Mundane Utility / Video Games

• Attempted in Alluna and Brie, via getting lightning elemental Max to try to start a car with a dead battery. Unfortunately, all she succeeds in doing is setting the car on fire.
• The planet Democratus, from Anachronox, is equipped with a tractor beam that can affect objects almost as large as the planet itself. After they shrink the planet and team up with the protagonists, the tractor beam is used to...reach things on high shelves. Or pick up a very hot rock. They can also construct a fully functional (if small-scaled) nuclear weapons program, which they use against opponents.
• Assassin's Creed:
  • In Assassin's Creed: Revelations, Ezio Auditore is shown to use his Hidden Blade for many things, including assassinations, stealth kills, picking locks... and cutting flowers from their stems...
  • Assassin's Creed III, at a young age, Ratonhnhaké:ton (Connor) used his Eagle Vision to win in hide-and-seek. It's even a Justified Tutorial for teaching you it. Also, by the end of the game, Connor will likely have used his hidden blade to kill and skin game far more often than he will have used it to assassinate people. The same likely applies for his grandfather Edward (minus the hide-and-seek).
  • From Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag onward, the evil MegaCorp Abstergo has started using its Animus technology to make in universe videogames. Granted, they act as propaganda for the Templars and basing them on Animus visions might cut down on development costs but still...
  • One of the Letters from Elise in Assassin's Creed: Unity points out that Arno's Assassin Training would make him an unstoppable goatherd.
• Astral Chain equips the player character with Legions, enslaved creatures from another reality, and state-of-the-art Augmented Reality police equipment to help them in their role as the last line of defence for mankind. Both are used for some stunningly mundane work:
  • Normal people can't see Legions or the Astral Chain. A Legionis shares sensation with their legion. Eavesdropping is as easy as hiding around the corner and parking the big glowy blue thing in earshot.
  • The Beast Legion can track scents in a busy city and locate things buried underground. About half the time you'll be tracking down dropped items or lost pets, and the Beast digs up cat food with hilarious frequency.
  • Most Legions hover off the ground, so retrieving lost or stuck items is as simple as a wave of your hand.
  • Chain Binding is used to tangle Chimeras for a few seconds to land some attacks. It doesn't actually hurt and most humans can't escape on their own, which makes subduing a fleeing person trivial.
  • The IRIS provides name and profile information on a person just by looking at them. This can be used to cheat some kids at a shell game.
  • If using a Chimera-sensing camera to take selfies isn't mundane enough, you can hand the camera to a Legion so they can back up and get the perfect shot for you.
• In the Atelier Series games, alchemy can be used for things as fantastic as making a Philosopher's Stone or the components needed to build an airship. However, it is quite often used for things like cooking or simple repair work, as well as making items which help to fight the monsters which plague alchemists when they're out gathering the ingredients to make said items.
• In Billy vs. SNAKEMAN, the power of doujutsu - seeing the flow of magic and chakra in people and things - is solely used to help you cope with fast food customers in a productive manner (i.e. not killing them out of sheer frustration).
• BioShock:
  • The series delivers this by the truckload in the form of the DNA-Altering Applied Phlebotinum ADAM. In fact, its first uses in Rapture were purely mundane, given that it was developed in peacetime; meanwhile, the game itself is crowded with advertisments suggesting mundane uses for ADAM-based superpowers- stirring a cup of coffee with Telekinesis, for example, or lighting a cigarette with Incinerate. However, the whole thing turns out to be something of Deconstruction of the trope: frivolous use of ADAM results in addiction, physical disfiguration, and insanity; the first of Rapture's citizens succumb to the effects and become Splicers were those who overused it for cosmetic purposes, and the rest ended up splicing themselves up in an attempt to defend themselves from them, overdoing it as well. Of course, the player characters are immune to the usual side-effects...because they were produced or modified to be as such.
  • Throughout both games, Electro Bolt can be used to jumpstart doors and malfunctioning equipment.
  • Incinerate might sound like a purely combat-based Plasmid, but it can be used to melt the ice on frozen doors.
  • In the first game, prior to Rapture's societal failure, Dr Steinmann used ADAM for plastic surgery, sculpting his patients- and himself- to the highest standards of beauty. Then, of course, Steinmann went nuts and decided to see how well the human face would handle being rebuilt to follow the cubist style of art.
  • One of Sander Cohen's equally crazy apprentices has taken to freezing people alive with Winter Blast...for the purposes of sculpture. And you become one of them for a time.
  • The teaser-trailer for the second game shows a Big Sister using telekinesis to make sandcastles.
  • At the beginning of the second game, you can find an audio diary of a woman who complains that her husband keeps wasting his money on Gene Tonics to make himself look buff, and considers buying some tonics to sharpen his mind.
  • In BioShock 2, when you finally get around to buying Incinerate, a prerecorded announcement suggests that you use it to light a fireplace for a couple of animatronic dummies; unfortunately, someone's spilled oil all over the floor, resulting in a merry blaze that consumes both dummies. Another announcement in the next part of the room suggests that you use the power again, this time to light a cigarette from a distance; however, it looks like somebody's already tried and failed, because the dummies have been charred beyond recognition.
  • In a rare example of Mundane Utility that doesn't rely on plasmids, the Big Daddies — normally bodyguards for the little sisters — occasionally can be seen performing repairs using the tools they normally use as weaponry.
  • Bioshock Infinite:
    • This game, on the other hand, presents us with Vigors, which give various superpowers much like Plasmids in the first BioShock. But unlike Plasmids, the Vigors have no known negative side-effects. much like Plasmids, however, the vigors were made with Mundane Utility specifically in mind, such as using Shock-Jockey (the game's equivalent of the first BioShock's Electro-bolt) to power a carousel ride.
    • Burial At Sea, a DLC story taking place in pre-fall Rapture shows exactly what life was like in a plasmid-dominated society when people could still think straight. At the start, Booker uses Incinerate to light Elizabeth's cigar, and you also come upon a waiter using the Houdini teleport plasmid to service customers in an extremely efficient manner. There's also a new weapon, a ray gun that makes splicers explode with enough force to clear a room, its intended purpose was a portable microwave.
• The Igniter bloodline in Bloodline Champions burns enemies in the game. However, their real purpose is to teleport around their people's underground city, keeping the torches lit.
• Chest: Tole is the greatest user of the Teleport skill, and he mainly uses it to quickly fetch ingredients from his and Zong's house so that he can cook elaborate meals anywhere.
• In Chrono Trigger, you need to charge this powerful artifact. So you take your time machine, drop it at an early point in history, then go to a much later point to find it fully charged.
• In the City-Building Series, Zeus: Master of Olympus and Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom have Physical Religions where you can entice gods and ancestral heroes to walk the streets of your city. You can then put them to work blessing your buildings (for free materials and/or improved efficiency), helping out the administration of your city, and even catching animals for your personal menagerie.
• Inverted in Civilization: Beyond Earth. The Planet Carver Kill Sat started as an attempt to make a better mining laser, but proved a bit too powerful. The military uses quickly became apparent.
• In The Coma: Cutting Class, the Shade tells a student that finds themselves in the eponymous place that it and the school mirror each other, with something done in The Coma affecting the school in real life. The student Seho Ghil promptly tests the waters by smashing a window and improving their grades. Though a note reveals that this was intentionally just to figure out what they can do with the power, before advancing to bigger things.
• Given a dark twist in Control with the NSC power plant that provides the FBC with most of its electricity. The second Director before Jesse, Broderick Northmoor, had pyrokinetic powers that eventually started to rage out of his control. The FBC built a Northmoor Containment Sarcophagus that was, after one mishap, effective at containing his flames. It didn't take long for Northmoor's replacement Zachariah Trench to realize he had an infinite source of energy on his hands, and, well, as the dead Trench says, "I suppose, at the end of the day, a Director's most basic duty is to keep the lights on."
• Cookie Clicker gives you access to interplanetary shipping vessels, portals to other universes, time machines that let you go to past and future, antimatter condensers that let you turn antimatter to matter, and deals and pledges with elder gods. All of this for what? Cookies, that's what.
• In Cult of the Lamb, the titular Lamb has the Red Crown, an artifact of power from his patron deity, the One Who Waits. While its most important function is as a Morph Weapon, transforming into a sword, axe, or dagger so the Lamb can go crusading in the Lands of the Old Faith and go to war with opposing cults, it can also transform into normal tools like woodcutting axes, hammers, and pickaxes for gathering resources and doing normal chores, for managing his cult's base.
• In Dark Seed II, Mike acquires a bio-mechanical machine gun and a magnetic crossbow. What does he use them for? Cheating at carnival games.
• Dead Space:
  • Inverted. The only actual weapon you receive, the Pulse Rifle, isn't the most useful against the Necromorphs, especially when wielded by Red Shirts who don't know they need to be dismembered. The weapons that are effective are basically tools for maintenance and repairs: the plasma cutter and line gun are usually used for cutting through starship walls and hulls to repair the machinery inside. The ripper, a buzzsaw held by electromagnetism, is used for cutting live power cables without the holder being electrocuted. The Shock Cannon is used for clearing hallways filled with debris in an emergency. Etc. Etc.
  • There's also Isaac's armor, another subversion: in its ultimate incarnation, it's only a little less effective than full-on combat armor (which you get for beating the game), and for a good reason: it's designed for engineers going into extremely hazardous and hostile environments (such as extremely high temperatures, toxic atmospheres, no atmosphere, areas where debris and shrapnel are flying at high velocities due to malfunctions in the gravity plating, etc, etc.), so it has to be very sturdy and airtight. And lucky Isaac, he has a suit of this on at the beginning, since he was being sent to do repair work on a ship that had suddenly gone silent, meaning he had to be ready for ANY situation that might pop up, since there's any number of things that can go wrong in deep space (although it's probably safe to say that nobody was expecting mutant space zombies).
