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Something that is Awesome, but Impractical has one or more undeniable advantages over mundane alternatives, but the drawbacks really make it not worth using: it's too expensive, it requires too much effort to get, etc. Don't list examples that look cool but are just useless; that trope is Cool, but Inefficient.


Examples

    Miscellaneous Games 
  • Most homing attacks (and the characters who specialize in them) in shmups — i.e. Reimu-A in Touhou Project, the Hunter in Thunder Force, and Isha from Giga Wing. While their enemy-seeking properties allow you to "fire and forget", homing attacks tend to also be the weakest shot types in their respective games, doing less damage per second than full-forward shots and even point-blank Spread Shots.
    • In addition, they can really bite you when facing a boss that surrounds itself with self-replenishing Mooks, as your homing shots will go for the closer mooks instead of the boss.
  • Ace Combat's Fuel-Air Explosive Bomb suffers from this in both 04 and 5. It has a bigger blast radius and deals more damage than the Unguided Bomb (Large). However, it's only available on one plane in either game. 04's one plane only carries eight of them; in contrast, the plane with the biggest UGBL payload in that game mounts 18. You're thus more likely to get more targets sticking to UGBLs rather than using FAEBs. 5 nearly doubles that loadout, but puts it on the YA-10B, a plane that is very slow and hard to maneuver, meaning you can easily take out ground targets but have to heavily micromanage your squadron's activities to effectively deal with anything else.
  • The pterodactyl in Adventure Island II can fly, but its control scheme is just far too difficult to make any real use of it. Since it moves vertically very slowly but moves horizontally very quickly, and drops rocks that are affected by momentum, you'll be lucky to make it more than a screen's-worth before you bonk into one of the numerous enemies who move around in wide patterns. In fact, its best use is to save it for a part where you simply can't seem to get past without taking a hit... and using it as a meat shield to absorb the damage.
  • Doing barrel rolls in the Afterburner games. You can dodge a number of missile swarms this way, but there are some frames of vulnerability as your bird comes out of it, so you can still get nailed if you aren't timing it right. If you're skilled enough, standard juking is better.
  • In the Cult Classic Lucasarts game Afterlife (1996) (in which you develop a planet's Heaven and Hell), the generic zoning has many advantages. You don't have to deal with zoning your astral realm according to the Seven Deadly Sins or Seven Heavenly Virtues, and the ultimate generic buildings hold more souls than the other, specialized zoning options. The problem? The best generic buildings are 4x4, while the others are 3x3, making a mess of your carefully-planned astral realms.
  • Air Force Delta Strike: Certain bonus aircraft like the Twin Bee fall into this category.
  • The Grenade Launcher in Alien Swarm. Does major splash damage to enemies, but the shots arc and explode where your targeting cursor is, making it useless for run and gun tactics. The friendly fire damage from the weapon is insanely high, making accidental team-kills much more likely.
  • Animal Crossing: New Horizons's retool to the Golden Tools places them right into this territory. Unlike past games in the Animal Crossing series, the Golden Tools do not add any extra benefits or abilities over the "standard" iron versions of each tool and can still break thanks to the new tool durability system. Their only claim to fame is they last more than the iron tools... when the iron versions can be given custom colors to repair them and replenish their durability — a feature the Golden tools lack entirely.
  • ANNO: Mutationem 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.
  • Ao Oni: There are closets in a couple of rooms. You can escape the oni by hiding in one of them. But if the oni is in the same room as you, going in one will land you an automatic Game Over (your hiding spot is no good when the oni sees you go in). Good luck trying to hide in one without the oni catching you!
  • Aquaman: Battle for Atlantis has impressive combos using Aquaman's hook hand and you can even summon sea life to aid you, but this uses up the combo meter quickly and basic attacks win the day more easily.
  • In the last level of Aquaria, you get an Eleventh Hour Super Mode. It is indeed powerful, and required to destroy some barriers and the Final Final Boss. In all other circumstances, however, it's more effective to just spam energy bolts like you've been doing all game.
  • In the RPI that is Armageddon (MUD), Muls are this in-universe. Muls are the offspring of dwarves and humans, which ends up in them having the advantages of both, possessing dwarven bulk on a human-sized body and having a human's intelligence as well. The impracticality lies in them being very hard to breed, their mothers always dying during childbirth, the muls themselves unable to procreate because they are sterile, and the muls themselves being emotionally unstable and prone to outbursts of anger that have them going on rampages leaving dozens at a time dead.
  • Armored Core:
    • Any Arms Fortress in Armored Core: For Answer, but three stick out:
      • "The Spirit of Motherwill" is a giant walking aircraft carrier and battleship, able to rip you apart in seconds. But it blows up when you destroy all of its missile batteries and cannons. Well done, BFF.
      • "Cabracan" is a heavily armored tank that carries hundreds of drones. But the skirt is hinged, exposing its treads when it runs into a mine.
      • "Stigro" is a speedboat the size of a city block, and can move incredibly fast with its hydrofoil... but only in water. Also, it's Point Defenseless, so if you can land on it while it's charging around, you can take it out with just a hit or two from your energy blade with no resistance.
      • The Kiku weapon, a melee-range pile bunker that can one-shot almost anything... If you can hit with it, and that's a big if. Fast enemies will zip right past you, and most others can be taken out with ease using mundane weaponry. Utilizing it as a countermeasure against lightweight blade-based enemies yields far more favorable results.
