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alt title(s): Cool But Impractical 
"It's not only impressive, it's irresponsible."
— Panther, of The Protomen
A skeletal steed. Impressive but impractical. I had one once, but the head fell off. — Death, Reaper Man
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 away from 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" factor of the ultimate attack that they forgot to actually make it usable. Maybe it requires too many resources to use, causing its allure of "awesome" to be lost as fast as your party's money. Maybe it requires some sort of bizarre set-up to enact, making your normal attacks and spells much easier to apply inside of battle.
Whatever the reason, it will get used once, as a test drive, 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. The weapon equivalent of Scary Impractical Armor.
Examples:
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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.
- Hell, even his ultimate attack in the Soul Society arc functioned that way. Tearing off the glove briefly gave him immense spiritual power, after which his powers were drained to nothing. Awesome.
- And now, we have Soifon's bankai, which is big, clunky, and above all loud, not exactly the best tool for an assassin.
- Unless you want to make sure everything's dead
- And yet, it still didn't work out.
- The Double Zeta Gundam, massive (even by gundam standards) Combining Mecha with many BFG's, the most powerful one built into its head. the catch? it can only fire them about 2 or 3 times before its reactor is completely drained of energy.
- on a similar note, the Gundam hammer from the original Gundam, the weapon in question was essentialy a rocket propelled ball and chain
- Gundam Virtue's GN Bazooka burst mode, sure its powerful, but it takes virtue several hours to recharge after firing it.
- 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 gets crushed by 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.
- Also, Piccolo's Special Beam Cannon, at least at the beginning of the series when it takes an inordinately long time to charge.
- It's because when he uses it, he's in the middle of not having an arm. According to Piccolo, having both of his arms would've let him charge faster.
- Knightmares of Code Geass sometimes wield chainsaw katanas. They continue to wield these even after the invention of flying Knightmares, energy rifles, and psuedonuclear weaponry.
- 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 (in the anime; in the manga, he can move slowly) and the zoid overheats and he nearly melts in the cockpit.
- 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 souped-up flame-throwers 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 pain-free and able to function, though they die quickly and in hideous pain if they take the suit off.
- Slayers, in the OAVs, has Naga the Serpent, Lina's self-proclaimed greatest rival, first traveling 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 sharp, that she stabbed herself in the face whenever she raised her arms over her head... like to cast a spell.
- The very first episode of Yu-Gi-Oh (Duel Monsters anyway) has Yami Yugi winning the match by summoning a monster named Exodia, whose power is defined as... well, winning the match. Obviously it's as powerful as you can logically get, but the caveat is that you need to gather all five parts of Exodia in one hand... which is roughly equivalent to drawing a royal flush of a specific suit, one card at a time, while your opponent tries to kill you, after managing to collect five extremely expensive and rare cards, and then adding them to your deck despite the fact that they are absolutely useless by themselves. When confronted with it, his opponent is suitably shocked and claims that nobody had ever managed to win this way before, which is pretty believable.
- The titular character of Gash Bell has the spell "Jikerdor", which magnetizes and immobilizes enemies. Seems awesome, until you realize you need a large amount of metal for the spell to make contact with, and very rarely do the opponents conveniently fight in a location like that. In fact, an entire filler arc where the Mooks consisted of iron-suited baddies were the only time the spell became truly important.
Comic Books
- The Batmobile as it is known and loved today. There, I said it.
- 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.
- Nite Owl II was the embodiment of this trope in Watchmen, spending millions on awesome but impractical hardware. His famous quote: "Who needs all this hardware to catch hookers and purse-snatchers?"
- By far the most awesomely impractical invention was his exoskeleton, which did grant him super-strength, but also broke his arms the first time he used it.
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. This doesn't stop Teal'c being badass with it, but even he switches to P90-s in the later seasons.
- 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."
- One Blake's Seven episode had a two-part weapon system called something like (I've forgotten the exact name) the "Incipient Molecular Instability Projector And Key". The idea is that you shoot your enemy with the Projector, but this doesn't kill him; it only induces incipient molecular instability. To convert this to real molecular instability, and thus kill him, you have to fish in your pockets/pack for the Key and activate it... except of course that you never get the chance, because long before you've done so, he's bopped you over the head with a less techy/acronymic but vastly more practical weapon.
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 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.
- And then they went and figured out that Cruel Ultimatum fitted so cleanly into the five-color control decks (which specialise in reaching unusual and specific combinations of mana to get strong, efficient answers to its opponent's threats) that even these embodiments of Awesome But Impractical made their way into one of the dominant decks of its day.
- 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.
- Occasionally it happens that a card goes from Awesome But Impractical to Awesome Yet Practical as a result of the release of subsequent cards. One example is the card Dark Depths, which is capable of producing an indestructible creature capable of one-shotting an opponent, but which required the massive investment of 30 mana to do so. Then, in Fall 2009, the card Vampire Hexmage was printed, which allowed the process to be circumvented for just two mana. Dark Depths promptly became a major force at the next professional tournament.
- 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 5 edition which not only made it cheaper (form 650 to 500 which is cheap in 3,000+ point games it's made for) and harder to kill
- The Baneblade (and its brother Super Heavies, the Mjollnir and Excalibur tanks) didn't fare much better in the larger scale game Space Marine. True, their 1+ save meant they could only be taken out by reasonably powerful weapons, and they packed Titan class weapons... but for the price of one of them, you could buy one or two units of regulars tanks, which could 1) bring more guns to the party and 2) move much, much faster and 3) not die in a single lucky hit. For that matter, the Ork Super Gargants were also all but useless - being extra hardy is nice. Having only short range and contact weapons on a slower-than-tectonics bullet magnet ? Not so much.
- Space Marines in general. Whats the point of spending millions to billions of dollars on one soldier if he can just get splattered by a single tank shot? Wouldn't it be smarter to just recruit about 100,000 Imperial gaurdsmen from the local population for the same price?
- 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.
- Not to mention, the Five Metal Shrike. It's a flying machine which survived the First Age. It's smaller than any major weapon of the First Age, and more maneuverable than any flying machine in the Age of Sorrows. It's got Artificial Intelligence. There is only one. It can repair itself, it can respire Essence by itself, it can cross Creation in a day, and it can become completely invulnerable to damage. In addition, its main weapon is the "Godspear". Listed statistics include: "infinite levels of lethal damage". Unfortunately, only one exists, it's controlled by a machine, and it can only fire the Godspear once per day. Oh, and creating a new one takes over 100 years, assuming you're already got the required knowledge. And the infinite damage radius is only 25yds, with a secondary blast of "only" 50 damage in a 500yds radius (where most characters have health levels in the single digits). Oh yeah... if the Shrike is destroyed, it explodes with double damage and more than triple the radius of the secondary blast from the Godspear.
- 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 extra-planar 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 Thrallherd 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.
- In the board game Risk, the player who controls the whole of Asia gets a bonus of 7 battalions per turn, the largest bonus in the game. This might be useful save for the fact that you almost certainly don't need the bonus if you are capable of successfully holding Asia for a turn (with its many border provinces).
