History Main / CoolButInefficient

* Fugu is infamous for being an extremely poisonous pufferfish, and despite or perhaps ''because'' of this element, [[MasochistsMeal it is served as a dish for human consumption]]. Obviously, chefs must cook the fish in such a way that the poisons are removed, and there's entire, rigorous courses dedicated to this practice to minimize the risk, but nonetheless, daring diners have been hospitalized or even killed trying to eat such a delicacy.

* Fugu is infamous for being an extremely poisonous pufferfish, and despite or perhaps ''because'' of this element, [[MasochostsMeal it is served as a dish for human consumption]]. Obviously, chefs must cook the fish in such a way that the poisons are removed, but nonetheless, daring diners have been hospitalized or even killed trying to eat it. There aren't really any major benefits to eating fugu, thus ruling out AwesomeButImpractical.

* ''VideoGame/DarkCloud2'' gives us Monica's Monster Morph ability, which sounds fun at first... and then you actually use it and realize just how horrible it is. First of all, you don't get to become any of the big boss monsters or even the giant enemies - just basic, low-tier cannon fodder mobs with extremely limited move sets and pitiful stats. You can level them up by gathering ABS crystals and even attain new forms at certain thresholds, but the stat gains are so negligible that it still takes dozens of hits to put down even the weakest of enemies. Oh, and did I mention morphing runs off a very finite timer too? Needless to say, you'll probably use Monster Morph exactly once (when it's required to advance the plot) and then never touch it again. The worst part is unlike Steve, which is meant to be Max's equivalent to Monster Morph, it can't be used as an extra life- If Monica goes down while in a monster form, she's treated as KO'd, whereas if Steve goes down, Max can continue just fine. This isn't helped by the fact that Steve is actually useful from the get-go unlike Monster Morph which requires unnecessary amounts of grinding to even be slightly viable.

* This was often cited as a weak point of the UsefulNotes/{{Kinect}}: it was certainly cool to be able to control games with nothing but your own hands and body, but with very few exceptions (i.e. dance games), a primitive joystick push or button press would be infinitely more responsive and accurate.

* This is what hurt the UsefulNotes/GameGear and its bright color screen during its run and helped the SimpleYetAwesome UsefulNotes/GameBoy with its green monochrome reign supreme in the handheld market. Game Gear looked great, but it took six AA batteries and would drain them in about three hours, while the Game Boy only needed four AA's and would last a whopping ''thirty hours''. Even the Game Boy Pocket which took only two AAA batteries lasted around ten hours to Game Gear's three, meaning unless you liked constantly buying batteries or sitting at home with an AC cable (thus defeating the purpose of a ''portable'' console), the Game Gear was just too darned inefficient.

* Invoked in ''Webcomic/ElGoonishShive''. While building a deck for the card tournament at the comic shop, Tedd mentally declares one of the cards to be "not efficient, but pretty damn cool".

** Also in 5th edition is the "Stunning Fist" ability for the Monk class. On paper it sounds very powerful, as very few creatures are immune to the "Stun" effect and the actual debuffs it provides can turn the tide of a battle. The problems with it however are threefold: Firstly, it consumes ki points which are a finite resource that the Monk needs to fuel most of its abilities. Secondly, it can only be applied to a successful attack which means it actually has 2 points of failure (a successful attack from the Monk and a failed save from the target), meaning it's more likely to fail than if it just targeted the saving throw like spells do. And finally, it targets the CON save, which is by and large the highest average among monsters in the game, meaning that the majority of the targets worth using it on are likely to just shrug it off anyways (even the ones that don't have Legendary Resistance). Effectively this means that the most reliable way to land it successfully is to combine it with flurry of blows and rely on the law of averages to brute force a botched saving throw, but this further aggravates the issue of Ki consumption and at early levels can consume your entire stockpile just to apply it to a single target. Legendary Resistance makes this even worse because even if you somehow get through, the enemy can just ignore the effect by consuming one of their charges. One might argue it could be used to drain legendary resistances, but at the point these become common spellcasters are likely to have plenty of more efficient spells to burn through those anyways. The fact that stun is such a good debuff is enough to prevent this move from being completely useless, but as it currently stands this is a horribly inefficient way of applying it.

Sci-fi spacecraft, in general, heavily tend to fall into this trope. Wings, fins, streamlined designs, and pointless projections stud the outside of spacecraft never intended to enter an atmosphere. Most modern portrayals are savvy enough to at least [[JustifiedTrope justify]] streamlined spacecraft. ''Franchise/StarTrek'' leaves gaping voids in the middle of their spaceships, but in-universe, this is because the warp fields generated by the nacelles necessitate them being kept at some distance to the rest of the ship. Likewise, the Alliance ships in ''{{Series/Firefly}}'' look nice because of their vertical ship alignment, but the placement of the engines is to keep the ships from ripping themselves apart every time they accelerate. Alternately, one could build along the lines of the ''Discovery'' from ''Film/TwoThousandOneASpaceOdyssey'', but even its comparatively utilitarian shape doesn't account for gigantic radiator fins to bleed off heat from its gas-core nuclear reactor/main engine.[[note]]In a case of RealityIsUnrealistic, there ''were'' going to be fins, but the production crew didn't want to keep answering questions along the lines of "How is it supposed to fly in space?" from the public.[[/note]]

