History AwesomeButImpractical / EasternRPG

** In ''VideoGame/Persona1'', [[EarlyInstallmentWeirdness rather than having a full team and swapping out members, you could only choose one additional person to join your initial party]]. Many consider Reiji Kido to be the best option, however recruiting him is not only a ''massive'' GuideDangIt but his nature as an EleventhHourRanger also requires you to go through large portions of the game without a full party.

** ''VideoGame/{{Persona 4}}'' has the ultimate Persona Izanagi-no-Okami. He resists all four elements and Physical attacks. He gets the strongest single target spells of all four elements, all four elemental Amp powers, and starts with four other high end powers. Unfortunately he's level 91 (which means you have to be level 91 to fuse him), he requires twelve Personas for fusion, cannot be retrieved from the Compendium, and has no resistance to Light or Dark. And worst of all, he doesn't inherit any skills. Given it is possible to fuse four element personas and personas that are immune to all seven attack types...

*** Yusuke's third-tier skill provides Heat Riser (buffing attack, defense and accuracy/evasion) to the entire party. Unfortunately, it costs 90 SP, only lasts for three rounds and can be taken off by a single use of the much cheaper Dekaja.

* ''VideoGame/ShinMegamiTenseiV'' has some skills that are [[PowerfulButInaccurate more powerful than usual and/or are guaranteed critical hits, but have lower accuracy to compensate for that]]. Since missing in Shin Megami Tensei not only does no damage but costs you two Press Turn icons, and a critical hit only grants you half a Press Turn icon, these moves are generally not worth the tradeoff.

** As a general rule, any of the strongest pieces of equipment in the game. Nearly all of them are very rare (1/128 chance) drops from very specific enemies, which means you can grind battles for hours and hours and never see them drop. Sure, they get amazing benefits (the Gutsy Bat in particular boosts Ness's Guts by a whopping 127, ensuring he'll get critical hits every other swing or so), but they comes so late in the game, and by the time you luck out and find them you'll probably have gained so many levels that any extra gains they grant will be trivial at best. The Gutsy Bat is the worst offender in this regard; the enemy it drops from only appears in the very last leg of the final dungeon, and only the first two stages of the final battle are resolved by dealing damage -- the rest is a scripted event where a traditional offense does you no good whatsoever.

** Most physical attack materia is pretty useless too, for the same reason - take even the slightest nick while the animation is playing out and the attack gets interrupted and your AP is wasted. Jump materia is pretty good though - it has a fast startup, lots of invincibility frames and a pretty wide area of effect. Aerial Drain (same but heals you for damage equal to what you dish out) is even better.

** Most physical attack materia is pretty useless too, for the same reason - even the slightest nick while the animation is playing out and the attack gets interrupted and your SP is wasted. Jump materia is pretty good though - it has a fast startup and a pretty wide area of effect. Aerial Drain (same effect but heals you for damage equal to what you dish out) is even better.

* Regigigas is an {{Olympus Mon|s}} that has amazing power (670 in base stats, [[LightningBruiser including an astounding 160 Attack and very good 100 Speed]]), but it also has [[BlessedWithSuck Slow Start]], undoubtedly the worst ability in the entire series: it halves both Attack and Speed for the first ''five'' turns of a battle. [[FakeBalance Five turns is way too much and hardly considered a "start" as so much damage can be inflicted in this mark. Even worse is that switching out resets the timer, and it lacks most recovery or Protect-type moves]] (outside of the situational Wide Guard in Gen V onwards) to help it stall foes until Slow Start wears off. One may as well use a StatusBuff like Dragon Dance on another Pokémon to get the same effect quicker. It took until [[VideoGame/PokemonSwordAndShield Gen VIII]], ''four'' generations after its [[VideoGame/PokemonDiamondAndPearl debut]], for Regigigas to ''finally'' get Protect and Rest, which still isn't enough for it to get past [[MedalOfDishonor Untiered]].