- Most Tribute/Advance Monsters 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 Bottomless Trap Hole.
- A good deal of this problem had to do with most skilled players having, at almost any given time, at least three or four different ways of destroying, removing from play,returning to the opponent's hand, or otherwise neutralizing any such monster. Pretty much anything that requires more than one tribute to get it on the field just isn't worth the effort considering how likely it is that your monster will be a victim to this.
- 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.
- In the card game, we have Final Destiny, which destroys all cards on the field at the cost of 5 discards. Since the maximum hand size is 6, playing Final Destiny leaves you with likely no hand and no field. There are also monsters like Super Vehicroid Stealth Union, a Combining Mecha Fusion Monster made of 4 specific monsters, with an effect that lets it attack all the opponent's monsters while negating their effects... and halving its own ATK, which isn't too high to begin with. Worst of all is the now-banned Victory Dragon, an extremely hard-to-summon monster with poor stats that, if it somehow attacks directly for the win, wins the entire match. However, there's no rule saying your opponent can't just forfeit the duel when you attack, sparing him the match loss.
- Except in Japan, where there is. That's the reason it was banned in the first place.
- Don't forget Final Countdown. On the bright side, you win automatically after a certain number of turns, and unlike cards like Destiny Board or Venominaga, the only way to stop it is to win before that happens. But that certain amount of time? 20 turns. And it has a 2000-point cost. Most of the GX-era new uber-archetypes would also qualify, being hard to put together, overcomplicated, focused on one specific thing that was often useless (Fusions, counters, skipping the Battle Phase, discarding, mill) and kind of crappy, with some notable exceptions. Perfectly Ultimate Great Moth embodies this trope: he's the strongest Insect in the game, but his Summoning conditions are practically impossible.
Video Games
- 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.
- 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. Vyse attacking with Pirate's Wrath 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.
- Cyan's later Sword Techs tend to fall into this category as well. They include things like powerful multiattacks and instant K Os - 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. (can be gotten around with a Quick spell that let's you charge the bar without time passing for anyone else.)
- The high-level multi-target spells like Quake, Tornado and Meltdown tend to fall into this, as they damage your whole party when used. Of course, abusing Elemental Rock Paper Scissors can make them all the more useful.
- Final Fantasy IV includes the Meteo spell, which is far and away the most powerful damage dealer in the game... but is also the most expensive and takes four times longer to cast than anything else.
- The DS remake features an attribute called "Limit Break", which raises the character's damage cap tenfold from 9,999 to 99,999. How do you get it? By beating the game.
- One must note that on subsequent playthroughs, there is still stuff to do, like the Bonus Bosses, for which Limit Break could very well be useful.
- The Twincast augment gives any pair of characters the same twincasting ability that the twins Palom and Porom have; with even more powerful moves available for use. By combining Cecil and Rosa, you get Ultima; strongest attack spell in the game bar none. The problem is that it takes time to cast, and the team is deprived of their strongest physical fighter and both of their users of White Magic until it's done.
- However, the main problem with Meteo and Twincasting lies in their long casting times. What the game won't tell you is that repeated use of a spell or ability cuts down on the time needed to perform it. So; if you spend some time using Meteo and Twincasting on weak enemies, you can eventually shorten their casting time to something far more manageable. Doubly so if you get the Fast Talker augment.
- Final Fantasy XII has the Zodiark summon, which is gained by completing one of the bonus dungeons and defeating a Bonus Boss. It's an awesomely devastating attack, but it costs all of the caster's MP and they need to be Petrified (basically dead) to cast it.
- While it does take all your mana, this is shared by the other 3 level 3 Espers (summuns) as well, as to being pertrified, you don't need it to summon him, but once he's summoned you need to become petrified to make him use his Limit Break. Given said Limit Break is the has the second highest possible damage of any attack in the game, it's worth it. A Better example is the Zalera Esper, only casts instant death spells, so useless on bosses, any enemy killed by an instant death spell gives you no Exp, LP, or loot, in order to trigger it's Limit Break it has to be facing an enemy below a certain health %, but since it only attacks with instant death spells that's pretty hard to do. And while it's Limit Break has the highest max damage in the game, to max it out requires using massive amounts of Knots of Rust and Dark Matters, cause the attacks damage is based on the total damage inflicted using these items, and the counter resets every time it's used.
- Actually, Zalera's Condemnation has a 9999 damage cap on it, and the damage is calculated on the enemy's max HP. The Esper that uses Knots of Rust as part of its damage calculation is Shemhazai, and even that isn't the strongest attack in the game (Zeromus's Big Bang is brutal, but he needs to have very, very few HP left in order to get it to do incredible amounts of damage; now that is Awesome But Impractical).
- Instant death spells in most Final Fantasy games are absolutely pointless. Any enemy worth using them on is immune or else evades an absurd amount of the time.
- In fact, a lot of Final Fantasy games have other spells that immediately incapacitate enemies but aren't technically instant death. They're usually cheaper and more reliable.
- Ark in Final Fantasy IX is an example. He does a lot of damage, but in the time that his 2 minute summoning animation takes to finish you could have defeated every enemy on screen with lesser spells and taken a short nap.
- You can actually exploit this long casting time for a practical reason. If your characters are equipped with auto-regen and auto-haste, they will continue to receive HP and be completely healed by the time the summon is over. It also gives you a chance to take a breather while fighting Ozma.
- 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 there are simple ways to duplicate its benefits with easier to obtain spells, and almost no way to nullify its significant drawbacks.
- What are you talking about? It's not difficult at all to obtain shadow absorbing/blocking armor. This is countered by that shadow absorbing armor usually isn't all that good, but since Ozma casts Doomsday himself, it's very satisfying when he uses it and it hurts the crap out of him and does nothing or even heals you. You are right about it being cheaper to replicated the effects by spamming flare.
- 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.
- In Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles, the difference between -ara and -aga fusion spells is about an extra second delay between the two casters. If all four players want to create one huge -aga spell, they have to coordinate their timing such that it'll take several seconds to actually cast the spell, during which the enemy might just attack them, interrupting the whole thing. Similarly, the single player mode -aga spells also have a much longer charge-up time than the lower levels. Best used for an opening move.
- 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.
- Your Mileage May Vary, since it depends on how you use the moves. While the chop is indeed efficient in man-to-man combat, This Troper prefers the spinning kick, since it can also hit other enemies surrounding you. If it breaks the guard of both, then they'll be open for you to send one flying away and bring a world of pain to the unlucky one that remained.
- 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 (Strike 1: you want variety) and position them in the same part of the map (Strike 2: If you do have multiple people that do the same thing, you want them spread out).
- 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% while also decreasing the critical hit ratio from 20% to 10%.
- Blazing Sword's 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.
- The high-end superpowerful moves in Pokemon — Sky Attack, Skull Bash, or Bide, which require a turn or two of charging before they actually do damage.
