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"We are certainly in great need," answered Caspian. "But it is hard to be sure we are at our greatest. Supposing there came an even worse need and we had already used it?"
"By that argument," said Nikabrik, "your Majesty will never use it until it is too late."
So, you've been toiling through the game for many an hour. You've scoured the sprawling dungeons, killed menacing bosses, and effortlessly solved every puzzle presented to you. When suddenly... you stumble upon some kind of super secret item room that must have otherwise been impossible to find without help from GameFAQs. Inside the room is a single treasure chest. You open the chest, and receive your reward: The ultimate attack. The weapon that can crush your enemies and drive them before you as you hear the lamentations of their women. The spell which channels the power of the gods and rends the earth (although somehow without damaging you or your teammates). 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 flashy. It's unstoppable. It's awesome and practical.
It also disappears after one use, never to be seen again.
It's going to end up sitting safe and sound in your inventory until the very end.
Games such as RPGs featuring an inventory system are prone to giving you items that are Too Awesome To Use. It could be an item that heals all your stats and makes you invulnerable for an extended period of time. It could be a special power that lets you fly, or a Status Buff that lets you destroy the universe with the snap of a finger. It could be a Superweapon with an extremely limited amount of ammo, or an ultimate sword that breaks after a certain amount of uses.
It's useful, awesome, and practical - unfortunately, you're never going to see the item in use, either because you're afraid to waste such a valuable treasure and will be waiting for that one good opportunity to use it, or maybe because it simply pains you to imagine having it missing from your inventory.
An item that is Too Awesome To Use can sometimes become Awesome But Impractical if it sticks around long enough to be outclassed by a much more efficient or re-usable item. In any case, the item may just become useful in the Bonus Dungeon if one exists in the game.
This can also be considered Truth In Television. There are some instances where militaries are far too fearful of using their most advanced weapons, either because of cost, fear of the technology falling into the hands of the enemy, or just plain politics.
Examples:
- P-wings in Super Mario Bros 3. This game also had some other items that fell prey to this effect, like the Hammer Bros. Suits and the Tanooki suits. They were just too cool and rare to use anywhere.
- Have no fear! Complete the game and restart it, and your entire inventory will be filled with P-Wings. Now you can fly your little italian plumber head off.
- Of course, the P-wing is a Game Breaker in open areas as you can easily fly above the entire stage, so it's intended as a way of skipping a level one has problems with.
- In Super Mario RPG there are tons of these. At the end of the game you have enough of these that you have to actually start chucking the "lesser" amazing items when your inventory fills up. I for example once killed the second form of the boss of the game almost entirely with bomb type items.
- Thankfully most of the really awesome items have either multiple uses or easily-acquired substitutes. The best example is Kero-Kero Cola, a Megalixer-equivalent that can be bought en masse for an expensive but comparatively worthwhile 150/200 coins, depending on where you get them. By comparison, Max Mushrooms (which heal a party member to full HP) can only be bought at the Very Definitely Final Dungeon and Royal Jelly (which restores FP to full) can't be bought at all. Kero-Kero Cola does the same thing as both items combined, and on the whole party, too. Unless money is an issue (and given the genre, it probably isn't) you'll never be in a position where using the rare item is better than using a Cola.
- One of the biggest items of them all would be the Red Essence, which leaves a character invincible for three turns and are very hard to find. The only two battles anyone would dream of using a Red Essence on are Culex and Smithy 2.
- Also, sometimes the game will let you keep an item even after you've used it. Seeing the "Got a Freebie!" message elicits a feeling of pure joy for any item-conscious player.
- Magic Potions in The Legend Of Zelda series. Usually, there is a super-rare and super-powerful type of potion that you can place in one of your bottles: For example, Grandma's Soup in The Wind Waker refilled all your magic and life AND doubled your attack power until you took damage (the only item in the game to do so), and you could do this twice with one bottle since she gave you two servings. Since getting a refill required the going all the way back to your house, an unpleasant task if you were in the middle of—say—a dungeon, and since the game was relatively easy in the first place, you might opt to search for hearts and potions in grass and pots rather than using it, and you might beat the whole game without using it. (But you'll keep one with you anyway, since they're the best thing to have in your bottle)
- In Twilight Princess, you are rewarded with a bottle of Fairy Tears for collecting 20 Poe Souls. These not only refill Link's health completely, but they increase his attack power temporarily as well (unfortunately, only for 10 seconds at best). However in order to even get to the supplier, you have to take Link on a quest through the Cave of Ordeals.
- If you do manage to do the Cave of Ordeals, however, you can get free refills from any fairy fountain. And Rare Chu Jelly does the same thing, and there's one near Ordon Village...
- In the earlier Dragon Quest/Dragon Warrior games, you could pick a leaf from the World Tree which had the power to resurrect a dead party member without having to use a costly magic spell that had a chance of not working. However, you could only pick one of these at a time, and those that were hidden around the world were One-Time items.
- DQ 8 would permit you to buy or otherwise legitimately acquire two such leaves; however, it was possible to smuggle a third into the inventory via the game's item-crafting system.
- The trademark Heart Artifact from Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil could stop time, turn the player invincible, and boost the damage of their weapon all at once. It was such a cool effect that the player is commonly tempted to conserve the artifact's energy and rarely use it, even though it could be recharged just about everywhere.
- The BFG 9000 from all installments is likely to fall under this trope as well.
- The player is likely to use the BFG 9000 only rarely, though it only uses forty plasma cells per shot, because it's the biggest gun in the game. The I can handle these with smaller weapons -effect comes to play even though in 75% of big fights, you can actually conserve ammo by using the BFG.
- World Of Warcraft has the Holy Mightstone, an artifact that a level 50 paladin receives at the completion of a lengthy quest chain. It provides a 10-minute buff to damage vs. undead when used, but it can only be used once and can never be replaced since it's a quest item, so the end result is that most paladins end up never using it.
- Super Sticky Glue is an item you get from a quest in the Orc starting zone that allows you to immobilize the target. People always hang onto them in case they would ever really need one.
- A similar case with the unique "Light of Elune" potion (which grants full invulnerability for 10 sec and then it's gone forever). You get it as a mid-20s quest reward; people still have it in their lvl 70 character's inventory.
- In fact, there are a lot of items like that, and Blizzard eventually changed them to be unreliable or useless against enemies over a certain level. Fortunately, many of them can still be sold to players that have less doubts about using them in a tight situation.
- And a lot of the abilities with cooldowns over 5 minutes are seldom used except in times of utter desperation, waiting for that right moment... and sometimes in a dungeon or battleground run, never used at all. e.g. "Lay on Hands" (paladin) or "Recklessness" (warrior).
- Flasks used to be like this in the original WoW. While they provided outlandish buffs (such as increasing player health by 1200, which for most classes meant a 30% increase in hp - an incredible amount, particularly for boss fights), they were also notoriously difficult to craft. Obviously, you needed to be a high-level alchemist (which in itself wasn't that big of a deal — many players would grind alchemy as it provided access to expendable mana and health potions). However, crafting flasks also required Black Lotus, a ludicrously rare herb that wasn't tradeable: you had to find it yourself (good luck!) and in order to be able to gather it, you had to be a maxed-out herbalist. Since herbalism was considered a primary profession (of which you could only have two), if you chose anything other than "herba-alchy", you could not make flasks, period. To top off the ignominy, flasks could only be made in one place in the entire world (later two), which was smack at the end of a high-level dungeon. When C'Thun was first killed, most of the player community had problems wrapping their minds around the fact that the victorious guild expended forty flasks on this single boss fight.