* ''VideoGame/Grandia1'' gives us Feena's Time Gate, which pauses combat for 2-5 turns for everyone but Feena herself. Which sounds great... until you realize that you need to max out your Wind and Water elements at 99 (which takes a solid twenty hours of grinding), it costs a whopping 99 Level 1 MP to cast, and that by the time you're likely to get it, you've already cleared most of the points where it would be useful. In addition, enemies and bosses in the late game are universally resistant to elemental damage, which all spells and virtually all of Feena's specials utilize. Physical attacks aren't a good choice either, as she can only use whips and daggers; neither of which are particularly powerful. So basically, Feena gets a bunch of free turns, but has very few options to use them efficiently, and the sheer amount of grinding required to even unlock Time Gate means your party has gained enough levels that you probably won't ever need to anyway. At least time-stopping showed up in a more viable form in ''VideoGame/GrandiaIII'' several years later, where it doesn't cost MP to use, is given to you as part of the story and gives the entire team some free turns. The only downside is the ridiculously long period it takes to recharge.

* ''VideoGame/Yakuza0'' has a lengthy and fairly involved quest where you help a citizen with a bag phone -- pretty fresh and swanky technology in the '80s. It entails first finding a battery (it drains its charge after he makes a single call), then a health item (it's extremely heavy and throws his shoulder out of whack), and finally, fending off some thugs who are harassing him. Your reward for all of this is to finally get to use the bag phone... which works just like any other save point/phone in the game save for not costing 100 yen. But to be fair, it's true to life -- actual bag phones were also notoriously expensive, unwieldy and impractical, especially in a big city where there's a perfectly functional pay phone every other block or so.

** [[TheChick Fina's]] ''Lunar Glyph'' super move is rather weak, and there's a slim chance that it will actually [[TakenForGranite turn the enemy into stone]] as it should.

* ''VideoGame/AnnoMutationem'' has the "Tunguska" Missile Launcher. It's one of the most powerful firearms in the game, capable of causing extreme amounts of damage and armor-breaking both, and can lock-on to multiple targets. The lock-on is very slow without an upgrade, ammunition is limited and very hard to come by, and outside of one boss battle where you can get them for free, good luck stocking up anywhere past the double-digits with how expensive missiles are.

* Lucario is a fan-favorite Pokemon, and for good reason. It's got a cool design, a pretty solid Steel/Fighting typing, is generally an offensive powerhouse that can run both Special and Physical move sets with more or less equal proficiency, and as the cherry on top it can control its own life energy and shoot it at things. However, as far as its usability in in-game playthroughs go it's more usable in just about every game it appears in EXCEPT [[VideoGame/PokemonDiamondAndPearl the ones it debut in]]. First, its otherwise solid Steel/Fighting typing is more BlessedWithSuck in Gen IV, because it shares at least one of those types with two of the starters, meaning unless you chose Turtwig it's actively competing with your starter from a typing standpoint. Second, it can only be obtained by evolving the Riolu that hatches from the egg you receive on Iron Island. Iron Island can only be reached from the town the 6th gym is in, right at the end of the mid-game. And on top of the headache of hatching the Riolu from an egg and getting it up to par with the rest of your team so late in the game, it also evolves through [[ScrappyMechanic friendship evolution]] but ONLY in the morning.[[note]]4 AM to Noon[[/note]]

* ''VideoGame/{{Undertale}}'' lets you get your hands on the Real Knife and the Locket in the Genocide Route, which give a +99 to Attack and Defense, respectively (for comparison, the next best boost is the Temmie Armor, which gives +20, and most other items are less than half that). However, to get them requires being in the endgame, and being in a Genocide Route requires you to kill enemies in every zone until the random encounters stop. Because of this, once you obtain these two items, there are no enemies remaining to use them on except the FinalBoss, a OneHitPointWonder who uses attacks based on ScratchDamage (plus a nasty poison effect), meaning that the two items are completely useless for any purpose aside from bragging rights. However, all of this is very much an intentional deconstruction.

* In ''VideoGame/TheWorldEndsWithYou'', most of the Gatito pins don't have any workarounds for their problems and are in fact quite Awesome But Impractical. Also, the elemental deck. It looks cool, but it's not exactly a deck to play seriously with. The Anguis pin has the highest attack power of all the pins... but it's extremely slow to level and does not reboot once used.