  • Dead Space 3 plays this oh so very straight as you regularly have to use use the kinesis ability to turn simple handles which are clearly within an arm's reach. There is no explanation provided why Isaac couldn't do that by hand. Presumably, EA didn't want to spend effort animating it.
• The setting of Death Stranding is infested with a deadly rain called "Timefall" that causes Rapid Aging in anything it touches. One NPC known as the Timefall Farmer began research along with his wife to see if it was possible for them to take advantage of this property for agricultural purposes. Once you end up helping connect them to the Chiral Network, their studies prove to be a success, as through careful calculation of Timefall patterns and sprinkler systems, they're able to rapidly grow and harvest immense amounts of crops. One of the rewards they give you for figuring this out is Timefall-produced beer.
• Destiny 2:
  • One lore entry reveals that when Mara Sov isn't using the wish-granting magic of her pet Ahamkara for her grand schemes, she uses it to make booty calls. With Lord Shaxx.
  • The technology of the enemy Vex faction is built for versatility, and anything that can hurt you (i.e., most of their stuff you encounter) likely has a non-military purpose as well. Often, in fact, the civilian use is the more important one. Minotaurs, their hulking shock-troopers, are also their architects and construction workers, and are bigger than the average model so that they can contain the processing power necessary to conceptualise the insanely complicated Vex architecture. Cyclopes, massive, immobile gun-turrets, are navigation beacons that coordinate the Vex's omnipresent space/time teleportation. With the exception of artillery pieces like the Minotaur's Torch Hammer, all of their weapons are terminals designed for receiving energy transmissions from elsewhere in space and time and projecting them a short distance, making them powerful communication and construction tools when they're not turned to the lethal setting and spewing plasma bolts all over the place.
• Destroy All Humans!:
  • Crypto, the alien protagonist, is a powerful psychic that can manipulate human minds to his own diabolical ends. What does he use this mind control for when he has no mission objective on hand? Making civilians do the chicken dance for his own amusement.
  • Destroy All Humans 2 features a minigame in Bay City, in which Crypto uses his telekinesis to play a game of tennis with a clone of himself. The "balls" used are actually live humans.
• Devil May Cry:
  • Some Key Items do basic things like opening a door or dispelling a barrier, even if their appearances and item descriptions imply them to have more noteworthy traits and uses. For example: In the first game, there are items that resemble weapons (Staff of Judgment, Death Sentence, Trident, Pair of Lances) but are only used to unlock doors. In Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening, you get to use the Soul of Steel (containing the brave soul of an immortal and invincible hero) to open ONE door, and so on.
  • This is used for comedy in Devil May Cry 5; when a Chaos demon got stuck on some debris, Dante uses its spinning blades to shave his scraggly beard. Nico also developed an entire Devil Breaker, Pasta Breaker, simply for Nero to have a fork to eat with.
• Diablo II has the Horadric Cube, an ancient artifact capable of merging items that has many powerful alchemical applications. You'll probably use it as a small extension to your inventory.
• Disgaea:
  • The art books make a mention of how certain spells, with their power turned down, can be turned toward ordinary tasks. Fire spells were used for making campfires, ice spells for air conditioning during the warmer months, but wind spells take the cake— skirt lifting.
  • Gameplay wise, you can often use your ridiculously destructive special attacks for alternative purposes like jumping over holes or getting enemies out of the way in situations where lifting and throwing won't work. A prime example is using the Martial Artist's repositioning attacks to push enemies off of portals in the Item World.
• In Don't Starve the Old Bell summons the Biiigfoot, a giant foot that destroys everything in its path and causes massive damage. It's also the best way to chop down trees and mine rocks.
  • In the backstory, Maxwell used the Codex Umbra for his stage magic career. This made the Nightmare Creatures rather angry.
• Dragon Age:
  • Dragon Age: Origins:
    • Rods of fire, when not being used by the PC to break into the basement, are used for a number of mundane purposes around the Circle Tower: these include lighting fireplaces, burning peepholes in walls, playing pranks on annoying Templars, and general magical research.
    • According to the in-game Codex, before the creation of the Circle of Magi, the Chantry employed mages exclusively so they could light candles and lamps with their powers.
    • Meanwhile, the Tranquil mages occasionally turn their skills in enchanting and alchemy towards the brewing of ale for the more privileged mages.
  • In the sequel, some team members take it in turns to cheer up Fenris by suggesting non-combat uses for his powers. Isabela thinks he could remove sharp objects from wounds, while Varric leans towards pickpocketing. Then there's Anders' "electricity thing"...
  • Finally, in Dragon Age: Inquisition, the Inquisitor receives a glowing sigil on their left hand that can be used to unleash magical destruction on their enemies, close holes in the fabric of reality, create shields that make the entire party invulnerable to damage, and act as a light source in the dark. In a different quest, a lady asks you to kill a wyvern (a powerful dangerous venomous beast) and bring back one of its glands. Her plan for this rare and magical gland? It's great for rat poison. Orlais also apparently uses it to brew liquor.
  • Solas makes mention of how the best way to explore the Fade is by being more knowledgeable and well traveled. Should the player voice skepticism, he brings up how the Fade reflects the person who travels in it so the more experience you have the more of the Fade you see. He even uses your class as an example, like saying a Rogue Player Character has sharp reflexes or a Mage finds it very easy to concentrate due to their training.
  • A more gameplay-oriented example is a Frost spell, Fade Step. Its intended use is a mage evasion spell (read: panic button). It can also be used to get around places faster. Indeed, if you do this too often before getting horses, you may forget you can summon them in the first place.
• At the end of Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2 the Dragon Balls are used to summon a massive feast to handle the bottomless stomachs of Goku, Beerus and Whis. While the person who summoned Shenron does get called out for using the Dragon Balls for something so trivial, it at least beats having the Supreme Kai of Time cook for them.
• Most of the training minigames in Dragon Creek involve you and your dragon doing chores, such as pulling a wagon, herding sheep, or using its fire breath to heat up a hot spring.
• In Dungeon Crawl, a Wand of Disintegration is very useful for killing enemies but can also be used for tunneling. It's not as good at that as a Wand of Digging, though.
• In Dungeon Munchies, Simmer uses her hell-fire powers to cook meals. Granted, these are magical dishes made from monster parts she slew herself.
• Dwarf Fortress:
  • The game lets you use catapults, capable of squishing half an army if they're tightly packed... to transport stone across the map. Handy for dealing with gulags and hauling of rock, though.
  • It's well established within the community that magma can solve anything, and is especially good for disposing of pesky trash, prisoners, spare rock, nobles, and elven trade caravans. With careful planning, large numbers of cave-in traps, sufficient manpower, and a lot of audacity, it's possible to use HELL ITSELF for much the same thing.
  • Forgotten Beasts can be butchered for meat like any other animal.
  • Drawbridges are capable of smashing almost anything out of existence. They are frequently used to dispose of truly useless objects and people in order to save framerate.
  • Having a vampire in your midst means having a tireless immortal who will go around the fortress looking for victims to suck blood from. The most common solution to accommodate them and keep the fortress safe from them at the same time is to lock them up in a "control room" and have them pull levers for all eternity, which ensures important mechanisms of your fortress are always activated without delay.
    • Another viable use of a sealed vampire is to disaster-proof your fortress. Urist McVampire will always count as a citizen, so your nation and dwarves will always send you caravans and immigrants to resupply and repopulate.
  • The precious adamantine is an extremely lightweight metal which makes the sharpest blades, strongest armor and, due to its abysmal density, ridiculously weak bludgeons. It only makes sense then that one of the best uses for them is "nerf bats" for punishing criminals without hurting them too severely: the hammerer is happy because they got to deliver the beating and the criminal is happy because they avoided the worst of Police Brutality.
• In Elden Ring, the mighty demigod warrior Starscourge Radahn is the most powerful Gravity Master in the setting, capable of feats such as conjuring meteor storms and even halting the motion of the stars, keeping the night sky locked in place through sheer magical power. And that's after his mind has degraded to a bestial state due to scarlet rot infection. Yet for all his incredible skill, the only reason he even bothered to learn gravity magic in the first place was so that he could keep riding his favorite horse he's had since childhood by making himself lighter, after having grown way too big for the poor thing. And yes, he's still riding that horse during his boss fight, despite being so big his leg stumps (he lost his feet to the scarlet rot) still touch the ground despite the creature's best efforts.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • In the series' backstory, Wulfharth Ash-King was the legendary ancient King of the Nords and noted Shezarrine who has died and come back to life at least three times. He was known to have a powerful Thu'um, which he used to accomplish his many great feats. On the more mundane level (or at least as mundane as something like the Thu'um can be), he once used it to "swallow a thundercloud" to protect his army from "catching cold"; presumably, he used the Clear Skies shout that the PC can learn.
  • Morrowind:
    • The teleportation spells Almsivi Intervention, Divine Intervention, and Recall, which instantly move you to the nearest Tribunal Temple shrine, Imperial Cult shrine, and wherever you set your Mark spell, respectively. In-game, descriptions of the spells and comments by NPCs make it clear that their intended use is to quickly escape danger. More commonly, however, players tend to use them for transporting more loot than they can otherwise carry. Since going past your encumbrance limit prevents you from moving, but there is no actual limit to how much stuff you can pick up, you can pile your loot in one spot, pick it all up, then teleport back to civilization where you can drop it and sell it as needed.
    • Sload Soap, a rare alchemical ingredient made from the larva of an aquatic race named the Sload, is also said to be an excellent body soap.