- In the original Warcraft II RTS the heroes were almost always Too Awesome To Use. They were basically souped up versions of normal units with immense attack power. However, in most missions if they died you lost the mission. Only the human side had healers, auto-healing hadn't been invented yet, and you didn't always have healers in every mission. Most of the time you kept your hero locked up tight in your base where no one could hurt it, so that you didn't accidentally lose the mission by getting them killed. Warcraft III fixed this problem by allowing you to resurrect heroes in most missions.
- This was a big problem in most RTS games of the era, including Starcraft and Age Of Empires. Generally the heroes only found use if they were either expendable or in a no-production mission. Newer games, especially Warcraft 3, combat this by making Hero Units respawnable and able to be customised and levelled up.
- The Lightning in Medievil is the most powerful weapon in the game, but you have no way to recharge it if you run out. Most players never bother actually using it.
- The Grenades in Metal Slug are rather powerful. You'll want to keep them, thinking you're going to find a good use for all that power...And then you get killed, effectively WASTING 10 of these. Oh, the frustration.
- Several one-use-attack items in many RPGs suffer from this, with the added problem of the fact that eventually, the item will be too weak to actually be of any use, making it a total waste.
- The Magic Bullets and similar items in Lunar: The Silver Star, to the extent that the Playstation remake removed them altogether.
- Averted with the gems in Wild ARMs 3, which could be used to allow the caster to cast the basic attack spell of the corresponding element (Fire Gem casing the basic Fire Spell, for example). You got them in the first place by killing enemies with a spell of that element, so using a gem to kill an enemy would give you another one in return. Coupled with a certain character's special ability to use a single item on every enemy/ally, you could actually end up with a net gain from a single use.
- Demonstrated in this strip
 of the Adventurers! comic. For clarification: at that stage even their standard attacks do 9999 damage, making 213 points a drop in a bucket.
- FF6's "Super Ball" may be unique in that, by the time you get it, it's already useless...
- Ethers are a restoring item that fits the trope. In Final Fantasy IV, they're rare, showing up maybe one or two per area. You can't buy them until almost the end of the game.
- It's not just in FFIV. In several Final Fantasy games, Ethers either can't be purchased or are very expensive. Therefore, many players end up hoarding their Ethers.
- Final Fantasy VII can potentially completely avert this. There is a glitch in the game's "W-Item" Materia (which usually lets you use 2 items in a single turn) that allows you to duplicate any item in your inventory. Abuse of this can result in 99 of anything, including Megalixirs. All the player need do is hold onto that one terrific one-shot toy until then.
- The W-Item Materia cannot duplicate items that cannot be used in battle, so Source fanatics are out of luck there. However, not only does it allow you to mass-produce Megalixirs, it also allows you to mass-produce Sylkis Greens, which makes Chocobo breeding much less expensive.
- The Atelier Series subverts this, Burst variation is activated via several means, attacking in combos and attacking stunned folks or hitting an opponent's weak point for massive damage. Most expendable items will see a use as they build up Variation when you needed it for a rainy day.
- The unique S-rank staves in various Fire Emblem games (e.g. the Ashera Staff in Path of Radiance). They heal all your allies on the battlefield as well as remove all status ailments. As well as give enough experience to the caster for a level up. But you get only three uses with it, and then it breaks and it's gone forever. While very useful, as a result, few gamers use it except perhaps for the last level.
- One issue associated with the S-rank staves is that they require you to S-rank in staves, and most of the FE games would only allow you to S-rank in a single weapon type, and some players considered making that weapon type staves a "waste" of the S-rank. In the handhelds, S-ranking in attack magic (or a weapon) had the benefit of giving you +5% to hit and crit even for non-S-rank magic, but S-ranking in staves was only good for the S-rank staff.
- And in a similar case, the Hammerne staff in said series, which can repair almost any item in the game. Again, three uses before it's gone forever.
- Combine the two, however, and you have a potential Game Breaker. By using an Ashera Staff twice, then repairing it with the Hammerne, not only do you get up to 7 turns of full heals for all allies, but you get 7 free level ups for your S-ranked staff wielder of choice.
- And a lot of other weapons (though they last a lot longer than the staves). For example, the Sonic Sword and Runesword in Path of Radiance can turn the weak healer Mist into a killing machine, but there's only one of each in the entire game, and they don't last very long to boot.
- So, you're really better off not even bothering.
- Most of the long-range magic items suffer from this trope. They're quite powerful and can be used from very far away, but are not common and have only 5 uses. In FE10 (Radiant Dawn), if you have them blessed near the end of the game, they become infinitely usable making them partial Game Breakers.
- While we're at it, the majority of S ranked, Brave, and special weapons in FE tend to fall under this trope. For example, in Po R, the Vague Katti is a decently powerful sword, but its true strength lies in its 35% increased chance of landing a Critical Hit. Too bad it only has enough uses to be good for one or two chapters.
- Blazing Sword references this when a character warns not to put too much thought into who gets an item; 'holding onto a useful item does no one any good'. However, said NPC appears in Lyn's mode, and saving the item will help up your funds ranking. A higher funds ranking means Lyn has a better gem in her inventory in Eliwood/Hector mode, so ironically, this is the one time not using an item IS helpful (If getting the gem for Eliwood/Hector mode or the stats bonus for a character that appears in Lyn's mode is better is up for debate though).
- Frankly, a lot of the items in the game, up to and including Vulnearies, which are the only way to heal without standing on fortresses or using healers.
- Dawn of War and Company of Heroes You can call in Veteran units at any time in the campaign mode from the previous missions. You never will because you might need them when the AI decides you have won too many games in a row and starts to rush you with an unbeatable amount of units. Any recent DOW game has had the same problem for me.
- City Of Heroes has several temp powers with a limited amount of use, many of which are earned for or after a specific mission and will never be retrievable again. Not surprisingly, these usually get hoarded for emergencies, and are still waiting to be used when your own powers are so far beyond them that there's no point any more. In some cases they don't make any sense using even when you do get them, a classic example being the Loa Bone, which lets you summon a zombie. Cool for most people, utterly redundant if you are a Mastermind who can already summon zombies.
- It's not as bad as all that, since the full-power temporary abilities will always remain at a consistent power for your level, so that bow and arrow power you picked up at level 20 will still do reasonable damage at level 30.
- Some of these temp powers became so popular that when the developers added Veteran Rewards, a shiny badge for every so many months the player has been subscribed plus an item like a special costume item or a free character rebuild, two of the rewards each gave a choice of two temp powers that would become permanent on that character. The player can make different choices of which powers to take on every character they have. The Sands of Mu and the Nemesis Staff are the two most popular choices.
- The devs actually added time travel to the game recently, allowing players to play through content they skipped and already completed. This allows anyone to get most temporary powers an infinite number of times. This is prevented from being game breaking by giving out a weaker version of the temporary power to those who already got the full-strength version before.
- The Wedding Band hero-side springs first to mind. It granted a hefty resistance buff to all damage that lasted for two total hours of on-time (and maybe required an hour to get). Since it was only available to heroes, it quickly became the major target of villains and a fair issue of player-versus-player balance. The "Echo" version of the power now gives the same level of protection, but only lasts five minutes of on time, but can be stacked with the original version.
- Similarly there's the Inspirations you build up as you play, basically the equivalent of potions in other MMORPGS that can be used at any time to heal health, restore endurance, or give a number of beneficial buffs. The thing is, you rarely need to use them to win most fights so the tray quickly fills up with Inspirations you hang on to for tougher fights and emergencies that never come.
- Many of the high-level powers take so long to recharge you can't use them in 99% of the fights. I mean, for example, an area-of-effect attack that lowers the defence, damage resistance and health regeneration of all enemies caught in the blast? Awesome. Too bad it has a several-minute recharge, and at the higher levels you tend to breeze trough foes anyway, so the effect would barely be noticeable.
- In nearly every RPG, especially the Final Fantasy series, there are such things as Elixirs and Megalixirs: magic items that completely restore one/all character's HP and MP. Most of the time they don't get used at all until the final boss.
