Magikarp Power / Video Games

Video games with their own pages:

• Arknights
• Final Fantasy
• Pokémon

Other examples:

Action Games

• Another Century's Episode 2, a mecha action game, gives players the Amon Duule "Stack", a red unit from Heavy Metal L-Gaim. In both the game and the series, the unit is technically a flawed and defective piece of junk, despite having a stupid powerful beam cannon that would make Wing Gundam cry. However, after some minor upgrades and using the unit for a little while, the player can upgrade it into its true form: the L-Gaim Mk. II, the most ridiculously powerful unit that the good guys get in the L-Gaim series, and a very good power unit in ACE 2.
• It's easy to mistake the Luna Lens in Boktai as exclusively being for flipping switches, as it has unlimited ammo but doesn't damage or stun enemies. Thing is, if you manage to get the lens up to Level 3 by killing enemies via stage hazards, it gains the ability to stun. Given the game's emphasis on stunning and sneaking by, it suddenly becomes the single most useful lens in your arsenal.
• Boktai 2: Solar Boy Django has the bare-handed punch which, in all likelihood you will use for the 14 second span between losing your gun and finding the Gradius sword and never use again. What a lot of people don't realise is that there is no recovery time for the attack; you can damage enemies as quickly as you can mash the B button. If you devote the time to level it up to 99 and raise Django's attack stat sufficiently, it becomes the single most devastating attack in your arsenal despite its low range and non-elemental damage.
• Brotato: The King gets noticeable stat penalties for every tier I weapon he has equipped, so early on, he has to choose between foregoing extra weapons or lowering his stats. However, in return, he gets big stat boosts for every tier IV weapon you have, so if he can make it to the late-game (or you just get really lucky with the shop early on), he becomes immensely powerful.

Action-Adventure Games

• Afterimage: Initially, the Sacred Seed accessory offers no stat adjustments despite its Flavor Text implying that it has some power inside it, and hints that carrying it brings you some luck. It "evolves" if you kill a lot of enemies when you have it equipped, which then makes it permanently grant five good stat boosts all-around.
• Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin:
  • The game starts you off with a gimped version of the legendary Vampire Killer whip, and it is the weakest whip in the game. However, if you defeat its "memory" (AKA Richter Belmont) in an Optional Boss battle, you unlock its true power and turn it into the most powerful whip in the game.
  • The game also features two gag sub-weapons: the pie and paper airplane. They're functionally useless until you level them up to max level, when they suddenly become some of the most powerful subweapons in the game. Interestingly, these are particularly useful in unlocking the full potential of the Vampire Killer, since they're two of the very few weapons Jonathan can use that deal dark damage, which the whip's memory is weak to.
• Castlevania: Symphony of the Night:
  • The Muramasa. A middling two-handed weapon whose obvious benefit is that it provides an automatic heal whenever an enemy bleeds on Alucard. Less obviously, the sword actually grows in power over time as it absorbs blood... the only limit to its power is the calculation algorithm of the game. However, in the time of actual gameplay, it's far easier to acquire a number of other game breaking weapons before leveling Muramasa to the point of it being of any real value. Players who do manage to power up Muramasa tend to just take advantage of a turbo controller in a specific location while leaving the game running over night.
  • The Sword Familiar. At first his method of attack is to slowly lock onto an enemy, slowly fly to whatever spot they were at (even if they moved), wait, and lazily spin in a circle that does weak contact damage. However level him up to 50 and he becomes an equippable weapon identical to the Alucard Sword but with an attack equal to his current level, and level him up to 70 and he glows blue and starts swiftly flying all over the place slashing hoards of enemies that only get faster and stronger as his level climbs. Get him to level 99 and you can pick between the strongest nominal sword in the game or a ridiculously powerful ally.
  • The Ghost Familiar attacks by clinging to an enemy and repeatedly delivering weak damage, and he'll get slightly more aggressive with each level. This isn't too useful until he reaches level 70 and suddenly each hit restores 8 HP to Alucard. At level 99 this adds up to about 8 free HP per second during boss fights and when battling strong enemies.
• Cave Story:
  • Refuse to trade away your wimpy initial weapon until the near-end of the game, and you'll be able to upgrade it to the almighty Spur. This is partially a reward for honesty, since said wimpy initial weapon technically doesn't belong to you, and you get the upgrade by returning it to its rightful owner.
  • The Bubbline/Bubbler is another example. At level 1, it's similar to the above-mentioned wimpy initial weapon, but slightly less useful. At Level 2, it makes a decent substitute for the Machine Gun — a weapon you can't get if you're going for the Spur. At level 3, it fires a cloud of bubbles as long as you hold down the fire button, which start popping rapidly and firing lightning bolts once you've built up enough... and once you release the fire button, they all pop and fire their lightning bolts at once. This is roughly as potent and deadly as it sounds.
  • The Nemesis is actually an inversion; it starts off as possibly the strongest weapon in the game, but as it levels up, it gets progressively weaker to the point that at the maximum level, it shoots rubber ducks. Did we mention this thing levels up insanely fast?
• In The Godfather: The Game, the shotgun is a bit like this. With a two-shot clip size and 12 rounds to spare, 24 at the second level, it's outclassed even in assault situations by the Magnum with six rounds per clip and 36 rounds (60 at level 2) to spare without sacrificing much power at all. Once you throw $450,000 at the right black market merchant to upgrade it to the level 3 "Street Sweeper", it goes up to ten rounds a clip and 100 rounds to spare with an automatic action, compared to the Magnum's level 3 "Python" with 8-80 and semiauto. Unless you are feeling the need to be stylish or are somehow running low, the shotgun is now the way to go.
• In Grand Theft Auto V, the heists let you select crew members for your Caper Crew, and as a general rule, the cheaper ones are usually the least competent. (The exception is the getaway driver Taliana Martinez, who's both the best getaway driver you can hire and the cheapest, but she's only available after completing a random event.) However, while the cheap gunmen will only ever cause liabilities, the hacker Rickie Lukens and the driver Karim Denz will grow into some of the most proficient crew members in the game if you let them get experience on the early heists, all while still charging a fraction of what the more expensive crew members will.
• Nobody Saves the World: The Egg is the only form that doesn't improve by fighting, meaning the player has little incentive to use it, and its basic attack causes it to take damage if it hits a wall. Getting it to Grade S is one of the necessary steps to unlock the Dragon, the most powerful of Nobody's forms.
• Several weapons in Onimusha: Dawn of Dreams are like this, probably the most notable of which is the Onimaru, a katana for Jubei. It can be dropped (albeit rarely) by one of the earliest types of mooks that she faces, but it may not seem like a worthwhile weapon at the time: it has an attack power that is lower than the other weapons you can get for her at that point, and for a long time leveling it up barely seems to improve it. Once it reaches the last few levels of the upgrades available for it, it gains Attack +100, Normal Attacks +40% (basic physical combos get a major boost to attack power), and Generate Attack Wave (which shoots energy waves with every attack made with the weapon, thus increasing its range). Jubei will then be able to shred through nearly everything you come across (especially when combined with her Time Stands Still special ability, which lets her freeze all opponents and then hit them with endless combinations), and it continues to be useful well into the second disc.
• ZanZarah: The Hidden Portal: All fairies with multiple evolution stages start off rather weak, but evolve into much more powerful forms at certain levels.

Card Battle Games

• In Yu-Gi-Oh! Reshef of Destruction, the Winged Dragon of Ra has 0 ATK and DEF when you first receive it. It takes a plot-relevant battle to make it useful. Using an in-game cheat code allows Ra to transform into its strongest form, making it the easiest summonable God Card.

Card Games

• Blue heroes in Artifact tend to have weaker raw stats, but make up for it by having powerful spell cards. Since your mana pool grows by one point per turn, blue decks become more powerful in the late game, when you have the capacity to use your most powerful spells.
• In The Elder Scrolls: Legends some cards can get more powerful depending on circumstances. The Elsweyr Lookout doubles whatever stats she has every time she hits the opposite player.
• Several cards in Eternal Card Game start out weak, but power up through various means. The Ultimate mechanic as a whole is usually this, letting you buff a unit once for a large amount of power.
  • The Stranger archetype gets exponentially more powerful the more Strangers you have, starting out unimpressive, but able of taking over entire games quickly if you can get out a lot of them.
• Many cards in Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft are weak when played but can quickly grow to insane stats. For example, the Questing Adventurer gains 1 attack and 1 HP every time the player plays a card, while the Frothing Berserker gains 1 attack when any minion takes any damage. With a good deck and good luck, they can win the match on the next turn — if they manage to survive past their first turn.
• In Inscryption, a game in which you collect cards to fight with, there's a few cards that engage in this trope.
  • Monsters with the Fledgling sigil start out weak, but grow into stronger monsters if they survive a turn on the board. The biggest example is probably the Strange Larva, a weak monster with no attack and a Fledgling sigil that turns into the almost-as-weak Strange Pupa. However, the Pupa has Fledgling as well, and if you manage to keep that alive for another round, it turns into Mothman, a powerful monster with the Airborne sigil and a whopping seven attack.
  • The Geck card has a meager one point in health and attack and no sigils. It's also the only card without a blood cost so it is adaptable to just about any situation. Put either Fecundity or Undying on it and you have a perpetual sacrifice machine with no drawbacks whatsoever.
  • The Ouroboros card starts as an unassuming 1/1 card. However, it gains 1 point to attack and health every time it dies. This increase is permanent across the whole game, so continually killing it will eventually make it a very powerful card.
  • The Squirrel Totem can be used to give your Squirrels (0 cost, 0 attack, 1 health cards that you have the option of drawing for certain each turn) a single sigil. While many sigils are effectively useless, a few can make the squirrels exceptionally powerful. Fecundity sticks out, meaning that whenever you play a squirrel, another squirrel is added to your hand, making it trivially easy to cram your deck with 2 and 3 blood creatures.
• Legends of Runeterra features several examples of weak cards that can be buffed to greater heights than their initial Power/Health, but the best example is in the form of the Poros, a species of Ridiculously Cute Critter, most of which cost 1 Mana, have 1 Power and 1 Health, and a single Keyword. The strongest Poro is a Mighty Poro, with a more respectable 3/3/3 and Overwhelm stat line. The Poro archetype then comes with the support card Poro Snax, which grants Poro cards everywhere +1/+1, including ones that are generated by other cards, while still retaining their low Mana cost. Additionally, a Leveled-up Braum can generate a free Mighty Poro every time he survives damage. With a little work, Poros can quickly overwhelm your opponent.
• Yu-Gi-Oh!:
  • Longtime players may remember Maha Vailo, a Level 4 monster with mediocre stats (1550 ATK/1400 DEF). On its own, it was useless, but its special ability allows it to gain an extra 500 ATK for every equip card given to it. A simple Malevolent Nuzzler or Horn of the Unicorn (both of which provide a 700 ATK boost) now boost Maha's ATK by 1200, and the fun doesn't stop there. With the right equips, it could have an ATK over 4000, and easily be strong enough to take out more than half the opponent's life points in a single shot. Bear in mind that this is a game where most high-end monsters have ATK power in the range of 2500-3000. The strongest it can get? Five Monsters out including itself (easy using Scapegoat), three United We Stand, two Mage Power, and Luminous Spark. That would give it 22550 ATK - for comparison, Five-Headed Dragon, the physically strongest Monster out there, has 5000, and starting Life Points is 8000.
  • It now has a Spiritual Successor in Morphtronic Videon (1000 ATK/1000 DEF), which gets 800 per equip card when in attack position. Using the above cards, it can get 23500 ATK.
  • Armed Protector Dragon also gains 500 ATK for each equip card on it and prevent equip cards from being destroyed.
  • For a similar effect that lets you use cards other than equip cards to power it up, and also includes your opponent's cards, you can use Jester Lord, which gains 1000 ATK for every spell and trap card on the field, and it starts off with 0 ATK, making it potentially even stronger than Maha Vailo or Morphtronic Videon. That is up to 10,000 ATK, plus any effects from equip cards if you used them. The downside is that there can't be any other monsters on the field.
  • Armed Samurai - Ben Kei gets an additional attack for every equip card you put on him. With, say, Mage Power and Axe of Despair, he'll hit three times for 2500, very nearly enough to completely oneshot a player. Yes, there have been decks built around disabling your opponents magic and traps for a turn, then summoning this guy with three equip cards and winning the game.
  • Mataza the Zapper - An effect monster card with a pretty dainty 1300 ATK and even worse DEF. The catch? He can attack TWICE during the battle phase. Helloooo equip cards! Plus, he is immune from having his control switched, so you can't use cards like Enemy Controller on him and works effortlessly into any warrior based deck.
  • Similarly, there's the combo with Chimeratech Overdragon, which is a Fusion Monster with ATK equal to 800 times the number of Fusion Materials. This can be combined with a card that lets you discard, from your deck, the Fusion Materials for one monster, and another card that lets you remove from your discard pile the Materials for a Fusion Monster and Summon it. Then you can use a card (Limiter Removal) and double Chimeratech's ATK, possibly leading to something along the lines of a 36000 ATK monster that can attack 20 monsters each turn.
  • Chimeratech Overdragon is not the only monster whose power is determined by how many cards are used to summon it. There also are Chimeratech Fortressdragon, Cyber Eltanin, Megarock Dragon, Evil Dragon Ananta, Worm Zero, Starduston, Kasha, Grandora The Dragon of Destruction, Prometheus King of the Shadows, and more.
  • The LV monsters generally start as something like a LV 3 1000 ATK monster, when conditions (Ranging from as simple as surviving until the next turn to directly attacking your opponents life points) are fulfilled they level up, bringing out the next level, until they reach their final forms, with 2700 ATK or more and powerful effects such as negating all Magic cards or destroying all your opponents monsters by discarding a single card. The highest levels were required to be summoned by effect (mostly) so you could often just skip the lowest stage by playing the middle one first.
  • Batteryman AA is a monster that for every Batteryman AA on the same side of the field, they all gain 1000 ATK each if they are all in ATK position and 1000 DEF each if they are all in DEF position. If you manage to three of them on the field, you can use the spell card Short Circuit to destroy all cards on the opponents side of the field, allowing you to attack the opponent directly and deal 9000 points of damage to kill them in one turn.
  • A number of cards gain ATK for number of cards either in the Graveyard or banished, meaning that long games can turn them into downright absurd powerhouses. The most notorious of this gang is likely Gren Maju Da Eiza, who earned a fair amount of infamy when the late-2010s metagame featured a lot of cards that banished as a cost en masse; a simple Pot of Desires could bring up Gren Maju from 0 ATK to 4000.
  • Another great one is The Calculator, which gains 300 ATK times the total levels of the monsters on your side of the field. On its own, it only has 600 ATK but with the support of a single high level monster, its attack shoots up to around 3000 or more, and with several high level monsters it can go over 10,000 and beyond. The Fortune Lady cards, Greed Quasar, and Montage Dragon also have ATKs determined by either their own or other monster's levels and can get very powerful.
  • There is a similar card to the above called The Calibrator, which gains 300 ATK times the total rank of all monsters on your opponent's side of the field. This is much more difficult to get up to the same ridiculous amount of ATK that The Calculator can have since only Xyz monsters have ranks and it is dependent on the opponent, so it compensates for this by starting with 1500 ATK on its own.
  • There is another one called The Accumulator, which gains 300 ATK times the Link Ratings of Link monsters on both sides of the field.
  • The Great Moth series is famous for being a bit too Magikarp. First, summon the pathetically weak Petit Moth (a caterpillar with Kuriboh-level stats), then equip it with Cocoon of Evolution, turning it into a somewhat poor Stone Wall. From then on, you need to keep the Moth protected as long as possible, so you can use it as Tribute once a certain number of turns have passed. Two turns nets you the completely useless Larvae Moth, four nets you the respectable (for its time) Great Moth, and six bestows upon you the Perfectly Ultimate Great Moth, the strongest Insect in the game by ATK. Unfortunately, the sheer difficulty of keeping any Monster alive for six turns, as well as the fact that PUGM is basically a highly vulnerable beatstick, means that the whole archetype was considered Awesome, but Impractical even when it was new, and time has not been kind to it.
    • However, this archetype may have become somewhat more useful again with the release of the cards Parasite Paranoid and Super Cocoon of Evolution, which can allow Perfectly Ultimate Great Moth to be summoned a whole lot faster, although they can also be used with other insect monsters.
  • A non-monster example was Broken Bamboo Sword. This Equip Spell did absolutely nothing to the monster it was equipped to, and a lot of players wondered what Konami was thinking. Then in the next two sets, they released Golden Bamboo Sword and Soul Absorbing Bamboo Sword, Spell Cards that required Broken Bamboo Sword to use. They don't make Broken Bamboo Sword a particularly great card, but it does make it Not Completely Useless.
  • There are a lot of cards in the game which exist to boost the powers of low-Level Normal Monsters. One example is Sword of The Soul Eater, which can only be equipped to a level 3 or lower Normal Monster and allows you to boost its ATK by 1000 for each other Normal Monster you sacrifice when you activate it.
  • Mokey Mokey is a very weak and harmless looking monster, but the card Mokey Mokey Smackdown raises its ATK to 3000, the same as a Blue-Eyes White Dragon.
  • Similar to Mokey Mokey, Skull Servant is a very weak monster, but has several cards that make it devastating when used with it. Skull Servant is one of the oldest cards in the game and its devastating support cards with not released until much later. The game company probably released these cards just to be funny. The main one is King of the Skull Servants, which starts with 0 ATK, but gains 1000 ATK for every Skull Servant, King of the Skull Servants, or any monster whose name is treated as Skull Servant in the grave yard.
  • Winged Kuriboh also is weak by itself but has several devastating cards to support it, including a very powerful One-Winged Angel form, Winged Kuriboh LV 10.
  • Dark Flare Knight is a Fusion Monster that actually has less ATK than one of the monsters needed to summon it, its only advantage in battle is a weak defensive ability. But when it is destroyed, it goes One-Winged Angel and becomes the devastating Mirage Knight.
  • Ma'at starts out with 0 ATK but by correctly guessing the top three cards on your deck (there are some cards that let you see what they are), her ATK can increase to up to 3000 and add the cards you correctly guessed to you hand.
  • Yubel has 0 ATK but strong defensive abilities. Its One-Winged Angel forms, known as Terror Incarnate and The Ultimate Nightmare also have 0 ATK but their abilities very powerful.
  • Satellite Cannon starts with 0 ATK but its ATK increases greatly with each turn and it can't be destroyed by low level monsters, although its ATK goes back to 0 each time it attacks.
  • Unformed Void can gain ATK equal to the total ATK of your opponents Xyz monsters, once per turn, up to three times.
  • Raging Flame Sprite, Mucus Yolk, and Drill Barnicle can attack the opponent directly and gain 1000 ATK each time they do damage. Mucus Yolk is even more this, since it has 0 ATK, meaning it needs an equip to do damage at all.
  • Aitsu and Soitsu are extremely weak but gain high ATK when united with their partners Koitsu and Doitsu respectively, who also are extremely weak on their own.
  • Possibly the most well known example are the Exodia cards. Individually the five main Exodia cards are weak but if you get all five in your hand, you automatically win. If you manage to get all five in your graveyard, you can summon Exodia Necros, which is extremely difficult to kill and gets stronger every turn. There also is another card called Exodius the Ultimate Forbidden Lord, which starts out with 0 ATK but rapidly gets stronger with every attack and can also cause you to automatically win if you use it with with the other Exodia cards. There also is another form called The Legendary Exodia Incarnate which is mechanically almost the opposite of Exodius. It gains 1000 ATK for every piece of Exodia already in the grave, but it returns one to your hand at the end of each turn so it gets weaker, but helps you get all the pieces in your hands, and if it is destroyed while you have pieces of Exodia in your hand, you can draw a card for each one.
  • During the Grand Prix arc in Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds anime, Team Taiyou uses as the absolute ace of their deck a card so common that everyone possesses at least 1 copy of it, but no one bothers using it, due to its extremely hard to fulfill summoning conditions, requiring you to protect a Level 1 Normal Monster for twenty turns. The twist? That common card is literally god-like and unstoppable in case the player is skilled enough to let it hit the field, said in-universe to rival the power of the Egyptian God Cards. This card's name: Zushin the Sleeping Giant. In the card game, Zushin is nearly impossible to beat once it is summoned. It is immune to card effects, and its ATK is always 1000 more than that of the monster it fights with. Pretty much the only relevant cards that can take it down are Kaijus and Utopia the Lightning... which, unfortunately, are run very commonly these days.
  • Thousand Eyes Idol has 0 ATK and DEF and no special ability. However, it can be fused with Relinquished or a fusion substitute monster, to create Thousand Eyes Restrict, which not only has Reliquished's ability to absorb enemy monsters, but also makes all the opponent's monsters unable to attack or change position.
  • The trap card Good Goblin Housekeeping works this way. It lets you draw one card, plus one more for each other copy of the card in the graveyard, then sends one card in your hand back to decks. So the first time you use it, it only lets you replace one card in your hand with another, but the second and third time you use it, it lets you draw more cards, increasing your hand advantage. It can get even crazier if you get three copies of it in the grave, then use a card like Mask of Darkness to get one of them back and use it again.
  • Diabound Kernel starts with only 1800 ATK but gains 600 more every time it attacks.
    • The anime version of Diabound may be one of the most broken monsters ever. Instead of growing stronger every turn, it had the ability to PERMANENTLY copy the abilities of any monster it defeated and grow more and more monstrous with every victory. And by permanently, I mean it doesn’t lose copied powers after the duel ends; Dark Bakura used it to defeat Kaiba's Blue-Eyes in a duel so that it would have Blue-Eyes's power when he later used it in the memory world.

