game, meaning a Medic can do everything an Assault does better, and heal people on top of it. Later games would cut down the number of playable classes by merging the existing ones to give them slightly better range of what they can do, most notably Battlefield 3 merging Assault and Medic.
  • In Battlefield: Bad Company 2 you have a choice of 4 specializations. It is possible to be crippled by the Medic's lack of explosives, or by the Recon's lack of ammo. Just as much as it is to be crippled by the Assault's continued lack of specialization.
  • Battlefield 1 follows a similar class balance to Bad Company 2 albeit with class effectiveness dictated by weapon range. Notably, the Assault class is a close-range powerhouse with its submachine guns and shotguns yet is absolutely useless at shooting infantry from beyond 75 meters.
• Call of Juarez: The Cartel: Eddie specializes in the one-handed machine pistols. Presumably meant as the short-range specialist (with his special ability being using two machine pistols at the same time), this ends up meaning he's ultimately the only one that noticeably cripples himself from performing in any other role with his specific weapons. Ben is closer to a mid-range specialist with his machine guns, but they do just fine at any range except close-in (where their long reloads can hinder them), and for those he has secondary specialization in the shotguns (which are slower but in turn put down who you hit with them the first time) and the handguns (which can be mixed-and-matched by any character, as typical are a bit stronger and more accurate than the machine pistols, and are the only weapon category with any attempt at variety). Kim, likewise, specializes in the long-range sniper rifles, but isn't hurting for other ranges either, since her secondary specialization is with the assault rifles and two-handed submachine guns, which handle any range just fine. Not to mention as well that Eddie's special ability is ultimately redundant, since if you really want something full-auto while using two guns at once, there's a very easy to activate glitch that lets Ben and Kim use a machine pistol alongside another pistol as well.
• The unstable overclocks in Deep Rock Galactic give your weapons a massive boost in power and / or a very great special effect at the cost of sacrificing other attributes. For example, there's an unstable overclock for the Engineer's grenade launcher that gives it a huge power boost on a direct hit and massively boosts the velocity of the projectile to the point where the shot will instantly hit the target the moment you fire. The power is so high that hitting the weak points of the highly armored bugs can kill them instantly or at least do an insane amount of damage. The trade off is having less ammo for the weapon and the range of its splash damage being almost non existent. Because you need to score a direct hit to do sheer amounts of damage, being slightly off means doing far less damage. Since splash damage range is made incredibly tiny, the Engineer is completely screwed if there's a swarm of enemies approaching since they now have no form of crowd control.
• Evolve: Ebonstar was well prepared to defend Shear against pirates, corp raiders, and mercenaries using a series of heavy cannon emplacements and EMP missiles. Unfortunately, their reliance on anti-spacecraft weaponry meant they had no heavy firepower for ground combat. As the monsters didn't use spacecraft to get to Shear, these weapons were useless against them, allowing the monsters to demolish their bases and slaughter their solders with little resistance.
• All the classes in Team Fortress 2 are very specialized, which is part of the game balance. No class is effective against all other classes, but each is devastating against one or two classes. They do have an item or two to make them a bit more versatile, but the only real exception is the Jack of All Stats Soldier, designed to be at least moderately effective in most potential situations.
  • Can happen to a team mid-match if most of their members choose one class, which severely limits their ability to deal with all the obstacles in the game. If the opposing team has a good mix of all classes, barring a massive difference in skill, the diverse team will very likely win over the specialized team with 6 to 8 Snipers or Spies.
  • The Demoman holds onto this trope with a deathgrip. Both his primary and secondary weapons are explosives (which can cause self-damage if he's near the projectiles when they detonate), inaccurate over long ranges, and don't directly hit enemies (unless aimed and timed specifically). However, this leads to his overspecialization at mid-range, which no other class (other than a Sniper with a Huntsman) is any good at.
    • During the WAR! update, the Demoman was given the Chargin' Targe, a shield that replaces his Sticky Bomb launcher with a charging rush that turns his melee attacks into guaranteed criticals. This has given rise to a new way to play the class, the "Demoknight". It involves using a shield like the Targe or the Splendid Screen alongside one of the many sword and axe-like melee weapons he's received since then, giving him the ability to overspecialize in melee (especially if you equip the boots that increase health by replacing the grenade launcher). This all sounds great until you remember that almost every other class will still have guns (unless you're playing Medieval Mode), and these loadouts compromise the Demoman's ability to shoot back.
  • The Pyro's flamethrower is, as one might imagine, a short-ranged weapon. Their long-range alternatives are a shotgun that isn't all that much better beyond a few feet, or a flare gun which has significant travel time, a firing arc, and can only load one shot at a time. This makes Pyros absurdly good at ambushing, but not that useful at other forms of combat unless you have the skill to consistently get in close. Worse is that one of Pyro's primary methods of dealing damage, doing so over time by setting enemies alight, is almost entirely useless nowadays — in the early stages of the game, fire was effective because even if a target got away before you killed him, the only ways for him to extinguish himself were either immersing themselves in water (which not every map had) or finding a friendly Medic, but then several updates happened over several years and now every class has multiple ways to extinguish themselves and/or teammates.
  • Contrary to how some players may act, the Heavy is also over-specialized for damage at short range. Few of his weapons are accurate at long range or do enough damage to justify 'suppressing fire' if opponents are a distance away since the primary weapon reduces the Heavy's already slow speed to an absolute crawl and the secondary shotguns spread a great deal.
  • Spy is hit hardest by this — pretty much no matter how you load your Spy, you're almost entirely limited to stabbing people in the back. In a fair fight between equally skilled players, the Spy — being one of the classes with the least health, and having his only ranged options being slow-firing, low-capacity revolvers — will pretty much always lose if spotted. His abilities do let him avoid fair fights as much as possible, but his "pick class" niche is usually crowded out by the more generalized Sniper.
  • As might be expected, Snipers are generally not strong in a close-range situation. The main weapon unlock that helps them at that range, the Huntsman, lacks the ability to zoom in or to hold a charged shot for very long, inverting their threat ranges somewhat, but not making up for their squishiness at close range.
    • The Sniper's inability to push an offensive or handle most of their counters, coupled with their association with players who care more about kills than objectives, has led to them being declared the class least needed in large numbers. It's often said that a team with more than two or three Snipers is doomed to failure. They can take care of problems when their team hits a log jam by targeting the Medic or other important targets, but that's it.
  • Scouts put the 'agile' into Fragile Speedster, possessing a powerful Sawed-Off Shotgun but lacking sufficient power and health to hold an area for long. They are also handicapped by enclosed areas that don't allow them to take advantage of their superior speed and maneuverability.
  • Medics heal people, and that's pretty much it. He can build up an Ubercharge which is devastating when used correctly, but that's charged by, you guessed it, healing people. Going Combat Medic will get you killed (and then kicked from the server for not doing your job correctly), as his weapons are only useful as Emergency Weapons.
  • Engineers build buildings, upgrade buildings, and maintain buildings. They can defend buildings from a Spy or two, but without their buildings, they're pretty much useless as a slower version of a Scout.
  • Many weapons provide a bonus so situational as to become useless, such as the Scout's Wrap Assassin (which launches a ball that makes targets bleed but does barely any damage and is difficult to hit with), the Engineer's Short Circuit (which destroys projectiles but makes you run out of metal, your primary building resource as Engineer, very quickly), or the Pyro's Neon Annihilator (which deals crit damage to players who are, or have recently been, underwater, although most maps don't feature water). The king of this is the Sun-On-A-Stick, a melee weapon for the Scout that only has a benefit when hitting someone on fire. This pretty much requires you to be buddies with a Pyro for the duration of using it. Otherwise, its only real change from the stock bat is a 25% damage reduction.
  • In FUNKe's "TF2's State of Specialists" video, he explains that the Sixes Meta is built around the Generalist classes rather than the Specialist ones. Specialist classes are focused on their set role and do it at the expense of everything else, which makes them easier to balance than the Soldier and Demoman. Sixes is based around having a Scout, Soldier, and Demoman to cap points while another Scout and Soldier, the latter paired with a Medic, roam the area to prevent other roamers.
  • Even Saxton Hale, a Lightning Bruiser who can comfortably deal with the army of mercenaries thrown his way in Vs. Saxton Hale Mode, has one glaring weakness; he doesn't have any guns and instead relies on his physical strength. Players who spread apart and take potshots at him are more likely to defeat him than those who bunch up near him, aside from similarly melee-focused builds like the Demoknight.

Mecha Game

• The Heavy Gear video games occasionally do this, with one of the worst offenders being the Mammoth strider, an enormous, heavily armored machine with the ability to carry frankly absurd amounts of firepower... which was slow as dirt and steered like a cow. It had no ability to dodge enemy shots or pursue opponents and relied solely on thick armor to survive extended fights, relegating it to a pure defensive role. Compare against the Naga, a less powerful but much faster Strider type unit that, while easier to kill and not nearly so well armed, could nonetheless remain mobile enough to perform duties that were denied to the Mammoth.
• Common in the MechWarrior franchise due to it spawning from the BattleTech game. Several 'Mechs are dedicated long or short-range specialists, or focus on one tactic in particular, and suffer significantly when not fighting in their preferred range bracket. The lack of foot speed or defensive armor on these models tends to compound their difficulties. Notable examples include the Hollander sniper 'Mech and the Hunchback close-combat 'Mech, both of which are powerful at their respective range brackets, but quickly and readily countered by one another's ranges. Overspecialization can be exacerbated by the MechLab, such as a player stripping all their long-range weapons in favor of more shotguns. MechWarrior Living Legends showed the pitfalls of overspecialization with the introduction of alternate asset types such as battlearmor and aerospace fighters; a weapon good at killing mechs at range will be pretty awful at killing a battlearmor pounding through your cockpit canopy.
• Mobile Suit Gundam Battle Operation 2 offers melee and ranged combat options, as well as ground and space combat. It is also possible for some suits to be field-exclusive (for instance, the Dra-C is a flying torso with no legs, and is therefore unable to fight on the ground). Some suits are also specialists with extremely specific niches and attempting to build outside that niche is a waste of time (due to the way additional equipment is handled). An example of combat overspecialization is the Gouf, an extremely capable duelist with good melee damage, but pitiful ranged damage capabilities, only able to call on weak Finger Firearms if an enemy is beyond sword distance. Any remotely competent pilot who can stay more than two steps away from a Gouf can blast it to pieces, even with beginner weapons.
• SD Gundam Capsule Fighter
  • Many units are designed to be this way and usually suffer for it, thanks to its Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors gameplay: Rock-type units excel in fighting in close range and are able to get in close quickly, but suffer by not having the quickness to shoot back in long-range if they have guns at all. Scissor-type units are more of a Jack of All Trades and tend to be easily pounced on by Rock-types. Paper-types excel in long-range attacks, even going so far as to be able to shoot from across a stage. However, their swing is incredibly lacking, if they have blades at all.
  • The S-Rank Gundams from Mobile Suit Gundam Wing: Endless Waltz really suffer from overspecialization: Wing Zero Custom excels in shooting at long range, but crumples at close range; Altron specializes in melee attacks, but doesn't have consistent range attacks aside from a grappling attack; Sandrock Custom specializes in stunning attacks but can easily lose that with a Vaccine item; Heavyarms Custom specializes in Tanking, but loses out in mobility and firepower; and Deathscythe Hell specializes in stealth attacks and Back Stab, but crumples because of the lack of defense.
• S.L.A.I.: Steel Lancer Arena International has an entire vehicle class that is notably overspecialized, moreso than the other manufacturers in the game: Ma Fabrik's Zwerg is a heavily armored unit with mediocre mobility and only average guns at best, but feature two excellent melee weapons in the form of its 'fist' weapons, both of which deal damage over time. The EMP fist hampers electronics and the Corrosion fist degrades armor. This means that it is reliant on its Invisibility Cloak to approach targets and must engage from close range. This works rather well in PVE because the AI is rather pathetic and will always wander into close range if you are camping in a tight space. In PVP, other players are fully aware that Zwergs will want to lurk in blind corners or near drop zones and refuse to play to its strengths. Once deprived of their primary advantage, many Zwerg players will be forced to flee the field or be cut to ribbons by shotguns and Vulcan cannons.

MOBA

• Heroes of the Storm:
  • Prior to her (multiple) reworks, Chromie was a spectacular case of an overspecialized hero: she could deal heavy damage in teamfights from a safe distance consistently, almost able to kill any hero on her own, but it came at the cost of all her utility and survivability. She was one of the squishiest heroes, had a crappy auto-attack, and only one of her abilities could even damage non-heroes and was on a lengthy cooldown. A Chromie player that didn't use her abilities to their full effect during teamfights wouldn't be of any help when a map objective was contested. Reworks averted this, first turning her into an artillery/AA hybrid, then a total redesign that lowered her overall damage but gave her more lane pressure and general utility.
  • Alarak has essentially taken Chromie's place as the game's bursty mage hero overspecialized in hero-killing. His job is simple: land his full combo on an enemy to drag them out of position and nuke them to kingdom come, while also leaving them Silenced for his teammates to finish off if they survive his burst. However, most of his damage comes from his trait, which only works on enemy heroes and thus makes him really bad at fighting anything that's not a hero, and being a squishy melee hero with a mediocre auto-attack means that missing his combo renders him useless until his skills come off cooldown again.
  • On the flip side of things is Lt. Morales. On the one hand, she boasts some of the best single-target healing in the game, along with respectable support abilities for her team. And that's all she does. She has very few ways to meaningfully interact with the enemy team aside from one ability that's intended to keep enemies away from her, with no crowd-control and very low damage output. Furthermore, she can't use her main heal on herself and has no area healing, meaning that she can't even attend to multiple teammates at once and is a very easy target that relies on allies to protect her.
  • Many of the former Specialists fall under this. A lot of them have Siege damage as their hat, and can push lanes like no one's business. This is particularly the case for Gazlowe, Zagara, and Probius. The problem is that they sacrifice a lot of teamfight power to do this, needing too much setup, not having any reliable CC outside of Heroics, and having burst that's awkward to hit and not as effective as a generalist's. With the removal of the Specialist category and some other reworks, it's clear that Blizzard is again slowly pushing away from this philosophy.
• League of Legends:
  • Blitzcrank is very much a one-trick pony- his entire kit is based around landing Rocket Grab to pull the enemy to his position, where he can punch them into the air and silence them with his ult to set them up for an ally to burst down. A good Blitzcrank can be a holy terror who can doom any enemy champion to death with a single move. A Blitzcrank who can't land Rocket Grab... does nothing.
  • Champions that are optimised to do raw DPS and nothing else (Tryndamere, Master Yi, Garen etc) can take over an entire game if they get ahead on gold and items, but if they fall behind (quite possible considering they're comparatively weak before they get equipped) their lack of any kind of utility makes them useless at best, a gold-vending liability to their team at worst.

Platform Game

• Each costume in Balan Wonderworld gives the player one specific ability which they can perform with the action button. Some costumes, such as the Dainty Dragon first found in World 1's second level, even specifically remove the player's ability to jump.
• The Frog Suit in Super Mario Bros. 3. It greatly improves your mobility underwater, namely by making you move faster and stabilizing Mario's movement so that, barring currents, he'll only move according to your D-pad movements. However, it has lousy speed on land and Mario can't even crouch while wearing it. You can subvert this, though, by carrying a Koopa shell.

