Awesome But Impractical - Television Tropes & Idioms

alt title(s): Cool But Impractical

A skeletal steed. Impressive but impractical. I had one once, but the head fell off.
—Death, Reaper Man

NUNCHUKS: Cool But Useless
—The Simpsons

How has ANYTHING we've seen today been the least bit practical?!
—Kreese, Mad World

So, you've been toiling through the game for many an hour. You've killed a veritable army of Mooks, solved all the puzzles, worked your way through the Bonus Dungeon, and uncovered The Very Definitely Final Dungeon. And here's your reward: The ultimate attack. The spell that scatters the enemies and razes their land, drives your foes before you and allows you to listen to the lamentations of their women. The weapon which channels the power of the gods and rends the earth (although somehow without damaging you or your teammates). The strategy that even Machiavelli couldn't work his head around. The one attack that rips victory from the jaws of defeat, bends to one knee, and hands it to you on a silver platter.

It's awesome. It's flashy. It's unstoppable.

It's also completely useless.

Yes, it seems that the designers put so much time into maxing out the ultimate-ness of the ultimate attack that they forgot to actually make it usable. Maybe it requires too many resources to use, so cheaper, less-explosive attacks are usually better. Maybe it takes too long to get or comes too late in the game, so by the time you get it, no opponent poses a credible threat to you. Maybe it requires some sort of bizarre set-up to enact, which makes it easier and more efficient to use normal attacks.

Whatever the reason, it will get used once, to see what it looks like, and then never again. Yeah, it's awesome, but you've got a game to win here.

Mind you, if you care about doing cool stuff over winning, they can be quite fun. A competitive player will never look at them twice; this is one of the good things about being a Noob.

Related to the Bragging Rights Reward and Inventional Wisdom on occasion. The Infinity Plus One Sword may be this. See also Cool But Inefficient, Useless Useful Spell, Blessed With Suck. Contrast Too Awesome To Use, Boring But Practical, Awesome Yet Practical and Game Breaker. Crosses with Death Or Glory Attack when a miss will result in nasty consequences.

Examples:

Anime

Uryu Ishida from Bleach possesses an attack like this—the deadly Sprenger, which requires him to set up a pentacle of Scheele Schneiders around his opponent and detonate their stored spiritual energy in a focused blast. He remarks that the attack takes so long to set up that its impossible to use it in battle without a partner to distract the enemy.
- And now, we have Soifon's bankai, which is big, clunky, and above all loud, not exactly the best tool for an assassin.
Similarly, Dragonball Z has Goku's massively powerful Spirit Bomb attack, an attack so ponderous it takes several episodes to fully charge—he also invariably needs help holding off the baddie while he does this.
- Even more annoyingly, the Spirit Bomb/Genki Dama is essentially The Worf Barrage. The first time he uses it- against Vegeta- it draws power from the entire planet, and while Vegeta's pretty banged up, he's still good for a fight up until the point he get's crushed by a King-Kong sized Gohan's King-Kong sized ass. The second time- against Frieza- he uses the energy of several planets, and it just makes Frieza mad. Goku- not as stupid as he seems sometimes- doesn't use it again in canon until the very last fight of the series, and this time it does work- with the power of an entire universe behind it.
  - Strangely, in movies 2-7, the Spirit Bomb was the most effective weapon against the villains.
Naruto's Rasen Shuriken has shades of this. Yes, it's basically a one-hit kill, and the only defense against it is 'dodge'. However, it also has no range and a very short duration, meaning he needs to get right up next to the enemy and basically shove it down their throat. Not to mention the minor detail that using it also hurts the wielder, exposing the arm he uses to throw it to the same cell-destroying properties that makes it so effective on enemies (using it is actually compared to injecting a poison into his own arm).
- The Rasengan has now become more Awesome But Practical since he gained the ability to use it for a long-distance strike, essentially annihilating anything he hits without hurting himself.
  - Too bad, that in the very fight this upgrade was introduced, abilities to absorb Rasengan without harm or repel it with sheer power were introduced too.
Zoids: New Century Zero anyone? Bit Cloud gets the amazing, highly offensive Panzer unit upgrade for his Liger Zero, at the cost that he cannot move and the zoid overheats and he nearly melts in the cockpit.
- That's only in the anime. In everything else, it just makes the Liger Zero slow as hell.
This basically covers of the special "Invisible 9" units in Pumpkin Scissors in a nutshell, which feature soldiers transformed into supersoldiers in order to counteract design and equipment failures, or to accomplish things that could otherwise be done cheaper with technology improvements. The 908 High Temperature Troopers, for example, use suped-up flamethrowers that are so powerful they cook the users alive. Their "protective suits", rather than actually shielding them from the heat and dispersing it, are instead filled with special chemicals that keep them painfree and able to function, though they die quickly and in hideous pain if they take the suit off.
Scrapped Princess had Ginnungagap, a Super-Range Strategic-Class Assault spell. It takes around 70 trained military magicians using a multi-stage ritual to pull it off and it was forbidden by treaty such that using it was tantamount to a declaration of all-out war.
Slayers, in the OAVs, has Naga the Serpent, Lina's self-proclaimed greatest rival, first travelling companion, and all-around egotistic pain in the butt. As bizarre as Lina's outfit looks, it pales in comparison to Naga's, which takes Stripperiffic to a whole new level. It also comes with ridiculously huge spiky shoulderpads. They were so big, and the spikes so long and sharb, that she stabbed herself in the face whenever she raised her arms over her head... like to cast a spell.

Comic Books

The Batmobile as it is known and loved today. There, I said it.
- Should we just say Crimefighting With Cash in general?
Marvel's premier Cloak And Dagger organization, S.H.I.E.L.D., prefers to operate out of a Helicarrier. It's basically a Airborne Aircraft Carrier , and it's exactly as cool as it sounds. Unfortunately, it tends to crash. A lot. This typically causes about as much destruction as you'd expect from dropping something the size of an aircraft carrier from about a mile up, and usually has the inadvertent effect of releasing whatever superpowered psychopaths, alien viruses, etc. that happened to be locked up there at the time.
Wonder Woman's invisible jet, especially since it doesn't make Wonder Woman herself invisible. She may as well had the ability to fly like Superman.
- The original version of Wonder Woman couldn't fly. Also she can use it to transport other people who can't fly. And just because you can walk doesn't mean a car isn't useful.

Live Action TV

The Excalibur from Crusade had the ability to fire a supercharged shot that could kill pretty much any ship it faced. Downside? It almost drained the ship, leaving it vulnerable for a minute. A minute in which the destroyed enemy ship's buddies could use to wail on it.
Stargate SG-1: the staff weapon. It looks great, it's flashy, it fires orange bolts of plasma, it doubles as a melee weapon... until you find it out, that it's inaccurate, slow-firing and the chances of surviving a hit is ridiculously high for the main characters. Of course, being the mook's weapon of choice doesn't help either. This doesn't stop Teal'c being badass with it, but even he switches to P90-s in the later seasons. Also, zats are far more effective in close quarter combat.
- Made explicit in one episode where O'Neill (with two l's is training some rebel Jaffa to use P-90s. After an impressive demo comparing the firearm's superiority, he explains "This (the staff weapon) is a weapon of terror. Its purpose is to intimidate the enemy. This (the P-90) is a weapon of war. Its purpose is to kill the enemy."
  - Even though the P-90 still looked pretty damn impressive when it cut a log in half.
- It's worth pointing at the Sodans have reduced sized staff weapons that apparently have a full-auto mode, firing huge torrents of energy bolts.
Myth Busters. In a recent example, they built a boat out of frozen newspaper, powered by a 150 horsepower engine and got it up to 25mph. Of course, being made out of frozen newspaper, it melted within half an hour.

Tabletop Games

Several years ago in the Magic: the Gathering tournament scene, the idea popped up that any card costing more than four mana had to basically win you the game single-handedly or it wasn't good enough. This has changed somewhat in recent years (and, perhaps ironically, the originator of the meme has since disavowed it himself) with Wizards Of The Coast's attempts to make the flashy-but-expensive cards more viable and tone down the power level of small creatures and cheap effects; nonetheless, high-cost cards are still seen as mainly the purview of social gamers who play for fun rather than that of pro tournament players. This concept is demonstrated in this strip of the webcomic UG Madness.
- A good embodiment of the trope would be the Ultimatum cycle from the recent Shards of Alara set, five rare sorceries with impressive effects each that all but guarantee you'll win the game the turn you play one... if you can only get seven points of colored mana in just the right combination together.
- Dragons in general tend to be extraordinarily powerful cards but incredibly difficult to get into play, with high casting costs. A particular example from the game's early days were the Elder Dragons, five cards with powerful stats and splashy effects but which were almost impossible to play thanks to their casting costs and which required a constant influx of mana every turn to keep them in play.
The Baneblade superheavy tank in Warhammer 40,000 looks absolutely sweet and its stats on paper are overwhelmingly awesome. After all, its ready to unleash ELEVEN BARRELS OF HELL! However, the sheer ridiculous points cost means that the opponent can field a much larger force, with all the dedicated anti-tank weaponry needed to make the Baneblade into eleven barrels of scrap metal.
- Then came Apocalypse and 5th Ed, which made them cheaper and harder to take down.
- On that note, Chaos Space Marines in Warhammer 40,000 have Obliterators, guys who have an amazing save, are good at close combat, but their greatest ability is that they can switch weapons between any non-solid ammunition weapons each turn (i.e. use a lascannon one turn, then a flamer the next.) However, each Obliterator costs more than a freaking predator tank, and it is much more practical to simply get that or a heavy weapons squad. If used right, though, they used to be Game Breakers.
  - Obliterators are still among the best heavy support choices for Chaos, since they are durable and extremely versatile. And they only cost more than a Predator with only one autocannon (which is not very useful). Not to mention you can have up to 9 Obliterators in an army. The Chaos codex is loaded with various Awesome But Impractical units though, the worst offender probably being the Possessed. They're quite powerful in close combat and randomly get useful abilities such as rending or feel no pain, but they're expensive and the abilities are random so you can't plan around them. They also lack grenades and power weapons (unless you get lucky rolling the abilities). Overall, Khorne Berserkers are far superior melee units, and also count as scoring.
In Exalted, the Sidereal Exalted have the reputation of unparalleled Martial Artists. They can create and learn Kung Fu styles so powerful that they basically rewrite the reality at whim and so flashy that fans of all the other splats demand them to be universally available. The catch is, these Martial Arts are incredibly expensive and very cumbersome to successfully employ in combat. Most Exalts are much better off using their less awesome but cheaper and more reliable Kung Fu.
Subverted by the Gloryborn template armour from the Dungeons And Dragons 3.5 Dungeon Master's Guide II. This was explicitly stated to look as absurdly impractical as possible - men would get chest armour limited to leather straps to show off their pecs, while women got pretty much what you'd expect. Despite looking Awesome But Impractical, it really functions exactly like normal armour of that kind, due to the extraplanar origin of the equipment.
- Also in this realm are many tricks the character op boards can come up with, for example a sack of pieces of paper with explosive runes cast on them, then cast a dispel effect on them and purposefully fail. In theory it does massive damage, in practice, the cost and time involved make it a lot easier to just exploit the game's inversion of Useless Useful Spell and fling save or dies around.
  - Also the Thralherd prestige class gets leigons of mind slaves, replenished each day, using them as suicide bombers is a neat gimmick, it isn't that great mechanically.