Eastern RPG

• The Gold Sword in Azure Dreams is a pretty weak weapon that looks useless at first glance until you realize that it's the only sword that can't rust. Give it plenty of Red Sand and you have an extremely powerful weapon. The Trained Wand is similar but much harder to find.
• Aveyond: Lars has annoyingly low health points and very poor melee damage, but level him up all the way to 99 and he is the most powerful magic user in the game.
• Bloodborne has the "Bloodtinge" and "Arcane" stats—which yield very few major advantages in the short-term, but can eventually yield massive advantages to players who take the time to level them up in the long-term. To elaborate:
  • Bloodtinge increases the damage of the player's pistol weapon, which serves as their primary sidearm. For context: the pistol is predominately used to facilitate the "parry" mechanic, which allows the player to briefly stun enemies by shooting them at just the right moment, allowing them to inflict massive damage using a special "visceral" attack. Since the pistol is primarily used for stunning enemies rather than inflicting damage on them, many players don’t bother to level up its damage, assuming that it's not effective enough to be worth it. But as a few fan-made player guides have demonstrated: it actually is possible to develop a "Gunslinger" build that allows the player to easily tear through enemies at long-distance using nothing but the pistol. It just takes a really long time to get there, and it helps to use Bone Marrow Ash to further increase the damage of Quicksilver Bullets.
  • Arcane increases the damage of elemental attacks (which is useless unless the player's weapons are equipped with elemental Blood Gems) and increases "Discovery", causing enemies to drop loot more frequently. As such, it yields few immediate advantages in combat. However: late in the game, the player will also gain access to a handful of highly useful magic spells (which are equipped and used as Hunter Tools), which can only be used if the player has a certain level of Arcane. Among the most formidable is "A Call Beyond"—one of the most devastating attacks in the game, which can easily wipe out an entire roomful of enemies with the press of a button. It requires a whopping 40 Arcane to use, providing a sizeable reward to players who take the time to level up their Arcane.
• Breath of Fire:
  • Pecoros (Or Peco) from Breath of Fire III is introduced fairly late in the game, and at level 1 to boot, meaning that most players ignore him and focus on their A team, however this also means that he arrives at a time where most of the game's masters, who can modify stat growth at level up, are available, meaning that he can be heavily customized as he levels: since he also has one of the highest Counter-Attack rates in the game and an unique passive HP regeneration ability, he makes for an excellent tank.
  • Breath of Fire IV has a New Game Plus mode in which you can obtain a rusted sword. It's not a particularly impressive weapon, but if you kill 1000 enemies with it, it gets transformed into a significantly more powerful weapon, the Slayer.
• In Chrono Cross:
  • Self-proclaimed "hero" Pierre is far and away the weakest character in the game — until you get the Hero equipment for him, and then he becomes a powerful character with an instant-death attack.
  • Pip starts off as a cute little bundle of fluff and is as powerful as it sounds. You can evolve him using a not too complex, but tedious method into an Archangel, Archdevil, or Holy Beast form. They are also as powerful as they sound.
• Xiao from Dark Cloud is ridiculously weak when she joins your party. Her sole use seems to be getting past the occasional obstacle, and most players will only pull her out for those, ignoring her otherwise. And then comes a level where you have to play as her, and only her. If you then decide to level Xiao up a bit by taking her through some of the earlier stages, you will learn that (a) Xiao isn't actually that much weaker than Toan was at the same level; (b), her weapon is really fast; and (c), having a ranged attack is useful when facing monsters and (d), you can get her a slingshot that can steal items upon successful hit. There are also enemies that you do not want to get anywhere near melee range, and enemies that cause your weapons to degrade faster. Xiao is immune to all of these, given her weapon is ranged. Even her randomly-spawning weapons in the first dungeon are ridiculously powerful, sometimes even more powerful than Toan's if the RNG is on your side, becoming Disk One Nukes for an already Disk One Nuke.
• Dark Souls:
  • Series-wide, many weapons have lower base damage than other weapons of the same category but higher stat scaling, meaning that they get a bigger damage boost with every point you invest into the indicated stat, eventually surpassing the high base damage weapons.
  • The two most useless weapons in the first game are the Straight Sword Hilt (yes, a hilt — blade not included) and the Broken Straight Sword. However, if you somehow manage to smoke the right combination of drugs to think upgrading either of them all the way to +10 is a good idea, you can then infuse your Useless Piece of Crap +10 with the Soul of Sif to get the Greatsword of Artorias, which has the best Holy modifier in the game (allowing you to destroy otherwise endlessly reforming skeletons) and gets very good scaling from four different stats. Infusing the Soul of Sif with any other +10 sword results in a cursed version of the same blade which has narrower stat scaling (giving it a lower damage ceiling) but does pure physical damage, making it better at getting past most enemies' resistances (also, it can hit ghosts, which is situational but handy).
  • Deciding to go into a Faith build can end up like this. Faith primarily affects Miracles, a branch of magic that mostly consists of healing and utility spells, which while certainly useful, doesn't help in dealing damage at all. Only in the late game are offensive Miracles available... but they are a doozy, mostly consisting of chucking lightning bolts at your enemies, which does some hefty damage in addition to looking amazing. Faith builds also get access to Lightning Weapon, allowing them to temporarily buff their weapon with lightning damage, and Vow of Silence, which completely disables all magic for a short time. Equip a Holy/Blessed weapon (which scales with Faith rather than Strength or Dexterity), and a high-level cleric is a force to be reckoned with.
• Disgaea:
  • In Disgaea: Hour of Darkness, Angel Trainee Flonne only levels up well with a staff but learns no spells beyond her three special attacks, making her almost entirely useless... unless the gamer discovers that the apprentice system lets her learn other classes' spells, in which case she can effectively be turned into a ridiculously powerful tank-mage with an attack range that would make gunners weep.
  • Super-Robot Thursday, being a robot, cannot reincarnate and gain all the juicy stat bonuses it imparts; he makes up for this with 150% aptitude in most statistics and ability to steal stats, so give him some time and he can be a very powerful character. However, his lack of skills and inability to use a staff to enhance any spells he may learn from pupils relegates him to a distant second behind a properly levelled and transmigrated Divine Majin.
• Dragon Ball Z: Attack of the Saiyans has Gohan, who like his anime counterpart at that point in the series is a near useless runt, only gaining one point per stat whenever you level up, compared to the other characters who all have one or two stats that get extra points. That all changes once you get to level 35, where not only does Gohan start gaining two to three points extra on all his stats, but it makes him the single character in the game who can completely outdo Goku.
• Day of the Idea: The Soroi uniform for Tomoko, it's very crappy and you cannot appraise it unless you have all 8 parts of the set. All of the equipment is scattered around the world.
  • The Tanuki has rather crummy stats, and hides if injured and can easily be replaced by another pet, but when you find the Symbol of Courage, it becomes a more useful ally.
• Dragon Quest:
  • In Dragon Quest III, the most useless class, the Jester, can be upgraded to the most powerful, the Sage. For anyone else this requires a unique item that can only be used once. Plus, in the later versions, they learn Whistle, which summons monsters—potentially shaving hours off your Level Grinding. They also have an absurdly high Luck stat, which has a few helpful effects, including helping them save against magic attacks.
  • Dragon Quest V:
    • The game allows the player to recruit monsters as party members. One of the first monsters the player is likely to recruit is the basic, run-of-the-mill Slime, with a whooping 8 hit points and next to no attack power. By the time the Slime reaches level 20, it has more hit points than a similarly leveled main character, and is outclassed in attack by only the main character himself when properly equipped. Combined with learning an absolutely devastating spell at level 50, the slime is easily one of the best monsters in the game. And if you are lucky enough to be able to catch a Metal Slime, they are even better!
    • The three brides count as well. Each one starts out filling a niche party role, but at the highest levels, their stat growths in other areas catch up and they wind up being differentiated only by what equipment they can use. For example, Debora can use stronger weapons, like the Hela Hammer.
    • Of the three brides, Nera takes the most work to get off the ground, starting at a lower level and with no spells other than Midheal (albeit with some rather good starting equipment), however she does have quite the potent spell list that can make it worth the effort of training her.
    • Dwight Dwarf. When he joins the party, it's pretty late in the game and the rest of the party will likely be around level thirty compared to his level one. his stats are also pretty low. However, he has a crazy high agility growth and will likely cap his speed far earlier than every other character, and afterwards will have a sudden surge in stat gains for his other attributes, to the point where he'll end up a Lightning Bruiser at higher levels. To top this all off, he learns some very nice all purpose spells leveling up and is generally a very versatile teammate.
  • Dragon Quest VI: Ashlynn is extremely weak at first, especially if you make her first vocation a Mage, but with enough work and patience to make her a Sage (and possibly Armamentalist), she becomes the best spellcaster in the game, with devastating offensive spells and healing spells on par with (or possibly even exceeding) Nevan.
  • Dragon Quest VIII: Among the special monsters you can recruit, there are three Slimes, three Drackies, and in the 3DS version, three Moles, that are all very weak individually with no real special abilities, being nigh-useless for serious use in the Arena and for your field teams. However put them on the same team together with the rest of their respective trios, and they can fuse together into a super monster far stronger than any individual monster in the game, that can each potentially beat the arena's S rank with some luck.
  • Dragon Quest IX has Armamentalists. While at first they are fairly sub-par, in the deep post-game, they do come into their own as being the Jack-of-All-Trades. It helps that Fource spells are almost required to effectively handle the stronger post-game bosses, having a very noticeable effect... provided you look up what elemental effect to use.
  • Dragon Quest XI: Once you start getting other physical damage characters like Jade and Sylvando, Erik's usefulness begins to falter in battle as his damaging spells and skills aren't quite as strong, his stealing has questionable accuracy, and he doesn't have a lot of support built into his skills. His skill tree is also spread out in such a way that almost all of his most useful abilities are far apart from each other, meaning he'll only be able to fully utilize his potential late into the game. With that said, his most useful abilities are incredibly strong and synergize well with all three of his weapon options, allowing him to be one of the best damage dealers in the party after he unlocks them all
    • Serena starts out as the main healer in the party with not much usefulness beyond that. After Veronica's death is revealed in Part II Serena gains access to her sister's entire spell list and all her skills. Her magical might skyrockets and she gains a ton of skill points when she levels up. She becomes the most powerful and useful party member in the game. Unfortunately, this power-up is temporary after Veronica is revived in Part III.
  • Slimes from Dragon Quest Monsters fit the trope pretty handily. They're the classic DQ monster, you see a billion of them in every game, and they're pretty mediocre... but if you level them up high enough, they learn the MegaMagic spell. What does MegaMagic do, you ask? Why, it's one of the most powerful moves in the game, dumping every last one of your remaining magic points into a super-powerful magical explosion that absolutely nothing in the entire game, including those damned Metal Slimes and their upgraded versions, is immune to.
  • Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker 2: The X and XY (Stronger and Strongest) system. Through patience, hard work, patience, careful breeding, and still more patience, you can turn any of the Mascot Mooks into endgame monsters. These come with updated traits (such as moving twice per turn) and each gain an "ultimate" ability, translated as Uber in the original Joker — Uber Healing, Uber Breath, etc etc. This system was expanded in the Updated Re-release — you could use any monster in the game until the endgame, provided you continued working on empowering it to the X and XY forms.
  • Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime: The P-O-W Tablets. Individually, they're weak pieces of ammo, but stack them together in the right order and...
• Dragon's Dogma II:
  • The Mystic Spearhand is a hybrid melee/magic vocation that starts off fairly weak. While being a primarily melee fighter, it doesn't have much in defensive abilities from the offset: it can't block attacks like Fighters, nor gain power armor or counters like Warriors, nor a dodge like Thieves, so getting cornered and attacked will lead to the player eating a lot of damage. The only real defense they have is a magic attack that can stun smaller enemies and slow down larger enemies. As the Mystic Spearhand levels up, however, they gains lot more utility: an aerial attack that can be used as a counter, more ranged attacks, an improved stun attack with area of effect, a telekinesis spell to throw objects and smaller enemies at foes, and a magic barrier that grants the player and nearby pawns a few seconds of invincibility. All of these make the Mystic Spearhand a versatile Jack of All Trades when ranked up.
  • The Warfarer is a Jack of All Trades/Master of None vocation that can use all of the other vocations weapons and swap between them on the fly, but the abilities and buffs you can use as a Warfarer depends on what you have unlocked for those other vocations. With their base stats being reduced compared to other classes, this makes the Warfarer a vocation that requires a lot of time and dedication with other vocations in order to bring out its full potential.
• Drakengard 2:
  • The game has a sword called Iron Butterfly, that starts off very weak and stays weak until Lv. 4, where it becomes super-strong and has a powerful magic attack. However, to even level it up to 4 requires a LOT of patience due to how much experience it needs.
  • It also has a sword that deliberately inverts it. Beginning with very high attack power, and growing weaker with each level, its own level 4 being virtually useless.
  • The first game had Hymir's Finger, a totally-not-the-Dragonslayer broadsword as tall as you are, that hits like a mountain (and just as slow, too, so enemies will often hack you before you can swing). But when you get it up to level 4...
• In EarthBound (1994), Jeff starts out the offensively weakest of the four main characters, with Paula even having higher base Offense and Defense than him. Jeff does indeed get better in the spirit of this trope, but not through stat growths. Instead he becomes more capable using various items. His item selection starts out limited at first, mainly reliant on the above-average-strength bottle rockets, but eventually he can get the ability to immobilize opponents, neutralize any PSI buffs on the field, remove shields, fire powerful bazookas, and especially fire Multi-Bottle Rockets that can one-shot even bosses.
• Elden Ring: Like with Bloodborne, there's the Arcane stat, which doesn't affect any of your offensive stats, it increases your chance of having items drop but it also increases the application rate of status effects. Early game this isn't impressive at all, while there's a handful of weapons that can work decently with stat buildup, it isn't until the second area you can start finding weapons or Arts of War that can change the scaling to work off Arcane... but once you do, you learn that very few enemies are immune to every status and with the absurd rate of application you can bleed, frostbite, burn or poison almost anything in a handful of attacks. There's a reason that Arcane built characters are considered a Game-Breaker to the point of having several nerf patches passed for them, and two weapons that cause bleed and frostbite are still considered the best in the games.
• Eternal Sonata:
  • Claves is, when first encountered, extremely weak, with slow attacks that don't do much damage, and unimpressive specials, Presumably this is so you don't waste any time leveling her up, because she dies almost as soon as you meet her. If you go through the game's Bonus Dungeon, she can be re-recruited and leveled up properly, eventually becoming one of the game's strongest characters, placing first or second in every stat, and having some seriously powerful moves. But since she rejoins at the same level as she first left, and thus probably 30 or so levels behind, most people never find that out. The drawback to this is that said bonus dungeon can only be accessed once you defeat the second to last boss, and open a portal that would literally take you right to the final battle.
  • There's also Frederic, who is noticeably weaker than many of the other characters owing to a high magic stat but a poor attack stat. Furthermore, most of his special moves are weak, up until roughly level 60, when he unlocks Phantom Pain, the best damage-dealing skill in the game, capable of inflicting upwards of 400,000 damage with the proper equipment.
  • Jazz in the 360 version. He is at every point in the game inferior to all other characters available. At the end, however, he gets a next to final weapon with an ability called Burst. Burst doubles the power of attacks in exchange for defense. He's the only one with a REALLY strong burst weapon, and the lack of a third burst item means he is the only one who can use burst without one in your three man team. He already did massive damage but other characters had him outsped by far and thus got in more damage than him. In the PS3 version there is now a third burst item and a new character that's a borderline gamebreaker. The existence of a third burst item greatly decrease his value in favor of everyone else.
• Evergrace: Zul's Toy is a toy hammer which becomes a Lethal Joke Item (and the most powerful weapon, capable of defeating the final boss in about two hits) when you upgrade it twice.
• Fate/Grand Order:
  • Mash Kyrielight, the main heroine, starts out as a rather dull and unimpressive three-star Stone Wall, unable to get type advantage and usually only coming along because she doesn't take up any cost to do so. However, she's the only Servant in the game to have her abilities and growths linked to story progression rather than grinding, and she becomes exponentially stronger with each new unlock, even jumping up from three-star to four-star. This includes her rather mundane party defense buff turning into a defense buff and a damage cut, meaning it makes the group near-invincible to their next hit, her gaining the ability to force enemies to target her and increase the charge on her Noble Phantasm, which synergizes perfectly when she can also make anyone in the party invincible and increase their charge, and said Noble Phantasm getting an attack buff stacked on top. A fully-maxed Mash is considered one of the strongest four-stars in the game.
  • Plenty of Servants to be released early in the game's lifespan were originally designed with two skills, and then had a third added in later on. Due to Power Creep, this third skill is almost invariably their best one, but most can only be reached by pulling them up to Ascension 4 (everyone else gets their third skill at Ascension 3) and doing a sidequest. An excellent example is Arash: he has terrible stats, starts off with two pretty useless skills, and if you take the time to charge up Stella, it's a suicide attack. But if you pull him up to level 50 or higher, then he gains Arrow Construction, which gives an extra 30% charge when maxed. Figure out a way to add the extra 70%^note a non-Limit Broken Kaleidoscope provides 80% at base, and suddenly, Arash can fire off Stella on the first turn. Stella has very high damage that gets boosted even higher in an interlude to make up for it killing Arash, and Arash is super common, so it'll usually be level 5, meaning it'll usually wipe out the first wave. On top of that, by nature of the game's mechanics, losing a weak Servant who's already fired off their attacks is a good thing: it lets you swap in somebody fresh, and since Arash is a one-star, it means his replacement can be very strong.
  • Similarly, the game's various Balance Buffs are all unlocked through sidequests that are accessible at the character's fourth and final ascension. Emiya, who's had an NP upgrade and two Strengthening quests, takes this very far; up until level 70, he's an extremely mediocre Archer who doesn't do anything very well, but when he hits that point and ascends, he becomes one of the best in his rarity.
  • Another stand-out example is Cu Chulainn Caster, who is probably the most extreme example in the game. He starts as a mediocre Caster with mediocre damage who only had a slight niche in survivability. Two Rank Up quests later, he has some NP battery and somewhat improved damage. And then Lostbelt 6 comes in, six full years after his initial release, giving an absolutely insane buff to his third skill that lets him fire his NP instantly, greatly boosts his attack, and in combination with the other servants released in the chapter, make him one of the best - if not THE best - farmers in the game with the potential for four NP loops.
• In Fleuret Blanc, Salute gets a better rate of success the more you use it. It's initially not very impressive, but eventually you can weasel the maximum number of points out of the judges pretty consistently.
• In Freedom Wars, all weapons have various weapon growth types, growth ranks, and rarity, with rank 1 having the best stat growth, but weapons with the Late-Bloomer growth type work like this, and it's the growth type that out-performs the others. Their stats start off abysmal, but as the player upgrades the weapon further, the Late-Bloomer weapon has the best stats for its class. If you're looking for an Infinity +1 Sword, pray to the Random Number Generator that your weapon manufacturer crafts a Rarity 8 Late-Bloomer version of your weapon of choice, then mod it with any weapon with a growth rank of 1. Inverted with the opposite growth type, Early-Bloomer, where weapons of that growth type start off strong but have the smallest stat growth rate out of the other growth types.
• Fullmetal Alchemist 2: Curse Of The Crimson Elixir: The flare does little to no damage and is only good for stunning enemies....but if you can level Edward to 99, he can transmute the flare into an absolutely devastating smart bomb that wrecks everything in range.
• Game Master Plus: The Joker class starts as the weakest of Elsa's classes, due to its lack of early equipment options, lack of MP, and dependency on enemy cards to learn skills. However, Elsa will eventually gain enough MP to use these skills and can gain access to better support abilities than the Tinker. Eventually, the game replaces the robots with human party members who specialize in offense, making the Joker's repertoire of support skills invaluable.
• In the popular RPG Maker 2000 Affectionate Parody game Jay's Journey, one of the hidden party members is... a slime. As in, the quintessential weak RPG monster, and indeed, the slime's stats are pathetic. ...at first. If you stick with it long enough to get it up to Level 50 and find the hidden "Slime Medal" item, all of its stats are maxed out, and it has a set of the most powerful spells in the game as well.
• In the original Kingdom Hearts (and the HD remake) Sora can be a little like this - depending on the choices you make in the early dialogues, you can have an experience curve that starts off painfully slow, but, somewhere around level 45, overtakes the other experience curves and ends up higher level by the time you reach the final boss around level 60, and can reach the level cap sooner too.
• The Legend of Dragoon:
  • Shana starts off as The Load and stays that way for all of the first disc and a good deal of the second. Once she reaches level three as a dragoon, she becomes decent but upon hitting level five, she's invaluable. Besides having the best healing spells in the game, along with a dragon that both deals damage and heals, she has by far the highest magic attack of anyone. However, she's still pathetic at anything but magic.
  • Meru starts off as merely a Fragile Speedster who sometimes attacks twice in a turn but still does less damage than any of the other characters except Shana. Once she starts leveling up, she does the most physical damage of anyone^note Rose does more per attack but Meru attacks more often and the second strongest magical damage on top of outspeeding everyone (even always attacking twice per turn with the right equipment). It's only Meru's low health and defenses that keep her from being an outright Master of All.
• Maya in Legaia 2: Duel Saga. When she first joins your party, she has very few hitpoints, has no offensive or defensive abilities, and at the most, she can use items on the player to help them. Otherwise, she's absolutely useless. However, halfway into the game, it is revealed she is actually an exceptionally powerful Mystic, and regains her natural abilities. She becomes extremely powerful in magic and summoning abilities at later levels after this.
• Terry Hintz, the first companion you get in LISA: The Painful RPG is absolutely useless (having mediocre stats and incredibly weak healing abilities) when you first get him to the point that you're encouraged to simply sell him away the first chance you get. However, if he's leveled up enough he gains the most powerful attack in the game.
• Weebos in Magi-Nation. One of the first Dream Creatures you can get, it starts out at level one, with the sole ability to heal. BUT, and this is a huge gigantic but, if you raise it to level NINETY, it learns the immensely powerful move Wreck, which is shared only by Ormaggon, the subject of That One Sidequest.
• In a mix between the Elite Tweak and this, Aaron of Lunar Knights starts off woefully underpowered (made worse by the fact that he can't fire without a Terrennial, and the first part of his chapter is a forced stealth segment because of this flaw). On the higher difficulties, however, further play as Lucian requires maxing your levels or having godly guard reflexes, as the enemies' damage output continues to rise, plus the direct-player-induced 999 damage limit. This ultimately puts Aaron on point, where his Solar Guns, coupled with energy levels on par with freakin' Naruto, help mitigate the risk of having to get close to such deadly attacks.
• In MARDEK:
  • Zach has one attack skill called sinstrike which deals armor piercing damage based on Zach's kill total. It seems utterly useless until you put some effort into kill grinding him, and after a few hours, which isn't too long for a MARDEK player, it becomes the most devastating attack in the game. That is, unless the enemy is immune to dark damage...
  • Elwyen also qualifies. She starts out at around level 10 (when most of your character levels are in the mid-late teens) with one of the lowest HP counts of any playable character, and a small number of somewhat counterintuitive abilities. Take the time to level her up and teach her the right skills, though, and she ends up with the strongest defensive reaction skill in the game, a decent party heal, powerful party buffs in a series where buff spells are usually mediocre to crappy, and the most effective attack against several dodging-focused Demonic Spiders.
• Ninjutsu in Nioh 2 falls squarely into this. Playing as a ninja character means enemies will cut through you like paper in a direct confrontation (you are limited to light armour) and you have little in the way to play with concerning tools early on - they are weak and have little ammo. However anyone who has played a Soulslike knows that being able to take out enemies before they ever get a chance to threaten you is very, very useful. A high-level ninja will be a Walking Armoury who can turn most powerful enemies into the Skippable Boss, using kunai and shrapnel bombs to obliterate them, or using a bow or rifle to snipe them from miles away, or poison and fire to deal massive damage over time.
• Octopath Traveler:
  • The Apothecary job (not Concoct) is generally considered the weakest of the initial eight jobs, mainly because all its skills are single-target ones—Last Stand notwithstanding—including First Aid and Vivify, single-target versions of the Cleric skills Heal Wounds/More and Revive, albeit restoring more HP^note which actually makes the Apothecary job consistently good for solo runs. However, the Apothecary job becomes significantly more useful late-game, once you've unlocked Sealticge's Seduction^note The Dancer divine skill, that turns the target's single-target skills into multi-target ones for three turns, Dohter's Charity^note The Apothecary divine skill, that makes consumable items affect the entire party for three turns and can farm items like Refreshing Jams^note Fully restores HP and SP. Can be farmed from Accursed Armors in Lorn Cathedral: Cellars, which is unlocked during Therion's Chapter 4; Animated Armors, found in the four advanced job shrines and Everhold Tunnels; and Brigand Leaders III in the aforementioned Lorn Cathedral: Cellars, Revitalizing Jams^note Fully restores HP, SP and BP. Can be farmed from Revenants on Grimsand Road, which is unlocked during H'aanit's Chapter 4; and Caits/Cultured Caits if you're lucky and Energizing Pomegranates (M)^note Restores 2 BP. Can be farmed from Frostwing Serpents in The Whitewood, which is unlocked during H'aanit's Chapter 3; Forest Ratkings III on the East Duskbarrow Trail; and Cliff Birdkings III on the South Orewell Pass with a Thief equipping Snatch^note A Thief support skill that lets the equipping character Collect/Steal twice as much money/loot from enemies.
  • The Cleric skill Reflective Veil^note Reflects enemy magic attacks back at the caster is all but useless early-game, because most enemies and bosses are physical attackers, and the 22 SP cost is discouraging anyways despite its native user, Ophilia, having the highest SP stat of the protagonists. However, the skill becomes more and more useful as the game progresses, your party levels up and their SP increases, and more magic-reliant enemies like the Elementals, as well as bosses like Mystery Man & Shady Figure, appear before you. Even more so if you unlock Sealticge's Seduction, which lets a Cleric empower the entire party at once.
• Velvet's Homing Attack from Odin Sphere, her claim to fame, isn't particularly useful, only hits one enemy, will usually fly off and hit a nearby projectile or item if it's the closest thing to her, and takes half her POW Meter off for each use. After enough levelling up, though, it can now hit multiple targets with enough force to One-Hit Kill the weaker enemies (including slimes) and carve huge chunks of HP out of the stronger ones, making it perfect for crowd control.
• Kel in OMORI starts out a Fragile Speedster with nothing to offer besides speed. At high levels, however, he becomes the most useful party member. He learns a lot of useful support skills like Rally to restore everyone else's Juice, Tickle for guaranteed critical hit, or Can't Catch Me to debuff enemy accuracy. He also has the skill Run n' Gun, which does damage based on his excellent Speed instead of his mediocre Attack, and if combined with various Speed buffs has the potential to do massive damage. His high Speed also guarantees him to act first, making him a realy good Item Caddy for extra healing or using emotion-altering items.
• Oracle of Tao:
  • Ambrosia. Unless you want to count her Useless Useful Spell Trigrams (which can end up healing the target as part of random chance and otherwise is more or less a percentage effect), and her totally useless spell Predict, she has effectively no abilities for the first quarter of the game. Then she gets a holy spell, a defense spell, a slow, and a death spell (still in the Useless Useful Spell territory). About the fifth spell, she starts getting various damaging effects. By the way, none of her spells use magic, so if you can bear the torture of waiting for proper plot events, she suddenly becomes a One-Man Party.
  • Tamashii, her daughter, is even more this, having bad stats as well until you get near level 99, when they're the best in the game. You also have to level up an evolving weapon to max out her weapon damage.
• Parasite Eve
  • The N Suit found on the Museum in Day 5. It has the same defense power as the B Jacket 1, the often recommended first-playthrough ultimate armor, but has significantly lower PE defense stat and comparatively lower critical evasion stat, not to mention no special effects attached to it. However, it has the highest max slots available of all the first-playthrough armors with 6 (compared to B Jacket 1's 4) and if a player collected enough tools and stat boosters, they could modify it as their tenured armor up until they get the actual best armor in the game in the Bonus Dungeon during New Game Plus, the Cr Armor 2^note Triple-digit defense power and PE defense stats, has the maximum 10 slots available, and HP Up already attached to it.
  • Torres' Beretta M92F. It's acquired in Day 3 and is the only weapon that can reach the maximum slots available, but it also has mid-tier stats. Modifying its stats with tools and boosters would take time, but doing so would also make it a great ultimate gun (especially for players who don't have the time or/and patience to collect 300 junks).
• Riviera: The Promised Land features this with Fia and the Rosaries. Normally, Rosaries heal every character in the party of all status effects—nothing special, as status effects aren't particularly worrisome in Rivera. She also has to use the Rosary upwards of 15 times to learn their Overdrive. However, the Overdrive she learns is a Level 3 Skill that wipes out all opposing monsters at the cost of destroying the Rosary. Oh, and the Unleash text is different from her other Level 3 Overdrives.
• T260G's original body in SaGa Frontier. It has stats of only 5 in every area, and the only piece of equipment it comes with is a piece of weak armor, while the other bodies you can switch to have a wide variety of extra gadgets, like lasers, repair kits, missiles, tougher armor, and more. However, all of these things take up equipment slots, and mecs like T260G gain stats by equipping items rather than leveling up; in his original body, he has seven slots free for stat-boosting equipment (as opposed to only 4 or 5 in any other body), so it has the potential to be the strongest of all in the late game.
• In Secret of Evermore, almost every damaging alchemical formula could be a sort of magikarp power, in that they almost all suck until you've used them a couple of dozen times, at which point the only thing stopping your rampage across the ages is the state of your wallet (as you need to money to buy reagents). As a result, the Flash alchemy, which the first one you get, will likely be your most powerful, and if it isn't then it's the Hard Ball alchemy, the second one you get, simply because the ingredients for them are plentiful and cheap, letting you use them over and over again from the beginning of the game.
• Spike, one of the titular Seven Knights. He has one of the best passives in the game, which protects the party from debuffs and ailments, as well as increasing their critical rate. The problem, his skills can cause Freeze, which renders the inflicted unit unable to act, but also protect them from any kind of damage. In PvP mode, which is almost entirely RNG-based, this often results in him freezing a strong enemy unit and having it unfreeze unharmed, when your party is in shambles from the fight. However, if you Transcend him enough times (quite an effort, since 7 Knight units are really rare), he can deal enough damage to outright kill his targets, and if not, the freeze damage will finish them off. Combined with his excellent passive skill, he becomes a threatening Lightning Bruiser with little way to counter.
• Shin Megami Tensei:
  • In Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne, by keeping the very first demon you can recruit (the Pixie) in your party for the entire game (she becomes rapidly outclassed very quickly)^note Fusing her with other demons is okay; her "DNA" carries over in everything but a sacrifice fusion where she or her "descendent" is the sacrifice and then presenting her to a door in the final level of the Labyrinth of Amala, she transforms into a Lv.80 juggernaut with 30s in every ability score and some of the best spells in the game. Also note that that particular species of demon is an example of Magikarp Power to begin with, as leveling one up when your main character is around level 50 enables her to evolve into one of the best Night demons, Queen Mab.
  • Physical builds for the Demi-Fiend. Early in the game, physical skills are thin on the ground, sacrificing HP to do more damage is extremely risky, physical attacks can't give extra Press Turns without a lucky critical, and a single resistance/immunity completely neuters damage output. Later in the game, some of the best skills run off physical stats, Pierce can bypass all but Repel, the HP cost is less of an issue with better healing spells in the party, and a certain combination of these is basically the only way to do more than tickle the True Final Boss.
  • Hallelujah in Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse starts out as the mechanically strangest party member; while everyone else has a clear role as healer, buffer, attacker, etc., Hallelujah has just three support skills that are useful only in niche situations. After a plot event, he reveals that he's the dedicated offensive spellcaster and starts attacking with powerful magic.
  • Persona 3:
    • Odin is pretty unremarkable at first (well, by the standards of a level 63 persona, anyway...) but a bit of grinding gets him Thunder Reign, an "extreme" tier Lightning spell. If that doesn't kill the enemy outright, it's also guaranteed to put them in Shocked status, meaning any subsequent physical attacks against them will critical. Level Odin a little more, and he gets Spell Mastery, which cuts his SP costs in half.
    • Daisoujou hardly seems worth the effort to fuse... until you realize it's the only way to get Samsara, the strongest light spell in the game, which has a high chance of delivering an instant KO to all enemies.
    • Junpei starts off as a decent tank, but quickly falls out of favor when nearly every boss uses his weakness element. Keep him leveled up, though, and he becomes a force to be reckoned with come endgame. This is even more pronounced in Persona 3 Reload, where he picks up buffs to his critical hit rate as well as a Theurgy skill which does a lot of Fire damage and fully restores his HP.
  • In Persona 4, Chie starts as a fairly basic attacker with access to weak Ice magic, but quickly falls behind compared to the rest of the party. Keep her levelled though, and by endgame she'll have some INCREDIBLE skills, including Power Charge and God Hand. Plus there's the fact that if you get her Social Link to level 3, her Galactic Punt follow-up attack can oneshot any non-boss enemy. Including minibosses. The Golden gives her S.Link Dragon Hustle, a full party Heat Riser (attack/magic/defense buff, which is normally restricted to a single target), when maxed.
  • Persona 5: The new "Sacrifice" fusion mechanic allows you to power up any low level Persona Guardian Entity to insane levels. However, as they only get part of the experience and one randomly selected skill from the sacrificed Persona, it will take dozens or hundreds of sacrifices to get them there.
  • Atsuro of Devil Survivor is primarily a physical attacker. Early on he is relatively useless due to magic being overwhelmingly more useful and powerful thanks to the magic stat governing MP, magic attack, and magic defense and being able to exploit elemental weaknesses. There are very few enemies with a weakness to Physical attacks. That some of the more powerful late-game enemies have passives that reduce, drain, negate, or reflect physical attacks does not help matters. But Atsuro redeems himself at later levels too. Provided you've cracked them (and you should), skills like Full Might, Attack All, Pierce, and Phys Jump/Rise will turn Atsuro into a Physical God that can bypass all defenses except Phys Repel, strike all enemies at once, and always get critical hits (which can steal Extra Turns from enemies). If necessary, give Atsuro Phy Repel to ensure that he doesn't get hurt from rebounded attacks. His high Vitality also means that he can make good use of powerful hp-dependent attacks such as Deathbound and Hassohappa.
  • Devil Survivor 2 has two characters with this power: Daichi and Hinako. Daichi's parameters start out more balanced, which is a terrible build in this game, but with a slight favor towards Strength and Agility; Hinako has a similar build, but focuses more on Agility than he does. Both are okay-to-mediocre party members to have at first, but there are two skills that can be cracked rather early on: Multi-Hit and Multi-Strike, a single and party-wide attack, respectively, that hits between 2 - 7 times and depends on the character's Agility parameter. Slapping this on one of them will instantly make their rather unorthodox build a much better option. Unfortunately, most people will favor Hinako to Daichi, as she maxes her agility out much sooner and will hit harder.
• Shining Series:
  • Shining Force:
    • Domingo, a jellyfish spellcaster whom you got late in the game with 1 low level spell. He eventually was able to spam cast the strongest ice magic in the game. He also gains such absurdly high HP, MP, and defense that at higher levels he literally shrugs off any enemy attacks, making even the game's resident tank Guntz blush in envy. And he can fly. And the fact that he has very high priority from the game's AI targeting system makes him break the game.
    • Arthur starts off very weak and doesn't learn any spells despite having Mana for several levels. But once he reaches about level 20 unpromoted or level 12 promoted, his stats suddenly skyrocket and he'll learn the powerful Bolt spell. He's one of the best units towards the end of the game.
    • Adam from the first game is an extreme case. He has the potential to be an excellent offensive unit. Unfortunately he joins you very late in the game at a laughably low level (Level 10 unpromoted) and is very slow, making him extremely difficult to level up.
    • Bleu from the first game is another good example, with a low starting level and mediocre stats that make him difficult to keep alive and level up. Once promoted and powered up, though, he's easily one of your best flying units.
    • Narsha in the Game Boy Advance remake zig-zags this. While she starts of quite weak at level one, you first get to play with her at the end of the first chapter. (When your characters aren't too far ahead), and she becomes quite useful due to her buffs. You get several more chances to level her and Zukia up, until they (and Mawlock) join the force, possibly close to the level of the rest of the Shining Force, and with enough time to use her. However, it takes a bit of babying in Narsha's first chapter for her to not get knocked out by the monsters, who are a little above her level.
  • In Shining Force III on the Saturn, Irene and particularly Cybel have awful HP, but persevering with them and allowing them to unlock their various specials allows them to become more effective in combat than even Dantares in the latter portions of the game.
• Fina from Skies of Arcadia is a very skilled magic user, but has atrocious physical attack power... until you fully level up her Infinity Plus One Blob.
• Star Shift Rebellion: Purely robotic playable characters like T-17, Cerberus-7, and Kronos-5G cannot equip the same types of gear as other characters and their skill trees don't include passives to increase knowledge gain, which means they won't be able to learn new skills as fast as other characters, nor will they be able to abuse the best gear in the game. However, they can learn passives that allow them to act up to three times per turn, which puts them above characters that use Doppelganger armor.
• Thomas in Suikoden III starts his chapters as a very weak fighter with next to no skills and terrible equipment, and he requires extra training to bring said skills to high levels. That said, if he's invested, he blossoms into a dynamo of a character in gameplay who's up there with characters like Geddoe's squad and the Zexen Knights in terms of the damage he can deal out.
• Summon Night: Swordcraft Story 1 has a master blacksmith "tricking" you into smithing a ladle for him to cook with. You can use it as a weapon, but it breaks very easily and does pitiful damage. However, if you forge another ladle with 50 of each material type available and use Mystic Ore on it, you get a... burning ladle. Which still does low damage but has the highest durability in the game, meaning it's ideal for breaking other opponents' weapons without knocking them out; which instantly wins the duel for you and teaches you a new smithing recipe. You will want to fight all weapon-bearing bosses with this, really. And if you dismantle it, you gain, instead of the common percentage of materials used initially, TWO Mystic Ores, a material that is often difficult to accumulate due to being grind-tedious to drop and luck-based to find the enemies which drop them. If you got no patience, and feel like burning through some money and/or surplus materials...
• In Super Mario RPG:
  • It is possible to obtain an item called a Mystery Egg. When used in battle this item does one of two things: If used by Princess Toadstool while wearing the B'tub Ring, it forms a heart and makes a pleasant ring. If used by anyone else or Princess Toadstool without the B'tub Ring, it fails to produce the heart and makes a buzz sound indicating failure. If the Princess produces enough hearts, the egg transforms into the potent Lamb's Lure, an item which can instantly kill any one non-boss character in the battle by turning it into a sheep. Use this enough times, and it becomes the Sheep Attack. It works like the Lamb's Lure, but affects all enemies in the battle. Unfortunately, you earn no XP or Coins from enemies defeated with either version.
  • Mario's basic Jump attack. Most players will probably switch to Super Jump and never look back once Mario learns it, as it will almost certainly be the far superior choice if they are just playing through the game normally. However, what those players probably don't know is that every 2 times you use Jump, its attack power permanently increases by 1, up to a maximum of 128 (meaning 256 uses of Jump), eventually becoming the single most cost-effective move in the game as it costs a measly 3 FP to use. You can even get Jump up to max power in the very first area after the tutorial if you're willing to spend all that time grinding, since you can easily recover your FP for free by returning to Mario's house and sleeping whenever you run out, though be warned that this will make at least the first half of the game boringly easy as you'll just one-shot everything short of a boss (and the bosses probably won't survive a second Jump). This is the standard strategy for the Low-Level Run, since the spiked enemies in the first area are immune to Jump attacks unless Mario has a specific accessory equipped (which he can't even get yet), allowing the player to grind without actually killing anything and gaining XP, then running from the battle when FP runs out.
• Tales Series:
  • Klarth from Tales of Phantasia starts off as The Load, being a summoner with nothing to summon, meaning he's reduced to just hitting enemies with a book. It doesn't take long for him to get his first summon, though, and by the time you get the first four summons he's a force to be reckoned with.
  • Tales of Symphonia:
    • Colette is initially weak, slow, and all around bad. However, once a certain boss is defeated, and if you chose the right side of the T/S gauge (namely S), she becomes the single strongest melee attacker in the game. Her main problem is also that the AI doesn't play her that well either; usually not taking advantage of her pow-hammer techniques or stupidly trying to use her magic with long-casting times on enemies that'll interrupt her.
    • The Devil's Arms are the weakest weapons in the game, at literally 0 attack power. However, once you defeat the Optional Boss, their true power is unlocked, and their attack power will go up by 1 for each enemy their wielder has killed. It'll take a lot of grinding just to get one of them up to par with what would otherwise be that character's best weapon, but they'll just keep getting stronger after that. The concept has been replicated in the other Tales games developed by Team Symphonia (Catalyst Weapons in Tales of the Abyss and the Fell Arms in Tales of Vesperia).
• Terra Battle:
  • Jaguna is considered to be the worst character in the game, due to her terrible stat distribution and mediocre skills. For one, she has very low Attack and high Magic, whereas her only magic skill is a weak healing spell and the rest are physical. However, a later patch allows you to Recode her into Jaguna Lambda, with much better skills, and one of the highest total stats in the game.
    • Interestingly, Jaguna Lambda herself is this. Her stat growth is pretty low, until she reaches level 70, where her stat growth increases a lot. A majority of her stats are gained during level 70 to 90.
  • Bonna is valued for her ability to increase EXP gained, but being a Remedy-type character, her other skills are too situational to be useful. Bonna Lambda, on the other hand, is considered one of the best units in the game. She gets a major boost in Attack and gets powerful Bow attacks which cover a lot of area, all of which can activate outside the pincer. Oh, and she retains her EXP increase ability along with her ailment skills, making her a very versatile unit who can still deal tons of damage.
  • Gatz has the same fate as Bonna. His original form is used for his ability to increase item drop rate, but he's mostly a situational utility character with mediocre damage. Gatz Lambda gained an array of powerful Sword attacks, along with the game-breaking Augment skills. And just like other Recoded units, he retained his old skills.
  • The two possible starter characters, Bahl and Grace starts out as somewhat strong Sword and Bow units respectively, but tend to fall out in mid-game when you have better characters. However, their usefulness suddenly increases when they learn some of their final skills.
    • Bahl gets the skill Physical Damage x 1.5, a buff which stacks with every activation. With good positioning, she can activate the buff many times in one turn, and deal obscene amount of damage. She's considered the third best physical fighter in terms of pure damage, only surpassed by S'naip and Ma'curi, who also learn the same skill.
    • Meanwhile, Grace gets "Defense -20%, Dragon", which reduces the defense of all Dragon type enemies. Proper usage of this skill allows her to reduce any Dragon type enemies' defense to one, basically making the next attack a one hit kill. Now, consider that this skill works on Optional Boss Bahamut and Leviathan... This skill was so broken that later patches gave a cap to debuffs, reducing her usefulness.
• The Tiamat Sacrament:
  • Xandra starts with no skills, but after learning all the skills the game's enemies have to offer, she can cure any ailment, fully revive party members, speed up Az'uar's inhalation, target any elemental weakness, and cast the most practical AOE spell in the game.
  • Az'uar's breath ability is initially very cumbersome to use, since it requires Az'uar and Xandra to spend a turn inhaling a rune and casting Catch Breath respectively. The starting breath skills all deal AOE damage and are inefficient for singular bosses. Once Az'uar evolves twice, he can use triple element rune combos, which have high enough damage multipliers to justify their cost. And this is before accounting for lategame skills and equipment that can make the process of inhaling runes faster and safer.
  • Kelburn's strongest skills depend on Az'uar's currently inhaled runes, which means Kelburn's damage progression relies on the player grinding Az'uar's evolution and completing events to make Az'uar inhale more efficiently.
• In Valkyrie Profile's normal and easy modes, every character who joins you starts at an appropriate level for that point in the game. In hard mode, every character joins at level 1. Sound like a crippling disadvantage? Not when there are accessories that give extra skill points and maximum HP at each level up, you can equip both at once, and the difference they make over 30 levels or so is very significant. Bosses that, in Easy or Normal, require the use of the Auto-Revive or Last Chance Hit Point skills to even survive, Hard mode characters will be able to straight up tank.
• View from Below: The Toy Sword and Piety Mask are the weakest pieces of equipment in the game, but can be upgraded by blacksmith spirits into mid-to-late game tier equipment.
• The World Ends with You has Joshua, who's the only partner who can't block^note This isn't as bad as it sounds - his sidestep is mechanically identical to the other partners' blocks - but he still learns it inconveniently late, only deals damage when his combo is complete (unlike the other partners, who actually land blows with each branch in the combo) and initially seems rather wimpy. However, he eventually gets the ability to levitate, in which mode he's much, much better at damage-dealing (including splash damage), hits with each button press and with enough hits on the same enemy before the finisher, hits every enemy for increased damage. Also, his most powerful special attack drops the moon on your foes and does at least 3 times as much damage as the strongest special attacks of the other 2 characters.
• In World of Mana:
  • Secret of Mana: The Sprite's offensive magic starts out fairly weak, but if you spend the time to level it up, it reaches Game-Breaker levels. Then there's the girl's magic: for a paltry 2 MP, Healing Water can restore 800+ HP to all members (you have a Cap of 999 for the Hero and 800 for the Girl and Sprite). That's forty-nine casts of full-party HP refill. Oh wait, you can also carry 4 Faerie Walnuts on you at any given time, so that's another 100 casts of that spell. The Sprite doesn't need faerie walnuts; it has MP-Drain which can totally drain most enemies when it is maxed out.
  • In Legend of Mana, many basic techniques are of little utility and some can be actively harmful at times. Spin can cause the main character to be disoriented, and Grapple often results in the character being squished by heavier enemies. These abilities must be used many times to unlock the powerful and devastating Special Techniques for each weapon.
  • Trials of Mana: Angela starts the game with no magic, and she's very squishy. However as she levels up and gains more spells she becomes a force to be reckoned with, especially through abuse of the spell time glitch.^note The spell cast time continues to count down when you bring up the menu, essentially allowing her to instantaneously cast and spam spells. In the 2020 remake, she can earn multiple stacking abilities that will greatly increase the hitting power of her spells, allowing her to one-shot entire mobs at higher levels. She has other abilities that allow her to recover MP either with power attacks or simply by being in combat, or you can beat the Black Rabite for an ability that reduces her MP to 0. Three Words: Unlimited Ancient Curse. While getting her to that point takes some work, once you do Angela may be the single biggest Game-Breaker in the entire game.
• Chu-Chu from Xenogears. Give her enough drives and she becomes the most powerful gear in the game. Of course, it takes a while to do it. Plus she's the only one who can heal gears in battle without burning fuel.
• In Xenoblade Chronicles X, the starting class, Drifter, has barely any skills of its own and can't use any notable weapons but it's the only class that has 5 passive skill slots. Since you can use a class' weapons in any other class once you master its most advanced form and what Arts you can use is determined by the type of weapon you're equipped with, you'll ultimately switch to Drifter permanently to make use of its 5 skill slots once you master every other class since at that point you have no limitations on what types of weapons you can use.
• Xenoblade Chronicles 2:
  • While he's never a Joke Character, you're likely to replace Tora in your party as soon as you have another decent tank. He can't use blades like the other characters, leaving him limited to Poppi, a good tank who's underwhelming compared to the variety of blades that the other characters can use for the majority of the game. If you're willing to go out of your way near the end of the game to do an optional quest to unlock Poppi's final form and spend a good amount of time getting parts for Poppi by playing the ''Tiger! Tiger!'' minigame, Poppi and Tora become unstoppable powerhouses, with an overwhelming amount of customizing how Poppi works, letting her different forms be the most powerful attacker or best tank in the game, which Tora can switch between freely. Just don't expect the game to give more than the most cursory overview of this potential.
  • Among the Rare Blades, Dagas fits the bill as well. He has some very solid abilities in his Affinity Chart, including the immensely useful Kaiser Zone, which increases the damage and AOE effect of the entire party when he is at max affinity, but he gives a paltry 5% Strength bonus to his driver, has no field skills (except his personal one, Cavalier Attitude, which is never used outside his blade quest), only one aux core slot, and most of his affinity nodes take a long time to fill. Doing his blade quest boosts that Strength bonus to 10%, gives him three usable field skills and two extra aux core slots, and makes his node requirements more reasonable... at the cost of resetting everything that you've already filled out. Level up Dagas' second affinity chart, however, and you've got one of the best offensive Blades in the game (helped out by Greataxe Blades having a great selection of arts in general).
• Xenoblade Chronicles 3: The "Soul Hacker" class starts off very underwhelming, with no skills other than its unique "Soul Hack" skill and a pittance of weak attacks. However, when you kill a Unique Monster while one of your characters has the class equipped, the Monster's soul is "hacked" and the class gains either a skill or an attack that that monster used. If you kill enough Unique Monsters, it becomes by far the most versatile class in the game, with an absolutely massive number of skills and attacks to mix and match into whatever you want it to be. (Sadly, the soul hacks don't apply retroactively, so any UM's you killed before gaining the class, you'll have to go back and kill again to get their benefits.)