- Similarly, most players also avoid the next-strongest set of attacks (Hyper Beam, Hydro Cannon, Blast Burn, Frenzy Plant, Rock Wrecker, basically any move similar to Hyper Beam). While they still do impressive damage, they have sharply reduced accuracy - AND MAKES YOU LITERALLY A SITTING DUCK ON THE NEXT TURN.
- Actually, with the right weather conditions (which some pokemon abilities create as soon as they are sent out into battle), two powerful-but-less-accuracy move, Blizzard and Thunder, get a roughly 30 percent accuracy boost (IE: Enough to make it so they wont miss without some other thing in effect, like double team). Plus the types that usually use them will probably get a boost for some of their other moves, and if you are really lucky, they will have an ability that benefits from it as well.
- Solarbeam also falls into this category - while without Sunny Day in effect it requires a one-turn-charging, when the sunlight shines, it's an instant attack.
- 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.
- 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 attacks instead.
- 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.
- 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, 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. Its death explosion was nearly large enough to completely destroy one of the smaller maps. It requires two separate self destructions to actually kill the unit. Oh, and it could walk in water. 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.
- Another two examples are the Rapid Fire Long Range Plasma Cannons, the Vulcan and Buzzsaw. 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 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 71 defensekm, while the largest maps in the game have dimensions of 80 km square. In addition, although strategic missiles can be intercepted , there is no defense 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 high-end units when it comes to firepower, durability, or practicality.
- Note that this only applies to the experimentals categorised as "Game Enders"- normal experimentals like the (comparatively) cheap Monkeylord and Ythotha were Awesome But Practical.
- 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.
- There's also the fact that the Mobile Gap Generator leaves a trail of fresh Fog of War behind it, meaning you're generally not too effective at sneaking.
- 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 actually an Achievement 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.
- More on the 'impractical' than 'difficult' side, Taki has a whole repertoire of attacks that involve attacking from the air, complete with screen-darkening and light-burst effects, but which almost never connect because their pinpoint aiming accuracy means that an opponent can dodge them by taking a step to the side.
- Another example from the Soul Series are the unblockable attacks. These attacks are powerful and unblockable, but are so painfully slow that even inexperienced players can easily sidestep or dodge them, and counterattack with impunity. Starting and then canceling these to psych out the enemy is the only real use for them.
- 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.
- Zombie pirate Cervantes has the unblockable projectile where he Just Shoots Him, but he flourishes the gun for so long that only the most idiotic of opponents won't either evade or duck it.
- 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.
- The Mothership is also horribly brokenly overpowered in multiplayer.
- 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.
- 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.
- However, the faction able to produce nuke trucks also had the "Iron Curtain" superweapon. For half the price of a nuke silo, you can give up to nine vehicles a few seconds of invulnerability. Nine simultaneous nukes to an enemy base is fairly decisive.
- 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.
- Silent Hill 4 takes this to another level. You can gather a whole arsenal of melee weapons, ranging from golf paraphernalia to demonic pickaxes... but the golf apparel breaks easily and the pickaxe is hard to use, so it's back to using Ye Olde Rusty Axe.
- The "Fallout 2 Hint Book" at (well, after) the end of Fallout 2 works much the same.
- A more conventional example from Fallout 2 was the Pulse Rifle. Had the greatest damage of any single weapon in the game and was billed as end game equipment. The problem? All the enemies you fight had silly levels of resistance to its electrical type damage and due to the way the games burst fire mechanisms work the most basic SMG you could use would do more damage. Many of the higher level weapons suffered from this. Mini Guns did no damage to anyone with armor as damage was subtracted on a per bullet basis. The Vindicator Minigun which did decent damage per shot had punishingly rare ammo. The true king of weapons was the boring and easily acquired Bozaar Light Support weapon which combined high burst value with a decent and plentiful ammo type.
- My neighbor and I thought the same when we were 12. Nostalgic replays over the last 10 years, though, have shown that any weapon skill (except thrown) has massive overkill potential if used properly. Pulse, for example, is lethal to a lot of stuff, with aimed shots - just don't rely on one thing. It's not a BFG, for godsake, and the game isn't a shooter. The absolutely most lethal skill, delivering 500+ damage (nothing has that many H Ps) per good landed hit to even the most armored of opponents, is unarmed, of all things. With the obvious drawback of having to get within punching range moderately alive first. The need to plan, think, and mix skills is what makes Fallouts 1&2 good RP Gs - there is no +15 Sword of Annihilation to be found, or rather, anything used properly can do the same in the right situation.
- 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 super rare. 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.
- Heavy weapons in general in Fallout 3 are difficult to put to practical use. The rarity of ammo means you want to save it for when you "really mean it", but conversely the weight-based inventory system discourages you from taking your heavy weapons along on quests "just in case".
- 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.
- However, by properly training up the True Fire Rune Bearer's fire magic skill, they can achieve such quick casting times that their explosively powerful magic is the first, and typically only, thing to happen in combat.
- 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 to the damage cap.
- 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: Till the End of Time 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 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.
- It's possible to set up a "Quickening Loop", which allows your party to have an infinite number of concurrent turns. However, it requires such an insane amount of setup and so many high-level powers that there's absolutely no use for it.
- The last of the Star Power abilities in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, Supernova, is only a couple of points more powerful than the earlier-attained, and much cheaper, Earth Tremor.
- Showstopper (and Up & Away in the first game) will destroy the enemies, without giving you a single star point. Not to mention how easily it can miss the target, how it's useless in Bosses, and how it costs 2 Star Power bars, when pressing the "Run Away" button has pretty much the same effects, except you lose a bit of your money instead... not like you'll miss it by the time you get the attack, either
- However, it had its uses in the Pit of 100 Trials, especially if you had low health or were fighting a particularly tough bunch of enemies.
- 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, inexplicably, using it actually slowed Shadow.
- Though some of the Program Advances 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. Even for the useful ones, attempting to include more than one or two will stretch your deck too thin.
- 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 deal amazing damage. 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.
- 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.
- Soldier Of Fortune 2 has the OICW; a scoped assault rifle with a 20 mm grenade launcher. 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.
- 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.
- In Civilization 2, 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.
- You can build nukes in Civilization, as well. The original OUR WORDS ARE BACKED WITH NUCLEAR WEAPONS!, which they left out from Civ4. Of course, the aforementioned damage cap has also been removed, so a nuke can kill everything, and two nukes is even more likely to kill everything. And only used once? It's a missile, what do you expect?
- In IV, you can build "The Internet" wonder of the world, which grants you any tech that 2 other civs know for free. The problem is: it comes all the way at the end of the game, and if you were early enough to build it, you usually know everything the other civs know and more.
- 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 super moves or roman cancels for the remainder of the round.
- Long, flashy combos in general get this, as the game's engine actually decreases the damage of each hit the longer a combo gets.
- Guilty Gears spiritual successor Blaz Blue has this in Astral Heats: gigantic finishing moves that guarantee victory if they connect. Unfortunately, in order to do one it has to be the last half of a match, with the opponents health at 20% or less, and enough "MP" saved up for two regular specials. Since you only get one shot, it's usually much wiser to just use the two specials.