Puzzle Game

• Similarly, Dragon Ball Z: Dokkan Battle can hurt you with this trope. Some of the more recent meta has gone from boosting one color type to one specific type. This is bad because some players don't carry the right card to have on a team because that character just isn't that good. A player can find plenty of Vegito Blues or Super Saiyan Rose Goku Blacks but you'd be hard-pressed to find an INT Kid Buu or an AGI Super Android #17.
• Marvel Puzzle Quest can hurt you with this trope. Having a team of three who have a predominant set of colors will hurt you bad if you plan wrong. For instance, creating a team comprised of the one-star Iron Man (Model 35), two-star Thor (Marvel NOW) and two-star Steve Rogers (Captain America) nets you a team sharing the same two colors — red and yellow. As well, Steve and Iron Man share blue. Since Thor's attack set is dependent on all three of his colors (red does damage and makes yellow blocks, yellow does damage and makes green blocks and green damages all opponents), you would have to choose between Iron Man's heavy-hitting attacks, Steve's shield-fueled recharges or saving up to bring the thunder down.
• Puzzle Quest and its sequel Galactrix: Pumping all your skill points into one or two types of mana/energy gives you near Game-Breaker power with some of your spells/attacks^note With the exception of PQ's Knight class, where pouring nearly everything into Battle and Morale turns you into a Mighty Glacier. but at the cost of under-powering the rest of your arsenal. And that's assuming you don't run into an enemy who has high-resistance to or can counter that particular mana/energy type (and you will) leaving you to muddle through with weak attacks while it pounds you at full strength.
• 'I' and 'O' Tetriminoes in Tetris. You can kind of fudge the other five types ('S', 'Z', 'L', and 'J' while the 'T' shape is a Jack of All Stats) into other spaces when they don't quite fit but when it comes to the 'I' and 'O' pieces, you have to have very specific spaces to put them in or you'll end up with awkward placement every time. That said an 'I' laid vertically is the only piece capable of scoring a "Tetris", so it serves a very explicit purpose.

Racing Game

• Since F-Zero GX lets you combine parts to create custom machines, it's not surprising some combinations fall squarely in the Epic Fail category. But the real 'winner' is the Slash Emperor -V2 (Big Tyrant + Windy Shark + Scorpion -V2), set to max speed; to get excellent top speed and durability, it has horrific acceleration, atrocious deceleration, and nonexistent turning. As a result it drops to 200-400 km/h when turning (compared to the usual 800-1000 km/h), never even approaches top speed, and has awful times even in the hands of top players.
• In Mario Kart Wii, the Aeroglider/Jetsetter suffers from this. Basically, it's got a great top speed stat and weighs a lot, but has the worst stats for drifting, handling, acceleration, offroad and mini turbos. So while it's fast, it can barely turn, flies off the road when drifting, and takes forever to get back to top speed after taking a hit. This means that if the player is racing on a track with lots of corners or item boxes, using the Aeroglider is basically guaranteeing they'll get last place.
• In Crash Team Racing and its remake/sequel, Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled, a unique fourth Engine class that isn't seen in contemporary competitors, is introduced that specializes in turning, with every other stat (speed, acceleration, and weight), being subpar. Such a class ends up only being useful for very new players that don't know how to drift or control the kart, or to make quick, effortless work of later levels that are almost exclusively tight turns, such as Oxide Station. However, most of the tracks in the game don't have this issue, and drifting is such a potent mechanic that, once practiced enough, players will very rarely have a tough time navigating even the most difficult courses using the Speed Engine class, the class with the worst turning stat.
  • This is compounded on in Nitro-Fueled, and at higher levels of play - in the original CTR, the unique mechanic of Sacred Flame and Ultra Sacred Flame exploit boost speed to be in a permanent boost state as long as the player constantly drift-boosts and never hits a wall or an item. This gives the Turn stat a bit more value, as the max top speed with USF is the same for every engine class, so better turning can be more useful. In Nitro-Fueled, however, the mechanics were changed so that each Engine class has varying speeds like normal driving, and new, potentially unintentional, mechanics were discovered that allow any engine class to make hairpin turns in the air, meaning that any use that the Turning class had in the original game are invalidated.