Fighting Games

• There are a number of characters in BlazBlue that have to build up a unique personal resource over the course of the match in order to make themselves stronger, but the absolute king of this trope in the series would be Susanoo, from Central Fiction. Susanoo starts each round with seven of his eight special moves locked and completely unusable, and the player must unlock them with his Drive attacks. Additionally, some of his specials can be powered up even further if you "unlock" them when they're already unlocked.
• The bow and arrow in Castle Crashers. Initially, the weapon fires arrows at an angle and at a very slow speed. Increase your character's Agility stat, however, and the angle lessens until it fires straight ahead and arrow speed shoots up considerably. With a high enough Agility, you can even juggle enemies with the bow!
• In the arcade game Dungeons & Dragons: Shadow over Mystara:
  • A player may find the Cursed Sword. As the name suggests, it's cursed; every time the player tries to swing it, it damages the Player Character. However, if the sword is swung often enough^note The amount of times it needs to be used varies, but on average, it will kill a Fighter twice before it becomes uncursed, which is a hefty price to pay in an arcade game, it becomes the most powerful weapon in the game, outmatched only by weapons that are specifically designed to kill certain types of enemies.
    • There's also the other Cursed Sword, which randomly can't be swung and isn't very powerful. Try to pick it up 8 times with a cleric^note Clerics cannot use bladed weapons like swords and axes, so this borders on Violation of Common Sense to try it even once, much less eight times, and it becomes the Holy Avenger, an extremely powerful sword that is the absolute bane of undead^note The boss fight with the Lich, where he can normally block an attack whenever he wants, will become much easier when the Holy Avenger ignores his blocks and hits him anyway. Similarly, the boss fight towards the end of the game against Enhorden, a giant ghost, will result in him getting absolutely shredded by the Holy Avenger, though not as strong as a level 4 Normal Sword. It's also not considered magical (so it can't hit gargoyles).
  • If you time it correctly, you can interrupt the "knock-back" animation (and the damage!) from the curse by either jumping and swinging right before landing, or having someone else cast a targeted spell (like Cure Light Wounds, or Striking) on the Sword swinger. Cursed Sword 2 is much easier; have the Cleric (try to) pick it up enough times.
• Pucci's moveset in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: All Star Battle is based entirely on this. He first starts the match with his stand Whitesnake, which is rather versatile but underpowered. By speaking all 14 of Dio's secret words to Green Baby, his stand permanently transforms into C-Moon and gives him several new moves, including his GHA which allows him to further evolve his stand into Made in Heaven, which causes the enemy's speed to be lessened for the rest of the match. Johnny also fits to a lesser extent, since he gains more moves the further Tusk evolves throughout the match.
• This describes Phoenix Wright's Marvel vs. Capcom 3 appearance in a nutshell. He starts with poor mobility, weak normal attacks, and a lack of moves in general. Collect evidence and put him in Trial Mode, however, and he gains access to a variety of projectile attacks and much better moves. And if you can get him in Turnabout Mode, he temporarily becomes one of the strongest characters in the game, doing immense damage with all of his attacks, having invincibility with some of his moves, giving him some insane options for juggling and gaining access to one of the best level 3 Hyper Combos in the game - which is the single strongest attack in the game, no less. In other words, you start the match with a huge disadvantage and have to slowly gather evidence while playing keep-away until you can trigger a turnabout... just like in his home series.
• Sonic Battle: Emerl. At the beginning of the game, he has a full set of moves copied from Sonic — but they're all "incomplete" and hugely nerfed. In each battle, he'll copy a random move from each participant, but he still needs Skill Points to equip them — and at the beginning of the game, you'll have very few, forcing you to make such decisions as "do I want Emerl to be able to walk or do I want to give him the second hit in his combo?" At the end of the storyline, you'll have enough Skill Points to give him a full loadout of okay moves, or a half-full loadout of good ones, and then you can start unlocking his Ultimate moves. As he approaches the Skill Point cap, you'll eventually be able to go full All Your Powers Combined Elite Tweak.
• Super Smash Bros. Ultimate has Spirits, which are a power-up which take the form of characters from various video games, both from Nintendo and other game companies. Primary Spirits can be equipped to fighters and can be leveled to Level 99. Some spirits can even transform into more powerful versions once they reach that level.

First-Person Shooter

• The first weapon obtained in BioShock is a wrench, the only melee weapon in the game, which does so little damage, even with the 4x multiplier of Electrobolt, it is at first only good as an Emergency Weapon. Then the player obtains the tonics that boost its attack speed and damage, as well as its damage against unaware opponents (which includes enemies stunned with Electrobolt or attacked by Insect Swarm), all of which stack with each other and the damage bonuses provided by the Research Camera and suddenly every single enemy in the game aside from Big Daddies and the final boss is dying in a handful of hits.
• In Bioshock Infinite, there's the Pistol and Machine Gun. The Pistol starts off as a fairly weak weapon which is good against minor enemies but not against other ones. Most gamers ditch it for other weapons. But if you stick with it and upgrade it fully, or have the correct gear, it becomes a weapon that provides fast fire, solid performance at all ranges, carries up to 31 rounds when you get to Soldier's Field and is an excellent sidearm overall. The Machine Gun is effective early on, but it isn't as good against tougher enemies. Fully upgrade it, and use the Bullet Boon or Ammo Advantage gear, and the Machine Gun will suddenly have a massive clip size, carrying even more bullets than the Crank Gun, is as effective as the Shotgun from close to medium range, can take out enemies with in a few shots, and will almost never run out of ammo because it's the most common weapon in the game.
• Krieg the Psycho from Borderlands 2 is extremely underpowered at low levels. His skill choices are either extremely narrow in application at low levels or just not useful enough to carry him through like the basic skills of the other characters... or it might just kill him outright by delaying his shield recharging or setting himself on fire. Level him up high enough, though, and he can become a damage-dealing monster, able to slaughter entire hordes of enemies while healing himself or chaining enough damage to annihilate raid bosses in an ever-increasing rain of blood-explosions.
• Call of Duty: Zombies has all the players start off with an M1911, a pistol which deals piddling damage which falls off hard only after a few rounds. However, if it is upgraded, you can dual-wield it and fire grenades that explode on contact, each gun having the same fire rate as a normal M1911. Although it becomes hard to see from all the smoke just what you're shooting at on top of the fact you can still hurt yourself by firing too close.
• Of all the weapons in Contra Doom, the Homing Missiles starts out being the weakest, which while the missiles home onto enemies, they otherwise act like the player's default weapon bullets in terms of damage and rate of fire. However, if you can find another Homing Missile pickup, you can fire two streams of homing missiles simultaneously, which makes the weapon more deadly. Couple that with both rate of fire upgrades and you have a monster on your hands. If you can keep a hold of them, that is.
• Doom 64 has the Unmaker. When you first pick it up, it only fires a single laser at a slow rate, which isn't really much to write home about. However, by picking up the Demon Keys found in three secret levels, the weapon eventually becomes stronger^note the first key increases its rate of fire, the second key gives it a Spread Shot effect and the last key basically ups both effects considerably, to the point that it can even take out the Final Boss in a couple of shots.
• The basic pistol from Doom (2016) starts out fairly weak, with the charged shot and infinite ammo being the only things going for it. But if you purchase the upgrades and complete the Mastery challenge, it becomes strong enough to one-shot Possessed Soldiers and send Hell Razers into a staggered state with a single headshot.
• Evolve: The Monster starts out weaker than the four human Hunters, but gradually through hunting and consuming wildlife, gains more powerful attacks and health, eventually equalling them, and then growing more powerful than them. This is downplayed somewhat by the fact the Monster is still a force to be reckoned with in stage one, and a skilled enough Monster player can end up brutalizing the Hunters without needing to level up.
• The Dispersion Pistol from Unreal starts off as a Ranged Emergency Weapon that is quickly outclassed by other weapons you find early on. But if you keep finding upgrades for it, it goes from peashooter to Punch-Packing Pistol to Hand Cannon as the game goes, with the only drawback being that it fires uncharged shots slower and slower.
• Cid the Seer of Ziggurat has low initial stats, and his saving grace is a considerable boost to experience gains. He's very much Difficult, but Awesome.

Hack & Slash

• In the first Dungeon Siege, the starting knife is required to get the chicken gun.
• In Dynasty Warriors:
  • In the sixth game, the bow moveset shared by Sun Shangxiang and Yue Ying initially seemed dismaying — "They took two of the coolest women in the game and gave them a useless weapon!" However, once you level up that bow and arrow, it's a monster because you can spray tons of arrows into the crowd at once. It's also a bit of a Game-Breaker in that you can snipe from a faraway enough distance that the computer AI generals don't realize they should block your attack.
  • In Dynasty Warriors Online, it's actually part of the mechanics. No weapon ever starts out at full power in the first place. You have to temper weapons so they have better stats. This trope comes in, however, in that tempering only has a limited effect on the stats based on the weapon. If you grind a weapon, you have to use it so many times, you can change the stat spread on a weapon. On some weapons this is needless. On others, like the tonfa, this turns what is otherwise a horribly stated weapon into a competent one, with good combos as well.
  • Speaking of Dynasty Warriors, Fire Emblem Warriors has special character-specific weapons that are pure garbage at first. They have abysmal attack power barely breaking 80 and most averaging 30 which is good until about halfway through the campaign on normal, but the latest updates the game released created "opus" materials which specifically power up certain weapons for certain characters, and change that worthless 30 damage stick into a 700+ damage god-killer. Even the hero weapons rarely boast such power. Coupled with the fact that you'll usually be breaking levels over one hundred at this point, you can practically ignore the weapon triangle and just beat everything to death in seconds.
  • Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity: Zelda might start off pretty lacking in comparison to Link or Impa, being reliant on her YX or YYX combos. However, if you manage to do the right quests, you'll be able to unlock more combos for her to use, giving her more utility in battle. And that's just with the Sheikah Slate. When she awakens her sealing power, hoo boy...
• In the X-Box remake of Ninja Gaiden, the wooden sword is easily the most useless weapon in the game, and takes the most time/money to upgrade fully... but once you do, it becomes the most powerful weapon in the game: the Unlabored Flawlessness.
• The Crystal/Big Star weapons in Warriors Orochi 3. Initially they start with low attack power (usually 9 or 10), but at max proficiency they gain a plus 54 attack increase, making them the most powerful weapons in the game, except for a select few 4-star weapons reserved for extremely badass characters.

Idle Game

• Lit (2021): The "Emission theory" upgrade multiplies the battery cap based on how many seconds you've spent in the challenge. It's okay, but won't help too much past a certain point. Yellow level 5 multiplies color gain effect by battery cap, making it a little better. But once you get yellow level 9, which powers its effect by itself^0.75, it becomes freaking amazing with a bit of patience.