  • Oblivion:
    • Due to the finicky nature of the physics engine, trying to do some interior decorating can prove difficult with the basic controls. The solution? Buy a telekinesis spell. You can now pick up nearly anything and move it at will. So now you can finally stack these books on this shelf.
    • The Ayleid Abusive Precursors had the long-lost ability to capture Mana from starlight in Welkynd Stones and Varla Stones, which are now rare, irreplaceable Emergency Energy Tanks. The Ayleids used them as lightbulbs.
  • Skyrim:
    • The immense power of the Thu'um shouts allows the player to smash enemies with a variety of useful and devastating effects. At the same time...
    • Unrelenting Force lets you fling enemies way from you. It also lets you clear annoying companions and heavy objects out of your path, set off traps, swat bugs to collect their body parts and is probably the best method for fishing.
    • Ice Form, normally used to freeze enemies in their tracks, lets you freeze animals in place to make hunting easier.
    • Aura Whisper, while allowing you to locate and avoid guards or discern if the next room has an ambush awaiting you, can help you find people in large buildings or locate your companions.
    • Whirlwind Sprint can, theoretically, be used to rush close to an opponent, run away from an opponent, or bypass traps. More practically, it gets a lot of mileage by getting lazy, overencumbered players to shops faster.
    • Elemental Fury allows you to swing weapons much faster than you normally could, destroying your enemies with a devastating flurry of blows. It can also be used to mine ore really fast, and since it doesn't work on enchanted weapons, eventually that's all you're ever going to use it for.
    • Slow Time helps you strike with tremendous speed, dodge incoming blows, grab enemy arrows out of the air and extend the duration of crafting potions to make more overpowered gear, not to mention fishing for salmon jumping up waterfalls, the only source of Salmon Roe in the game.
    • Become Ethereal prevents you from both dealing and taking any damage; when you need to get the bottom of a tall cliff, accept no substitutes. It also emits a slight glow, making it a useful (if brief) night vision for stealth users avoiding light spells and torches.
    • Fire Breath, Frost Breath, and Unrelenting Force are the best friends of the lazy fisherman.
    • Clear Skies makes Skyrim's weather itself yield, allowing you to stop impassable blizzards blocking your path, or just to get rid of annoying rain. Or, if it's night, to cause an aurora.
    • Bend Will, which lets dominate even dragons, but all they'll really do is let you ride on them from point A to point B and take in the scenery, and while they will fight for you, unless you rushed straight into Dragonborn you'll likely have learned one or both of the Shouts that summon much stronger dragons.
    • The Skeleton Key is a Daedric Artifact of Nocturnal, and she's pretty pissed about it being stolen. Mercer even uses it to unlock his own potentials. However when you get it, all it does is act as a unbreakable lockpick.
    • The Dragonborn DLC gives you an active power to summon a Dremora butler to serve as your pack-mule.
    • In the Dwemer ruin Raldbthar, shortly after going inside, you can find the bandits that took over the ruin using a Dwemer fire trap to cook meat.
    • The player character can gain the ability to turn into a werewolf, in the process becoming a monster capable of feats such as tackling giants, killing all the guards in a hold, and being able to walk at full speed despite being over the encumbrance limit.
    • Similarly, in the Dawnguard DLC, the powerful Vampire Lord form lends itself to multiple mundane utilities. Not only does it ignore the encumbrance limit, but it also has no time limit and allows faster sprinting than normal, which makes long-distance travel while over-encumbered much easier. The form can levitate over bodies of water, making crossing rivers easier. One of the unlockable abilities, Mist Form, turns the Vampire Lord into invulnerable mist, which can be used not only for combat but also for jumping off cliffs without harming oneself, much like Become Ethereal above. A slightly less mundane usefulness is the fact that while all NPCs will be hostile to a Dragonborn in Vampire Lord form, they will also not be able to recognize him/her unless they saw the transformation before their very eyes. This means that, as long as you make sure you remain well out of sight during the actual metamorphosis, you can use the Vampire Lord form to conceal your identity, murdering anyone you want without racking up enormous bounties on your head.
    • Werewolves and Vampire Lords are immune to all diseases. You could become either one of these powerful monsters for the sole purpose of not getting sick, and never bother to transform even once.
    • The detect dead spell allows the user to see vile undead creatures in pitch darkness or even through walls. It also allows them to see corpses that fell somewhere out of the way during battle that the player may have missed while looting.
• Fallout:
  • Fallout: New Vegas:
    • The Sierra Madre Vending Machines from the Dead Money add-on. According to background information, they are actually molecular assemblers, the holy grail of nanotechnology. Yet according to Dean Domino, it never caught on before the Great War, and they're only used as food dispensers for the Sierra Madre Casino.^note Due to the massive Continuity Snarl this information presented, since whole wars were fought over dwindling resources leading up to the Great War that ended it all, come the next add-on Old World Blues, it was "explained" that the vending machines were an experimental technology made at Big MT and never publically released, since Sinclair paid an arm, a leg, and the safety of his hotel guests to obtain them while Big MT then turned the Sierra Madre into a testing ground for their highly unethical experiments that eventually turned it into the city of death it became.
    • In the base game, one of the cybernetic implants one can get from Dr. Usanagi is one that increases Luck. As the Luck stat is represented as the Courier's ability to calculate probability and affects gambling, it is entirely possible for them to become a cyborg for the sole purpose of winning at gambling.
  • Fallout 4 has a settlement-building mechanic, which leads to the player scrapping surplus weapons and use their components to build all kinds of things, such as scrapping that Fat Man capable of lobbing miniature nukes because you wanted a new power generator.
• The forward aerial attack in The Fancy Pants Adventure: World 3 is normally used to dispatch enemies, but since it extends your horizontal momentum, it can be used as an improvised Double Jump to reach areas with ease that would normally take longer or more difficult maneuvering.
• Fate Series:
  • Fate/Grand Order:
    • If you ask Florence Nightingale what she wants from the Holy Grail, she jokes that she'll use it to wash her hands.
    • In the Okeanos arc of Grand Order, Francis Drake is using the Holy Grail for endless rum and provisions.
    • In addition to misusing the vessel itself some Servants have very mundane wishes. Sometimes it's simple but sympathetic (Mata Hari wants a loving family, Ereshkigal would wish for a friend), sometimes it's deep in this trope (Medusa, perpetually awkward about her figure, wonders if she can wish to be shorter).
    • The first three Halloween events are because Elisabeth Bathory tried to use the Grail to throw a Halloween party.
    • A few Servant interludes suggest that since mankind is extinct in the present, some of your time-traveling missions are to buy supplies.
    • Sigurd has access to primeval runes, which can be used to perform spells from the Age of Gods powerful enough to kill Servants. He also uses them to enchant a pair of glasses to protect his Master's eyes and help them study.
    • Scathach uses Primordial Runes in the first summer event to give herself and the other female Servants beach attire.
    • Thanks to Goredolf's alchemist background, he knows and even invented spells that can remove toxins from meat, boasting he can even "transform spoiled meat into sirloin." A really good ability to have when one's only food source is demonic beasts. da Vinci even notes that such magic would normally be considered mostly useless.
  • In Fate/stay night, Shirou's first act of magic is used to fix a broken air conditioner. He uses Structural Analysis to create an image of what the air conditioner should be, and compare it to how it is in reality, finding the damaged part that way. We learn later on that SF is a facet of Unlimited Blade Works, and that he's been using Reality Warping for home repairs.
  • Fate/hollow ataraxia:
    • Archer and Lancer have a fishing competition. Archer uses Projection to recreate a cutting edge, expensive fishing rod, which he uses to beat Lancer. Shirou, having observed this, hopes Archer doesn't change his name to Angler. In the background, Gilgamesh can be seen with several solid gold fishing rods, presumably pulled from the Gate of Babylon.
    • Gilgamesh uses the Gate of Babylon as a top-notch wine cellar as well as an armory. In Grand Order, his child counterpart is using it as a toy box.
    • Bazett uses Fragarach to cheat at Rock–Paper–Scissors.
    • Rin suggests that Shirou, who can reproduce objects from nothing, make money by forging paintings for the black market.
  • In Fate/Samurai Remnant, Rogue Berserker's boundless strength and stamina make him a formidable opponent. But while he's working for Dayu, she has him help with chores and groceries for the locals by using his strength to carry stuff around. One civilian remarks that she saw him carrying ten bags of rice at once.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Final Fantasy Tactics lets you send some of your army's combatants to do certain jobs, performing better if the job is better suited to the task. The Arithmetician, who uses magicks and mathematics to nuke entire armies from anywhere on the battlefield, is the best qualified for one of these jobs, which involves teaching a child.
  • In Final Fantasy IX, Vivi's fire magic is put to use heating the stove during Eiko's cooking minigame. Earlier in the game, it's used to melt ice blocking a path.
  • In Final Fantasy XIII, you'll come across many fal'Cie, essentially Physical Gods who are responsible for keeping the societies of Cocoon and Gran Pulse up and running, and who occasionally get Chosen Ones to go on quests and grant them powers to do them with. Then, you get to Edenhall and see that some of these mighty fal'Cie have the grave task of...opening doors. As in, the fal'Cie are the doors. A door (bulkhead) fal'Cie is also seen in Gapra Whitewood. It seems that some of them can be very mundane.
  • Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker reveals that G'raha Tia has developed a Zero Gravity spell with enough potency to save himself, the Scions, and a tower full of Matanga from a massive fall. It's brought to light that he was using it during the Scions' earlier library-plundering in Sharlayan, and Alisaie observes that he must have used it to keep silent during his forays into the restricted section. G'raha promptly reveals that he had an even more mundane use for it: reaching the books on the upper shelves.