Video Games

In Age Of Mythology, practically all human troops of the Atlantean civilization may become heroes, increasing their stats and allowing them to cause bonus damage against myth units. However, doing so costs extra resources, and makes them take up more population, meaning your enemy will be able to heavily outnumber you if you use that feature friviously.
Shining Soul II features "Soul" items that allow the player to perform a Wave Motion Gun attack after having filled a meter by killing a few trillion Mooks. On triggering it, the player is treated to a lengthy cutscene of whichever godlike entity's power is being used generally strutting their incipient-apocalyptic stuff.. followed by the Soul doing about as much damage as two or three good regular weapon hits.
Averted in City Of Heroes, where both fundamental meat-and-potatoes superpowers learned at level 1 and the big flashy "nukes" are very effective.
- Your Mileage May Vary. Nukes drain the user of all energy and prevent it from recharging from a while. Some actually do find the attacks Awesome But Impractical for this reason. Others find there isn't enough resistance left afterward for this to really matter, and just find it Awesome.
The Prophecy Spirit Bomb attack from Skies Of Arcadia. It does deal quite a lot of damage to all enemies, but it requires that all four characters be able to act and that you max out your Spirit Meter, which can take as many as five or six turns just for one use. A buffed-out Vyse attacking with Pirates' Wrath (which can be done every other turn at late levels and deals as much or more damage, albeit to only one enemy) is almost always a better strategy.
Newbies to Final Fantasy VI like to proclaim Locke as the best character in the game, as he is the only character who can hit the damage cap. With a Valiant Knife, an Atma/Ultima Weapon, a Genji Glove, and a Master's Scroll/Offering (quadruples the number of attacks), Locke can attack for 9999 damage eight times in a single turn. What the newbies ignore is that this is only possible at extremely high levels (at which point enemies have long since ceased to pose a threat), and is therefore more of a parlor trick than anything.
- This can actually be done almost as easily with 3 other characters in the game. Though you will not be doing 9999 each hit, you can still really easily break the game with that combo without being extremely high level. People gawk at the 8X 9999 but it does not even require anything near that to break the game.
- Cyan's later Sword Techs tend to fall into this category as well. They include things like hitting enemies four times for a good deal more damage than his regular attack per hit, and attempting an instant KO on every enemy - but to use them, you have to sit there and wait for a slow-moving gauge to fill, during which time you can't input commands for any other character and the enemies keep attacking. This is subverted if you teach him the spell Quick - which grants the caster two consecutive turns during which time is essentially frozen. This basically ends up being another way to hit for 8x 9999 in what's effectively a single turn.
- Speaking of Ultima, that spell is pretty much the only worthwhile mass-damage spell in the game. Other mass-damage spells, such as Quake and Tornado, damage your party in addition to the enemy (though damage from Quake can be prevented with Float). In the most egregious example, the spell Meltdown and the Esper Crusader, both gained by defeating the eight dragons in the World of Ruin. One would think that such spells would be more powerful than anything else in the game, but the damage done to the party, plus the fact that Ultima is more powerful anyway, makes these spells completely useless. One can avoid taking damage from these spells (and turn them into a combination Fire/Curaga spell) by configuring the party's equipment to absorb Fire, but that comes at the cost of missing out on some of the game's best armor.
  - As an amusing side note, the item "Magicite Shard" summons a random Esper at no cost except the item itself. Guess what happens early in the game when it rolls up Crusader?
- Similarly, Final Fantasy IV gives you the spell Meteo, which costs 99 MP to cast... and takes several turns to perform, during which the caster can't do anything else. Since you will usually get it during the The Very Definitely Final Dungeon, in which you're attacked by single (but powerful and fast) enemies at a time, it's much more efficient to use Nuke/Flare, which costs 50 MP per shot and is cast instantly.
  - The last boss absorbs Flare though. (summons are still more efficient than Meteo in this case anyway)
- Final Fantasy XII has the Zodiark summon, gained by venturing through the game's most difficult dungeon and beating what is widely considered to be one of the game's three most difficult bosses. It's the best summon in the game, capable of wiping out large groups of lesser enemies with a single attack, and possessing a special attack, Final Eclipse, capable of dealing a whopping 50,000 points of damage to every enemy on screen. However, unleashing the power of that special attack requires that the character that the summon is equipped to be afflicted with the Petrify status, and summoning Zodiark itself requires the summoner to expand all of their Magic Points.
  - Also in FF12, The Zodiac Spear is the strongest in the game, but is absolutely impossible to find without a Guide Dang It.
- Instant death spells in most Final Fantasy games are absolutely pointless, because they tend to only work on weaker enemies; medium-strength enemies have a good chance of evading it, and higher-level enemies will not get hit at all.
  - Final Fantasy II NES had some insta-KO spells that were hugely effective, even without abusing the game's highly breakable leveling system. Played somewhat straight though in that the Death spell itself is less effective in just about every way possible compared to spells that merely grant functional K Os (by petrifying, toadifying, or simply teleporting enemies away—all achieved the same thing as killing them outright in that game).
  - You really need to just know what enemies are vulnerable to those attacks. And quite some mooks that are otherwise annoying to deal with can be oneshotted with those spells easily...
- Ark in Final Fantasy IX could be an example of this trope. If your characters are at a high enough level, sitting through the 2 minute animation that Ark has isn't worth it anymore. This game's damage cap is at 9999 again (Final Fantasy VIII broke this, then again in Final Fantasy X). It's much faster to just dish out more damage than it is to sit through Ark's animation. Also, your white mage is summoning it, you'd rather have her spend that magic on healing.
  - Ark's overly long animation is pretty useful when combined with Auto-Regen. Got hit by a party wide attack? Summon Ark (while Dagger has Boost equipped), and by the time the animation's over, your party is more or less back at full health.
  - That trick actually only works on Active battle mode, but as long as you know what you're doing, Active + Boost + Eidolons + Auto-Regen = no real need for healing spells anymore.
  - There's a glitch that this Troper's trying to figure out without a Game Shark. Basically through some extreme leveling or bizarre combination of abilities, Auto-Regen goes haywire and will heal any wound in less than a second. The only way to kill your characters is to overkill them.
  - Another Final Fantasy IX example is the Doomsday spell, an uber-level Shadow spell you get in the final dungeon that hits everything on the screen for massive damage. Unfortunately, the spell is pretty much worthless, given that Flare is almost half as expensive (40 MP versus 72 MP), and by the time you get Doomsday you're only ever fighting one enemy at a time, in which case you might as well just use Flare. To make matters worse, Doomsday hurts your own party members too. You can set up your equipment so Doomsday heals you or doesn't do any damage, but your defenses against other attacks suffer as a result. Doomsday's one saving grace, that it bypasses Reflect, can also be ignored if you just equip Vivi with the Reflect-Null ability.
  - Quina has the ability known as Limit Glove, which is guaranteed to do 9999 damage. The catch? Quina has to be at 1HP for this to work.
This goes as far back as Final Fantasy I game, where the nunchucks (and later, iron nunchucks) could only be used by the Monk class, a class which has separate combat formulas that make them far more powerful when they aren't wielding a weapon (and, for that matter, when they aren't wearing any armor).
- That said, the nunchunks were still useful very early in the game, when they actually did give a bonus. After about level 7 or so, forget it.
Knights of the Round, which can one-shot the final boss with some preparation. Only problem? The Applied Phlebotinum that allows you to use the ability is stuffed away on an island reachable only through the use of a "Golden Chocobo", which can be aquired through breeding said animal in an hour-long process OR by defeating one of the game's optional bosses who are by far more powerful than the final boss anyway.
- Never mind that using Knights of the Round against the high end bosses either causes their next form to become harder or a causes powerful counter attack.
- In fairness, the breeding process doesn't require any fighting, so in theory it could be achieved by characters low enough in power for the attack to have some use.
  - True, but characters with a low power level in will probably be unable to satisfy KOTR's rapacious MP requirements (unless they're packing several MP plus materia).
- Also, the Master Materia. To get a master materia, you need to max out at least one of ALL the materia in a certain category. Several of which require hundreds of thousands AP to simply level up. Alternatively, you can fight the OTHER, more powerful bonus boss.
In God Hand the main character has a variety of "guard breakers", attacks that stun a blocking opponent. These range from sobats to flying kicks to haymakers to spinning backfists, but the best guard breaker throughout the entire game... is the basic, boring overhead chop.
The triangle attack in Fire Emblem gives you a guaranteed Critical Hit, which is nothing to be scoffed at. However, it requires that you raise three characters of the same class (which is not that smart - you want variety - plus said class has a common weakness) and position them in the same part of the map (which is also not that smart - if you've got units that do basically the same thing, you want them spread out). And if it doesn't kill the target, the units are wide open for counterattacks.
- Alm and Cellica in Fire Emblem Gaiden have a similar attack, but unlike every other instance of it it is actually useful, because the two are the main characters and required to be used.
- Sacred Stones turned the Luna dark magic tome into this. Granted, it was a Game Breaker in Blazing Blade, but they nerfed it too much, decreasing the accuracy to just 50%, worse than anything else except Eclipse, while also decreasing the critical hit ratio from 20% to 10%.
- Blazing Sword's (or just Fire Emblem for the localisation) Durandal is a gigantic (i.e. bigger than its user) sword with massive attack power... unfortunately, it's so heavy that the only person who can wield it will get double-attacked by most of the enemies on the only level that you can use it on. In the sequel-but-not-quite, it was actually quite a decent weapon and was available for over half the game.
The high-end superpowerful moves in Pokemon — Hyper Beam, Blast Burn, Frenzy Plant, Hydro Cannon, Rock Wrecker, Roar of Time and Giga Impact — do some of the highest base damage in the games. However, they require that you lose a turn immediately after use. It's usually more efficient to simply attack with two weaker moves twice in a row than employ them.
- Unless, of course, attacking with one of them will end the battle right there.
- Of course, THE highest base power move in the game, Explosion, is considered incredibly useful on any pokemon that learns it, because using it on anything except a pokemon that doubly resists Normal attacks (or outright immune to them) is going to kill them. This is partially due to the high attack power it has on paper (250), and partially due to the hidden effect it has on the other pokemon (it halves their defense, effectively boosting Explosion's power to 500). Even a physically wimpy pokemon like Gengar has a high chance of having Explosion as a suicide move.
- And don't get us started on moves like Sky Attack, Skull Bash, or Bide, which require a turn or two of charging before they actually do damage. Skull Bash at least has the saving grace of improving your defense on the turn you charge.
- Similarly, most players also avoid the next-strongest set of attacks (Blizzard, Hydro Pump, Thunder and Fire Blast). While they still do impressive damage, they have reduced accuracy. And sometimes it can feel like any percentage to hit that isn't 100% is 0%.
  - Thunder, however, does have a trick up its sleeve: it becomes 100% accurate in rainy conditions. In execution, this means that a single well-placed Rain Dance beforehand can equal death from above for the next four rounds or so.
  - Hail and Blizzard seem to work in a similar fashion. Also, Sunny Day removes the charge turn for Solarbeam.
  - Oh, a lot of metagamers use Fire Blast pretty casually, mostly because its accuracy is actually worth a damn, not to mention it can roast physically-defensive Steel-types pretty well.
- While we're on the subject of Pokemon, there are a few mons that qualify for this description as well. For example, Sharpedo. If the name alone doesn't tell you, it's a shark and a torpedo rolled into one. If that doesn't scream HOLY SHIT AWESOME, nothing does. Sadly, Sharpedo has crap stats due to having almost no defenses whatsoever, an ability that requires Sharpedo to get hit in order to do anything, and a worthless movepool, leaving Sharpedo as one of those Pokemon that you catch, stuff into your PC, and never look at a second time.
  - A really good example of a Pokemon attack that fits this example due to the Pokemon that learn it? Eruption/Water Spout. They would be EXTREMELY powerful... if the Pokemon that used them werefast enough to use the attacks before they receive damage
  - Choice Scarf Kyogre. The fact that the auto-rain boosts its power, that it gets a same type boost, and that Kyogre is the 3rd best Special Attacker in the game, just 8 points behind Mewtwo, mean that Water Spout is not that. And that you are screwed if you don't have something that resists Water.
- The one-hit KO moves were worthless in the first few games because of their low accuracy (30%) and their inability to hit pokemon of higher level. Later games made them better by introducing a move that guarantees the next move used will hit, making Articuno even more of an unholy terror than it was before. Still, the OHKO moves are extremely limited in use.
- And then there's Head Smash, which is insanely powerful (Base Attack 150) but has the most recoil damage of any move in the game (50% of what's done to the enemy). Which is why I kept catching Relicanth until I found one with the recoil-nullifying Rock Head ability.
As your weapons upgrade in Secret of Mana, you can push the Charge Meter to higher and higher levels. But it takes so long to charge to the eighth and final level that, even if you charge that high without getting knocked over and connect with the attack, you would usually have gotten far better results using multiple lesser-charge attacks throughout the same period. This actually has one use — it is the only way the Girl and the Sprite can harm the Final Boss. Of course, you have Mana Magic as well...
Total Annihilation has the Core Krogoth, a unit about three times larger than any other unit. It has insane amounts of armor, the best laser in the game in its head, arm cannons, and anti-air missiles in its back. However, in multiplayer no one will build this unit because it uses the equivalent of 200 advanced fighters' worth of metal, energy, and build time, and requires its own expensive factory that can only produce that one unit. With the 200 fighters you should have been building, your enemy could take down the Krogoth in less than 30 seconds. This leaves you with massive resources wasted on one dead unit and 200 fighters heading for your base.
- Additionally, there was a Third-Party created unit, the Be'elzebub, which took the Krogoth formula and cubed it. It took way more than an obscene amount of resources to create. If successfully built, its weapons would continue to drag and cause damage after hitting the ground (an effect used with the Commander's Disintegrator Gun), was bristling with AA missiles, and had a high-power laser cannon. Its HP was roughly four times greater than the game's previously determined maximum (held by the Krogoth). Its death explosion was nearly large enough to completely destroy one of the smaller maps. This could be used to the owner's advantage, as the volume of health it had required two separate self destructions to actually kill the unit (this was counting its own explosion). Oh, and it could walk in water, at the cost of being unable to use its primary cannons and being limited to fighting off only aircraft. It was, as noted by the creator, only balanced by the amount of time it took to field. Once it hit the field, the other team would be better off simply self destructing every unit it has on the field, as the only weapons that could out-range it couldn't hope to kill it before it reached them to destroy them.
- Another two examples are the Rapid Fire Long Range Plasma Cannons, the Vulcan and Buzzsaw. Yes, they can shoot to about 10 screenlengths at 360 rounds/minute. They also cost as much as nine single shot Long Range Plasma Cannons, which shoot about 60 rounds/minute, are more accurate, fire 40% further, and can be spread out to minimize Splash Damage.