- Chrono Trigger lets you steal Megalixirs off of one specific enemy (Ruminators) that tend to eat each other. Not only that, they can also be stolen from Fossil Apes, respawning monsters found in a dungeon popular for end-of-game leveling. A player can end up with 80 of the things if he or she is too afraid to use them.
- Final Fantasy XI runs into this situation as well, but from a slightly different perspective. Every job has an ability that, once used, cannot be used for another two hours. But many of these abilities never get used because players either want to hang on to them in case the party gets into a bad situation or the like, at which point it's probably too late anyway, or a waste—Benediction results in the user getting much too much aggro to avoid being the enemy's target, and Hundred Fists, which allow the Monk to hit repeatedly with almost no delay, usually can't do enough damage to kill the enemy before it starts offing players late in a battle, for example. Somewhat averted in Corsair's 2hour, Wild Card, which can recharge 2hours for others in the party... except other Wild Cards. If you're lucky, you can make quite a bit of money on the side by having your level 1 Corsair use Wild Card for random people who'll pay you for success.
- Some cards in Magic The Gathering are specifically designed to invoke this trope, by giving you a small cheap effect and/or a large expensive effect. Good players will know when getting it out now is more important then making it more powerful; bad players will not.
- One such example is Kavu Titan; when they were playtesting Invasion and someone lent now-head Designer Mark Rosewater a deck to use without mentioning that the Grizzly Bears were supposed to be proxies for Kavu Titans. Mark went 4-0 the first week, and then upon being told that they were actually Titans, he went 2-2 the next week, wanting to hold back to use the Titan's improved version rather than just pouring on the aggression.
- Another example in Magic The Gathering is the Chaos Orb, a card which is tossed from a specified height onto the gaming table and destroys any card it ends up touching. It is now banned entirely from tournament play, but in the early days a story went around about some players came up with the clever idea of tearing up the Chaos Orb card and scattering all the pieces across the opponent's side of the table. This was eventually deemed illegal, but anyone with the cojones to pull a stunt like that with an extremely valuable out-of-print rare deserves to get the win.
- The story concludes with the opponent calling for a count of the number of cards in each player's deck. The Chaos Orb user now had only 59 cards, one short of the legal minimum for tournament play, and thus lost by default!
- Whether or not that story is true, in the wacky-on-purpose set called Unglued, Wizards created a card referring to the incident: "Chaos Confetti" is actually played in that manner, forcing players to choose between destroying a common (but out of print for a decade at this point) card and a single guarenteed victory.
- Wizards has actually ruled that it is legal to piece the Chaos Confetti back together as long as it's in a sleeve and indistinguishable from other cards from above.
- And the newest and now best example are the Planeswalkers, which have two small abilities and one "ultimate" ability. Garruk Wildspeaker, in particular, gets this treatment: "Do I untap two lands or Overrun?" is a legitimate question.
- Sadly, this isn't the case with the Yu-Gi-Oh card game; while there are several powerful and highly exploitable cards in the game, most duelists have fallen into the "use and abuse" mindset, and stock their decks full of them specifically so they can spam them as much as they could. In fact, they will even consider any card that fits this trope, but isn't generic enough to fit into any deck regardless of theme, to be worthless, for the sole reason that they can't exploit them as easily.
- The Eternal Key in Shadow Hearts 2 and 3 allows a character to extend a physical attack string infinitely, as long as the player can keep hitting a series of timed button presses. Get enough hits with one, and it'll kill literally any enemy in existence through overwhelmingly huge damage. Of course, there's only one in each game.
- In Valkyrie Profile, the only weapons that allow mages to use Great Magic; which do an absurd amount of damage compared to normal special attacks; are also breakable—some with a 1/20 chance, some with 1/3 chance of breaking. Consequently, get were stashed away for "emergencies", and aren't used at all for most of the game.
- You can eventually find a couple Great Magic staves that don't break if you know where to look for several of their components. This, of course, just drives up the Too Awesome To Use aspect further - you'll end up with the breakable ones clogging your inventory and just use the ones that won't break.
- Ironically, Ether Staves (The first source of great magic, with a whopping 50% chance to break on use) only break on use of great magic. They do, however, have a massive base magic attack stat which, combined with the early spell Lightning Bolt, becomes a nasty Disc One Nuke capable of one shotting almost everything that isn't a boss.
- There are also the breakable Slayer weapons, which are a One Hit Kill against enemies of their type (though there is one early boss dragon that usually has players reaching for the Dragon Slayer if they didn't keep the Garm for themselves after the first dungeon). Most players find a couple of these collecting dust in the equip screen by the end of the game.
- Whether by glitch or intentional, physical damage weapons only do the check to see if it breaks when the attack phase switches from the player to the enemy, thus if you kill everything on the screen in one turn your weapon cannot break. This does not apply to staves, which can and will break on great magic use whenever it is used.
- Castlevania: Symphony of the Night has any number of powerful, one-shot items that most players will hang onto "until the right time". But as the game is relatively easy compared to later Metroidvania-style games (and possesses what many consider the easiest Dracula fight in the series), that time will never come. On the second or later playthrough of the game, it is possible to obtain an item called the Duplicator, making those single-use items infinitely reusable; still, it's easy to see why many of them became equippable (and thus infinite-use) subweapons in later games.
- People went through Mother saving up on attack items like bottle rockets to use on the final boss, only to find out in the end that to beat him, you have to sing to him.
- Practically the same thing happens in the sequels, though Mother 2/Earth Bound did have you actually fight Giygas in the second stage of the final fight. There is also a healing item called a Hand-Aid which recovers all your HP and PP, but there is only one of it in the game.
- Fortunately, Earth Bound allowed you to buy the various types of bottle rockets (and for fairly reasonable prices considering how much damage they can do). So bottle rockets are no longer Too Awesome To Use.
- Then there's the Bag of Dragonite, which turns one character into a dragon (although this just means an one-time powerful fire attack). If it weren't for the restrictive nature of the inventory in that game, they'd never be used at all.
- Mother 3 repeatedly asks you not to do this, telling the player it's no use carrying around items you never use. At one point a woman asks if you're the kind of person who "stocks up on food and never eats it."
- Similarly, Lita cheerfully reminds you in Boktai 2 that "items are meant to be used". Of course, she has an ulterior motive — she wants Django coming to her store as often as possible.
- There are a multitude of items like this in Pokémon, the Master Ball is probably the most famous example, since it can catch any monster regardless of how strong it is. However, you usually only get one during a playthrough. Though it's possible to get more of them via the lottery, trading or exploiting cheats. Other examples may include certain TMs, evolutionary items, battle items and even certain healing items, such as the Sacred Ash, which can heal every Pokémon in your party to full health—essentially a Megalixir, but found attached to (or somewhere around) Ho-Oh, a legendary Pokemon. Another bizarre example would be the Old Gateau, which is a one-off item that otherwise functions like a full heal, so you end up keeping it just because it looks cool.
- Although, considering that in the first generation, there was an easy way to duplicate items like the Master Ball many times over, while in the later generations, duplicating was a slow, and involved process if you wanted many of the same item.
- Ethers and Elixirs couldn't be bought in stores, and are only found on the maps. Therefore they are usually conserved for the right time.
- However, in the later games, Mysteryberries and Leppa Berries had the same effect, thereby rendering Ethers yet another useless thing that garnered lots of cash.
- I'd say the one true too awesome to use items are Max Revives. They revive you and completely fill up your HP, handy for the Elite Four, but only a handful exist in the games and they can't be bought. Sure, you can always buy Revival Herbs, which have the same effect, but only if you don't mind your Pokemon hating your guts afterwards. Afterall, they take down your Happiness by a whopping 15 points.
