Uselessly specific superpowers in anime and manga.
- Amagi Brilliant Park: Seiya's mind-reading ability bestowed upon him by Latifa only works once per person/thing he uses it on...and Isuzu plays him into wasting her use. That said, the few times he does utilize the power, it gives him incredible leverage to use in order to help the park out, such as offering to sponsor the soccer game when he reads the owner's minds and how they're struggling financially in episode 11.
- The comedy manga, Banana no Nana, takes place in a world where everyone has superpowers, which range from the typical but powerful, like water manipulation, to the situational but useful, like superhuman leg strength. The title character has the power to manipulate... bananas. If you look at Heart Is an Awesome Power, you'll see that her power is actually the most useful (especially since people with superpowers have to perform a ritual to retain said superpowers. The water-manipulation person, for example? Has to sit in a bathtub for 20 hours a day, every day. The title character? Just has to eat a banana, peel included.)
- Banished from the Hero's Party: While Gideon is a natural-born soldier, he, at least from his point of view, thinks he is sub-par compared to the more accomplished members of the Hero party. However, he did not take into account that he was the most capable and vital of the group, having being looking after them, cook for them, handled information gathering etc. This is how Ares drove Gideon away. This comes to bite him and his party as Ruti is too depressed to be any threat against the Demon Lord and the party had to work much harder without Gideon.
- Bleach:
- The filler character Ryusei "Kenryu" Kenzaki's Zanpakuto's ability is to cover his opponents and their weapons with flowers to paralyze them and make them blunt. Though it has its uses, nobody can take him seriously because of how ridiculous his power looks, and the flowers can easily be overpowered and destroyed by strong opponents.
- The filler villain Koga's power is to control the Zanpakuto of other Shinigami. Now, this in itself is an incredibly powerful ability. The problem is that Koga is a Shinigami himself, and is part of a larger Shinigami military force. Therefore, his ability would only be useful against his allies, and when fighting Hollows, he would be forced to rely solely on Kido and his own basic swordsmanship skills. On the flip side, this power came in very handy when he took part in a Shinigami civil war and later decided to rebel against the Shinigami himself. Why the Soul Society didn't recognize his utility and put him in one of its several special groups that suppress internal dissent (his rebellion is but one of many) is never explained.
- In Canaan, Yunyun revealed that her superpower was having two appendices. In fairness, she is more of a comic-relief character.
- Cardcaptor Sakura: While many of the Clow Cards do have formidable abilities, it's hard to see things like "The Sweet" (can turn objects into edible sweets or make other foods taste sweeter), "The Cloud" (can create thick clouds all over the sky), "The Glow" (can create tiny orbs of light), "The Flower" (can create flowers), "The Bubbles" (can create a mass of soap bubbles), "The Change" (is able to swap the minds and bodies of two people) and "The Twin" (can duplicate objects) be used for anything devastating in battle or stealth. "The Song" is also, in essence, a music recorder.
- On paper, "The Move" sounds like an extremely useful card, given that it has the ability to teleport things from one place to another. However, it can only move one object at a time, it can't move heavy objects, it can't move objects any bigger than a book or pencil, and it can only move non-living items. Given all these limitations, the card is essentially useless.
- "The Through" allows the user to pass through walls, but if they're too thick, then the user runs the risk of being stuck forever.
- In A Certain Scientific Railgun, Kazari Uiharu is an esper like Mikoto and Kuroko, but her power is rather underwhelming: she can maintain an object's current temperature so long as she's touching it. However, she can only tolerate touching the usual range of temperatures a normal human can, and she doesn't seem to be able to affect her own body with it either. She usually uses her ability to keep takeout food warm or stop ice cream from melting. Of course, she's the only level 1 in the series. In the Jailbreak Arc, she temporarily upgrades her power, turning it into full entropy control and allowing her to disintegrate objects at a distance and erase an enemy esper's power.
- Cyborg 009's female member, Francoise aka 003 had superhuman hearing and superhuman eyesight (though she could still use a laser gun). Her powers actually help a lot whenever the team needs to gather information, but it has no use in direct combat.
- Alongside her with non-offensive powers are 008, who can breathe underwater and swim at superspeed, and 002, who can fly.