- A similar argument could be made for the Mavor, the UEF faction's tech 4 Strategic Artillery in Supreme Commander, Total Annihilation's Spiritual Successor. Its damage is massive, the impact radius of its shells considerable, its running costs modest and it has a range of 71km, while the largest maps in the game have dimensions of 80km square. In addition, although strategic missiles can be intercepted by strategic missile defence units, there is no defence against artillery shells except for shield generators — which Mavor shells punch straight through as if they weren't there. However, the build time, along with the mass and energy costs of its construction, are so prodigious that with the hundreds of tanks or fighters you could have built, any enemy can systematically dismantle your firebases and your main base — or build several nuclear missile silos and bomb your expansion into glass.
  - Most superweapons in Supreme Commander simply can't match their weight in tech 3 units when it comes to firepower, durability, or practicality.
  - In the expansion they fixed many build times and costs to make Experimental Units much more useful, though still expensive enough to be strategically limited.
- Total Annihilation Kingdoms had each nation's Sacred Dragon one-off super unit, which was nowhere near as powerful as its cost, build time or "unique" status would suggest, being only slightly stronger than the standard dragons and having a "wave of death" attack that did no damage whatsoever.
A common Real Time Strategy Awesome But Impractical unit type is the "Mobile X", where X is an awesome but practical stationary defensive structure, usually a turret of some kind. For instance, the Command And Conquer series has the Mobile Gap Generator and Mobile Stealth Generator — the stationary building version is useful enough, but the mobile ones' range is so contracted that they're practically worthless. Total Annihilation examples include the Arm's Penetrator and Shooter — supposedly mobile Annihilator energy weapons, but nowhere near as powerful, and both the Arm and the Core have mobile artillery (the Luger and Pillager) which are supposedly mobile versions of the powerful Guardian/Punisher plasma turrets, but are incapable of shooting straight.
Many fighting games have super moves that do insane amounts of damage and are awesome to watch, but often require button combinations that only Mr. Fantastic can pull off. One example is Ivy from Soul Calibur, whose telekinetic attack Summon Suffering is absolutely amazing, but the human players who can pull it off can probably be counted on one hand. There is a trick, at least in Soul Calibur 2 to perform it by rotating the joystick a few times, but this makes you shimmy in place, loudly telegraphing your intention.
- There is actually an Achivement for pulling this off in Soul Calibur 4.
- There's also Talim's "Whirlwind Festival" throw: a multi-part, highly damaging throw that requires you to input very odd button combinations in very short windows of time as she performs the throw. Fail, and the throw's animation cuts off at the first part or so and does far less damage.
Another example from the Soul Series are the unblockable attacks. These attacks are powerful and unblockable, but are so painfully slow that experienced players can easily sidestep or dodge them, and counterattack with impunity. Cancelling the unblockable to psych out your opponent is a far better strategy.
- Unblockable and projectile attacks in many 3D fighters tend to be this way. It's hard to carry the legacy of the Dragon Punch or Hadoken when the opponent can sidestep.
The original Command And Conquer had the Mammoth Tank, which was the most powerful unit in the game, but cost so many resources it was a white elephant.
- On the other hand, the Brotherhood of Nod's most potent weapon, the Avatar, is actually not as useful. Sure, it's tough and has a powerful beam cannon, but it's more expensive than the Mammoth Tank, and to boost its killing ability you have to destroy close to its value in other units to scavenge their parts.
- In Command and Conquer 3 the Scrin's most powerful weapon, the Mothership, is ludicrously costly to produce and is slower than Christmas, giving the defender enough time to mass produce anti-air defenses to blow it to bits.
  - In Red Alert 2 and 3, the Soviets have the Kirov Airship which is an armored bomb dropping blimp that kills most structures in one or two hits. They have the same problem as the Mothership in that they are retardedly expensive, take forever to build, and the slowest unit in the game. They tried to make them better in Red Alert 3 by giving them a secondary ability that makes them get a burst of speed, but it also damages the ship continuously until you turn it off, making that restrictive at best.
- China's Nuke Cannon in Command And Conquer Generals sounds awesome (it's artillery that fires shells with nuclear warheads), but long deployment time, slow firing speed, a minimum range less convenient than its maximum range, surprisingly underpowered damage, and the requirement of a General point to build makes the Nuke Cannon very impractical. What really kills it, though, is the fact that it doesn't autotarget. If you want it to hit something you have to tell it to do so every single time. You can get a few to keep shooting at a frequently-used passage, but only the CPU opponent is dumb enough to fall for that one.
- What is it with the Command And Conquer series? In the FPS Command and Conquer: Renegade, no one will use the Mammoth Tank online. Why? Besides its pathetic speed and high cost, the reason is complicated: Because the odds of actually winning a game via base destruction or nuke is unlikely, players will play for points, which are earned based on damage caused to units. The more valuable the unit harmed, the more points you get. And the mammoth tank, having the most HP and the most cost, is nothing more than a big points-based bank machine for anyone with a rifle! It's also, all things considered, not that much more powerful than a medium or light tank.
- Let's not forget the Redeemer, MARV, and Eradicator. Completely awesome, but such a time and money sink that the only reason to bring one in play is to show off against an opponent you've more or less already beat.
- Nuke trucks were introduced in Red Alert and reinstated in Red Alert 2. It's Exactly What It Says On The Tin, a truck with a suicide bombing capability on the in-game nuke proportions. Only problem was it was made out of dry wood, one or two bullets was enough to set it off prematurely.
- Speaking of nukes, practically every super weapon in Command & Conquer is awesome, but very impractical, probably for the best. Nukes for example only cover a smidge of the map (they're pathetic in the Tiberium Dawn and Red Alert). The Ion Cannon can instant kill one thing at a time. A lot of other superweapons are indirect and based on luck. And even the defensive superweapons aren't that great. The Iron Curtain for instance in Red Alert only covered one unit (maybe great for a suicidal unit), while this expanded to up to about 5-9 in the sequels, and it only works on vehicles. The only "superweapon" that's worthwhile is the Allies' GPS/Spy Satellite.
Pyramid Head's Great Knife in Silent Hill 2. It would be an awesome one-hit-kill weapon — if you could wield it effectively. As it is, equipping it slows you down to a crawl. It takes forever to bring it to the ready position. You can't move while it's in the ready position. It's so slow to move in striking that an enemy with any mobility at all will simply step out of the way. And the recovery time is so long that you're a sitting duck if when you miss. On the plus side, it's the only weapon that has any effect on Pyramid Head, its sheer bulk knocking him off balance... but even then, you're generally just better off keeping out of the way.
- Likewise, the secret chainsaw weapon in Silent Hill 2 is certainly awesome (it's a goddamn chainsaw!), but James has to start the saw each time he readies it, holds it off to the side so enemies can't walk into it, and swings it so slowly that there's almost no chance of ever hitting an enemy before they can hit him.
- The maul in Silent Hill 3 is like a lighter, slightly more usable version of the PH Great Knife.
- Silent Hill 4 takes this to another level. You can gather a whole arsenal of melee weapons, ranging from golf parafernalia to demonic pickaxes. Though the golf apparel breaking easily and the pickaxe being hard to deal with, you have no choice but using Ye Olde Rusty Axe.
The Wild Arms series of games typically rewards you for beating the game's strongest optional super-boss, Ragu O Ragula, with the ultimate accessory, Sheriff's Star. It skyrockets all your stats, it makes you immune to Standard Status Effects, it boosts your damage... and you've already beaten the toughest boss in the game, so what are you supposed to do with it, exactly?
- In most recent Wild Arms titles, there's a New Game Plus feature, which doesn't carry your levels over, but does carry over your Sheriff Stars. Essentially, it's a fun and amusing way to see how much of a badass your characters are when kitted out with Sheriff Stars from the beginning.
The "Fallout 2 Hint Book" at (well, after) the end of Fallout 2 works much the same.
Fallout 3 features the Experimental MIRV, a weapon that can fire eight mini-nukes at once. Problems: There's maybe two dozen mini-nukes in the entire game, and the largest bosses in the game take maybe two hits to kill with a regular Fat Man. Overkill much?
- The Fat Man itself is slow to equip, uses scads of action points, and its mini-nukes are the second-rarest ammo type in the game. Groups of enemies rarely stand close enough together to get a good area effect, and as an added bonus, it irradiates the blast area. It makes pretty mushroom clouds, though.
  - Not as bad, but still impractical, is the Alien Blaster. Upon discovery of a UFO crash site, you can pry this pistol from the cold, dead, ten-fingered hands of an alien pilot. It's fast, lethal and always crits. Problem is, it degrades very quickly, you can't repair it because there's only one, and the ammos is rare and microscopic in size. It's so awesome that you'll never want to fire it for fear of wasting what precious ammo you have.
The Suikoden series contains a large number of 'Team Attacks' that fit this trope — they look flashy, but have so many special restrictions that most of the time you'd be better off just having each individual character attack separately.
- The True Fire Rune in Suikoden III fits this trope like a glove. It holds some of the most powerful spells in the game, easily capable of wiping out enemy teams in a round or two. The big problem is that with S3's mechanics, the spells hit EVERYTHING within their range, your own team included. And the higher-level spells, even with the most skilled fire-user, will take so long to cast that by the time they go off, the two sides will have moved right next to each other. The result is a barbecued hero's team that just took as much damage as the enemy group.
- This Troper would like to say that McDohl's and Riou's team attack is quite practical. It hits every enemy at 0.75x damage. It may not sound like much but if you do abuse a glitch and somehow got McDohl to level 99 in Suikoden, this'll be the defacto move for the rest of the game... provided you don't mind grabbing him after every major event.
- Some of the Runes are impractical at times: Cecile's War Horse Rune does 1.5x damage to a circular area around her - which in theory should help clear out group enemies faster, but 70% of the time, the enemies move out of the way so it's a waste.
Phantasy Star IV has the Destruction combo; it requires four of your five party members, it requires them to act in exact order with no interrupting actions on either side, three of them are using their most powerful attacks possible, two of those were obtained through semi-hidden sidequests... and in the end, it does much less damage than the three attacks in question used independently (thanks mostly to the fact that the engine caps damage at 999 HP.)
Most of the "ultimate" moves in "active battle" RPGs require so much set-up time that you're bound to be knocked out of them before you can get them off. Ethereal Blast in Star Ocean 3 comes to mind.
- Star Ocean: The Second Story has its own brand of impractical, with ridiculously flashy, full-screen "ultimate" attacks like Meteor Swarm, Extinction and Tri-Ace (which is so awesome it's named after the developers). All of which hit just one time, running up against the game's damage cap of 9,999. As opposed to the supposedly less advanced techniques like Mirror Slice, which can hit more than a dozen times.
- "Star Ocean: The Last Hope" features a combo system where attacks do more damage as they were chained together. However, later magic spells were could only be cast from the menu, crippling their usefulness. In fact, Myuria, one of the game's magic characters, most effective damage dealing spell was the most basic ice spell Ice Needles and the final attack she learns, called Divine Wave, is almost completely useless with its large casting time and pitiful range.
In Final Fantasy Tactics, Optional Party Member Cloud has a large arsenal of special abilities that are extremely powerful... but also take a few turns to charge. By the time you immobilize your enemy (to stop them from simply walking away) and wait long enough for the attack to execute, Cloud could have executed multiple quicker attacks for more potent effect in the same time frame.
- Hell, Cloud himself is arguably this. He starts off at Level 1 when you get him, and has to have a specific weapon (which you will have stronger weapons than by that time) equipped to even use his special abilities. On the other hand, you get three very useful characters while undergoing the sidequest to get him.
  - Cloud at level 1 is capable of crossing swords with guys at higher levels and coming out ahead. Level him up and he becomes quite the physical powerhouse. That said, his only good "Limit" is Finish Touch, and requires Short Charge to be effective at all.
- It is possible, through the use of multiple units with the Calculator ability set, zero faith, and in critical status with the Critical: Quick reaction ability, to put the game in a state where your side effectively gets unlimited turns without the battle's timer advancing. But to pull this off requires so much setup that 99.9% of the time it's easier to just fight normally.
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance has a similar problem. Many special characters can be unlocked, but only after you have finished the plotline and won the hardest battles. There's still completing all 300 quests, but that shouldn't be a problem at this point. What's more is that you can even get the Master Judge, Cid, on your team, who is incredibly powerful, but only after you have completed all 300 quests, so there is literally nothing left to do with him.
- There are also the four growing items, which each have the potential to raise their respective stat by 255 but start weak and add an extra stat point every time you recomplete the mission that granted them. Given that you'll have to wait for the mission to show up again after completing it, even raising them above the ability of the best items you could find otherwise is ridiculously impractical.
- While most storyline characters do play this straight, it should be noted that the Judgemaster himself actually avoids this due to joining at the start of the post-300 Judge Arc, the difficulty of which depends on how powerful your party is when you get to it.
The last of the Star Power abilities in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, Supernova, is very powerful... but on closer inspection, it's only a couple of points more powerful than the earlier-attained, and much cheaper, Earth Tremor. Against bosses you're better off with that or Art Attack (or saving the Star Power for healing and just smacking them), and against regular enemies you can wipe them all out instantly with Showstopper.
Most sacrifice creatures in the Yu-Gi-Oh card game. You can spend an enormous amount of resources on it and lose the whole thing to a simple Trap Hole. Better idea: Special Summon creatures (which Trap Hole and its cousins are meaningless against).
- Or a man-eater bug or an Acid Trap Hole. But newer cards allows you summon some of the high sacrifice creatures without fear of retribution mostly
- And then there's the anime-only card, Ragnarok. The effect? If Dark Magician and Dark Magician Girl are on the field, all monsters on the enemy's side of the field can be removed from play. The cost? You have to remove every monster from your hand, deck, and graveyard from play. The cost was probably only there for the undoubtedly awesome visual effect: all of Yugi's monsters appear and swarm the enemy in order to banish it. Without the fancy holograms, though, the card is much less impressive, and the user is more-or-less screwed if the opponent pulls out a monster with more than 2500 attack points on the following turn.
The motorcycle in the much-maligned Shadow the Hedgehog. Although the other vehicles legitimately provided benefits Shadow couldn't get on foot, the motorcycle's sole purpose was looking cool — it was difficult to steer, and, unsurprisingly, using it actually slowed Shadow.
Though some of the Program Advances (sets of three or more chips which, if they all show up on one turn and are selected in order, are replaced with a single really powerful chip) in the Mega Man Battle Network series are quite useful/balanced, and worth including in an appropriate deck, others are nearly impossible to use, requiring that three or four chips each of which can only show up once in a 30 chip deck all come up on the same turn. Plus, including even more than one or two of the useful Program Advances in a deck tends to stretch it far too thin to be effective.