Real-Time Strategy

• In Act of War, and its Creator-Driven Successor Act of Aggression, the US army suffers from this. Tough and experienced, their units outclass any other in a particular role, but are almost useless outside of that. For example, the F-15 in AoW and F-22 Raptor in AoA are the strongest fighter planes in their respective games, but only carry Anti-Air Missiles, so are only good at taking out other aircraft.
• Age of Empires:
  • In Age of Empires II, the Khmer have extremely nonstandard economic bonuses and they do particularly excel in any regard to the standard unit categories — infantry, archers, cavalry or naval. All their bonuses are focused on war elephants and Scorpion ballistas. Would it surprise you to know poor Khmer has one of the worst win records in online play? The civ isn't bad, just very hard to make work.
  • Age of Empires III:
    • Mortars are incredibly powerful against buildings and ships but can't be used at all against any other unit.
    • Pikemen are good against all cavalry, but useless against infantry and artillery.
• Battle Realms both uses and avoids this trope. All ranged units can also attack in melee (but most of them are horrible at it), while most tier 1 melee units have only a melee attack and nothing else. The tier 2 and 3 melee units of the Dragon and Serpent clans have a secondary ranged weapon, however, which is useful in a pinch. There are also 7 damage types (slashing, piercing, blunt, crushing, fire, explosion and magic) and all units have different resistances to each type — any commander who tries to overspecialize by fielding an army of one unit type will quickly find that this is not a good idea since they can be quickly countered by a smaller number of units whose attacks screw them over.
• Combat in the second The Battle for Middle-earth game tends to consist of a desperate attempt to get the right type of unit fighting the right enemy, because if they're fighting the wrong type they get slaughtered. Well, unless they're fully upgraded elven archers, who can usually mow down an entire cavalry unit while they're charging. Or fully upgraded Rohirrim, which can trample right over pikes. Incidentally, these two units are the ones capable of both melee and ranged combat. The first game even allowed you to merge two infantry units into one. If one unit was melee fighters, while the other one was archers, then the archers would take the back rows and first while the infantry holds off the enemy. In the case of two joined elven archers battalions, the ones in the back would use their bows, while the front lines would switch to swords.
• Command & Conquer:
  • Units usually have only one weapon, and are on their own extremely vulnerable to units impervious to their single weapon. A rifleman never has rockets or other explosives to use against vehicles, a grenadier has only grenades and no firearm for self-defense, a rocket soldier only carries rockets effective against vehicles and aircraft, tanks never have machine guns for close defense against infantry, and so on. This often results in absurd situations such as, in Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2, a Soviet Conscript being able to take several shells from an Allied Grizzly tank to the face before dying, only to immediately keel over from a single pistol bullet from Tanya. This is sometimes in spite of the fact that the unit's sprite/model, or promotional images, will show it with additional anti-personnel weapons. The series also harbors one near constant aversion, however — the Mammoth Tank and its successors have almost always had a big pair of cannons for taking out buildings and vehicles, and ground-to-air missiles for dealing with airborne enemies. They, like all tanks, can also run infantry over.
  • Those in the modding community for early games can attest that technical limitations make it impossible to mount more than two weapons on any given object and even then, the two are mutually exclusive when it comes to target selection (the primary weapon can force-fire at the ground, onto terrain objects and is normally used against enemies, while the secondary can only attack stuff the primary either can't or where the primary would do less damage, period).
  • One of the worst offenders in the series is the Tank Destroyer in Red Alert 2; the unit is well-armoured and does tremendous damage to vehicles, but it can barely hit infantry (though can still run them over) and can only do minor damage to buildings which can be easily repaired while it's still firing.
  • Snipers in all games can one hit kill most infantry, but are useless against anything else. However, in C&C 3, they get a passive ability to spot for Juggernauts.
  • Commandos in Tiberium Wars. They are devastatingly effective against buildings and infantry, and exactly one type of vehicles: Walkers. There are, prior to the expansion, exactly 3 units of this classification; at least one is considered Awesome, but Impractical and another is an artillery unit. In the expansion they were made a bit more useful, with a few new variants of the walkers appearing and being genuine threats, while an entire faction focused on infantry.
  • In Generals, several of the specialist commanders unfortunately fall victim to this. Gen. Granger, the air force commander of the United States, has access to King Raptors and has second-to-none air power, but he can't even build the basic tank. Gen. Kwai of China can build exceptional tanks very quickly... which will quickly fall to anti-tank units, and he has no artillery, meaning he won't be able to effectively and safely assault fortified positions. Prince Kassad is a master of staying undetected and infiltrating enemy positions, but he'll get his ass handed to him if he needs to fight in big open ground battles or actually besiege a defended base, plus if he wants any tanks, he'll have to steal them from the enemy. Gen. Townes, the technology specialist of the United States, loves using lasers to counter vehicles and protect his base from missiles, but infantry rushes give him a headache, and all his shiny gadgets are useless if someone manages to unplug him from his huge power grid.
    • Averted by the standard Humvee, which starts with an anti-infantry attack and can get an anti-armor missile, but more importantly can be filled with up to five Missile Defenders or insta-death-to-infantry Pathfinders, or some combination thereof.
    • Anti-armor infantry absolutely suck at killing other infantry, even when outnumbering them.
    • Infantry stationed inside structures are completely safe from attack, letting them destroy most enemies quickly... but a single flashbang or spray of napalm/toxin will instantly kill everyone inside the building, often giving the killer several promotions.
    • Aurora Bombers are invulnerable when attacking — until they drop their bomb, at which point they'll soon be very dead. With very good micro, they can be used as a fire magnet.
    • The Chinese Overlord tank can avert this trope somewhat by installing an anti-air and infantry gatling gun (its main weapons are anti-armor), though it's still slower than molasses in winter and vulnerable to anti-armor weapons.
  • Two units introduced in Kane's Wrath are dedicated anti air, however the AI doesn't seem to know this and often sends them in place of normal tanks, where they get torn apart due to their lack of ground weaponry.
  • In all three Red Alert games, Attack Dogs (and later bears) could only harm infantry as they're only using their paws and teeth (and thus, could not harm vehicles or buildings at all), and could sniff out Spies and Thieves, none of which were particularly useful compared to the time-honored tactic of the tank rush (at least not until RA3). Squids and dolphins had a similar problem, as while both are invisible to the enemy until he bumped into them, they could only attack aquatic units. Squids have it even worse, as they can't move after they've started attacking a ship. However, all of them are devastatingly good at what they do; dogs and bears insta-kill anyone they touch, squids disable ships when attacking them and does this instantaneously, and dolphins' sonic attack not only pierces multiple targets, but also deal respectable damage with a fast firing rate.
  • Speaking of Spies and Thieves, in the original Red Alert, both were only good for infiltrating enemy bases; they had no weapons on them, and as above dogs could sniff them out. However, get either into their target buildings and you can severely cripple your opponent.
  • Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3:
    • Lampshaded with the background information on the Allied Hydrofoil unit, which has a weapon jammer device. The background states that Allied tank crewmen and fighter pilots asked why their units could not also be equipped with jammers, but engineers the world over have encountered unspecified technical difficulties designing vehicles with multiple weapons. Red Alert 3 actually changed the whole model on this one, given that all units in that game have a special ability of some type, and for about half those units that ability is a second weapon. The hydrofoil's primary is an anti-aircraft gun.
    • The Apocalypse Tank (a Mammoth Tank Expy) has lost its anti-aircraft missiles in favor of a big magnet that pulls enemy vehicles towards its circular saw. Basically, the tank has been redesigned to be more effective against other ground vehicles, something it was already good at, while leaving it vulnerable against airstrikes, which was already a weak point considering its missiles were slower and weaker than its main cannons. Lampshaded in the "Double-Barreled" challenge mission, where the mission texts scoffs at the idea of improving the tank by adding missiles.
    • The Hammer Tank played with it: its Leech Beam special ability is an absorption beam which (in addition of draining the HP of the enemy while repairing itself) is able to steal the weapon of enemy vehicles destroyed while it is targeting them (effectively giving the Hammer Tank a second primary weapon that can be Anti-Infantry, Anti-Armor, etc. and possibly an ability to engage air targets). However, it becomes unable to shoot infantry while the beam is on.
    • Averted for the AI commanders: while they are focused on one strategic aspect (air power, infiltrators, tankstanksTANKS, etc.), they will by no means limit themselves to those units. It's not uncommon for their endgame forces to consist almost solely of high-end units.
    • The Empire dominates the seas but is ironically pretty bad at amphibious assaults on fortified beaches, as their amphibious units are quite light (the Tsunami tank can activate a defensive ability, but this neutralizes the tank's gun, and unlike the other factions, has no T1 amphibious units built from the water) and their T1 and T2 water units can't hit anything on land. Only with a T3 battleship to clear the area can they make progress.
    • The Soviet Bullfrog is the only land unit that can only attack air (the Allied IFV can attack land and air while the Imperial Chopper can turn into a ground-attacking air unit), usually leading it to be among the first killed in an attack because they rush forward without targets to attack. This is actually stated to be deliberate in-game (and illustrative of the endemic corruption in the Soviet regime), as the company making it also wanted to sell the government a ground-attack-only Sickle walker. Its transportation ability also counts: it launches stored infantry through the air at quite a long distance, but the units are utterly helpless during the drop, and are all fired at the same time.
    • Empire turrets can attack ground or air, but must transform to do so. Bringing a single air unit just out of range of the turrets is enough to get the AI to switch them to Anti-Air, leaving them helpless against ground attack.
• The Sniper from the Commandos series suffers from this in the original game. While everyone has several different abilities, the Sniper gets precisely one unique ability: his rifle. Granted, it is silenced, but he is given very little ammunition and a relatively short (for a sniper) maximum range. The later games alleviate this by allowing him (and the rest of the team) to engage in hand-to-hand combat and tie up unconscious enemies and use normal rifles and submachineguns and at least provide more opportunities to acquire ammo for his sniper rifle.
• In Conquest: Frontier Wars, carriers lack any weapons of their own, only capable of launching wings of fighters. While it does allow them to strike from afar without risking the ship, if an enemy gets within directed-fire range of their own weapons, the carrier is as good as dead, especially if they use specialized anti-fighter ships to turn the fighters into mincemeat. While the Terrans only have one carrier type, most Mantis ships are carriers with only a few directed-fire ships available to cover them. Even their most powerful ship is a super-heavy carrier. The Celareons don't use carriers, since they don't like to throw away their lives without a good reason. That said, carriers can be very useful, especially if they strike from beyond a natural barrier, such as an asteroid field or a nebula. If they're beyond the target's visual range, the target will need to look for the carrier. Additionally, very few ships have anti-fighter weapons.
• In Cossacks: European Wars, several kinds of units armed with firearms are completely incapable of defending themselves in close combat, and will simply retreat in face of such an attack. This is particularly ridiculous in the case of the Russian unit called a strelets, which carries a large poleaxe (as is historical, and these poleaxes were of course used in close combat) which is solely used to rest their arquebuses on!
• Dawn of War, much like its source material. Anti-vehicle weapons are useless against infantry except for knockback, regular weapons can only do Scratch Damage against vehicles, melee specialists must get in melee range to do anything, and most ranged infantry crumble in the face of melee combat. However, in the Soulstorm expansion, all ranged units could attack air units (for Scratch Damage if they aren't Anti-Armor), and in the sequel anti-vehicle weapons turn infantry into Ludicrous Gibs; their real weakness is their low rate of fire.
• The "Forces of Corruption" Expansion Pack to Empire at War has the most powerful Zann Consortium warship, the Aggressor-class Star Destroyer, being a good example of this. While its firepower is comparable to that of an Imperial Star Destroyer, the ship has a total of 4 weapons. Two of these are fixed forward firing weapons linked to fire one immediately after another (an ion blast followed by a plasma blast), designed to cripple enemy capital ships. The two Wave Motion Guns fire very slowly but can take on an ISD. However, should the enemy destroy the two big guns, all the Aggressor has left are two turbolasers that aren't much of a threat against a determined enemy.
• Empire Earth:
  • The game uses Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors for its units (arrow beats spear beats sword beats arrow, battleship beats frigate beats galley bea-does more damage against battleship), though it's not as crippling as most examples given the vast numbers of units that can come into play (swarming units is a very common scenario, archers can deal damage to swordsmen by virtue of outranging them, and battleships have so much life and damage that they'll often win against galleys, though at heavy cost). Further muddled in the later ages, when gun-type damage becomes a factor, later on when tanks show up (allowing for specialized infantry that's strong against tanks or infantry) and later still, when damage type becomes gun or laser (the anti-tank tank and infantry disappear at this point, leaving only the laser-armed basic soldier (who can attack helicopters and flying cybers but not airplanes) and laser tank).
    • In multiplayer games swordsmen were generally not produced because of this. Not only do archers have the advantage to deal damage anyway because of range if something else was nearby, but spearmen had the additional advantage of being more effective against cavalry (particularly sword cavalry that could close the gap with archers). Thus game balance ended with players usually fielding spearmen as main infantry backed up by archers, unless in very rich maps and/or with good micromanaging team mates. Swordsmen + archers would see the former being thrashed in the front line (it would make no sense to expose the fragile archers to direct attacks while the swordsmen are in the rear guard) and swordsmen + spearmen was impractical due to the same type of resources needed (food and iron, where archers cost wood and gold).
  • In addition the usual minimum range and slow rate of fire, artillery comes in anti-building (higher damage) and anti-unit (splash damage) variants, and later adds anti-tank units. Rams (and the very first siege unit, a man named Sampson dragging around a really big log) can only attack buildings at melee range, while siege towers have no attack and serve only to get units on the other side of a wall.
  • Anti-Air units, well, can only attack air.
  • The only TRPS that remains relevant throughout is the naval one, where galleys are eventually replaced by submarines, who can't even be targeted by battleships. Strangely, battleships can hit underwater targets if they're considered amphibious (the Hyperion and Poseidon cybers).
    • Submarines further specialize into attack submarines (who can only hit naval units) and nuclear submarines (who can only hit ground units and structures with the longest range in the game).
    • Cruisers can only attack air, and aircraft carriers depend on escorts as their fighter-bombers are even weaker than the land-based kind.
    • The frigate, mostly averts this, being the only ship capable of attacking any naval (and ground) unit at all stages of its existence, including when it was called a War Raft that consisted of a paddler and a caveman chucking big rocks at enemies.
  • Airplanes are either able to attack air targets (fighters), ground targets (bombers) or both (fighter-bombers) but far less efficiently than the other two.
    • The anti-tank fighter can only attack ground units, not structures.
    • Helicopters can't attack aircraft, and specialize in either anti-infantry or anti-tank damage (or in the Sea King's case, only submarines, but by God does it kill them good).
  • Hero Units are either Warriors (high HP and attack, and provide a 50% defense aura to nearby units, but regenerate slowly and can only heal faster at a hospital) or Strategists (can reduce enemy defense by 50% and heal allies, but have a pathetically low attack that they won't even use unless ordered to, and the same health problems as the Warrior). And you can only have one at a time in skirmish games.
  • Tends to be the case in skirmish games that start during prehistory and end in the Nano Age- the AI civilizations (determined by starting era) have preset bonuses, meaning they might have terrifyingly overpowered horse archers or spearmen early on, which will of course be obsolete and unbuildable by the game's end. Naturally, bonuses that last throughout the game (ranged infantry, economy, priests and prophets, artillery...) are much more expensive.
• In Frontline Attack: War over Europe, the only armoured vehicles that have any effectiveness against infantry are the light armoured cars. You can send 20 Pershing tanks to attack an enemy base, but if there's just one team of anti-tank infantry, or grenadiers, or a flamethrower squad, not one of those Pershings will survive. Escort them with M8 Greyhounds, and watch them all die as the light anti-tank emplacements blow up the M8s, then the flamethrower squads do their work on the Pershings. And don't take your own infantry either, because enemy buildings have machine guns, and most infantry is actually crap at anti-infantry work.
• Ground Control:
  • Anti-air Terradynes cannot target anything on the ground and rocket Terradynes cannot target infantry.
  • In Ground Control 2, helicopter-type units will just own armoured vehicles, such as tanks, with impunity because the tanks have no defense from aircraft. Most units armed with guided missiles can't attack infantry; the in-universe explanation is that individual soldiers are too small for missile tracking to work.
• Hearts of Iron IV features the Superheavy Tank by taking the concept of a heavy tank and turning it up to eleven. They are extremely durable and pack some serious firepower, but they are also so slow that using them in any offensive capacity is usually futile in a game where the most successful strategies rely on quick maneuvering to encircle enemies after a breakthrough. This combined with their enormous production cost usually makes them not worth it, especially since regular heavy tanks can fill their role almost as well while being cheaper and more maneuverable.
• Homeworld: Most units are this. The attack bomber is a fighter extremely lethal against warships but useless against fighters and corvettes; most anti-fighter units are fighters or corvettes. The defender is a small fighter with a powerful and fast-firing weapon that will wreak havoc among enemy fighters but is too slow to avoid fire from enemy warships. The defense fighter and defense field frigate block enemy mass driver rounds but does nothing against beam, plasma and missile weapons and is otherwise useless. The mine-layer lays mines to make an area impassable from warships but is useless against fighters. The ion frigate's ion cannon has a powerful punch against warships, but can fire only in front of it and is slow turning, and a squadron of bombers will disintegrate it in a single passage. The drone frigate is a frigate that houses a group of point-defense drones that will annihilate enemy fighters but does nothing against enemy ships. And all the non-combat units only do their main function: the salvage corvette salvages ships and data, the collectors collect resources, etc. All other units are overspecialized for one job, but the different load out of weapons allows them to do something else too (the Mothership and carriers serves mainly to build other ships and carry and repair fighters and corvettes but can also work as anti-fighter units, the assault frigate is good at fighting other frigates and fend off corvettes, etc.)
  • Slightly averted with the Somtaaw in Homeworld Cataclysm, whose ships are more generalized. In-universe, this is necessary for such a small kiith, since they can't afford to build large numbers of specialized ships. Instead of corvettes, they have fighters that can combine into corvette-like ships with double the firepower and a different special ability. Instead of anti-capital ion cannon frigates, they have multi-beam frigates that aren't as good against cap ships but can slice through fighter screens. Their most powerful unit (the Archangel-class dreadnought), though, is designed to take on multiple opponents at a time, being armed with four homing energy cannons, two heavy ion cannons, and six missile launchers, not to mention a repulsor that can push away enemies to beyond their weapons range. While it loses out in a one-to-one fight to the Taiidani/Beast Qwaar-Jet-class heavy cruiser, the point is to not make it a one-to-one fight.
• Hyrule: Total War:
  • The Gorons are an entire race of melee fighters. They have one ranged unit, a bomb thrower who loses to just about any other faction's missile unit. On the other hand, they get amazing charge bonuses and exceptional movement speed due to their ability to roll around. Their game plan is literally rolling armoured bowling balls at the enemy.
  • The Fairies of Tarm have the opposite problem. Almost all of their units can shoot deadly lasers, and their ultimate unit can vaporise entire columns of men with a One-Hit Kill Wave-Motion Gun. Unfortunately, they're Tinkerbell-esque fairies and hence practically anybody can just swat them like bugs if they get close enough.
  • The Darknut Legion is an entire faction of BFS-wielding heavy infantry, and all but two of their units can't even run due to the weight of their armour. However, this same armour makes them immune to practically anything shorter than a siege weapon.
• Little King's Story gives us the Chef. He can kill a Cock-a-Doodle in one hit. He's useless in almost any other task (well, about as useless as carefree adults), and he's expensive as hell. The only reason you'd buy more than one is if your first one got killed.
• Metal Fatigue:
  • Combots that dual-wield ranged weapons do twice as much damage in the same amount of time but absolutely suck at melee combat. Not only they do very little damage by bashing the opponent with the guns, such a build has much less HP and armor than a melee build which in turn is a real powerhouse that can close up into melee range and wreck the ranged combot before it can inflict any real damage. On the other hand, melee combots have two banes: hit-and-run attacks by missile cars and Nemesis trucks^note whose only real function is paralyzing combots via a self-destruct EMP supported by bombers^note since melee weapons can't attack air units. Both of these threats are cannon fodder to ranged combots who can easily One-Hit Kill the offenders without having to chase after them.
  • Flying combots are excellent Lightning Bruisers... as long as they have time to land since while flying, they have zero armor which means AA towers can really tear them up. Plus the part that makes the combot fly has absolutely laughable HP. If we take these two into count, a flying combot is actually a Fragile Speedster Glass Cannon: it has firepower AND mobility but it sucks in defensive capabilities so it's only good if the target isn't surrounded by AA.
• In Mount & Blade, the Khergits use an entirely cavalry army. Even their basic Tribesman has a good chance of starting on a horse. This means they dominate in the open field battles, but in sieges where they are forced to assault the walls on foot, their poor armour means they die in droves... and sieges are the most difficult and important battles in the game.
• Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord: All of the factions, to some extent:
  • The Imperials make use of pike-and-shot armies with crossbows and heavy infantry, but little cavalry to speak of. So they are fantastic in sieges, but struggle in open field battles, and you pay dearly for that kind of quality too - you'll often be outnumbered because their powerful troops are so expensive.
  • The Viking-esque Sturgians have fierce heavy infantry (especially when fighting on the offence) and decent cavalry too... but their top-tier missile troops are much weaker than the militia and starting missile troops from other factions. This limits their defensive potential and their ability to hold ground, as they must always close in to get anything done.
  • The Battanians, the local Welsh/Celts stand-ins, have some of the finest archers in the world. However their cavalry selection is subpar. In addition many of their best melee troops, while fairly strong, rarely have shields and prefer two-handed weapons and polearms, ironically making the Battanians fairly vulnerable to missiles themselves.
  • The Vlandians are generally more balanced than the other factions, but they use crossbows exclusively for missile troops. Crossbows are good for sniping out key units thanks to their damage and anti-armour, but they suck at the kind of volley fire that actually decides battles. Being so short-ranged and slow-firing means that Vlandian crossbowmen will nearly always come out worse in a skirmish.
  • The Khuzaits, as the ancestors of the Khergits, can field entire armies of light cavalry and Horse Archers which makes them spectacular in open fields and steppes, but an utter joke in forests and in city sieges.
• Sins of a Solar Empire: Occurs to some degree . Light carrier-type cruisers have no onboard weapons, just their two fighter or bomber squadrons. Siege frigates and support cruisers have ship-to-ship weapons, but they're rather wimpy. Siege frigates are extremely weak against other ships/buildings, but are the only non-capital ships that can bombard a planet. Torpedo boats in the expansion packs make mincemeat out of buildings and starbases, but are unable to attack other ships/bombard planets.
• StarCraft and StarCraft II:
  • The Brood War expansion introduced new units to all three factions (Terran Valkyrie, Protoss Corsair, Zerg Devourer) with air-to-air splash attacks intended to counter massed air units. Their overall usefulness varies greatly. Protoss Corsairs largely avert this: they are highly cost-efficient at countering air units, excellent at scouting thanks to their high mobility, and can be upgraded with an ability that shuts down ranged ground unit attacks. Zerg Devourers are rarely used, as the Zerg have more efficient ways of dealing with air units and their Acid Spore gimmick (which slows down enemy unit attacks and makes them take more damage) is generally of limited use outside of the late game. Terran Valkyries however, are extremely circumstantial: their area-of-effect rockets are only useful against large numbers of relatively low-armoured air units. They are almost completely useless against the Protoss and are largely outshone by Science Vessels against the Zerg; their most plausible application is in Terran mirror matches involving massed Wraiths. Compounding this is the fact that due to quirks of their attack animation, they are difficult to micromanage as they cannot move until they have fired off all eight of their rockets and may potentially not fire at all if the game reaches its sprite limit.
  • Zerg Guardians embody this trope: a very powerful ground attack with incredible range but slow as molasses and possessing no air attack whatsoever. If you fail to back them up with anti-air units or allow them to be exposed to massed ground-to-air fire, they get wiped out.
  • Terran Siege Tanks are highly effective artillery units which can lay waste to any opposing ground force at long range. However, they come with a huge number of potentially crippling weaknesses to offset their resounding strengths. First, you need to back them up with fair number of supporting units: Siege Tanks cannot attack air units at all, and when in siege mode, they have a minimum range which prevents them from hitting units right next to them. Second, their splash damage is equally deadly to friendly units, which means that if an enemy manages to get into close range combat, your tanks can end up pulverizing your own troops. Third, Siege Tanks are completely immobile while in siege mode, which not only leaves them vulnerable to static area-of-effect abilities, but also significantly reduces the overall mobility of any Terran composition based around them. This largely holds true in the sequel, though there are now units which can effectively replace the Siege Tank in a number of match-ups.
  • Protoss Zealots are by far the strongest tier 1 units and on paper, will straight up defeat most other ground units in a one-on-one confrontation. In the early game however, they are handicapped by their low numbers and relative lack of mobility; these weaknesses are to some extent mitigated by economic expansion and an upgrade which greatly boosts their movement speed, but their comparative advantages become increasingly marginal as the game progresses. While overall changes to Protoss in the sequel have helped offset Zealots' weaknesses in the early game, their late-game role now more closely approximates that of Cannon Fodder.
  • Compared to their Corsair predecessors, Protoss Phoenixes are something of a downgrade, being overly specialized toward hunting down air harassers. While they are slightly faster and cost the same to produce, their attack has changed from a rapid-fire area-of-effect to two single-target projectiles with substantially reduced DPS against most targets. This makes them far less scaleable into the late game, as Phoenixes have to rely exclusively on micromanagement to counteract Zerg Mutalisks and have difficulty overcoming Terran Vikings, even with an optional range upgrade. This is in some ways emphasized by their Graviton Beam ability, which picks up enemy units and disables them for ten seconds. While useful in its own right as a tool for harassment and for taking key units out of the fight, it is also very microintensive to use and becomes far less viable as the game progresses.
  • In more than one sense, Terran Reapers are Marines on steroids: they're armed with dual pistols, fly around on jetpacks which allow them to hop up and down cliffs, are pumped full of drugs which allow for self-healing out of combat, and are slightly more durable. Unlike Marines however, Reapers are not expendable: their gas costs prohibit them from being trained in large numbers and they scale poorly compared to Marines, which synergize much better with other units and can be upgraded to the point where they surpass Reapers. For most part, their uses are confined to early-game scouting and harassment. Subverted in their campaign incarnation where they deal ridiculously high anti-building damage, making their mass use both practical and hilarious to watch.
  • The Protoss Tal'Darim subfaction specialize in maximum DPS, at the cost of all other stats. If you're playing with these, you'd better have one hell of a distraction / escape strategy or all those Glass Cannon psychopaths are going to be mowed down in seconds.
  • In Wings of Liberty, Diamondbacks specialize in dealing high damage to armored units while on the move. Unfortunately, they're basically worthless for anything else and the campaign is mostly defensive so they see almost no use outside of their introductory mission. Worse, Siege Tanks are actually more useful for said mission if they're already unlocked.
  • Downplayed with the Planetary Fortress in the Wings of Liberty campaign. On missions that were primarily defensive, they functioned as amazing stone walls, especially if backed up by Siege Tanks. On more offensive missions, they're pretty much dead weight, especially in Supernova which requires frequently relocating your base to avoid an Advancing Wall of Doom.
  • Just about every campaign level gives its newly-introduced unit a chance to shine, since they often won't be useful elsewhere: Reapers on a level with lots of cliffs and periodically-rising lava, Diamondbacks on a "kill moving target" level, etc.
• Star Ruler: The Galactic Armory mod has weapons excellent at killing shields but don't hurt armour or the physical ship.
• Stellaris: All end-game crises are specialised to some degree, to the extent that general purpose fleets will usually struggle against them so they require constructing a counter. However, some take this much further than others. In particular, the Unbidden focus entirely on shields and have very little health and no armour. While it's possible to design a fleet to counter this normally, it's even easier to simply fight them in a nebula that removes shields from all ships within, at which point they become a completely helpless walkover.
• Supreme Commander:
  • Most anti-air units are only able to fire at air units, but the Cybran T1 and Cruiser both have a switch to change their weapons from homing missiles to dumb-fire rockets for fighting surface targets. Spread means that it's more effective from the latter, which is fighting large ships, but in groups the former becomes remarkably dangerous.
  • The UEF Anti-Tactical-Missile Defense, which is basically a Phalanx CIWS. It can only shoot down tactical missiles.
  • While most naval units for the UEF and Cybrans have some AA guns mounted on them, the Aeon ships lack any AA, instead mounting them on small, cheap attack boats which are incapable of engaging anything OTHER than air. However their Frigate at least gets torpedo defenses in return and the Cruiser ships are better for AA overall.
  • Aeon Absolvers are dedicated shield disruption units. They wield both good firerate and high firing range comparable to mobile artillery — just a dozen of them can easily drain shield domes protecting the enemy while staying at a safe distance. When it comes to actually finishing the job however, Absolvers are laughably non-threatening. At 5 damage per hit, their weaponry is above only the peashooter guns mounted on UEF and Aeon scouts from Tier 1. On their own, even the paper-armored shield generators that conventional units bring down in a couple shots are a tall order. Shield Disruptor damage against non-shields is increased to 100 for the campaign, which makes them still sub-par for the price but not entirely incapable.
• Total Annihilation did this about as naturally as possible. Every weapon in the game can fire at just about any target (and will try to if necessary), but only the anti-air units have the turning speed, range, or homing ability to actually catch air units 95 out of 100 times. While this meant that generally only anti-air units could take out aircraft, ever so often, you'd see a fighter or bomber shot down by an artillery cannon.
• Total War:
  • Rome: Total War has many examples. Nearly all of Egypt's units gain stamina bonuses when fighting in the desert... and takes penalties in any other terrain. Oh, and they become hopeless in high-money battles due to their very poor armour. Carthage has a great roster of infantry, cavalry and War Elephants, but they have a complete lack of archers. The worst offender though is Britain — largely mediocre infantry (barring a few exceptions), limited to slingers and no conventional cavalry, but they have light and heavy chariots^note Chariots are arguably Awesome, but Impractical as they cost a ton to maintain and produce, come in woefully small units, are easily countered by phalanxes, and die quickly if they get bogged down and surrounded.
  • Total War: Warhammer: This is largely what makes the Dwarfs and Bretonnia bottom tier in competitive multiplayer:
    • The Dwarfs' entire shtick as a faction is good value-for-money heavy infantry who all boast high armour and melee defence, with quarrellers and gunners (who also happen to be heavily armoured) and some artillery and air units to give them a little reach. They have no cavalry and no real anti-cavalry unit except for Slayers (who are slower than cavalry and also unarmoured so they can actually die in droves if they are counter-charged), and very limited magic. This means that opposing players can confidently bring loads of infantry with great weapons or other units with anti-armour capabilities (Halberdiers and Greatswords, Crypt Horrors and Cairn Wraiths, Black Orcs and Big 'Uns, etc.), or heavy cavalry and chariots, that will mow through the heavily-armoured Dwarf battle line like a chainsaw through guacamole. Insultingly, their big blocks of slow-moving infantry also makes the dwarfs lethally vulnerable to artillery, which is one of the things their tabletop incarnations are famous for being the absolute best at in the game. Unless they can take a good fortified position or employ some brilliant infantry tactics, dwarfs have few ways to answer units that counter heavy infantry, because heavy infantry is all they have.
    • Bretonnia, on the other hand, has an amazing cavalry selection, probably the very best in the whole game. They get multiple different varieties of heavily armoured knights, and they can even have a fair go at air superiority because they have knights on Pegasus horses and Hippogryphs. But everything else about the Bretonnian army is just... sub-par. All of their infantry are mediocre compared to similar units of the same role; they just have too little leadership and heavy armour to form a reliable battle line. They have access to archers to pepper lightly armoured foes but they really suffer from a lack of any armour-piercing at long range. They have only one option for artillery, the powerful but inaccurate Trebuchet, and their magic game is there but it isn't anything to write home about. In other words, all of the other elements of Bretonnia's force completely rely on how you support them with the cavalry, which unfortunately means that the faction is very reliant on good micromanagement.
    • One patch made things even worse: Bretonnia being The Dung Ages version of France, their economy is tied to how much of their peasantry is working the fields rather than getting slaughtered in levies, meaning too many peasants in an army meant no economy, leading to an army of expendable heavy cavalry protecting a tiny core of peasant archers.
    • This also makes Bretonnia particularly bad in campaigns. In open battles, they can at least attempt to play to their strengths. In sieges, however, the bulk of their army is completely useless, since cavalry are unable to either assault or defend walls. Since campaigns consist mainly of taking and holding cities, Bretonnia suffer here even more than they do in one-off battles.
    • While they do not suffer for it as much as the previous two, the Warriors of Chaos. Imagine an army of superb heavy infantry and powerful monsters that also happen to be really expensive, with no options for ranged damage except for short-ranged axe-throwers and the Hellcannon, another really expensive piece of artillery. Because all their non-infantry options are so expensive, bringing them along will mean you have a really small army, which has its own problems (being flanked or enveloped easily).
• Town of Salem has the Plaguebearer's evolved form, Pestilence. Pestilence is completely invincible to any form of attack, with the only way of killing him being via lynching. Additionally, he will kill anybody who visits him, as well as any player unfortunate enough to be visiting his primary target that night. However, this all means that it becomes painfully obvious as to who the Pestilence is as he has no way of covering up his tracks, and dead players' wills tend to have a lot of information. Even trivial information such as who they last visited usually results in the Pestilence being instantly lynched.
• Warcraft III's human faction has a unit called the Steam Tank, which does fantastic damage to buildings... but can't attack any units. Its sole use is to damage enemy structures. The Frozen Throne expansion pack remedied this a bit by giving the player the option of buying an improvement that added a rapid-fire, multitarget (though weak) attack that can only be used against flying units.