- 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.
- But remember that Iris also heals and revives your entire party so if nothing else it is an excellent desperation attack that can give you a second chance. Less effective in a New Game Plus especially if you were Level Grinding in both games so that you barely need healing past what the party can provide conventionally.
- 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.
- Some Double Techs and nearly all Triple Techs in Chrono Trigger suffer from this, especially late game when your gear breaks the game mechanics. Simply put, you're almost always better off having each individual character take their action than using all of your turns up at once.
- The degree to which this applies is roughly proportional to the amount of time you spend Level Grinding, especially early- and mid-game. This troper didn't have the patience for significant Level Grinding, and found that the Triple Techs were most definitely the better choice for many bosses.
- An exception being Marle, whose final two techs are healing moves. This can make double-teching with her much more damaging than simply using her best attack, the mid-game Ice 2. Frog possesses this quality as well, to a lesser extent, as his ultimate attack requires him to be half-dead for any real damage to be done.
- 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. With so many restrictions, they tend to get used on only the final few battles, and sometimes not even then.
- 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, 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 camouflages 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 camouflages is wiped) to get a new icon, and this can be done ten times. As you might have 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.
- 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.
- 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 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Well, the thing is that even though they're somewhat almost balanced, there are characters like Snake who are both excellent and have a good Final Smash; there are also characters like Yoshi, who aren't very good regularly and don't have a good Final Smash. Also, one Final Smash in particular breaks the game completely: namely, Sonic's Super Sonic, with relieves Sonic of his only main problems (low priority and low killing power) and makes him even faster than he was before. He's pretty much guaranteed to get at least one KO, sometimes more. In a Singles match. So in serious tournaments, it's really ban Sonic or ban Smash Balls.
- There's also Donkey Kong, who's Final Smash looks fairly good, but is so incredibly easy to dodge that it has very little value in a match. Or Ganondorf, who's Final Smash looks awesome, and is powerful, but will probably hardly ever get used due to his difficulty in reaching said Smash Ball before any opponents can.
- Some of the Buster attacks from Devil May Cry 4 are dangerous enough in crowds that using standard attacks is safer and more effective. Then there's 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").
- 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).
- Ultima IV had the Skull of Mondain, and item that would kill all non-party members in the immediate area at the price of wrecking the players Karma Meter.
- 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.
- 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 technique 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 so much time to use that you could have done a lot more damage just by using regular attacks.
- 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 vaporizing 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.
- 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.
- 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 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).
- Well, you can use telekinesis to pick up all the stuff in the Warlord of Blood's armoury before opening the door. That's probably not something you were supposed to be able to do.
- Sure, you can find town portal scrolls, but sooner or later you'll find yourself without one and then you're stuck. Telekinesis is great in multiplayer mode where your gear ends up on the floor when you die, usually surrounded by monsters, since it lets you extract your stuff from behind a wall. Cool but useless spells would probably include things like Guardian and Flame Wave, just for the sheer lack of damage they do.
- 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.
- Alternatively you're just really bad. Meteor is a fine spell if you know how to use it.
- One of the best sorceress skills in the latest patch actually. Nothing withstands 30K damage. Actual cool but useless skills in Diablo II would include the druid's Armageddon, which causes a rain of meteors to follow you, but the meteors hit randomly and do very little damage compared to the sorceress ones. The entire martial arts tree of the assassin is spectacular to watch but does next to no damage as well.
- 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; never mind summon him in a battle where he'd actually be useful. Summoning as a whole is pretty much a good example of this, actually.
- Presea and Lloyd both have flashy, awesome-looking powers that have long lists of absurd requirements that are never even vaguely hinted at in-game.
- Colette's "Sacrifice". If its absurd TP Cost isn't enough of a deterrent, casting the spell causes Colette to die. While its effects are nothing to scoff at, this spell has no use.
- There is also Genis' Indignation Judgment, which requires you to fulfill a series of convoluted requirements. While it is a powerful attack, one can usually cast several normal Indignations in the time it takes to set up.
- It's not actually too hard. You need to have used Indignation 50 times and need to be overlimits. Colette's Hi-ougi (Holy Judgment) is worse. Not only must you use both Holy Song and Judgment 50 times each (most players will have no problem with the latter, but the former is annoying). After doing both you have a random chance of whether she'll do it or not.
- 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.
- That would be correct expect for the fact that Fatal Strikes are suppose to be used with the Quarter, Half, or Minimal Damage ablities, and all Techs to a certain Color. It allows you to grind EXP, Ablities Points, or Items and Gald, at an increased Rate, dependent of what Specices the monster(s) are. Pretty Much grind for an hour or two and you should have enough Gald and Items to create a good portion of weapons, armor, and atachments, have a good combonation of Ablities, or be at a level to tear through the mooks. Impractical in the shortrun yes. Very Practical in the Long run.
- 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.
- 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. It looks cool, but it's not exactly a deck to play seriously with. The Anguis pin has the highest attack power of all the pins...but it's extremely slow to level and does not reboot once used.
- 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 lackluster 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.
- It gains practicality in Devil Survivor, especially against bosses, in the form of Drain and Holy Dance. Since many late-game bosses are at least strong to every element, if not outright draining or repulsing at least one, the two-to-five hit Holy Dance has a chance to deal tremendous damage by itself without risking an Extra Turn for the enemy. Follow it up with a Drain to restore MP and take some away from the boss, and it's a very practical nuke.
- In Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, the two final weapons are perhaps the most useless. The Fusion Cannon and Chronosceptor (the latter of which whose pieces the game revolves around finding) are extremely powerful, but also slow to fire. You're a sitting duck taking damage as the 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.
- The Fusion Cannon shoots a small slow-moving red flare that explodes after two seconds or so, filling the screen with orange smoke, and several shockwaves afterward. The Chronosceptor shoots a semi-homing laser that explodes not once but twice on contact.
- Additionally, there's also the Nuke in Turok 2, which takes a moment to charge, then shoots a laser, gathering energy at the target, finally exploding after 4 seconds, turning enemies into charcoal. Ten seconds later, any enemy affected by the initial blast suddenly explodes.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 is there to ring up instant victories; the math for determining one simply doesn't understand the innacuracy issue, allowing you to avoid a few random encounters while actually gaining experience. This only matters for a very short time, however.
- 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, there's no New Game Plus so you never get to Junction it. Plus, using it as a magic attack yields lower damage than doing other things (attacks, Limit Breaks, summons, etc).
- 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).
- Super-useful for the Large Cavern, though.
- 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.
- 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 your normal minion. The Doomguard (a standard western devil) is even worse, requiring a 5 person summoning ritual, one of whom will take a large amount of damage. It used to be truly appalling - one random member would die from the ritual, and the doomguard had to be immediately enslaved or it would attack the party. And if the warlock was the one who died, then congratulations on unleashing a powerful demon to attack the party.