- While somewhat unrelated, many players refused to use Legendary Pokemon against the Elite Four. This is due to an attatchment players form to the team they've been raising the entire game, and because (especially in Emerald where a level 70 rayquaza is catchable before the elite 4) it removes the challenge.
- Pokemon games have a large list of TM's, some which can be bought at markets and game corners, others that you only get one of...ever. And if you're the kind of trainer that switches up his/her team a lot, you just wasted a strong attack on a pokemon you'll never use again. a good example is earthquake which does 100 attack damage and has 100% accuracy (as long as the opponent isn't a flying type and your accuracy hasn't fallen), but you only get to use that TM once and a large number of pokemon can learn it.
- Super Smash Bros Brawl has Golden Hammers that can automatically unlock a secret without having to do the challenge. You never use them.
- Made even worse because, for the few challenges that really are exceptionally difficult (beating Boss Battles on Insane, for example), you can't actually use the damn hammers in the first place. Which makes them completely useless unless you're too lazy to complete the challenge yourself.
- Or you made a vow to never play Coin Mode.
- Damn that PAL Bonus.
- A lot of first-person-shooters tend towards this with the final weapons that become available in their arsenal, or otherwise goes the other way falls prey to having either a Game Breaker or Infinity +1 Sword, that is to say, the biggest and most devastating weapon(s) in the game are either available halfway through the game and make it too easy, or only turn up right at the end and have so little ammo available that the player never gets round to actually using them.
- F.E.A.R. Perseus Mandate suffered from a form of this, where the three-weapon limit to the player's inventory meant that the rarer, more powerful weapons like the Lightning Gun or the Laser were often just left in favour of something simpler with more readily available ammo to prevent suddenly running dry mid-fight, or being left without explosives should a robot turn up.
- The Gluon Gun from Half-Life. It wastes away enemies with ease, even bosses, but drains your Nuclear Ammo extremely fast, so instead you end up picking and prodding at the enemies with your pistol.
- You could use the Gluon Gun... or you could use the Tau Cannon instead, which uses the same ammo instead, is far more efficient, and can damage enemies hiding behind cover due to its mechanics.
- The two have different advantages; the Tau Cannon is good at shooting down helicopters and blowing up tanks with its charged shots, but the Gluon Gun does more damage per unit of ammo, and is good against the last two bosses.
- Half-Life 2, however, nicely averts this; not only do all your guns hold a lot less ammo than in most FPSs, there's no BFG-style big bang gun, and ammo tends to be rather easy to come by.
- Players may still cling onto the 3 rockets for the RPG you can carry, nevermind that you get infinite rocket crates for every battle that requires the RPG.
- The Neverwinter Nights franchise has this. This is mostly the case with powerful or even ordinary potions and scrolls, especially if your character is not a magic build. A lot of mundane but tough fights could have been made easier if you'd just used that barkskin potion or whatnot, but you keep saving it for the boss fights.
- Similarly, occurs with potions and antidotes in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. You'll instantly start collecting various buff, health and antidote potions, but when an opportunity arises to actually use them, you'll find some way to avoid 'wasting' them until that special moment when you really need them. As time passes, this simply has the effect of rendering the items useless, as a formerly effective health potion that just restores one hundredth of your now leveled-up character's hitpoints is no longer as valuable. Then you drop the junk because it weighs you down. To make room for new junk.
- Of course, considering you can make them yourself via Alchemy, that every potion you make raises your Alchemy skill and that by the time you're a Master of Alchemy it's probably the quickest and easiest way to make money (go raid a few farms and presto, 200 potions of restore fatigue to sell), this doesn't really apply through most of the game.
- And that's to say nothing of your Greater Power; a once-a-day ability that's pretty useful (and doesn't even consume Magicka!).
- The Greater Power issue is avoided with the Khajiit race, whose night vision ability can be used an infinite number of times a day with no cost whatsoever; their once-a-day ability terrified enemies, and worked very rarely anyway, making it pointless.
- Alchemy ingredients that can only be found on quest-specific creatures or plants, such as painted troll fat. They come in limited quantities, as do the creatures/plants they come off of, and so you may not want to use them ever... Unless you've become guildmaster of the Mage's Guild, in which you get access to a chest that duplicates ingredients for you free of charge, once a week. Nice.
- A great example is found in one of the expansions to The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind. In a stump are five Ebony Arrows Of Slaying that do 5000 damage apiece. This is enough damage to drop The Imperfect (The Dragon in one of the expansions. Also a giant magic robot that the offical guide refers to as a monster to take down) twice over in one shot. But the odds of getting these arrows back is low, so you will almost always save them for a rainy day.
- Using items mid-battle in Eternal Sonata is clunky and generally unnecessary for victory, so many very useful ones remain unused throughout - even in the final battles of the game, when it only really becomes necessary to use HP restoring items.
- Though in the later battles it is simply easier to stack the battle inventory with only resurrection items and let characters die and raise them rather than healing them at all.
- Not to mention that some of the heal items are of the "heal 50%/75%/100% of Max" variety. Obviously, the more HP a character has, the more HP these items will restore, so you keep not using them. (Instead, you use Heal Arrow and Blossom Shower...)
- Falling into this hoarding mentality is especially deadly in Net Hack, doubly-especially on the first few levels. Until you've built up a small cushion of hit points, use that wand of lightning!
- In the late game, certain expendable items do become almost useless - namely scrolls and potions. (No need to hurl potions of paralysis at a monster when you can smite it with Excalibur, after all.) Almost, because you can dip potions and scrolls in water to blank them out - and with the proper tools, bottled water and blank paper can be some of the most useful tools in the game.
- One playing the Net Hack variant Slash'EM may come across the Houchou, an artifact-level spoon. Throwing this spoon at a monster results in an instant kill, after which the artifact is destroyed. Slash'EM mostly averts this trope, though, because just about every player has their own idea of which single creature in the game deserves skipping.
- This is especially true in Linley's Dungeon Crawl, as beneficial potions and scrolls are relatively common and safe to identify by trial-and-error (and it is easy to end up facing half a dozen rampaging orcs with three hit points left).
- ALWAYS have at least one Scroll of Teleportation in your inventory! Even if you have the spell you'll be grateful for it sooner or later.
- Scrolls of Weapon/Armor Enchantment are a different matter altogether, though. Since you can never know if you won't find a nice speed-branded weapon with a higher base enchant that what you already have, many people end up never using their Enchants before they die.
- Being based on the same principle, but adding in an overworld and the ability to buy storage houses...lets just say it is very common to have a ginormous amount of these in Elona.
- Paper Mario has the Jammin' Jelly, and to a lesser extent, the Ultra Shroom. The latter gives Mario 50 HP when used, while the former gives you 50 FP. Since you can only level Mario's HP and FP up to 50 (to have more than that, you need the HP Plus or FP Plus badges equipped), chances are you'll have one or two still in your inventory when you beat Bowser.
- You can combine the two into a "Jelly Ultra" Which restores both HP and FP by 50. Doing this may seem like a good idea, but doing so will cause an extreme mental block which will prevent you from ever using the item.
- And then The Thousand-Year Door has those same items, but you can increase your total HP even further. Even so...
- Final Fantasy VIII's junction system essentially discouraged the player from using magic, since you'd either be saving up your best spells to junction with a specific stat or you'd have them junctioned already, meaning you were left with the lesser spells that weren't worth using on account of the stat boosts from the junctioned spells.
- At least until you found the heaven/hell drawpoints. Free draws of all the game's strongest magic - that remains accessible until just before the end-game boss fight. Triple + Expend 3-1 + Meteor remains one of the few magic attacks that can come close to competing with the Limit Break.
- Except for the fact that junctioning them to your attack stat would let you do insane damage every turn for absolutely no cost at all.