- Da Capo: Junichi, grandson of a witch, has two powers: uncontrollably viewing others' dreams (which he emphasizes is incredibly boring in practice and only makes him lose sleep) and making Japanese sweets appear in his hands. On the plus side, though, the latter is useful with the little ladies, and he himself remarks that it is a good way to lose weight, since the required calories are drawn from his body. He can't read minds, shapeshift, talk to the dead, or warp reality, but whatever.
- Itzhak of Darker than Black has the very specific power of being able to absorb the Observation Ghosts of Dolls. This makes him very difficult to track and let's him control the Dolls' minds (plus he has a very mild remuneration of just having to write poetry), but in a world full of people shooting lightning and melting peoples' internal organs with their eyes, it's not especially impressive.
- In The Demon Girl Next Door, this is what Yuko initially thinks of her Dream Walker power, but after she uses them to get a hostile magical girl and amoral fox girl to drop the Conflict Ball, she comes to the realization that her powers are a lot more dangerous than she realized. Then Yuko realizes that her relationship with Momo may be built on a lie because she's unwittingly brainwashed her in both the literal and figurative sense. Momo reassures her that she'd have come to cherish Yuko anyway, and she's never used her powers for anything but making other people happy, but a seed of doubt has been planted that probably won't be going away soon.
- Digimon Adventure:
- Gomamon, whose rookie "attack" is to control fish and is only seen actually battling twice over the entire series. Yet this becomes an inversion when you realise that it works in other situations while the Rookie attacks are only effective one time in the entire series (and Gomamon was helping out for that one too, tripping the monster)
- Not to mention Gomamon's fish-summoning power has no end of uses: saving the team from a plummet, functioning as a makeshift raft, pushing an island back to shore, distracting the enemy, saving the 'mons from a net. And it even works when Gomamon is in places like a gym, a swimming pool, or a colosseum in the middle of a freaking desert.
- Gomamon, whose rookie "attack" is to control fish and is only seen actually battling twice over the entire series. Yet this becomes an inversion when you realise that it works in other situations while the Rookie attacks are only effective one time in the entire series (and Gomamon was helping out for that one too, tripping the monster)
- Digimon Adventure 02: Cody/Iori's parter Digimon Armadillomon got hit with this to a degree. In 02, every other main character's Champion-level Digimon had multiple attacks, including projectiles and the ability to fly. Ankylomon was a bulky, slow moving dinosaur who never used projectile attacks, couldn't fly, and had to be rescued by Stingmon in its debut episode. The show seemed to be aware on this disadvantage, as several episodes in the final arc featured Cody using the earlier armor forms, Digmon and Submarimon, since the former could fly, carry Cody on his back while flying, cause fissues in the ground, and shoot projectiles, while Submarimon was a submarine that floated above land (complete with cockpit) and could shoot torpedoes. His next stage, Shakkoumon (which, as a fusion creature, he shared with T.K./Takeru) was more versatile, but still had notable limitations. He could absorb energy attacks to prevent anyone taking a hit and could shoot projectiles and eyelasers, but was also a large, bulky, slow-moving creature with stubby arms and legs. Like Ankylomon, he also failed to win the fight he took part in in his debut episode. The other two fusion monsters on the team however, were faster moving and could use melee attacks in addition to projectiles.
- Intentionally parodied in Doraemon: Nobita and The Space Heroes, a Superhero Episode of the Doraemon franchise. The gang gets temporary superpowers thanks to Doraemon's Upgrading Light, with Gian having Super-Strength, Suneo a Gadgeteer Genius who can create assorted weapons, Shizuka can blast high-powered jets of water... and Nobita can create strings with his hands. Weak, regular string. To play cat's cradle with.
- The Fantastic Adventures of Unico:
- Averted, as The Power of Love enables Unico to turn into a full-grown unicorn and kill a 50-story tall demon by charging through its torso.
- Unico's power to stop all wars is nothing to laugh at either. This power forces the gods to get rid of him because it seriously messes with their plans.
- In Final Fantasy: Lost Stranger, Shogo is excited when he learns that his Stat-O-Vision is the lost spell Libra, but is soon dismayed when he realizes that his version only works on objects and not monsters or people. That means he can't pick out people's identities or monster's weaknesses, and the information he gets is pretty sparse at best. But when he realizes that this same ability lets him combine two items together to create a new item, he changes his mind and learns to use it to greatly improve his effectiveness as an adventurer.