- A popular combo for a while in the third game was "Disco Inferno". Without going too far into details, it causes the entire field to explode in a giant blaze (awesome) and dealt anywhere between 1200 and 1800 damage (the most powerful bosses in this game have 2-3 thousand, and most enemy humans will have 1000, if not 500). The combo also required five chips in the correct order and could be circumvented by using any of the staple defensive chips, raising one's shield, or simply stepping back and firing the buster. Other folders, like the one which simply focused on repeatedly deploying Dream Sword, turned out to be more robust.
- The entire concept of Mega Man Battle Network is Awesome But Impractical - Twenty Minutes Into The Future, Everything Is Online, so viruses are incredibly more dangerous than usual. However, the only form of virus protection is the Net Navis, which explode viruses with virtual cannons and swords. Certainly very cool, but the antivirus programs used today are far more effective, and generally can't be removed by said viruses.
Counter Strike has a wide variety of weapons to choose from, some of these include the dual Elites, the famed Kevlar-piercing Five-seveN; the assault rifle with a scope; Steyr AUG; and a machine gun with a 100-round belt. All of them suck. "Duelies" are unreliable, take long to load, and cost more than a simple SMG, Five-Seven has been nerfed for balance, Steyr AUG is overpriced, and the machine gun is heavy and inaccurate. Few players really venture outside the tested and approved Colt/AK line.
- The FN P90 is a submachine gun that fires quickly, is rather accurate and deals a decent amount of damage — in fact it was so awesome it became a Game Breaker during the early betas. The recoil was Nerfed, and became Awesome But Impractical due to the pricing: the MP5 is much cheaper, and the AK47 and M4A1 much more powerful but not much more expensive.
  - The FN P90, along with the Five-seveN, take a special type of 5.7mm ammunition, specifically designed to pierce body armor. The small size increases magazine capacity; the Five-seveN holds 20 rounds, unique (as far as this Troper knows) among pistols, barring extended magazines. Of course, the 5.7mm round won't do much to a SAPI.
- The M249 machine gun actually received a good boost in Counter-Strike Source, with its accuracy and firing rate upgraded. That makes it much more useful, but still impractical compared to the much cheaper AK47s and M4A1s.
- The Dual Elites are useful in the good old Counter-Strike 1.6 - all you have to do is NOT to spray. Shot one bullet at a time, with patience, and you are able to kill those damn snipers at awp_map =D
- The Dual Elites allso have no check on how fast it can shot, it can be as fast as the small machine guns and can be more accurate under the right circumstances.
Soldier Of Fortune 2 has the OICW; a scoped assault rifle with a 20mm grenade launcher. The player is given a long tutorial on the advanced fire control system for the grenade launcher — it uses a laser to measure distance to target and shows you on the scope how high you need to point the gun to fire the grenades on target (they have a high, arcing trajectory). The main problem is that you have to use the laser system to check the range before firing a grenade, which simply takes far too long in a firefight. If you have time to sit and muck about with the scope, it's easier to just use the rifle component to snipe them in the head. The huge size (it takes up a ridiculous amount of screen real estate when equipped) and lack of ammo (being an experimental weapon, your enemies don't carry it, so you can't scavenge ammo from corpses) don't help either.
- Partially Truth In Television (or in this case, in videogames); the OICW's failure to make it to mass production came from, among other things, its users considering it way too complicated for the task.
- The OICW used standard 5.56mm rounds, the same as M16s/M4s/M249s. Yet another case of Did Not Do The Research.
  - The "kinetic energy" portion of the OICW was supposedly based on a short-barreled version of the G36 assault rifle without a buttstock, with the grenade launcher part (and the fire control system) on top of it.
In Civilization 3 and 4 you can eventually build nuclear weapons. These seem very cool and look cool when used. But, they are expensive, take a long time to build, and cannot be built until very late in most games. Furthermore, each weapon can only be used once and despite being fairly powerful, they still follow the standard rule that no enemy can be knocked down below a certain health threshold by air power. As a result, building a fleet of reusable aircraft is usually a better strategic use of your resources. In addition, Civilization 4 has the SDI, which shoots down nukes at a great frequency. Any decent player or AI will render your nukes pretty useless with this.
- Every use of a nuclear weapon (successful or not) causes a negative impact to diplomatic relations with every other civilization and a double penalty for successfully hit civilizations (the relation penalty being listed as "YOU NUKED US!"). This can very quickly lead you to a war against the rest of the planet.
- Each nuclear explosion is a serious hit on the global warming scale, and even light use of nukes could easily cause the world to deteriorate into mostly swamp and desert areas within a short amount of time.
  - None of the above prevent computer players from happily nuking you with no diplomatic consequences. But hey, The Computer is a Cheating Bastard
The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion has a spell, Finger of the Mountain that is purportedly the epitome of Shock magic. A radial lightning blast, it is one of the few levelled spells in the game that has its power set to when you acquired it. However, it requires much more magicka to cast than other equivalent spells (including those you create yourself) - literally more than a character can have, if acquired at high level.
- There's an unofficial mod out there that recalculates the amount of mana needed to reasonable quantities.
Instant Kills in the Guilty Gear games do exactly what the name suggests: finish the round in favor of whoever connects one. Most of them look pretty cool, too. Unfortunately, to keep them from being gamebreakers, they can only be used once, they're extraordinarily difficult to hit with unless your opponent isn't paying attention (you have to switch into a "sudden death" stance, complete with a glowing outline, making these better suited for Mind Games and last-chance desperation attacks), and if you attempt one and miss, you can't use any more special moves for the remainder of the round. Luckily for you, they can be used on SNK Boss I-No. Sweet! Except in Accent Core. Damn it!
- Long, flashy combos in general get this, as the game's engine actually decreases the damage of each hit the longer a combo gets.
Golden Sun: The Lost Age's best Djinn Summon can only be acquired after confronting the strongest Bonus Boss in the game, and that can only happen after you get halfway through the final dungeon. And using the summon costs a full complement of Mars Djinni and half of your Mercury Djinni — a hefty cost that, depending on your class setup, can deprive you of your best healing for a few critical rounds. Also, the only boss you haven't beaten yet by the time you get it is strong against fire. Guess what element the Iris summon is...
- Yes, but it does heal all eight party members back to full health afterward, even the ones that were knocked out, so if you're in dire straits, getting off an Iris summon is basically giving yourself new life.
Neverwinter Nights 2 had you spend a major chunk of the mid game collecting a series of powers designed to kill the Big Bad; it turns out they weren't necessary at launch. Additionally, late in the game you get your hands on an Infinity Plus One Sword, that's also often superseded by gear a player already has access to.
Triple techs in Chrono Trigger are almost never worth it. All of the straight damage ones have lower multipliers than the double techs that use the same moves, and they're harder to set up. The ones that don't just do damage aren't much more useful, since killing your enemies as fast as possible is usually the best strategy.
- Double techs can end up this way, too. This has partially to do with the fact that the multipliers are at least partially based on the characters' on-paper damage output for the same amount of time. Unfortunately, by the time you're able to use Triple Techs, you probably have your characters' best accessories, which break the rules of standard combat.
  - For example, Frog's "Hero's Badge" when paired with his Infinity Plus One Sword, gives Frog something around a 75% critical chance, easily doing 800-900 damage per attack.
- At the end of the day, the only combo techs this troper ever uses are magic-combos (extremely useful if you only have one character with high magic), and cure-combos.
- 3D Attack, Triple Tech, or Spin Strike is a decent triple tech and double tech respectively as it does the same amount of damage as all the techs required combined (if not slightly less). Since not a lot of enemies resist attacks, this is perfect for the later enemies, except two bosses in the Black Omen. Omega Flare is the magic alternative to this.
- Ice Water is another dual tech that avoids this trope. It hits all enemies at once and will instantly defeat most of the mooks in Magus' Castle - the first dungeon you have access to it.
- Some bosses encourage you to use combo attacks with their mechanics. For example, Yakra frequently counters your attacks, so having two people hit him at the same time instead of having them attack seperately will result in you getting counterattacked less.
Chrono Cross, for its part, has Summon Elements. Necessary for the most high-end equipment, but requiring an elaborate setup every time one is used. Also, you can only cast one for every boss you've beaten so far; fortunately, the counter resets every time you beat a new one or visit an inn. With so many restrictions, they tend to get used on only the final few battles, and sometimes not even then.
- For that matter, the Chrono Cross itself is extremely impractical to use, requiring you to use an element of each color in order, without the enemy casting one that would break the pattern.
  - You have to set all your color elements to level one and then cast them WITH the Time Devourer in a very good example of Guide Dang It.
- The Chrono Cross is simply a Plot Coupon. This Troper actually managed to use the Chrono Cross correctly in a different battle, but it does nothing.
The Graviton Gun in Syndicate Wars meant death to anyone on the wrong end of it, recharged quickly and also emitted tendrils of energy that disintegrated eight other people when you fired it. So, unless you cared about collateral casualties, it was great. Except that it cost three times as much as the Satellite Rain and by the time you developed it, you were probably on the last levels, where you couldn't resupply your agents (or you cheated like a bastard).
The triple nuke in World In Conflict: first, you need a whopping 240 Tactical Aid points at once to summon them (that's an amount a very active and skilled player MAY amass in an entire 20 minutes game if he doesn't spend anything), and second, even one nuke is usually Over Nine Thousand destruction-wise, which makes the other two mostly just hit the dirt.
- Unit-wise, US and Nato Heavy Artillery units certainly apply. They fire an extremely flashy and lethal barrage of rockets... but any alert player can see them coming from afar and avoid the attack entirely. Plus the barrage can be seen on the minimap and will give away the position of the artillery, which is just a sitting duck at close range. Medium artillery is much cheaper, it's shots can't be seen and it's just as effective against anything short of tanks. It even has Napalm against infantry in the forest.
Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare lets you unlock two additional scopes for most guns, the red dot sight and the ACOG scope. However, the ACOG scope, which provides 4x zoom, is unlockable even for weapons on which it does more bad than good; putting an ACOG scope on the SVD Dragunov sniper rifle not only reduces its accuracy (the default scope is easier to aim with), but it also makes aiming at nearby targets harder, and you can't hold your breath when using it, so there is always breathing sway. In addition, the 4x zoom is largely wasted as most maps do not have open spaces big enough to make it useful.
- The ACOG scope could be useful to sniper rifle in closer combat since you don't need to steady to pull off a shot, but the golden gun camoflauges are very much Awesome But Impractical in most of the criteria for the trope - most of them require you kill 175 enemies with headshots to equip it, which is out of the reach of players who wish to use Prestige mode, which causes you to wipe your levels and challenges (which also means progress towards the golden camoflauges is wiped) to get a new icon, and this can be done ten times. As you might of guessed, the gold camouflages also make it easier to see you, being gold and all.
- The ACOG is noticeably more useful on the fully-automatic weapons like the M4 Carbine, though, because the additional breathing sway is negated by the zoom helping you put more of the target in the center of your screen, which is all you need when you let the automatic fire rip.
In Final Fantasy XI, the Dark Knight Two-Hour ability is Blood Weapon, which drains an enemy's HP by the amount of damage a physical swing does. Problem is, Dark Knights traditionally use two-handed weapons, which have a high delay in attack speed, the drain effect doesn't deal additional damage, Weaponskills aren't affected by this at all, and the effect lasts 30 seconds. That's about four, five swings of a two-handed weapon. While the Souleater ability can make it somewhat more effective, it's generally not as useful as other Two-Hours... unless you get the Kraken Club, which attacks multiple times in one attack round, which actually turns Blood Weapon into a Game Breaker, and even then, it requires a hefty Haste build, with Bards and Mages buffing them to kingdom come.
- A better example of this is probably the Ninja two-hour, Mijin Gakure, which kills the user, without the usual EXP loss, to cause damage to an enemy. The damage from it is so minimal, though, that the only reason to use it is for a quick trip to your home point.
  - Some Ninjas do use this ability specifically to get around the EXP loss penalty if they are about to die. This is generally frowned upon though since most Ninjas are the party tank and some would use it before their death was inevitable.
- To a lesser extent, the White Mage 2 hour Benediction could fall in this category against mobs with AoE damage. While it is a very useful ability, it sometimes ended up healing generally not very threatening amounts of damage to the rest of the party and could end up generating so much hate that tanks simply could not get hate until the White Mage was killed.
- "Blood Weapon" is far from impractical even if you are restricted to 2-handed weapons, which you're not. This shows that. Yes it requires support but this is FFXI, support is basically a given 80% of the time, especially when it matters most. And no, you do not need that weapon to do it.
  - That Dark Knight did not even use "Blood Weapon," which is even more amazing. He would had done 2 times the damage if he did; definitely the most broken ability in the game, til it got nerfed.
In Star Wars: Rebellion, a Turn Based Strategy game set in the Star Wars Expanded Universe, the Empire could actually build Death Stars and Super Star Destroyers, but the cost in resources made them impractical. Anything they do can't be done more cheaply with regular ships. The Death Star is especially impractical since it is vulnerable to fighters, the cheapest space units in the game.
- The Death Star DID have the ability to destroy planets, no matter what sort of planetary shielding or defenses were there, and doing so caused the rest of the planets in the system to immediately increase their support for the Empire out of fear. The downside was that every other planet in the galaxy would have a drastic shift AGAINST the Empire in response to the atrocity, and if the Death Star left a system the support would turn back against you.
On the subject of Star Wars, one of this troper's pet hates is the Double Ended Lightsaber. Less useful in every possible way than wielding two lightsabers (apart from being kinda cool), it does in fact give a wielder many more ways to be killed by their own weapon, given how much less freedom they have to block and parry without cutting their own legs off.
- Lampshaded in the Expanded Universe novel Darth Bane: Path of Destruction, in which the titular character notes that the only real advantage of a double-bladed lightsaber genuinely is that it looks cool. It's unusual appearance and the complex combat style required to use it without slicing off the wielder's own head make it look really, really intimidating to anyone fighting against one... which can actually make it effective, when coupled with the fact that they're so rare that few people have ever seen one before, and automatically assume it must be incredibly deadly because it looks deadly. But if you keep your cool and approach the fight logically, a single-bladed saber is more useful in pretty much every way.
In the GBA versions of Harvest Moon (Friends of Mineral Town and More Friends...), you can assemble the three Gems: when equipped, the Kappa Gem automatically restores Strength, Goddess Gem restores Stamina, and the Truth Gem displays both stats on screen. Handy, but at the time when you can actually get them (at least five in-game years in), most players will know the limits at which they can safely work their character, negating the need for the Truth Gem. Not to mention scarfing down some Elli Leaves or drinking a Bodigizer XL and a Turbojolt XL restore your health much faster than the Kappa and Goddess Gems would. All this still ignores the amount of effort needed to find all twenty-seven pieces of all three gems.