Role-Playing Game

• The 7th Saga gives you seven characters to choose from. All of them learn magic, but Wilme's low magic stats means he'll cast few spells. Meanwhile, Esuna and Valsu (the Squishy Mage and the White Mage, respectively) will almost exclusively use spells. But the game leans more and more towards physical attacks as you level up (especially since Esuna and Valsu learn powerful buffing spells), so by the end Esuna and Valsu will be decent both at attacking and casting spells, while everyone else will be sticking with physical attacks.
• Absented Age: Squarebound: Despite being a Squishy Wizard, Astrake's default skills have surprisingly poor elemental coverage, forcing him to rely on equipment in order to access more elements. Unfortunately, unlike in Story Mode, Arcade Mode doesn't allow the player to bring their equipment into the dungeon, meaning Astrake is always going to be set up with a limited selection of elements.
• Alpha Protocol predates Human Revolution in allowing you to build Mike Thorton completely to stealth/technical specifications and then kicking your arse with unskippable boss fights. At least unlike Jensen it's impossible to go completely unarmed and a heavy combat approach is quite viable.
• Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura: Dog is... a dog, and the best melee damage dealer in the game. However, dealing melee damage is all Dog can do. No magic, no tech, no non-combat skills, no ranged attack, no dialogue, no associated quest, no armor, no usable items, no inventory....
• Baldur's Gate: Both represented and averted. Some classes and kits are very specialized and find total usefulness in limited situations or only until a certain point. However, the party composition will often cover any weakness, unless you are playing solo (without dualclassing or multiclassing).
  • Missile weapons, like bows or crossbows, are quite deadly in the first game, but lose a lot of effectiveness in the second. The ranger kit of the archer is in particular hyperspecialized in ranged weapons. While for the most part of the first game it results in an Over Kill, the archer still proves deadly against the most powerful enemies of late game. On the contrary, his abilities and powers make him a bit more competitive during early Shadows of Amn, but better melee weapons and enemy AC and resistances cripple his usefulness in late-game sets. In Throne of Bhaal, some boss enemies are almost immune to missile damage.
  • Wizard slayers come with skills that make them useful only against magicians, but they are quite powerful in that. While the second game has a lot of situations where wizard slayers excel, the first game (in which they were added after the Enhanced Edition) has really weaker and less common mages, so that wizard slayers are quite unnecessary most times for any party, and suffer from not having special abilities like other fighter kits and not being able to use magical items.
  • Hexxat has powers that make her very powerful at night and in dungeons. Outside when there is daylight, however, she becomes really, really vulnerable.
    • Almost every fight however is located underground or inside buildings. The few outside, daylight only fights are generally easy anyway.
  • Conversely, the druid spell "call lightning" only works outdoors, which makes it a case of Useless Useful Spell since it is quite powerful.
  • Ranger racial enemies. This is a "skill" that gives a bonus against a particular enemy and might compensate the weaker fighting skills of a ranger compared to other fighters. Now, when you create a ranger protagonist, you can choose a racial enemy that is common, a racial enemy that is uncommon but really dangerous, or an enemy that is uncommon and weak (and even enemies that you might not encounter at all!)...
  • Totally averted with cleric kits. It doesn't matter which one you choose, they have only bonuses in comparison to plain unkitted clerics, thus a kitted specialized cleric, even if dedicated to only one particular field of a deity, is always stronger than an unkitted one. While in the original Dungeons & Dragons a good dungeon master could turn the campaign to put on test the moral alignment of a character or make him/her stick to the religious belief, this is very limited in Baldur's Gate (just a few optional instances would be affected) and there are more consequences in the dialogue choices. You can even do charity to the poor as an evil cleric and you won't sufer penalties.
  • Dual classing in general is a powerful and viable strategy that averts this trope. The kensai is considered a Glass Cannon with strong attack and no armor. Many situations require tanking and a kensai if not correctly employed might become very vulnerable. The mage has weak attack, no armor too, but can cast spells both offensive and defensive. Combine the two and you can get a powerful spellcaster that can engage in melee with deadly proficiencies and magical armor (stoneskin, firewall, globe of invulnerability, etc.). Combine the kensai kai ability with time stopping spells, katana proficiencies and the magic katana+2 that gives extra spell slots and you have probably the best damage dealer of the game.
  • Also averted with the Undead Hunter Paladin kit. While it sounds very niche at a glance, undead enemies are extremely common throughout the series (and the sister game Icewind Dale), and the hit/damage bonuses apply to all of them, as opposed to the Ranger only getting bonuses against a very specific sub-type. They also get complete immunity to two very nasty status effects regardless of source (Hold and Level Drain). The only thing they lose in exchange is the ability to Lay on Hands, but that's a very small tradeoff for all the benefits you get.
• Bleeding Sun: Haruki has powerful skills for offense and healing, but they all consume items and he lacks a normal attack. If the player doesn't spare the first bandit group to get a discount on crystal bundles, it can be difficult to sustain the resources for Haruki's skills.
• City of Heroes:
  • The game has this to a degree, but you have to try for it. You can make a Blaster with all the primary set attacks, as many tertiary/epic attacks as possible, and maybe a travel power, and dump a bajillion damage (and maybe some accuracy) enhancements in, that overall gives enough attacks to be able to blow nearly anything in the game away; unfortunately you'll have no defense, and draw so much aggro that the best tanks and healers in the game will look on helplessly as you get stepped on. Speaking of tanks and healers, you can dump so much into the stay alive/keep them alive sets that you're utterly useless soloing unless you like spending 30+ minutes per random mission. Controversially Cryptic/NCsoft implemented features like diminishing returns and power set restructuring that made these types of setups not only difficult to accomplish but redundant and more-or-less pointless.
  • From a non-gameplay perspective, some of the Freakshow (gang members who replace their body parts with cybernetics) are described as this: "The Metal Freak's devotion to the cause is obvious- he's had both arms replaced with robotic contraptions that are good only for destruction. He must rely on other Freaks to feed him, but in combat, he is a whirling nightmare."
• A problem in Deus Ex: Human Revolution is that it is quite possible to use your Praxis Points for a Jensen that specialized in sneaking around and computer hacking (and in fact the game actually encourages you to do that because of how easy it is to die in firefights) instead of combat, and might not even have a lethal weapon on you because of space limitations. Until the game suddenly throws an inescapable boss battle with Barrett at you and you have to figure out how to kill him without any augs or weapons while he's throwing grenades at you^note the game does give you some slack by providing rooms with weapons and ammo but even with that it can be an uphill fight. This is alleviated in the Director's Cut, which significantly remaps the boss arenas to allow for any build to beat the bosses, though some are still easier than others^*Notably, a straight-up fight is now the worst option, as stealth, hacking, and other less confrontational methods will conserve resources that would otherwise be expended.
• Diablo:
  • In Diablo II, this is often done intentionally: your character may be completely unable to kill cold immune enemies, but that's okay if there are no cold immunes in your favourite hunting grounds and you got rushed to said top-level area without killing more than a handful of enemies on your way. There was a time when javazons were popular: they were only viable in one level but that just happened to be the farming hotspot. Diablo II: Resurrected remake introduced items which remove monsters' immunities, but leave them at 95% resistance, so unless you have other means to further reduce that resistance, you'll be doing pitiful damage against them.
  • In the first Diablo, the sorceror's spells are devastating against non-resistant enemies, and are even competent against resistant enemies, but there are certain enemies that are immune to all damage-based magic near the end of the hardest difficulty. Hope you brought Stone Curse and a good melee weapon (or a high-level Golem).
  • Averted in Diablo 3; all classes have two modes: Defense (dodging or weathering superspells), and MURDER.
• Qunari in the Dragon Age have a major problem with this trope, which is a large part of why they're seen as Scary Dogmatic Aliens to everyone else on the continent. Their religion comes with an extremely strict Fantastic Caste System; your role is given to you at birth and considered equivalent to your identity, and you perform that role and no other. If a Qunari warship was shipwrecked, for example, they'd better hope rescue is imminent because none of the soldiers onboard would even think to try to create shelter or find food and water, since they're not builders, cooks, or hunters. They have massive communication problems with other nations because if you ask something of a random Qunari, chances are they're not of a talky role and will categorically refuse to explain things to you. The Qunari in II are easily provoked to war by radical Chantry members because their group of soldiers had no diplomats and thus nobody to tell the Kirkwall government why they weren't leaving.
• Dragon Force (Sega): The archers' only strength is against harpy troops, but they're either weak against or average against everything else.
• Dungeons & Dragons Online has the Sorcerer class that can use far fewer spells than ordinary Wizards, they cannot swap between spells on the fly either, but they have much greater magical reserves to draw upon, making them able to hit harder with the same spells and cast them for much longer. However, having few spells to choose from can quickly make a Sorcerer useless — specializing in only fire-based spells will not help a player against opponents with fire immunity.
• The Elder Scrolls series has an in-universe Inversion example in the backstory. Uriel Septim V, after inheriting an Empire wracked with internal strife and floundering provincial support, decided to launch a series of invasions outside of Tamriel. After several successes invading island nations in the Padomaic Sea east of Tamriel, Uriel V decided to invade the continent of Akavir itself. However, due to space restrictions on his fleet, his forces were cripplingly underspecialized except for the Battlemages. The lack of cavalry was one of his biggest issues, as it left his infantry and settlements vulnerable to quick-strike attacks by mounted Tsaesci raiders. Eventually, Uriel V was forced to withdraw from Akavir, and he died in a Heroic Sacrifice while covering the retreat of his legions.
• Fable: Dedicated melee or archery builds both suffer from being really good at one kind of fight but bad at others. Melee excels at groups of weaker enemies, especially since they can hit multiple enemies with one attack, but has trouble against enemies that block often or have high defenses such as assassins and trolls respectively. Archery is amazing at burning down a single tough enemy such as trolls and bosses, but is quickly overwhelmed by swarms of weak enemies. Though melee at least can alleviate their problems somewhat using Berserk and Multi-strike spells.
• Fallout 4: Radiation damage is brutally effective against human enemies due to causing them maximum hitpoint reduction that can't be gotten rid of easily. The rest of the enemies you can potentially encounter consist of robots, ghouls, mutants or animals that have evolved to cope with a radiation-heavy environment, all of whom are highly resistant or outright immune to radiation. As an extension to the above, the gamma gun (a weapon that does pure radiation damage unless the Random Number God grants you a particular legendary variation of it), and the Children of Atom (a faction who are armed almost exclusively with gamma guns, apart from the Far Harbor branch who use radium rifles that inflict both radiation and physical damage).
• Fate/Grand Order:
  • Servants often have some kind of Situational Sword gimmick, such as a damage boost against a specific enemy type or the ability to add or remove a specific debuff, which can push them into this territory when done too clumsily. The most infamous of this type is likely Stheno: her kit is based around "charmlocking", where she uses a mixture of her Charm skill and the Charm effect on her Noble Phantasm to lock down an opponent and stall them out while she whittles them down and hopes for the Instant-Death effect on her NP to trigger (which, admittedly, is not often). The problem with that? Both her versions of Charm and her Instant Death only work on male targets. Against female or genderless targets, Stheno's damage is godawful and her sole non-charmlock skill is a simple party buff, meaning she can't do much more than flail impotently and hope the enemy doesn't target her.
  • Beowulf is skilled at fighting monsters, but not other humans, so he finds himself at a loss when he ends up fighting Li Shuwen.
  • Li Shuwen has the opposite problem. He is skilled at fighting humans, but not monsters, so he ends up relatively useless when the party faces demons.
  • Orion also specializes in fighting monsters and is inexperienced at fighting humans, so he gets steamrolled by human opponents like Martha and Achilles.
• In-story in Final Fantasy XIV: The Ishgardians have built their entire culture around their thousand-year war with the Dravanians. Everything they do is for the war effort which has stunted them significantly in other fields. One example is astrology. Sharlyan astrology reads all of the stars and grants healing magicks. Ishgardian astrology only focuses on one star to predict Dravanian movements. Later events reveal that many Ishgardians don't want the war between them and the Dravanians to end exactly because of this.
• Game Master Plus: The Tinker class has support skills that apply to robots, but not humans. This limits its usefulness in Grandora Island, where Elsa only has human party members.
• Golden Sun:
  • The versatile Class and Level System and skewed casting system makes it easy to adjust warrior-type characters to do anything needed in combat, leaving the caster-type characters in the dust unless there's a rock that needs moving.
  • In Golden Sun: Dark Dawn, most of the player characters have healing abilities in their base classes, even when they're otherwise warrior-types. This means squishy pure-healer Rief is functionally useless, unless there's a bucket you need to fill with water.
• Guild Wars 2 did their darndest to try and avert this. Primarily melee combatants have at least the option to equip ranged weapons (with a single-button quick-swap ability,) ranged attacks work in melee without penalty, most classes have some combination of single-target and area-effect abilities, and everyone has at least one healing ability. The stated mission was to do away with the "holy trinity" of DPS, Tank, Healer but how much they succeeded or failed is... a divisive matter at best.
• Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days: Donald has the highest Magic stat out of all characters, but all of his other stats are bottom-of-the-barrel and the limited Magic system makes his bonus pretty moot. The character with the second highest Magic stat, Zexion, can actually deal physical damage with strong combo finishers due to the Critical Hit mechanics and his high Crit% stat.
• Shana and Miranda in The Legend of Dragoon. Their skillset is centered entirely around healing — which is far too specialised for a party size of three, so they are essentially stuck dealing Scratch Damage or having to use magic items to catch up with everyone else. When it comes to healing or magic damage, they're the best by far, but they deal negligible physical damage and have paper thin physical defense with low health.
• The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky: Estelle Bright in The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel IV has one of the highest damage modifiers in the game with a whopping 5S rating on her S-Craft. However, all but one of her crafts are single target, including her S-Craft, and the bosses she's available are of the Flunky Boss variety which means she only ends up attacking one enemy at a time.
• Mass Effect:
  • Mass Effect 2:
    • Jack is specialized with two directed-force biotic attacks that don't penetrate shields and Warp Ammo, which is applied to her less-than-impressive firearms. Basically, this means that she is incredibly good at killing Husks, and incredibly bad at killing anything else.
    • Tali has a similar problem, except that instead of husks, her only real use is against geth and other mechs: her three powers are 1) a hack that only works on unarmoured, unshielded robots, 2) an attack that drains shields from anyone and the health from synthetics, but has no effect on organic flesh, biotic barriers, or armour, and 3) a drone that distracts people but serves mostly as setup rather than a killing blow. 3 buffed her by letting her hack sabotage the weapons of armed organics, letting the drain attack inflict full harm on biotic barriers and a little bit on organic health^note plus, in the Citadel DLC, it can target CAT-6 Heavies that the otherwise more destructive Overload can't, and giving her more to do with her drones.
    • Shepard can fall victim to this if playing as an Adept or Engineer: in Mass Effect 2, biotics don't do much to shields and tech powers don't do much to biotic barriers. And since neither class has much in the way of weapon selections and lack ammo powers, they can't easily shoot their way out of trouble, either. Can still be averted depending on what bonus power Shepard takes, as selecting Tali's Shield Drain gives a biotic Shepard a powerful anti-shield attack, while Reave can be given to a tech Shepard for anti-barrier work. Fully averted in Mass Effect 3 when powers were redone to give them more universal effectiveness.
  • As a race, asari also fall victim to this with their ground forces having a focus on elite biotic commandos rather than a larger combined arms military, relying on their fellow Council Race turians for full scale warfare. This turns out to be less than ideal when the Reapers attack Thessia while the turians are also bogged down fighting Reapers on their home front. Thessia falls swiftly once the Reapers win in space.
  • It's the same with the salarians, who specialize in small covert strike recon and strike units at the expense of a sizable fleet or army, which also bites them in the ass during the Reaper invasion.
  • Human military doctrine meanwhile, is to use armored cavalry and mobility to completely bypass the enemy's positions and attack their command and logistics sections and leave the rest of the enemy army to "wither on the vine." Once again, this was problem when the Reapers invaded, as they have no supply lines to target. Fortunately, humans are also good at adapting and using unconventional tactics, which gave them a chance.
  • Finally the turians, whose doctrine is "destroy the enemy with overwhelming force". This lacks the weaknesses of the other species' doctrines, but Reaper technology is so superior that the turians simply don't have enough force to counter it. Telling however, the turians last longer than any other species in defending their homeworld.
  • Javik can talk about the Prothean war with the Reapers, which reveals they suffered from this too. Every species in the empire fought by the same doctrine, which meant none of them had any idea what to do once the Reapers adapted.
  • The krogan are really only good at close-range ground fighting, since their eyes aren't positioned or adapted for long-range firefights but they are super-durable and strong enough to carry really large guns; additionally, while lacking a fleet is due to ruinous post-Rebellion sanctions rather than choice, they also lack an air force. On top of this, their Proud Warrior Race Guy culture means that they have little in the way of agriculture or technological progress except as a side-effect of building more spectacular guns, although (if he's alive) Urdnot Wrex is fixing this by beating the crap out of any scientist who doesn't research what he tells them to. Unlike the above two races, a lot of the time, they not only won't get their asses handed to them by the Reapers, they'll get a cure for the stillbirth plague afflicting them as well — when your specialisation is very much in demand, it turns out you can pretty much demand any kind of blank cheque you want and people who need it will sign on. Of course, this requires Shepard to take the Paragon option; in the Renegade path, the ways in which they've used it in past will ultimately sign their death warrant as a species.
• Persona:
  • Persona 3: Fuuka, especially when one compares her to her successors. Her Persona is meant to be used for searching areas, finding enemy weaknesses, and supporting the party, but communications is where she really shines. The long range of her Persona means she can keep track of the party while they're 200+ floors into Tartarus, or lost somewhere in the TV world. Her ability to provide battle support on the other hand, is extremely low. All she has is a slight HP restore, an escape from the dungeon skill, and her Oracle skill, which is random and may backfire. Meanwhile, Rise and Futaba, while lacking the range, have a wider variety of skills at their disposal to provide aid in battle.^note Both can restore HP and SP to the party, charge their attacks, or block fatal damage once per battle. Futaba can also switch out party members and reposition the party if they're ambushed. Rise has the ability to join in All-Out Attacks, revive the protagonist once per battle, and change her Persona to a combat form or stage form.
  • Persona 4: Naoto, the final party member, specialises in the Light, Dark and Almighty spells, which are all things that only the protagonist can normally use. Unfortunately, Light and Dark are instant-kill attacks that don't hit often and are entirely useless against bosses. Almighty can't be blocked or resisted, but it uses up a massive amount of SP, meaning that if Naoto wants to hit anything reliably she's not going to be doing it for long. She's almost totally useless in boss fights and doesn't have much extended usability in normal dungeon play. Fortunately, the Updated Re-release Persona 4 Golden solved this problem by giving Naoto access to the highest-level single-target spells of the other four elements, meaning that she now has a way to harm bosses and avoid running out of SP.
• Phantasy Star II gives us Hugh Thompson, a biologist who comes armed with the ability to learn techniques which are especially effective against biological enemies. The problem is that few biologics have high defense that would require techniques to bypass, plus other characters will likely have techniques which are just as effective, if not more, than anything Hugh can throw out, save for his instant death spells which tend to miss often, anyway. Not to mention the primary enemy type for the latter half of the game is mechanical enemies, which his skills are largely useless against. His skills are effective against the demonic critters in the final area, though, which may give him some merit.
• Pokémon: Many Pokémon fall into this, usually by specializing in specific stats at the exclusion of all others or by having particularly vulnerable elemental types.
  • This can apply to many Mons concerning their movesets and whatnot. Many of them can only learn a small type pool, effectively making them one-trick ponies. Take the Dugtrio family, for example. Their attacks mostly consist of shaking the ground, shaking the ground harder, randomly shaking the ground at varying strength levels, and burrowing underground and then shaking the ground as they come up. But because of their high speed and ability that prevents opponents running away from them, they are great for picking off opponents weak to those moves.
  • Rampardos is a Glass Cannon with ridiculous Attack and decent HP, but its defenses and Speed are so low it falls in a couple of hits, and its pure Rock-typing does it no favors.
  • Ninjask is ludicrously fast (it's one of the fastest Pokémon in the game, and its ability makes it go faster every turn), but is not only easily walled with poor attacks and an average Attack stat, its bad defensive Bug/Flying typing and really low defenses make it really only useful for Baton Passing, as it learns a few good set-up moves. Otherwise, it's too fragile to do much more than hit the enemy once or twice before being inevitably knocked out.
  • Shedinja can only be hit by super effective attacks and passive damage, but only has 1 HP at any level. It also has five weaknesses, and there are a lot of passive damage attacks.
  • Deoxys can take several different forms. The Attack and Normal forms have the highest attacks and special attacks in the series and a fantastic speed, but their defenses and Hit Points are so weak that they go down in one hit from about anything. Its defense form has superior defenses, but can't really dish anything out. Speed form, however, is more of something between a Lightning Bruiser and a Jack of All Stats.