- In Hunter × Hunter, Komugi has the ability to improve rapidly at gung-gi, a fictional board game, and is the only superpower thus shown in the series with no proven combat or support use. That being said, she does, albeit accidentally, put her gung-gi skills to use in such a way as to stir up some respect from the Big Bad of the arc she appears in. This newfound compassion causes him to shift his priorities in favor of the heroes and to hesitate in battle just long enough for Netero to inflict radiation poisoning on him.
- Shippo in Inuyasha: Although a skilled magician, he can only create harmless illusions. He can also transform himself into various other forms, but these transformations only last a limited amount of time. Because of this, his powers rarely have any real use in combat.
- Though the Stands in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure are famous for being utilized in creative and effective ways, despite their unconventional nature, a few just aren't particularly impressive:
- Boingo's Stand "Thoth" from Stardust Crusaders is the first real example of a genuinely useless Stand in canon, with even the "weak" Stands of this Part like Hermit Purple still having some saving graces. Thoth takes the form of a manga that can predict the future... however, Boingo can't control when Thoth will actually activate, and its predictions only cover a very short-term series of events, with no context as to why those events are happening, or what their fallout will be. Despite attempting to exploit Thoth to their advantage, neither Boingo's brother Oingo nor his one-time partner Hol Horse succeed in their missions, with things going so badly that they would probably have had better luck if they hadn't bothered with Thoth at all. Boingo is in complete denial of his uselessness, however.
- From Diamond is Unbreakable:
- Super Fly takes the form of a radio tower that reflects any damage done to it back onto the attacker. The downside is that the User cannot leave the tower's general location, as any attempts to do so will result in the User turning into a metal statue. The only way to get around this is to have someone else enter Super Fly, causing them to become the new User.
- Cheap Trick is quite possibly the only Stand in the entire series to have absolutely zero positive qualities. How it works is that it attaches itself to the User's back, and if anyone looks at their back, they will die and Cheap Trick will attach itself to the person that looked. On top of that, it's actively malicious and will attempt to draw attention to the User.
- From Stone Ocean:
- Highway To Hell is an oddball Attack Reflector, which reflects the injuries the user inflicts to themselves onto another. Note that this doesn't actually stop the injury, it just means someone else gets it as well. It doesn't have any form of regeneration or protection, and it doesn't even reflect non-self-inflicted injuries—effectively, all that it does is make it so that you can take someone else with you if you kill yourself. White Snake managed to make some usefulness out of the thing by giving it to someone who was suicidal but didn't want to die alone, but it still doesn't rise above Monster of the Week level.
- DIO named the weakest Stand to be Survivor, an extremely short-ranged Stand that creates an electric impulse which travels through water and enters another person's brain, filling them with blind Unstoppable Rage and enhancing their combat skills to an expert level. Use it on an enemy, and they become much stronger and totally merciless. Use it on an ally, and they will murder whatever's closest to them, which is probably you. Since the impulse travels through water, it requires either prior setup or a wet environment to do anything, and can't simply target people at will. But on the other hand, it's implied that it's not actually controllable, which makes it near impossible to live a normal life; simply walking down the street after it rains turns into a bloodbath with you at the center. Hell, you can't even use it on yourself! Still, Pucci was able to find a situation where it could be useful: a high-security prison with a recently hosed floor, with Survivor's user inside a locked cell and the protagonist outside their cell with a number of prison guards.
- Kenzo's Stand, Dragon's Dream, uses Feng Shui to point out physical locations of either good or bad luck note . Unfortunately for him, it's also an extreme Fair-Play Villain that insists on explaining how it works and how to beat Kenzo. As he's already a master martial artist, it frequently does more to hinder him than help.
- From Steel Ball Run:
- Hey Ya!, Pocoloco's Stand, might be the most passive Stand in the franchise, to the point that it was commonly theorized to be a figment of his imagination. Its power is simply a steady stream of positive encouragement and occasional advice, making it exactly as powerful as having a cheerleader. Pocoloco being on the world's hottest hot streak though, means he gets a lot of mileage out of positive thinking, especially when Hey Ya!'s advice depends on information that Pocoloco doesn't know.