Massively Multiplayer Online RPG

• City of Heroes:
  • Several of the archetypes have this feature. Some types of Controllers, for instance, are fairly hapless at low levels when soloing but on reaching high enough levels (and with a selection of complementary powers) become unstoppable engines of destruction that can outdamage the dedicated damage-dealers.
  • Dominators are a very good example. Often considered underdogs, perceived as one of the two weakest archetypes in the game... at least until somebody discovered that, with some careful (and prohibitively expensive) build planning, one could stay in their "Mr. Hyde" mode without having to recharge it between uses. A "permadom" Dominator is easily one of the strongest characters in the game.
• The (supposedly) lower-tier Agility heroes from Defense of the Ancients have this. Starting out, not only is their health and damage disappointing, unlike Intelligence heroes or higher-tier Agility heroes they don't have good spells for burst damage, making life difficult. By avoiding the enemy's assassination attempts and building gold and levels, though, they eventually become One Man Armies who eat mooks and their former oppressors like so much popcorn.
• Digimon Masters Online: Oddly enough, one of the most popular Digimon in the entire Digimon franchise, Renamon, most definitely falls under this. It's even more prominent in that she gets the 'power' part of this trope upon digivolving to her final form. In this game, Renamon's skills are incredibly lackluster compared to the skills of many other Rookie Digimon. They have long startup with low damage, which doesn't do justice to her original incarnation as being one of the most powerful Rookie Digimon to exist (but, to be fair, her normal attacking capabilities are very good). Evolve it into Kyuubimon, and her second skill's damage also isn't worth its cooldown and mana consumption. Evolve it into Taomon, and you'll quickly get turned off by the enormous startup of her second skill, which deals a little less damage than the typical second skills of Ultimate Digimon. Evolve it into Sakuyamon, and she gets even more pathetic! She sports one of the the longest startup and one of the weakest first skills in the game. And then she has one of the weakest final skills of all the obtainable Mega Digimon, sporting the weakest final skill damage with an above-average length of cooldown. Endure all that however (or find an alternative way to level her up), and you're rewarded with Kuzuhamon. Treated as a Burst Mode in this game and thus given the stats of a Burst Mode instead of a Side Mega, Kuzuhamon is considered the strongest non-Jogress Data Type Digimon in the entire game, capable of dishing out her first and second skills alternatively. While her skills are just slightly better than the average Burst Mode skills in the game, what makes it appealing is the fact that her normal attack stats are hard hitting but slow, in which the 'slow' part could be completely eliminated by using a skill, in which she can quickly rinse and repeat a cycle of dealing lethal blows and throwing out a good skill. She deals an incredible amount of damage in that she can actually KO Digimon in the hardest levels of the Digimon Labyrinth before they get a chance to hit her back. You get all of this by leveling your Renamon all the way up to 65, and leveling starting from level 41 is a very slow and painful process for all Digimon.
• In Granblue Fantasy, Rusted weapons have stats that make them completely useless. However, with a Bahamut horn they can be transformed into a Bahamut weapon, which offer powerful attack and HP buffs based on a character's race.
• Guild Wars: Mesmers. At their peak in the hands of a skilled player, Mesmers are hell on earth for enemies, due to the fact that the class's showcase style is turning an enemy's power against himself and making enemies die in a matter of seconds for no immediately obvious reason. However, in any campaign, it takes time for mesmers to find all the specialized skills they need to perform at peak efficiency, and even more time to get over the huge learning curve of the class-early mesmers, and unskilled players, are mildly annoying at best, and have minimal impact on anything.
  • Necromancers would fall under this category as well. Initially, they seem like one of the weakest classes in the game, only able to deal weak hits and very slowly drain an enemy's health bar, while the Necromancer himself takes damage like a newborn baby. However, once you hunt down some of their more useful skills and start capturing elites, they become extremely versatile and devastating in both PvP and PvE.
  • In the sequel, Mesmers again fall victim to this trope. Initially they are very off-putting. Most of the other classes have unique and useful class-exclusive mechanics, while the mesmer's only real power is to create very weak clones of himself, in addition to being a Squishy Wizard. Later on, with the proper skill setup and trait point distribution, they become absolute monsters capable of piling on damage in many different ways, often all at once, while creating mass confusion by pumping out identical copies of themselves capable of tanking and creating distractions, or exploding for massive damage.
• In Pirates of the Burning Sea, the Freetrader class is one of the weakest in the game at early to mid levels, having no decent specialised combat ships unlike the Naval Officer and Privateer classes. But once you reach max level, you get access to the Couronne Mastercraft Galleon, which is arguably the strongest single ship in the game. It possesses equal or greater firepower than the best warships that Naval Officers can sail, and its armor is much thicker and tougher. It also has the bonus of eight bow and stern cannons, making it quite deadly when approached from any angle, whereas almost all other ships in the game have only two bow and stern cannons.
• The Terran Republic in PlanetSide 2 starts off with some of the worst weapons and vehicles - a carbine that cannot hit anything past 5 meters, a clumsy tank that loses every fight, anti-armor MAX grenade launchers that cannot kill anything, a weak LMG, etc. However, Terran players can unlock some of the most powerful weapons in the game - said carbine can be replaced by a gun with laser-like accuracy, their SABR-13 assault rifle can out-snipe snipers, those crappy MAX grenade launchers are replaced by dual rotary rocket launchers that can kill enemies from a mile away, etc. The biggest change comes in their Prowler tank, which becomes faster, more armored, and can unlock the Lockdown ability, anchoring it in place while increasing its fire rate, projectile speed, and reload speed by 50%, which when matched with an armor-piercing main weapon, allows it to kill anything within a mile - air, infantry, and especially vehicles. Infantry beware a locked down Prowler loaded with high-explosive rounds.
• Ragnarok Online:
  • Although it became easier eventually, the Merchant class series (Blacksmiths and Alchemists) were slow to level unless you had a large amount of money, but once they get one particular skill (Arm Cannon and Cart Cannon), they can one or two hit most players.
  • Likewise, leveling a specific build for a professor is painfully slow and probably requires a lot of leeching exp, but once they reach very high levels, they have very high survivability in PvP situations, especially for a mage class, and they also have a vast array of overpowered support skills for large scale PvP.
  • The 'Super Novice' class, which is only accessible if you refrain from switching classes until level 40. Even if they're a Glass Cannon, they become extremely powerful in the endgame.
• Runescape has the Ivandis Flail (And later Blisterwood Weapons), which is of the only weapon capable doing full damage to vampyres. It's basically a sickle on a chain attached to a stick, and starts out about as powerful as farming implement on a stick would be. But, if you kill enough vampyres, take their corpses to a sacred site and cremate their bodies to release their souls, your skills with the flail magically improve and becomes an extremely powerful weapon (But only when used against vampyres). Blisterwood weapons, released in a later quest, are affected by this too. Only those start out powerful and become even more powerful.
• Spiral Knights:
  • The Sealed Sword, which is a 3-star sword that can be purchased following several battles against the Royal Jelly boss. While it is capable of causing random status effects, it only deals normal damage and has the same attack speed and damage as the Kamarin and Grintovec, sans their abilities to stun and freeze enemies respectively, and a far less useful charge attack than the two of them. If you can lug it around until it gets to level 5 (preferably with an extra weapon slot so you don't sacrifice carrying one of your actually useful special damage swords) it can be upgraded into the elemental-dealing Avenger and the shadow-dealing Faust, which can in turn respectively be upgraded into the Divine Avenger and Gran Faust, both of which are incredibly common among 5-star players for a reason.
  • In comparison its handgun counterpart the Antigua, which can be upgraded into the Silversix and Argent Peacemaker or the Blackhawk and Sentenza, is a bit more useful because it deals piercing damage and it can fire off six shots before reloading.
  • The Brandish is a 2-star sword that's basically a reskin of the Calibur with a unique charge attack. It can be upgraded into three elemental variations of it that can set fire to, freeze, or shock enemies, the Nightblade which is one of the only two shadow-dealing swords in the game (the other being the Faust), or the Cautery Sword, which is borderline useless due to Crippling Overspecialization; it's intended for destroying slimes, which shadow weapons already can do with ease.
• Temtem: Towly has paper-thin defences and a shallow technique pool (it only learns attacks of its own types through breeding!), but it evolves into two powerful attackers.
• World of Tanks: When first purchased, many tanks have weak engines and even weaker guns, forcing them to crawl across the battlefield to attack enemies they have little hope of damaging. Hanging in there and getting the experience required to unlock some upgrades, however, can make them into powerhouses. Perhaps the ultimate example was the Tier-5 KV Heavy, prior to the tech tree split in Patch 0.7.3. Incredibly slow and initially sporting a barely adequate 76mm gun, it could upgrade to some of the most powerful weapons available in its tier, including the 152mm which can one-shot many smaller tanks and a 107mm gun capable of penetrating heavy tanks two or three tiers up for significant damage.
  • One of the biggest offenders is the Tier-6 KV-1S Heavy. The stock configuration results in a slow tank with unreliable armor usually using an outdated howitzer, and it stays this way until the user grinds out every single upgrade. The top configuration that requires over 40-thousand experience? Medium-like mobility, armed with an extremely painful 122mm cannon, and one of the most whined about tanks in the game.
  • Also a benefactor of this trope is the Tier-4 JagdPanzer 38(t) "Hetzer" tank destroyer (prior to the introduction of the Waffentrager TD line in Patch 0.8.9). If to be accessed via the Tier-3 Marder II, absolutely nothing from the previous TD will be carried on to the Hetzer; while accessing it from the Tier-4 Pz 38(t) n.A light tank will only unlock the second out of the 4 compatible engines. Still, once fully upgraded and in the hands of a skilled player, the Hetzer becomes absolutely murderous on the battlefield, giving positive light to the infamous "Hetzers gonna Hetz" meme.
• The Ecaflip from Wakfu are built on this. In the earlier levels, they are lackluster, mid-range close-range fighters with a useless teleport, some very limited healing ability and chance-based attacks that do more harm than good. As they level up, however, they quickly turn into Glass Cannons who can heal if the party lacks an Enripsa, whose chance-based skills become a lot more useful. For example, one of their special abilities, which in earlier levels could accidentally heal the enemy, does 1/2 the damage of the Ecaflip's previous attack with no cost when it is fully upgraded.
• World of Warcraft:
  • The Paladin class. Leveling up a Paladin was absurdly boring. A Retribution Paladin (the damage spec) didn't even get a damage strike until level 40, meaning that they basically threw up a seal and auto-attacked for 40 levels, tossing in a Judgement every 10 seconds (it was so bad that a lot of Paladins leveled in their tank spec, because your damage was hardly any different, but you had extra health and armor, as well as multi-hit abilities). But at level 80 (in Wrath, Retribution was basically non-existent till then), they were one of the strongest DPS specs in the game, if not the strongest. They got toned down a bit, but thankfully in Cataclysm, leveling was reworked so they get Crusader Strike from level 1 baseline and at level 10, either Holy Shock, Avenger's Shield, or Templar's Verdict depending on spec (any of those make leveling much easier than it used to be).
  • Shadow Priests and Shaman. Even with the class changes that get them the fun abilities earlier, they both start out slowly and tediously, only to turn into one of the highest DPS in the endgame if played well.
  • On release, Windwalker Monks started out with middling offensive capability, with them primarily relying on Blackout Kick and Tiger Palm to bypass enemy armor, then right before level 60 they learned Rising Sun Kick, which caused all enemies within 8 yards to take an additional 20% damage, and Tigereye Brew, which at 10 stacks from spending a total of 40 Chi on other attacks would grant a 60% damage increase. And when Tiger Palm, Rising Sun Kick, and Tigereye Brew were used together...
    • Adding to Tigereye Brew's power, Windwalker's pre-Legion Mastery gave you a chance to get an additional charge with a base chance of 20%. If you invested primarily in Mastery, you could get 2 charges every other time you spent 4 Chi; the ability held a maximum of 20 charges and you could use 10 charges at once, so you could pop it as soon as you has 10 stacks or wait until you had 20 so you could activate both halves in succession. The results were quite bloody.
  • Affliction Warlocks are entirely reliant on their Damage Over Time effects, so starting out they're mostly reliant on slowly letting their spells waste away at the enemy while their minion keeps aggro. At max level, with a multitude of DoTs and talents that affect how they interact, how they tick damage, or giving them new spells, an Affliction Warlock's enemies will only stay alive as long as it takes them to pile all on their spells before dying, and in high end group content Affliction has infamously ranked as the highest output caster DPS for almost every expansion.
  • The Elekk Plushie in Warlords of Draenor is a nearly-useless battle pet, due to all of its "abilities" being cosmetic in nature. While it can gain XP and reach the same max level as other pets, its only apparent use is soaking attacks. However, if the player defeats every battle pet master with the Plushie on their team, they receive a special achievement and the plushie comes to life as a real elekk. Needless to say, this is no easy task as some of the masters are difficult to beat with all three pets, let alone only two that are usable.

Miscellaneous Strategy

• Terra Invicta: India starts off relatively insignificant, especially compared to the great powers of the U.S., China, and E.U., but a properly managed and invested in India can catch up to the U.S. in GDP and science output within ten years of the game's start.
  • Africa is a patchwork quilt of corrupt and impoverished semi-failed states that nevertheless has a stupid amount of potential. Start with Nigeria or Egypt for the best conquest launchpad, and use either home-grown armies or a mid-sized external power like Israel or the UK to gobble up African nations. In mid-game you can merge the Nigerian Federation, Great Bantu and/or the East Africa Federation into a big super-state that controls four resource regions and an impressive GDP for the late 2020s. Fully unified under the African Union, the continent is host to one-fifth to one-quarter of the Earth's total population with a GDP comparable to Greater India or an expanded EU, though admittedly it takes a long time to reach that point (which is why this strategy is seldom used). Your main enemy is unrest, which only really becomes manageable after the continent is unified under African Union.
  • China if Difficult, but Awesome. It is the largest economy on Earth with a colossal population, but unlike the USA it starts as a technological middleweight with an inefficient authoritarian government, and its military is nowhere near America's might at first. But its economy is very mighty, and China has more room to grow than any other power in the game. If developed into a first-world democracy, China (or even better, the Pan-Asian Combine) can make America's research establishment feel distinctly inadequate, and a well-developed Chinese military is one of the few things that can match alien power on the ground.
• Total War Franchise:
  • Rome: Total War:
    • Parthia starts out with some of the most financially poor starting cities in the game which are separated by huge tracts of empty wilderness, making troop waypointing tedious and leading to high corruption. They are a Fragile Speedster faction with pitiful infantry (in a game where infantry is the backbone of any serious army) and their best units, their horse archers, require serious practice and micromanagement to use effectively but even then are terrible at capturing cities. However, when powered up enough, they can become the ancient equivalent of the Timurids.
    • The Greeks start out with scattered territories and enemies all around them. In fact, it's not uncommon for them to be one of the first major factions to be eliminated. However, if they survive, they get some of the best Mighty Glacier infantry and most profitable provinces in the game.
    • The Seleucids have good units (including overpowered phalanx units in several varieties) but start with numerous enemies on all sides. If they survive until the late game, they get Silver-Shield Legionnaires, who are every bit as good as Rome's.
  • Medieval II: Total War:
    • Portugal. Early game, laughable militia and light infantry. Late game, tied with Spain as the best overall army list.
    • Scotland. One fairly impoverished town province with Highlanders (admittedly fairly good light infantry), Peasant/Highland Archers (terrible archers), no crossbow or gunpowder units at all, and only the bog-standard knights along with Border Horse (fast but poorly armed and armored light cavalry). The Scotland faction usually just gets steam-rolled by England in the first few stages of the game. However, if you hang in there, you end up getting Highland Nobles, Noble Swordsman and Noble Pikemen (respectively: very good and cheap heavy infantry, Dismounted Chivalric Knights but cheaper and on steroids, and the second-best pikemen in the whole game), access to Knights Templar and Hospitaller guilds, access to gunpowder and crossbow mercenaries, and the cheap and fairly-decent Noble Highland Archers unit.
    • Russia starts out with a few poor provinces at the very top corner of the map, and their starting roster isn't particularly impressive either. The Early Game Hell gives way to Mid Game Hell when the Mongols show up, but by then hopefully you will have fortified your defenses and your armies will be much better - you will have top-notch cavalry along with heavy troops like the Boyar's Sons and the Druzhina. When you fully upgrade the walled cities, you get the powerful Cossack Musketeers which are on par with Italian musket troops, and you get them automatically.
    • In the popular Medieval II mod, Third Age: Total War, the Free Peoples of Eriador. They can eventually become the fabled kingdom of Arnor, which has some of the very best units in the game. Well, by human standards anyway.
  • Russia in Empire: Total War. Yes, 9 provinces sounds good, but most of them can't pay for their own upkeep, and you mostly just have crappy militia that can only win through Zerg Rush tactics. Get hold of a sea port, build up some infrastructure, encourage growth in your poor provinces, and research some technologies, and Russia becomes a very different beast.
  • Total War: Shogun 2:
    • The Otomo clan are Christians, which means everyone in Japan hates their guts. Their initial leader is dishonourable, adding to the public order penalties from Christian/Buddhist conflicts. They start with a matchlock unit, but it isn't very good and costs a ton of upkeep. They share an island with the extremely aggressive and expansionist Shimazu. They start at war with two factions, who also happen to be allied to each other. However, if you overcome all these downsides, you'll find yourself swimming in money (thanks to foreign trade ports), armies bristling with matchlocks (which are short-range, but MUCH more powerful than bows) and nigh-unstoppable fleets (thanks to European-style ships armed with cannon).
    • The Ikko-Ikki, thanks to their Jodo Shinshu Buddhist faith and rejection of the feudal system, are also The Scrappy of feudal Japan, and as such don't have any samurai units besides the somewhat limited katana/bow/yari ronin. They do, however, have very powerful warrior monks, including matchlock monks, as well as the ability to take over provinces via rebellion! Their main problem is, however, the simple fact that monks take quite a while to acquire, moreso if you want to upgrade your blacksmiths and fletchers beforehand.
    • The Uesugi clan also specializes in warrior monks, but must survive the Early Game Hell of their terrible starting position. If they can overcome that than they have the potential to become a terrifying powerhouse in the late game. Fielding tons of warrior monks who'll get boosted stats from blacksmiths or fletchers, and also be cheaper to recruit and maintain. All while making tons of money thanks to their extra trade income.
  • Total War: Warhammer II:
    • Alarielle suffers from the same problem in both the Vortex and Mortal Empires campaigns: she starts in control of only a single settlement with a Dark Elf faction right on her doorstep (and poised to grab the Sword of Khaine if they feel like it), her economy can barely support the High Elves' notoriously expensive units, and the facilities to use her unique perks are witheringly expensive. Additionally, her unique mechanic means she starts of with penalties to public order and diplomatic relations, and her already-shaky economy takes a further hit. Manage to beat back the hordes and establish a foothold before her allies turn on her, though, and she can make great use of having one of two hybrid armies in the game while that same mechanic turns around into a massive buff that easily allows her to ally with every other High Elf faction.
    • Tomb Kings in general can be this compared to usual mechanics. They have strict limit to every unit type except Cannon Fodder basic skeletons which increases by unit production building itself, and you have very poor income from your cities. Even your armies in general are limited strictly, so you could not simply conquer more land to get more resources from more cities. But on tier 3-5 they have constructs which are so powerful that can be considered Game-Breaker. The key to strategy is ravage enemy territory instead of expansion to quickly construct expensive buildings in your starting city instead of investments into newly obtained.
    • The Ordertide is a player name for a phenomenon where the non-Chaos factions (Empire, Bretonnia, elves, dwarves...) end up completing researches that make them all have little reason to go to war with each other, making them able to outnumber and Zerg Rush the hordes of Chaos (which you may recognize as the exact opposite of what happens when Chaos is finally united under a single banner and is able to curbstomp the fractious Order factions.
• Valkyria Chronicles 4: Lady Drunk Shell-Shocked Veteran Vincey stands out for being one of the worst units in the game with her freezing up mid-mission out of drunkenness… but once you unlock the Secret Character Gertrude by saving up research points, you can do her mission, which fixes Vincey's potentials into a powerhouse who can compete with Raz for best shock trooper.

Party Games

• Mario Party: Star Rush: The 1, 2, and 6 faces on Daisy's Friendly Dice Block are replaced with a number matching however many characters are currently on her team. While a team of only Daisy and Toad gives the block a 50/50 chance of rolling a 2, the more teammates she has, the more consistently she will be able to roll higher numbers.

Platform Games

• Broforce: when Brolander spawns in, he starts with no special attack and abysmal running speed. Successful kills and ammo drops power him up and give him his special attack (which also doubles as an indicator of his current power level). At the fifth stage, he moves faster than any other character in the game, deals insane amounts of damage, zaps enemies just by being near them, and has the ability to resurrect himself at the cost of his accumulated power.
• Kero Blaster:
  • The Repeater (the first upgrade to the Pea Shooter) is outclassed by the Fan overall, since it deals roughly the same damage with a bigger projectile size, and it costs less to upgrade overall; the other two weapons introduced afterwards also have wider roles than the Repeater. However, putting money into the Repeater upgrades it to the Lazer for a massive damage upgrade, which can then be upgraded to the Lazer Uzi, making it the strongest weapon of the main four.
  • The Kuro Blaster starts with great damage, but has the range of the starting Pea Shooter. Finding the other parts of it drastically increases its usability by adding range and damage.
• MapleStory pre-revamp had the bowmaster. Early on, they were clunky to play and pretty much outclassed by night lords in every way. However, at the third job they started getting skills that were very useful and by fourth they had the fastest attack in the game, and unlike Night Lords they don't have to worry about ammo.
• Mega Man
  • Mega Man X himself. At the start of each game, his abilities are mediocre at best, but collecting Powered Armor and Heart Tanks turns him into a One-Man Army.
  • For Zero in the Mega Man Zero series, his weapons from the first two games. Frequent use of said weapons increase their abilities (the Z-saber, for instance, unlocks skills and even enables a Charged Attack with each subsequent level). There's also the Platforming Pocket Pal from the fourth game: it has 21 different abilities that can only be unlocked by feeding it E-crystals, the Reploids' and Energy Beings' equivalent to a power food.
  • In the fangame Mega Man Unlimited, you can play as the final boss (Prototype Zero) after beating the game. He starts out incredibly weak, with a short-ranged attack that is Cast from Hit Points and not a lot of health. Thing is, instead of Power Copying, he gets upgrades each time he beats a stage. This includes a far more damaging sword attack that cancels projectiles, increased range on all his attacks, godlike air mobility (including a double-jump, a flying uppercut, an airdash, a ground-pound, and a Rush-style hoverboard), a big speed boost, an attack that generates seeking projectiles that damage enemies, pick up items, and can move in any direction every time he dashes, and the ability to deflect shots just by standing still. And remember: unlike Mega Man, he gets all these abilities at the same time. By the Wily Castle stages, he's turned the game's notoriously steep difficulty curve into a pretzel.
• In Ratchet & Clank series since the introduction of upgrades, many of the weapons will be crap to start with, but after an upgrade or two, will become massively awesome. Notable examples:
  • Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando:
    • The Shield Charger. It surrounds you with shield that negates all damage and slightly damages enemies that touch it, but it has kinda low ammunition that cannot be found in crates and does not stay on that long. Upgrade it - which is very hard to do - and it becomes Tesla Barrier, that shocks nearby enemies with surprisingly powerful shocks, takes much more punishment, and gets more ammo.
    • The Plasma Coil from the same game is basically a plasmatic rocket-launcher that damages a single enemy and zaps everyone nearby. Cool, but not as powerful as you would expect from a weapon that costs 150000 bolts (more than The Bouncer that is available two planets prior). 15 shots only don't help at all. Upgrade it and it becomes Plasma Storm that shoots a ball of plasma that shocks all enemies it travels by, possibly multiple times, and can clean a room by itself.
    • The Gravity Bomb/Mini-Nuke is a different case of this trope. It is your starting weapon and upgrade makes nice mushroom cloud. Strong for the first half of the game or so, but by the end of the game it will be largely forgotten. Until New Game Plus, that's it, where its upgrade to mega version costs as much as Zodiac and more than R.Y.N.O II, but its ammunition goes from 8 to 20 (and 30 for Ultra version), while the damage becomes on par with said weapons and is ramped further when upgraded to Ultra.
    • The Hoverbomb gun. Holds only 10 charges, costs more than The Bouncer, is available only quite late into the game and while it has technically unlimited range, you keep your usual view so good luck hitting anything with it outside of point-blank range. Even though mines are powerful, the above makes it hard to use mines efficiently. If you persist and upgrade it though, it becomes Tetrabomb gun, which shoots five mines at the price of one, and is one of most damaging weapons in the game. Nothing prevents you from using it as mine shotgun then.
  • Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal:
    • The Holo-Shield Glove. V1: blocks a few projectiles before it shorts out, and serves no secondary purpose. In a word: useless. V2: blocks more damage, and sucks the very lifeforce from your enemies to heal you. In a word: awesome. It then begins to Counter-Attack enemies, and shields become bigger.
    • The Infector. It's a complete bitch to upgrade, the hardest in the game and only ever has 15 ammo, 20 or so max. V1, shoots out a ball of goo that does small damage, V2 makes the infection last a bit longer by a few seconds, V3 has splash damage, V4 has slightly better splash damage and homing, and V5? Launches out a massive Infecto-Bomb, hence its name, that infects the blast radius and anything the resultant 6-8 globs of goo seek out and find, with phenominally better performance.
    • The Disc Blade Gun, which is pathetically weak by the time and for the price tag you get it. V2 does not help it much with saws reflecting from walls, but not enemies and slightly higher damage. Then at V3 its damage more than doubles, and discs starts to bounce of enemies as well, allowing it to hit many enemies with a single disc (especially with their latent homing abilities). The final upgrade causes disc to split each time they hit an enemy up to 16 discs, making it an effective crowd-controller.
    • Quack-o-Ray. At first it just transforms enemies into ducks, but at higher levels these ducks lay eggs that seek enemies and then explode, and for final level the first transformed enemy will be duck from hell that stays with you and attacks enemies.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • Tails, specifically Sonic 3 & Knuckles: in both Sonic 2 and Sonic 3 without locking the game onto the Sonic & Knuckles cartridge, getting all seven Chaos Emeralds didn't do squat for Tails other than rewarding the player with the Good Ending, unlike Sonic. Even in Sonic 3 & Knuckles, collecting all seven Chaos Emeralds still doesn't grant Tails any cool new powers, unlike Sonic or Knuckles... however, by playing through seven more Special Stages, the Chaos Emeralds can be upgraded into the more powerful Super Emeralds, which grant a fancy new Super Mode to anyone who collects them, including Tails. And unlike the other transformations in the game, Super Tails comes with four birds that home in on enemies and deal damage to them — all Tails has to do is just stand and burn rings for energy while the birds fight for him. The game also largely averts Contractual Boss Immunity: the birds can damage almost any boss in the game, with the only exceptions resulting from the unusual strategies those bosses require. The only bosses the birds can't help with are one of the bosses in Death Egg Zone,^note which can only be damaged by its own bombs and the miniboss of Sandopolis Zone^note who must sink in some quicksand in the left half of the arena, but the birds don't know that and knock the boss all over the place.
  • Sonic in Sonic 3 without Lock-On. His special abilities aren't nearly as useful as Tails' flying, but unlike Tails, he can transform into his Super Mode after you collect all Chaos Emeralds, which makes him invulnerable and faster and improves his jumping height.
  • In Sonic Adventure 2, the Mystic Melody power-up. On your first playthrough it will seem useless, and no characters can get it unless they backtrack to find it (for some it's easy, for others you can't get it until the last level). Then, when you finally HAVE Mystic Melody, you can use the power with small temples which are just barely hidden in the game's stages. The Melody can do everything from open portals to cause rings to magically appear, which you can use as shortcuts to later parts of a stage or pathways to other powerups... basically, it's practically an in-game cheat item, and is also required for certain special missions.

Puzzle Games

• Puzzle Quest:
  • In Puzzle Quest: Challenge Of The Warlords, the Broken Shield you receive at the beginning of the game becomes obsolete almost immediately. But if you complete all of the Great Machine subquests, it is transformed into the powerful Shield of Albion, which can potentially make you immune to any spell using Yellow Mana.
  • In Puzzle Quest 2, the Templar's first offensive spell Shield Bash becomes stronger as the Templar's defense increases. Improving defense will eventually make Shield Bash the Templar's most efficient and powerful means of inflicting damage.

Racing Games

• In Shift 2: Unleashed The Toyota Supra starts as a C-rank retro car. Then you can install the Lexus LFA engine and tune it up to an eye-watering 230mph(370kph) or outright insane 277mph(446kph) for you Speedhunters. It has decent handling to boot! Just watch out for the torque steer.
• The FEISAR Prototype is this in Wipeout 2048. The vehicle is unique in that it starts off slow, but with each speed pad boost, the speed is permanently increased until it collides with a wall or completes a lap.