  • In Final Fantasy XV, Noctis has the Royalty Superpower to store an armory of mundane and legendary weapons in Hammerspace, switching between them as needed in battle. He also uses it as an extradimensional tackle box to keep his fishing gear on hand at all times.
• Fire Emblem:
  • Fire Emblem: Awakening has Lucina catch her sibling using the Falchion to cut apples in their B-rank support conversation.
  • Fire Emblem Fates:
    • In the Beach Brawl DLC, Hinoka's vacation picture shows her using her naginata to cut apart coconuts.
    • Leo uses his legendary tome Brynhildr to grow tomatoes and dig up ore in Nohrian mine tiles.
    • In the Museum Melee DLC, Xander mentions that he does not want see his legendary sword Siegfried used as a "glorified whisker shaver." Which is hilariously hypocritical, as he has no problem using it to follow Leo's example and dig up ore from Nohrian mines.
    • Female Kana uses her ability to turn into a dragon to quickly dig a hole during a game of hide and seek, letting her beat Asugi.
    • If Saizo ends up marrying a female Avatar, he mentions in his C Support with his son Kana that he gave his wife a magic whistle that emits a sound only he can hear. It was originally created for the Hoshido Royal Family as a tool to summon bodyguards, but he says that she'll use it to get his help carrying heavy objects or when she wants sugar for her tea.
• In Galactic Civilizations II, Terror Stars: Awesome, but Impractical Star Killing battle stations, capable of annihilating entire civilizations one star system at a time — and of turning useless, uninhabitable planets into Asteroid Thickets that you can mine.
• In Genshin Impact, the inhabitants of Teyvat can be blessed with a Vision, a magical focus that allows them to channel the elemental powers of fire, ice, electricity, water, air, stone, or nature, if they can prove themselves worthy of attention from the gods of their world. The gods aren't too discerning in who they bless with these powers, so they often fall into the hands of people who have no use for them or use them for mundane purposes more often than self-defense; Xinyan, for instance, use her Pyro Vision as a means of producing pyrotechnics to enhance her musical performances.
• God of War:
  • In God of War III, Kratos rips off the head of Helios, the god of the sun...and uses it as a makeshift flashlight.
  • The opening scene of God of War (PS4) shows Kratos use his main weapon, the Leviathan Axe, a frost-enchanted axe created by the same blacksmiths who made Mjolnir, as an ordinary woodsman's axe. He then uses his godly Super-Strength to carry the fallen tree in one arm.
  • A conversation with Mimir in God of War Ragnarök reveals that Kratos has tried to use the Blades of Chaos to cook. Apparently, the blood just ruins the food.
• Golden Sun:
  • A lot of Psynergy falls into Utility Magic, but some spells simply have Mundane Utility. Whirlwind can be used to clear away vines obstructing goals (or set dangling chains/vines/ropes in motion for some swinging); Frost can be used to bridge gaps by turning a puddle of water into a giant ice pillar; Growth can be used to turn random sprouts into climbable vines.
  • In The Lost Age, a baby girl in a house in Contigo can be seen using Whirlwind to cool off in the hot weather.
  • Dark Dawn's version of the Sol Blade explodes into fire, calls meteors from the heavens... and opens the door to the bonus dungeons.
• Reapers in Grim Fandango carry around huge foldable scythes that are meant primarily for freeing souls from their dead bodies. Which Manny does about once or twice in the entire game. Every other time he whips out his scythe, it's used as everything from a hook to a circuit component to a door bar. The possibility of using scythes as weapons gets brought up at one point, but Manny is obviously not very good at this. Subverted in a scene near the end where Manny's scythe is utilized for literal reaping, cutting flowers to uncover Salvador's body - in dramatic slow-motion, no less.
• Dizzy's attacks in Guilty Gear are named after the various nonviolent uses she came up with for them. "This Was Used For Fishing", "This Was Used To Get Fruit From Trees" and the like. She doesn't want to fight, but her wings have no such compunctions.
• In Half-Life 2, Alyx says that the Gravity Gun was originally designed for handling hazardous materials, but they mostly use it for heavy lifting. Gordon later repurposes it as a weapon. It also makes a pretty mean mine sweeper. Of course the very first thing Gordon uses it for is playing fetch with Dog.
• In Halo Wars 2, the Spirit of Fire's crew intend to use a Halo, one of the most advanced weapons in existence, as a radio relay.
• In an optional scene for Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2, Neptune finds herself just barely too short for an amusement park ride she wants to go on, so she transforms into her superpowered HDD form to get the height needed to ride it. It goes off without a hitch, aside from the fact that in her HDD form she's less Genki Girl and more Lady of War, ruining her enjoyment of the ride. She did get some interesting reactions form the other riders, though. After all, wouldn't you be shocked to be riding alongside a Physical God?
• House Flipper's Cyberpunk Flipper DLC adds a new tool. It's a flamethrower. Used for cleaning trash.
• During the Wits Path of Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Indy finds a mysterious artifact capable of generating a sizeable burst of electricity: almost immediately afterwards, he uses it as a substitute for a car battery.
• In the inFamous series, protagonist Cole MacGrath frequently uses his powerful electric abilities to recharge batteries and other electronics. Hell, Cole and his best friend Zeke tried to set up a business after Cole discovered his powers and the quarantine was set up where Cole would charge up batteries in exchange for food. This backfired because people were naturally terrified of his powers.
• It's entirely possible in Jak II: Renegade and Jak 3 to use a gun to open boxes. If you've activated infinite ammo, you can use the tank-killing lightning-bomb gun to crack open crates.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Eyes of Heaven: DIO uses The World to pull out his chair for him at the Café Deus Magots.
• Journey to the Savage Planet uses Nano Machines to make nutrient paste taste good. While it comes out as a purple goo, once activated, it reconfigures into real (if occasionally disgusting) food. It has four trillion flavors. This could be done just as well by simply flavoring the paste with additives in the same way candy is, but hey. The specific brand of nutrient goo featured ("Grob") is noted to be 4th Best overall, so there's probably more expensive nutrient pastes available that never rolls snake eyes and ends up looking and tasting like deep-fried shit.
• In Kartia, the cards which are used for devastating magical attacks and creating weapons and armor can be used for pretty much everything else, from transforming into cleaning implements, to transforming one into a tea cup, and the second into the tea itself. Think I'll stay with the leaves myself.
• Kerbal Space Program plays around with this, mentioning that certain low powered engines can be used as a BBQ or that a rocket fuel tank is not a swimming pool frame found on the back lot. It makes sense considering a lot of the parts are either stated or implied to have been cobbled together from scrap, and thus, feels very appropriate when said rockets fail catastrophically. Never mind the way players abuse the parts to fit different purposes:
  • service bay - meant for storing hardware - makes the smallest cockpit once you install a command seat inside
  • Bind two basic reentry capsules together, use their reaction wheels - you have a rover/roller to travel over land
  • The tiny "Spider" rocket engines are often used as hinges due to their attachment flexibility
  • Jet engines are used as ballast in rovers, capable of bringing the vehicle's center of mass below ground level, improving turn stability
  • The big solid rocket boosters are used as structural elements - long, thin inflexible tubes, quite light after solid fuel is removed.
  • Radial air intakes for jet engines are used as water skis for hydroplanes thanks to their impact durability and extreme hydrophobic properties.
  • The "shock cone" air intake is used in rockets that don't require it, simply because it has less air drag than any standard nose cones.
  • Before introduction of dedicated radiators, airplane wing segments were used as radiators for nuclear engines
  • Airbrakes can be used to mechanize a cargo ramp.
  • Mining drills can double as retractable lander legs
• Kingdom Hearts:
  • In Kingdom Hearts, one treasure chest can only be reached by using the Graviga spell to pull it down from a height.
  • The act of opening treasure chests itself is mundane, considering all of the things a Keyblade is capable of doing aside from being able to open any lock; be it physical or otherwise.
  • The Keyblade's ability to unlock or lock anything is attempted on normal doors a few times. A cutscene in Kingdom Hearts χ has the Player Character trying to use the Keyblade to open the White Rabbit's house door after the Rabbit loses his house key, and Sora himself uses the Keyblade at least twice to just lock doors.
• In one 4-koma◊, Kirby gets the Fire ability... and uses it to cook food. It's also worth noting that in the games themselves, abilities such as Sword and Cutter are very useful for cutting ropes and grass.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The Master Sword. The fabled Blade of Evil's Bane. Forged and blessed by the Goddesses to defeat the vilest demons and sorcerers that may threaten the world. Lawn mower.
  • VG Cats plays with this.
  • In The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks, Link can use the powerful Spirit Train to carry passengers and cargo as well as travel across the landscape fighting evil. He also has a monopoly on the rail trade because he's the only train out there that isn't possessed by demons. The train rails are also the chains used to bind an powerful demon.
  • In the Japan exclusive Spin-off game "Navi Trackers", Tetra uses the awesome, ancient magic of the kingdom of Hyrule to...split Link into four and play a game of tag with them. A really complicated game of tag, but still, a game of tag.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask has the Fierce Deity's Mask, the reward for 100% Completion that makes all boss fights a joke. In the 3DS remake, it also gives Link the strength to reel in huge fish in the Fishing Minigame. (You can use the Goron Mask too, but this is much more fun).
  • The Rito of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker use the power of flight, which is granted to them by climbing a mountain and obtaining a scale from a dragon, to deliver mail.
  • And in The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, you can use the Gust Bellows for house-cleaning.
  • In The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds, Link will sometimes use his Fire Rod in one minigame in place of a baseball bat.