- Blackmore's Catch The Rainbow is an incredibly versatile form of Making a Splash, allowing him to run across raindrops, create giant water blades, freeze rain to make shields, travel at remarkable speeds, and even meld with rainwater to become an Intangible Man. The problem? All his abilities only work with rainwater, meaning if it's not raining, he's completely useless. And unlike Weather Report, he has no ability to actually make it start raining.
- JoJolion's Starter Villain Ojiro Sasame has the Stand, Fun Fun Fun. Its ability (People Puppets) definitely sounds useful, and it is. However, it has two limitations: it can only puppeteer people if they've been injured, and more importantly, it can only puppeteer people who are physically beneath Ojiro. This means his targets are basically restricted to the people in the floor below him in a multi-story building. Later on, he manages to at least solve the first weakness.
- Magical Girl Site: There are a few magical girls who get blessed with powers that aren't really impressive. Hiroko Shimozono got a remote which causes nausea, and then there's the girl who got a syringe which can erase the last three minutes of someone's memory and a girl who got a necktie which allows her to change genders. Not exactly the most useful tools for revenge, unless you got really creative with them.
- This is the premise of Modern Magic Made Simple: Koyomi can use a spell to make washbasins fall from the sky. She is very good at this one spell, and she does have some serious potential since creating items from nothing isn't beginner material, but this the only thing she can do. Any spell she tries to use, either complicated or simple, will inexplicably turn into a washbasin summoning spell. Then she realizes that she can also turn ''enemy'' spells into washbasin summoning spells, making her a Power Nullifier.
- Yukino Kikukawa's CHILD in My-HiME, Diana, is a Magical Security Cam. In certain plots this is quite useful like the time she uses it to locate kidnapped or missing people and then tell the others where they are, like in the cases of Natsuki and Takumi, but given how everyone is expected to battle to the death, when it's time to fight this turns out to be useless.
- In the setting of My Hero Academia, 80% of people have some sort of power, known as a "quirk". While a lucky few have abilities worthy of a Super Hero, or at least Heart Is an Awesome Power, most people didn't do so well in the Superpower Lottery.
- The main character is a similar case to some members of the Legion of Substitute Heroes, such as Fire Lad or Polar Lad, below. His (newly-acquired) power is not useless at all, being a ridiculous level of Super-Strength. However, as he has zero control over it, every time he uses it he lets off an extremely powerful attack that breaks the limb that uses it. As time goes by he finds ways to use it more effectively.
- His mother, Inko, seems to be a pretty good indicator of what the "average person" has for a Quirk: she can telekinetically attract a small object to her if she waves her hand at it. Jean Grey, she is not — but as she's not a professional hero, she's content to just have a relatively normal life where she can pick up the remote without leaving the couch.
- Katsuki Bakugou's Having a Blast power doesn't fall into this in any way, but the two Quirks that combined to make it definitely count — his father sweats nitric acid (the most he can do with it is cause a small explosion when he claps) and his mother can produce glycerin (so her skin is always in great condition). Katsuki got the best of both worlds — he can sweat nitroglycerin.
- Mei Hatsume has telescopic vision, which is pretty useful in her work, but not so much in combat. Her real power comes from her Gadgeteer Genius nature, not her superpower.
- The Spike Villain can summon blades out of his body... but only ones that are less than 10cm in length. He takes Trigger, an illegal quirk-enhancing drug, to allow them to grow past these limits.
- Minor character Daikaku Miyagi's Quirk just gives him horns. It's actually a problem with his job (newscaster) since they obstruct camera views, so he cut one of them off.
- In the movie, David Shield's Quirk is that his fingers are more flexible than normal. He uses this to reassure his daughter that it's not a bad thing that she's Quirkless — he has a Quirk and it's not like it does much.
- There once existed a man with the Quirk that could only be transferred to another person... and no other abilities besides that, making it functionally useless. Combining it with another Quirk that stockpiled power led to the birth of the absurdly powerful Quirk "One For All", used by the #1 Hero in the world, All Might.
- One of Kirishima and Ashido's schoolmates in middle school was a tanuki-like boy who had the ability to transform leaves into money, but only temporarily. Some bullies try to force him to use his Quirk to make them some money, and don't believe him when he says it won't work (since it would turn back into the item after a while, and therefore easily seen as illegal counterfeit), so the boy's Quirk ends up causing him trouble in addition to being useless.