Real-Time Strategy

• Age of Empires II:
  • The Turks have late game bonuses such as increased gold mining does little use early in the game, since the civilizations have no pikeman or elite skirmisher upgrades, lousy and their mangonels have no upgrades. Along with them missing a few important technologies in the earlier ages. However, if Turk players manage to age up to late Castle Age and Imperial is where they get their power. For example, their unique unit, the Janissary is the one of the two Castle Age gunpowder units available (The other being the Spanish Conquistador). Their gunpowder units are cheaper, have higher hp, and can be created faster. The Janissary is basically a stronger hand cannoneer with higher damage, better accuracy, and increased range. They also get free light cavalry upgrades, with expert Turk players advancing with hordes of Hussars, Bombard Cannons, and Jannissaries. Finally their unique technology "Artillery" increases the range of their Bombard Cannons, Cannon Galleons, and Bombard Towers.
  • Do not let a Goth player take a heavy lead. Because if the Goth player does, the player will spam a shitton of cheap infantry units and swarm into your base (especially Huskarls where they can even shrug off arrows from castles and towers).
  • Due to lacking long-term economic bonuses they are very difficult to start with, but once they reach Imperial Age the Saracens can kill anything at sight with their strong camels and various advanced ranged units. This is obvious in the second Saladin scenario, where the player starts in Feudal Age with little resources, restricted to the Castle Age and many soon-to-be Imperial Age foes trying to kill the player.
  • The Koreans do not have any significant early game economic bonus, and their stone gathering bonus isn't that significant in the early stages of the game until the Castle Age. However, once they start building Bombard Towers, Keeps, and Castles and mass up War Wagons, they are incredibly hard to deal with late game.
  • The Magyars are considered to be one of the best late game civilizations. The Magyars not only have access to cheaper Hussar units, but their unique unit costs no gold at all. In addition, they have a very versatile tech tree with mostly full archer upgrades (minus the Hand Cannoneer), full infantry upgrades, and full cavalry upgrades. Their only weakness is their mediocre siege weaponry and somewhat weak defense, and they don't have any significant early game economic bonuses across from the free Blacksmith upgrades for melee units. This is also highlighted in Honfoglalás scenario. The player starts out with a few villages where the Pechenegs come and attack the said villages. The Magyars then settled near the Khazars as a refuge from the Pechenegs, but the Pechenegs still continue to swarm the Magyars which forces them to retreat again. The Magyars then settled forward west with a few Pecheneg attacks, but the attacks were stalled when the Byzantine empire request help from the Magyars to defeat the Bulgarians. The Magyars defeated the Bulgarians which earns them a Worthy Opponent label from the Bulgarians. Then the Magyars are forced to retreat again from the Pechenegs. The scenario ends with the Magyars conquering Moravia, abandoned their nomadic ways, settled in, and adopted a lot of European customs (including Christianity).
  • The Portuguese are incredibly weak early game since their gold discount bonus doesn't play into the later stages of the game and don't have any significant early game economic bonuses until they get the Feitoria building.
  • The Vietnamese are very comparable to the Portuguese in retrospect. Both are team dependent civilizations that don't have any strong economic bonuses early game and many of their civilization bonuses only have a bigger impact in later stages of the game. This means the Vietnamese in 1v1 situations will get destroyed by early game civilizations such as the Malay, Vikings, and the Huns (not to mention, the Paper Money tech, where each Vietnamese ally get 500 gold, will be incredibly useless in 1v1 games). That being said, should the Vietnamese snowball the game, they are a very feared lategame powerhouse with not only tanky archers and Battle Elephants, but also having one of the best trash units with Imperial Skirmishers, meaning they can easily hold off in trash wars.
• Age of Empires III:
  • The British civilization is incredibly slow to start off with, but in the 4th and 5th ages their epic Musketeers and rocket artillery form some of the strongest armies in the game.
  • The Dutch and the Portuguese as well with a dash of Difficult, but Awesome. The former has a slow start since their settlers cost Coin instead of food but can build banks to balance it out. Later on, they get excellent ranged cavalry with only 1 population instead of the usual 2, enough coin to afford expensive mercenaries, unlocking the best halberdiers the game has to offer, and one of the best naval city card bonuses including the powerful fluyt unit. The latter has the lack of settler card bonuses, thus leading a slow economic build up but if players can memorize the map using the Portuguese explorer's ability to use the spyglass, and get a Covered Wagon with every advanced age. Meaning, experience Portuguese players in the late game can spread their base around for resources while having the best naval bonuses, excellent dragoons and light infantry, and their musketeers that rival the British.
• The Panzer Elite Grenadiers of Company of Heroes start out as very expensive for what they give, poorly armed, few in number, and quite vulnerable overall. However, they can be given a truly staggering number of combat upgrades, including weapon packages, new abilities, a squad size increase, and even more upgrades depending on the player's preferred tactical doctrine. Fully upgraded, Grenadiers are hands down the best core infantry choice in the game, comparable to the elite infantry of the American army.
• Dawn of War:
  • An Imperial Guard Squad at the beginning of the game can't shoot, can't fight, dies like flies, and runs screaming in terror at the slightest problem. By the time you reach tier two, the 5 man squad is now 13 men, 5 of them have heavy weapons, and with a commissar, the IG Squad is unbreakable and can fire twice as quickly as normal. In this state it is the most powerful non-unique infantry unit in the game. Watch the Space Marine terminators die before they reach range...
  • The Ork army is this. At first you only have Slugga and Shoota boyz, with minimal squad numbers and abilities that suck outside their namesake and are crap without backup. Fully upgrade them and outfit them, though, and a full squad of slugga-boyz can rip through any other unit in the game.
  • While all commanders are no slouch during the campaigns, the Chaos Lord stands out in that he starts out squishy like the Space marine commander, but after obtaining his last upgrade (daemonic ascension) he permanently becomes a Daemon Prince, who is powerful enough to go toe-to-toe with any of the relic units in the game. Because he's your commander though, you get him as soon as the mission starts.
  • For about the first half of the Dawn of War II campaign, Cyrus deals pathetic damage, dies easily and is the epitome of Useless Useful Stealth. Level him up, give him a sniper rifle and various explosives, and allocate the right traits to him (especially the ones that make his stealth incredibly useful) however and he becomes the single most versatile character, effective against all enemy types, and with careful player oversight is capable of soloing missions.
  • A piece of equipment, the Heavy Bolter for both Space Marines and their Chaos counterparts. It trades off damage capacity for rate of fire and suppression. Squads carrying heavy bolters can be devastating, but equipping a single hero with it is underwhelming, as many times "kill it dead" outweighs "make it not be able to run at us as fast" as a strategy, especially since (typically) two of your other heroes are melee oriented. But the semi-random wargear drops (and one named drop) have a single effect that trumps all others: "Cause X% damage in an area." This coming from a gun with likely the highest rate of fire in the game, equipped to a character who has hopefully taken the skill that lets them ignore the "set up" timer before and after moving, and each shot fired causes a small explosion; suddenly those massive hordes swarming your lines are not so massive.
• In the PC strategy game Dungeon Keeper (1997) by Bullfrog Productions, you must build training rooms to train up your monsters; and a few monsters will become far more powerful at maximum level. Demon Spawn, while moderately good fighters at low level, become Dragons at level 10. Thieves can be trained into Knights, identical to the Lords of the Land you've been fighting. Even the lowly Imps get this. As workers, their fighting ability is pathetic, so most players won't bother. But at level 3, they get Haste, letting them mine through stone like a buzzsaw, and at level 10, they get the ability to Teleport.
• In Paradox Interactive's Grand Strategy Games (Crusader Kings, Europa Universalis, Victoria: An Empire Under The Sun and Hearts of Iron) there are plenty of examples of nations with very difficult or limited starts, but whose expansion avenues, unique ideas or other bonuses make them extremely powerful if you can overcome the initial handicaps of picking them:
  • Victoria's Germany starts out divided into loads of weak one province states that are effectively irrelevant compared to other monster countries like France, Spain, or Great Britain. However, with some skill (or just a constant series of wars) a player who conquers enough German states can create Germany who's sheer size and population can make it one of (if not THE) most powerful countries to play in the game, especially in Victoria: An Empire Under The Sun where a united German state gains so many advantages it basically becomes a Game-Breaker. That's right, a entire nation is a game breaker in this game.
  • Kingdoms in India from Europa Universalis qualify. They start out with a far steeper technology curve than European powers, their religions (Sunni Islam and Hinduism) are statistically inferior to the Christian religions, and even the strongest powers are at best mid-weight by 1399 European standards (and they fall back further as time goes by). But! If an Indian prince grows strong enough, it can declare the Kingdom of Hindustan/Bharat, which controls an area nearly as large as Ming China, without Ming's governmental flaws. And as for the technology issue, that can be solved by westernization, which will rapidly lead Hindustan to exceed Europe in tech level.
  • In Victoria, Punjab is one of the few Indian states that isn't under Britain's thumb, and thus stands a relatively good chance of working its way up to GP status and kicking the British out of India. A good player can do this by around 1870. Heck, one of the most critically acclaimed After Action Reports for the game was Punjab.
  • Japan in Victoria. Anyone who knows anything about Japanese history will know that those backwards island fools with the fancy swords might not look like much, but wait and see when they drop the traditions and start getting things like guns, railroads and factories. Indeed, Japan starts out as a small, uncivilised country in East Asia, but it gets a huge bonus to westernization and industrialisation. This combined with a disproportionately large and relatively well-educated population means that Japan stands a very good chance of becoming a modern, secondary world power, capable of dominating China, Southeast Asia and the Pacific rim. In fact, in the hands of a half-decent player, Japan can easily reach GP status.
  • China in both Victoria and Hearts of Iron, for all its notorious status as a nigh-unplayable Butt-Monkey, is an absolute monster once it finally gets its shit together and gets past a plethora of hideous issues including widespread government incompetence and corruption, a hilariously backwards stance on scientific development and public education, constant rebellions and a terribly inadequate military that relies mostly on overwhelming numerical superiority. The AI will never manage it, but some good players can and have done.
  • Bahmanis in EUIV starts as a moderately-powerful regional power in the Indian subcontinent, with some stellar national ideas and Vijayanagar to the south as the only real threat. If you can survive their assaults and take their territories and those of Orissa, you can form Hindustan and gain permanent claims on all remaining Indian territories. A unified Hindustan is a monster with limitless potential: resources and population to rival Ming with superior government bonuses and a very strong military, plus possibilities to ally with Muslim nations in the middle east and even the chance to do a bit of colonization in Africa and Indonesia.
  • The Anarchist faction in the Spanish Civil War in Hearts of Iron IV is the most difficult faction in the civil war to play, and even if they do come out on top they have the problem that everyone hates the anarchists and won't ally with them. Should you survive long enough to unlock the late ideas that form the Iberian Defence Council and the later Global Defence Council, the result is an utter monster of a faction that ignores many of the core rules on how to rule or expand a nation, chief of which is its ability to core any territory in the game simply by taking it.
  • Byzantium in Europa Universalis IV has a nightmarishly difficult start, being nine years away from their historical conquest by the Ottoman Empire. Should you survive that and re-take the offensive, Byzantium has a number of unique events and powerful Ideas from the Purple Phoenix pack that grants them powerful short- and long-term bonuses.
  • Crusader Kings 2's historical starts features a single Mongol ruler actually present on the game map, a single-province nomad chieftain who is a tributary vassal of the much more powerful Kara-Khitai Khanate in 769. Unique amongst the steppe nomads, Mongol rulers have the ability to declare themselves Genghis Khan should they control enough of the steppes, which grants huge amounts of prestige, additional troops arriving from Mongolia, and most usefully prevents the game's historical Mongol Invasion from ever taking place.
• Dr. Neurocide in Evil Genius, who can be recruited very early in the game, is worthless in a straight fight and thus very difficult to level. On the other hand, both of her unlockable special abilities are spectacularly useful in certain situations; she can blast an area with a hallucinogenic gas that masks anything affected and keeps agents from noticing it, meaning they can walk through the middle of your morgue and not pick up on it, and she can also deploy a nasty knockout gas that'll plant pretty much anyone, Super Agents included, flat on their butts if they get stuck in it long enough.
• Majesty has an extremely annoying character type. The wizard. When first hiring the wizard, he will be extremely weak, going up against the weakest sewer rat is a death wish for a level 1 wizard. However, nurturing them to higher levels will make them unstoppable killing machines.
• There's plenty of examples in MOBA's like DOTA 2 and League of Legends:
  • This is the whole point of the Carry: to start with, Carries are utterly useless in the early-game, depending on what hero your team is using to fill the role. But halfway through, assuming they have managed to farm enough, suddenly, they turn into lean, mean killing machines capable of winning 1v5 team fights and singlehandedly felling an entire lane - hence the name, since they tend to "carry" the rest of the team. They are normally Glass Cannons, and are often ranged characters (though there are exceptions). Some noteworthy extremes of this role include:
    • Medusa, who can turn mana into a shield and attack everything in range on zero cooldown. When you have no items, you'll have very little mana and hit like a strawberry, so these abilities are only useful once you've purchased items to increase your mana and damage. Once you have mana you'll almost never die, which means buying a Divine Rapier, which gives a massive amount of damage but drops when you die, is suddenly worth considering.
    • Spectre, who can reflect a portion of the damage she takes to enemies in an area. As in, the enemies take that portion of damage instead of Spectre. Problem is, this ability isn't at all threatening unless your opponents have a reason to attack you and you can take some hits. Get some gold and buy the right items and these problems disappear. Spectre's natural damage output is also lackluster without damage items or illusions.
    • By no means is Yasuo a slouch in the early-game as a melee carry, but he's still a pretty fragile Critical Hit Class at that point; allow him to free-farm however, and he'll potentially induce a Total Party Wipe in the late-game depending on his build.
  • Characters who have unique resource mechanics also fit in this category.
    • In the early-game, Thresh is incapable of doing much damage on his own and is very fragile as his passive Damnation prevents him from gaining armor as he levels up. To compensate for this, it has an effect in which enemies that have been slain near him give up their souls (sometimes from minions, but always from heroes), and he can claim them to not only boost his armor, but to increase the damage of his spells. Come the late-game, when he's harvested enough souls, he's more than capable of taking as much damage as he dishes out.
    • It can be hard to pull off, but Gangplank's Parrrley ability gives him a unique currency in the form of Silver Serpents as soon as it's used to last-hit anybody. Normally used to get more gold, but in the late-game, when enough Silver Serpents have been collected, you can upgrade his ULT to either do more damage to enemies closer to the center of the blast radius, buff your allies' movement speed as long as they're in the blast radius, or to have the barrage last longer.
• Plants vs. Zombies 2: It's About Time has several plants that are initially outclassed, but qualify as they level up via the Plant Leveling System.
  • The Bonk Choy is pretty much outclassed by many other plants a Close-Range Combatant, doing rapid but very weak damage. However, it levels up very quickly and its damage increases extremely fast when it does so, killing a basic zombie in just three rapid punches, and coneheads in eight.
  • The Bloomerang. Your first One-Hit Polykill plant, it becomes quickly outclassed by the Laser Bean and Fume-Shroom, both of which can hit infinite targets as opposed to Bloomerang's three. Like Bonk Choy, it also levels up very quickly, the number of targets it can hit increases, its cost decreases by a lot, its damage increases very well, and soon it'll be killing groups of zombies in less than five attacks — at maximum level, three of these can take down a Gargantuar before it reaches them. In spite of this, it's still Overshadowed by Awesome by a leveled Laser Bean, which destroys lanes of zombies with ease, even bucketheads and knights.
  • The Bowling Bulb starts off Awesome, but Impractical due to the way it works. It has three bulbs, a small green one, a medium blue one that does 3x the damage of the green, and a large orange one that does 1.5x that of the blue, and recharges them in green>blue>orange order. The problem occurs when there are zombies in its lane once all of its bulbs are used — it will recharge then fire out the weakest bulb all the time, making it weak for its sun cost. Once it gets to level 3, however, the recharge order changes to blue>orange>green instead, essentially tripling its damage per second by firing and recharging blue bulbs. Get it to level 7 and it recharges the orange bulb first, further increasing its already good damage.
  • Pepper-Pult is initially seen as a weak version of Melon-Pult, having a slow recharge time while dealing rather weak direct damage and negligible Splash Damage. Its only use is to warm or thaw plants in a 3x3 area near it in Frostbite Caves, something that the stronger Fire Peashooter and Jack O' Lantern are capable of. However, leveling up Pepper-Pult turns it into an incredible Support Party Member, as its very useful warming effect grows in area size, eventually reaching a massive area of the map. At maximum level, simply placing a few in the middle lane will keep all your plants warm or thaw them out extremely quickly. Plus, its recharge time and damage increase as well, making it more useful.
• Rise of Nations gives you the Lookout or Observation Post, a largely useless structure whose only purpose is to provide large LOS. It can't be moved, it has no ground attack and minor anti-air attack with normally no air units to shoot at, and you could just as easily use a couple strategically placed Explorer units or patrolling Cavalry. But once you reach the Industrial Age, it turns into the Air Defense Gun, which can destroy biplanes in four or so hits while costing little more than the Lookout. In the Modern Age it turns into the even-more-powerful Radar Air Defense, which has massive range in addition to being a superpowered airplane-killer, so you can make nine or ten and set up an impenetrable flak curtain that will effectively deny your enemies any form of air support. But its greatest evolution has to be in the Information Age, when it turns into the SAM installation. These consist of three homing missiles arranged on a little tripod thing, which will be ripple-fired at the first sign of an enemy plane, and which then will be reloaded in seconds. Build multiple ones for a bomber-killing, fighter-vaporizing Macross Missile Massacre. And all of these auto-target.
• The Kol Battleship of Sins of a Solar Empire, despite its glowing description in lore, has poor antimatter reserves, unflattering damage and can be beaten by most other capital ships in a duel. However, with enough levels, its antimatter reserves grow to the point where it can use its abilities much more freely and the Finest Hour Limit Break can dramatically turn a bad situation around. Then it becomes the beast the story claims it to be.
• The UNSC in Sins of the Prophets initially have to outnumber the Covenant many times in order to win. By late game, the gap closes, such that the Orion Battlecruiser or Thermopylae Supercarrier only needs two-to-one odds to beat a Covenant capital ship.
• StarCraft has the Zerg. Due to their peculiar method of creating units, they are extremely vulnerable to early attacks, but if left alone long enough, they will bring forth armies of Ultralisks (highest HP of all ground units) and Guardians (a flyer that outranges every defensive structure and ground unit). In StarCraft II, replace Guardian with Brood Lord (in addition to huge range, every attack will now spawn Broodlings).
  • The humble Zergling. Made two-for-the-price-of-one (at 50 minerals, it's the same as every Worker Unit and the Marine) and pretty much exists only to be spawned and die in large numbers. However, by end game it gets upgrades that increases its already impressive movement and attack speed, letting it shred apart armies... when spawned in large numbers.
    • The sequel takes it even further, by giving all Zerg units speed bonuses when on creep. It also gives them an invisible creep spreader that lets their armies move lightning-fast across vast distances. Oh, and they can now morph into Action Bombs.
    • And even further in Heart of the Swarm's campaign (once you've progressed far enough), where Zerglings can now jump cliffs/spawn instantly and three at a time, while Banelings either split into smaller Banelings or gain the ability to jump into enemies over their allies' heads. And just to put the cherry on top, one of Kerrigan's passive abilities lets you respawn killed zerglings at a steady enough rate that you can almost continually sweep large amounts of zerglings all over the map without fear of leaving your base defenseless.
  • in the co-op commander mode, Dehaka is, at the very start of any match, the single most useless hero unit with terrible DPS, awful range, and low attack. The thing is, he's the only hero that levels up as the match progresses, and by level 15 he's an armored, anti-air, instant-killing, ally healing, debuffing, AOE monster with ridiculous attack and high health. You can practically solo normal and casual maps with just him and not a single other unit from either army once he starts getting up there in size.
• Star Ruler: Fabricator-type subsystems aren't much good when you first unlock them, but with enough research they can outproduce planet-based factories. Use them right and you have a massive A.I. Breaker that the computer has no hope of matching.
• Warcraft III:
  • The Night Elf Archer is the weakest of all basic units. However, once you reach the late game you can improve range and damage, make it ride a hippogryph, a flying anti-air unit greatly increasing HP and mobility and unaffected by melee attacks. And since they can dismount, attacking aerial units find themselves suddenly facing twice the targets dealing more than twice the damage.
  • The Siege Engine starts off as a Joke Character that only works on buildings (though admittedly it is quite good at doing so) at short range, but upgrade Plate Armor and Ranged Weapon damage (when ranged units generally use leather armor), add in its rocket upgrade (that lets it fire at multiple units at once) and watch the enemy's entire air force disintegrate under a hail of missiles, while their weapons just bounce off its armor and then plough them straight into their base and destroy it.
• Warlords Battlecry:
  • Both Dwarven factions qualify. Their initial units ranges from average to rather bad, with Dwarven Infantry being rather underwhelming and Stone Golems being way too slow to use them much. Then, they unlock much better units: Crossbowdwarves are the best garrisons in the game, Dwarven Berserkers are almost indestructible to physical damage and Iron Golems can hit everything around them at a decent speed. Both factions unlock Siege Weapons around this time. And at the final stages of the game, both are essentially unstoppable: Dwarves get Runelords (dangerous magic units), Kazhrimi Guards (Critical Hit-spamming soldiers with a tanky streak) and Generals (extremely tough, and can rip buildings apart like no other), while Dark Dwarves get Bronze Golems (almost unkillable unless the enemy has lightning, and they hit like trucks), Hellbores (imagine a lightning-shooting AA cannon that could take down dragons) and Flame Cannons (the single hardest-hitting thing in the game aside from titans, they can incinerate an army and their base in seconds). The fact both get expensive but powerful armor and damage upgrades that span the whole tech tree only adds to it.
  • Fey. Their units will remain Fragile Speedsters to the end of the tech tree, with cheap, tiny, zippy units that hit for very low damage, though quickly. However, they have a tremendously useful upgrade line in their Orb Of Wonder, which gives units extra experience right out of the assembly line. The upgrade line is enormous, possibly the longest in the game, but leveling up mooks in this game will turn even a lowly pikeman into a menace. Due to the way upgrades work, these tiny units benefit even more from the extra experience, as the damage increase is a flat raise for everyone, even if they stab you five times per second. Not to mention they get even faster, and they remain just as spammably cheap as before. Thus, if you don't wipe out a Fey faction early in the game, you will be swarmed by tiny men and women with spears and magic bolts that will inflict a Death of a Thousand Cuts on you faster than you can wipe them out.
  • Knights qualify as well, and have a similarly hard time getting to the levels where they can be useful. Their starting units are basically worthless, and their mid-tier units (Knights and Dancing Swords) are just enough to keep them afloat. But once they get past the first few hurdles (easier said than done due to money problems) they get access to Knight Champions and Knight Lords, which are extremely tanky slayers of evil that can get upgrades to experience and thus level freakishly fast (see above for why this is dangerous), as well as Archons, literal angels with flaming swords that make short work of anything the Knights can't handle. While you need dozens and dozens of Dancing Swords to fend off most attacks, a tiny group of just five Archons and three Knight Lords can squash that attack and charge forwards to carve a hole in the enemy base right afterwards.

Roguelikes

• In Abomi Nation, Seedlings do not evolve and have baby-level stat totals, but they have the unique ability Budding Seed, which gives them a huge boost to offense and defense after level 30.
• Ancient Domains of Mystery:
  • The Farmer class, whose special powers are of very limited use compared to those of other classes. The exception is their final power, gained at level 50, which grants 30% resistance to all corrupting effects - possibly the best power in the game.
  • Necromancers are generally played as wizards whose class power drains their magic, but when they reach level 50 they can come back from the dead.
  • Just getting Mindcrafters through the game relies upon this. They start unable to learn spells, no offensive abilities, awful equipment and may or may not have a damaging magic wand. If they reach level 6, they finally gain Mind Blast. That takes the heat off, but you're still unable to use your powers on undead and unlife, which is why levelling up still further to lvl. 15 is the make-or-break point, as you learn Telekinetic Blast: a physical attack that strikes remotely and never misses.
• Balatro:
  • Any card with scaling effects can quickly become a key factor in a run if its scaling is fed. Cards like Spare Trousers and Square Joker start out with meaningless boosts, but when upgraded enough times they can provide a significant boost to multiplier and chips compared to jokers with better default boosts.
  • Yorick, one of the legendary jokers, originally had no benefit until after a high number of discards have been used. After hitting that however many rounds later, it goes from useless to suddenly granting a 5x multiplier that can carry the player through the rest of a run. It was changed in v1.0.1 so that it gains x1 Mult for every 23 cards discarded, which has the same slow but powerful scaling effect as other scaling Jokers.
• The Binding of Isaac: Arguably the entire playable roster falls under this in some shape or form, with a few noteworthy examples listed below.
  • Initially, Isaac starts the game with no usable items or accessories to give him a bonus at the start. After beating the game a certain number of times and meeting certain criteria, however, Isaac begins with a D6 which will allow him to reroll unfavorable item drops for a chance at something better, giving him better scope than the other characters for customized powerbuilds.
  • The cube of meat item will initially only act as a shield, blocking attacks against Isaac and inflicting collision damage on enemies. Finding two will allow it to attack enemies in conjunction with Isaac's tear attacks, three will turn it into a Meat Boy pet who will seek and destroy enemies, and four will up meat boy's size and damage.
  • The sequel/Updated Re-release Rebirth adds a Magikarp Character: The Lost. Good news: he can get the items from Devil Rooms for free, and, due to its mechanics, he's gonna get a lot of them. Bad news: One-Hit-Point Wonder. No, we don't mean that he starts with low health, we mean that one hit and you're out.
  • Azazel is an interesting example. He starts with flight and a short-ranged Brimstone, and his high speed and damage will likely let him breeze through the early levels. However, his range is absolutely terrible, only allowing him to attack enemies practically point-blank in front of him. Unless he finds a way to mitigate that (Tech X, regular Brimstone, absurd damage, etc.), he will definitely struggle with late-run bosses, especially ones that employ Bullet Hell.
  • ???'s schtick is that he starts with a crappy activated item, three soul hearts, and cannot gain red hearts. This means he's a nightmare to play as in the early game as replenishing his health relies entirely on soul heart and black heart pickups, as even Health Up pills and health-increasing items like Breakfast will only give him a soul heart. However, never taking red heart damage means he has a 99% chance of a Devil Room or Angel Room, and while the cost for Devil Room items is tripled, he always pays with replenishable soul/black hearts rather than permanent heart containers. It's a steep, but payable, price with a little luck, or you can hold out for Angel Rooms, but either way as ??? it's not hard to have pretty high stats, flight, spectral tears, be surrounded by familiars, and even be Leviathan or Seraphim before even reaching The Womb. If you get lucky enough to find Mr. Me! in a shop, you can even do both for a paltry 15 coins and a bit of luck.
  • The Afterbirth+ expansion for Rebirth includes a new active item called "The Void". While it initially doesn't do much on its own, it can "consume" any pedestal item(s) in a room and either provide a random stat boost if it's a passive item or permanently gain its effect if it's an active item (with some exceptions such as single use active items), as a result, the Void gets continually more powerful the more active items it consumes while the user gets more powerful the more passive items it consumes. Depending on what items it absorbs, the Void can easily become the single most powerful active item in the game. This is demonstrated nicely through the Afterbirth+ unlockable character Apollyon: a subpar (stat wise) clone of Isaac who starts the game with the Void, before breaking it with good charge management and some luck.
  • Lilith starts with two black hearts, one red heart, an Incubus Familiar, Cambion Conception, the Box of Friends active item, and permanently blindfolded. In short, she sucks. However, every so many times she takes damage she will spawn a new familiar, and her Box of Friends will double them for one room. If you manage to get her health up enough and get five familiars following you around (in addition to any extra you might get from item rooms) and can double them with Box of Friends: you can just frigging carpet bomb entire rooms with shots and devastate bosses in seconds.
  • And for a non-character example, the Soy Milk powerup that gives you insane firing speed at the cost of only doing Scratch Damage per shot. On its own its pretty lousy and it'll easily get you overwhelmed and killed in pretty short order if you're not very careful with it. It falls under this because it has insane synergies with not only rare items like Dr. Fetus, Brimstone, and Ipecac, but also with pretty common ones like Blood Clot, The Mulligan, and Chemical Peel. If you manage to survive long enough to get one of these, or god-forbid several, or even to boost its attack power back up, you will be an unstoppable god of death.
• Death Road to Canada: Telling people to "COOL IT" or saying "Say it, don't spray it!" will always have negative consequences, ranging from being forced to leave a trader camp to that character getting killed. However, telling people to cool it three times will result in a charged "COOL IT", which always brings a positive outcome and big rewards to your party.
• Dicey Dungeons:
  • The Robot's Precious Egg level-up reward requires you to load six consecutive dice in reverse order starting from 6. Upon opening it, you'll receive a random powerful item such as the Fury Spell or one of Scathach's attacks.
  • The Witch's first handful of fights can be hard: only a few dice, only a couple of spells in her spellbook, meaning that she can very easily find herself with nothing to do except lob the last couple of dice at people's heads. When she gets up a good head of steam during a fight, however, she can be rolling a dozen dice a turn and have a use for every single one.
  • Sneezy's "Sneeze" ability starts out somewhat dangerous — doubles let you reduce all countdowns by the doubles' pip value, essentially a nerfed version of the Thief's Crowbar — but the upgraded version is insanely powerful — doubles instantly reduce all countdowns to zero. This not only makes stealing Sneeze a priority in the Thief's Finders Keepers episode, it also means the upgraded version of Sneezy in the Elimination Rounds or Hard Mode Bonus rounds is one of the most dangerous enemies in the game (and using Freeze goes from being the best strategy for beating him to suicide).
• The Neophyte character trait in The Drop invokes this trope, offering increased stat growth rates in exchange for lower starting stats.
  Greener than a seasick Shra, though you have definite potential. You're not strong yet, but given a few days in the Drop, who knows?
• Dwarf Fortress:
  • Wrestler dwarves. In general, a raw recruit tends to last a bit longer if they have a weapon to parry the occasional attack. Once they can consistently dodge or block attacks, and have adequate armor, they can easily cripple most enemies with their bare hands. Depending on the version, they can either render the enemy helpless against better-armed comrades, or do all the work themselves tearing enemies to bits.
  • For a literal example in older version, carp. And most other swimming creatures with any decent natural attacks. This came about by accident due to the game's skill- and stat-raising mechanic: skill levels increased by the act of performing the skill, and increasing a skill readily affected the relevant stats. Creatures like carp gained extremely high stats due to constantly training the Swimming skill, which translated into their becoming infamously lethal.
• Enter the Gungeon has Ser Junkin, an inconspicuous brown bag that may randomly spawn when you pick up junk from destroying a treasure chest. Junkin starts out so weak he can't even hurt enemies, but if you acquire more junk (which means that - in doing so and destroying chests, you're denied the guns, use items, and passives from them) he gains a helmet, then a shield, then a sword and can start properly fighting. Getting more and more junk from that point on makes Junkin gradually more lethal until he gains a spin attack, wings, and eventually turns into a flying angel of death who does so much damage he can humiliate the True Final Boss while all you need to worry about is dodging and can sacrifice himself to revive you from death once if you run out of HP.
• FTL: Faster Than Light:
  • The Carnelian (Crystal Type B) suffers from this. You start out with no weapons, no drones, a three-Crystal crew, and a four-man teleport. Getting through the first sector or two requires more than a little bit of luck, since you have no way of destroying Rebel drones unless you sacrifice a crewmember, which is a spectacularly dumb thing to do. However, if you can keep it flying long enough to get some more crew and some backup weapons to shore up your offense, then it's far and away one of the most powerful ships in the game.
  • The Basilisk (Mantis Type B) also suffers from this, but not as badly as the Carnelian. You start out with two Mantises, two layers of shields, and a Defense Drone and Boarding Drone. While you're better equipped to shrug off enemy attacks, you have to leave your ship on autopilot while you send your Mantises over to fight. Also, Mantises naturally have horribly slow repairing speeds, meaning it's nigh-impossible to get a system running again in the thick of combat. Again, though, if you can get some additional crewmembers (preferably Engi to shore up your repair capacities) and some backup weapons, then you've got a powerhouse.
• Hades:
  • The Pierced Butterfly grants bonus damage each time Zagreus clears a room without taking damage. Useless during the early game when the player is still learning the ropes and doesn't know what each new level contains, but a skilled player basing their entire run around it can end up with 20-30%+ bonus damage by the end of a run and it comboes nicely with skills that grant additional damage when at high health.
  • The Lambent Plume is based around speedrunning, granting bonus movement and dodge chance every time a room is cleared under a certain time threshold. Like the Pierced Butterfly, picking the Lambent Plume will define an entire run but will pay off immensely by the end if you can pass 20 or 25 rooms in low time.
  • Poseidon has a pair of Duo Boons that do absolutely nothing on their own, save buffing the power of Boons or Poms of Power you gain afterwards. They require an awkward combination of Gods' Boons that ordinarily do not overlap too well (Poseidon and Dionysus or Aphrodite), but if acquired early on will immensely power up Zagreus.
  • Exagryph, the Adamant Rail, is a weapon based around the power of upgrades you pick up for it from Daedalus Hammers. On its own, it is one of the weakest weapons with a short-ranged and inaccurate main attack and a powerful but slow and finicky special attack. Its upgrades, such as Triple Bomb, Cluster Bomb, Explosive Shot and Triple Shot, are however extremely powerful and drastically boost either the main or special attack.
• A backing principle in Luck be a Landlord:
  • The literally worthless Coal will turn into a valuable Diamond after 20 spins.
  • Similarly worthless Cultists multiply in value if you can get more of them.
  • Suits are worth half as much as most other uncommon symbols on their own, but explode in value when next to other same-colored suits and certain rare symbols.
  • An item that floods the board with cheap objects becomes worthwhile with another symbol that destroys or boosts those cheap objects.
  • Entry-level Cats gain more value with Pizza the Cat. And if you're lucky enough to get Copycat, causing cats to function as Wildcards—you get the idea.
• NetHack:
  • The Tourist character class. They start with a handful of darts for a weapon, a Hawaiian shirt for armor, and a jumble of seemingly-useless tools. Only an experienced player would know that in the endgame, an enchanted cotton shirt is one the rarest and most desirable things there is. They can acquire the Platinum Yendorian Express Card, one of the more powerful artifacts in the game. They also have the greatest selection of weapon skills of any class, and can become proficient in every weapon but clubs (which aren't a good choice for a weapon anyway).
  • Less extreme but still eligible is the Wizard class. It starts with a quarterstaff for a weapon and a piddly little Force Bolt for offense (and one random other spell). By endgame, Wizard is by far the most powerful class in the game. Area effect magic, infinite death spells, instantly mapping dungeon levels, instantly identifying unknown items, teleporting at will... all with nigh-infinite MP because of their quest artifact. Oh, and their first sacrifice gift allows for unlimited, instant, semi-permanent Elbereth. And zaps enemies with status ailments. And blocks curses. And is powerful enough to let Wizards play melee, if they so choose. They also get bonuses to Magic Marker use, hungerless casting, self-healing, no-items-needed levitation, Very Fast speed... you get the picture.
• Numerous Pokémon in the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon series are like this, only getting tiny stat gains at lower levels, but suddenly getting huge gains after crossing a certain level threshold. For the most part, if a Pokémon seems bad initially, it's going to end up improving greatly sooner or later. Though, given that the series is a spinoff of the Trope Namer, it's to be expected.
• Project Zomboid: Taking a buttload of negative traits on your character gives penalties which can be overcome with enough training. Some of the most severe ones (like Obese) can give you points for traits that give you abilities no amount of training can provide. It's theoretically possible to start out as an obese nerd who literally can't run or fight to save his life, has claustrophobia and gets sick easily, and with enough time, effort and luck, turn him into an unkillable Genius Bruiser. Given the game is already Nintendo Hard, however...
• Wayward Souls: The Adventurer starts of weak, with only shortsword, a lantern that forces you to stand still, and a stun amulet that only deal minimal damage. However with emberforge upgrades, he can get increased healing from floors/fountain, has a lantern that deals great damage, and a fast moving powerful projectile.
• Of the submarines in We Need to go Deeper, the Poubelle starts out slow, weak, and unwieldy, but upgrades to it have twice the benefit, allowing it to become more powerful much faster. A single hull integrity upgrade can make it as durable as the toughest sub, then boosters to the shields and engines can easily make it the best ship available, if you're lucky enough to get those upgrades.