  • A Skitty with the ability Normalize will use all moves as if they were Normal-type. While this means constant STAB bonuses and being able to use moves against types that normally resist them, it also means anything the Skitty does will be resisted by Rock and Steel types, and it is completely useless against Ghosts. This is especially problematic in Pokémon Mystery Dungeon if you get a Skitty as your character; be thankful the game allows Normal moves to do slight damage against Ghosts.
  • Shuckle. It's got ludicrously high Defense stats, but all of its other stats are practically non-existent. There are a few tricks to turn Shuckle into a powerhouse, but this usually leaves it very vulnerable.
  • Absol has an absurdly large movepool and great Attack, but a good chunk of it is wasted due to its average at best Special Attack. Especially so in Generation III, where the Dark-type is considered Special. This is somewhat rectified in Gen. VI with Mega Absol, who in addition to a small increase in Attack gets massive increases to Special Attack and Speed. However, Mega Absol's paper-thin defenses still make it a Glass Cannon.
  • The Blissey family is specialized as an ultra-high health tank against special attacks, but it is so vulnerable to physical attacks that it ultimately only serves as a Metal Slime during the metagame. Game Freak is surely aware of this, since they littered the Bonus Dungeon of Pokémon Black and White with trainers who only use the Blissey family.
  • Since Gen II, Marowak has had access to an item called Thick Club that doubles its attack which leaves it with one of the highest attack stats in the franchise^note Out 809 Pokémon, including Mega Evolutions, only fourteen have a higher functional attack stat. Without Thick Club, it's just an inferior Sandslash, itself a fairly lackluster Pokémon, and with it, it hits hard and can sort of take a hit or two. That's it.
  • Pyukumuku has almost no attacking moves whatsoever, and what few attacks it has are counter moves. Though it gets both Counter and Mirror Coat, ensuring there is no attack in the game that can't be countered, anything with Taunt, which disables all non-attacking moves on the target, will ruin Pyukumuku's day.
  • Indeedee is typically used in competitive double battling for one purpose and one purpose only: To set up Psychic Terrain, which blocks all priority attacks, then spam Follow Me, which leads all opposing attacks towards herself.^note Male Indeedee exist, but they can't learn Follow Me, making them much rarer. This allows one turn for Indeedee's partner to be free to do whatever they want. On the other hand, this one purpose is so useful and versatile that Indeedee wound up in the top 10 most used Pokémon in Ranked double battles in Pokémon Sword and Shield.
  • Rillaboom is meant to do only one move: Grassy Glide, which always goes first when Grassy Terrain is up, and some kinds of Rillaboom create Grassy Terrain as soon as they show up. Take that Grassy Terrain away, however, and they become a lot weaker.
  • Crabominable is a beast under Trick Room,^note Reverses the order in which Pokémon move whose Ice/Fighting type combination allows it to hit numerous Pokémon for super-effective damage before they can strike back. Without Trick Room, Crabominable is a sitting duck due to its middling defenses and the fact that Crabominable itself has many type-based weaknesses. This strategy also means Crabominable is much more practical in double battles than single battles, since double battles allow you to set up Trick Room with Crabominable already present, whereas you need to expend a turn in single battling to send Crabominable out, during which it's helpless.
  • Regieleki is the single fastest Pokemon of them all, and its ability Transistor powers up its electric stab by 50%! The caveat is that its coverage is abysmal, it's attacking stats are only at 100, and its defences are a joke. Basically it is meant to hit fast with electric attacks, and that is it. Any ground type pretty much invalidates whatever threat it has, and most priority moves slaugher it easily.
  • Scovillain is tailor-made to be a peak sun abuser — it has the Chlorophyll ability to double its speed in the sun, learns powerful Fire moves alongside Solar Beam (which activates in one turn instead of two in the sun) to annihilate its opponents, and is Grass/Fire-type so it doesn’t take super-effective damage from enemy Fire moves, which is normally a weakness of Grass-types under the sun. Outside of the sun, it’s just a slow Glass Cannon that doesn’t even have much “cannon” to it, with its offensive stats paling in comparison to many other fully-evolved Pokémon.
  • Gen V Pokémon have significantly less type range overall in their movesets compared to previous generations. Generally, they get moves in their own type(s) and a few Normal moves, along with some Status-type moves. Moves outside their typing are rather difficult to come by. Grass-types in general tend to have this kind of typing trouble.
  • The Ultra Beasts all have one or two very high stats, while the rest are pitifully low. As an example, Pheromosa has phenomenal Speed and very high offenses, but its low defenses mean a small breeze will KO it. The only exception to the rule is Celesteela, who has well-balanced stats (aside from very low Speed).
    • Special Poké Balls called Beast Balls are developed to catch the Ultra Beasts, and they have an impressive 5x catch multiplier on them. Any other Poké Ball used on them (bar the Master Ball) only has a 1x multiplier. Use a Beast Ball on a normal Pokémon, and its multiplier drops to a pitiful 0.1x.
  • Gyms, their Trainers, and their Gym Leaders all follow a type specialization that can be exploited by the player with counter-strategies using their obvious weaknesses. It's slightly rectified in later versions, as their Pokémon know moves to compensate. Several later Gym Leaders and Elite Four members do avert this sort of, but usually in some strange ways. Candice in Generation IV specialized in Ice-types but had a Medicham, which is a Psychic/Fighting type. The weirdest would be Volkner and Flint in Diamond and Pearl, who specialized in Electric-types and Fire-types respectively, however, Volkner's four-mon team consists of only two Electric-types, and Flint only has two Fire-types on his team of five. (This was because in Diamond and Pearl, there only were two evolved Fire-type Pokémon, Rapidash and the starter Infernape, and Magmortar in Dual-Slot Mode. Platinum expanded the Pokédex, in part to give them teams that are closer to their specialized types.)
  • Either your crime group comes from Orre or you assign very specific Pokémon species to your grunts. Teams Rocket and Galactic are reasonably safe from monotyping (even though their lineups are reasonably weak), but Aqua fears Grass/Electric and Magma loathes Water. Also on that note, Team Plasma does not take Fighting well (the grunts use Watchog and Dark types, N's only protection is Archeops and a Dragon, and even Ghetsis can lose half his team to Fighting attacks).
    • Ghetsis is also a storyline example: a little careful analysis of his team reveals that it is perfectly designed to counter N's, such as leading with Cofagrigus to bait for disguised Zoroark, and the moveset on his Hydreigon. He did not anticipate the player character's interference, did not expect them to defeat (and befriend) N, and is not prepared to deal with them himself, leading to his defeat and Villainous Breakdown.
    • This trope works against Ghetsis in other ways. Due to the weakness structuring and move layout of his entire team, a good Water type can tank one or two members of his team before going down (the exception being Hydreigon). The most probable? Samurott. ^*Teach Samurott Razor Shell, X-Scissor, Rock Smash, and Swords Dance, and bring some Full Restores, an X Speed and an X Accuracy. Set up during Cofagrigus using the items and Swords Dance; luck willing, Samurott will then proceed to one-shot everything Ghetsis will throw at you, Hydreigon included!
  • For the most part, Gen. V champion Alder. While he has extremely powerful Pokémon, all but one can be easily taken out by Emboar (though one of these requires using a TM). And the one that can't? Druddigon, a Dragon-type so slow that a powerful Dragon or Ice move will take it out before it does any damage.
    • Similarly, in the sequels Iris also has very powerful mons, but all of them are weak to either Fighting or Ice (the very first mon she sends out is weak to both types). The best choices for taking them out? Basically any strong Water-type other than Magikarp or the Seismitoad evolutionary line that can also learn good Fighting-type moves. The most probable candidate among those? Samurott.
  • While Team Flare has a wider variety with some good defensive and offensive coverage, they still do not escape the "limited species" clause above. Theoretically, a Pokémon that learns both Fairy- and Ground-type attacks can wipe waves of grunts at a time.
    • Even worse is Lysandre, whose lineup makes one question how he planned to contain the Legendary powering the ultimate weapon should it ever go rogue or wind up under the player trainer's command. Mienshao and Honchkrow are both gimped against Yveltal (Mienshao in particular gets wiped by Oblivion Wing) and they, plus Mega Gyarados, are fodder for Xerneas. The only justification for any of this is that Lysandre is completely nutbar, but Ghetsis and Cyrus were stark raving mad, too.
  • The player can deliberately invoke this using the "Choice" items. Choice Band, Specs, and Scarf increase the Attack, Special Attack, or Speed, respectively, of the Pokémon holding them, allowing them to either throw around absolutely devastating attacks or outspeed just about anything that doesn't boast a similar advantage. However, a Pokémon holding any of these items can only use one move until they switch out or lose the item. Particularly savvy players sometimes use this drawback to their advantage by forcing a Choice item onto an opponent's Support Party Member, generally rendering it useless for the rest of the match.
  • In Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire, the Hoenn Elite Four is set up to the point where it's brought to its knees by one Pokémon, Gardevoir^*Thanks to the Gen VI retcon, Gardevoir is a Psychic/Fairy type now. Gardevoir's new Fairy type gives it an advantage against Sidney's Dark-Types, Gardevoir can learn Shadow Ball and Thunderbolt to beat Phoebe's Ghosts and Glacia's Ice Pokémon (most of whom are part Water), and the crowning achievement: completely shutting down Drake's Dragon Pokémon with its Dragon immunity and Fairy attacks. None of the Pokémon the E4 uses seem strong enough, fast enough or pack the right attacks to stop Gardevoir either The game then subverts this with the Champion, Steven, whose Pokémon have a strong advantage against Gardevoir.
    • Likewise Mega Lopunny can crush the first three Elite Four with nothing but STAB moves and can destroy Drake with Ice Punch. Steven on the other hand, has several Pokémon bulky enough to survive then crush Mega Lopunny's less than stellar defenses.
  • Pokémon Sun and Moon does this again with the new Alolan Elite Four. The four leaders' types are Fighting, Rock, Ghost, and Flying, and they can all be taken down by one single Pokémon, who isn't weak to any of their types and can strike at their weaknesses. Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon does mitigate this somewhat by replacing the Fighting-Typed Elite Four with one who uses Steel, but said Pokémon doesn't too much trouble. Who is this Pokémon?^*It's Primarina. Primarina can beat Olivia (Rock) with Water, Hala (Fighting) with Fairy, and can learn Shadow Ball and Ice Beam to deal with Acerola (Ghost) and Kahili (Flying), respectively. It isn't weak to Steel either, and can hit Molayne's Steel types hard with its Water.
  • After presenting the first villain team since Cipher to not pigeonhole themselves into a single type of Pokémon, the franchise screams right back into this trope in Pokémon Sword and Shield. Team Yell's addiction to Dark-type Pokémon makes them laughingstock villains... but they're not villains to begin with, and their type choice is justified since they're Gym Trainers for the Dark-type Spikemuth Gym. Less justifiable is the Macro Cosmos corporation, who use Steel-type Pokémon to the last (barring Oleana, who has a diverse team that errs towards Poison) even when their division is not related to construction. Most damning is Chairman Rose, who shares this monotyping with the rest of the group. News flash, buddy: ancient and powerful Pokémon don't get to be ancient in the first place without something to counteract their weaknesses, like a Flamethrower to melt all that Steel.
  • Competitive battling in general tends to be this. Pokémon are raised with a focus on one or two specific stats to the neglect of everything else, filling very specific roles on the team. Naturally, competitive battling also features high usage of Choice items (mentioned above). Since competitive battling involves ridiculously frequent amounts of switching Pokémon in and out,^note Unofficial formats, at least—official tournaments run solely as double battles, with each side picking 4 Pokémon out of 6 being able to see the other's team, making for much less switching due to it being much riskier the downside to Choice items is essentially non-existent, since the Pokémon will only get in one attack (at most) before you switch it for something else. Since the "choice" of Choice items doesn't stick when the Pokémon switches out, when it enters battle again, you get to pick a different move if you want.
    • For the ultimate example of this trope, many competitive teams have one Pokémon whose entire purpose is to clear away "trap" moves such as Spikes, Toxic Spikes, and the granddaddy Game-Breaker of them all: Stealth Rock. Naturally, in the main games themselves, such an archetype doesn't exist due to the rules being different enough for there to be much less switching, removing whatever niche these Pokémon have in full-team battling.
    • In Gen IV, Quagsire saw a fair bit of use in Uber matches because it's typing and ability made it a magnificent check against Kyogre, with it being capable of completely walling any set lacking Ice Beam. While Quagsire couldn't do anything else in Ubers, Kyogre was so ubiquitous that it was still popular. This happened again in Gen VIII, where it's combination of Water/Ground typing and Unaware ability allowed it to Stone Wall the most dangerous Pokemon of that generation, Zacian-Crowned, in Anything-Goes. Outside of this specific (but important) niche, quagsire has no business anywhere near that tier.
    • Double battling in Pokémon Sword and Shield have a lot of "tentpole" teams, in which one Pokémon does all the heavy hitting while all of the other ones serve to either play support or cover for that one Pokémon's vulnerabilities. Usually, this one Pokémon is also the go-to Dynamax or Gigantamax subject. Naturally, should that Pokémon actually faint, especially before it can deal much damage, chances are the rest of the team will go down not long afterwards too.
  • And of course, every game has that one Fisherman with a full team of six Magikarp.
  • Besides Pokémon themselves, there's berries. A mon can hold one, and will eat it in battle in certain circumstances. Early ones would heal HP, or certain status effects. But as more and more were added, they started to become ridiculously specialized. Some reduce damage from a single super-effective attack of a specific type. Another set increases a stat when your HP is low... but increasing defense when you're at less than 25% health already isn't likely to save you.
  • Some non-damaging moves are rarely, if ever, useful (disregarding joke moves like Splash that do literally nothing), and the limit of 4 attacks per Pokémon makes them difficult to justify keeping:
    • Water Sport and Mud Sport make Fire and Electric moves, respectively, 50% weaker. The biggest issue being that most mons that can learn these moves are, as you might guess, Water or Ground type. Water already resists Fire, and Ground is immune to Electric, making Mud Sport entirely redundant outside of double battles or other rare edge cases. They became somewhat more useful in later generations, when their damage reduction was increased and remained in effect for 5 turns, even if you switch to something not immune to Electric.
    • A few moves, such as Follow Me, Helping Hand, or Spotlight, serve absolutely no purpose outside of double battles. The main storyline of a game mostly consists of single battles, and even when you are in a double battle, there are generally better move-slot options available. There are some exceptions, however, such as the aforementioned Indeedee, who has made Follow Me one of the most-seen moves in Ranked double battles. These moves do much better in Max Raid Battles, since you have to work with a group against a more powerful target.
    • Spite, which cuts 4 PP from whatever move the opponent just used. Unless the opponent just used a 5-PP move and has no other good attacks, this attack rarely changes the course of a battle. Grudge drains all the PP of one move, but only if your opponent knocks you out with it.
  • Specialized Pokéballs are better than even Ultra balls at catching certain kinds of Pokémon, but against anything outside their specialization, they're only as effective as regular Pokéballs while costing five times as much. Perhaps the worst are the Love Ball and Moon Ball, the former only being super effective on Pokémon of the same species but opposite gender of your current Pokémon and the latter only being super effective against Pokémon that evolve via moon stone. The only specialized balls that most players use are Level Balls^*Their effectiveness ranges from twice as good as Ultra balls to four times as good if your Pokémon is a higher level than the one you're trying to catch, Quick Balls^*Twice as effective as Ultra balls if used on the first turn, good for roaming Legendaries, and Timer Balls^*Grow more effective the longer the battle goes, becoming more effective than Ultra balls after four turns.
  • Some Apricorn Balls from the second generation suffer from this when they return for Pokémon HeartGold and SoulSilver, because balls introduced in the third and fourth generations have simply outclassed them. The worst of the bunch is the Lure Ball, which provides a three-times catch rate (50% better than an Ultra Ball) against Pokémon snagged with a fishing rod. The problem is that's too specific to compete against the Net Ball, which applies the same bonus against any Water- or Bug-type Pokémon, and too low to compete against the Dive Ball, which applies a 3.5x catch rate to Pokémon encountered while fishing or surfing. The only reason it remains worthwhile is because, as an Apricorn Ball, you can get it in higher numbers with the only cost being having to wait a day for Kurt to make them. When Sun & Moon reintroduced the Lure Ball as a special Ball you could only get two of, they had to increase its catch rate to 5x for it to be relevant.
• As a Gacha Game with a large variety of characters and skillsets, it was inevitable that Reverse: 1999 would have some characters that excel at one specific aspect, to the detriment of their capabilities everywhere else. One good example is the Sotheby/Jessica duo, who, respectively, specialize in inflicting Poison stacks and Healing-Over-Time, and whose attacks both inflict Poison stacks as well and inflict bonus Reality Damage the more Poison stacks an enemy has. They can quickly wear down even the most durable of enemies in a few turns... provided they aren't of Beast Afflatus and have a damage bonus against them and could kill them more easily, don't have incredibly high burst damage that Sotheby's purely over-time-healing can fail to compensate for, don't have a strong Reality defense that renders Jessica's attacks much less effective (such as robotic enemies), or worst of all, they have some way of cleansing Poison stacks from themselves, rending their most effective strategy moot.
• Ruina: Fairy Tale of the Forgotten Ruins:
  • Enda has high attack, magic, and defense growth, but her equipment options are more limited, especially when it comes to weapons. She can only equip dragon gems and can only obtain new ones by defeating the optional dragon bosses. This is downplayed when she gets her final dragon gem, which is well-balanced in terms of stats. However, her limited armor options still make it difficult to build her resistances.
  • The class system gives the user both stat penalties and stat bonuses depending on which class they level up. This means a protagonist who only masters classes they have aptitude for will likely have very high primary stats and very low Dump Stats.
• In Star Trek Online, the original trinity of Federation endgame ships, the Exploration Cruiser Retrofit, the Tactical Escort Retrofit and the Long Range Science Vessel Retrofit (re: the Galaxy-class, Defiant-class and Intrepid-class) were built around this, using the "holy trinity" that the Guild Wars 2 example tried to do away with. The Exploration Cruiser was meant to be the Tank, the Tactical Escort was meant to be the DPS and the Long Rance Science Vessel was meant to be the Healer. However, as time passed, these lines blurred away, but the Exploration Cruiser got left in the dust. It's durable, but without the strength of firepower, it's not going to do much. This was finally solved with its Tier 6 counterpart
• Mint from Tales of Phantasia is the only purely supportive character in the Tales Series, all of the healers falling into the Combat Medic archetype. While it's not an issue in her game of origin, it makes her rather obsolete in the crossover titles like Tales of VS and the Radiant Mythology series.
• Gaius from Tales of Xillia 2. The guy is a Lightning Bruiser, easily dealing more damage than any other party member, and he's extremely fast as well. But, he can only deal Fire, Light, and Slashing-type damage, excluding linked artes and affinities. In a game where exploiting the enemy's weaknesses could mean the difference between victory and defeat, Gaius doesn't have many enemies that he's overtly powerful against.
• Underrail: A lot of character builds suffer from this effect. There's no such thing as a perfect character, and everybody is going to have a weakspot. As an example a full Psionic build will have a plethora of Psychic Powers to deal with most enemies in the game - they can electrify you, melt you with beams of burning energy, skewer you on icicles, freeze you solid, blast you into gibs, strangle you with your own shadow, drive you violently insane or into despair so soul-crushing that you become an Extreme Doormat who doesn't react to anything... but full Psionics can do hardly anything against robotic enemies. Robots can outright No-Sell most forms of direct energy damage and all thought control abilities, and are immune to most forms of crowd control too. Conversely playing as a Tin Can Assault Tank, basically an assault rifle-toting Mighty Glacier clad in Powered Armor, could see you being effortlessly torn apart by Psi Beetles, as psionic powers can ignore armour. Energy shields work fantastically well against plasma blasts and provide good protection against shrapnel and bullets as well, but a guy with a sledgehammer is going to do a number on your spine. A Stealth Expert with a crossbow can also negate energy shields and also be a bitch to fight against by cleverly using poison, traps, the environment and stalking and ambush tactics... but good luck ever winning a direct firefight against guys with guns, or any kind of protracted melee. The game does however provide you with some wiggle room; bear traps, caltrops, throwing nets and flashbang grenades are handy devices that almost any kind of character can use against any kind of foe, and they are fairly cheap and easy to get hold of too.
• World of Warcraft essentially forces most classes into doing this for either of the three roles in raiding and dungeons, especially hybrids like druids who could theoretically do everything at once, but poorly. Tanks give up most of their damage-output for durability, Healers do the same for healing power and mana regeneration, and damage dealers give up most of their survival chances (and probably won't use what they have left to focus even more on dishing out as much as they can).
  • Damage dealing specializations suffer from this as well. Specs like Outlaw (formerly Combat) Rogues and Elemental Shamans can dish out massive amounts of AOE damage, good for trash and boss fights with a lot of adds, but their damage is extremely poor for single target. Specs like Affliction Warlocks or Arcane Mages deal massive single target damage, both ramping up overtime, but are particularly bad for shorter fights or fights with lots of weaker adds is their bane. Burst specs, like Feral Druids, are great for shorter single target fights, but their damage drops off completely when their cooldowns expire and rotations inevitably slow down. The representation of each class in raid groups depends on the specific raid, and some specs might be entirely absent for entire raid patches due to their overspecialization.
• Much like in The Legend of Dragoon, Sharla in Xenoblade Chronicles 1 suffers for this for very similar reasons. Sharla is a Combat Medic with more emphasis on the medic part than combat. Her skillset is based too much around healing with very little in the way of offence. Since her base attack and her attack abilities don't deal enough damage (and in the case of Head Shot, have a very long cooldown) she is considered one of the worst characters in the game. Part of this is due to the fact that the party size is three — if the party size were four, Sharla would probably see more use.
• Vanderkaum in Xeno Gears over-relies on large, clumsy naval cannons in combat, which prove almost entirely useless against the speedy mobile Gears that have become standard in warfare since his heyday. He persists in this tactic despite having anti-Gear weapons ready to deploy, causing Fei and company to easily pick apart his fleet and destroy his flagship. He fares a little better once he gets into a Gear himself, but not by much at least until he makes a Deal with the Devil to gain absurd powers, but that doesn't end well for him either.