Zone Of The Enders: The Second Runner has the Vector Cannon. When fired, this weapon will absolutely, positively, obliterate whatever is in front of it, no questions asked. Mooks, smaller bosses, what have you, they're incinerated in the power of this cannon. The problem? The weapon takes almost twenty seconds to charge, including latching it to the ground, bringing up an external aiming/charging system, charging the cannon... charging the cannon more... and look, because I stood still for this long, now I'm dead. The only time it works right is in a mission where you have to use it to blow the engines off of battleships, because the game is built to let you use it there.
- And oddly enough, it's often quicker to use the Vector Cannon to blow up the rest of the ship instead.
Several of the Final Smash attacks in Super Smash Bros. Brawl qualify for this trope. A character's Final Smash is part of their balance. For example, Meta Knight, who can get off attacks frighteningly quickly and has decent smashes, gets a fairly weak Final Smash, which is clumsy, hard to hit with, and can hit at most two characters. On the other hand, Captain Olimar, who can't do nearly as much damage, gets one of the cheesiest Final Smashes in the game, due to its being unavoidable (unless you're a character like Pit or ROB, who has a high enough recovery to go above it). Mario and Samus, who fall somewhere in the middle, get fairly decent Final Smashes, which are powerful and easy to hit with, but also easy to avoid. This is why some tournaments turn on Smash Balls, even though they usually also turn off all other items.
- Pikachu's Volt Tackle does less damage than Pikachu could do in the hands of any decent player, is arguably the hardest thing in the game to control, and can affect your score negatively if you happen to end your rampage of suck over a bottomless pit. Also, Marth's Final Smash can be suicidal if you perform it without an enemy to destroy.
- Pit's super smash is worthless against anyone who can dodge, unless they're at high damage and make a mistake. I gave up on him when I realized that the Valkyries could be killed. Both Link and Toon Link's super smashes are decent, being a near guaranteed instakill, but a simple dodge/jump is all it takes to avoid it.
In Sonic Adventure 2, both Sonic and Shadow can, with the right upgrade, use an attack that destroys multiple enemies almost simultaneously, and while attacking they move too fast to even be seen, let alone hit. Of course, it requires a few seconds of charging, which means that it's completely useless against enemies that can fight back.
- So long as you don't let go of the button, you can move with the attack readied. However, you often have to cross gaps by using the same button to dash across rings, so it can't be held indefinitely. The move will also sometimes glitch, causing Sonic or Shadow to spin around an enemy without hitting it.
  - Not so much a glitch as the move having a certain amount of turning capability so an enemy inside that would just have you orbit it. However, moving the control stick changes your movement path during the attack allowing you to get out of this.
- Magic Gloves. Most useless addition in Sonic Adventure 2 by far. Sure, being able to grab enemies into a small little orb to then chuck it at enemies is pretty damn cool. Having to stand still, select "Magic Gloves" from a list of possible actions to take, one button press at a time (it's pretty far into the list, and God forbid you press it one time too many, since then you'll have to go through the list again), and only then use the bastard is far too much effort to get an orb from one enemy to throw at another, when you could just use a Homing Attack on both in a fraction of the time.
  - Some people say that the only time the Magic Gloves are useful is in Cannon's Core, where you have to destroy an Artificial Chaos hovering over a pit in order to progress. If you homing attack it, you'll have to do a second homing attack directly at the screen in order to get back to safety due to the stupid camera angle, so many prefer to stand safely on the platform and grab it with the Gloves. But that's about it.
In the original Kingdom Hearts, completing the Hades Cup netted you Trinity Limit, supposedly an Ultimate Attack. Except that it took 5 AP to equip (a rather painfully large amount), required Donald and Goofy, and used your entire mana bar up. This was especially bad since the attack often replaced other, less costly, more useful attacks such as Ragnarok. Note that the same attack is far more useful in both sequels.
Some of the Buster attacks from Devil May Cry 4 are dangerous enough in crowds that using standard attacks is safer and more effective.
- There's also Nero's 'Showdown', which is almost impossible to pull off without getting screwed yourself. Showdown was only effective to this troper when using it on downed enemies at point blank range as finishers. And still sometimes they missed.
Secret Of Evermore has the Reflect spell, which as its name implies, reflects alchemy spells back at the caster. This would have been a great spell, since no enemy absorbs alchemy spells and bosses frequently use very powerful alchemy (especially That One Boss, Verminator). Unfortunately, you don't get this spell until the beginning of Omnitopia. At that point, the only enemy left that uses alchemy is the Bonus Boss, the Faces (aka "Your Cleanliness").
- You can get a spell called Barrier that makes the characters invincible and you can get it on your search for the rocket ship parts. It works wonders, except for one boss who's lightning attack goes right through the barrier and may outright be an instant game over.
Certain games from Ultima have the Armageddon spell ("Imbalance" in Ultima VII Part II — Serpent Isle). The spell kills all enemies on screen as well as all enemies not on screen. It also kills your entire party, all bystanders - and everyone and everything in the world except for you and Lord British (and Batlin in Ultima VII)! Naturally, the game becomes Unwinnable at this point, so there is absolutely no reason to use this other than to see Lord British's reaction (and to find out why Batlin sided with the Guardian).
In the same vein as the above, Sierra's Quest for Glory series has the Thermonuclear Blast spell, which, when cast, essentially causes a nuclear explosion that destroys everything in a mile's radius — centered on, and including, the caster. The spell first turned up as a fake spell listed in the manual of one of the early games, as if the spell existed in the game (it didn't). The final game in the series revisits the joke by actually making the spell available to the player, though of course casting it is highly unwise.
MightAndMagic had a slightly more forgiving version of the Armageddon spell. It would damaged everything on the map, however plot important NPC's were inside houses, which were not considered part of the map. It was still rather impractical for two reasons. 1)It would kill all the peasants, killing your karma. 2)Rather than kill everything it would do a fixed amount of damage, which was rather unimpressive against the high level monsters you would be facing by the time you got it. 3)It didn't work in dungeons.
- It still was useful however if you were on an outdoor map with only monsters that were the right strength to get killed by it. Use it a few times in the right area and mop up the XP and gold.
In Ultima 9: Ascension, the fourth level two-handed sword technique is an elaborate figure-8 slash that your trainer Duncan describes as this amazing shot that he could never master. To learn it, you have to sail (or make a bridge of objects) to a deep ocean dock off the coast of Yew, then risk drowning as you dive to an underwater crypt containing the book with the technique. Unfortunately the move does a piddling amount of damage, is very hard to aim, hits only at the very end of the swing, and takes time to execute in which you could have done several quicker slashes for far more damage.
The Zodiac from Ratchet And Clank 2 definitely qualifies for this. Costs a ridiculous 2.5 million bolts, with ammo costing a further 10 thousand bolts a shot. The weapon itself takes several seconds to charge, before vaporising all (non boss) enemies on screen. However the weapon can only hold four shots, and ammo has to be brought. Much more effective is to let rip with your 100 round, rapid fire R.Y.N.O. 2, for just a mere one million bolt purchase, and a hundred bolts a shot. Considering the amount of enemies ever on screen, the R.Y.N.O. 2 can take out what the Zodiac can in almost the same amount of time.
Any of the open vehicles in the Metal Slug series, such as the Camel Slug in the second game. What can be more awesome than riding a camel with a machine gun strapped to its back? Quite a few things, given that vehicles in Metal Slug are primarily there to give your One Hit Point Wonder some extra hit points. The Camel Slug and its ilk don't — you die if a bullet hits you. And they raise you into the enemy line of fire and prevent you from being able to duck! You're better off trusting your ability to dodge than riding those things. In several cases (like the first stage of Metal Slug 2), however, their purpose is to give you a huge end-of-round point bonus. If you can make it there alive, that is.
- Then there's the Iron Lizard. It's a gun that shoots out mechanical lizards, which drive across the ground and explode on contact with the enemies. Looks friggin' sweet (mechanical lizards!), utterly worthless. Reread that: "across the ground". In a game where every fifth enemy can fly, a weapon that can't fire aerially is unacceptable.
  - Worse that that has gotta be the Drop Shot. All the disadvantages of the Iron Lizard, only now the shot fires slower.
Baldur's Gate II would give you the Imprisonment spell, which traps the victim in suspended animation in a hollow sphere deep underground permanently — without a saving throw! Downside: A level 9 spell won't be used on everyday foes, and the player will want the big foes' loot which they take with them to their new plane of existence if imprisoned. It was made useful in the Expansion Pack Throne Of Bhaal, since loot stops being such a big issue.
- Most of the more important enemies are immune to the spell, anyway. But the game also has another ability for warriors with at least 3M XP. (Greater) Deathblow which allows you to instantly kill any opponent of 10th (12th) or lesser level. It's like giving Batman the ability to kill rabbits.
- 'Imprisonment' is useful as a crowd control spell when paired with 'Freedom', which reverses it. When used together, you can cast Imprisonment to remove a tough opponent from battle until you have killed everything else, and then cast Freedom to release him and triumph easily because you've already eliminated all of his support.
  - Although for such purposes Maze generally works just as well, and is a level lower. In Baldur's Gate the difference between permanently and "long enough you'll have killed everything else in the area" is not that significant.
- This is filled with these, like "Gate." Though summoning a gigantic "Pit-fiend" may sound cool, it is way too much trouble to be worth it (not to mention completely unnecessary, unless you did it for fun). It is also a 9th level spell, the highest level, making it take a slot that can be used for those game breaking spells. Make no mistake though, most of the spells are useless but the ones that are useful are ridiculously overpowered.
  - If nothing else, the problem with "Gate" is that if the pit fiend kills the powerful enemy you summoned it to deal with, you don't get the XP.
The monofilament whip in Shadowrun is a cyberpunk vorpal sword: A filament made of a single long chain of molecules with a handle at one end and a little weighted ball at the other. Presumably it is so sharp that it will instantly sever a limb, but you need mad skills to use it; if you miss your target, the whip is likely to come back and take off your head.
Diablo has the über-spell Apocalypse, which is a variant of the main attack wielded by Diablo himself. Looks flashy; causes every monster on screen to erupt in a mushroom cloud of fire. Unfortunately, the player's version of the spell can never be learned, only cast from staves with ridiculously few charges, and the damage is pathetic. In the Hellfire expansion it can be learned, but the mana cost is so high as to make it worthless.
- Diablo has a LOT of spells that are cool but useless. Town Portal can be learned as a spell, but you're very likely to find a scroll anyway. Couple that with the fact you have to learn it multiple times to reduce the mana cost to reasonable levels (especially for the Warrior) and, well... Likewise, Healing is a lot less useful than just slugging back a potion, and the unique ability each class has will see use only on the far side of never. Telekinesis has no redeeming qualities whatsoever (you can just walk up to the items, and being able to push a foe back a square is more than inadequate for the amount of mana it costs).
  - It might be easier to list the USEFUL spells Diablo has...
  - Mana Shield, which stops the Squishy Wizard being squishy; Fireball, which generally utilises a Good Bad Bug to dump an obscene amount of damage on anything non-fire immune; Chain Lightning which does pretty much the same thing for non-lightning immunes; and Warriors using both Teleport and the often-underused Flash spell to catch up with ranged foes that run away.
"Diablo II's sorceress has a spell that summons a meteor from the heavens to smite her foes, but because of the couple second delay, by the time it hits those foes are either dead or have moved out of the way.
- That's why you hire a merc - to hold the enemy in place...
Maxwell in Tales Of Symphonia — he's the most powerful Summon Magic bar none and casts a higher-power meteor storm that blankets most the battle, but he can only be cast while Sheena is in Over Limit mode, which happens more or less randomly, and he appears only once you've unlocked the last stage of The Very Definitely Final Dungeon. Odds are you'll never actually get to summon him once; nevermind summon him in a battle where he'd actually be useful. Summoning at a whole is pretty much a good example of this, since all summons (except Corrine) can only be cast in Over Limit mode and cost 100 TP to cast.
- Maxwell in Tales of Eternia is usable. His extensions, not so much. They require Maxwell charged up (by using his expensive spells) and the same mage to have a prohibitive amount of TP remaining, and no enemy can even survive it except the Fakes and ~~Dhaos~~ Sekundes, who'll never let you get it off.
- Lloyd's Falcon's Crest. This attack is even more ridiculous to use. You have to have access to the The Very Definitely Final Dungeon, have flashy Material Blades equipped — even though there's much better weapons to be found, be at critically low HP, have no spells on the field what-so-ever, and then you hold Guard, Attack and Tech. This is never mentioned in the game.
- Furthermore: Presea's Hien Messhoujin in the Japanese-Only PS2 version. It requires her to be at 10% of her HP or less, everyone else must be dead, she must be in Overlimit, you must have used her "Beast" tech 200 times, and you have to use a special skill with all those requirements met before using Beast to start the attack, but with a x75.20 multiplier on it it, it's way more awesome than Lloyd's Falcon's Crest.
- Colette, upon breaking all four of the seals, learns an Angel Skill called "Sacrifice". If its absurd TP Cost of 150 isn't enough of a deterrent to using the spell, its made even more impractical: When cast, Colette dies. While its effects are nothing to scoff at (the highest blast of Light-elemental damage in the entire game — in an auto-staggering, never missing blast of light that hits ever enemy on the screen, in addition to Healing all Party Members (besides herself — she's in the process of dying) by 30%, even if they were dead), this spell has no use.
  - Sounds like another Iris...only worse.
- There is also Genis' Indignation Judgment. First you must use Indignation (a spell that you get fairly late in the game) at least 50 times. Then, while Genis is in overlimit (very rare since Genis tends not to be in close combat), cast Indignation. While it is a powerful attack, one can usually cast several normal Indignations in the time it takes to set up.
  - Needs to be noted that the 50 cast rule isn't per battle. Once you're done spamming, you're free to Indignation Judgment whenever he gets into overlimit, which is affected by 1) food, 2) hits taken, and 3) allies killed (like say his sister Raine dies in battle. Points towards overlimit there). The meter resets upon death and did we mention that it's invisible? So when you're a Squishy Wizard... Really, the only difficult part is getting into overlimit; the cast time for Indignation Judgment is roughly around the same as the normal Indignation, cept it has a much lower chance to miss and much higher damage. So thus, you can't really depend on it but it's great when you're lucky enough to get into overlimit.
  - Through a glitch with the Spell Save EX skill (which most people will have equipped for Concentrate, which prevents spell interruption), you can actually get off two Indignation Judgments per overlimit- any Hi-ougi like this one usually ends the overlimit once it's used.
- Emil, Regal, and Sheena are the first to get their Mystic Artes in the sequel, and they're also quickly outclassed by the others'. Marta at least heals you with hers. On the other hand, Lloyd's is practically a Game Breaker unless there's a huge level difference.