Survival Horror

• Project Zomboid allows you to take negative traits to gain more points to buy positive traits, and some of these traits can change, evolve, or go away over time depending on how you survive or what items you use. Taking a lot of negative traits that you can lose over time, like Obese, Overweight, phobias, and Weak, or ones that you can negate like Short-Sighted (wear glasses), will make your first in-game month or so ludicrously difficult, but if you can tough through long enough to shake these negatives you'll get a very powerful character.

Third-Person Shooter

• Dark Forces Saga:
  • Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast: Force Lightning and Force Grip start off very weak when you first get them, with Lightning barely doing any damage to enemies, and Grip only being able to stun enemies for a few seconds. At their highest level, you can clear out entire rooms with Lightning, and use Grip to fling enemies off of ledges and disarm them, which is useful for quickly ending lightsaber duels.
  • Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy: Force Rage. It makes you stronger while eating your health and making you more vulnerable to damage for a few seconds after it ends. At level 1, the health drain is enormous, and your strength increase is... not. It doesn't last very long, the time spent in the unskippable activation pose is counted in how long it lasts, and you can take damage during it. When it ends, and all or most of the enemies you were trying to use it against are all still there, you will die. So why invest in it? Because Force Rage 3 is another story. You'll hand out epic beatdowns and hardly notice the drawbacks.
• In Dead Space:
  • Your starting weapon, the plasma cutter. Upgrading it improves it so much that, combined with the fact that the game only drops ammo for weapons you actually own, it's entirely feasible to use no other weapon for the duration of the game. There's even an achievement for doing this.
  • The Pulse Rifle chews up ammunition fast, does barely any damage, and has a ridiculously small hit area. If you upgrade it though, it can become an incredibly accurate and ammo-economic limb remover from over 100 meters.
• The Grinder in Red Faction: Guerrilla is somewhat like this; when you first get it it's Awesome, but Impractical with a slow fire rate and shots that sometimes aren't an instant kill (on hard at least), after getting the explosive upgrade (which between the higher damage, splash damage and building and vehicle damaging capabilities makes it FAR more versatile) and the fast shot upgrade (which fixes the weapons biggest flaw) it becomes a good all-round combat weapon.
• In the Resident Evil series:
  • In Resident Evil 2 (Remake), Claire's default SLS 60 is a dinky five-shot revolver that has to be reloaded one bullet at a time and is pretty much obsoleted by the JMB Hp3 as soon as you get it due to the latter's semiautomatic capability and included laser sight. Then you get the Reinforced Frame for the SLS 60 in the sewers, and it becomes the game's Magnum, with stupidly powerful damage per shot with High-Powered Rounds and the ability to switch to standard Handgun Ammo if you run dry.
  • Resident Evil 4:
    • The Handcannon, which can't even be purchased until you've beaten the game at least once, and whose ammo is incredibly rare, making it pretty much a paperweight once you own it. Spending a ridiculous amount of money to upgrade it, however, gives it infinite ammo and a firepower rating that lets you one-hit-kill pretty much everything in the game. The only problem is you get access to it so late in the game and after so many proofs of prowess, it's at best a Bragging Rights Reward.
    • The 9mm handgun you begin the game with is arguably the weakest firearm in the game. However, once you max it out it becomes five times more likely to get a critical headshot which, so long as you hit enemies in the head, virtually turns into a one-hit-mook-killing machine.
    • Same with the shotgun found in Pueblo which, while far from useless is still swiftly outclassed by better weapons. Max it out and it gains the unique attribute which ignores pellet dispersion and averts Short-Range Shotgun: now if even so much as a single pellet fired hits an enemy at any distance, they take the same damage they'd take if hit by the entire blast at point-blank range. Suddenly the thing is able to floor entire crowds with a single-shot, something no weapon other than the rocket launcher or a grenade is capable of doing, and can easily blow multiple heads off per shot which is something no other weapon can do.
    • It can be quite easy for players to overlook the TMP. It starts out as a Little Useless Gun which deals anemic damage per shot, chews through ammo like popcorn and is ineffectual at any range besides very close because Leon shoots from the hip using it. With some upgrades and the Stock however, the TMP is a marvellous alternative to a shotgun. A pinpoint-accurate 4-round burst is ideal for taking out thrown axes or dynamite efficiently or tacking a head or knee shot on a Ganado which can be followed up with a melee kick to open up some room, but spraying and praying will also shred shields and small mobs with little trouble (and with the Stock, you can do this at ranges that exceed the effective range of a shotgun). TMP ammo pickups come in boxes of 30 or so and are quite common, and the Exclusive upgrade gives you a stupidly big 250-round magazine.

Turn-Based Strategy

• Advance Wars:
  • Good old "useless" Colin from Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising. He's a rookie whose units have reduced attack power in exchange for a 20% discount on manufacturing cost, and one of his first major missions is a Hold The Line Style setup which goes out of its way to remind you he is useless. Later in the game, when the strong units (Like Battleships and Bombers) are in use, his weakness is suddenly a moot point since his units are still doing tons of damage and that discount means you're saving thousands on new units. Happy smashing!
  • The sequel Dual Strike allows you to team him up with Kanbei, his polar opposite who has insanely strong units that are much more expensive to produce. This is one of the strongest teams in the game and the two don't even get a tag bonus.
• In Age of Wonders you can buy dragon hatchlings. They start off rather weak and are often targeted by the enemy, but if you can build their experience to gold medal rank they will grow into full size dragons.
  • Age of Wonders 3 has a similar mechanic but with a greatly expanded number of units that "evolve" after they hit gold-level experience. Most races have a low level units that gets promoted to a better unit in this way, which is fairly easy to do, whoever getting a Dragon Hatching or a Baby Kraken to evolve takes a lot more work but consequently produces an absolute monster.
  • The Sorcerer leader class is another example. Unlike every other specialization they get one class-specific unit that is built from cities; every other one of their unique units is summoned. Because of the way casting spells works ^note You have a set amount of casting points per turn, spells cost some of this, if you don't have enough the spell take several turns to cast they can only have one unit being summoned at a time, often taking several turns, while all the other classes can pump out as many units as they have cities. In addition to that the amount of spells you can cast is shared between the world map and the battle map, meaning if you go ham on the casting at the start of your turn you can wind up with no spells available for battle. However, once you get some research under your belt all of the Sorcerer's spells and units have an insane amount of synergy, and their ultimate unit is basically lightning Cthulhu. If that wasn't enough their ultimate spell creates a persistent world effect that increases the casters total casting points and cuts the mana cost and casting point cost of their spells in half.
• Orion in Atlas Reactor is a character whose power is tied to how close he is to his ultimate ability. When Orion is at 0 energy, his moves are amongst the worst in the game with low AoE and healing/shielding potential. When Orion is at full energy all his moves are greatly powered up, making playing him a balancing act between knowing when to ult (which consumes all your energy) or staying with the ultimate ability on backburner to get the most out of his other moves.
• Common in Civilization, particularly in the case of younger civs and former colonies:
  • America's special units tend to appear late in the game, around the Industrial Era, but when they do those B-52s or F-15s or Navy SEALs will hit hard. And in Civ VI, America's unique Film Studio buildings can only be built after the discovery of Radio, but will help the civ win a late-game Cultural Victory.
  • Australia is pretty unassuming until the midgame, when it can start building Outback Stations whose bonuses improve over subsequent eras. By the late game Australia will have turned marginal terrain into fuel for thriving coastal metropolises that can help it win a Scientific Victory.
  • Brazil in Civ V has a difficult early game since its start bias is for jungle terrain, meaning that not only is it stuck with a lot of unproductive real estate, it's also likely to share borders with the Aztecs. But in the Renaissance era, between the University's bonuses and their unique Brazilwood Camp improvements, those jungles become the most diversely-useful tiles in the whole game. Bonus points: not long after that, Brazil picks up the Pracina unique unit.
  • England is a naval power geared towards building an intercontinental empire, but you can't even cross oceans until the Renaissance, so for roughly half the game England won't be anything special. But once it hits its stride, those Redcoats and Royal Navy Dockyards and Ships of the Line will help England lock down control of the world's oceans and conquer lands anywhere.
  • India in Civ V has a special ability that encourages it to develop "small but tall," with a few high-population cities instead of a sprawling empire. This means that in the early game an opponent doesn't have to do much conquering to knock them out of the game, but if India persists, it'll end up with a small number of well-developed and well-defended cities - especially since Gandhi's AI puts an emphasis on nuclear weapon production.
  • Venice has a very precarious early game because it can't found other cities, so one bad move can be fatal, particularly if its neighbors are people like Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun or Montezuma. But as the game goes on, Venice will start making boatloads of cash from all its trade routes, enough to simply buy whatever military units it needs and bribe every city-state in the world to its cause, assuming Venice doesn't make puppets from them with its unique Merchants of Venice.
  • The Zulu in Civ V are oddly both this and a Crutch Character. They have nothing really going for them in the early- or late game, but in the medieval era get access to their unique Impi unit and its special promotions, allowing them to go to on a spree of conquest before gunpowder makes them obsolete.
  • The Mali in VI are focused on gold, but with a lack of gold in the early game and a production malus towards units, it makes it harder to build new cities with settlers or even get units to defend yourself, but once they get their gold rolling in and set up their Sugubas to make purchasing cheaper, it is hard to stop them towards any victory.
• Conviction (SRPG): Mages are much harder to level up than other units, since their AOE magic deals low damage and they don't get much EXP for casting support spells. Additionally, characters cannot move and cast magic in the same turn, making it hard for mages to catch up to physical units. However, if they're promoted enough, mages can learn all kinds of powerful AOE offense and support spells. They also have access to good endgame staves that boost their range and damage further, allowing them to cherry tap several enemy squads at once. Some advanced mage classes have access to slingers, giving them more ranged options outside of spells and making it easier for them to steal kills.
• The Healers in the Sega Game Gear title Crystal Warriors resemble this trope in that they are remarkably weak in melee combat. If you manage to get one to level 9 somehow, though, they suddenly turn into unstoppable killing machines. To put this in perspective: a level 9 Healer has 95 HP, 85 Attack and 80 Defense. By comparison, the game's Final Boss has 98 HP, 97 Attack and 12 Defense.
• In Fire Emblem:
  • The "Est archetype": a character that joins the party late and it looks like Can't Catch Up is in full effect, since he or she is quite fragile, but if the player is patient and levels him/her up adequately, after promotion the character will become extremely powerful due to having high growth rates, meaning each stat is that much more likely to increase when they level up.
  • Several games also employ an opposite of the Est archetype, commonly nicknamed the "Trainee archetype", named because they tend to start in a "trainee" or Villager class. Much like their counterparts, characters of this archetype start out in a low-level, and players will have to work hard to make them great. The big difference is their much earlier recruitment time, as well as branching promotions that can further empower their strengths.
  • The Troubadour class in the games it appears starts off as a mounted healer, meaning their magic is worse than the Clerics who usually show up first, and they can't defend themselves at all. They also rely on healing to level up, which is decidedly slow. Once they promote, they can become Valkyries (or sometimes Mage Knights), which have access to offensive magic. This turns them into unbelievably versatile units, combining high attack range, speed, and access to what will probably be a high staff rank. As an added benefit, their speed makes it fairly easy for them to stay safe long enough to reach that stage.
  • Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light:
    • The DS remakes have Wolf and Sedgar. Despite the fact that they join pre-promoted and give signs of Crutch Character, if you look at their stats, you might be surprised because of how low their bases are. They actually have the best growth rates in the game.^note Especially in health, their growths exceed 100% meaning they're guaranteed at least 1 HP per level up and have a chance to get an additional point.
    • Tiki joins at the end of Chapter 19, about three-quarters of the way through the game, with bases weak enough to see her slaughtered by the brave weapon-packing enemies that you face for the rest of the game. If you put in the effort to train her, her great growths combined with a unique personal weapon tailor-made for mowing down enemy Manaketes makes her a very valuable combatant in Chapter 24 and the Endgame, and the only unit realistically capable of facing Medeus in single combat and living to tell the tale.
  • Fire Emblem Gaiden has four Villager units (five in Echoes: Shadows of Valentia), but two stand out in particular:
    • Kliff begins in a low level and with low stats, even for a Villager. But his higher than average stat growths and the Villager class's branching promotion really benefits him. In particular is the Mage line, where he will struggle to double enemies in the early game, but compared to the other male Mages, Kliff is the only one who has access to Aura, and not only has the best speed and skill growths, but only loses in defense growths to Boey.
    • The remake-exclusive Faye is also this; she starts off as the weakest among the Ram Village team alongside Kliff, but because of her unique status as the only starting female Villager in the game, she has access to a variety of tools depending on her chosen class. In particular, a Faye who takes up Cleric as her class will be hard to train, due to her base attack being Nosferatu, which leaves her with the atrociously low hit percentage of 60%, but with the effort she will become an exceptional support unit due to her having earlier access to ranged healing with Physic compared to a Mage Tobin (without them and DLC, players will have to wait until recruiting Tatiana to get the spell in Alm's route), one of three characters (along with Atlas as a Sage and the DLC-exclusive Shade) to have access to the Rescue spell, and the only character in the entire game to have access to Anew, which allows her to take on the Dancer role from other games.
  • Fire Emblem: Mystery of the Emblem:
    • Archanea's Archer class is often considered this: it has bad base stats and movement equal to the game's Mighty Glacier class even though Archers are supposed to be Fragile Speedsters, but its promotion to Sniper gets rid of both these flaws. If you can get one up to a Sniper, they suddenly become very serviceable. This goes double in the DS remakes where the Archer/Sniper line gets exclusive access to the Longbow.
    • Sheena joins at level 1 promoted into General. However, not only are her stats very decent for a pre-promote, she also possesses great growth rates. If you take your time to level her up in the short time she's in, you'll be able to make her tank damages easily or become a Lightning Bruiser on a certain forthcoming That One Level (if you haven't been training an Armor Knight/General).
  • Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War:
    • Finn zigzags between this and Crutch Character. In the first generation, he starts off quite weak and is disadvantaged by the fact that he uses lances when the first chapters are full of axe-users, but because of his good growths, the Prayer skill and the Brave Lance Quan gives him in Chapter 2, he becomes a valuable asset to your army until he leaves (at the end of chapter 3). Then, in the second generation, he is normally much stronger than the characters he's protecting (Leif and Nanna) at the beginning of Chapter 7, but because most of your army can be made of Game Breakers, he ends up being outclassed in the last chapters.
    • Lachesis, who joins during the first half and is just as weak (though she has the benefit of being able to use healing staves along with swords), but promotes into the insanely powerful Master Knight (a class she shares only with Leif).
    • Tailtiu is the last character that joins you in the first generation. She's a level 3 Thunder Mage, has a serious gap to bridge, and is hampered with the fact that the next chapter has her elemental weakness, Wind Mage, aplenty. The player can still make her promote at the level she joins (leaving all villagers unsaved for her to reap the golds to buy a Paragon Band, then level up immensely in Arena), and she will be able to hold on her own until her generation ends... in which with a proper pairing (with either Azelle, Lewyn or Lex), her children Arthur and Tine, who join very early unlike her will be a duo to be reckoned with, though not to the extent of a Game-Breaker.
    • One non-Est example is Leif, who joins in the second chapter of the second half (that starts with a new group of characters) and starts out as a mere swordfighter, but can eventually promote to the almighty Master Knight class and use every non-personal weapon in the game except Nosferatu and Aura.
  • Fire Emblem: Thracia 776:
    • In general, most units who can promote into a Sage count in Thracia, including Asbel, Linoan and Sara.
    • Asbel starts in a good position as he joins early as a Squishy Wizard with an extremely powerful personal weapon which helps him during the early stages and turns him into an amazing boss killer. The promotion into Sage increases his durability a lot, and with only 7 levels with the help of the Sety Scroll, he is guaranteed to have maximum speed, and a good chance to have an acceptable magic and skill, both of which are boosted in high amounts by the promotion bonus. As far as offensive magic goes, the only character who can outdo Asvel is the Glass Cannon Olwen, and the 11th-Hour Superpower Ced.
    • Homer is a prime example of Magikarp Power. He joined underleveled in a rather difficult and pretty late chapter, followed by a chapter with Fog of War. He specializes in Light Magic, which is rare, and he can't even use the Nosferatu tome that you acquire at the same time he joins the team, and he can't use Wind Magic. Then you realize that he has the Elite skill to double his exp gains, he has stat growths that are even better than Asbel, and he has a PCC of 5 which means on his second attack he has a massive chance for a critical hit. He also promotes into a Sage, which allows him to use staves (a huge plus since staves are poorly balanced in Thracia, although Homer is not expected to have a high staff rank in Endgame), an extra rank in the elemental magic and 2 ranks in light which allows him to use better tomes including Nosferatu and the Wind spells. It helps that Sages have a promotion bonus that looks like something out of Genealogy of the Holy War which is REALLY massive when compared to the current standards and Thracia's standards alike.
    • Linoan and Sara join in a late chapter rather underleveled with no personal weapon, and Linoan is forced to promote with a late game event. However, Linoan can use the Nosferatu tome from the start and is likely the only person who can use it, and she can wield staves, helped by her solid stat growths. Sara later gains a personal weapon that is rather useless other than giving access to That One Sidequest, but she has a better starting staff rank than Linoan, massive growths, can promote earlier than Linoan, and her skillset is filled with three of the best skills in the game, which includes Elite. And they happen to exist in a game where having a good staff rank right from the start is an equivalent of winning a grand prize in a Superpower Lottery.
  • Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade:
    • The Hero Roy counts. Roy has mediocre bases and average growths. His promotion is forced through the story extremely late when the rest of your army will be well into their promoted classes. If the RNG is kind to Roy, then he can become very powerful when he promotes to Master Lord and obtains the Binding Blade, the most powerful weapon in the game and canonically the strongest weapon in all of Elibe.
    • Gwendolyn, who begins with atrocious stats, has all the drawbacks of a Knight in a game whose design is very disadvantageous to that type, but if trained and eventually promoted, has great bonuses as a General.
    • In the Reverse Recruitment Game Mod, this falls to Karel. In the base game, he's an 11th-Hour Ranger with the gimmick that he has the highest growths in the entire franchise (all of them are 100% or more), but he's only one level away from capping out and his stats are pretty average for an endgame unit (and the endgame isn't a time where super-high stats are especially necessary anyway), making this rather unimportant. However, in Reverse Recruitment, he replaces Roy, with his stats reduced to fit his lowered level. This results in him starting the game with a flat 0 in nearly all his stats, with only Strength, Skill, and HP being above that (largely so he can get kills, period). However, given those aforementioned super-high growths, he ends up being a competent fighter after only a handful of levels, he'll likely be far stronger than his original counterpart once he's hit level 10 or so, and it's hard to end a game where he doesn't have all his stats capped.
  • Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade:
    • Eliwood starts off as a Master of None, lacking the specialization of either of his comrades and being locked to swords while slogging around on foot. However, once he's gotten a Heaven's Seal, he promotes to Knight Lord, giving him a horse to considerably increase his speed and access to lances (and by extension, javelins to increase his range). If you've been bothering to level him up, he becomes a very viable unit at this stage.
    • Nino, who joins at level 5 about 5 chapters away from the end of the game. She also has some of the best growths in the game, and can be made very powerful if you're willing to slow yourself down.
  • Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones:
    • By the time that Amelia joins your army in either route, she will be woefully underleveled. She's a level 1 trainee unit with less than 20 HP when the majority of your units will be in the low to mid teens. She can easily be one-rounded by any enemy in the chapters she joins in. Training her requires a considerable amount of babying to feed her kills. Once she promotes to her next tier of classes, she may still require a bit of babying in the very early levels. Once she begins to catch up in level to the rest of your army, she has the potential to become the best unit in your entire army. If she doesn't cap her Strength, Skill, Defense, HP, and Speed, then she will end up with very high stats in all categories. She can turn into a General who takes little to no damage from every attack, if she doesn't dodge the attacks, and can double virtually every enemy in the game, including Swordmasters who are known for high Speed.
    • A straightforward example is L'Arachel, the only Troubadour in the game. When she's recruited, she's simply a mounted White Magician Girl, which is handy for mobile healing but no good for combat and therefore both vulnerable and agonizingly slow to level up. She's also far inferior to Moulder and Natasha, who have had several chapters to gain staff ranks and levels. With the patience to finally get L'Arachel to level 20 and promote her into a Mage Knight or Valkyrie, however, she has been known to clear the first floor of the Bonus Level of Hell by herself, often gaining her remaining twenty levels and capping several of her stats in a single mission!
  • Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance:
    • Astrid starts out so weak that most enemies on her joining map one-shot her. However, she has the personal skill Paragon, which doubles her XP gain, and if trained she rather quickly catches up and then surpasses the other characters in levels. Not only does she get great stats, but her promoted class, Paladin, is extremely broken. On top of that, she's an archer, meaning she can pick up those first few levels pretty easily by scratching enemies at range.
    • Sothe is an intended example, but tends to fall flat. He boasts the Blossom skill, which increases his already pretty good growth rates but reduces XP gain. Sothe tends to be trouble to train, but when he does level up, he sees massive gains. Unfortunately, he can't promote and is in a class not meant for combat, meaning he tends to not do well.
  • Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn:
    • Edward is a Myrmidon who starts out frail, but has the best growths of any on-foot sword user in the game, being basically standard myrmidon growths... but with extra Strength. He can statistically expect to cap every stat in the game save Magic and Resistance at 20/20/20. Unfortunately for him, the early parts of Radiant Dawn are not kind to Magikarp characters like him on the hardest difficulty, and you quickly get the Swordmaster Zihark who fares only slightly worse than him in exchange for requiring far less investment.
    • Laura takes the trope WAY too far. She's a White Magician Girl with insane growths in both Magic (third-best in the game, behind Micaiah and Soren) and Speed (tied for best with Elincia), but not only can she not use offensive magic until she promotes, she starts at level 1. Staves also give painfully low EXP.
    • Meg is an interesting case. Many people immediately write her off, but if raised patiently, her stats can turn her into a very effective Mage Killer. However, like many Dawn Brigade units, her growths are at odds with her base class... which is Armor Sword. Between its low mobility and total lack of ranged physical weapons, this is perhaps the class least suited for mage-hunting, and Meg's mediocre HP and defense mean she can't do her class's traditional duties worth a damn. So while her numbers show a case of Magikarp Power, her usability remains questionable at best.
    • Vika. She has one of the worst availabilities in the game (if not the entire saga, being a new character introduced in Radiant Dawn) yet she has pretty high growths for a Laguz. It takes a lot of babying, but she pays off. Her main problem is also that she joins very late, and in the rest of part 4, you have the Laguz Royals, so there's really no point in using her when you can take Naesala if you want a raven with you in the final battle.
    • Sanaki veers into this and Glass Cannon territory. She joins very late in the game and has a few powerful weapons, but is marred because a) you've had three parts to train your other characters, b) her strength is so low she takes a penalty from using her own special weapon and c) she has very low health, making her the Glass Cannon. Despite this, she has the best growths in the game.
  • Fire Emblem: Awakening: Donnel (aka "Donny") seems designed with this trope in mind. He joins with pathetically low stats and in the weak Villager class that can't even promote. His class, however, does give him access to a special skill that boosts all his growths by 20% with no penalty. Even his Character Development reflects this trope; initially he sees himself as weak and useless and the whole point of his sidequest is to convince him otherwise by letting him get a Level-Up. Unfortunately, he still has issues meaningfully contributing to the army due to factors besides his stats^note Mainly the fact that the Villager class exclusively uses Lances, but none of the classes he can 'graduate' to can (they're the Mercenary and Fighter lines), meaning he has to spend ages building up a Lance rank for nothing., but luckily the 'Aptitude' skill can be inherited by his kids (who don't have his bad start), turning them into utter Game Breakers. The saddest thing about Donnel is that if he were in any other Fire Emblem game besides Awakening, he'd be instant top-tier material, because he joins much earlier than other Est-archetypes (his mission becomes available after chapter 3), and therefore he has the entire rest of the game to level up. But because Awakening lets you reset a unit's level as many times as you want and grind endlessly for experience, Donnel's growths don't matter nearly as much in the late game as his stat caps, which are mediocre at best and easily outclassed by other units.
  • Fire Emblem Fates:
    • Mozu, who just like Donnel, starts with the Villager class. When she's first met, she is rather weak, but she can become one of the most powerful units. Unlike Donnel, she can promote, and her two class choices, Master of Arms and Merchant, both utilize lance-class weaponry, so her weapon rank isn't wasted. That said, the developers noticed what her combination of early availability (like Donnel, she's available almost from the word go), growth-boosting skill, and overall usability could result in, so she doesn't get as powerful as many Ests.
    • Elise starts off as a mounted White Magician Girl; her growths in Magic, Speed and Luck are insane, and once promoted to a class that can use offensive magic she's able to utterly demolish most physical enemies with even basic E-Ranked tomes. She still has the defense of wet tissue paper though, but when she's fighting something she can one-round kill without fear of a counterattack, this hardly matters. You can also reclass her to Wyvern Rider, which makes her a questionable physical unit who relies on class bases to carry her past an absolutely miserable 20% Strength growth and is forced to use the pathetic Bronze Axe... right up until she hits C Axes and unlocks the magical Bolt Axe, turning her into a Lightning Bruiser who slaughters everything in her path.
  • Fire Emblem: Three Houses provides several unusual examples, as most of the game's playable characters start off as the Commoner/Noble class, a weak and unspecialized class akin to the Villager of old.
    • Bows. While useful early on for chip damage, with the exception of the Mini Bow (which cannot make follow-up attacks at close range), they lack the ability to counterattack at close range, which can leave archers a sitting duck on enemy phase. However, upon reaching C Bows, every character learns Close Counter, which allows bows to counterattack at close range, effectively rendering weapons such as Javelins and Hand Axes obsolete. On Maddening in particular, bow usage is basically mandatory on every character that isn't a mage (even characters with bow banes such as Sylvain), due to the abundance of -breaker skills on enemy units but a notable absence of Bowbreaker.
    • Magic in general. The Commoner/Noble class has half the spell charges of proper magic classes, meaning characters such as Linhardt and Mercedes can be rendered effectively useless after expending all their charges. However, upon promoting to a proper magic class, this becomes less of an issue, and the Warlock, Bishop, and Gremory classes even provide double charges.
    • Most students, plus Byleth and Flayn, have a budding talent that usually starts as a neutral skill, or in the case of Dorothea's Faith, Felix's Reason, and Lysithea's Swords, a weakness. However, when the budding talent blossoms, the character becomes proficient in that skill (even if they were weak before) and learns a unique combat art or skill. (In particular, Sylvain's Black Magic Avoid +20 cannot be learned by any other character and provides an alternative to bows for ranged combat).
    • Ferdinand's personal skill, Confidence, provides a flat +15% to his Hit and Avoid so long as his HP is full. While this skill will likely only be active for his first round of combat in the earlygame, in the lategame, when Ferdinand's stats are higher and the player has access to Avoid-increasing battalions, this skill makes him into one of the best evasion tanks in the game. ^note As a Wyvern Lord, Ferdinand's evasion can easily go over 100%.
    • A more conventional example is Cyril. If you're a Blue Lion or Golden Deer, he can be recruited in Chapter 5 as a Commoner when the rest of the player's team is likely already in Beginner classes and working their way into Intermediate classes. If you're a Black Eagle and side with the Church in Chapter 11, he is automatically recruited in Chapter 12 at a point when your other units are all probably in Advanced classes. However, Cyril's personal skill, Aptitude, gives him good growths, and his proficencies (lances, axes, bows, riding, flying) allow him to easily become a Wyvern Lord or Bow Knight, considered the two best non-exclusive classes in the game. He also learns Point-Blank Volley at C+ Bows, allowing him to cheat out doubles earlier than any other character, which can be useful on Maddening. ^note The only other character to learn Point-Blank Volley is Leonie, who doesn't get it until A Bows. Its lance counterpart, Swift Strikes, is learned by Ferdinand, Sylvain, and Seteth, all at A Lances.
  • In Fire Emblem Heroes, it is possible to turn any unit in the game into a complete monster. With that said, it largely depends on the unit as it may take a significant amount of investment (which usually involes a lot of money) through inherited skills/weapons, Dragon Flowers (which boost stats), Feathers (as most Com Mons are at a 3 or 4 star level and will need to be a 5 star unit to access certain skills), and many other consumables in the game to make your unit even passable at higher levels of play. It is common practice amongst players to heavily invest in their favorite characters to make them into a powerhouse.
  • Fire Emblem Engage:
    • Jean starts as a Level 1 Martial Monk, with fittingly low stats to match. While unlike most healers of old, Jean can actually attack things before promotion, his offensive stats are laughably bad, leaving him to gain experience by healing. However, his personal skill, Expertise, doubles his class growth rates, allowing him to snowball quickly once he starts gaining levels, and once promoted (and optionally reclassed), his growths skyrocket due to the generally higher growth rates of advanced classes.
    • A more lategame example comes in the form of Rosado. Despite his strong base class of Wyvern Knight (flying with good weapon ranks in axes and lances) and high starting level, his stats, even on Normal, his Strength and Speed are too low to one-round anything by himself in his join level, while his Defense is too low to allow him to tank more than one or two hits. However, if the player puts in effort, Rosado has excellent growth rates, including the tied for highest Strength growth (second if including Madeline), and even a decent Magic growth for using staves (with Micaiah or if reclassed to Griffon Knight) and magic weapons.
• Maury from Front Mission joins your unit at a very low level and without any skills well after you have more wanzers than you can deploy at any one time (even if you've ignored optional members like Alder or Gregorio) and she also won't earn her first short skill until a comparably high level, making it easy to put her on the back burner and forget about her. While it can be tempting to train her in melee since she can learn melee skills early, that would be throwing away her potential with guns as she happens to have the best natural skill progression in short-ranged attacks and highest accuracy in the game. If you put in the hour or so needed in the colliseum to raise her level to match the rest of your party, arm her with a pair of machine guns, and have her learn switch, she will become a literal killing machine capable of completely obliterating enemy wanzers in a single turn.
• A hidden example in Galactic Civilizations where, if you have your race take the morally good path you find out about Telepathy — that almost all telepaths born with severe physical disabilities, they don't survive in the evil races, but if they do... What this means is that, as you're a good race and look after your people, then you get access to a series of telepathic defensive technologies which are far more powerful than anything else at that tech level.
• To get a wizard to learn the Arcane Omniscience skill in Heroes of Might and Magic V, you need to let them learn a specific set of skills ^note  Sorcery, Enlightenment, and War Machines, which means neglecting their other skills and being forced to rely on their army and low level, low power spells for most of the early-to-mid game. Once they learn Arcane Omniscience, however, they instantly have every spell in the game added to their spellbook, and can cast them all at expert level mastery.
• Two examples in Jeanne d'Arc:
  • Rufus joins alongside La Hire as a second axe user and La Hire's assistant (in a way). His starting stats are rather low, but if one gives him the time, he will start trumping people with the (intentionally) overpowered armlets late-game, he easily surpasses La Hire and Bartholomeo.
  • Colet, the game's only knife-wielder and the Thief-type character. The manual points out that knives are physically weak, but have a very high critical hit rate - and sure enough, the player does indeed see this early on. Unfortunately, the early game knives are very weak weapons, and they do not hold up to the other weapons even with the bonus damage from critical hits. However, while Colet's skillset will make him useful throughout the game (Stealing, being able to produce ladders or bridges), he truly starts to pay off mid-game when his weapons start to boost his base damage to the point where the critical hit bonuses catches up to the other weapons and when he gets "Two Hits" and "Three Hits", resulting in Colet being able to shred through bulky enemies.
• Relena Peacecraft in the SD Gundam G Generation series is a practically a textbook example of this; since she's a politician and Actual Pacifist in her home series, her initial stats are all incredibly low (except for her Charisma). But if the player is willing to tough it out, her late-level stat gains are so incredible that she becomes a One-Woman Army, and she's an excellent candidate to power-level any new mecha since her stats can more than make up for any weaknesses or flaws in the machine.
• Despite being a mandatory character, Ibis Douglas in Super Robot Wars: Original Generation 2 is like this. Her primary Humongous Mecha is potent, but her stats are so low she lags behind... until you get around level 50, when her stat-gains start going out of control and she ends up the best character in the game. However, unlike many, this is frequently alluded to in-game, with multiple references to her "potential."
  • She's also like this in her debut game Super Robot Wars Alpha 2. And she's also a main character. She only gets a massive stat boost as part of a plot event in stage 32 (namely finally shaking off her self doubt and loathing. Before then leveling her to max won't help her any. In fact weak Ibis and strong Ibis have separate character data. Strong Ibis has a few different abilities (and loses a useful ability weak Ibis had that helped keep her alive though you no longer need it at that point) and her outfit in game is different.
  • Gundam 0083's Kou Uraki's a more reasonable example, combining with Took a Level in Badass. Kou starts out underleveled and in an inferior machine. Between leveling up and getting the GP-03, you realize problems with him in the past didn't come from himself, but simply his machine. And then he gets the GP03 Dendrobium Orchis, a Gundam with as much size, HP, and Armor as a typical super robot, while still being able to dodge like a normal Gundam.
  • The other traditional example in the later games is Boss from Mazinger Z. He starts off in a terrible machine with low stats and little value except a cheap repair cost. However, if you level him high enough (usually around 80) his subpilots get a ton of incredibly useful spells for dirt cheap and his stats go through the roof. In addition by this time you'll usually have Mazinkaiser, which means that Boss can get out of his terrible machine and upgrade to Mazinger Z. The trick is that level 80 is absurdly high in a game series where the final bosses rarely get above the mid-70s. There are ways to level him up that high, but they're generally inefficient or a lot of trouble.
  • The Borot itself is often a kind of Magikarp Power - while it starts out with terrible stats and no ability to hit airborne enemies, its weapons are extremely cheap to upgrade and become stronger than those on Mazinger itself. With four part slots, you can easily buff up its stats and give it flight, fixing its anti-air issues.
  • Turn A Gundam is the most infamous one. In any game you get it it starts out underpowered, but after it unlocks some of its attacks and abilities (such as flight, Moonlight Butterfly, and HP Regen), it's a powerhouse. Also, Loran's stats start jumping when he passes around level 50.
  • Also in Alpha Gaiden, all the originals are pretty much useless. Especially Ryusei, who starts out as the worst due to being in an MP mecha. Most people don't use him since you only have him for a couple stages before the time jump and you get him back pretty late into the game. However, he has a VERY high melee stat from the start, and once he starts getting into the higher levels he learns incredible skills (his starting Psychic ability can hit L9 and he gains Guts, Support, and Shield Def), a wonderful spirit list, and once his stats start jumping up, he becomes one of the best pilots in the game. But he's still so-so until he gets R-1 Kai, which has one of the best barriers, the TK Field, and great stats.
  • In Super Robot Wars A Portable, Bright Noa and his battleships fall under this in a way. They start out as plain battleships, which can slowly repair and resupply units inside it, do some damage, and have easily accessible MAP attacks, but suffer from low accuracy and are generally best left out of the way. However, if you painstakingly get Bright to 50 kills, you unlock his Ace Bonus, which is one of the best in the game. When a unit retreats into Bright's ship, instead of taking several turns to be back to 100%, they're completely ready to go in one turn, allowing them to quickly get back into action with none of the Will loss that comes with being resupplied by a Resupply unit.
• Super Robot Wars V gives us Ange and her Vilkiss. Vilkiss by itself has quite a bit of attacks that aren't really impressive for a protagonist unit but as the game goes on, Vilkiss gets quite a bit of load out in its attacks including a MAP attack that's available around halfway through the game, and gains its Ariel Mode that gives a small percentage of completely dodging an attack. Its custom bonus gives it medium amounts of EN and HP regen so it can at least survive at the front lines. At the climax of its plot, Vilkiss gains a post movement final attack since its final attack for most of the game isn't one and uses range stats (though Ange's stats are almost equal anyway though she slightly prefers melee). As for its pilot, Ange starts the game with zero kills, forcing players to babysit her for most of the way till she gets her ace bonus which is one of the best in the game as it allows her deploy with 25% more SP compared to the rest^note Super Robot Wars V has units start deploying at half their SP just like Super Robot Wars Z Jigoku-hen and Tengoku-hen and some bonus evasion and hit rate. Finally when she achieves Great Ace, she'll deploy with full SP, allowing her to burn through her spirit commands and still have enough to cast whatever she needs.
• Sword of the Stars:
  • The Morrigi, who are also Difficult, but Awesome. Their destroyer-class ships are fragile and strategically sluggish. Their population growth, terraforming ability, research speed and industrial growth are awful. However, if you know how to play them and get them to lategame, you find they have good to great chances at the best techs in the game, and their dreadnoughts are monsters.
  • Liir did it first; they suck at start, being Glass Cannon without the cannon due to their few weapon mounts with poor firing arcs. However, they have faster research speed than the rest and similarly good to even better chances at the best techs than Morrigi. A Liir player who can avoid getting crushed in early game will out-tech the opposition with frightening speed.
  • In the sequel the Zuul are turned into this, with a weakened early game but the lategame goal of summoning the very powerful Suul'ka to aid them.
• In Chapter 2 of TearRing Saga, you can get your hands on Narron, a crummy Rook Knight with poor bases, mediocre growths, and a class that is oversaturated with good units like Kreiss, Arkis, and Raffin. Then he promotes.
  Let's Player: [Volume Warning] Yeah, let's look at Narron... Let's look at Narron's promotion, I guess... Okay, bud. Whaddya have...? "Gold Paladin promoted!" ...SIX STRENGTH, SEVEN SK-SEVEN SPEE- [dissolves into incoherent babble as Narron proceeds to gain an additional 5 defense, 4 weapon level, 8 HP, 1 movement, Pavise, and Adept] -fuck! OH MY GOD!!!
  Nappa: Vegeta! What does the scouter say about his power level?
  Vegeta: IT'S OVER NINE THOUSAAAAAAAND!!!
• The Astra Militarum/Imperial Guard in Warhammer 40,000: Gladius. When you just have basic Guardsmen squads, they will be bullied by every other faction - this is a setting where every other faction have Super Soldiers as their basic units. To say nothing of Gladius' native wildlife, who see Guardsmen as helpless snacks. But in the grim darkness of the far future, the Militarum are the undisputed kings of mechanized warfare. Things begin to change once you get access to their motor pool, and start supporting your poor human soldiers with artillery and Tank Goodness. And once the Guard get a large industrial base up and running and start cranking out Baneblades (a super-heavy tank the size of a manor house with eleven barrels of Hell), it's basically game over for everyone else.
• The Sniper class in XCOM: Enemy Unknown. Unlike other classes, Snipers at "Squaddie" rank aren't much more useful than a basic Rookie, since they can't use their weapon in a turn they've moved, and can't actually see far enough to make the most of their rifle's long range, giving them the mobility of a Mighty Glacier without the stopping power to offset it. The real change is once they make it to Corporal, thanks to the most important skill choice in their career:
  • "Squadsight" lets the Sniper shoot at any target their teammates can see so long as the line of fire is unobstructed. A max-level Sniper with the "Squadsight" and "In The Zone" perks can in the proper circumstances clear several pods of enemies outside of cover in a single turn so long as they have ammo in the rifle. Enemy Within nerfs the ability by completely negating Critical Hit chance for shots beyond the Sniper's own line of sight unless the signature Headshot skill is used, and that one has a cooldown of several turns; still, a Squadsight Sniper with the "In The Zone" Colonel skill can wipe out a lot of aliens with base damage alone.
  • "Snap Shot" was worthless in the core game due to the very high aim penalty (-20), but Enemy Within buffed it to a modest -10, that can be negated by carrying a S.C.O.P.E. item. A Snap Shot Sniper is for all intents and purposes a regular operative that carries a massive battle rifle into combat, with all the other skills the Snipers get; at a high enough rank, the aim increase is so high that the penalty barely matters. And unlike their Squadsight pals, Snap Shot Snipers make full use of the very high innate Critical Hit modifier of their weaponry^note 25% on the ballistic rifle, reaching 35% on plasma tier; by comparison, the second closest weapons, the Assaults' shotguns, stay at a fixed 20%.
• Yggdra Yuril Artwaltz from Yggdra Union begins the game as a relatively useless character with stats well below every other character in the game (excluding the summonable extras). However, halfway into the game, she will gain an upgrade that not only turns her into a character on par with some of the strongest characters in the game, but also gives the Always Ace ability, the equivalent of arming her with the ability to abuse nearly every card in the game. That, added with the final equip Fanelia can turn her into a Game-Breaker that can literally OHKO every single unit in the bonus stage by herself.
• In Yu-Gi-Oh! Monster Capsule GB, some monsters are very weak at first, but can become very powerful if you level them up and use an Evolution Chip.
• In Yu-Gi-Oh! Capsule Monster Coliseum, some weaker monsters can evolve into stronger forms under certain conditions. Dark-type Monsters are this in general, as they start out weak and have costly summons, but if trained can prove very powerful.