Sandbox Games

• Don't Starve:
  • Woodie's Werebeaver form is very powerful in combat, can mine and cut down trees very quickly, and survive the night without light... but cannot use items at all. Woodie was nerfed further in Don't Starve Together; the Werebeaver's combat ability is halved, and Woodie's Sanity Meter rapidly depletes while he's a beaver.
  • Shipwrecked introduced a new character, a pirate known as Woodlegs. His special power allows him to instantly make a ship and locate treasures, but he loses sanity on land. While he's powerful in Shipwrecked, there is no reason to play him in the original game or Reign of Giants.
• The abilities in [PROTOTYPE] suffer from this. The Claws are best against large groups of fairly agile enemies, but everyone who fits that description dies instantly no matter what hits them. The hammerfists can instakill tanks, but is extremely slow and its most powerful attack has to be initiated from on top of a skyscraper to one-shot vehicles (which you can do with any weapon by just using the hijack ability). The Whipfist is good against helicopters, but so is everything and it barely scratches anything else. The Blade and Musclemass can handle pretty much everything well enough, with none of the drawbacks. The sequel (mostly) fixes this.
• Palworld:
  • The Pal Shadowbeak, a Bioweapon Beast with high attack, high defense, high HP and a bevy of attacks, including a particularly powerful Secret Art. It's also nearly useless as a worker at your base with only a gathering skill of 1.
  • Tocotoco has the devastating Implode and Megaton Implode skills as well as a powerful partner skill that lets you use it as a Grenade Launcher. It's not great at using other attacks thanks to their low base attack of 75 and it's also pretty much useless at base with a gathering skill of 1.