- Fatal Strikes in Tales of Vesperia are an instant kill on all normal enemies, but in the course of normal comboing you're never going to see them. In fact, even if your normal combo is right for building up a Fatal Strike, the target is still probably dead or almost dead when the FS activates. You might get one if you're actually trying for it. On the other hand, they speed up boss battles a great deal if you know how to get them quickly.
- Beryl Benito's Combination Blaster Extensions in Tales of Hearts are impractical for the same reason the Maxwell extensions in Eternia were - a downright silly CG consumption, and her Relationship Values have to be in the sky to boot. You have to grind Beryl stupid in the first place to have a chance of seeing it.
- The New Game Plus full cut-in mystic artes in Tales Of The Abyss. They do look really cool, though.
  - Luke's Lost Fon Drive. You have to be at critically low HP, and have the Key of Lorelei sword equipped, which you don't get until fairly late in the game (and there are much more useful swords available).
  - Anise's Fever Time. The skill Lucky has to have 200 uses, Anise has to have full HP, and you have to have at least 20,000 gald. If the attack doesn't kill the enemy, you lose a lot of money.
  - Guy's Brilliant Overlord is a bit like Lost Fon Drive. You have to have the Jewel of Gardios sword equipped, which you have to do an easily-missable sidequest to get (and you don't actually get the sword until you've been to the end of The Very Definitely Final Dungeon). Then, the skill Final Cross needs 200 uses, and Guy's HP has to be critical.
  - Tear's Fortune Ark. She has to know all of the hymns, 2 of which you can only get through missable sidequests (one being early in the game, the other being very late). All of them need at least 50 uses each.
  - Jade's Indignation is fairly easy to get (Thunder Blade needs at least 200 uses), but next to impossible to figure out how to activate. (Hold down the button for around 5 seconds after activating Overlimit. Jade can't move, attack, start casting a spell, guard, or be attacked, but if you have the Charge AD skills active, he can charge his P. and M. Attack.)
  - Natalia's Noble Roar is extremely easy to activate (use Piercing Line while in Overlimit), but you have to have the Elven Bow equipped. It's a good weapon, but very difficult and time-consuming to get.
In The World Ends With You, most of the Gatito pins don't have any workarounds for their problems and are in fact quite Awesome But Impractical.
- Also, the elemental deck. The pins float around the screen, and touching one causes a ball of energy to move from one pin to another, damaging whatever Noise get in the way. It looks cool, but not exactly a deck to play seriously with.
About 90% of the available Plasma Blade combos and almost all of the Boosters in the 3-D Castlevania-styled action game Nanobreaker serve no real purpose other than to put on a (somewhat nifty) laser light show for your opponents. For that matter, if it doesn't hit all around you or deliver a quick instant kill, it was essentially useless against the game's swarming Orgamechs.
The Almighty spells in the Shin Megami Tensei games. On the surface it sounds like a dream come true: A type that no demon is resistant to in a game where elemental resistances are your main obstacle to victory. However, the inflated MP cost and lacklustre damage compared to your normal elemental spells means that they just aren't worth it. Making things worse, no demon is weak against the Almighty type and by the time you gain access to the Almighty spells you'll already have figured out that it's far more profitable to aim for a demon's weakness to earn more actions.
- They're not half bad for dealing with enemies with no weaknesses in the first place...
- And technically, all of that only applies to the games from Nocturne onwards. In earlier games, Almighty weakness wasn't that uncommon... and hitting an enemy with its weakness just hurt it. A lot. And increased the chances of any status effects or instant death the attack would inflict anyway. It's only in Nocturne and later that they piled on further nasty effects beyond just "crippling damage."
  - In the earliest Shin Megami Tensei games, multi-hitting physical attacks and guns do so much damage that it may not even be worth it to use magic. Even the heroine, who specialize in magic, may be better off using regular attack.
  - This is reversed in latter games and spin-offs series, where the opposite is true.
Also in fighting games, any attack that requires you to Charge (hold a specific button for a few seconds), leaving you wide open for attacks. Especially frustrating when the AI doesn't have to do this.
- Fortunately, some games, like the Street Fighter series will be generous in acknowledging a player's charge motion, i.e. holding down-and-back will allow charge moves that go back to forward or down to up. Unfortunately, this is also known as "turtling", and is decried as a very n00b-ish tactic.
- Samus and Donkey Kong also avoided this in the Smash Brothers Series where they can roll away and maintain charge and then resume charging. That said, the charged attacks aren't game breakers like some charge attacks.
  - Combining both in Bleach: Shattered Blade is Byakuya Kuchiki's Hakuteiken. The pros? If you manage to activate it, it will hit your opponent no matter what, and for 80% of their health. The con? You activate it by charging it up for 4 WHOLE SECONDS. Good luck using that on a non-computer opponent. And then there's the characters that have their Ultimates in the form of traps. They can't just hit you with an attack to start their ultimate, they place a small glowing circle in the area in front of them, and have to hope that the opponent has the lack of common sense to stand inside this area for about one second. Byakuya Kuchiki's Senkei (Yes, he does have two ultimate attacks instead of just one) makes this work somewhat, just because his trap covers a very large area in front of him, and slightly to the sides of him, which will catch characters trying to counter-attack.
In Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, the two final weapons are perhaps the most useless. The Fusion Cannon and Chronosceptor (whose pieces the game revolves around finding) are extremely powerful, but also slow to fire. You're a sitting duck taking damage as guns charge up, and if the enemy isn't stationary, it'll probably get out of the weapon's blast radius. Furthermore, the Cannon only holds two Fusion Charges without a Backpack, and they're extremely hard to find. The Chronosceptor holds three shots and can't be reloaded at all. When fighting the Campaigner, you're better off just using the Plasma Rifle.
- Similarly, the Nuke weapon in Turok 2 is pretty much useless. You don't get it till near the end of the game, it takes a long time to charge up, and there are no practical situations to use it in.
Super Robot Wars lives on this trope. Many attacks sure look cool and are stronger than others, but the overall cost is usually greater. Case in point: Cybuster's Cosmo Nova only has a single shot, and requires a very high Willpower rating. It's the machine's best move, but you'll usually end up using the weaker Akashic Buster more often, simply because you can squeeze off many more attacks with it and sooner as well.
- There are entire robots like this: massive, powerful combining juggernauts that require you to devote multiple deploy slots (to send out all the parts) and have nothing but over-the-top power attacks that suck energy like crazy. Like everything else in Super Robot Wars, you generally want to use the more robust components to sweep up the enemies and then start hammering the boss with the high-end attacks.
The Supernova weapon in Jak 3 kills all the enemies on screen. It also uses up all your violet ammo — the most powerful ammo in the game. This also applies to the violet ammo itself, which can also be used to reverse gravity for all your enemies except for you. Cool? Yes. Practical? Not so much.
- Of course, the entire line of violet ammo weapons are Awesome But Impractical, and overshadowed by the much more utilitarian Red, Yellow and Blue ammo weapons. As a result, Violet weapons, especially including the Supernova, are pretty much all either specific to certain situations, or just designed for total devastation of enemies, moving them from Awesome But Impractical to Too Awesome To Use.
- The Mass Inverter was actually extremely useful, because it disabled enemy weapons as well. You could simply use Jak's Jump Physics to spin-kick them into water, bottomless pits, Dark Eco pools, or just beat them to death, all without needing to worry about damage.
- The Vulcan Fury also qualifies. While it openly invites simply spamming ammo everywhere, if you aren't careful with your aiming Jak will lock onto a single enemy out of the horde and pump them full of three times the amount of ammo required to kill them. While There Is No Kill Like Overkill, there has to be a more efficient use for blue ammo than turning one enemy into hamburger while his friends do the same to you.
- Krimzon Guard Hellcats. Flying tanks are cool, right? Yeah, but they have all the agility of a brick, they move with the approximate speed of a dead slug, they're a huge target, and they piss off the KG. Except that one level in Jak 3 when you get to fly a heavily upgraded one that can actually manoeuvre, and has a truly beautiful smart bomb.
The Roguelike Ancient Domains of Mystery has a learnable spell called Wish (or, for divine casters, Divine Intervention) which does Exactly What It Says On The Tin: you get a wish. Unfortunately, the spell is extremely difficult to learn even for high level wizards, attempts take so long that you will usually be forced to abort by hunger or risk starving to death, and if you have teleportitis it will interrupt your reading. Even if you do manage to learn it, it costs 3000 PP to cast (enough to put it out of range for many characters even with casting from hit points; one of this game's Self Imposed Challenges is to craft a character who can) and takes 10 points off of one of your stats. It's much easier to simply use Potions of Exchange to polymorph a large pile of worthless rings until you get Rings of Djinni Summoning, which can give you a wish, and then use those to get more Potions of Exchange until you have infinite wishes.
Planescape Torment has level 9 ultimate spells with intensely cool cutscenes, which is rare in a Western RPG. Unfortunately, barring some serious Level Grinding, by the time you're able to use these you only have one enemy left worth using them on, and even that's a Skippable Boss.
The final unlockable car in Tokyo Xtreme Racer Zero is an extremely powerful Nissan Fairlady Z...but just like its inspiration, the Devil Z from the Wangan Midnight series, it's a challenge to drive.
The Field Shutter in Zanac, which is a shield that protects your ship from frontal attacks. Sounds good until you discover that it pisses off the AI and makes it throw more enemies at you.
In Breath Of Fire III, Garr can obtain a weapon called the Beast Spear. At 150 attack points, it's far and away his strongest weapon (the second strongest weapon, the Dragon Spear, only has 110 Attack Power), and is even obtained about halfway through the game (provided you know where to look, and don't miss it), instead of at the end like most of the other strongest weapons. However, the Beast Spear also weighs a whopping 15 points (making it heavier than any other item in the game and practically ensuring that Garr will have a Speed of 0) and will drain 10% of Garr's max HP every single round. These drawbacks will naturally turn most players away from it (though if you're willing to work with them, Garr can become one hell of a damage dealer, thanks to his already high Attack power).
PK Love Omega. The most powerful attack in Mother 3, period. However, only Lucas can use it, and it costs 50 PP. The most powerful healing PSI in the game, Life Up Omega, costs half of that. And Lucas is also the only one who knows Life Up Omega too. The simple problem with this entire situation is that, most of the time in situations where PK Love Omega would be useful and needed, Lucas is likely already having to devote most of his time to healing and buffing as it is. So PK Love gets little love.
- Kumatora's PK Starstorm has elements of this as well: sure, it does a ton of damage to all enemies and is compareable to PK Love Omega in power, but it only costs 2 PP less, while PK Ground she learns naturally costs less PP than either of them, does overall more damage to bosses, bypasses barriers, can't miss nonflying enemies (which none of the bosses are) and hits 5 times, with each hit having a decent chance to knock the enemy down, even bosses, which makes them unable to do anything for 1-3 turns. That being said, you won't learn it until lv 60, and unless you specifically spend a lot of time grinding for levels, you might not even get that high before the Point Of No Return.
  - And from its predecessor, Earthbound: the Casey Bat, which is Ness's most powerful weapon at +125 Offense... and it misses 75% of the time it's used in combat.
  - The Casey Bat does have a use. If you keep it equipped outside of battle, the algorithm for calculating an instant victory only sees the high attack value and ignores Ness' woeful innacuracy, meaning you can just walk through many a random encounter without taking damage. If you're forced to fight, you just switch to a viable weapon and attack with it by selecting that weapon from the item menu. Immensely helpful if you're a bit underleveled in Stonehenge.
The entire city/facility of Junon in Final Fantasy VII, immortalized by the tiny little peashooter Sister Ray◊. The first two out of three guesses why this installation is pointless don't count. The entire installation is useless against anything that isn't seaborne and headed straight for the city, and the only location that the Sister Ray can even be aimed at is a sleepy resort town across the ocean.
- Somewhat justified in that the range of the cannon was in fact roughly half the span of the World and that it was pointed in the general direction of a nation that had a bloody War with Shinra some years ago. Actually comes in useful twice during the game.
  - Junon, yes. The Sister Ray... not so much.
  - If I may remind you, The sister Ray blasted the head off a WEAPON who, granted, was OPENING IT'S MOUTH RIGHT AT THE CANNON; THEN it obliverated Sephiroth's protecting bubble over the North Crater while killing Diamond WEAPON, who was in the way Gameplay And Story Segregation, it may be, but darned if it wasn't impressive.
The "Apocalypse" spell in Final Fantasy VIII. There's only one place you can find it - it can be Drawn from the final boss. Though hackers have found its stats far exceed any other spells when Junctioned, by the time you get it you won't be able to open the menu before the game ends, and using it as a magic attack is nowhere near as useful as other actions such as Limits.
The Volaticus glyph in Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia. It's not a super jump like the Griffin Wing or Gravity Boots from Ecclesia 's predecessors; rather, it allows Shanoa to freely fly around. But you get it so late in the game, in the Final Approach area of Dracula's Castle, and to add insult to injury, the only two areas that cannot be reached without it are a shortcut back to the Library and Dracula's quarters (which requires this glyph due to the stairs being broken).
- To make matters worse, using it during the Dracula fight will make him switch tactics and fire a MASSIVE energy wave that kills you in about three hits. On the other hand, using it just right against Eligor lets you skip to the final stage of the fight... too bad you can only do that during Boss rush, as he's guarding one of the keys to Volaticus in the main game.
- OBJECTION! Volaticus is essential in the Large Cavern!
  - And Dracula becomes a very predictable boss when he switches tactics. The real problem with Volaticus is that you lose it when you get hit, so you still can't fly willy-nilly.
  - Also, if I recall correctly it allowed you to use spells and attacks without being forced to stand still so you could freely cast a spell while retreating.
The Excalibur sword in Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow. Sure it's pretty strong, and you get to hit enemies with the sword and the rock it's embedded in stuck on the end. Unfortunately, it's so slow to swing that it's nigh useless against difficult enemies.
Against Iron Golems in Castlevania, any hard-hitting weapon that chooses quality over quantity is impractical simply because all attacks only do one damage to it. When fighting it, it's better to go with whatever hits the enemies very quickly and you repeatedly, which means your bare fists are more practical than nearly anything else.
Many of the Gnomish Engineering devices in World Of Warcraft fall under this trope, especially the cloaking device and the mind-control cap, which seem really cool in theory but have such a short duration that they are essentially worthless.
- Any mechanical item in the tabletop RPG, as well. All of them come with such high difficulty to use and such a long list of drawbacks that you're better off pretending they aren't there.
- The Warlock class can, in addition to their permanent demonic minions, summon two very powerful demons: the Infernal and the Doomguard. The Infernal is a demonic rock monster that deals heavy damage and has a fire aura that burns anything nearby, but it only lasts for 2 minutes before despawning and replaces you'r normal minion, which you have to resummon with a long cast time spell or a en extremely long cooldown instant ability. Thus it's only useful in the last 2 minutes of a fight or if you'r minion has died and the insta-summon is on cooldown.