** ''VideoGame/EldenRing'':

** ''VideoGame/EldenRing'' has Comet Azur, identical to the above example in that it is a huge high-damage dramatic laser beam that chews through a max-level FP bar in a matter of seconds. Couple this with you being locked in place for a few seconds afterward, and it just can’t keep up with the chaotic fights. That is, unless you pair it with the Crystal Tear that offers ''[[GameBreaker 15 seconds of infinite FP]]...''

* ''VideoGame/{{Undertale}}'' lets you get your hands on the Real Knife and the Locket in the Genocide Route, which give a +99 to Attack and Defense, respectively (for comparison, the next best boost is the Temmie Armor, which gives +20, and most other items are less than half that). However, to get them requires being in the endgame, and being in a Genocide Route requires you to kill enemies in every zone until the random encounters stop. Because of this, once you obtain these two items, there are no enemies remaining to use them on except the FinalBoss, a OneHitPointWonder who uses attacks based on ScratchDamage (plus a nasty poison effect), meaning that the two items are completely useless for any purpose aside from bragging rights.

** As for Command Styles, Sky Climber falls victim to this. Just being in it lets you move freely in the air, with even better control and speed than Ventus's Superglide, making it the only Command Style to change your movement. It also has strong combos involving somersaults and launching foes, similar to Final Form's, and its finisher is both cool-looking and powerful. At the same time, though, it prevents you from blocking and replaces your spammable dodge roll with an air slide that functions like [[TierInducedScrappy Terra's]]. It also makes your character drop to the ground before using any commands, making you entirely helpless for up to a second, a death sentence if you're just trying to heal yourself. It doesn't help that it requires strange commands to activate in the first place, none of which are very useful against bosses.

*** Pikachu's other SecretArt, Volt Tackle, is also considered this for the same reasons as the other recoil moves, but it's [[UpToEleven an even worse case]] since Pikachu is a GlassCannon with a terrible HP stat. While holding a Light Ball, Pikachu's STAB Volt Tackle is one of the strongest moves you can use, but it will deal such immense recoil that you really only get to use the move once or twice, as any other uses will finish the user off with its recoil alone.

** Synchronoise is a 100% accurate, 120 base power Psychic-type attack. Unfortunately, it can only hit Pokémon that share at least one type with the user, which makes it too situational to be useful. It doesn't help that Psychic-type Pokémon resist Psychic-type attacks, which makes Synchronoise less useful for the Psychic-type Pokémon that at least get STAB on it.

** The charge-up moves -- Sky Attack, Skull Bash, Bide, the aforementioned Solar Beam, etc, which require a turn or two of charging ''before'' they actually do damage. Later games introduce the held item Power Herb, which allows a Pokémon to bypass the charging turn and attack right away... [[ItOnlyWorksOnce once]].

* L-sized monsters in International and Remaster versions of ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyX2''. Many of them have powerful attacks, overpowered abilities (notably Total Limit Break, which raises both Damage and HP caps) and their stats (especially Agility) are usually cranked up, but they must fight alone, and plenty of late-game enemies have PercentDamageAttack or even HPToOne attacks, which means without [[AutoRevive Auto-Life]] they will possibly go down in two hits.

* L-sized monsters in International and Remaster versions of ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyX2''. Many of them have powerful attacks, overpowered abilities (notably Total Limit Break, which raises both Damage and HP caps) and their stats (especially Agility) are usualy cranked UpToEleven, but they must fight alone, and plenty of late-game enemies have PercentDamageAttack or even HPToOne attacks, which means without [[AutoRevive Auto-Life]] they will possibly go down in two hits.

** As a general rule, any of the strongest pieces of equipment in the game. Nearly all of them are very rare (1/128 chance) drops from very specific enemies, which means you can grind battles for hours and hours and never see them. Sure, they get amazing benefits (the Gutsy Bat in particular boosts Ness's Guts by a whopping 127, ensuring he'll get critical hits every other swing or so), but they comes so late in the game, and by the time you luck out and find them you'll probably have gained so many levels that any extra gains they grant will be trivial at best. The Gutsy bat is the worst offender in this regard; the enemy it drops from only appears in the very last leg of the final dungeon, and only the first two stages of the final battle are resolved by dealing damage -- the rest is a scripted event where a traditional offense does you no good whatsoever.