- Sid Meiers Alpha Centauri's expansion pack introduced Battle Ogres. These are alien war machines left on Planet that really kick ass, especially the Mark 3. Problem? They are rare, appearing when you pick up some pods and any damage can never be repaired. EVER. So they rarely, if ever, get used.
- They are very useful as garrison units, because they have a special that doubles their ability to suppress dissent. Just be sure to never let them get into combat.
- Battle Ogres are a little bit of mid-game firepower, dropped by fortune into your lap the very start. Using them on police duty the whole time is a terrible waste. The way to use them is to go straight to your nearest neighbour, and use the Battle Ogre early and as often as possible to crush all opposition. Shortly afterwards, you'll have several extra bases, a former rival either capitulated or stuffed inside a punishment sphere, and a heavily damaged Battle Ogre. It's no longer much use for combat, but just as good for police duty as it ever was. This is a huge bonus in the early game and the extra resources you seize can set you up for an easy win. The Advanced Battle Ogre is the one that's Too Awesome To Use: it's fantastically powerful, but the wars in the mid-game are far larger in scale and a single Battle Ogre doesn't make so great a difference any more.
- Bombs are very useful in Star Fox, and are instrumental in a few boss fights. You don't find yourself using them too often, though, do you?
- Doubly so because killing multiple enemies with a single Bomb does not offer the same cluster-kill bonus that doing the same with a charge shot does. It mostly comes down to a matter of only using it on enemies that you KNOW you can't clear out anyway, and memorizing the points where more bombs appear so you can be sure a replacement is right around the corner.
- Thanks to there being almost no hint of when it might be safe to use them, and being generally placed in arbitrary positions, the rarer-than-golddust save crystals in the Playstation version of Tomb Raider 3 ended up suffering from this for a lot of people.
- Previous games encouraged/forced players to manage their inventory by striking a balance between using medi-kits and using ammunition for the better weapons when confronting dangerous enemies. The crystals created a third thing to manage, and the more obsessive-compulsive players could find this pretty stressful.
- In most normal gameplay, you won't need to use the Jonathan Ingram card in Metal Gear Acid, despite it being one of the most powerful ones in the game. Ingram removes twenty COST from your character, far beyond the twelve COST removed by the most powerful conventional COST reduction card - but, because Jonathan Ingram is so powerful, it tends not to get used.
- The Heart Pot you receive from Jenka in Cave Story would certainly fall into this category: using it completely refills your Life Meter, and then it's gone. You can later go back to Jenka to get another, but soon after getting the first one comes a long period where you can't return to Sand Zone.
- If you're going to the best game ending, it's a good idea to hoard the Heart Pot. In Sacred Grounds, it's nearly impossible to conserve your health all the way up to the final boss, especially if you're doing a speed run. So most speedrunners will use the Heart Pot just before the final boss fight.
- Nearly all entries in the Resident Evil series barring Code Veronica (where there simply isn't enough ammunition) and 4 (where it's just so damned fun to shoot regular enemies with larger weapons than is necessary, and the game will give you more of the larger ammo if you're short on it anyway) have players finding themselves with dozens of magazines worth of ammunition for their weapons, and their larger guns all but unused by the time they meet the final enemy, which most likely cannot be hurt by any of those weapons, even the big-ticket firearms.
- Ink Ribbons. 'Nuff said.
- While most typewriters have at least one and possibly as many as three ribbons nearby, the prospect of running out and being unable to save is quite scary for many players.
- Resident Evil 4 has this with the rocket launcher, which while omgwtf powerful(can one-hit just about every boss in the game), is better to sell for cash and use that to upgrade one of your guns that gets more then one use.
- On the other hand, the Merchant conveniently has the Extra-Large attache case available shortly before you find the one rocket launcher lying around in the game, so it isn't too difficult to carry it until you come to the Verdugo boss fight, in which it comes verrrry handy.
- Resident Evil 5 ends up playing this trope semi-straight (or at least straighter than RE 4 did) due to its more limited inventory system. With only nine slots available per character, space is at a premium and it's usually best to rely on the weapon you have the most ammo for, if only to keep your inventory from being clogged with four or five superfluous ammo boxes. Sadly, the ammunition for the best weapons in the game (magnums and the grenade launcher) are almost impossible to find. And even when you do find magnum and grenade rounds chances are you won't have either of those weapons in your inventory since you so prudently chose to store them away in your hammerspace inventory accessible only in between chapters. On the other hand, RE 5 also allows you to replay individual chapters over and over again to stockpile items, so there ya go.
- The first System Shock also does this. 45 magazines for my RF Scorpion? Why did I not ever use this?
- The second Parasite Eve game presents a similar problem to that posed by Resident Evil games. Stocks of unlimited standard pistol bullets appear early on, and unlimited stocks of slightly more powerful pistol bullets and standard shotgun ammo appear later. But you're going to be lugging that assault rifle and grenade launcher around for the entire game without using them because ammo is limited and you want to save it for later. You might get way more use out of the rifle's optional bayonet attachment than out of its actual bullets.
- Fallout 2 had the Monument Chunk, a consumable which offered massive combat bonuses, but was available only once in the entire game. It almost always wound up in the trunk of the car until after the end of the game.
- If you were willing to risk an instant death trap, you could have three or four.
- Fallout 2 also had the three special Federation super-medkits which you found in the special encounter with the crashed Star Trek shuttle. They restored your health completely, no matter how hurt you were - but there were only three in the entire game. As a result they inevitably ended up in a chest or other container, from which they would only be taken when really needed. Or not.
- Fallout 3 features the Experimental MIRV: a modified Fat Man that fires 8 mini-nukes at once. The average player probably won't find enough mini-nukes over the course of the entire game to fire this baby more than two or three times. No fight in the game justifies the use of such firepower, so the weapon will most likely remain unused. Great for showing off, though.
- The Alien Blaster, however is severely Too Awesome To Use! Fully funded, Crazy Wolfgang can maintain it at a reasonable level and it packs ungodly power per punch even with no skill in Energy Weapons - it's the most powerful non-explosive weapon and has a 100% crit rating, meaning most freehand headshots will turn any target to a pile of ash! BUT!!! There are less than two hundred rounds of ammunition for it in the entire game!
- You could also classify the Firelance under the same banner as the Alien Blaster. Only obtainable in a randomly found event (of which you may not even notice and end up walking away from). It's a unique variant of the Alien Blaster that sets things on fire as well as having a pretty punch. Because of the fire effect, it gets an extra 50% damage from the Pyromaniac perk. Add the Xenotech perk from the Mothership Zeta Downloadable Content to add a further 20% damage to it, and you can easily drop the toughest enemies with a decent Energy Weapons skill. Sounds good and all, but the event only spawns it with 12 rounds, randomly thrown about the nearby area, so you're not likely to find even half of them. The total available ammo for it in the game is around 280: 120 from the crashed Alien ship, 12 from the Firelance event itself, and ~100-150 from Fort Independence assuming you have the Scavenger perk. You can find a further 80 or so shots from the Mothership Zeta DLC, and a small stash of ammo with the Broken Steel DLC. So in theory, you might be lucky to get 400 shots if you know exactly where to get them, what perks to have, have both of the necessary DLC, and have plenty of time to invest in getting them. After all that, are you really going to squander the ammo on some weak mutants?
- The three one-shot ultra-weapons in Gorky 17 (known as Odium to you Americans), (a missile, a lightning and an energy beam). They cause colossal damage in a huge radius.
- A very frustrating occurrence might be using one of those on the final boss... only to discover he was immune to this type of attack.
- STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl has several special weapons that can be found once and only once. Typically they have something that sets them above their normal counterparts - for example, there is a special MP5 that uses common pistol ammo instead of less common submachinegun ammo, and does the same damage. Problem is, the game has weapon degradation, and - if left unmodded - no way of repairing damaged items. Which is why many players save up the special weapons, only to find out later on that they become useless against the heavily armored foes of the later game, who require heavier firepower to be brought down.