!!Examples

* In ''Manga/InitialD'', Takeshi Nakazato sees drifting as unnecessary flashiness, instead favoring a more BoringButPractical grip-driving style.
* Discussed quite a bit in ''Manga/KeepYourHandsOffEizouken'', where the Film Club are commissioned by the Robot Club to do a short film about a HumongousMecha battle. The leader of the Robot Club is a big-time RealRobotGenre purist, and tries to take pains to make the film as realistic as possible (to inspire people in real life to build giant robots), but when realism ends up on the table, the Film Club start nitpicking the idea because the phrase "realistic mecha" is kind of a contradiction in terms. After all, a humanoid robot isn't very stable or agile once [[SquareCubeLaw scaled up to the point where it can carry a pilot]], and it can't carry very heavy weapons or armor, and it's really tall, which makes it an easy target -- and even if a technologically-advanced culture did manage to solve all those problems, they could probably do a much better job throwing the resources needed to make a combat robot usable into making tried-and-tested vehicles like tanks even better. This causes the head of the Club to have a small breakdown, admitting that he knows his dream of combat-ready mecha will probably never come true, but [[IJustWantToBeSpecial being a giant robot pilot is his lifelong dream]], so he wants to persist in the idea even if he knows it'll never come true.
* Lampshaded in Episode 7 of ''Anime/NeonGenesisEvangelion'', wherein a character points out that an ordinary nuclear-powered HumongousMecha with conventional weapons is a much more practical solution to the Angel threat than using genetically engineered cyborg monsters piloted by mentally ill children and powered by the souls of the pilots' dead mothers. The only reason why the latter is used instead of the former is because conventional weapons cannot penetrate the Angels' AT fields, whereas mentally ill children and the souls of their dead mothers ''can''.
* ''Anime/TigerAndBunny'' has Good Luck Mode, a "super mode" that does fuck all when it comes to actually enhancing the title duo's abilities — but doesn't it just look so ''cool?''
* In ''Manga/OnePiece'', Ganfor's mount Pierre, a large bird, ate the Horse-Horse Fruit, enabling it to become a pegasus-like creature. This serves no benefit whatsoever beyond looking cool, since it can already fly and carry Ganfor in its bird form. In fact, [[SuperDrowningSkills the Devil Fruit powers' drawback of making their users unable to swim]] ends up resulting in Pierre being unable to escape by itself after Shura knocks it into a lake.

* In ''Fanfic/TheBlackEmperor'' the Burai is touted as the first Japanese Knightmare Frame, but is noted by several to just be a Glasgow with improved armor on the forearms and a chest cannon. Unlike later models, Glasgows are fragile enough that an rpg can take one out and have such poor performance that Kallen, one of the best pilots in the world, struggles against average pilots in Sutherlands. As a result, when the Black Knights get a shipment of them, Zero strips them down to their cockpits and repurposes them as training simulators until his own Knightmares are completed.

* In ''[[https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13034223/10/A-Discordant-NoteA Discordant Note]]'', Harry derides swords as being worthless for anything but fighting a single unarmored opponent. Against an armored opponent you're better off using a club or axe which can injure them without having to target weak points. In open warfare, most uses spears or polearms which have far greater reach than a sword. In his words, people just like using swords because HeroesPreferSwords.
* Slade Princeton in ''[[https://www.fanfiction.net/s/12290211/22/Jaden-s-Harem-Return-of-the-Supreme-King Jaden's Harem: Return of the Supreme King]]'' uses a Duel Monsters deck constructed entirely out of ghost rare cards despite them having literally no benefit over their more common variations.

* Taken ''literally'' with ''Film/BackToTheFuturePartIII'', when Marty helps Doc with a massive steam-powered machine built in the old west -- that creates a single dirty ice cube.
* In ''Film/DemolitionMan'', the plasma gun used by Simon Phoenix is a subversion. At first it takes minutes to recharge; Simon uses it anyway, because he likes to see things blow up. However, this was because it had been in storage in a museum and had to reachieve fusion first. Once it had recharged itself it was firing plasma bolts as fast as a pump-action shotgun would be firing slugs.
* In ''Film/TheForeigner2017'', Quan blows up a bathroom in Hennessey's building with a bomb that he intentionally designed to be flashy yet do minimal damage in order to send the message "IfIWantedYouDead".
* ''Film/GalaxyQuest'' lampshades this. The ship that they use is based off the ship from the ShowWithinAShow, and it's designed with giant fans, fire pits, and gratuitous explosions. Why? To make it harder to get from point A to point B, for plot purposes.
* In ''Film/IronMan1'', the arc reactor that powers Stark Industries is {{implied}} to be this, kept only as a publicity stunt, until Tony Stark is able to build a much more efficient prototype [[MemeticMutation in a cave! WITH A BOX OF SCRAPS!]]
* ''Film/TheIsland2005'' featured weapons that fired barbed hooks, like a taser, used to stop escaped clones. Except the hooks were bigger and looked more painful, and the thing didn't give an electric charge to subdue the struggling victim, now in horrible pain from having two huge anchors shot into his skin.