- The Doomguard is a litle more useful as he does extremely high damage and lasts for 15 minutes. However he requires 5 people to summon and the summoning spell has an extremely long cooldown. Furthermore, if you're a Demonology warlock using these demons causes you to lose Master Demonologist and Demonic Knowlege effects, which depend on you'r regular minions to be summoned, and thus causes dps loss (not to mention your Felguard is about as strong as the Doomguard, altho lacks some of the latters useful abilites). If you're Destruction specced you lose a crit buff provided by your Imp (who is also rather good at dealing damage by himself). Affliction warlocks should use the Doomguard when able, tho, as they don't receive any special benefits from their normal minions.
Pretty much any beam-missile combo exept the Super Missile in Metroid Prime games. They tend to cost far too much ammo to use in order to be effective. Although, each combination comes with its own pretty effects.
- The Wave Buster was also good for "easy mode Ridley", but this was patched in the NTSC Players' Choice and PAL versions of the game.
  - However, the Wave Buster is extremely helpful against the invisible dronebot where you get the Super Bomb.
The Gravity Hammer, and Energy Sword in Halo 3, as well as any other similarly flashy weapon. Sure, they look very cool, but the battle rifle/covenant carbine is far more effective at quickly killing enemies, and the second slot is better used for a sniper rifle or an anti-vehicle weapon. The Energy Sword is only good for killing one specific species of Flood, and the Gravity Hammer is fairly useless. This might just apply to Heroic/Legendary mode, though, which is what the game is meant to be played at, and where cover is useful.
- This applies to multiplayer too. A good player can do some serious damage sneaking around with a hammer or sword, but for the most part, unless it's a hammer/sword only game, most players stick with guns. Hell, most players stick with the assault rifle/battle rifle they start the game with.
Defeat the Bonus Boss the Egg Dragon in Lufia II by collecting all of the Dragon Eggs four times, and then challenging him to a fight, and you'll get the Egg Sword, which adds nothing to a character's ATP but has an incredible and cheap to use IP technique capable of causing insta-death or major status effects to all enemies, and and the Egg Ring, which sets all of the equipping character's stats to maximum. The catch? If you can defeat the Egg Dragon in the first place, you're powerful enough to waste everything else in the game already.
Most Infinity Plus One Swords are like this. Really powerful but you get it from the hardest boss in the game, making them useless.
In Moonwalker on the Sega Genesis, you can perform a special move that makes everyone on screen dance themselves to death. Unfortunately, it costs half your life.
- And you can get a powerup that transforms Michael into Humongous Mecha Michael, but it is completely useless, as you can't rescue children with it equipped, so all you can do is blast away at infinite Respawning Enemies for a minute or so.
Any Arms Fortress in Armored Core: For Answer, but two stick out:
- "The Spirit of Motherwill" is a giant walking aircraft carrier and battleship, able to rip you apart in seconds. But it blows up when you destroy all of it's missile batteries and cannons. Well done, BFF.
- "Cabracan" is a heavily armored tank that carries hundereds of drones. But the skirt is hinged, exposing its treads when it runs into a mine.
- The Kiku weapon also comes to mind, a melee-range pile bunker that can one-shot anything, save two Arms Forts that are designed to be destroyed in sections. Regular Arms Forts, Normals, Nexts, all else will die to this weapon. If you can hit with it, and that's a big if, as the range is melee, and you don't even dash forward to attack with it. Any Next will zip right past you, and Normals can be taken out with ease using mundane weaponry. The only thing it's really good for is against Arms Forts (And perhaps blader mechs, if you're really good).
What? No The Legend Of Zelda: Twilight Princess? I think that the Ball and Chain fits this perfectly. A huge ball that crushes AND impales enemies? GRE—What do you mean that I can barely defend myself or even move if I have it out?
- And then there's the matter of the Spinner, which is quite possibly the most useless, contrived item in the Zelda universe.
  - Let's face it— by the end of the game, at least half of your inventory consists of items like this. Or items that are just entirely useless (I'm talkin' about you, slingshot).
  - As an interesting sidenote, this troper once read a column in a magazine about what the outcome would be if Bungie created the next Zelda. While Zelda fans would almost certainly cry foul at nine-tenths of the ideas presented, the one that would be unconditionally loved was the one about making all of those items useful, and not only that, useful in combat.
- Seriously, the Ball and Chain? I use that thing all the time, and the only time I get hit is when you've got the army of Chilfos throwing spears or the unlucky Freezard breath; just bring it out without swinging it and you've got a shield. And you move faster than you do with the Iron Boots; that's gotta count for something. The Mortal Draw and Jump Strike are kind of guilty of Awesome But Impractical; while they do massive damage, there's a chance you'll get hit and the attack will be ruined.
More Zelda, more specifically, The Legend Of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass. The keys. Sure they get you through the entire game when achieving them, but you can only use them once. As Katie Tiedrich one set as an example in her webcomic Awkward Zombie[1]
"You know, you'd think that after seven dungeons, you'd have figured out how to open a door without breaking the key."
Close Combat II has quite a few such units. Flamethrowers are devastating, but their crew are killed by rifle fire before they can engage as often as not, except on some urban maps. Flamethrower Tanks are more durable, but are usually overkill for fighting infantry, inadequate for fighting tanks, and cost a whole lot more than simpler vehicles. The entire Tiger tank line, Tiger, Kingtiger, and Jagdtiger, is considered overpriced, and the weak Panzer III sees more use in multiplayer. The British also have a Churchill tank mounting a massive 280mm spigot mortar, capable of killing anything in one shot, but it takes a full minute to reload.
- This was a case of truth in gaming. Since Flame-thrower weapons were rare on the western front because they weren't effective; the Tiger, King Tiger, and Jagdtiger were notoriously useless except as 'shock' weapons. Finally, the 280mm spigot mortar was put on an AEV and intended for occasional use on bunkers and building.
- Close Combat III has similar issues to II, but that's probably because Hitler had an obsession with such weapons in real life. Spoiler: They lost the war to practical weapons like the T-34 and Sherman (1 Tiger can take out 8 Shermans, but we had 12 Shermans for every Tiger).
Banjo-Tooie. Sure, Banjo's uses of his backpack without Kazooie in it were generally useful — the Sack Pack lets you cross dangerous surfaces without harm, the Shack Pack would let you fit through small spaces and be protected by harmful pools of liquid, and the Snooze Pack is perfect for regaining health when there are no honeycombs around — but the Taxi Pack can only be used to transport certain characters and items to the intended places. At least it still has a use after all is said and done; you can still use it on the Floaters in Cloud Cuckooland. Meanwhile, Kazooie can learn the Hatch move, but it can only be used on certain eggs (and in one case, an alien baby!), and unlike the Taxi Pack, it has no more real use thereafter — performing it anywhere else would just leave Kazooie akwardly sitting on the ground. Finally, we have the Breegull Bash, where Banjo can pull Kazooie out of his pack if she's in it and slam her against the ground. While it does harm enemies, it is a completely unneccesary move that can only be learned by bringing the Pink Secret Egg to Heggy the Hen.
- To be fair, the Breegull Bash is mostly meant for humor value.
- This troper has used this move to open the elevator doors of Grunty Industries from the wrong side. So it's not completely useless.
- In the sequel, Nuts & Bolts, you can use the Stop 'n' Swop feature to get some vehicle parts that are ultimately tacky. They are (in no particular order) the Googly Eyes, the Mole-on-a-Pole, the Flags, the Goldfish, the Disco Ball, the Beacon, and the Fluffy Dice.
Almost half the special weapons in Mega Man Legends are of this variety. The laser sword, for example, is slow, does only moderate damage, and has no range. In a 3D game where every enemy has projectiles and deals contact damage. The only really useful special weapons are obtained within the first few hours of gameplay, and by the end of the game even they become useless due to the fact that your buster gun is more powerful than any of them are and is actually practical for killing things. Add in the facts that you have to collect several items to even build them and then spend several thousand zenny just to power them up to their full potential, and honestly, there's little to no point to even bothering with them.
- to be fair there are certain enemies who have shields which stop all ranged attacks but the laser sword can destroy in one hit.
Mega Man 1 had the Ice Slasher, which could freeze enemies in their tracks for several seconds. What made it impractical was that it did no damage, and you couldn't swap weapons while it was active, meaning it's only use (other than fighting Fireman was to get by the Big Eye enemies. Much better freeze weapons would come along later, including, interestingly enough, the Ice Slasher from the Game Boy Mega Man I. In that game, you can switch weapons, which makes the combo of freezing the enemy and then lighting it up with Fire Storm the best strategy for poor, nerfed Megaman.
In Team Fortress 2, The Scout's taunt kill with The Sandman is the most awesome (launching enemies several meters away), but also the most impractical, as it takes roughly 5 seconds to ready and use, which is a long time for a point blank attack. The Pyro's taunt kill is less awesome, but takes less time to charge. The Heavy's is also less awesome, but has a somewhat long (albeit VERY narrow) range. All of the Taunt Kills are Awesome But Impractical, but The Scout's is the most awesome and most impractical.
- The Sniper's Huntsman bow is starting to look Awesome But Impractical. One second charge time for full damage, sure, but you can't hit anyone from far away due to how slow the arrows move, and if you're close enough to hit someone you're already dead due to a combination of long reload time and having slowed movement when pulling the arrow back. Still, it's an awesome concept for a weapon in TF 2.
  - Not really. Due to its lack of a scope, it has no "tunnel vision" effect, therefore making it more comfortable to use and easier to aim. Also, the standard rifle has a firing rate barely better than the Huntsman, and you move twice as fast with the Huntsman drawn than with the rifle scoped. The only real problem is how slow the arrows are, but the Huntsman was made for shorter-range attacks, anyway.
The Urban Terror mod for Quake 3 introduces quite possibly the most Awesome But Impractical method of killing in a First Person Shooter - the Goomba Stomp. Yeah. It's even called the Goomba Stomp. And it's a One Hit Kill. Thing is, you can't just jump on someone, you have to have some... distance...
- The Team Fortress 2 server 2Fort2Furious has this as a unique server mod. The code for the mod is not public, thus only that server has the feature. Amusingly enough, a message pops up on everyone's screen telling who killed whom with the technique. It can even kill Ubercharged (otherwise invincible) opponents. Otherwise, it sounds as if it is nearly identical to the Urban Terror version. Except it's much more useful in TF 2, considering how much more vertical movement there is in the game, especially with Rocket/Sticky Jumping.
The GBA version of Yggdra Union has the Fanelia. It's a wonderful item that instantly kills enemies if you use one of the 5 elemental based skills. If the unit using it is strong enough (has max TEC), they can use the skills instantly. However, by the time you can equip it, the only enemy you encounter is immune to those skills. Too bad.
- If you have the PSP version, though, it's actually useful in the last Battlefield. Or So I Heard...
In Left 4 Dead, at certain points players will come across a mounted minigun that can, predictably, wipe out hordes of zombies in seconds. The trouble is, the weapon is almost never mounted in such a position as to effectively cover more than a few of the many directions attacks can come from. Using it effectively requires the 3 Player Characters who aren't using the minigun to both watch their own backs and shoot down any zombies that get behind the gunner, and on higher difficulties where the risk of friendly fire damage becomes a very real threat, most players find it far more prudent to simply ignore the minigun, put their backs to the wall, and fight off the incoming zombies with small arms fire.
- The Tank's rock throw ability in VS mode is also awesome but useless. It takes the Tank about 3 seconds to lift up a huge chunk of slab and throw it, which by then the Survivor players have either taken cover or set you on fire.
The (in)famous Shun-Goku-Satsu by Akuma from Street Fighter and the other Capcom Versus Whatever games he shows up in. Using it on almost anyone below half health is an "I Win" button and its animation looks awesome, but... the input is relatively long, plus the initiating dash does not go the full length of the screen, is not all that fast, can be leapt over and can also be interrupted with a ranged attack. So Yeah.
- That being said, there are actual tactics that you can use to make it practical, such as forcing your opponent into a corner and blocking while setting up the combo. The Shun Goku Satsu is unblockable, by the way.
Persona 4 has the ultimate Persona Inzanagi-no-Okami. He resists all four elements and Physical attacks. He gets the strongest single target spells of all for elements, all four elemental Amp powers, plus four other high end powers. Unfortunately he's level 91 (which means you have to be level 91 to fuse him), he requires twelves Personas for fusion, cannot be retrieved from the Compendium, and has no resistance to Light or Dark. And worst of all, he doesn't inherit any skills. Given it is possible to fuse four element personas and personas that are immune to all seven attack types, this makes him definitely Awesome But Impractical
Magical Battle Arena has a classic usage of this trope, Yagami Hayate (Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha) can dish out a ton of damage AND freeze enemies that are on nearly half of the entire battlefield. The catch? It takes an impossibly long time to charge. Hayate can be useful in 2v2 battles with inexperienced players.
The Flamethrower in Saint's Row 2. Sure, it sets your opponents on fire, which will normally kill them, but it has limited range, when combined with the fact that enemies running into you while blazing will catch you aswell, maybe torching that bastard isn't the best idea.
- Not to mention that setting some enemies on fire alone isn't enough. This troper tried setting a crowd of protesters ablaze during Fuzz and all he accomplished was causing them to scatter all over the damn place. The minigun would have worked better...
The Special or Ultimate attacks from Naruto Clash of Ninja are like this. Especially in the first game the attacks generally did a fair bit of damage but cost all of your charge bar which is used for substituting out of attack combos. And they were pathetically easy to dodge. Meaning that you can never use them in human vs. human unless your are very lucky.
In World of Warcraft, fire specialization mages can learn the spell "Pyroblast". At the current max level, it takes 5 seconds cast time to hit for roughly 4500 total damage, with 1000 of that damage being dealt over 8 seconds, without stat bonuses. The reason it's not worth it is the "Fireball" spell with a cast time of 3 seconds deals 3500 damage, with 200 of that being dealt over 12 seconds. Effectively, spam casting fireball yeilds more damage per second than pyroblast, with a lower mana cost. Of course, mages that do learn pyroblast can subvert this by casting it to initiate the combat, instead of after the monster starts attacking them, and also by learning a talent that allows their pyroblasts to be instant cast, so long as they can get 2 spell criticals in a row before casting it.
The bug bait in Half Life 2. It lets you summon Antlions and manipulate them to attack the Combine soldiers, but the bugs only appear for a few levels, making this item completely useless for the rest of the game.
- You could throw it at the Combine to distract them. But that's about it.
Xenon 2: Megablast has the Super Nashwan Power, which can be purchased in between half-level sections. It gives you a fleeting glimpse of awesomeness, upgrading your ship pretty much as far as it can be upgraded at any stage of the game, only to take it all away again after ten seconds.
Starcraft 2 has the Protoss Colossus that is supposed to be incredible anti-infantry unit, and looks pretty damn cool. Unfortnuately, it cannot target air units and is so big that it can be targeted by both anti-air and anti-ground =attacls. Also, every time the thing has been fielded except in its opening debut, it proved pretty useless, either getting destroyed by air units or being controlled by the Infestor without dealing any significant damage to the enemy.
Mortal Kombat brutalities. Flashy, incredibly nasty ways to finish your foes. Also nearly impossible to pull off. They require a sequence of button presses that's near impossible to actually do. 10 or so in correct order at the correct time very fast. It's awe inspiring to see it pulled off though.