- All the former users of One For All had rather inoffensive and unremarkable Quirks, such as the ability to float a bit off the ground or the power to summon energy ropes temporarily. This is justified because, All For One killed anybody with Quirks strong enough to oppose him (and of course at this point, One For All hadn't accumulated enough power to match up to him, either). While the powers are unimpressive by themselves, they are useful support Quirks for its current wielder, Izuku Midoriya, who can use all of them in tandem to gain the advantage.
- My Hero Academia: Heroes: Rising has Mr. Shimano's Quirk Cell Activation, which kicks up the healing process of the subject but only on Type B blood, whereas his son Katsuma got the superior O, A and B blood version. After getting his Quirk stolen by Nine, only to find out it wouldn't work with his blood type, Mr. Shimano isn't that shaken about losing it because of how specific it was and not regarding it as special.
- One Piece: Even though Heart Is an Awesome Power is frequently in play, this trope can come up now and again. Word of God is that there are joke powers out there;
- "Iron Mace" Alvida ate the Slip-Slip Fruit, which made her body... slippery. So far, the only uses her powers have shown is causing shrapnel to slip off of her (Causing no damage) and turning her from a Gonk to Ms. Fanservice...oh yeah, and letting her slide across the ground while barefoot. However, this is useless against Smoker's Smoke-Smoke powers, and she can't slip out of Seastone nets, and because she's been Out of Focus for 17 years now, we have yet to see whether or not Heart Is an Awesome Power.
- Filler character Apis ate a Devil Fruit that gave her the ability to telepathically talk to animals. While this does have its uses, it's probably the only Devil Fruit in the entire series that has absolutely no combat ability and does not fit into Paramecia, Logia or Zoan types. Her power is made especially useless when Luffy spontaneously gains the ability to do the exact same thing in that arc. The next member to join the crew, Chopper, also has this ability because he happens to be an animal and his Human Human Fruit ability enables him to speak human languages.
- Bon Clay's Mane Mane no Mi allows him to transform his face and body to match that of anyone he touches. He cannot use this in combat as all of his martial arts training was based on his actual body shape and musculature; another person's body won't perform as well as his own. However, as he and his predecessor in Wano Country demonstrate, a person who can perfectly imitate another person can reshape world politics given the right opportunity.
- Kelly Funk and his Jake Jake no Mi is one that will always come up when a topic discussing the worst Devil Fruits pops up. The fruit only has three abilities; to allow the user to turn into a jacket, take control of anyone who wears them and has access to their abilities, and can change size to accommodate them. However, Kelly hasn't shown the ability to force people to wear him which implies he needs someone willing. The nature of this fruit means that it is functionally useless on its own and it needs someone stronger than the user to be used effectively. Even by One Piece standards, this fruit is so limited to what the imagination can do with it that Oda created the Funk brothers (a duo of assassins, of whom one is well-trained and aggressive but small and weak, and the other is big and strong but a total coward with no fighting ability—the fruit allows the skilled brother to control the body of the strong brother) specifically for it to be of any modicum of use. To make things worse for it, in the Whole Cake Island arc, there's another fruit called the Gocha Gocha no Mi which has similar abilities in merging but it isn't restricted to two people.
- Subverted with Brook's Yomi Yomi no Mi that allowed him to come back to life...once. And his disembodied soul had to manually find his body, which took a year, meaning that his body had wasted away to being a skeleton by the time he found it. At first, it seems to be less combat-oriented than the other Devil Fruits, but then we see that he has a major Healing Factor from drinking milk, and as a skeleton, he's much lighter than everyone else allowing him to run on water and jump incredible heights, and that's saying nothing for his You Are Already Dead sword techniques.
- And it gets even better after the two-year Time Skip; he can use his spirit energy to pull himself together if his bones get knocked apart. Plus, he can use astral projection and channel the chill of death into his blade.
- There's also Gan Fall's steed Pierre, a giant bird who ate the Horse-Horse Fruit, allowing him to turn into a really goofy-looking pegasus, and has no real advantages since he was already a perfectly serviceable mount as a bird. In fact, when Shura knocks Pierre into the water, the Devil Fruit prevents him from escaping on his own.