- Don't forget both come from complicated quests, use up reagents and used to turn on you regularly. Wrath of the Lich King buffed them enormously, both in power and in ease to use (as of now, the Doomguard, as previously mentioned, doesn't kill anyone but rather deals heavy amounts of damage instead. Also, he became much more powerful and lasts for a decent amount of time before despawning). However, even with the buff, the Doomguard is almost useless. Demonologic warlocks are waaaay too dependant on their regular demons, who buff them, and Destruction warlocks will hardly be seen with anything except an imp, who packs immense firepower and, again, buffs the Destrolock. An Affliction warlock would benefit fully from a Doomguard, but those are becoming increasingly rare these days.
- Pretty much any beam-missile combo except 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 Wavebuster can be used to make Meta Ridley absurdly easy. And other than the Flamethrower, they're all useful on Prime itself.
- The Sonic Boom from Prime 2 can do an ungodly amount of damage to the Emperor Ing's eye-form (up to a third of his energy bar per hit, depending on difficulty). However, it's dead slow, it costs 30 rounds of each ammo to fire, and you're trying to hit an extremely narrow moving target while dodging all the boss's regular attacks.
- The Gravity Hammer and Energy Sword in Halo 3. The Energy Sword is only good for killing one specific species of Flood, and the Gravity Hammer is fairly useless. They look pretty cool, but most other weapon combos are more efficient and safer to use.
- The Gravity Hammer gets a bit more love in Halo: ODST, where it has a bigger impact area, allowing you to maul multiple grunts and jackals with one swing. However, it has less love as well, because it's much harder to use (you're not the superstrong Master Chief, after all), and it's strangely not as good against shields as it used to be.
- 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 hundreds 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 almost anything... If you can hit with it, and that's a big if. Fast enemies will zip right past you, and most others can be taken out with ease using mundane weaponry.
- 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. 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 is considered overpriced. The British also have a Churchill tank that's capable of killing anything in one shot, but it takes a full minute to reload.
- This was a case of truth in gaming. 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).
- 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.
- Actually, if you have iron patience, you can get the Shining Laser, which, if fully upgraded, can kill any enemy in one hit (Including the final boss), and apparently unlimited ammo if you upgrade it to the max.
- 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.
- 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. Of course, all of the Taunt kills are unwieldy (that's their purpose) but the Scout's is far and away the most.
- Actually, the Spy's taunt is even harder to use; it takes longer to hit, the Spy talks during it, and it deals small amounts of damage before the killing blow, which means that trying to use it on stationary enemies such as unaware Snipers (usually perfect targets for tauntkilling) will usually result in them stepping out of the way and meleeing you to death as you transition from third- to first-person.
- 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.
- The GBA version of Yggdra Union has the Fanelia. It's an item that instantly kills enemies if you use one of the 5 elemental based skills. However, by the time you can equip it, the only enemy you encounter is immune to those skills. Too bad.
- 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 watch the gunner's back, 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.
- 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 four 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 twelve 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...
- 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.
- 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 as well, maybe torching that bastard isn't the best idea.
- 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. They're also pathetically easy to dodge, making them all but useless against human opponents.
- 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.
- Also, the Revolver pretty much packs the second biggest punch in the entire game, but it carries so little ammo (and it's so rare to find) that you end up using your Sniper Rifle (actually a crossbow) more often.
- 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.
- 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. It's awe inspiring to see it pulled off though.
- Xenosaga has a few examples:
- First, the last special attacks that can be earned for certain characters. They are awesome to watch and rack up the damage, but unless you have the right accessories and/or items, you'll never have enough boosts in your gauge to pull them off.
- Second, Erde Kaiser Sigma. Leaving out the fact that the crucial item needed to get this ether skill is only obtained through a near impossible side-boss battle, the ether cost is absurdly restrictive.
- An item in Episode III called Seven Moons brings the character back with full HP and EP. Unfortunately it can sometimes crystalize the character you use it on. At that point, they're out for the rest of the battle.
- Technically, Seven Moons only starts the crystallization process, meaning you can quickly use an anti-crystal item right after and get a full revival for less cost than a normal revival item would cost, even if you have to decrystal them.
- Grand Theft Auto IV, since they took out the Tank, the Apache and the Harrier from its predecessor, San Andreas, The Blackhawk 'Annihilator' Helicopter remains the only weaponized vehicle in the game. While it does indeed sport a pair of twin miniguns either side of the cockpit, they are beyond impractical - if not completely useless. They do not auto-aim like the aircraft guns in the previous game (i.e. they fire directly forward at all times) meaning that to hit anything on the ground, you have to pitch the chopper forward at such an angle you either zoom straight over the target or crash (often both), but they also don't seem to do any more damage than handheld weaponry anyway. Furthermore, after just five seconds of firing, they have to reload (even though miniguns are belt fed).
- In Blood Omen: Legacy Of Kain you acquire the Soul Reaver, which both looks awesome and kills in one hit. On the other hand, it's a two-handed weapon, prohibiting magic of any sort, had a one hit combo which takes as long as two hits from the regular sword, and it drains your magic bar. As a result, the mace and the other swords are much more useful in the long run.
- The pistol in La-Mulana is ten times as powerful as the first whip, hits instantly, and hits everything in your path. Problem? You get it pretty late in the game, and you can only get ammo by buying it at an outrageous price for 6 bullets per purchase - the maximum you can carry. It's still necessary if you want Hundred Percent Completion.
- In Fallout Tactics we get the Punch Gun, a glove with a micro-shotgun mounted on the back with a trigger activated by punching someone. Sounds effective, right? Wrong, it takes the entire clip of shells to kill one raider from the start of the game, on easy, with max skill. A regular shotgun only takes 1 or 2 shots.
- Gradius ReBirth's Type E powerup configuration has the Vector Laser, which pierces through any object, even structures, is as wide as the Ripple laser, and looks cool. Unfortunately, not only is it weaker than the other lasers, but it cannot destroy the regenerating walls in Stage 2 or the destructable dot walls in the bonus stages. Which means if you enter a bonus stage or get caught behind a solid regenerating wall in Stage 2-2 or 3-2, you're fucked. The only way to circumvent this once you've gotten the Vector Laser? Switch to the Vertical Shot, which is probably the worst Gradius powerup ever: it shoots upwards and downwards, but not forwards.
- In Sailor Moon: Another Story, you start off with the Holy Grails of the present and future that can power up Sailor Moon and Sailor Chibi Moon (respectively) into their Super forms. Sounds awesome, right? Except Super Sailor Moon and Super Sailor Chibi Moon lose all of their attacks and combo attacks in exchange for one attack each. You've basically given a power-up to two characters who are better used for healing than for attacking, and taken away their healing abilities.
- The Legend Of Zelda Majora's Mask. The Fierce Deity Mask requires you to get all the masks in the game, and then beat the boss. The boss is made incredibly easy with the FD mask, and then its only usable in boss rooms after the end. And the Giant's Mask, incredibly awesome concept (giant Link!), but only usable against one boss. Which could have been shrunken. And to top it off, considering it didn't even have to be there, it slowly drains your magic! It's necessary for the boss, but COME ON.