  • In The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the Rito, the resident Bird People of Hyrule who can fly just about anywhere they want, use the feathers they molt to stuff soft and incredibly comfortable beds and to craft super-insulating armor. Also, the Gerudo Champion Urbosa has a magic electrical attack that she uses at one point to prank Zelda by calling down a lightning bolt in the distance to wake the latter.
    • Some of the weapons have secondary uses depending on their element or characteristics. For example, the game's Flaming Swords can be used to warm yourself, melt ice, and so on. Likewise, the effective indestructability of the Master Sword means it can be used for mundane tasks such as cutting down trees or splitting open mineral deposits without spending an inventory slot on a dedicated tool or wasting the durability of your other weapons.
    • The bombs you get at the beginning of the game? Those make for excellent forest-clearers, especially since the cooldown is a fraction of a second, and this way, you don't use valuable weapon durability. Probably not the use the Sheikah intended. Also great for fishing without using arrows!
  • The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom: The Recall ability is used to reverse time for an inanimate object. It was first used by queen Sonia, who is shown in a cutscene using Recall to place a teacup back on a table after it had been accidentally knocked off.
• LEGO Dimensions: Jay (of Ninjago) will occasionally grumble when called in about the possibility of being summoned just to use his command of lightning to hot-wire cars. Doesn't stop him offering to give Cyborg of the Teen Titans a free recharge, though.
• In Marvel vs. Capcom 3, Mephisto attempts to tempt Dante with the idea of a family reunion in the latter's ending. Dante's response is to threaten the demon by blowing off his head if he doesn't give him a way to have free electricity for a year.
• Mass Effect:
  • According to the Cerberus Daily Newscast, the krogan's natural strength and speed makes them extremely good North American football players. North-American-Union-Rules apparently allows nonhuman players to compete. Or at least have an alien league based on their rules. And now it's...real?
  • Biotics will think nothing of using their powers to retrieve minor objects. Subverted in Kaidan's backstory, where they were forced to do this by their Drill Sergeant Nasty. Kaidan mentions his girlfriend getting her arm broken for picking up a glass of water - "she just wanted a drink of water without getting a nosebleed."
  • Omni-tools can be used to flash-forge knives, launch balls of burning plasma, fire electricity, flash freeze enemies, launch combat drones, apply medical care, analyze threats, launch grenades...and to play music and check email. It's like a weapons grade smartphone. More than once, they even get used as flashlights.
  • Kasumi uses her tactical cloak to steal the most priceless art treasures in the galaxy...and to spy on her crush, Jacob Taylor. She also uses it to walk through the CIC without being ogled by one of the security men.
  • The eponymous mass effect fields are used for an astounding array of purposes, from FTL to weapons to defenses to propulsion...to, according to Specialist Traynor, dental hygiene. Her toothbrush uses tiny mass effect fields to massage the gums. Amusingly, in the Citadel DLC, the fate of the entire universe actually hinges on Traynor's toothbrush saving the Normandy.
  • During the Firewalker DLC for the second game, Shepard recovers an Prothean Orb which appears to use Hammerspace to shrink itself from over 20 metres in size, right down the size of a basketball. What does Shepard do with this priceless, fifty-thousand year old relic? Use it as a table centerpiece in their quarters, what else?! Considering it's not returned along with Shepard's other things in 3, one can assume that the Alliance R&D team that retrofitted the Normandy was highly irritated by Shepard's casual use of archaeological artifacts as high-tech paperweights.
  • In Mass Effect 3, Javik claims that in his Cycle, Protheans used their biotic abilities to flense the food from their teeth.
    Wrex: Man, your Cycle sounds like crap!
  • Citadel also mentions a sport called biotiball, which from the sounds of it is basketball with biotics. Asari largely have a lock on the sport, but humanity has several well established teams despite their oldest biotics being 32-33 at the start of the series.
  • Also in Citadel, Jack reveals that as a side effect of her overcharged biotic abilities, she's immune to hangovers no matter how drunk she gets.
  • From Mass Effect: Andromeda:
    • The Cardinal, like all kett Ascendants, has a teleportation device which she uses to avoid attacks, get the drop on enemies or... hurry across the room.
    • In one sidequest, you can use your hyper-advanced Pathfinder AI to cheat at poker.
• Mega Man:
  • The Japanese version of Mega Man 7 (Rockman 7) has Roll suggesting to her brother that he use the weapons he obtained from the Bosses as tools for housework, as seen here. Highlights include using the Burning Wheel for a barbecue, the Slash Claw for trimming the garden, and the Thunder Strike to save up on their electric bill...
  • Megaman And Bass has Flash Man's entry in the robot database describe that he uses his power for non-combat purposes too: spying on women in the shower in the Japanese version and pulling pranks in the English version.
  • Also, Mega Man's Variable Weapons System is actually an inversion. Since he was originally a housekeeper robot, said system was devised as the Variable Tool System, to be used to replicate normal household tools. Only in his conversion into a fighting robot was the system adapted for combat purposes.
  • It's suggested that the majority of Robot Masters were intended for civilian jobs and got retrofitted after the fact, creating some overlap with Super-Powered Robot Meter Maids. Guts Man's Super-Strength is obviously helpful for combat purposes, but it's also really useful for construction and civil engineering. Some material suggests that certain robots go rogue or choose deactivation precisely because their abilities don't really lend themselves to peacetime.
  • Much of the gameplay of Mega Man ZX revolves around Biometals, Transformation Trinkets that anchor the souls of legendary heroes and allow those attuned to them to transform into those heroes and unleash their power. They can also be used as CD players.
  • Mega Man Star Force:
    • Geo Stelar can merge with an alien to access the Wave World and transform into an intangible Energy Being made mostly from computer data. When not using his powers to save the world, he uses them to fix malfunctioning computers and TVs by putting the responsible viruses to the sword. He has also used them to gain entrance to his own (locked) hotel room, and dedicates a ridiculous amount of time to hacking into the private and theoretically secure data of random people on the street, figuring out how best to help them, and then running out and doing that in the hope of getting money, cool battle cards or more HP. He's also a one-man global postal service and one episode of the anime is spent delivering packages all over the city when they're all mistakenly delivered to his house.
    • This is invoked in the third game - Ace asked Geo to stay behind for a briefing with him while his friends took a flight to Alohaha, the intent being that he can use the world-spanning Astro Wave to catch up with them. Geo and Sonia also use it so the latter can elude a storm of fans.
• Metroid Prime 3: Corruption has a creative use of the powerful Plasma Beam. In previous games it was your Infinity -1 Sword, capable of tearing through hostile creatures quickly, and second only to weapons found during the final bosses. It turns out if Samus lowers the power and focuses it on a small point, she can also use this item as a welding torch to fix broken electric panels.
• Minecraft:
  • Want to have an awesome looking fireplace that will never burn out like wood does? Get some Netherrack from the Nether, it turns out that the landscape features of hell itself make fantastic pseudo-firewood.
  • A bucket of lava can be used as fuel for a furnace, and is naturally the best fuel source in the game.
  • Other common examples include using molten lava as a garbage disposal, using redstone torches (basically never-depleting batteries) for mood lighting, using the teleportation powers granted by Enderpearls to climb out of holes, and using the peculiar dimensions of the aforementioned Nether for rapid transportation.
  • Trapped chests can be used as the Schmuck Bait trigger for an elaborate Death Trap, or in complicated redstone mechanisms to sort your inventory. Also, since mixed trapped and regular chests don't merge together into large chests, the game lets you set them directly next to each other.
• Mortal Kombat 11: Friendships often feature the Kombatants' powers and abilities for funny mundane purposes.
  • Kano uses his eye laser to light a barbecue grill.
  • Fujin uses his wind powers to fly a kite. Then he gets dragged by it when it gets too windy.
• Mutant Football League:
  • It features a wide variety of freakish species using their many natural talents, weapons and bloodlust in the service of playing American Football. Alien criminal scum dumped on the living hell known as Earth? Play football. Bitten by a radioactive wolf and mutated into a rabid lycanthrope? Play football. Self-aware war machine with no wars left to fight? Play football.
  • Hellspawned Demons deserve special note as many of them honed the craft of spinning intricate deals during their centuries of service to Satan himself, which they now use to negotiate the best contracts in the league. Additionally, the ability to access Hell directly means that players killed on the field can be brought back to life by wiring the Prince of Darkness a wad of cash.
• All over the place in NetHack. In just one of many examples, a good use of the spell Stone to Flesh would be to transmute a boulder into a huge chunk of meat.
• Neverwinter Nights:
  • In the original Neverwinter Nights:
    • How do you open a locked chest if you're a mage? Do you hire the annoying little halfling rogue? No. You hurl a fireball at it. Or have your Pixie familiar take care of it. Or you can make an Infinity +1 Sword and give it the power of "knock", so that it'll unlock every door and locked chest in the building when you bash one locked door. And if you are a mighty barbarian, you just chop the chest into kindling.
    • Chain Lightning and Epic Spell: Hellball are most commonly used to destroy every locked chest and door in the room.
  • Neverwinter Nights 2: What's the best part of being able to enter and travel through dreams? If you ask Gannayev, it's the extra opportunities for getting laid.
• As a part of a sidequest in Nobody Saves the World, Nobody uses their transformation powers to get past a store's limit of one item per customer.
• In Octopath Traveler II, Osvald uses his ice magic to create a boat that he then uses to escape from Frigit Isle, after the actual ship became off-limits.
• Ōkami:
  • There is an NPC named Mrs. Orange, who uses Shun Goku Satsu (A.K.A. Instant Hell Murder A.K.A. Raging Demon A.K.A Akuma's signature move from Street Fighter) to make cakes. And they're delicious.