- Flashback character Corazon ate the Nagi Nagi no Mi (Nagi, meaning "calm" in Japanese), which basically gives him the power to be a...soundless human. To be specific, he can create an invisible bubble around him from which no sound can escape- no one outside can hear him, and those inside the bubble can't hear the outside. He can also use it by touching his own body with his palm to make any of his actions soundless, or touching a thing or a person to make them soundless. While it's very good for stealth (and getting uninterrupted naps), it has no obvious combat applications. Trafalgar Law outright calls it lame. Subverted when Corazon does use it effectively for an action sequence where he effectively ambushes a pirate stronghold without making ANY sounds, including fire burning, glass breaking, gun firing or EXPLOSIONS.
- Logias become this in the New World, as it's noted their users typically don't live very long there. See, Logias have the power to avoid attacks by reflexively converting their body to elemental form. The only way to hurt them in this form is to win Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors, or to have Armament Haki. While Haki is very rare in most of the seas, in the New World, it's commonplace. So most Logias get used to not being able to be hurt, and then get a rude and potentially fatal awakening once they enter the New World. A cautious Logia user can make it, however, and Monet demonstrates that Logia can still dodge easily by morphing their body so that the attack misses.
- Essentially, whether or not a Devil Fruit power is useful comes from a combination of what the power is and who's using it. A 'good' power can be utterly wasted to the point of becoming this trope if its user is uncreative and doesn't come up with new ways of using it. Mr. 5 had the power to use any part of his body into a bomb (including his breath), but was ultimately more or less a joke as far as the Strawhats were concerned as he wasn't all that creative or skilled with it. In comparison, Mr. 3 is a master of his wax generating Devil Fruit power, meaning he was not only higher ranked, but nearly succeeds in killing the Strawhats and considers Mr. 5 'an idiot with a Devil Fruit'.
- In Project ARMS, three of the four ARMS protagonists are fitted with incredible bionic limbs in either their arms or legs, letting them fight bad guys effortlessly. The fourth member is fitted with bionic eyes which lets her foresee events and analyze battles to figure out strategies, but is mostly useless in actual combat (a fact she laments). She is later revealed though to have the incredible power to kill all ARMS born of Alice (as well as Alice), including herself, though she is unable to go through with it).
- In Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Mami Tomoe's original ability was to conjure yellow ribbons which lack serious firepower against Witches. She quickly mastered it, however, turning it into a kind of Imagination-Based Superpower that enabled her to conjure her signature muskets.
- Almost all of the Aasu sisters in Puni Puni☆Poemi are victims of this trope, which wouldn't be so bad if they didn't make up the entire team. "Super breakfall" (the power to never be injured if you're knocked off your feet), anyone? Lampshaded during a fight scene when they realize they can't fight the bad guy since none of them have offensive powers.
- Sailor Moon:
- Originally, Sailor Mercury's only power was to create fog; she could not defeat monsters without another Sailor there to attack them.
- In the third season, Sailor Chibi-Moon assumed the "useless member" role; as a Senshi-in-training her "Pink Sugar Heart Attack" was shown to be so weak and pointless that it mostly only annoyed the villain (it also occasionally just didn't do anything period, and on at least one occasion backfired on her). She got demoted even further in the fourth season, replacing that attack with Twinkle Yell which summons the pegasus Helios to power up Sailor Moon for her final attack - in other words, she had no powers of her own, reduced to merely being able to call someone else to empower yet someone else. It was later revealed that she could still do her Pink Sugar Heart Attack with the bell for summoning Helios... for all the good that attack ever does.
- This is averted in the manga, where the Pink Sugar Heart Attack is actually effective and can do real damage.
- "Moon Princess Halation" is also weaker in comparison to the manga, on the anime, it's able to destroy droids and weaken enemies. On the manga, one blow is enough to vaporize almost anything instantly, so much that a double blow is all that is needed to destroy Death Phantom.
- In Sailor Moon Crystal Sailor Moon herself basically laments that she doesn't have flashy elemental powers like the other Sailors, apparently not quite realizing The Power of Love is incredibly powerful in her genre.