- It might be safe to assume that every weapon is impractical once you encounter a new enemy set. Same goes for all the ammo you saved if that new rifle doesn't take what you have 700 rounds of.
- Also the gauss rifle, which is not sold in any store, is found in the Point Of No Return, and will kill any enemy in one or two shots.
- Any Final Fantasy game with a class or character that can throw items turns the better weapons into this. And the cheaper weapons may simply not do enough damage to be worth throwing...
- In Team Fortress 2, medics can, over the course of about 2 minutes, charge up ten seconds of invulnrability. Of course, this leads to the age-old dilemma of when you actually use your ubercharge... Saving it can be vital, as beginning it mere seconds before the enemy initiates theirs will make it all but obsolete. So often, I end up waiting to long to initiate ubercharge that I am killed before I can, and my uber meter is reset. Grrrr...
- The Kritzkrieg, an alternate Medi-Gun, is less likely to cause this dilemma. It charges faster, and increases damage instead of providing invulnerability, so as long as you can see something to shoot, it isn't a 'complete' waste.
- Many, many one-use items in Kingdom Of Loathing, especially the ones that were available for a limited time in the past and most likely will never become available again.
- Jick seems to be trying to fix this through the use of special raffles every now and then...though that doesn't guarantee you'll have a spare unless you plunk down the cash to take it from another player.
- Many of the semi-rares fall prey to this trope. This may be later averted when diving Fernswarthy's Basement, where every little bit of stockpiled resistance and HP buff becomes more and more necessary.
- (Literal) Easter Eggs in the Urban Dead-inspired Nexus War, because they can only be found once a year, at Easter, and have variable effects which can't be determined before use.
- Mega Man 9 gives us a few of these, with shop items that are expensive, or of which you can only have one at a time. Eddie Call can give you items, including 1-ups. The M-Tank acts like the Megalixers described above; it refills your Hit Points and all your Weapon energy. But the biggest user of this trope has to be the Guard Power. It grants double armor for 1 level, but though you'd be tempted to use it against the !*%@?&% Bio-Devil twins, you'd be far better off using it against the final level's Boss Rush and Wily's 3-stage battle.
- This is generally true of all Mega Man games. With some minor exceptions (such as MM 2's Gdlk Metal Blade), special weapons are too costly to use willy-nilly especially when the end boss might have a vulnerability to it. Plus in a lot of cases, it's simply too much work to go through the weapon select screen (they didn't figure out that Select was a viable button to switch weapons until much later).
- Superiority, by Arthur C Clarke - one side has more and better technology, but ruthless perfectionism destroys their actual front-line combat capability and loses them the war.
- Real life example: The Japanese in WW 2 more or less hoarded their battleships for a decisive surface fight that never actually wound up happening. By the time they got to the point of desperation, the best use they had for the largest battleship humanity has ever built was as improvised land-based artillery.
- Similarly, many WW 2 German weapon programs fell into this category - ballistic missiles that were a waste of manpower compared to just building more bombers, jet engines being shelved for a year longer than necessary because Hitler wanted jet bombers instead of jet fighters and thus refused to allow the latter to be deployed, the Schwerer Gustav superguns that took so long to build that all their plausible targets had been overrun by the time they were built, and many more.
- Anime example: Both Kyou and Asu in Binbou Shimai Monogatari worry so much about their cell phone's calling cost and end up didn't use it until they start discuss about this problem later.
- Wild AR Ms had the extremely useful "Ambrosia" potion that revives, fully heals health and magic points and removes all status changes for the entire party.
- Somewhat subverted in the horror-based adventure game/first-person shooter/interactive movie Realms of the Haunting, where this sort of behavior actually did pay off in the end. There's a magic staff which, unlike every other weapon in the game, had a very limited number of charges (something like 12 shots or so) and couldn't be recharged at all, ever. It wasn't noticeable more powerful than the game's other magic weapons, though, so you either never used it anyway, or used all 12 shots then forgot about it. Sucks to be you if you did use it up killing common enemies, because it turns out this particular weapon pretty much insta-kills the otherwise very tough and annoying final boss.
- In the Silent Hill series, The more powerful weapons such as the Rifle in the first two games, and Submachine Gun in SH3, tend to have the scarcest ammo, and should be saved for major boss fights. SH4 had the extremely rare Silver Bullets (only two or three in the game) which could stun a Victim in one shot, best saved for Cynthia and Andrew, which are the most difficult to take down by other means.
- 4 also had the Swords of Obedience, and there are only 5 in the whole game. They can be used on unkillable Victim ghosts, who harm you just by being near you, to permanently pin them to the ground. You can pull them back out, but it defeats the purpose of using them in the first place.
- The reality/game show Cha$e has the utility items, which some players hoard, as they are single-use and can't be replaced. A couple of players ended play with items on hand even when those items would've helped them stay in. For instance, some held on to the glasses, which render players "invisible" for 2 minutes, even when the 2-minutes-remaining warning was given. The logical thing would be to use the glasses and book it for the goal.
- Also, see every contestant who ever missed a question on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire while holding at least one lifeline in reserve.
- The first three Turok games all feature a superweapon that the player must rebuild by collecting parts hidden in secret areas (the first game actually has two superweapons, but only one must be built). All four of these guns can clear entire rooms of enemies with one shot, but two of them carry only tiny amounts of incredibly rare ammunition (the Fusion Cannon having a total of eight rounds in the entire game), and another, the Chronoscepter, is limited to only three shots that can never be refilled without cheats. The worst part of this comes when the player realizes that the final boss of Turok 2 is actually completely immune to the ammo-starved Nuke superweapon, and that saving those precious few shots accomplished nothing. The effect is alleviated somewhat in the third game, as the Personal Singularity Generator superweapon instead has a lengthy cooldown after each shot, and the final boss is vulnerable to its fire.
- Bombs in Shoot Em Ups, especially in Bullet Hell shmups. Because they often have the property of rendering the player invincible for a few seconds and/or nullifying all on-screen bullets, many players will save them for when they're really in danger of losing their current life...and then die and have their bombs wasted as a result. Some games offer an "auto-bomb" feature that automatically deploys bombs for this purpose or gives the player a few additional frames to fire a bomb, though sometimes it comes with a penalty; Imperishable Night will burn an additional bomb for using this feature, and Ketsui Death Label takes away all of the remaining bombs and reduces the player's score multiplier.
- Averted in technical-heavy Shoot Em Ups such as Battle Garegga and its spiritual sequels as well as the Raiden Fighters series — in the former, not using your bombs will leave you with a dearth of extra lives needed to actually finish the game, and in the latter you are robbed of 75% of the special bonuses (and in Jet, levels) available.
- Bombs are not Too Awesome To Use in Tou Hou games; learning to spam bombs at the slightest sign of danger is one of the first steps in learning how to play. On the other side of the coin, in expert play (where score becomes more important than survival), knowing when to use bombs to boost your score is also important.
- See also, Gigawing, as bombs add a ridiculous amount of points to your already ludicrous trillion-digit score. The temptation to beat your old score by holding onto just ONE more bomb this time is quite deadly.
- To a lesser extent, Pipebombs in Left 4 Dead.
- That's only if the AI Director isn't being a total bastard against you when it comes to spawning items. In some levels, you can find bombs all over the place and in pairs.
- First Aid Kits as well, even more so on Expert. Sometimes, people will absolutely refuse to use First Aid to heal and will either be popping pills or just limp on and will only use First Aid when the next knockdown is going to cause death.
- And don't forget not using molotovs when the entire hoard is coming through a wide chokepoint in case there isn't a new one before the tank.