Simulation Games

• Monster Loves You!: Lampshaded during the Ascension segment of the game. The Elders tell you that Nash-Gnash failed to ascend to Elderhood as she is pure Ferocity — mean and violent — with no other qualities to redeem that. Justified in that you can get several of the endings by specializing in just one virtue, but you almost certainly won't get past the Ascension segment of the game.
• The Sky Fox in RC Helicopter is the fastest of the three helicopters... but also the least stable. This makes it the hardest copter to use as it's the easiest to crash into things and break down.
• The Kitakami, a ship that was available during the World of Warships closed beta, was a Japanese light cruiser that mounted 40 torpedo launchers. However, the torpedoes had a range of 10 kilometers, while the Kitakami could be seen at 11 km, which made it impossible to stealth attack in open water as Japanese destroyers could do. The ship also had only 4 guns, which made it essentially useless in a gunfight even against destroyers, it wasn't particularly fast or maneuverable, and had weak armour. The only way it could be used effectively if the enemy was paying minimal attention was to try and hide behind an island and hope enemies blundered into close range, or run toward a cap circle, swamp it with torpedoes, and run away before it was blown up, and both tactics relied on having maps that allowed this. Due to the highly situational nature of the Kitakami having any use, it was removed from the game and replaced with the Atago, a much more flexible ship.
• X-Universe:
  • Missile frigates in X3: Terran Conflict are normally just glass cannons, weak on defense but able to level entire sectors from extreme range. However the Boron Kraken eschews any form of point-defense in favor of more missile launchers. This essentially means they have no way to protect themselves from incoming missiles, save for spamming their own missiles at enemy missiles and hoping they hit.
    • The OTAS Sirokos missile frigate is designed specifically for launching boarding pods at enemy craft, and can carry ten more marines than any other missile frigate (30 instead of 20) ... at the cost of having no method of attack other than ramming. It works fine for boarding TLs^note giant freighters that can transport stations from shipyard to jobsite, but it can't really do anything else.
  • Terran and AGI Task Force ships are incapable of mounting Commonwealth weaponry used by every other faction (besides the Kha'ak), forcing them to use the more limited Terran arsenal, which lacks in fast projectile weapons to kill M5s and M4s, and they are completely lacking a frigate-size weapon, making their otherwise awesome Yokohama and Aegir frigates pathetically weak at fighting ships of their size or larger (unless they're equipped with the Wraith missile).
  • Used as player ships, M5 fighter craft are good at exactly two things: getting you from point A to point B very rapidly, and quickly reaching a heavier craft so you can spam enough low-yield missiles at it to get the pilot to eject — at which point you can ditch the ineffectual Fragile Speedster and commandeer a ship that can actually do stuff.

Survival Games

• The Paddle Tires in Pacific Drive are the absolute best tires for going through water, with an AA rating. However, they have a B rating off road, and a C rating on pavement, making them terrible for anything else. There's only one junction zone, the Mires, that has water, and it's generally avoidable or not a nuisance, and the Off-Road Tires, which are available earlier, have an A rating in water, a B rating on pavement, and an AA rating for off road. The Paddle Tires utility is completely irrelevant because the Off-Road Tires are almost as good in water, and are better everywhere else.

Sports Games

• Small players in Arc Style: Baseball!! 3D only excel at running the bases fast. The rest of their stats are worthless. Why? They don't field better unlike the Normal type, they don't hit strong, their pitches are slow and inefficient, and worst of all: their special ability in batting? It's called "Quick dash", and makes the player run faster than normal towards first base. But it's almost always a ground ball to the infielders, who will most likely put you out anyway. So you'll probably only use them to get doubles instead of singles when that tiny time gap that would put out any normal runner allows the small character to reach second base just in time.
• Most teams in Mutant Football League feature a decent assortment of the various species available to take advantage of their myriad skills and specialties. A few, however, only feature one or two species, and consequently end up being fairly weak or even one-trick ponies that are easily shut down by a balanced team. This is especially true of the Orcs of Hazzard, who have only one offensive weapon to speak of (massively multitalented human RB Iron Jaw Macgilicutti) on an otherwise plodding, clumsy all-Orc roster. Tellingly, the highest-rated team, the Full Metal Mayhem, are also the only team in the entire game that has all seven species in their roster.

Stealth-Based Game

• In Hitman (2016), the Sedative poison is the most useless form of poison in the game when compared among its peers. Sedating can't kill someone, so it's worse than Lethal Poison already off the bat, and it voids "Silent Assassin", meaning you can't get the best possible score for a level if you use it on some poor soul and they get found by someone. And worst of all, it isn't useful anywhere where Lethal or Emetic poisons work better anyway (e.g. when a person is drinking wine, which is how you deploy it). Basically, there is no situation where it works and Lethal or Emetic won't also work, so you may as well ignore it. This is precisely why Hitman 2 made sedative weapons and poisons not count towards a body being found, making it a solid upgrade from knocking people out with a hammer.
• Kenneth Baker and Donald Anderson from Metal Gear Solid both had psychic insulation due to special cranial implants, preventing Psycho Mantis from reading their minds and getting the information he needs. Revolver Ocelot then steps up and tries old-fashion torture instead, and quickly gets the information due to neither of them having trained to resist it. Donald Anderson, however, dies in the process, taking his info with him, though it's revealed that Ocelot killed him intentionally as part of his own Double Agent plans.

Third-Person Shooter

• From Kid Icarus: Uprising:
  • Clubs excel at melee attacks, and their charged attacks hit anyone close to the wielder for massive damage. However, clubs' charged attacks have a limited range, and they don't have a basic ranged attack at all. In Air Battles, they do hit a bit further with their "shockwaves", but the range is pretty bad and it's quite likely that many enemies on a given Air Battle segment will be impossible to hit with a club.
  • On the opposite end are Staves, which have powerful charged attacks with impressive ranges, but so-so basic ranged attacks and lousy melee attacks. The most extreme example of this is the Flintlock, a "Staff" (it's actually a rifle) that can hit enemies up to 120 meters away, but practically does Scratch Damage at best with its melee attacks.
• Warframe:
  • The revamped damage mechanic encourages this. Each of the three factions reacts to specific elemental and physical damage types in different ways; corrosive and piercing damage is great against Grineer armor, but blast and slash damage are terrible. This means that players are encouraged to adapt their entire loadout to whatever faction they're facing in a given mission. Normally that works fine, but if a different faction shows up in a mission (or if the player just forgets to switch their loadout), they'll find themselves unable to deal significant damage.
  • Warframes designed for dealing direct damage, especially elemental damage, fall into this. Ember can deal massive amounts of fire damage, but that's only really useful against Infested, and even then it's less useful at higher levels than gas damage would be. Since there's no way to modify her damage type to one of the more advanced types, she's left in the dust.
• Splatoon: This is the running theme of the Grizzco weapons, only available in the PvE Salmon Run mode on rare occasions, which have been illegally modified by Mr. Grizz to wipe out Salmonids as quickly as possible. They're Purposefully Overpowered in a few regards (usually DPS), but that usually comes with major drawbacks ranging from rapid ink consumption to the removal of major features of that weapon's class. For more specific examples:
  • The Grizzco Brella is basically a full-auto shotgun that can do stellar AOE damage and can easily paint most of the map in the 10 seconds between waves... but this is possible because Mr. Grizz removed the canopy shield that's the reason the class is called Brellas.
  • The Grizzco Charger doesn't have a charge time like other weapons in its class; just tap the trigger to snipe Salmonids from halfway across the map. However, the ink consumption per shot is pointedly not changed. Have fun going from a full tank to needing to reload in less than a second, even though whatever you were aiming at is almost certainly not a problem anymore.
  • The Grizzco Slosher is the Mighty Glacier of the class, dealing eye-watering, armor-piercing damage... but each projectile uses an entire quarter of your ink tank and can easily be outwalked. Better hope that Boss Salmonid doesn't reposition itself.
  • The Grizzco Splatana deals nightmarish damage up close and its charged slash is a One-Hit Kill on anything that's not a Mothership, Gusher Goldie, or a King Salmonid (none of which show up in normal waves). The downside: you don't have the Sword Beam projectiles that are your main option for painting surfaces and attacking anything not within spitting distance.
  • The Grizzco Dualies have 9 exploding dodge rolls, turning you into a cephalopod wrecking ball... but the guns themselves have pitiable range that only gets better if you stay in combined fire mode after a dodge roll.
  • Splatoon 3 Side Order has this come up with certain color chips, particularly the Lucky and Drone chips. Sure, loading up on them can result in the player able to clear floors without attacking, as the Pearl Drone spams attacks while enemies drop items left and right... but hit a Danger floor where item drops are cut off, the Pearl Drone isn't allowed in, or items drops are cut off and the Pearl Drone isn't allowed in, and you'll have to clear the floor with what's basically a default build and whatever hacks you have. Depending on the floor and what hacks are active, this can go beyond crippling and become a run-ender.

Tower Defense

• The Battle Cats:
  • Cats that can perform a Critical Hit. Against Metal enemies, their crits can pierce the enemy’s défenses and deal heavy damage. Against literally anything else, though, their damage tends to be well below-average. The only units without this tend to have critical hits as more of a secondary feature than their main focus, such as Island Cat, Tesalan Pasalan, and Kyosaka Nanaho.
  • Ubers with the “target only” ability, like Takeda Shingen or Warlock and Pierre. They have very high stats, but can only attack enemies that have the types they target.
• Plants vs. Zombies 2: It's About Time:
  • Grave Buster, Lily Pad/Tangle Kelp and Hot Potato are only useful in the worlds where there are graves, water, and frost respectively. In fact, Lily Pad, Tangle Kelp and Hot Potato can't be taken out of their respective worlds.
  • Lightning Reed exists to counter Chicken Zombies, and that's it. While it can attack multiple enemies through Chain Lightning. Its damage is so pitifully weak it won't be able to kill anything tougher than basic zombies. It can't even properly counter the Ice Weasels, which are basically tougher version of the Chickens.
• Happens to the enemies in the Tower Defense game Tower Madness. The towers you build (save the fully upgraded Missile Launcher) do either energy, explosive, or electrical damage. Powered Armor aliens come in three varieties- Light, Heavy and Bionic, each of which is resistant to one type of damage, but weak against the other two (light resists energy, heavy resists explosives, and bionic resists electricity). If you place two turrets of different damage types, they're pretty much sunk.