- And in Twilight Princess, the Magic Armour makes you totally invulnerable to damage...at the cost of steadily draining your rupees (money). And draining them much faster if you got hit. And you'd still be knocked back. And if you ran out of money the armor would stop being protective, as well as weighing you down to the point of sitting-duckhood.
- Due to the weapon customization system in Mass Effect, you can make guns like this. The default shotgun (no modifications) can fire a reasonable number of bullets before overheating, but this troper managed to turn the shotgun into a one shot killing machine. It can only fire one shot before overheating, yet it kills most enemy grunts in one shot and it sounds like a cannon. For those about to rock indeed.
- It's also possible to turn a good, two-shot sniper rifle into an amazing, six-shot sniper rifle. And a pistol into a explosive, long range death dealer that can kill multiple enemies with each shot.
- They couldn't even give it to you just for beating the main game. That just gives you a 7 round shotgun with no ammo counter. You also had to beat all side quests for the above, ensuring there was nothing left to do.
- Microsoft's space sim Freelancer features a single-player campaign that raises the player to about level 18 and ends with only a portion of the available star systems visited; the maximum level cap is 38, and there are many more systems that can be explored, including Easter Egg worlds inhabited by monkeys and robots. Players also gain access to exponentially more powerful ships and weapons at higher levels, such as alien lasers that inflict massive damage and require no energy to fire. However, once the main campaign has ended, there is no storyline to follow except for missions that are randomly generated by the computer, all of which follow a given template. The player has no real motivation to reach the higher levels except for the sake of completion.
- The second-level mystic artes in Tales Of The Abyss are nearly impossible to figure out how to use, but are absolutely brutal. (However, some of them are actually very useful and practical once you know how to actually activate them.)
- Unreal 2 (if I remember correctly) has a Black Hole Gun near the end of the game, the only weapon that can defeat those monsters lurking in the ship (?). Anyway, with this gun the whole game would have been much MUCH easier to finisch, as I think it also had unlimited "ammo". Oh, what does the gun do? Guess :)
- Zone Of The Enders had the VECTOR Cannon. It kills everything in one shot.. but spends about 15 seconds Engaging Chevrons before firing. And if you get hit, you'll have to start over.
- A few of the highest-level cards in Lost Kingdoms 2 were like this. It was rare that you ever actually had 8 levels in any element which would mean that the various high-level cards would cause you to Cast From Hit Points, and by the time you got them a lot of them were simply ineffective. Great Turtle is an incredibly durable independant monster with a volcano on it's back - who tended to miss almost constantly, and Ice Skeleton had similar problems as it was really slow. The Emperor, who can only be gotten from the final dungeon either by capture or a 1 in 6 chance, can either randomly kill all monsters of one elemental type (and the hardest opponents are typically Neutral, which is unaffected), or act as a glorified Capture Card. Yes, you could get most monsters easily this way, but enjoy having to go back through an hour-long Bonus Dungeon to get another one.
- Any game (that includes both video and table-top) That has a Necromancy/Shadow/Death magic skill-set with an exploding dead guy spell. It requires you to lure an enemy over a pile of corpses and then make them go boom. You'd be much better off simply raising those bodies and swarming him.
- Actually, in Diablo II, the Necromancer's Corpse Explosion is an incredibly useful skill. If you have a summoning build, chances are you're already at your maximum limit for skeletons (and/or mages) and raises, so it becomes a valuable skill. Considering it does damage based on a percentage of the corpse's original health, it is the premier spell for a Necromancer being swarmed, where raising creatures, especially in Hell difficulty, is likely going to be too slow to kill the oncoming rush. Top this off with a quick cast rate that generates more ammunition for the spell, combined with the fact that this damage cuts through all immunities, it's a pretty important spell to pick up (depending on the build, of course)
- The RHINO weapons from Ratchet And Clank fall under this category unless you spend forever grinding up bolts.
- Touhou's Marisa has her infamous Master Spark, which looks cool, but leaves her wide open. She later states she's trying to find a way to splinter the attack to make it weaker, but cover more range because "it doesn't matter what hit's your opponent in danmaku".
- She already has "Stardust Reverie" from Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, "Milky Way" from Perfect Cherry Blossom, and a few other omni-directional attacks. Also, given that she's a protagonist ever since Lotus Land Story, Master Spark is actually effective, confers invulnerability (and thus she's not open to attack), and inflicts more damage per second than trying to use her rather weak shots. In the case where she is actually an antagonist, her "Final Spark" spell is better since she can rotate the beam while flinging attacks in all directions.
- Machines Wired For War gives us the eradicator, a small unit that can wipe out entire sqauds with a controled gravity collopse. Unfortantly its slow, weak and could wipe out severalof your own units(and the units itself)if it tries to defend itself. See also, the Bee bomber, nuclear missle and spy.
- Prototype has a number of high-end moves like this, such as the Bullet Drop, which has awesome damage but has horrible prep time and is difficult to aim or hit anyone with.
- Doing barrel rolls in the Afterburner games. You can dodge a number of missile swarms this way, but there're some frames of vulnerability as your bird comes out of it, so you can still get nailed if you aren't timing it right. If you're skilled enough, standard juking is better.
- In the Descent games, most high-level weapons were this: most of the powerful cannons used up lots of energy, or were hard to use effectively. Or both. High level missiles were only useful for bosses, considering how few of them there were. Most of the time you could get through the games using only lasers, gatling guns and basic, common missiles.
- Great against other players in multiplayer, though. Plus energy for the high-level cannons is fairly readily available, so it's not that hard to use them.
- Half the weapons in Duke Nukem 3D fall in this trope, by either eating ammo, only being useful at close range, or only being useful in specific situations.
- R-Type Final features 101 different ships to play through the game with. A few of these ships have "Final Charge" Wave Cannons, that can be charged up to truly devastating levels and kill anything, including every single boss, in one hit. The problem is that building up to the Final charge level requires forty-five seconds, in a game that sends waves and waves of enemies at you. Even bosses will likely require you to be constantly shooting in order to get rid of some of their projectiles. The only time it's useful is against the final boss, when every other ship gets it automatically (though it's not called such).
- NetHack has the "huge chunk of meat," obtained by using a wand of stone to flesh on a boulder. It has a nutritional value of 2,000, the highest in the game; eating one will definitely cure hunger, weak, or fainting status. However, unless you're in the latter condition, eating a huge chunk of meat is guaranteed to put you in "oversatiated" status, in which your movements will be stifled and eating anything will cause you to choke to death. And you can't really carry it around either; it's extremely heavy. Good for feeding to your pet dragon, though.
- Every weapon in Iridion II that isn't the normal shot or the search laser. Thanks to the game's accuracy-based scoring, the latter two are the only weapons that can be used to get a high score; the radial gun, for instance, fires a needless amount of bullets in a sweeping pattern, which means your shot accuracy is going to go out the window if you use it.
- The
Porsche Gemballa cars in Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune. Despite being European supercars, they are nowhere near the tops of the tier lists.