  • Ammy herself gains a wide range of elemental-based, borderline Reality Warper abilities. One of the very first things she does with the power to make the sun come closer to the Earth? Helping the aforementioned Mrs. Orange dry her laundry. Most likely, were she not the Goddess of the Sun, the world would've been engulfed in flames. She also uses the Whirlwind skill to help a sushi chef carve up a fish, and Fireburst to light the fire for another chef's oven. And Cherry Bomb levels 2 and 3 just to cheer up the pyrotechnician.
• Panzer Paladin: The good ending has android girl Flame use the Humongous Mecha Grit as a construction worker to help rebuild the Earth's destroyed buildings, taking advantage of his sheer size and strength.
• Persona 5: The start of Yusuke's Confidant arc is accompanying him on a trip to Mementos, the palace of the entirety of Tokyo... for artistic inspiration.
• In Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Trials and Tribulations, Maya uses her abilities to channel her deceased older sister Mia...in order to have significant enough cleavage to convince a witness to cooperate with them (And an upset Mia says she can't believe Maya would do that, though she plays along). She also does it to pass messages to Phoenix in desperate situations by writing a note, channeling her sister who then reads said note, and having Mia go to be channeled by Pearl and pass the message along.
• The DOS game Pickle Wars
  • Inverted. Salad Shooters are mundane. They also just happen to be the most effective weapon against the pickle invaders.
  • Played straight when the Doomsday Device is said to make good milkshakes.
• Pokémon:
  • Pokémon use their powers primarily for battling, but it's been shown plenty of times that they also use their abilities for everyday living. An example would be in the beginning of the Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire Versions, where your character is moved into their new house by a team of Machoke.
  • This goes all the way back to the first Pokémon games where a Machop was being used to help flatten the foundation of a construction site.
  • The HM Moves are used to perform tasks in the field like cutting down trees, moving boulders, or surfing across streams.
  • Some players have Pokémon used only for HM-moves, known as HM-slaves. As it turns out one of the most effective Pokémon for this is Mew, a legendary once rumored to be the strongest Pokémon in the world, due to its ability to learn any TM or HM in the game.
  • Most Olympus Mons are banned from tournaments, thus you usually use them for unofficial in-game battling and competitive Contests.
  • Black and White's in-universe TV show "Moves for Living" is all about practical uses for the moves introduced in that pair. Some suggestions are little bizarre.
  • Pokémon X and Y:
    • One girl asks you if you have a Psychic or Flying Pokémon, so she can get a heavy luggage she can't reach.
    • A trainer in the Ice-themed gym also suggests using the powerful move Ice Beam, which can take down legendary Dragons, on berry juice to make frappes.
  • Rotom is a ghostly Pokémon with the ability to possess electronic appliances. While it is more than competent in a battle environment (even changing type and abilities depending on whatever it took over), it is primarily known nowadays for being used as a makeshift AI for various smart devices. The Rotom Dex from Sun and Moon was effectively a prototype for the tech, and in the following generations it's not uncommon to see people with sentient smartphones.
  • A number of Pokémon Abilities have quite useful out-of-battle effects: Pokémon with Synchronize have a 50% chance of encountering wild Pokémon (including Legendaries) of the same Nature, reducing the amount of Save Scumming needed to get a good Pokémon. Putting a Pokémon with Flame Body in your party makes eggs hatch in half the time. While Sticky Hold is useful in preventing opponents from stealing or swapping out your Pokémon's held item, it's even more useful for increasing the likelihood of bites while fishing.
  • Pokémon Sword and Shield has an entire system dedicated to this: Poké Jobs. The player can send their boxed Pokémon out to perform mundane tasks for various companies in exchange for experience, money, and items. A restaurant might ask for Fire-type Pokémon to aid in cooking, while a fabric company will hire Bug-types to produce thread for them.
  • Pokémon Scarlet and Violet Because of their injuries at the start of the story, you use whichever box art legendary you have (which depending on version is either a cyborg from an unfathomably distant future, or a dinosaur from a past so distant not even fossil records are left) as a glorified motorbike to get around the world instead of a fighter. Most people just seem to think they're a distant regional variant of the relatively unimpressive Cyclizar (whose identical usage also qualifies them for this) instead of an Olympus Mons because of this.
• Portal:
  • Valve seems to love these. The Portal Gun was originally supposed to somehow be used for shower curtains. GLaDOS was designed as a sentient Anti-Freeze dispenser. One can only wonder what the Companion Cube was meant for.
  • In Portal 2 we have the Propulsion Pudding originally marketed as a dietary aid, speeds food through your stomach before it can be digested. Removed from the market when it was discovered that digestion plays an important role in the eating process, namely breaking down food into easily absorbed pieces BEFORE it is violently expelled from the body. Repulsion Pudding was removed from the market for similar reasons. Both of those could probably be used for real advances, if Aperture Science wasn't utterly incompetent at seeing a logical application of their inventions.
  • Portal 2 features a meta-example in one of the game engine's new features, "world portals", which can link any two areas just like standard portals but are meant to be placed in mid-air, seamlessly integrate with the environment, and can have standard portals shot through them. The result: crazy non-Euclidean geometry similar to what late '90s engines were capable of. What did Valve use it for? Building maps in chunks during early development instead of having to make everything line up. Those maps were all eventually rejiggered back into a coherent Euclidean whole except one, which involves a room that's slightly Bigger on the Inside, but just barely.
  • The Perpetual Testing Initiative demonstrates that Aperture developed interdimensional travel (apparently reliable, at least as much as any of their other products), and decided to use it to get other Apertures in parallel universes to build test chambers for them. This is like having a key that can open any lock and using it to steal office supplies. They did, however, eventually find not one but two universes made entirely of American money, and use that as their own funding.
  • One Alternate-Cave managed to use the interdimensional travel portal to play practical jokes on Cave-Prime, because that Alternate-Cave is apparently evil and a dick. Shenanigans include teleporting in a huge cube of frozen urine (which was bigger than Cave-Prime's own portal, so they had to melt it with hair dryers before shoving it back), doing a human pyramid out of the blue, and stealing Cave-Prime's lunch.
  • Aperture Science as a whole either subverts this trope or plays it so straight that it never uses its many innovations correctly. For example, the company can use cheap panels to generate portals, but only uses these as a test element and decided to construct an expensive system of pneumatic pipes to move things around.
  • The fan-made video Outside Aperture shows Chell living in an abandoned apartment after escaping Aperture, haunted by the memories of the place and living in constant fear of GLaDOS. She uses the portal gun for such things like picking up trash (one above a trashcan and one under the trash) and scratching her own back.
• In the mobile Time Management Game Potion Punch, you use a variety of magical creatures to help you run a shop. For example, in the first location, you have a slew of baby dragons you use to grill fish. Later, you can also summon spirits of legendary heroes to assist you with shopkeeping. For example, one of these heroes is a dragon tamer queen, who uses her powers so the aforementioned baby dragons don't overcook the fish.
• In Project Wingman, a Spiritual Successor to Ace Combat, the Federation deploys fleets of airships towards Cascadia to prevent them from seceding. Unlike in Ace Combat, airships in Project Wingman are much more common, as some airships are used as commercial airliners rather than military combat vessels.
• During one of the training segments in Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy, Edgar Barrett suggests that they use Nick Scryer's pyrokinesis for a barbecue.
• Psychonauts:
  • Sasha Nein, an extremely powerful psychic, uses his tele- and pyrokinesis to aid him in his chain-smoking.
  • You can see a lot of the campers abusing their powers. Nils the Casanova Wannabe can be seen early on using clairvoyance to practice spying on the girl's cabin using a squirrel and an acorn, Milka, an extreme wallflower, uses invisibility to escape from awkward situations, and Elka uses her foresight to look into the future of her love life. And then, of course, there's Cruller's subversion of Comes Great Responsibility:
    Cruller: You have to promise to use this only when it's really important or really, really funny.
• Psychonauts 2 continues the trend.
  • The elevators in the Motherlobe and all forms of travel are done via levitation, and in the main base itself you can probably count on one hand the number of agents who are walking instead of floating around.
  • Two of the agents are a Brain in a Jar that are fully mobile and conscious, and at least one of them debrained herself and put her brain in there because her body needed the day off, with the same casual air of someone choosing to work from home instead of going into the office.
  • There's a pin that makes the Slow Time power invert its effects, making things faster. There's basically no point in the game where this has any kind of reasonable or pragmatic use - its sole purpose seems to be to make the Funicular in the Questionable Area (which normally moves at an absolute snail's pace) go up and down at a semi-reasonable speed.
• In the Undead Nightmare DLC for Red Dead Redemption, the torch is a highly effective zombie-killing melee weapon. Also, it lights up dark rooms.
• Reverse: 1999 has An-an Lee, an exorcist who uses magic and science to give restless and malevolent spirits peace. Once the souls move on and reincarnate, she can harness the magic from that supernatural process for other things, like boiling water, making batteries, or roasting meat. She's especially enthusiastic about that last one.
• The Rimworld mod A Rimworld of Magic has a number of spells and abilities that can be used automatically and outside combat. Your mages and fighters will gain far more experience using their short-range teleport abilities to get around your base than using their abilities in combat.
• RuneScape:
  • The Divination skill revolves around channeling the divine energy of the gods to create do-it-yourself miracles. One of the most common uses is "Sign of the Porter", which instantly transfers items to your bank account.
  • Why does the elite skill Invention require 80 Divination to start? Because you use divine energy to power your gadgets. You are making batteries out of godstuff.
  • After "While Guthix Sleeps", Linza wonders if the Dragonkin Forge could be used to create new items out of dragon-metal, instead of just reusing found artifacts. Her first suggestion is a dragon cheese grater, though she immediately realizes that's a stupid idea.
  • Marimbo's tale of ascending to godhood implies the previous god of merriment possessed the Elder Horn and was using it for drinking contests with mortals.