Turn-Based Strategy

• Advance Wars:
  • Units in this series can usually only (effectively) attack a few types of other units. For example, infantry can attack vehicles, copters and other infantry to varying degrees of effectiveness with their firearms, but cannot even engage ships or planes. Some units have a primary and secondary weapon, however, which they use against different opponents. The most notorious example is the Missile unit, a devastating anti-air unit that is incapable of firing on anything that doesn't fly. It's also rather weak in the armor department. Woe to the player that accidentally deploys this one on a map without air units.
  • The Piperunners from Dual Strike have very high range and damage output and can do what no other unit can and move along pipes, but can only move on pipes. As few maps have enough pipes to move very far and pipe seams can be destroyed, these units typically can't be used with any real level of effectiveness.
  • The Megatank. It hits hard enough to One-Hit KO pretty much any unit it can target, but that is all it's good for. It's slower than molasses in January with only 4 move, it's blind as a bat in Fog of War with only 1 vision, your grandmother could carry more ammunition than its 3 rounds, it's not going far with only 50 fuel, and you could mortgage a house for cheaper than one of these units. Barring very unique circumstances you're never getting this thing into range to attack without a ton of support, and it's so easily taken down with indirect units or bombers that it's not good for defense either. Those rare times it hits, though, it hits harder than a nuke.
  • Days of Ruin, features a new unit called the seaplane which totally averts this trope and can attack every single unit with its main weapon. The downside? It has practically no fuel or ammo and so has to be restocked constantly by units with little or no attack capabilities. And it can only be produced by the expensive Carrier unit, which has little purpose beyond that and the ability to supply and repair up to two aircraft units at once.
    • It also features the Anti-Tank, an expensive form of artillery with the ability to counterattack. Unlike other ranged units, it cannot attack sea units and is less effective than the basic artillery against anything but tanks, especially considering the price. It also has the Flare unit, which shoots Flares to light areas in Fog of War and doesn't suffer from as many stiff penalties the recon does in forest terrain.
  • Some COs. Max, for instance, has powerful melee units but incredibly weak ranged units. His opposite Grit is generally considered to be a Game-Breaker. Other COs suffer from specialization in units or circumstances not present on all maps at the cost of unit types that are present on nearly every map (for example, Sonja has attack penalties on all units but increased vision range in Fog of War, which isn't present on every map).
• Battle for Wesnoth gives us the Dark Adept, a low-level "black" magic-user with a couple of accurate and fairly powerful magical ranged attacks that has no melee capability whatsoever and is thus a helpless target for anything that attacks it with melee weapons, which basically means "any enemy unit that's not a Dark Adept itself". (If it manages to live to become a Dark Sorcerer, though, it gains a moderately effective staff attack.) On the other end of the spectrum, you can find the Dwarvish Ulfserker (a melee-only unit that when engaged in close combat always fights until either it or its opponent is dead) and the Horseman (also melee-only with its only attack being a charge for double damage both inflicted and received), as well as their level 2 Dwarvish Berserker and Lancer counterparts that do exactly the same, only with more powerful attacks and extra hit points.
• Harebrained Schemes' Battletech video game features several canonical 'mechs who fall under this heading (see the tabletop games section). It has two especially notable examples who are generally considered Joke Characters because of this, as even using the mech lab will rarely make these chassis produce much of use:
  • The UM-R60 Urbanmech is a light 'mech with a comically undersized engine that makes it the slowest 'mech in the game bar none, and belonging to the stereotypically Fragile Speedster class of 'mechs. In return for this it mounts weaponry and armour that would look okayish on a medium 'mech, but none of those weapons are designed for long-range, meaning that if the Urbie can't somehow sneak up on its opponent (like, say, in an urban environment with building cover) it can and will be outrun by practically anything it's capable of tussling with in the first place.
  • The CDA-2A Cicada is the urbie's opposite, a medium 'mech that trades in almost all its armour and weaponry for a giant engine. The Cicada is able to outrun all but the lightest 'mechs in the game, but because it has so little space for anything else it tends to be outgunned by those very same 'mechs who can use smaller engines to move their lighter frames and thus stuff in more weapons and armour.
• It's up to you if you want to do this in Endless Space since you get to design all your ships. However, while every pirate ship you encounter starts with just kinetic weaponry, if you overspecialized to deal with that, your ships will be cut apart when the pirates start mounting armor defenses, lasers, and missiles.
• Civilization:
  • Submarines are very strong against other ships, but without giving them one-use missiles, they cannot attack land targets.
  • A number of civs have abilities that are basically designed to exploit specific tricks and crumble without them. The classic example is a civilization with strong ship units, which can dominate maps with lots of islands but are limited to raiding trade routes on Pangaea-style maps. This is allayed a bit by giving most civs a "start bias" — a naval-focused civ will always start on the coast, for instance. Venice in V is the king of this, though; it cannot found or annex other cities, but it can buy city-states as Puppet States to steal the allies of other civs, can purchase in puppets to make them difficult to conquer, and receives twice as many trade routes, allowing it to be rolling in gold and bribe the allegiance of the puppets they haven't bought. This makes it the king of diplomatic victories, which are achieved by having as many city-state allies as possible, but near-useless at anything else (inability to annex means conquering is not as profitable, only being able to build in the capitol means the Wonders and Archaeologists needed for a cultural win aren't practical, and the reduced science yield of puppets makes scientific victories difficult), on top of being incredibly vulnerable to conquest themselves. This also makes Venice into the game's most notorious Skill Gate Character; the fairly passive AI is likely to not consider Venice a threat until it snowballs out of control, while human players will recognize its potential and ruin its chances by raiding its caravans, declaring embargos against it, or just conquering the city itself.
  • The fanmade Tojo's Imperial Japan faction downplays this issue. Unlike most other naval-focused factions that usually have some aspect that's still useful on land, both Tojo's Unique Ability and the stronger of his Unique Units require access to water to be used. While you're not completely helpless on a landlocked map, you still lack a major edge, so you'd better choose a different faction. The specialisation comes in on watery maps. His Unique Ability gives Science for each Coast or Ocean tile acquired, with double that in conquered cities, meaning it's possible to gain even late-game techs in less than 10 turns by conquering enemy coastal cities. It also gives a 50% bonus to producing naval units in conquered cities, meaning quickly building massive fleets is possible. And that Unique Unit that needs water, the Yamato-class battleship, has a bonus against cities that synergises perfectly with this need to conquer cities for Science, while its ability to carry fighters synergises with the other Unique Unit, the Zero, to provide great protection against air attack.
• Fire Emblem: In most games, archers are helpless in melee, and entire classes (cleric, troubadour, etc.) have no combat skills whatsoever, leaving them doomed if the enemy catches them off-guard. The only game to mitigate this for archers was Radiant Dawn, which introduced Crossbows. This gave archers some viability in melee combat.
  • As the series has gone on, this has been downplayed by either removing the specialization ^note Fire Emblem: Three Houses notably lets anyone with a bow eventually have a melee-counter as a skill, meaning they get all the advantages of ranged weaponry with the only cost being they can only initiate combat on their terms at range. Additionally, as magic is learned through teaching, you can make any mage both a healer and an offensive spellcaster, though notably some characters favor one over the other. or by leaning further into it. ^note  Fire Emblem Fates was notable in that mages took a large hit in terms of ability while archers were given a massive buff in terms of crit-fishing, overall damage, and speed, meaning most archers just did such ludicrous damage that their gimmick did little to make them unappealing to use. Additionally, armor units in the later games have all just gotten better at tanking damage as the 'ceiling' for statistical totals has risen, putting them firmly in this camp. Either way, Fire Emblem has been working hard to balance the field somewhat.
• Galactic Civilizations: This happens a lot in 2. Typically, when computer-controlled, a race focuses on one type of weapons and armour. Terrans, for example, tend to use armour (good vs. mass drivers — basically huge space guns) and lasers (which are blocked by shields), while Drengin tend to focus on mass driver cannons and armour plating. The player, on the other hand, has the option of focusing on areas the closest races are weak against. This then leads to a second example of this trope where your fleet of Terran-killing shielded missile cruisers runs into a squadron from another race with missile defences and heavy-duty mass driver guns who proceed to eat them alive. So you have to go research armour and mass drivers to exploit their weaknesses and hope that you don't run into a third race who like armour and missiles. It's also ludicrously easy to capitalize on a potential enemy's specialization. In some cases, a race will develop a particular weapon (say, mass drivers), and also the defense against that weapon (armor). You can then trade money for their own defense research, and send your now-fully protected ships against his helpless vessels. On higher difficulty levels, you can do this exactly once, and then the AI will counter-research and murder you.
• In Great Little War Game, the bazooka deals less damage to infantry than the grunt trooper (rifleman) does. The behemoth, an enormous tank, will deal less damage to infantry than the bazooka does. Finally, the MLRS, an artillery truck, will also deal little damage to infantry.
• Gundam:
  • Gihren's Greed: The biggest flaw of most of Zeon's Mobile Suits and Mobile Armours is that they are designed for a particular niche and barely functional outside of it. They normally begin the game with the Zaku II C-type, which can then be further refined into the F-type and the J-type. The F-type is geared for space combat but barely functional on Earth, while the J-type is designed for terrestrial combat but can't even be deployed in space. Most of their later machines still have this issue, with the Doms being highly capable machines on Earth and Rick Doms in space, but they cannot be used outside of their particular environments. In comparison, the basic GM utilised by the Earth Federation can fight both on Earth and in space without any modification, meaning that it's fully possible for GMs to take a base on Earth and then immediately be transported into space to join a battle in orbit. In comparison, a force of Doms that takes a base on Earth would first have to be converted into Rick Doms (thus eating up valuable money and resources) before they can join a battle in space.
  • SD Gundam G Generation does this with the RX-79 [G] Ez-8 Gundam Ez8. In Gather Beat and its Updated Re-release Advance, the Ez-8 starts out as a normal ground-only unit. When Shiro gets his ass kicked by Ghinias Sahalin and the Aspalas III, Doctor J upgrades it to be space capable, the Ez-8 Kai. J later creates two specialty packs for the Ez-8 Kai, the Heavy Armed Custom and the High Mobility Custom. The Heavy Armed Custom gives him a powerful Salamis-class beam cannon, but it draws too much power and he's stuck with a normal 100mm machinegun as a basic range weapon. The High Mobility Custom slaps on a lot of thrusters but is so powerful speed wise that only aces can control it. Even more, it uses so much power that the Mobile Suit can only use a modified beam spray gun.
• Nectaris has the Atlas, a very powerful and long-range anti-ground artillery cannon...that cannot move. Once it's unloaded from a Mule or other transporter, it isn't going anywhere. It is very good at picking off advancing enemies, but not if they get too close because it also cannot attack directly in front of it. The DOS version of the game also has the Thunder, which is the anti-air equivalent.
• In most Nippon Ichi games, thief units balance their powerful thieving skills with being absolutely awful at most other things, such as fighting.
• Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri:
  • Almost all air units can't capture bases. You've got to use ground units (for bases on the ground) or sea units (for bases in the sea) for that.
  • The Believers have only one way to win the game without a huge difference in player skill. Expand as quickly as possible and attack anyone nearby. The only way for them to win is to gain a huge advantage early game through expansion, so they can field enough of their undoubtedly weaker, poorly equipped forces to overwhelm the other factions. With a player skill difference, it is possible for the Believers to win in other ways, but they will not perform as well as other factions with any other strategy. This strategy is problematic because several factions can very easily stop the Believers in their tracks by exploiting their weaknesses. In the expansion, assuming equal player skill, it is effectively impossible for the Believers to go toe to toe with the Nautilus Pirates due to the fact Pirates will have centuries to build up their naval forces before the Believers could even hope to mount an attack capable of taking an unguarded sea base.
• In the Space Empires games the enemy tends to focus on just one type of weapon.
  • Ironically, this is the result of the most flexible part of the programming in an AI's "generate a ship design" module — it's capable of taking advantage of both optionally available weapon techs and unusual hull classes, but that complexity makes it hard to then do more than going down a list of weapon types and use the first available one. In IV it's certainly possible to write AI which forces mixtures of weapons into a ship (it'll be less certain the AI will actually design and build any of that template) or to create multiple ship class templates using different weapon types and force building a mixture of them (though the AI can't distinguish among them when creating fleets and using them). In V it's theoretically possible to break all of these limits but it might be simpler to just write a new game than do the necessary level of modding.
• Sunrider:
  • The Phoenix is Fragile Speedster and Glass Cannon that excels at taking out enemy Ryders, but its swords are completely worthless against capital ships and its submachineguns won’t do much good against a capital ship’s armoured hull if it hasn’t been softened up first.
  • On the villainous side of things, the Havoc is a slow and heavily-armoured Ryder that relies on its payload of missiles and antimatter rockets. These weapons do quite a bit of damage, provided they don’t get shot down by enemy flak on the way to their target. More importantly, the Havoc can only carry a finite supply of them into battle; once they run out, it’s forced to rely on its Gatling gun and chainsaw, which both have limited range and aren’t very effective against armoured targets.
• Super Robot Wars:
  • Getter 3 and Getter Poseidon are pretty much built for underwater battles because they don't suffer from movement limitation. The main problem is the fact that most of the battles take place in Air, Ground or Space which the other forms excel in. Add to the fact that most of its attacks can't hit Airborne units (including the Daisetsuzan Oroshi and it becomes fairly apparent why its the least useful despite the damage output). To compensate for this, Musashi and Benkei gain some of the more useful Seishins amongst their teammates to use in their own Getter forms.
  • This frequently happened to the Getter Liger and Getter Two as well, for its usual inability to attack flying units. In fact, a sizable amount of players said that Getter-1 is the form that you will use 99 % of the time, and you should give it movement adapters anyway.
• In Sword of the Stars there are ways to counter, weaken and negate pretty much every weapon type. Being overreliant on one weapon type often leads to this as the enemy researches and equips the appropriate counters.
  • Drone carriers can fall into this. While dreadnought versions usually have enough mounted weaponry to act as The Battlestar, those below the wall of battle have the majority of their firepower on their drones and become much less useful once PD works its way through said parasite craft.
  • Interceptor missiles are even better than phasers against big PD targets like guided torpedoes and drones but are completely unable to maneuver against other missiles. This was eventually subverted in the sequel, though their low rate of fire still makes them less than optimal.
  • Shield Breakers are excellent at killing shields but don't do anything against the ship proper.
  • Polarized plasma weapons are an evolution of other plasma weapons you can research, whereby plasma bolts are shaped into thin discs for firing. They slice right through thick armor, but they're terribly weak against shielded targets, making more conventional weaponry the better option.
  • Dreadnoughts fitted with Impactors (enormous railguns) can obliterate other capital ships, often more quickly than with equivalent energy weapons, especially since they tend to push enemy ships away to beyond energy range. However good luck hitting smaller ships since Impactors often miss anything smaller and faster than a similar-sized ship as your own.
  • Likewise, the mighty siege driver can be fitted to a dreadnought and fires literal asteroids for planetary bombardment. The unfortunate side effect is that it tends to miss anything smaller than a planet. Also, it's usually unnecessary to bring one to a planetary bombardment when a fleet of well-rounded ships can do the job equally well. Its only use would be strategic (i.e. to bombard a planet from far away and then jump away to avoid the defenders).
  • Deflectors and disruptors generate a forward-facing shield that is utterly impenetrable to kinetic and energy weapons, respectively (torpedoes happen to fall into both categories). Unlike complete shields, they can't be brought down with sufficient firepower. This, effectively, makes ships that are exclusively focused on kinetic or energy weaponry useless, although kinetic shots can still impart some momentum onto the target.
• In the Valkyria Chronicles series the Lancer is the most extreme example of this. They wear blast-proof suits that let them shrug off explosives and fire anti-tank Lances, and that's it, really. They're sitting ducks against infantry, their lances are too inaccurate to be effective against anything but big, stationary targets (curiously they inflict no splash damage either, unlike grenades or mortars), and they have very low movement meters; only Snipers are slower than they are. Bring one if you need a Tank or heavy emplacement destroyed, otherwise there's little point to using them.
• X-COM
  • It's possible to build Snipers this way in XCOM: Enemy Unknown. Making them extremely good at sniping means that they won't be good at anything else like moving, close-range combat, and so on. This type of build is also punished in Enemy Within, which introduces Seekers, stealthy alien robots that, once they start strangling a soldier like an isolated sniper, won't stop unless another soldier shoots it off; even if you take steps to counter their grabs, they'll still go for flanking shots.
  • XCOM 2 has the new faction soldiers specifically designed to evoke this, focusing the abilities of your more generalized soldiers to a razor tip.
    • Reapers are brilliant scouts that can move in concealment far better than they can move in the open. They specialize in ambush tactics, with explosives and abilities that let them do bonus damage or hide after specific actions. They can shoot without being detected as well. However, their weapons are underpowered and have small magazines, all but forcing them to stay in the shadows or risk death. Their one truly devastating skill, Banish, allows them to fire until a target is killed or their run out of ammunition, but this is hampered by their small magazine size and damage output, and guarantees they'll be detected. They combine the sneaky benefits of the Stealth-focused Ranger class with the range and potential damage output of a Sniper-focused Sharpshooter, but they end up very vulnerable when out of concealment and have no close combat abilities whatsoever.
    • Skirmishers are all about attacking. They can attack twice per turn naturally (if they don't move), and all of their abilities are either a form of attack or a movement ability to better position them for an attack. Their Ripjack is as strong as a Ranger's sword, and they get two abilities that either pull them to an enemy to attack, or pull an enemy to them to attack. Additionally, a lot of their attack abilities are free actions, allowing Skirmishers to put out a lot of damage. However, their Bullpup Rifle has mediocre damage^note Better than a Reaper's rifle, but less powerful than an equivalent XCOM rifle and a small magazine size, meaning their endless attacks are hampered by having to stop and reload constantly, and while they have excellent attack abilities, that's all they have: with the exception of the Whiplash attack, they have no crowd control abilities and their multi-enemy damage is restricted to grenades. Finally, their high mobility encourages flanking tactics, but that has a tendency to put them in harm's way, where they have nothing that helps them survive more effectively. They combine the high-mobility and flanking of the shotgun-armed Ranger with the strong single-target damage of the Sharpshooter, but their range is limited and they're vulnerable frequently due to their ammunition concerns.
    • Templars are the best melee combatants bar none, and every ability they get is designed to make them even more ferocious in melee combat. Their Shard Gauntlets are more powerful than the equivalent Ranger sword, and every kill they make gives them Focus, which increases their melee damage even further while also fueling their abilities. Unlike the Ranger's blade attack or the Skirmisher's Ripjack, when a Templar attacks in melee, they get a free movement point to scramble back to cover, preventing them from being left vulnerable by striking an enemy in the open. Outside of melee combat, however, the Templar is horrifically underpowered: their Autopistol is as weak as a Sharpshooter's basic sidearm, has terrible range and accuracy, and cannot accept modifications; their ranged options are limited to the aforementioned Autopistol and a few Focus-powered psi abilities, which require that the Templar kill a target in melee^note An upgrade allows them to collect Focus from any killed target, but requires Sergeant rank to unlock. A Templar on the move and able to kill targets is a force to be reckoned with, potentially capable of sweeping an entire enemy squad without taking any damage, but a Templar that can't close to strike their targets or that lacks the power to finish them off is a severely underpowered liability. They combine the high-risk, high-reward power of Ranger melee with the utility of the Psi Soldier, but their effective range is point-blank, and if they can't deal enough damage, you're better off taking anyone else.

Visual Novels

• In the third case of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Trials and Tribulations, the witness Victor Kudo is really good at kimono embroidery... and not much else, which is a problem as he either lives in a time (Japanese version) or place (English version) where kimono embroidery just isn't in high demand.
• Galaxy Angel: From the second game onwards, applies to both Chitose and her Emblem Frame, Sharp Shooter. Chitose is extremely intelligent and skilled, but also too by-the-book and cannot adapt to shifting circumstances too well. The Sharp Shooter itself is a sniper unit, so most of its weaponry are fixed, forward-firing ordinances with the exception of her high-speed homing lasers. Also, Sharp Shooter's special move, Fatal Arrow, is very damaging, but tricky to use due to range limitation (she needs to gain distance to use it), and being stationary makes her very vulnerable to flanking units unless she's covered by other units or is near Elsior/Vanilla's Harvester. There's a reason why her introductory combat mission is almost impossible to execute without casualties, combined with the fact that Tact is commanding a common cruiser instead of Elsior.

Other

• In various competitive games, high-level players will sometimes lose to complete noobs simply because they're used to only ever going up against other high-level players, and high-level players tend to follow the metagame religiously, only ever using top-tier characters and the most effective strategies. Thus, the high-level players can easily predict what other high-level players are about to do and counter it with a reasonable degree of accuracy, but have no idea what a random guy with 5 hours total playtime and a mid-tier character is about to do because he's not playing the game the exact same way as everybody else, resulting in the noob winning through unintentional use of Confusion Fu.
• In some MMORPGs with a PvP system, there would be at least one player character or class highly specialized on fighting other players, but ends up terrible on more cooperative aspect of the games. Support Party Member character classes also suffer from this trope as they are designed to rely and support other players and almost useless by their own.