Western RPG

• Albion:
  • In principle, all spells work a little bit like this, because they only start to function properly as advertised after some practice (i.e. dozens of castings). However, it's really exemplified by some of the most powerful spells, such as Demon Exodus (destroys all demons in a battle) and Goddess' Wrath (destroys all enemies). Yes, they'll do that eventually, but it takes a while before they do anything at all to speak of.
  • Melthas, who is almost completely useless. His only offensive spell is Small Fireball — the weakest offensive spell in the game. His healing spell isn't much better either. All of his other abilities are support spells which will almost never be used when you can just freeze the entire battlefield with Sira (who will ALWAYS be in your party if Melthas is). That changes when he gets Demon Exodus, and upgrades it to at least 50% of its full power, at which point it will instantly eliminate all demon type enemies (which include both the most powerful and the most irritating non-human, non-technological enemies in the game) on the field.
  • Harriet's Wrath of the Goddess. When you first learn it, it will use up all of her energy (and quite a bit of her health if said energy is not on 100%), and disintegrates a single enemy at most. Develop it to 100% and it's an instant I Win button, as it will destroy everything except Ned's type 2 androids. Of whom you will only have to fight one.
• Baldur's Gate:
  • Dual-classing in general. You abandon your old class and start taking levels in a new one, which suppresses all of your old skills until your new class becomes a higher level than your old one (so if you, say, dual-class from thief to mage at level 7, you need to hit level 8 as a mage before you get your thief skills back). Dual-classed characters usually have to spend a lot of time playing 'catch-up' to the rest of the party and gain no HP until their new class bypasses their old one, and it is crippling if a vital party member (like a thief) does it while you have no spare, but the end result is a whatever you dual-classed into with the HP and skills of the first class stacked on top of its own. Applies less in the second game, where it's easy to just take some of the benefits of dual-classing without the cost; several potential party members are already dual-classed, and the Player Character could just switch right at the start of the game and catch up quickly, as the first dungeon gives a lot of experience (from spell scrolls).
  • Baldur's Gate II gave us the Sorcerer class. Initially it seems far weaker than a normal mage. Instead of learning spells from scrolls, it can only learn a total of 5 spells per level, which are slowly chosen over the course of level-ups. In other words, make any bad picks and you're screwed. Even the official strategy guide for Throne of Bhaal recommends against choosing a Sorcerer. However, the Sorcerer is able to cast an unprecedented 6 spells per day of every spell level (an amount only outdone by Edwin) and can pick which spell to cast on the fly, flexibility only matched by a Reckless Dweomering Wild Mage (but without the wild surge). In Throne of Bhaal, where tenth-level spells learned by wizards as high-level abilities don't count against the Sorcerer's limit of learned spells, the Sorcerer dominates the Mage.
  • The Monk (also in the sequel) starts the game almost crippled by high armor class (high being bad) and the fact his fists don't count as magical weapons. By the time he hits high levels, not only are these problems long cured, he also gains insane magical resistance and fists that can outdamage Dual Katanas.
  • With the Ascension mod installed, that +2 Sword of Chaos that you've been carrying from the first dungeon in Shadows of Amn will become a +4 weapon with better special abilities if you give it back to its original owner Sarevok.
  • Aerie. She starts as a multiclass mage/cleric with 16 points both on intelligence and wisdom, making her decent but singularly weaker than other mages and clerics (especially Edwin and Viconia, who however are evil characters and might not fit in a good alignment party with Aerie) and slower to level. This is of main importance in early game where the party is still weak to fight against some bosses and high-skilled specialists perform better against them than an all-around character. However, when she levels up she becomes able to choose sequencers from both wizard and priest spell pools which results in many interesting combinations. Though she can become an excellent tank with the right equipment and spell enhancements, it is best to keep her in the back while using her to cast spells from a safe distance, making her also a Glass Cannon.
  • Anomen is even more blatant. He is a dual classed fighter into cleric with 18/52 strength, 10 dexterity, 16 constitution and 12 wisdom. Considering that dexterity can be raised to 18 very early with a pair of magical gloves, this results in a pretty decent fighter stopped at level 8 and a rather mediocre cleric still progressing. However, he gets a quest that, if successful, might increase his wisdom to 16. Thus making him a flexible good cleric also capable of melee tanking (with the added thac0 bonus and extra proficiency points of a level 8 fighter).
  • Thieves in the second game. They are still needed to detect and disarm traps and to unlock chests without sacrificing dedicated spell slots, but there are no traps or locks that require more skills than those of a thief like Imoen: she is permanently fixed at level 7 thief since she dual classed to a mage before the beginning of the game, while other characters progress up to level 18 or 19. Specialized kits like the assassin or the bounty hunter might get a little more momentum, but still they are complexively not as indispensable as in the first game. However, with the expansion Throne of Bhaal, thieves at higher levels start to gain many incredibly powerful skills, like the ability to wield any weapon, even those that are normally forbidden. Imagine a backstab multiplier applied to Carsomyr or after setting up time stopping traps...
• Cyberpunk 2077: The Problem Solver is an iconic sub-machine gun that seems to work like another Saratoga when you get it. But if you upgrade it to Legendary status, the magazine increases to 85 rounds and the fire rates goes up to 1000 BPM!
• Dragon Age: Origins:
  • An archer rogue, more so than any other class, fits this role, especially if you want to invest talents into lockpicking. While melee classes such as Warriors and Dual Wielding Rogues get access to decent weapons sooner and mages start out strong and just get stronger, an archer is... somewhat underwhelming in the early-game thanks to a lack of decent bows and relatively weak initial talents. However, archers have extremely powerful late-game talents such as Scattershot, which does better than normal damage to and stuns just about every enemy you're facing at once and is almost impossible to resist, and Arrow of Slaying, which can deal up to several hundred points of damage with one hit (up to 10 times normal damage in the right circumstances), and is perhaps the best way to deal with enemy casters before they get in range to do real damage. Several of the unique bows that are found later in the game are also very powerful. By the endgame, a properly built Archer Warden will be the best damage dealer in your party.
  • The Bard specialization starts out rather spoony, as the base stat buff and initial skills compare very poorly to all other specializations. But the effects scale up with Cunning, which a smart Rogue develops to increase their lethality. Since the song effects the entire group, the value is multiplied by each conscious teammate. In the end, there is no specialization across all the classes that is as powerful.
  • The Templar specialization for warriors allows the character to wear some pretty good armor that only they can use, but for the most part, their abilities are very niche and only really work against mages...until level 15, when they get Holy Smite, a powerful Area of Effect stun and knockback. It's one of the most effective Crowd Control abilities in the entire game.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • In general throughout the series, "Mage" and "Thief" based builds are almost always weaker to start out and have a much tougher going early in the games than their "Fighter" oriented counterparts. However, after leveling up a few times and getting higher quality equipment/spells, these builds quickly outpace the pure "Fighters" and reach massive levels of power. While they're busy trading blows with enemy mooks, skilled Thief-types can, for example, have wiped them all out with x30 damage critical hit sneak attacks while Mage-types can have dropped them all with a mass Paralysis spell while their powerful summoned creatures tear them apart, both without having taken a single hit in return. However, as seen under Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards, you can still find yourself at a disadvantage if you're forced to fight an enemy you can't sneak up on or who is immune to/reflects your spells, so it is wise to have a Plan B.
  • Oblivion:
    • At the start of the Dark Brotherhood questline you're given a crappy little dagger that is basically useless compared to everything else you have. At the end of the brotherhood quests, the dagger gets enchanted and becomes a fairly powerful enchanted weapon that, if nothing else, will get you a decent amount of money if you sell it.
    • There is also the Chameleon spell, which would make it possible to sneak well, but even with 97% Chameleon, you would be found by enemies after the first strike on them, seeing as they are all somewhat psychic (which made it a waste of magic against multiple enemies). However, if you managed to get 100% Chameleon (which could be done permanently), you would essentially never die, as only scripted characters or monsters could find you. Add max sneak, and you could have 6x damage on every attack in addition to the invisibility. To get this with a spell, armor would often lower the percentage and ruin it, forcing you to become an Invisible Streaker (if underwear had not been grafted on to your body).
  • Skyrim:
    • Thief skills. These abilities initially are nothing impressive: with pickpocketing you can occasionally find good loot in someone's pockets, sneaking lets you avoid getting in fights, speech nets you slightly higher prices, and lock picking makes opening locks a little easier. Invest in their perks, and once you've built up your experience with them, you can sneak during combat with an enemy, allowing you to steal his armor and weapons while he's trying to find you again, then drop a few bottles of poison in his pocket, causing him to die instantly, or you can use a dagger to slit his throat, which, due to sneaking's perks, will do as much damage as a Daedric warhammer to the face would (x15 sneak attack critical damage with a Daedric dagger is insanely powerful, and with an easily found enchanted item found in the Dark Brotherhood questline, you can easily make it x30). Then you can search whatever treasure chest he was guarding and get much better loot due to lockpicking's perks, which you can sell for drastically higher prices at the store.
    • Archery. Initially, the damage isn't impressive, but an Ebony bow and arrows will, from a base, unperked sneak attack, drop many foes in a single shot (Draugr Deathlords with Ebony bows can drop even a heavy armor-wearing character in a couple of shots). Sneak allows you to change the damage bonus for sneak attacks with bows from x2 to x3. This is enough to kill just about anything short of a dragon or high level dungeon boss with a single shot once you're using Ebony or higher.
    • Alteration magic, to some extent. Yes, the various armor buffs can be useful, but a Destruction-minded mage may prefer to Stun Lock her enemies so they never reach melee range, while a Conjuration specialist may let his summoned minions do the fighting while he hides in the next room. But once your Alteration skill approaches level 75 you can buy the Paralyze spell, which will render the majority of enemies helpless for ten seconds or more. Start a Wall of Fire underneath that Draugr Deathlord and watch him burn, and if he starts to get up, just zap him with Paralyze again.
    • Crafting. Sure, a little Smithing boost to your equipment is nice, but limited since you can't use it on enchanted gear, and at starting level, any Enchanting that you do yourself will be vastly overpowered by loot that you find in the world. Spend some time power-leveling these skills and investing in perks, though, and soon enough you'll be smithing gear far superior to anything else available and laying down skill-boosting enchants that can make you an expert at melee, archery, magic, or thievery. And that's without abusing an infinite loop of Alchemy, Enchantment, and Smithing buffs that can create gear so powerful it crashes the game.
    • In the realm of follower characters, there's J'Zargo. An overconfident Squishy Wizard when you meet him, he's the only character in the core game (and only one of four with all the official DLC) who never stops leveling up with the player. What holds him back, though, is the poor design of the Mage AI - J'Zargo will never get any better spells, the damage of spells doesn't increase with level, and he doesn't use any weapons you give him. While the player ought to be using weapons that far outscale the Master level spells, J'Zargo will contentedly throw his Novice and Apprentice level lightning magic until he runs out of magic and engages the dragon in fisticuffs.
    • Light Armor. The starting armor you get won't even give you 50 Armor points where the starting heavy armor (if you side with Ralof) will give near 100. But, when combined with smithing above will allow you to reach the armor cap with with only Elven armor, which is one of the lightest in the game, lighter than leather in fact. This will allow you to ambush most of your targets while taking only scratch damage from everything but giants and higher level dragons and draugr. You'll also be able to carry more loot/potions/backup weapons because the full set only weighs 9 pounds.
• Fable: The Summon spell initially summons a weak wasp that deals pathetic damage and doesn't last for very long. But if it lands a killing blow on an enemy stronger than it, it's permanently replaced with said enemy. With a bit of luck and skill, you can have a White Balverine or Minion as a helper.
• Fallout: New Vegas:
  • "Euclid's C-Finder", a thing that looks like a toy raygun and is indeed being used as such by a pair of kids in Freeside. Initially, you never find ammo for it. But once you power up ARCHIMEDES II, the little gun becomes the targeting laser for it.
  • The humble Varmint Rifle is the first weapon you get in the tutorial. You get it in poor condition, it suffers from low rate of fire and low clip size and its one good point, high accuracy, is largely useless with just the iron sights. But once it's fully repaired and upgraded, it turns into an extremely light-weight silenced sniper weapon that can take out even late-game enemies with a sneak attack headshot. On top of that, it's cheap to repair and maintain, ammo is plentiful and it can be loaded with AP ammo that'll go through most non-powered armor types without even slowing down in return for a barely noticable 5% reduction in damage. Once you get Ratslayer, however, the Varmint Rifle quickly becomes obsolete and serves as a repair item for its aforementioned unique variant and other weapons of similar build if you do invest in the Jury Rigging perk.
  • The Laser Rifle may possibly qualify, while it has low spread, can be found quite early (you can find two in Nipton in a rather poor state, and if you're really lucky, one of the diggable graves at the Yangtze Memorial.), and a respectable zoom, the rather low damage and the fact it uses Microfusion Cells doesn't quite allow it to be an amazing weapon out the gate early on, but if you are lucky and/or patient the town of Novac has a merchant that sells all three modifications for it, a scope that puts the zoom on par with that of the Gauss Rifle, Focus Optics, that give it +3 to damage, and finally a beam splitter that turns the one beam into three that can hit the same spot all at once, turning it into a weapon capable of carrying you through all of the game, save the Dead Money Add-On.
  • In terms of character build, an explosives-based character is most definitely this. To wit: the best explosives-based weapon you can get at the beginning of the game is a single-shot grenade launcher reminiscent of the M79. Used carelessly, you will blow yourself to bits, and its high damage and range is offset by the fact that you only get twenty shots for it. Oh, and you have to buy the DLC in order to even have it in the first place. But once you get the right weapons ^note 25mm APW, Thump-Thump, Annabelle, maybe a fat man or Esther, take the right perks ^note Demolitions Expert, Splash Damage, Hit the Deck, Grunt, and find the right vendor for your ammo ^note George Bardon at Hoover Dam, you morph into what can only be described as the angry fist of God. Anything that gets within the (very, very long) range of your weapons is either swiftly reduced to a pile of mangled body parts and blood or is slowed to a crawl due to explosives having a tendency to cripple limbs. Even the mighty deathclaws will not be able to get near a leveled explosives character.
  • Unarmed is pretty similarly powerful. In the early game, your bare fists are about as pitiful as you'd expect, most enemies fight in melee, and the only real choice to enhance it is boxing gloves that aren't capable of killing an opponent. Once your Unarmed skill hits a certain point, you pick up the various Unarmed moves and perks, and you pick up weapons like the Ballistic Fist, it becomes both highly damaging and highly versatile.
• In Freedom Force, Man-Bot is slow and clunky with a weak blast attack, although he has a powerful punch if he can connect. However, if you can bear with him, he eventually gains the ability to fly, and more importantly can be vital to the team by using his tremendous Energy X generation to transfer energy to his team mates, allowing them to use their own abilities much more frequently.
• Jagged Alliance:
  • If the player gives their custom IMP merc 85 (the max) wisdom (that affects how quick they improve) a merc that was "meh" everything, with a little practice, becomes perfect at everything.
  • Same goes for some of the other mercs that you can hire, notably Ira, who is assigned to you at the very start in Jagged Alliance 2. She seems like a mediocre medic and awful everything else... except for her 83 wisdom that allows her to quickly become one of your elite soldiers.
    • Gumpy. An overweight, unattractive dork who throws dated pop-culture references around with a speech impediment. He's okay-ish with explosives and terrible at everything else. However, his wisdom is 93. He can potentially take several levels in badass.
• Mass Effect:
  • Mass Effect:
    • Infiltrator Shepard is this, by sheer virtue of Immunity and Marksman. Sure, Soldiers get them too, but the Infiltrator has a plethora of debuff abilities to - by the endgame, allow him/her to dash into a crowd of heavies, taking almost no damage, and then jam their weapons and cooldown times, and then take them out with a highly-accurate machine pistol. But to pull this off, you need a good medicine mod in your armor; that same armor also needs a high defensive rating - don't worry about shields, you won't need them - and to max out Immunity's level, and get the Prestige Class that allows you to further rank Immunity up. And then do so. Just watch out for Damping attacks from the enemy. Garrus doesn't get Immunity. Just saying.
    • If you get party member Liara early enough, she's pretty weak. She can't be trained with any weapons and she can only equip light armor. However, if you get the party, and by extension her, up to level 60, and distribute her skill points appropriately, she will be the most powerful biotic party member with extremely fast recharge times on all of her skills.
    • Tali starts as just an engineer, however her Quarian Machinist Skill and another of Skill both improve her shields. If you max both, and give her proper Armor add-ons to further improve her shield and shield regeneration, she can be more durable than a Soldier/Infiltrator and second only to Wrex in sheer survivability (with the exception of Immunity). She'll have more shield than most heavy armor users.
    • Kaidan starts with only a weak throw and sabotage, but with levels and by maxing out his class skill, no other party member can compete with him in the sheer variety of ways he can screw with enemies, being able to single-handedly lock down anything that's not meant to be fought exclusively with a tank.
  • In Mass Effect 2, DLC party member Kasumi is extraordinarily weak, even more so than Jack. However, careful distribution of her skill points will turn her into a Glass Cannon with abilities that can disorient enemies, overload their shields, and severely weaken most mooks (or one-shot them in the easier difficulties, where it becomes Awesome, but Impractical by virtue of sheer cooldown time.)
  • Come Mass Effect 3, the multiplayer mode added volus as playable characters. With weak shields, little in the way of offensive powers, and low carrying capacity for weapons, they look like joke characters (hell, they stand on boxes when you pick them) but they're lethal. You just need to max out their level, and find a good weapon for them, such as the Reegar Carbine. Then, you can maximise their carrying capacity, spec Shield Boost to increase damage resistance, give them a shield-boosting mod, and get really really good at timing Shield Boost, their heavy melee Defensive Stance, their free cloak, and their other two powers along with shooting things and reload-cancelling. But you, too, can be a biotic god. Or The Smart Guy, if you prefer.
• Neverwinter Nights:
  • The Monk character class. Most players avoid it because it doesn't exactly sound exciting — he can't wear any armor, and can barely use weapons. As expected, his initial attacks pale in comparison to those of sword-wielding warriors; however, level a monk enough and he becomes one of the strongest attackers in the game, hitting harder than most magic swords several times per round, and having ridiculous spell resistance above almost all items in the game, with great saves for anything that gets through.
  • In the expansion packs, there are Shifters. Their physical stats don't matter when they're shapeshifted, so you're pretty much encouraged to Minmax and up their Wisdom scores. The problem, unfortunately, is that they need to take 5 levels of the mostly-useless Druid to get them, and their forms are quick-moving but painfully frail until they reach level 7, for a combined level of 12 to turn a physically weak, magically inept character into an Awesome, but Impractical Fighter-wannabe in a game that you're expected to beat around level 15. In multiplayer and the expansions, though, you can get characters up to level 40, and past the "epic" level of 20 you can start learning to boost a character's base stats. If you got them a base wisdom of 16 or higher, and you invested every point gained from levelling up into wisdom, and for every point below a base 20 wisdom you used an epic feat to boost wisdom, then at the level cap you could get the ultimate feat for the class: turning into a dragon.
  • The Bard class. While they manage to avoid being a Quirky Bard at the beginning, they're not particularly amazing. As they level up, though, they gain stronger and stronger songs like Curse Song (which affects multiple enemies at once), Legionnare's March (which affects your entire party), and Hymn of Requiem (which damages multiple enemies while healing your entire party). While they aren't Game-Breaker status, a properly-levelled Bard can be the best support character in the game.
• In Pillars of Eternity, the soulbound dagger The Unlaboured Blade is one of the weakest daggers in the game and gets worse with each level up. By the second-last level it is bar none the worst weapon in the game. Leveling it up one last time makes it one of the best. This is made more frustrating since the means of leveling up the dagger is by using it to deal ever higher amounts of damage. To get it to the final level, you have to deal nearly 2000 damage with a weapon that has severe accuracy and damage penalties.
• In Planescape: Torment, one of the spells you receive for unlocking and interpreting the Unbroken Circle of Zerthimon is "Missile of Patience," which fires a single bolt of energy that does a negligible amount of damage. Until your mage reaches level 11, that is. Then it summons a giant repeating ballista that fires many bolts of (more powerful) energy at as many targets as you can hit before the spell ends. Of course, given the prerequisites necessary to unlock this spell, it's entirely possible that The Nameless One will already be above 11th level by the time he gets access to it.
• Some versions of Ultima IV has a quirky variation in the Shepherd class. The class itself (which has marginally better weapon and armor selection than the mage, no magic, and poor trap disarming ability) never really gets better, and to top it off you start off at a lower level and outside a demon-infested ruin instead of a city you could actually buy food in... but mastering the powers of the Avatar lifts restrictions on you regardless of class, like allowing you to equip anything or cast any spell, and due to how the party system is set up the party ends up overall stronger (you can't recruit the companion of your own class, and have to bring all recruitable companions with you at the end of the game, so you, who eventually can bypass the restrictions, being the Shepherd makes for better synergy).
• Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader: Burst fire weapons early in the game feel very unimpressive. Their per shot damage is low, as is their max range, and recoil means that most shot in a burst can miss so their damage output falls well short of their theoretical maximum. They are prone to Friendly Fire. Compared to single shot rifles, who have longer ranges, can reliably hit (especially with their deadeye attack) from long range, and can also hit several enemies with overpenetration. Their damage is 3 to 4 times higher meaning they can one shot enemies reliably and cripple tougher enemies. Later in the game the dynamic flips around. Burst fire weapons begin to take huge advantage from the growing sources of damage buffs (as these apply to each shot in a burst), and higher ballistic skills mean they hit reliably. The Game-Breaker Arch-Militant mid-game archetype allows one to boost Ballistic Skills so high as to negate their recoil and general lower accuracy. Meanwhile enemy HP growth and higher armor value mean that single shot rifles lose favor to autofire or dedicate anti-armor attacks like Melta Guns and Plasma.
• In The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, it really takes a while for an Alchemy-heavy skill build to begin paying off due to spending time hunting recipes and ingredients for various items, but between the vast bonuses given by potions, decoctions and oils, along with huge boosts to survivability, it's alarmingly potent and many Death March players swear by it.