- The Bard's Tale has Adder Stones, which allow you to heal instantly, restrain enemies, become immortal for a brief period of time, and do several other cool things. Depending on how conservative the player is, this can result in completely unnecessary hoarding in case they need to become immortal later — people have died sitting on a decent collection of adder stones and entered the final boss fight with 102 stones (one is needed to heal, and 3 for immortality).
- Various awesome potions and protections scrolls in Baldurs Gate just pile up in your inventory until the endgame, when you don't really need them since your mages and clerics can cast far mightier buffs on you. However, magic and from undead scrolls MAY prove useful in the final levels. And for all that's holy, do hold like glue onto that Cloudkill scroll you find! Party mage + Cloudkill = the Big Bad's henchmen gone before they even see you.
- Same goes for most scrolls and potions in BG2: by the time you'd figure you need them, you can beat pretty much anyone to bloody pulp without magical buffs, let alone potions. This also applies to artifact weapons lying around, especially after you find that Bag of Holding.
- Ultima frequently features the Glass Sword, which is very much one of these (like a wielded Houchou - see SLASH'Em above).
- Glass swords also used in quite a few of the Sa Ga/Final Fantasy on Game Boy games.
- The dragon form in Breath Of Fire: Dragon Quarter is so powerful it can demolish any enemy with ease, even bosses. But using it increases your D-Ratio, which triggers a Nonstandard Game Over when it hits 100%, and there's no way to reduce it. And it still increases gradually even if you don't use your dragon powers.
- In Galactic Civilizations 2, it is possible to 'get lucky' and find a rare Precursor battleship early on which is generally much stronger than anything currently out there. However, between fleet limits (a player at that point can generally only afford to field -only- that ship in a given battle) and a rather adaptive AI, those ships may be held in reserve until they get surpassed by normal researched ships. Ironically though with the proper civilization traits, one can end up finding quite the number of such ships very early on.
- Truth In Television: Chaff was invented independently in WW 2 by both the British and the Germans. Neither used if for fear that the other would reverse-engineer it and be better able to bomb their cities.
- The GEP gun in Deus Ex is offered as an option to the player at the start of the game. Good enough to take out sentry robots with one rocket, it takes up a giant 8 out of 30 inventory slots but ammo for it is rare.
- Deus Ex plays with this a lot, really. The concept of resource management runs strong enough that a smart player will be able to keep stockpile while one that rushes headlong into combat can find ammo a bit too scarce for comfort.
- HE ammo for the Assault rifle later on in the game is partially susceptible to this, as while it offers Heavy Weapon power for a Rifle specialist, ammunition is fairly rare.
- Don't forget throwing knives. There's, like, a dozen in the whole damned game. And it's a subversion because they're not too awesome. They're THROWING KNIVES. On high enough difficulty, they don't even kill on a headshot.
- zOMG! has the power-ups (Superchargers to restore partial health & stamina, and Ring Polishers to temporarily increase the strength of your rings). Players get a couple of these from early quests in order to try them out. You can buy more, but the cost is in Gaia Cash, which requires spending real money (as opposed to Gaia Gold, which you can earn in at least a hundred different ways). Therefore, the power-ups earned as quest rewards can become Too Awesome To Use. Recent updates have attempted to mitigate this: power-ups are now rare loot drops, and power-ups bought from the store can be resold on the site's marketplace, which uses Gaia Gold as its currency.
- Rare literary example: Focus of the plot in the short story That Hell-Bound Train by Robert Bloch. A man makes a Deal With The Devil for his soul after he dies, in exchange for a stopwatch that will stop time, in order to live at the moment of his greatest happiness forever. The Devil agrees, knowing that no human would ever use it, always waiting for a better moment. It doesn't quite work out that way.
- Bunny Must Die has both Bunny and Chelsea dolls. Bunny dolls are optional uses when Bunny bites the big one, and can reload the entire room with Bunny at full health. Chelsea dolls are automatically used when Chelsea gets slagged, and restore Chelsea to full health and Mana. Naturally, players will preserve as many of both of these as possible for the final boss battles in each game - Bunny with Chelsea, and Chelsea with the final devil and Bunny.
- The Samurai class in Final Fantasy Tactics has the ability to unleash area attacks from the different katanas available in the game. However, using them in this fashion had a chance of breaking them. While some of the weaker katanas were easily purchased (including, fortunately, one that restored allies' health), the most powerful ones were available only as rewards in battle (or via stealing from enemies). This is only a partial example - while you could just equip said katanas and use them for melee attacks to your heart's content, the special attack (which could break the katana) wound up never used.
- A minor example in Diablo II are the jewels and runes, items that can be put into special "socketed" items for stat bonuses, but can only be used once. They are just rare enough, and special items with stat bonuses drop regularly enough, that it makes one hesitant to use them instead of just waiting for another special item to drop.
- In Ladder tournament play the object is to get the highest level runes, which ever remain Too Awesome To Use. The player often faces the dilemna of whether to create a powerful runeword for survival now or hoard the runes to transmute to higher runes later.
- Then there's the question of finding the correct BASE item for it. "I can finally make a Breath of the Dying! But I only have an ethereal Colossus Blade, I need an ethereal, superior Berzerker Axe...". Of course, this is what happens when there are literally dozens of items which are each so rare that many-year players frequently never find any of them in the first place, many of which have to be COMBINED to yield results...
- Another example is the quest rewards that let you imbue and socket an item.
- One thing that complicates the decision of whether to use a gem is the fact that three gems of the same type and quality can be transmuted into a better one. Then again, many of the gem augmentations lose their effectiveness on Nightmare and Hell, especially when items have unique effects that cannot be obtained through socketing.
- In 4X game Space Empires V there is a special Ancient Ruins tech you may find if you colonise a planet, called Shield Imploder. It will bring down the enemy shields and cause damage to the enemy ship (Best description is the Breen weapon in DS 9), however it is rather weak at first, but eventually it will destroy with one shot ships relying on shields. So you end up keeping it secret so as not to let other players know you have it. A game can actually end before you get to the stage where it is a one shot kill weapon. Meanwhile it would have been quite good as it is to instantly remove enemy shields if you hadn't wanted to keep it a secret for later.
- The dual shotguns of the latter two installments of the {{Marathon}} trilogy, which would use up even a maxed-out load of ammo in a matter of seconds. And reduce anything in the game to a bloody pulp even faster.
- EVE Online has several extremely limited-run ships that were only handed out as a result of one-time events. Since being able to say that you destroyed one of the five, say, Imperial Issue Apocalypses in existence is cause for immense bragging rights, the result is that these ships sit in their owners' hangars, never actually being flown.
- In fact, four out of five Impocs have been blown up, making the last one a museum piece.
- Splinter Cell: If you didn't realize you could use the Sticky-Cam to knock out people, you'd end up hoarding Sticky-Shockers and Airfoils right past the point where they'd be useful.
- In the second and third Jak And Daxter games, it took so long to charge up your Dark Eco meter to use your Dark Jak Super Mode, and you could use up your entire meter in one kill-everything-on-the-screen spray of purple lightning (the same applied to the Peace Maker, a BFG lightning-death-cannon-thing due to its extremely low ammo capacity). As a result, it was extremely rare that you'd bother using either...until the end of Jak III, in which the end boss was kind enough to provide light and dark vents, permitting you to Super Mode with impunity.
- Odin Sphere averts this trope nicely (and it is so difficult that if the player refuses to get rid of their Too Awesome To Use attitude, it makes the game much harder than it needs to be). The only consumable items worth using are food and potions. Food is used mostly for HP Experience so it is often used immediately instead of being saved for healing purposes (and the best food is purchased in restaurants and eaten automatically). Every type of potion can eventually be made by the player and the ingredients to make them are plentiful (the exception being potions that require Troll Molars, but those aren't used for combat). Furthermore, inventory space is very limited to further discourage item hoarding.