- Lost Odyssey's "ultimate" magic spells require the player to visit a side area and defeat a boss to obtain them. The rewards? "Sacrifice Self" kills the caster to revive any dead party members, "Divide" damages the entire enemy party for an amount equal to the caster's current health divided by the number of enemies, and "Leveler" has the same effect as Divide applied to a single enemy...only it takes so long to cast that the same character could likely fire off two weaker spells for the same damage and less MP.
- That's not even touching the cannons that shoot swords instead of arrows.
- Emperor Doviculus of Brütal Legend fights with a guitar with four necks.
- A rare in-universe exaple, The Big Daddy Prototype was able to dual-weild the power drill and rivet gun, as well as use plasmids. This was too expensive a build to mass-produce (and too difficult to pacify if they should hulk out), so they decided to divide the weapon types into Rosie (gun) and Bouncer (drill) types, neither of which could use plasmids. The prototype was put on ice for 20 years.
- The special weapons of Dune II: the Devastator is the most powerful tank, but is very very very VERY slow, and when it shoots, it takes a long time to shoot again - its Self Destruct Mechanism is impressive, but usually useless (it will explode anyway if heavily damaged). The Sonic Tank is awesome as it can hit many enemies with a single blast, but it may hit your units if they are in its firing range. The Ornithopter is awesome as it's the only one flying unit, but you cannot control it! Once deployed, it goes directly against your enemy and attacks a target of its choice, and in a minute it is shot down by enemy rocket turrets. The Saboteur can run very fast and can destroy a building simply by touching it... but, again, turrets are a problem. The Death Hand is an incredibly powerful missile: unfortunately (but fortunately for you when the enemy uses it) it studied at the Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy.
- In general, many combo videos, whether for 1v1 fighting games or one-v-many beat 'em ups, are staged against a training mode dummy or a lone target and thus the very impressive-looking combos showcased aren't much good in real gameplay against an active target or a mob of enemies.
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.
- The pair of wings Buwaro gets from his dead sister's pendent in Slightly Damned look REALLY cool, but are too small to fly.
- Or, at least, that's what Rhea said. Buwaro believes her.
- Sword-Chucks, yo!
- Well, they are practical and efficient, but only if you have a low enough INT to not notice how bad they are.
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.
- If they allowed Ben to make sway them on current business, he'd revert back after the five seconds it'd take to reduce his opponent to their component atoms and leave them still deadlocked about whether or not to save the dinosaurs. Being omnipotent and immortal, they don't really feel any need to make quick decisions.
- Cause they're nigh-omnipotent beings who don't believe a non-them can possibly make any kind of decisions... Or at least, that's the in-universe reason I believe. The real reason is because if Ben could use Alien X at all, then there'd be no enemies to fight, and they'd have to focus on Ben, Gwen, and Kevin. Cue the Ho Yay (Kevin/Ben) and incest (Ben/Gwen) pairing wars.
- I dunno, as stated above, they were eager to present the argument of whether or not to revive the dinosaurs to Ben. The second reason is probably true though I'm afraid.
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.
- Around 2007, Gaia Online developed a forum based RPG System for use in it's Halloween Events. The system works by granting users XP with every attack, granting them an item upon a level up. Upon reaching the final level, players typically receive powerful abilities such as full heals or one hit kills. However, since they already have all the items they can get through that faction, these skills are useless. This was Subverted with the most recent event (Camp Chaos), due to a massive revamp to the system. (Battles are one on one, and items can only be obtained by defeating bosses). Players receive their most powerful skills just prior to facing the final four bosses, which makes the final battles against the Camp Councilors a breeze!
Military
- The M-16, when first used in Vietnam, was supposed 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 its weight, and a number of other features. However, it was prone to clogging, corrosion and jamming in the jungle environment of South East Asia and because of its light weight, often felt like a toy to soldiers who were forced to use it.
- There's more to the story: the M16 was mainly unreliable in Vietnam due to the Army 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. Further, the smokeless powder they were using at the time was coarse and tended to foul up the receiver. They believed this because Colt told them: "As we've designed this, it will need minimun maintenance." Before it went into production, though, the Army Acquisitions Board insisted that some changes be made, notably that the barrel not be chromed as in the original specs. That chroming was what made the barrel corrosion-resistant in the first place. Tha ammo issued for it was also not the same as Colt had designed it for.
- The PSG-1, yeah its so accurate that you can shoot a penny out of someone's fingers at 600 meters without heven grazing said fingers. Unfortunately it ejects casings with such force that they land 10 feet away from the user which makes policing brass Problematic to say the least. Not to mention this gives the sniper's position away, making it a life or death issue and rendering it useless for military purposes. It is only for Law Enforcement.
- 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 rubber-band gatling gun. The ultimate rubber band gun, it can fire over a hundred bands in a matter of seconds. Unfortunately it costs $500.00 (not including shipping), takes around half an hour to load, has a tendency to jam if not loaded very carefully, and is horribly inaccurate.
- 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 Germans. 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.
- Which is precisely why the Soviets preferred self-propelled artillery.
- The book My Tank is Fight! is about impractical inventions of World War Two.
- The German Dora gun/Gustav. Possibly the biggest artillery weapon ever. Problem is? By the time you fire it, the enemy's already in front of you.
- 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''◊.
- The author himself specifically states that the amount of money, time, and materials spent on these 'superweapons' had to be diverted away from more useful things, such as the Panther Tank.
- The XM29 OICW. It's a 20 mm grenade launcher on top of a 5.56 mm 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.
- 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 trope 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 its 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.
- B-1 clarification - the original B-1 and B-1A designs were strategic nuclear bombers that failed miserably due to flaws, policy and cost. The B-1B design was costly also, but became operational as a supersonic nuclear bomber for SAC through the early '90s, when its mission was shifted over to conventional bombing. The B-1B is a successful aircraft still flying missions in support of ground troops in Afghanistan and had the recent distinction of being the first aircraft to fly supersonically on an alternative fuel.
- The Gyrojet gun. Essentially a gun that fired rocket propelled bullets. The problems mainly stemmed from the fact that the bullet was rocket propelled meaning that rather than starting fast and slowing down, it started slow and built up speed. This mean that within a certain range, a bullet would not be moving fast enough to harm someone - at point blank range, the bullet could very well simply bounce harmlessly off someone. Or, worse yet, the bullet might not even have enough speed to travel resulting it falling out of the barrel or simply failing to push back the hammer of the weapon.
- The Davy Crockett. A very large rifle like weapon designed to shoot a small nuclear bomb. The issue should be obvious - nuclear bombs are heavy and have very big blast radius while the amount of propellent available to a rifle meant that any shooter would be well within the blast radius. Also surpassed by the introduction of the bomber.
Other Real Life
- 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. They do have some limited uses: slicing fresh bread or angel-food cake without mashing it and fileting fish (with a lot of pactice.) They're also really good for cutting styrofoam.
- "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. that 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?).