- Tuxedo Mask in the original anime. He throws roses, he has an extendable cane...and that's about it. The Moonlight Knight is slightly better as while he still throws roses, he also wields a short sword. Averted in the manga, where Tuxedo Mask had legit powers such as Tuxedo La Smoking Bomber which shoots energy blasts from his hands.
- Seikon No Qwaser: The title qwasers have the ability to control a single element - as in, elements of the periodic table, not the classical ones. The lucky ones get common, stable elements like iron. Joshua ended up with element number 111, roentgenium. Roentgenium is a synthetic element, with any naturally occurring atoms having decayed long ago, and labs can only create a few atoms at a time. If he somehow scraped together enough roentgenium to actually do something meaningful, it would quickly overreach critical mass and explode, before swiftly decaying into unusable, but still super radioactive, elements. And, as a parting gift, it would give everyone around nasty radiation poisoning. So his power is utterly useless, and in the extremely unlikely case he gets to do anything with it, he'll be shooting himself in the foot and giving himself cancer. Talk about losing the Superpower Lottery.
- Shugo Chara!: First, Amu and Rima were the only ones in the group of the Guardians who could do Chara Transformations and it was always depicted as something amazing and powerful. When the remaining members of the Guardians finally access their own Chara-Naris, everyone of them gets a cool weapon, like Kairi's Katanas or Tadase's holy scepter of doom... Yaya gets Ducks.
- Bossun's Concentrations Mode when he puts on his goggles in Sket Dance. While admittedly very useful in solving problems and aiding his aiming skills with the slingshot, it's often called out for not being very cool for the main hero.
- In Slayers, there were many, many magic spells... from the earth-shattering Giga Slave, to the Ferious Breed, the spell that summons pigeons. But Lina did find a use for the pigeon-summoning spell twice: first time, to break a hole in a pocket universe, second time, to knock off Pocota, who is not much larger than a pigeon.
- In the world of Tiger & Bunny where the focus is on corporate sponsorship and crowd-pleasing masked heroics, Origami Cyclone's ability to copy other people's appearances—which would be great for undercover police work or espionage— is unfortunately not very marketable and therefore almost useless to him. And he's still got it better than some of the other students at the Hero Academy, whose powers include being able to stretch their skin or sweat a lot.
- The Second League Heroes are not as competent as the First Leaguers nor are their powers as impressive: Bombeman can breathe underwater, Chopman can make his hands bigger, and Ms. Violet can shoot her fingernails like projectiles. But while their powers could be useful in the right circumstances, the worst off is Sumo Thunder who can spray salt from his hands.
- The Myers sisters, who each have a smelling based power; Mari can smell danger which is basically nasal-based precognition and Lily can smell lies which makes her a Living Lie Detector, whereas Mary can smell money which is only good for choosing children for them to kidnap.
- In Unlimited Fafnir, Yuu is able to manifest a handgun from anti-matter. But according to several of the girls, they wonder how useful that is against a gigantic dragon. He later sees what kind of powers the girls have compared to what he summoned such as his sister with an Energy Bow.
- From the Urusei Yatsura manga and anime, we have the alien girls Sugar, Ginger and Pepper. Sugar has the power to blend with the background like a chameleon; Ginger can feign death at will; Pepper can shed her whole skin (while still wearing a set of cloth underneath) to escape grapples. Said capabilities could sometimes be handy, but the trio has a much-inflated opinion of their usefulness. Especially compared to the powers of those they consider their "rivals": Lum (who can fly and shoot lightning bolts), Oyuki (an Ice Maiden) and Benten (a Super Strong Action Girl fond of BFGs). The fact that Sugar, Ginger and Pepper are morons doesn't help.
- Zatch Bell! had the Majestic Twelve, an American team of superheroes who seemed to really have super powers, but were comically inept at using them (though that's only in the anime; the manga gives less than no indication that they are not as competent as they are portrayed to be). The only one who demonstrated any prowess in battle was Big Boing, whose powers are self-explanatory. Her greatest power was chopping her "boing" to distract the enemy.
- Some of the mamodo get stuck with lame powers. Until late in the series, Kanchomé's abilities revolve around transforming, but are rarely useful for offensive purposes in battle. Purio has the power of ailment-inducing liquids, which is only mildly useful. Momon has what Kiyo calls "running away powers", which involve running away.