Other Video Games

• Nath in 100% Orange Juice!. She begins with negligible combat stats (-1 ATK, -1 DEF and +1 EVA), however, when she uses a battle card, she stores one stack of "Active Extension", which gives her +1 ATK and DEF, at the cost of -1 EVA, and can store up to 3 stacks of this special ability; and her Hyper, called "Another Ultimate Weapon", gives her +1 ATK and DEF, +1 additional ATK and DEF for every 20 stars spent in this card, meaning she can rack up her attack to a maximum of +9, and demolish anything the game has to offer.
  • Then there's also QP (Dangerous), who at first seems like a slightly worse version of regular QP, (Having -1 EVA), however, she gets combat bonuses just by holding cards with "Pudding" in their name, and her Hyper allows her to get these cards from the center of the deck.
• Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War has a "Kill Rate" system through which planes unlock variants. Most lines of planes improve modestly, but two of the lower-end aircraft unlock vastly superior aircraft. The first is the MiG-21 bis, which more or less equivalent to the starter F-5E, except its rocket launchers are arguably worse than the F-5E's unguided bombs. Through heavy use, it unlocks the MIG-21-93, which handles much better, carries QAAMs, and performs at a similar level to the F-14D "Super Tomcat". The second is the F-4E Phantom II, which is a large fighter with poor handling and a unique weak and hard to use SP weapon in its napalm bombs. The F-4E unlocks the F-4G Wild Weasel, which handles even worse, but at least has a decent SP weapon in its unique LAGM anti-surface missiles. However, this, in turn, unlocks the F-4X, which remedies pretty much all of the performance issues of the earlier F-4 series and flies similarly to an F-15C or SU-27 with a better SP weapon. Other aircraft trees also get better with newer variants, some even substantially so, such as F-15C -> F-15 MTD/ACTIVE or SU-27 -> SU-35 -> SU-37, but few increase in performance so dramatically.
• The Battle Cats has plenty of examples, but some of the most notable are:
  • The purchasable Special Cats have decent stats for Empire of Cats, but past that point, most of them are sharply outclassed in later stages, even in their True Forms. Unlocking their expensive Talents, however, changes things: all of them get an 80% stat boost to make up for their poor base stats, and some of them unlock powerful new abilities, like Dark Lazer's wave attacks or Dancer Cat's wave immunity.
  • All of the Ancient Egg units. They start out as completely useless eggs, and have to be hatched with Behemoth Stones, farmed from stages that appear daily where you take on Behemoth enemies. The early ones don't take many stones, but some of the later ones take lots of grinding to hatch. Once they do finally hatch, they become proper cats with new abilities, and many of them gain the Behemoth Slayer ability to easily take out Behemoth enemies — and some of them, such as Courier Cat, Mushroom Cat, Hitman Cat, and Ape Lord Luza, prove to be very powerful to justify the expense.
  • The Li'l Cats start out as smaller, cuter, and much weaker versions of the Normal Cats. They're very cheap to upgrade, so they can potentially carry you through the very early game, but after that, they become useless outside of CatCombos. However, clearing the awakening stages for them unlocks their true forms, which dramatically boost their stats. They're still a bit weaker than their Normal equivalents by default, but they compensate with unique abilities their bigger forms lack, like Li'l Eraser Cat's freeze immunity and Li'l Flying Cat's anti-Zombie abilities, and they can also be used in 4-crown stages that restrict the use of the Normals. In addition, they also gain access to Talents, which can be bought to improve their stats and give them powerful new abilities. At full investment, some of them, like Li'l Dark Cat and Li'l King Dragon Cat, can become far stronger than the Normal Cats which once outshined them.
  • Zig-zagged by the Ultra Souls set of Uber Rares. They’re pretty weak in their basic forms, having to Zerg Rush to be of any use. Their evolved and true forms are much stronger, becoming heavy attackers. However, in a case where the Magikarp can sometimes be more powerful than the Gyarados, the basic forms can be useful on certain stages due to their low cost and fast production speed. In particular, Kasa Jizo is considered more powerful in basic form. The Elemental Pixies and Uberfest Ubers zig-zag this trope in the same way, but are generally more useful in their later forms.
  • The Nekolugas are weak, slow, and expensive in their basic forms. Upon growing to level 10, they suddenly gain both massively increased range and stats, and powerful special abilities.
• Bloons Tower Defense has a few towers which get much stronger with a little investment.
  • Monkey Aces are pretty expensive for a base tower, but also relatively weak. Although they fire a spread of 8 darts per shot, they don't aim their shots and will miss most of them, so their damage potential is not very high. Invest enough money into a Monkey Ace, however, and it'll become much more powerful, whether by pumping up its rate of fire and amount of darts to scour the entire screen for heavy damage, aiming a constant stream of darts and bombs at the bloons, or dropping a screen-wiping bomb.
  • The Spike Factory is a generally powerful tower on its first two upgrade paths, but its bottom path falls under this. The bottom path upgrades are very weak, focusing on utility and spike placement instead of directly improving its ability to pop bloons. However, reaching the final upgrade, Perma-Spike, lets it create extremely powerful and long-lasting spikes which can stack up to hold off entire endgame rounds. It's one of the only towers which can effectively solo a BAD, the final bloon encountered on round 100 of CHIMPS.
  • Ezili starts out with a weak attack that deals damage over time, which isn't very useful against huge rushes of regular bloons. However, she does a lot more damage to MOAB-class bloons, especially with her MOAB Hex ability, making her much better in the late-game rounds when these bloons start showing up in masses.
• Battle Nations: "The Wimp" unit has lower stats than even the basic Trooper. Getting it to rank 6 and unlocking its two attacks requires a lot of effort, time and resources. The unit at this point now has very high stats and two attacks that are accurate and very powerful attacks that deal well over 200 damage each attack and have have unlimited ammunition.
• Cookie Clicker has the Cursor and the Grandma. In the early game, the Cursor is little more than wasted cash, with a pitiful 0.1 cookies per second, and the Grandma is a bit better at 0.5 but stops being useful after the farm. However, both of them get upgrades. Lots and lots of upgrades. Most other buildings get six upgrades — one increases base CPS, the other five double it until it's 32x its increased amount. Cursors start out with that... and then they get upgrades that let them boost their CPS by a number times every other building, which quickly stacks up to a massive amount. Meanwhile, grandmas start with the six standard upgrades... and then get access to nine of their own, making them one of the most powerful buildings in the game. And that's before you get into the boost added by portals, or the Bingo Center.
• Cultist Simulator: The Society of St Hydra is both this and a Crutch Character. Early on, it gets a head start over the other cults due to its ability to call upon any principle to promote a Believer into a Disciple, but becomes weak in the midgame as it cannot exalt regular cultists at all. However, it is VERY good at seducing and recruiting Hunters- the most effective followers by far- making it a good choice for the lategame.
• In the original Digimon virtual pets, the amount of care taken in raising your pet determines its evolutionary path, with bad caretaking resulting them digivolving into the pathetically weak Numemon, a bug-eyed slug-thing who attacks by throwing its own excrement. However, raising Numemon with perfect care will result in it Digivolving into Monzaemon, a giant teddybear who is capable of defeating any other Digimon with extreme ease.
  • In the first Digimon World game for the Playstation, you didn't even have to raise Numemon well, just finish the Toy Mansion to get the Teddy Bear Costume; then you can spam all the Monzaemon you want.
  • Pretty much all the virtual pets had one of these - a worthless Champion/Adult level created by failing every other requirement, that could digivolve into a superlative Ultimate/Perfect if you played your cards right. The other versions had Vegimon to Vademon, Scumon/Sukamon to Etemon, Nanimon to Digitamamon, and Raremon to ExTyrannomon.
• Dungeon Explorer, a Gauntlet-type game for the TurboGrafx-16 console had the bard - a weak character that did low damage and had crappy spells (one of them changed the background music.) However, midway through the game he could be transformed into a hermit - the most powerful character in the game.
• The PSP game Dungeon Maker 2 provides you with a pet who can change into a number of different monsters if you have their "memory." The memories for stronger monsters are found later in the game, but they all start at Level 1 (which is no more powerful than it sounds). This effectively makes all forms other than Human Ally a Magikarp, and also gives Magikarp Powers to players willing to level up a number of them just to learn their transferable abilities.
• The first fighter you get in Freespace 2 is pretty average — not too fast, not too strong, can't carry a lot of missiles, moderate weapons compatibility and later on is usually passed over in favor of Interceptors or Assault Fighters. It's a strategic pick in multiplayer, however, because it's the only fighter that can carry the Helios antimatter torpedo. Most bombers can't even equip that weapon, which is capable of destroying a cruiser in one shot. The ability to carry this warhead is generally agreed to be unintentional on the part of the developers.
• The cheapest tower (and possibly the first you can afford) in Grow Castle is the Worm, which pops up under one enemy to deal a small amount of damage. It has limited range and its attack doesn't scale to large groups. However, when levelled up and promoted, it deals much heavier damage, and it also steals a percentage of its damage as mana points. The steady MP income, and damage potential against bosses, makes it a vital part of most builds.
• In the PlayStation survival horror game Hell Night (also known as Dark Messiah outside the U.S. — not that one), you have a choice of four partner characters that can accompany you through the game. If you get attacked by whatever monster is currently stalking you at the time, you die, unless you have a partner, in which case they take the hit for you and die in your stead. You can then get one of the others if you're in the right place at the right time. The first partner you get has no weapon but can sense the location of the monster on your map, while the other three cannot; however, they do have weapons (with limited ammo, of course) that can stun the monster long enough for you to get away, but not kill it. If you keep the first partner (a teenage schoolgirl named Naomi) all the way through the end of the game, in the final areas of the game she has a random chance to say, if you spam the "talk to partner" button while the monster is approaching, "I wish... I wish you were DEAD!", which stuns the monster just like an attack from one of the other partners would, and can be used an endless number of times.
• In I Was a Teenage Exocolonist, your starter cards based on your babyhood memories and your Bio-Augmentation start out being worth 0 points^note except for the Super-Strength card, which has a flat score of 5, but they can be upgraded into more powerful cards at the Garrison Gym, which is unlocked by the 2nd Toughness perk.
• KanColle has this in the form of second remodels. Not all ships have them, and those who have them either get them at a fairly high level or needs a rare item named Blueprints (and some ships require both of those). Once they attain that upgrade however, they get a myriad of advantages which makes the game easier for the players.
• Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain has Quiet, a Cold Sniper that can be deployed as an assistant for Snake on missions. When she is first recruited (due to having an uneasy alliance with Snake and Diamond Dogs), she will more-or-less refuse to do anything beyond the most basic scouting procedures, fires an unsilenced rifle that draws enemy personnel to her position (risking her own safety) and doesn't seem to know how to communicate with Snake, only responding to several of his commands with a non-verbal sound. (Miller even lampshades this when Quiet asks to go on a mission, inquiring how Snake is supposed to talk to her when she doesn't even speak.) Even worse, as Snake is spotted, she'll almost immediately snipe the foe that saw him. This may sound useful, but the player is generally encouraged to use non-lethal force against enemies (both to get bonus points and to send the enemies to join the Diamond Dogs PMC). In many cases where Quiet will snipe a guard, the player would have ample time to non-lethally dispatch the guard before they could call for support. However, as Snake's bond with Quiet grows, she learns a multitude of functions and commands, including hand signals (giving the thumbs-up to Snake if he looks at her through a scope while giving a command), can equip a silenced tranquilizer rifle, become a much more effective spotter (to the point that she will gather up enough supplies for a full refill of weapons and item ammo at max level), be trusted to cover the player in stealth and even accomplish trick shots (shooting a thrown grenade into an object or around corners) at the highest bond level.
  • Another one is the Stun Arm prosthetic. It starts out as a standard taser, but once it gets to Grade 4 it acquires a third charge bar. Charging it fully to this third bar allows the user to knockout all enemies^note The exceptions being puppet soldiers, skulls, enemies inside armored vehicles and unable to one-shot the Third Boy via lightning bolts within a 45 meter radius. This includes even Eli as well. Though it takes quite a long while to recharge so using it wisely is the best course of action for it.
• In MOBA (Massive Online Battle Arena) games such as Heroes of Newerth, Defense of the Ancients, and League of Legends you have champions that are very frail and vulnerable in the early game, but have incredible endgame power because they scale really well with levels and items. These are generally known as "carries", as in "they carry the team to victory". If the enemy team does not stop them from progressing to this stage, carries can win 1v2, 1v3, and sometimes even 1v5 fights. Competent carries will play defensively, hold back from attacking the enemy champion, and focus only on defending their tower while killing enemy minions for gold in order to buy the items and acquire the experience they require to scale into late game.
  • League of Legends has officially shied away from the "carry" term, feeling it unfair to put the burden of winning the game on a single player. The term, however, is still used among players for characters that tend to be very strong in late game, with "hyper-carries" being the most extreme examples. Examples of characters with scaling mechanics built into their core kit include:
    • Tristana begins the game with one of the worst basic attack ranges for a ranged marksman. Her passive increases her range as she levels up, ending with one of the best. Not quite the same case after her rework, where her passive range increase was nerfed and so has her attack speed, though she still remains one of the stronger marksmen at the latter stages.
    • Vayne starts out with nothing but a short-ranged basic attack that deals very little damage when she's still starting out, and her defense is so frail she can lose half her entire health with just a few blows. However, she has so much damage crammed into her ability kit (to begin with: percent-based unblockable damage), she ends up becoming an incredible damage powerhouse in late game.
    • Kog'Maw fits this trope to a T. Short range, no mobility and low base damages, any character can basically kill him with a sneeze during the first 15 to 20 minutes in the game. Kog needs to get levels in order to empower his Bio-Arcane Barrage, his primary offensive tool which increases the range of his basic attacks and grants him percentage health damage per hit. Also his ultimate, Living Artillery, is a long range skillshot with an execute threshold that increases in range with each rank. Once acquiring a few items and levels, his lategame becomes SO. FREAKIN. NIGHTMARISH. that high level players and teams developed entire team compositions based around Kog as the sole damage dealer with everyone else supporting him via buffs, shields and heals of all manners.
    • Kayn starts the game with a fairly mediocre ability set, and lacks any passive bonus, instead having a special bar that charges by damaging enemy champions. Once the bar has been filled, he can transform into the Shadow Assassin or Darkin form, augmenting three abilities each (including his ultimate) and granting a powerful new passive bonus.
    • Nasus permanently increases the damage of his Siphoning Strike attack every time he kills a unit with it, with no damage cap. Leave Nasus alone and his Siphoning Strike will eventually hit with the force of a nuke.
    • Veigar permanently gains Ability Power every time he kills a unit with his Baleful Strike or hits and enemy champion with any ability (with a larger bonus for kills/assists), again with no cap.
    • Variation with Ornn: he starts as a fairly weak laner who is easy to bully and tends to burn mana fairly quickly, and he rarely builds offensive power at all, but his passive really comes into its own at levels 13 and above. Said passive allows him to freely upgrade two of his own items, and hand out one item upgrade per level to another party member as well. Some of Ornn's item upgrades include stat improvements equivalent to entire other items - especially with the ones focused on tanking, which tend to get upwards of 1500 gold in stat boosts for free. This tends to make the already durable Ornn a ridiculously resilient tank who can be showing up with 200-300 in both his defensive stats and 4000-5000 HP, ready to lay down a torrent of CC, while also letting him hand out, for example, a free Needlessly Large Rod to anyone with a Rabadon's Deathcap or a thousand gold worth of bonus attack damage to a champion like Vayne or Jhin who first-buys an Infinity Edge, meaning that a late-game Ornn tends to have given every other member of the team a noticeable power boost while being able to take entire teamfights to the face without flinching.
  • In addition to champions, there are items which becomes stronger as the game drags on.
    • Sword of the Occult and Mejai's Soulstealer are both stacking items that grant additional attack power and ability power (respectively) each time you kill another champion. They begin as two of the least cost-efficient items in the game (read: horrendously expensive for the bonus you receive), but at maximum stacks provide the highest raw attack power of any item.
    • Rod Of The Ages gives additional bonus HP and MP every minute after it's bought; In other words, the HP and MP boost it provides increases with time.
    • Tear of the Goddess grants additional maximum mana every time an ability is used or mana is spent. Its two build items grant bonus Attack Damage or Ability Power based on the total maximum mana the champion has.
    • The support-focused items like Steel Shoulderguards and Spellthief's Edge gradually improve during the game, starting as simply ways to pick up some extra gold despite the support's entire job being to give another player an easier time at that, and evolving into impressive ward factories with better stat bonuses, allowing the support to keep map control while also being able to run around with the Oracle Lens.
• Several monsters in Monster Sanctuary aren't competitive at all until they get their level 20 skills.
  • Catzerker is the best-known example, being encountered at level 3 as an extremely fragile Glass Cannon who doesn't even hit especially hard due to dealing mostly Neutral physical damage. At higher levels though Catzerker turns into a powerful Critical Hit Class with a Herd-Hitting Attack, and since nearly nothing resists neutral damage it can wipe out entire teams in one swing.
  • Specters start off outclassed by Mad Eyes in almost every way, as they're similarly based around debuffs, but are limited to only Burn and Chill. Once they hit level 30, however, they get access to Congeal, which turns Chill into a powerful Damage Over Time effect. Mad Eyes do not share this ability, making Specters better for raw Damage Over Time power. Specters also gain access to Spectral Cannon at level 20, giving them a powerful burst damage option instead of just playing support.
• Shujinko, the "deceived" hinted at in Mortal Kombat: Deception's title, has a whole story mode to unlock him. Once you've done that, you have to go through the realms to get his other moves, without anyone to give you hints. But these moves are the best moves from the other fighters, so it works out well.
• Mount & Blade: The Peasant Woman unit can only be recruited if they are rescued from another army's prisoners, they're abysmal fighters, and all they have on them are puny little daggers. Their chances of surviving battles are slim. However, if they grow in experience, they can end up becoming Sword Sisters. Sword Sisters are adept at combat and equipped with good swords, heavy crossbows and plate armor. They're on par with Mercenary Captains.
• Realm Grinder: The Goblin faction has the Goblin Greed ability which automatically gives Faction Coins when used, but the Goblins have no mana-regenerating upgrades apart from passive bonuses and generic upgrades. Once you unlock the Drow, however, they can very quickly become one of the best factions as they can get the faction upgrades almost instantly and get a mana boost from the drow that increases over time.
• Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri does this not with a unit but a terrain type. At the start of the game xenofungus is a useless nuisance that yields no resources for most factions (Gaians get a bonus nutrient and start with one of the Centauri techs), obstructs movement, and allows mind worms to spawn. Researching the "Centauri ___" line of technologies gives improvements to the resource yield up to the same as monoliths by endgame. The Xenoempathy Dome secret project means all fungus is treated as roads, allowing for very fast travel, the Pholus Mutagen grants impressive bonuses for fighting in fungus squares, and the Manifold Nexus boosts resource yield (with sufficient planet rating) past almost any other terrain.
• Sol Forge has several cards which start out extremely weak at level 1 but become incredibly powerful at level 3. Chrogias, Scorchmane Dragon, and Scrapforge Titan are examples.
• sora has Nath, the boss of stage 5 and playable character in Acceleration of Suguri 2. She begins at Level 1, but has a special ability called "Extension", which allows her to upgrade one level, and with each one she gets stronger attacks; she's able to upgrade up to Level 3.
• In Starbound, the Broken Broadsword is the weapon that every character starts with in their ship locker, and is often quickly tossed aside in favor of stronger weapons. However, if you hold onto it until after the Baron’s Keep, once the Baron joins the Outpost, he can fix it for you, and turn it into the Protector’s Broadsword, which is one of the most powerful swords in the game.
• Terraria: Summoner builds. Most of their best items are gotten late hardmode, and their early game armor tends to have paper-thin defense. Unless you feel like farming for the rarest item in the game, they don't even get their first summon until after beating the Queen Bee. Once they do get going though, they're quite a force to be reckoned with, with their summons being able to easily tear through most bosses and invasions with little effort. Do note that this is slightly unusal in that the only stats that are innate to the player character are health and mana so you can pviot your build at any time with the right armor.
• Tofu Tower (Naka): The "Databun" card, gotten for defeating the strongest monster in the first approximately 150 floors of the game, which can randomly appear on floors. Databun starts as the worst card in the game, and its stat growth initially just 1 in most stat per level, worse than even the Starter Equipment cards, but that growth rate gets better every level, such that by around level 100, which isn't the cap, it's better than the best card of the same "pink" element, "Bunny", and at level 113, has either better health or attack than the best cards of the other elements at level 117.
• Touken Ranbu has Iwatooshi of the Naginata class, who starts out so pitifully weak that even at level 25, he does next to no damage. However, he happens to have the best attack range of any sword in the game: the entire enemy team. Level him up enough and max out his stats and he'll eventually be capable of taking down all enemies in one swing, making clearing maps a breeze.
• Town of Salem has several roles that are start out weak, but become absolute terrors once the game getss going.
  • The Mayor can reveal himself to confirm his role and gain three votes, but cannot be healed after revealing. At the beginning those votes aren't worth the massive target you put on yourself by revealing, but once enough players have died, the Mayor essentially becomes a daytime killer, being a majority by himself.
  • Juggernauts gain new abilities whenever they kill a player. Because they start without these abilities, Juggernauts are very vulnerable for their first few kills, but once they've collected all their powers, they're downright unstoppable- they rampage (killing all their target's visitors), attack every night, have defense, and deal an Armor-Piercing Attack. The only thing that can reliably killed a powered-up Juggernaut is lynching.
  • The Plaguemaster's power (spreading a plague by visiting others) does absolutely nothing- until everyone is infected, at which point the Plaguemaster transforms into the unstoppable Pestilence. Pitting Pestilence against a full power Juggernaut gives everyone in the game an achievement.
  • The Hex Master is another whose power doesn't kick in until they've managed to affect everyone outside their own faction- but once they've hexed everyone not in the Coven, they all die, and no level of defense will stop it.
  • Downplayed with the Coven, since they don't get the Necromonicon (which powers up one of their members) for the first few days of the game.
• The second sword Lann smash in Vindictus is fairly useless at low skill ranks, with a small area, little damage, both only mitigated by a moderate knockdown. Once you max the skill however, the damage is improved immensely, the moderate knockdown becomes a high knockdown, and it gains a secondary dash attack, making it one of the more useful smashes for mobile bosses.
• Special weapon 5 from Zanac. It starts off as a single small orb which slowly goes forward and them back. However, it ends up as a laser which goes through almost everything and is one of the most damaging weapons and won't even ricochet off the capital ships.

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