• Scarlet Nexus: Kasane specializes in using Psychokinesis for throwing knives and environmental objects at her foes in battle. She also uses this power to water a potted flower Yuito gives her at the Home Base, or to carve wooden sculptures by floating both the wood and the knife and manipulating it freely in space.
• In Second Sight, John Vattic uses his telekinesis to restart a generator with a missing starter motor.
• Secret of Mana adds conversations between the protagonists when staying at inns in the remake. Among the conversations is a discussion about how hot and dry the desert is, leading Popoi to summon Undine and have her give them water to drink.
• The Secret World
  • During one of the trailers, The Illuminati henchman Alex McCall uses magic to make the end of his cigarette spontaneously ignite and to telekinetically play around with spare change.
  • In the game itself, Callie James uses her own pyrokinetic magic to dispose of John Galahad's cigarettes before he ends up accidentally setting fire to himself in a drunken stupor. It's also possible she just lights his ciggies when he's in a more sober mood, which is quite a step up from accidentally burning down her ballet school.
  • Akashi of the Jingu Clan is capable of incredible bursts of speed that belie his massive size; when not in the field, he mainly uses this to chop vegetables at superspeed.
  • According to the lore entries, Inbeda of the House-In-Exile set up shop in a bathhouse so he could use the waters in order to scry into the Hell Dimensions - not for the sake of espionage or anything like that, but because Inbeda occasionally feels homesick.
  • Issue #11 reveals that the Orochi Group daughter corporation Anansi Technologies has managed to develop ^note or possibly reverse-engineer a powerful virtual-reality machine identical to the one hidden in the Sunken Library. However, where the Council of Venice uses it to train their agents for front-line combat, Anansi employees mainly use it to play Pac-Man; also, several of them have ended up in trouble with management for using the VR machine for "adult programs" - and making so much mess the janitors had to shut down the entire floor just to clean up all the... residue.
  • The Black Signal AKA John is an immensely powerful Filth entity who's managed to shed his physical body and now exists in a permanent state of Body Surf, possessing Filth-infected minds and seizing control of technology all over Tokyo - and later, throughout the world at large. And when he's not using this power to turn the entire Manufactory against you in Tokyo's dungeon missions, he's using it to waste time in increasingly ridiculous ways, from cheekily sabotaging Masao Tanaka's Emergency Presidential Address to chatting online with Harumi Nakahara.
• Tachibana Muneshige from Sengoku Basara wields a pair of chainsaws in battle. He also mentions that his wife uses them to prune her bonsai trees.
• Senran Kagura:
  • Bon Appetit! has a Secret Ninja Art Scroll that can grant any wish as a prize for a cooking tournament (ignore the Fridge Logic, the guy who set it up admits he did it for a laugh). If it doesn't get used for something ludicrous, it's this trope. Such as Murasaki wishing for a refrigerator so she doesn't have to leave her room as often.
  • The opening movie of Peach Beach Splash has Yumi conjuring up and shattering a pillar of ice to cool a paddling pool on a hot day. This sets the tone for the main game: using ninja reflexes and abilities in a water gun fight.
• In Shadow of the Colossus the path to the eleventh colossus features a trek through the desert to a ravine, followed by a walk a couple of minutes to the east, a climb down a staircase in the cliff wall, a swim across a lake and a long climb up a steep hill...or jumping down the ravine, surviving due to Wander becoming more durable with each defeated colossus, sitting still for maybe 30 seconds while his Healing Factor does its thing, and then facing the colossus, all in the name of laziness/impatience.
• In SNK Gals Fighters, the prize for winning the fighting tournament is a talisman that will grant a single wish. Most of the endings result in the winner wishing for something relatively mundane (Athena wishes for her long hair back, Leona wishes away a toothache, etc.). The most egregious example has to be Shermie, who wishes for a larger hamster cage for her pregnant pet rather than summoning Orochi. Yashiro even points this out to her.
• In Sonic the Hedgehog (2006), Silver, who possesses sufficient psychic powers to lift a large group of cars (during gameplay!) turns his might to...collecting apples.
• One early mission in Spider-Man: Miles Morales has Miles use his newly-discovered ability to produce thousands of volts of lethal electricity within a second... to restore power to his apartment building after it goes out. Had to save Christmas dinner somehow.
• The descriptions of several items in Spiral Knights suggest they can be used for non-combat purposes, such as a helmet and suit that provide protection against fire being usable as a makeshift coffee pot and stove, respectively. Why they would use them for such purposes becomes clear once you realize the conditions the Knights go through typically mean they have to resort to doing whatever they need to survive.
• StarCraft:
  • In StarCraft, a demolition squad carries a nuke to a zerg-infested installation in a large cooling box filled with ice to prevent it from overheating. The box also has beercans. They open up the cans and have a drink allowing the zergs to attack them. They still get the nuke off.
    "Thank God for cold fusion!"
  • StarCraft II contains another cutscene where Zeratul examines some old Xel'Naga ruins, by using his large glowing green psychic energy sword as a torch. In Legacy of the Void, Artanis uses his psi blade to the same effect.
• Stardew Valley allows you to use your sword/dagger/hammer to cut weeds scattered about. This goes one step further after update 1.5 if the weapon has the Haymaker enhancement, which also yields hay from weeds cut with the weapon, to keep your farm animals well-fed.
• The teleporter in Startopia can be used to move any non-organic objects, or store them indefinitely in the pattern buffer. 95% of the time, it'll be used for picking up trash or storing perishable goods.
• Star Wars video games:
  • At several points in The Force Unleashed, Starkiller uses the Force to do things like move around and operate machinery. He is usually in life-threatening situations where he has to work fast. In the second game, he uses Force Lightning to charge up a cannon so it can blow up an attacking star destroyer.
  • Kyle Katarn's Idle Animation in Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II features him using his lightsaber to cut his beard. This requires balls of durasteel, because...well...it's a plasma sword capable of cutting through starship hull.
    • It's the only thing in the galaxy capable of cutting Kyle Katarn's beard.
    • Darths & Droids weighs in:
      Obi-Wan: Some Jedi are known to shave with their laser swords.
      Tion Medon: Yet you have a beard.
      Obi-Wan: Yes. And a head still attached to my neck.
  • Knights of the Old Republic:
    • "We don't need to pay the landing fees."
    • If you have Bastilla and Mission on your team for long enough, Mission will start annoying Bastilla to the point where she uses the Force that binds the galaxy together to make Mission trip over her own feet. It's made even funnier by the fact that the reason Mission is bugging her is to try and get Bastilla to admit to using the Force for mundane reasons occasionally. Like tripping people up people who annoy her.
      "I would never use the Force for such petty and trivial revenge! The mere thought of it's preposterous."
  • In Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, Cal Kestis uses his lightsaber as an improvised light source in dark places.
  • Star Wars: The Old Republic:
    • The Consular and Inquisitor classes have a spell that operates as a short-range teleport. The stated reason is to get them out of danger or teleport them around a battle. One of the most common uses? Having a save point when hunting treasure chests or datacrons.
    • Within the expansion Knights of the Fallen Empire, an oddly cheery montage scene has new allies Koth, Lana and HK-55 retrofitting the Gravestone, a powerful starship. While most take their jobs seriously, all-powerful yet title-fearing Sith Lord Lana Beniko's only contribution is using the mighty power of The Force to stack a random collection of seemingly unimportant crates on one side of a room. And she looks so pleased with herself afterwards.
• In Stellaris, you can research Powered Armor to boost your armies' combat ability. The same powered exoskeletons are also used by your empire's miners to produce additional minerals.
• In Street Fighter Alpha 3, Blanka has a victory pose where he blends some fruit to make a drink. He uses his electrical powers as a power source for the blender◊.
• In Super Robot Wars Alpha Gaiden, Heero decides to use his Gundam's Zero System (a brain-interfaced tactical computer and enemy movement prediction system) to predict where Masaki could have wandered off to, since there was no other way to humanly predict that.
• In Super Smash Bros. Brawl, the cargo-carrying hovercrafts that Wario and King Dedede use are equipped with articulated arms powered, so the trophy says, by magic. While magic is a more common resource in Nintendo world than in ours, one has to wonder if a simple hydraulic rig wouldn't be more practical.
• In a skit in Tales of Symphonia, Sheena asks Genis how he cooks so well. "I always cast Fireball!" While he was joking, Sheena considers the possibility of getting the fire Summon Spirit Efreet to aid in the process. They then get snapped at to stop using their powers for such trivial things.
• Team Fortress 2:
  • All throwable liquids can be used to put out fires. "Meet The Medic" also shows that Mediguns will repair damaged clothes.
  • The Medigun itself is also this trope in action, since the Medic considers healing a side effect to whatever the hell he'd originally invented the Medigun for.
• Terraria:
  • Magic Missile is useful for many, many things. For starters, the missile tracks your cursor and lasts as long as you hold the mouse button down, making it easy to hit agile mooks. The missile is decently powerful, can slip through small spaces that you might not be able to attack through, generates quite a lot of light, and doesn't expire when cutting through plants. Jungle thorns blocking your way at an inconvenient angle? Trim them with a magic missile! Flamelash is the same but brighter and more powerful, and update 1.1 introduces the Rainbow Rod, which is even stronger and all rainbow-y.
  • Any item that emits light particles will be used as a light source. Some people keep items like Gungnir not only as a fast, hard-hitting, long-reaching sacred spear but also as a means to see through walls. Starfury makes glowing stars drop from the sky towards wherever you click; if you're underground, it's a great way to detect nearby caverns. Starwrath is Starfury but with rapid fire. Even gunslingers can get in on the fun once they get an Endless Musket Pouch for infinite bullets, letting them illuminate caves by simply holding down the trigger on a Megashark.