Webcomics

Riff uses one of these in this Sluggy Freelance strip. At first a gatling gun that fires 100 stakes per second sounds like a great anti-vampire weapon. But when you realize that it can only hold one hundred stakes at a time and takes two days to load ... well, you can stake one vampire really, really good. The other dozen or so will tear you to pieces.
- He eventually makes it better by adding a beltloader, similar to a mini-gun.
Sword-Chucks, yo!

Western Animation

One of Ben Tennyson's alien forms in Ben 10: Alien Force is the awesome Alien X, capable of reshaping the very fabric of the universe at whim. But there's a catch: Alien X has three separate personalities, Serena, the voice of love and compassion; Bellicus, the voice of rage and aggression; and Ben, the voice of reason. In order to perform any action at all, up to and including speech and physical movement, two of those three personalities must agree to do so. Considering the other two personalities have been arguing for an eternity before Ben's arrival, this doesn't happen very often.
- Made stranger by the fact that since the two voices have been arguing for eternity, naturally when a third (Ben) appears, that third should be more or less all powerful as they can sway all the deadlocks to their side with tie breaking votes, however when Ben appears, it seems they put aside all their differences, to oppose Ben's choices for some reason.

Web Original

Many of the guns in Survival Of The Fittest fall under this, simply because they're good, but require training that no Ordinary Highschool Student should have to be used effectively. It is also played very straight when the villain Adam Reeves receives a Damascus sword as a prize, then discards it because it is too heavy.

Real Life

Howard Hughes's Hercules aircraft, colloquially known as the "Spruce Goose". He spends several million dollars of his own money to prove it would work and he took so long building it that World War II was over by the time he finished it. Due to questions over the money spent by the government on its development, to prove it really would work, he does a small test flight. The plane was too big and so overengineered it was impractical to actually use, so after its single flight, it is mothballed for decades until it becomes a public museum exhibit.
Quite a few aircraft have been deemed too expensive to run, despite having met their design goals. For example, the SR-71 Blackbird, the world's fastest jet. Or for a nonmilitary example, Concorde was definitely awesome but for various reasons aren't being flown any more.
- To underline just how fast this thing goes, ACCELERATING was usually the best tactic in the case of the enemy firing off a locked-on missile.
- The Blackbird was far from impractical: it had a thirty-two year operational life and completed over three thousand combat missions with only thirty aircraft. On a per-airframe basis, that's better than most frontline fighters.
The M-16, when first used in Vietnam, was suppose to represent the pinnacle of the modern assault rifle. It was made of lightweight polymers which reduced the rifle’s weight tremendously while still giving the user the option of automatic or single shot fire, decent penetration for it's weight, and a number of other features. To most civilians and politicians, this rifle looked really badass. However, it was expensive and prone to clogging, corrosion and jamming in the jungle environment of South East Asia (unlike the mass produced AK-47s or the earlier M-1 which were still in use), and felt like a toy to soldiers who were forced to use it. To be fair, the AR-15 really did work for civilian and Air Force uses in the U.S., but in the field it wasn’t the ‘general purpose military rifle’ until its revision as the M-16A1.
- It's still a lemon. The M855 67 grain .223 NATO round is a varmint round. The M16A2 took away the full automatic setting, changed the twist in the barrel, changed the handguards, and added a brass deflector. The M16A4 didn't make any significant changes to the A2 besides rail mounts on the handguards and carrying handle.
  - The 5.56mm round is "underpowered" and yet the Beltway sniper managed to kill umpteen victims with it; US and NATO troops seem quite adept at using it to mow down enemies in Afghanistan and Iraq (often while taking insignificant casualties themselves); you can carry twice as many rounds of it compared to 7.62mm; and it makes for a lighter, easier-to-wield, lower-recoil weapon. Anyway, studies done by the Operational Research Group showed that lethality is primarily determined by the location on the human body that a person is shot - not the round they are hit with.
  - This was actually an important change. Sure, there is such a thing as overaccessoring (especially with the M4A1), but the most common item this troper sees on a M16 or M4 type? An optic, which makes quite the difference compared to (open) iron sights and nowadays averts the trope by being durable enough for combat. (As opposed to, say, the fire control system on the OICW.)
  - .223 isn't a varmint round. The bullet may be small, yes, but when it hits something, it tumbles, creating a very large wound channel INSIDE the person. When you take into account how light it is, how low recoil it is, and how easy it is to shoot, it actually is a pretty good cartridge. Now, this troper would prefer a good .308 all the same, but that's just him. The M16 also was mainly unreliable in Vietnam due to the brass believing it was so reliable and advanced it never needed to be cleaned thus the soldiers were never issued cleaning kits nor taught how to clean the thing properly (([[I Am Not Making This Up]])) and the smokeless powder they were using at the time was coarse and tended to foul up the receiver. In time they got their act together and the M16, while a bit more maintenance needing than, say, an AKM, is now a reliable rifle.
  - Minor correction: it was not the brass, but Colt itself that told that the weapon was so advanced that it did not require cleaning. The brass believed it and since this is the military we are talking about, took any method to save on budget. In general, most of the problems could be traced back to cutting corners, which is why it caused a bit of a political mess at the time. The ammunition issued was particularly at fault: the Army decided to stick to its old ball powder and not the IMR type that the AR-15 was designed to be used with. If that weren't enough, the chroming of the barrels was also cut to save money. How the 5.56 was selected is another sob story, involving lots of heated discussion and political foots put down.
The alternate cursors in Windows.
- There are alternate cursors?
The Nock Volley Gun. This thing was designed for use in naval warfare. It has seven barrels. Unfortunately, it turned out most men weren't big or built enough to fire it without a) being thrown violently backwards by the recoil, b) falling off whatever high place they were firing it from, c) having their shoulder shattered. Shame.
- You can unlock this gun after you finish the last mission of GUN. Unfortunately, it falls under the territory of BraggingRightsReward as there's pretty much nothing left to kill with it and there's no NewGamePlus. It's a shame, because it makes quite an amazing mess.
The Dallas Cowboys are selling the Endzone of their stadium. For the low, low price of $500,000, you can get all 530 square feet of it put in your own back yard. Of course you'll still have to cut and repaint it every day, and give it the 5 star lawn care it would require to keep it from turning into plain old regular grass.
- Um, if this is the actual end zone from Texas Stadium, it's artificial turf.
The rubber band gatling gun. The ultimate rubber band gun, it can fire off over a hundred bands in a matter of seconds. Unfortunately it costs a small fortune, takes around half an hour to load, has a tendency to jam if not loaded very carefully, and is horribly inaccurate.
Electric Knives. One urban legend states that the electric knife was never meant to be used; it was designed, in fact, to be something for kids who don't know any better to buy their parents for birthdays. (Though a number of TV chefs, Rachel Ray in particular, actually use electric knives.)
- This troper actually finds electric knives extremely useful, but not for cutting meat. When cutting homemade bread, electric knives make it very easy to cut the loaf without mashing it.
- This troper's brother uses an electric knife to fillet fish. It's somewhat faster than using a manual knife.
Double Barrel Tanks are the mecha of Tanks, seen as cool but yet as impractical.
- The Soviet T-35 heavy tank deserves special mention here; it looked impossibly cool, had 5 turrets and 6 machine guns, weighed 45 tons and took 11 crew members to operate. It was also slow, incredibly expensive, and far too mechanically complex for the rigors of war. Only 61 were built, and most of those were lost due to mechanical failure rather then German Panzers. The T-34 was half as big, and only had one turret. This tank won World War II, and 84,000 T-34s were eventually built.
- Same with any heavy tank, but especially hard hit were the Nazis. They had some kick ass tanks including the Tiger II. Great firepower, awesome armor, but it probably used 2400 liters per hundred kilometers and by the time it was fielded, their fuel supply was next to none.
The book My Tank is Fight! is about impractical inventions of World War Two.
- Here's one. The German Dora gun/Gustav. Possibly the biggest artillary weapon ever. Problem is? By the time you fire it, the enemy's already in front of you.
  - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dora_gun
- Unless of course it is mounted to the Landkreuzer P. 1500 Monster, which was basically a tank designed to have the Dora Gun as its main armament. This tank would have been impractically ''massive''◊.
  - So it's basically a Basilisk?
"I Am Rich," an iPhone application that costs $1,000 and has two purposes: 1. Show a glowing red gem on your screen and 2. Show a secret mantra of some sort when you click the "i" icon in the lower right corner. In other words: a near-useless app that costs more than the iPhone itself.
- Many people just buy it to prove they are rich enough to spend $1000 dollars on a crappy application and not care (It's called "I Am Rich", is it not?). It's also a total scam.
- Some would say the iPhone itself is a victim of this trope.
The XM29 OICW. It's a 20mm grenade launcher on top of a 5.56mm assault rifle. It also has a kick ass computerized scope that programs the grenades (yes... programs) so that it will explode at a certain distance. The problem? Military officials equate sending a soldier with one of these the same as sending an aircraft carrier into combat.
- Could you care to elaborate on this? The OICW was meant to be a infantry weapon, so why would it be too expensive? It was cancelled because it never reached it projected weight, so instead the program was split into two: the XM 8 (an update to the M4, based on the H&K G36, the program got cancelled despite showing promise) and the XM 25 (the grenade launching part with all of its features, doing field tests in Iran and Iraq as of 2009 Summer). I agree that it embodies this troop quite well though: it essentially combines a multi-shot grenade launcher with an assault rifle. It was good, until you considered what would lugging the thing around, fully loaded meant.
The B-1 "Lancer" was originally conceived as a bomber that would roar in at supersonic speeds to defend itself against missiles and enemy aircraft, and would, if hit, eject the entire cockpit as a survival capsule that would parachute to earth. By the time it's production version, the B-1B, ended its operational life it was used as a conventional bomber operating almost all the time at subsonic speeds. And no capsule. Basically, all attempts at supersonic heavy bombers have ended up as failures.
- Speaking of supersonic heavy bombers... the SLAM. Imagine a locomotive. Now, imagine that locomotive with a nuclear ramjet engine, flying at three times the speed of sound at low level, lobbing nuclear bombs at things. Even without the nuclear bombs, the shockwave, exhaust, unshielded reactor, and fission fragments would destroy, kill and irradiate whatever it flew over. Unfortunately, the problem with building a weapon that spews nuclear waste everywhere is that nobody will give you permission to test-fly it, and your allies might disapprove of it flying over their countries to get to the USSR.
This project. A group of engineers decide that the best way to prevent malaria in developing nations is to kill mosquitos...with lasers.
Segways. The self propelled vehicle, AND the lead-ins to jokes.
- Segways: Changing the way people get hit by cars.
The Nazis had the Tiger tank. Big and brawny but too pricey. The parts used for one could have been used to build 3 Mark II Panzers.
Shotguns most of the time. Shotguns are the equivalent of firing multiple rounds in a spread shot fashion, you just have to point the gun in the general direction of the target and fire. And the ammunition for the most part is universal. The only problem is is only a few shotguns use box magazines, so reloading is a painstaking shell by shell process, and their range.
Nuclear weapons (save possibly for those with really low yeilds for precision strikes). Once it was clear it would do more harm than good (and we didn't even quite know the full extent of the damage when they were used at the end of World War II), the only reason to keep them was just in case someone else did.
8-bit◊ Mario computer mice◊. They're nifty and look nice, but they're also large, clunky, and uncomfortable.
Sweets, very fatty foods, and junk food in general. These foods can taste awesome, but are usually unhealthy.
The Sydney Opera House. It's an opera house. It looks awesome. It cost $102 million, more than fourteen times its original estimated cost of $7 million, and was created ten years after it was supposed to be. And it's one of the modern wonders of architecture.