- 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 may not be much use as personal transport but they are much in demand as the mounts for AI's (see: robot soccer)
- This troper has been on a guided DC Segway tour, and it was TONS of fun riding on the things. But, for the same price, my '09 model Motorcycle is more fun and a more practical personal transport.
- Fully automatic pistols, like the Glock 18 or Ingram MAC series. (The Beretta 93R is limited to three-round bursts, which is slightly more practical.) They are all sorts of badass, except that everything after the first round is not likely to be on the paper at more than a couple of yards, and they take a great deal of proficiency to master; you may as well just get really good with a standard pistol. At a cyclic rate of 1200+ RPM, your pistol-sized magazine is going to disappear in less than a second.
- For that matter, cartridges themselves can qualify for many reasons. Some are too rare. Some are too expensive. Some have been supplanted by newer, better cartridges. Some are just not intended for anything smaller than an elephant. But probably the most annoying case is when Counter-Strike players go out and buy Desert Eagles because they're cool. For most people and most circumstances, the 50AE is a definite instance of Awesome (Comparable to 44Mag yet not intended for a revolver) but Impractical (Bulky, small magazine size, overkill).
- One thing that very few games get right is the fact that the .50AE round is ludicrously large, but also boasts extremely poor penetration characteristics. Usually, this isn't a problem if all you're looking to do is shoot someone in the head. If someone is wearing infantry-standard Interceptor armor, on the other hand, you'll be lucky if you manage to do more than bruise (painfully, yes, but it's not a kill shot).
- 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.
- Usually, but not always. If somebody passes out from wrong blood sugar levels, the best thing to do — while you check for a medic alert bracelet — is to give him or her something with sugar in it. A coma from high blood sugar is a lot less risky & more easily treated than one caused by low blood sugar. (Yes, both ends can put you in a coma.)
- Project Orion. What if I told you that we had the technology to explore the entire Solar System at a extremely good "bang for your buck"? With Project Orion, it may have been a reality. With Orion, we could have sent a ship to Pluto and have it return within a year. A single large-scale Orion could have potentially set up a permanent moon base. Even Interstellar travel would have been (theoretically) possible, at least using unmanned probes. So why would this awesome technology not be used. It's like this: it would run by riding the shockwave of precisely timed A-Bomb blasts.
- Orion wasn't "impractical", it became illegal with the first of the non-proliferation treaties. The fallout from its use would have been negigible compared to all the other tests going on in the 50's and 60's, and one of the projects sub-aims was to improve on preexisting work on "zero fallout" nukes. However the first treaties banned the design of small tactical nukes.
- Butterfly knives or balisongs.◊ Other than looking damn cool when they’re flipped, the knives are culturally significant in the Philippines where they were first made and they are steeped in tradition, with knifemaking techniques passed down from generation to generation of craftsman. Other than being illegal in alot of other places, the downside is that they’re relatively slow to open when compared to other utility knives, they are prone to wear and tear and inexperienced users run the risk of cutting or crushing their own fingers. But did I mention they look damn cool while being flipped?
- With practice, a balisong can be opened (with one hand) in a quarter of the time it takes to open an ordinary pocket knife. It is therefore classified as a switchblade, which is why it's illegal in some states.
- It is, indeed, a weapon that without much practice can be opened in a fraction of a second, with one fluid flick of the wrist and proper fingering. But, more importantly, it is - until flicked - an absolutely concealed weapon. As to the "coolness"/intimidation factor of spinning it around, that is nearly all bark and no bite. And cutting one's own fingers?! Don't play with weapons when drunk and/or high and always know which side of the lock (on the otherwise mirrored body) has the blade handle.
- Some car fans—particularly those who own coupes and other economy-level cars—like to put, on their cars, what is known by detractors as "rice"—huge spoilers, neon lights, decals, big rims, etc., but those do absolutely nothing to a car's performance.
- In fact, they usually detract from a car's performance - there goes all that careful weight reduction and areodymanic design that the manufacturers spent millions of dollars on. I've seen a two-door mid size car, which standard weighs about 1.5 tonne, modified, to look like it could fly if it was just given wings, and loose about 30 kilometres of it's top speed, because it now weighs three and a half fricking tonnes.
- In addition, large rims and small tyres also detract from a car's performance by reducing the amount of traction (due to harder tyre compounds) and torque (remember physics? Small gears turning large gears means higher speed but less torque) applied to the road surface. In other words, your car might look nice (for a certain definition of the word) but it's not going to go faster, and it's certainly going to have a lot of trouble going around simple corners. It's maddening to see manufacturers providing larger and larger rims and lower and lower profile tyres with their cars as standard.
- The Hummer. Yes, it's practically a bick on wheels. Yes, it's got some kickass chrome trim and lots of bolts sticking out all over the place. Yes, it's got a turbo engine. Yes, it looks like it'll survive a direct hit by a nuclear warhead. NO, it's not a practical car. It weighs three and a half tonnes - more than a standard Land Cruiser - without the latter's V8 Desiel engine. It comes standard with Profile tyres that are more-or-less useless for offroad. plus the windows on the doors are way to small to see clearly out of, resulting in many blindspots which does not help the fact that it has the turning circle of an ocean liner. Oh, and you know those big tow hooks hanging down at the front? They're not actually attached to anything. They're part of the front bumper bar. I've seen a Hummer (an mind you, this is the baby one - the H3) stuck in sand, being pulled by a Land Cruiser. This particular Hummer had 20 inch rims and profile tyes, and the driver was American. After one (one!) high-speed snatch, the entire front bumper pulled itself from the front of the car. We eventually had to hook a snatch-strap around the front axle in order to get the damn thing out (because there wasn't actually a tow hook that was attached to the Chassis of the damned car.
- This is probably one reason why, during the 2008-2009 financial crisis, GM essentially shut down the Hummer line. You might still see the H3 being made, but you're not likely going to see very many, and the Hummer company itself is all but dead.
- It's telling that when This Troper asked several vets of their opinion of civilian Hummers, they responded unanimously along the lines of "Why the heck would we want to spend more time in a death-trap than we have to?"
- The top bunk of a bunk bed could probably qualify. You get the fun factor of being on the top bunk, but it sucks if you have to get out of bed in the night, because you have to climb down the ladder and you run the risk of waking up whoever is sleeping on the bottom bunk.
- EXCEPT that everyone and their grandma sits on the bottom bunk in the dense environments where bunk beds are typically found. Hence, the bottom bunk's owner is likely to have a perpetual mess and to find it occupied by lounging guest, neighbours, etc., while the top bunk is nearly always available to its owner to relax in, whenever. Especially relevant in places like dorms/barracks or trains, top bunk wins hands down unless you're ridiculously fat and lazy.
- Plus falling off the ladder if you're too tired. Fun.
- When this troper was a kid, he would just jump. Awesome, yes. Practical, no.
- This troper's only slept in bunk beds a few times, but has always been quite happy to take the top bunk. It's a combo of honestly not caring about whomever is in the bottom bunk, being confident enough of my physical skills to get down the ladder, and people don't look up.
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