- Zombies Ate My Neighbors has a flamethrower located in a hidden alcove. Despite being the strongest weapon in the game, the flamethrower is unique, only has 400 ammo and is best saved for the final boss. Other rare items, like Red Potions and Pandora's Boxes, may also qualify.
- Star Wars: Rebellion had the Death Star if you played as the Empire. Though costly and time-consuming, building one immediately helped your popular support, but if it left the sector, all the planets would slightly favor the Alliance. Furthermore, if you destroy a planet or if your Death Star is destroyed, you lose popular support throughout the galaxy. But if you've found the Alliance headquarters and have already captured Luke and Mon Mothma, it's a quick win.
- Conversely, the Alliance had Luke: High in all stats except Diplomacy and Force-sensitive, his Force powers meant he could level up with a certain number of missions. If Vader or Palpatine were present, it would be that much quicker. (In fact, if you have Palpatine under blockade, you can have Luke powerlevel by sabotaging everything on the planet, and then abducting Palpy.) But if Luke encountered Vader or Palpatine, there was a chance he'd be captured instantly, one third of the Imperial victory conditions. But you need to encounter Vader to learn that Leia's Force-sensitive.
- The Earthshaker missiles in Descent II. You'll need most of them for the Final Boss.
- The Random Joker cards in Kingdom Hearts Chain of Memories. Exceedingly rare, and one Random Joker fits any critera for opening a door. If you manage to get one, you'll probably end up saving it until you reach the Final Boss, just in case you find a door with an even more insane requirement.
- 0 world cards (open doors of any less than or greater than value, as well as doors with a 0 value) count to a slightly lesser degree, as players may want to save them for 0 doors rather than use them to easily open other types of doors.
- Legend Of Dragoon manages to avoid this by providing an inventory with only 32 spaces, and combining with VERY limited magic. If you want to attack all enemies, heal, or buff, you either have to use your limited supply of magic (Replenishable by items, of course), or use those items. Unusual in that the attack items were actually magical, and based on a characters magic stat. The game also has several infinite use items (That can only be used once a fight), though they are mostly support effects.
- Then there's the Psychedelic Bomb X - a super version of a unique attack item. It hits everything for Non Elemental damage - and a lot of it - is multipliable like the standard-sale attack items, and it can be used once a fight. Used by Meru or Miranda (Shana's long gone by the time you get it), it equates to an instant-win button for any Random Encounter.
- Averted with Illbleed - at the end of each level, any items except for artificial body parts (used for stat upgrades) are taken away. Use it now or never at all. (This also makes getting the highest rewards at a level's end pretty easy - heal yourself with the stuff you're about to lose until you're at acceptable parameters, then cross the goal.)
- Skies Of Arcadia features the Aura Of Valor which maxes your Spirit pool allowing you to unleash your biggest attacks but you only ever get 2 or 3. The bright side is that the storyline bosses are easy to beat using the gamebreaking Justice Shield move you never need to use the Aura unless you take on some of the sidequests. The downside is that trying to beat the Impostors without an Aura is wandering towards the hard side of impossible and even when you do use it there's a non-zero chance they can recover from it (especially if you were fool enough to use Blue Rogues rather than Prophecy) and even in the best-case you'll blow a hell of a lot of Riselem Crystals to win the fight.
- The question skips in The Impossible Quiz. You do actually need to stockpile every last one to get past the last question. Muhahahaha.
- The Spartan Laser in Halo 3, at least in the campaign. It will kill almost anything in the game with one or two hits, can hit multiple targets at once, and it's also really cool. The problem is, it takes a few seconds to charge up so it's a little hard to actually hit something, it only has 5 shots and can't be reloaded, you only get one two or three times in the entire campaign, and one of those times, you get it for the sole purpose of killing 343 Guilty Spark. So, you probably won't be using it much.
- In the 2009 Wolfenstein the powerful experimental weapons you acquire early will have very little ammo available for scrounging until the weapons themselves become plentiful in the hands of the enemy. On the other hand, the Thule Medallion that gives you mystical powers appears even earlier, and energy refills are literally everywhere. Of course, the Medallion is an integral part of the game and story and you need to use it no matter what.
- The GBA/PSP RP Gs Riviera The Promised Land and Yggdra Union were both FULL of these, since both had limited-use item systems (and even worse, in Yggdra Union good items were sometimes needed to give to certain NP Cs to obtain better items).
- Yggdra Union happens to have two items (Marietta's staff and Nessiah's spellbook) which are literally too awesome to use—your characters can't even equip them.
- The All-Divide in Tales Of Symphonia halves damage that the party receives and inflicts, and while it makes battles take longer, it makes it considerably easier to withstand enemies' attacks long enough to heal. Unfortunately, given how rare they are, most players will save them for That One Boss or not use them at all.
- The Climax Mode Limit Break in Afterburner Climax, which gives you Bullet Time and a Macross Missile Massacre, does not come that rarely, but it's still possible to fall into this mentality as there's a chance you burn it on one enemy wave only for an even larger wave of enemy planes to show up.
- In Thunder Force III onwards, dying takes away your current weapon unless it's Twin Shot or Back Shot, your initial weapons. Less experienced players who are aware of this penalty may find themselves refusing to use the better weapons, out of fear of losing them.
- Real life example: Tamiflu, an antiviral drug that proved itself to be very effective against many types of flu, so the CDC guidelines called for it to be used only when desperately needed so it didn't run out. Only now it turns out that flu is starting to develop a resistance to it, so it might be too late to use it at all.
- In Basilisk the anime, Gennosuke has the best ability of them all — with his gaze he can command his enemies to kill themselves or each other. He gets to demonstrate it early on against some mooks but soon after has his eyes blinded and sealed shut for 7 days, making him unable to use it and rendering him mostly useless for the rest of the series. Liberal use of his ability would have made it too easy for his clan to win the battle. Oboro has her own Evil Eye which nullifies the abilities of any ninja. This too would have given her clan a clear edge in the battle, but she too becomes blinded (though for her it was deliberate so she would not have to fight Gennosuke) for 7 days.
- The Penny Arcade games do their best to avoid this; items spawn randomly and the max of each that you can hold is pretty low, so if you don't use items regularly, they'll just be wasted.
- In Harry Harrison's novel Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers, the main characters encounter a an advanced race that has developed the ultimate weapon. However, this weapon can only be used once, as it creates a giant vortex that sends any matter in its range back to the beginning of the universe, causing the Big Bang. This also creates a paradox where the weapons must be used eventually for the universe to be created. However, the aliens are holding on to it for the most desperate situation they can think of (despite their base being under constant siege by hundreds of warships).
- Deliciously averted in Borderlands. You'll be throwing away or selling epic loot every fifteen seconds.
- Summon feathers in {{Chocobo'sDungeon}} allowed you to replace your partner with far more powerful summon creatures. This meant calling to your aid allies that could take down the game's bonus boss singlehandedly while taking only pitiful damage in return. The downside is that, should they actually die, you lose the feather you likely spent hours trying to get your hands on. A random summon feather takes away that risk but doesn't give you the option of selection.
- Foolishly averted in the TV series The Visionaries. The heroes' and villains' power staffs are extremely powerful and useful, but after each use, the user must go on a dangerous quest for the wizard Merklynn before he will recharge it. Yet, in the course of the show, the characters rarely if ever show a sensible reluctance to use up their hard-won power staff charges. This guarantees the viewer will get to see them going on lots of quests, of course.
- Another Real Life example: Golden/Silver Dollars and 50-cent pieces in the US. They're rarer than normal coins, so people collect them instead of spending them. However, since they're not being circulated, they don't get minted as much, creating a cycle. But why spend that Golden Sacajawea Dollar when you might never see another one again?
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