* A running theme in the JurassicPark series is the desire to sell dinosaurs for [[BeastOfBattle military purposes]]. However, an objective assessment shows how ridiculous this is. A Tyrannosaur is roughly the same size as an African Elephant, which is easily killed with specialized weaponry. What could it do to a M1A1 six times its weight?

* ''Film/MysteryMen'' has the Blue Raja, an Indian-themed superhero who can throw silverware with unerring accuracy... but not knives or other bladed cutlery. Just spoons and forks. Maybe a pie server if he was ''really'' pressed.
* ''Film/RepoTheGeneticOpera'' has translucent sheets of plastic for paper. One wonders how exactly you can read only the top page and not the stuff underneath.

* In ''Film/StarshipTroopers'', the standard-issue Morita assault rifle of the Mobile Infantry features an underslung pump shotgun and fires a hefty round that can punch through two inches of solid titanium and blow an Arachnid's limb clean off with one shot. However because of the ridiculously overpowered round, troopers shoot like graduates of the ImperialStormtrooperMarksmanshipAcademy when firing on full-auto (which they need to do as Arachnids FeelNoPain and will keep fighting no matter how badly hurt they are) and worse, the guns seem to even lack basic iron sights.

* [[LampshadeHanging Lampshaded]] in ''Film/WithoutAPaddle'' when one of the murderous rednecks advises the other against using a meat cleaver to try to kill the main characters. "The cleaver is scary, but inefficient".
* ''Film/{{Chappie}}'': The MOOSE, much like the ED-209 from ''Robocop'', is a walking tank that can shoot down aircraft and devastate entire city blocks with its firepower. The South African Police laugh at the thing when it gets pitched to them by the ex-military hard man BigBad; the human-sized Scout robots that can move through buildings, pick up and use human guns and still adequately deal with 90% of perps are the much better buy.

* A minor character in ''ComicBook/{{Empowered}}'' is a cowboy-themed hero, Single Action, who uses [[SchizoTech plasma-shooting revolvers]]. A frustrated Thugboy points out that manually cocking your guns went out of style for a reason; at that point, he has to put a lot of work into making a revolver's mechanisms play ball with making it an EnergyWeapon, and all it does is make the gun worse. Single Action weakly defends himself by claiming he just thought [[RevolversAreJustBetter it looked cool]].
* In ''Comicbook/{{Fables}}'', magical artifacts native to the Homelands are capable of powerful and varied effects such as the Vorpal Sword being able to cut through anything or the Mirror on the Wall being the perfect spying device while on the same plane. However they cannot be mass produced and mundane weaponry is a serious threat to the Adversary's regime. The Adversary is well aware that mundane technology is BoringButPractical by comparison, but eschewed it because allowing the spread of technology that could allow a peasant to kill a mage would have been all but inviting massive rebellion.
* In ''ComicBook/TheLeagueOfExtraordinaryGentlemen'', Mr. Hyde helpfully points out Lesson Three to the inhabitant of a Tripod -- whilst the whole 'three-legged tripod of death' thing ''looks'' awesome, should something happen to one of the legs (like, say, a superpowered psychopath physically wrenching one of them off), then good luck remaining upright with only two.
* The ''ComicBook/RemoTheDestroyer'' comic featured at one point (in the hands of the bad guy) a prototype gun, intended by the manufacturers to be a standardized field weapon, that fired a ''nuclear'' explosive. Blast radius? 5000 meters. Range of a shot? 1800 meters... maybe... with the wind in the right direction. Suffice to say, it didn't sell.

* One of the stormtroopers in ''ComicStrip/TwistedToyfareTheatre'' built a three sided lightsaber. He ended up accidentally cutting his own hand.

* An issue of ''ComicBook/AstroCity'' features an actor and former stuntman who plays a superhero in a TV show try to stop a real-life robbery in progress, while in full costume. While he does manage to take down the guy, he realizes very quickly that his outfit was made to look cool on a TV budget, not actually fight in: the armor is mostly thick plastic, it includes jutting teeth on the chestplate that poke into his gut, and his WolverineClaws snap right off when he throws a punch with them.

** One of the more interesting (and disturbing) Japanese weapons development avenues was research into what we would now consider "microwave" weaponry. Inspired by Nikola Tesla's theoretical "death ray" weapon, the "Ku-go" was a projected "microwave cannon" that utilized magnetron technology. Exact details are scant, but the weapon was apparently tested in laboratory conditions, with some reports suggesting it was used on lab animals. The ultimate goal of an area-denial weapon would have likely been impossible or impractical, given the technology of the era. Only recently have any developments in microwave weapons been considered practical, or even feasible.

** Additionally the US has now developed 3 generations of stealth aircraft at a staggering cost to the tax payers, while other countries have only recently developed their 1st generation. Repeated upgrades when they were up against no competition, now that's inefficient.

* Companies have always been sending spam everywhere and to everyone to boost their profit, using the infamous spambots to do so. Recently it turned out a bunch of Chinese people could do it cheaper and more efficiently.