  • With the 1.2 update, the Death Sickle passes through blocks while emitting a faint glow. Equipping accessories that grant burning effects causes the spectral sickle to glow even brighter. Very useful when trying to spot holes and goodies or even when digging up ores.
  • Phaseblades and Phasesabers as well as any weapon on fire such as the Fiery Greatsword or Molten Hamaxe can be used to light up dark caves while exploring. Combined with the Mithril armor which shines for several seconds AFTER a light source is cast on it lets you ditch the otherwise necessary illumination tools while mining.
  • The sparks of light thrown from several weapons when swung or thrown, like the Magic Boomerang and the Hellstone weapons, are very useful for spotting things through cavern walls as you can throw them through the otherwise-solid blocks and see what's on the other side. Similarly, setting enemies on fire will cause sparks to drop from them, which illuminate further down than you can normally do. Light an enemy on fire and look under them as the sparks reveal the area.
  • Flares are not only mundanely useful for lighting up distant areas, but they can light enemies on fire. Not only does this have the effects listed above, but you can see enemies that retreat into the dark. The damage caused by fire is pretty low so it doesn't really work as a damage source by the time you would end up finding it.
  • The Solar Eruption. It's a flail with a good range, lights up a large area and passes through walls allowing it to light up a considerable area. As an added bonus, it's one of the most damaging melee weapons in the game, only falling shy of the Moon Lord's drops.
  • Cursed Flames and Ichor are, respectively, a demonic flame that cannot be doused by water and volatile Alien Blood, and can be crafted into various nasty weaponry. They can also be used to create waterproof torches.
  • The Zenith, weapon to end all weapons, is similar to the Solar Eruption in its regard to lighting up huge areas through walls, and has even better range and area coverage. Its primary use is slicing up any enemies and bosses on the screen to ribbons in a matter of seconds.
• Total Annihilation has the Commander's D-Gun. Strongest weapon in the game, passes through any armour and will kill any enemy - including experimentals - in a single shot. Most widespread use? Clearing out the base area from plants and derelict units so you can build in peace.
• In the backstory of Total Distortion, a mysterious artifact's appearance from nowhere led to the discovery of alternate universes and teleportation. The primary use for this? Instant shipping - you teleport an object to another universe on one end and pick it up on the other (sending living things through the process sends them into a six-week coma, so any other uses took a while to make feasible).
• Touhou Project:
  • Marisa Kirisame has a Mini-Hakkero. It can be used for cooking, and for firing gigantic laser beams. And before you start guessing, she is not a Lethal Chef. Marisa was also noted in the story material for Touhou Youyoumu ~ Perfect Cherry Blossom to have relocated a hot spring with her magic...for indoor heating in the winter.
  • Reimu uses her Hakurei Yin-Yang Orbs as an air freshener.
  • Sakuya Izayoi regularly uses timehax to speed up housework, as well as making the Scarlet Mansion Bigger on the Inside.
  • Alice Margatroid micromanages her doll army, which can wield weapons and launch danmaku, to do chores all over the house, even when she isn't in the same room as them. However, this is explicitly noted as more a matter of pride than practicality, as because she needs to control each doll individually it doesn't make the work any easier.
  • Utsuho gains the power of nuclear fusion and plans to Take Over the World with it. After the heroines beat her, she provides free electricity for Gensokyo, and heating for hot springs. The description of her Light Energy "High Tension Blade," an attack which ejects huge amounts of nuclear energy from the tip of her control rod molded into the shape of a massive sword, notes that she also uses it as a flashlight.
    "...Seriously now?"
  • In Eientei, Kaguya uses her power to manipulate eternity to make the mansion timeless, so the house would not degrade over time, and food would not go bad. Shortly before the events of Silent Sinner in Blue, however, she stops doing it, and begins to appreciate the passage of time in her home once more.
  • As a manipulator of density, Suika can create black holes, grow to giant size and split into hundreds of copies. What does she use this power for? To gather people together for an endless kegger.
  • Even lame powers have their uses; on especially hot summer days, other youkai and fairies who dislike the sun will use Rumia's personal bubble of darkness to avoid the heat.
  • Similarly, in the official manga Strange and Bright Nature Deity, Youmu unsuccessfully tries to convince Marisa and Reimu to stop collecting ghosts in jars and using them as air conditioners.
  • Eirin is an absurdly old super-genius that invented a potion for immortality, as well as who knows what else. After the events of Touhou Eiyashou ~ Imperishable Night she used her abilities to open a clinic, providing medicine for youkai and humans.
  • Yukari Yakumo, youkai of boundaries, uses her Reality Warper powers for transportation. As we learn from an anecdote in Forbidden Scrollery, this even extends to reaching across the room to turn off the lights without having to get out of bed.
  • In the artbook The Grimoire of Usami, the characters use their danmaku patterns to put on a fireworks show for the human villagers.
  • Touhou Soccer, where the girls unleash their unbelievably powerful magic/world-crushing energy beams/Reality Warper powers/whatever...to play soccer. Yes. Whatever they're using for a soccer ball, it must be goddamn invincible.
• Two from Triangle Strategy:
  • Corentin is interested in making weapons using his ice magic, since iron is rare in Hyzante (where he comes from), and it'd reduce their dependency on other nations. Unfortunately, the ice proves too fragile to be reliably used for this... But then Erador and another Wolffort soldier point out another Mundane Utility: ice can be used to keep food and drinks cold, preserving them for longer and making alcohol more enjoyable.
  • Ezana likes to use her weather-manipulation skills to help people, such as summoning rain for some farmers whose crops were in need of water.
• Shiki in Tsukihime tends to use his Mystic Eyes of Death Perception to quietly open locked doors more than kill vampires, poison, brick walls, evil hair or weird things like that. In fact, it's why Satsuki has a crush on him: He used his eyes to cut the lock on the door of a shed she was trapped in. Also vaporized the arm of a national monument statue after accidentally breaking it.
• Undertale: Toriel, a powerful fire mage, uses magic to cook her dinner and keep her fireplace lit. A diner in Snowdin is staffed by fire elementals, presumably for the same reason.
• Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines: Several vampiric Disciplines give a buff to physical or mental attributes, which indirectly improves mundane Skill Scores derived from the attribute. A master of Protean can activate their bestial War Form to become a better computer hacker from the Wits boost.
• In Valheim, the Obliterator is a device used to call upon Thor to strike it with lightning. You essentially use it as a trash can, turning unwanted items into coal.
• In a somewhat meta example, the Wii U's Gamepad can be used as a television remote control out of the box.
• Woo-whee, the stuff you can get in Wild ARMs! Throwing knives, flaming playing cards,watches that reverse time, BOMBZ! These would be awesome to use in battle. But...they're used for solving puzzles (or, in the case of the watch, resetting them).
• In The Witcher video game series, Geralt is able to use the Igni sign to damage his foes, set them aflame to make them flail in a panic, sunder their armor to make them defenseless and ... light torches (even when lighting fires with the "interact" key, it's clear that Geralt is using Igni to do it). This is in keeping with the book series, where Geralt used Igni as both an offensive and a utilitarian technique.
  • The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt features a Magic Lamp, whose spectral light permits Geralt to perceive, and in some cases communicate with, the spirits of the deceased; its glow is also so bright that it's perfectly useful for lighting up dark places.
• World of Warcraft:
  • The Blood Elves, despite being driven to consuming demons to get magic fix, still waste a lot of that magic on things like self-pushing brooms, floating lamp posts, and parties. Also, the Magical City of Dalaran, now rebuilt and flying over Northend, has mages to turn on the lamps at night.
  • You can also get a nice sharp skinning knife.
  • In a rather meta use of this trope, the Corrupted Blood epidemic was studied by researchers at Reuters to better understand the spread of real-world plagues.
• X-Universe series:
  • Inverted with the Split Iguana in X2: The Threat. This unassuming passenger transport can compete with heavy fighters in speed, shielding, and firepower, and can take out destroyers if you can get it moving fast enough. Played straight elsewhere in the series, where you will frequently be using ships meant to fight wars to haul cargo and passengers for cash Factories needing small amounts of very expensive items, in particular, will benefit a lot more from cargo runs by a fast fighter with its weapons removed than by a slow transport that'll only ever fill up its cargo bay by a twentieth of its space. Because NPC factories in the game only ever use cargoes, fast transport fighters also allow yours to nab the precious - and almost always close to sold-out - resources before everyone else's noses.
  • In X3: Terran Conflict, the Pirate Blastclaw Prototype is used in about equal measure as either its intended role (a top-of-the-line Space Fighter) or as an external cargo bay for the Hyperion Vanguard corvette (the BC Proto has just under double the cargo space of the fighter with the next-biggest hold).
• Xenoblade Chronicles 1: in a heart-to-heart between Reyn and Seven, it is mentioned that Reyn once tried to use the Monado to cut vegetables.
• Xenoblade Chronicles 2: the party ends up with more Blades than they can ever use, and so use them to staff a mercenary company. Sending living weapons off to do independent military work doesn't qualify for this trope. What does is some of the shockingly mundane tasks that get asked of the Garfront mercenaries (such as catering a party)... and the specialized skills the right Blades can have (such as the ability to whip up vast quantities of amazing dumplings).
• Zenless Zone Zero has select employees from Victoria Housekeeping Co., a manpower agency that supplies Ninja Maids like maid Corin Wickes or Battle Butlers like Von Lycaon. Both of these examples are seasoned Hollow-diving agents, capable of standing toe-to-toe with reality-warping, extradimensional monsters like the Ethereals, but they're also just as likely to be hired to clean things, run errands, and accompany their clients to events.

---