    • From Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon, there is the Rubicon Liberation Front's crowning glory, the STRIDER. It looks imposing and has a fearsome long-range gun, but it's still an industrial craft trying to do something it's not meant for. It's slow, full of obvious weak spots, and its main weapon is easily dodged by a brain-fried AC pilot. It's telling that 621 can momentarily cripple the gigantic vehicle merely by damaging one of its legs, thanks to its poor condition.
  • The Flash game Flight has the "Mystery Upgrade", a heftily-priced item at the end of the list. It is "a mysterious and impractical upgrade that is probably not worth the cost".
  • The Visual Novel Aselia the Eternal - The Spirit of Eternity Sword has a lot of gameplay features. Near the end, you get some units called Eternals. They have what are the strongest attack, defense and support skills in the game... and you might very well never use them. Why? Because every time you use them, you lose a lot of Mind and they require you to have a lot to work at all. So you get to use them about twice before you have to switch back to normal attacks.
  • In Banished, farming in the early game. Gatherer Huts provide so much more food than a farm what with the very wild and overgrown terrain you start out having to deal with. Farms can only produce one type of crop, and there's strict time windows involved — you sow in spring, and you harvest in autumn. Farms are also far more labour-intensive than Gatherer Huts and Hunting Cabins, which isn't good when your population is low. Farming does become vastly more useful once you have a larger population, as farms produce much more food in much smaller space, and farmers with nearby homes, markets and storage barns can make massive harvests, and in Colonial Charter, farming is essential for getting hold of higher-end items — you need farms to create ropes, cloth, silk, tobacco and alcohol, for instance, and you'll only get the raw materials through farming or very hit-n-miss trading.
  • Batman: Arkham Knight has Iron Heights Penitentiary, a zeppelin prison. Sure it sounds cool, a flying prison where no prisoner can escape, but the idea seems prohibitively expensive in fuel and all the helium needed to keep it afloat. And as demonstrated in the DLC featuring it, if the inmates break out of their cells and damage it enough, it'll crash and the survivors can easily escape. It would be easier to keep guys locked up in a normal on the ground prison.
  • In The Battle Cats beating Filibuster Obstructa will make him join your army as Filibuster Cat X. For a unit you can get for free he has long range, enough to outrange most mid-ranged enemies, and has the ability to always freeze traitless enemies upon attacking which, when considering that non-Uber cats that specialise in dealing with traitless enemies are very rare, makes him sound like a great unit. The problem is that the time it takes for him to charge up his attack takes a while, long enough that any enemy that’s in his range can get knocked back out of it whether due to doing enough damage (as is most often the case) or through the Knockback ability, and even if it the attack hits, the freeze lasts for only 4 seconds, out of a nearly 20 second gap between each attack. Even worse, the other free anti-traitless cats (Glass Cat and Lone Cat & Kitten) are usually more impactful to the fight and can be obtained much earlier than him meaning that, by the time you get him, you use him much less than you expect.
  • Blossom Tales: The Sleeping King: The late-game Thunder spell will instantly destroy any minor enemy within a wide radius of the heroine, but using the spell eats up most of her Special gauge, limiting its usefulness.
  • Bomb It 6 and Bomb It 7, Bomberman clones, have the Angry Hammer weapon. It sends a massive and destructive shock wave in the direction it is aimed, but it is also one of the most easily dodged attacks. So unless an enemy is immobilized or you want to open a corridor fast, it's not likely to be super effective.
  • Brütal Legend:
    • Emperor Doviculus fights with a guitar with four necks. For context, just being able to play riffs on a single neck electric guitar in the world of Brutal Legend lets you cast spells and other combat magic; you don't need any more necks than that to make it stronger. The only way he can make his work is that it's collapsible and by using demon magic, and even then he has to store the pieces in his ribcage where his heart used to be.
    • Lars Halford is a leader so inspirational that people who have just met him will gladly march to their deaths beside him, but he's also completely incapable of managing the day-to-day recruitment and logistics of an army in the field. This is where protagonist Eddie Riggs comes in, because his job as a roadie makes him the perfect man to handle day-to-day operations and lead the troops during battles.
  • A Bug's Life: Flik's Harvester appears in several levels. He can equip it and use it for however long he wants. While using it, he is invincible, he magnatises grain to him, and he can use the blades to kill enemies in a way so that they die permanently and do not respawn (in one hit no less). However, to keep it from being an overpowered tool, it has three flaws; Flik moves slowly while using it, he drops it when he jumps (meaning he can't take it with him to areas that require jumping to reach), and it only kills enemies that can be harmed with red berries. While it does make you invincible, it would be more efficient to use the gold berries to permanently kill the enemies (unless you don't currently have them, in which case the Harvester can be useful for eliminating whatever enemies you can at the moment), and to just go and collect grain normally.
  • Bottle rockets in Bully dart in and out of this trope. Fire once, and it usually hits for some nice damage. Fire more than once, they'll start ducking, or the bottle rocket will miss entirely. You can use it to make the sledgehammer boss a lot easier. (Since he moves so slow, he won't try to dodge and is easily kited.) But against trying to take out random people? You're better off using that to get the first strike and then switching to a more reliable weapon. (Even the Spud Gun is better.)
  • The Volaticus glyph in Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia. It's not a super jump like the Griffin Wing or Gravity Boots from Ecclesia's predecessors; rather, it allows Shanoa to freely fly around. But you get it so late in the game, in the Final Approach area of Dracula's Castle, and to add insult to injury, the only two areas that cannot be reached without it are a shortcut back to the Library and Dracula's quarters (which requires this glyph due to the stairs being broken). And if you try to use it when fighting Dracula (which would otherwise be a good idea), he'll swat you out of the air with an attack he would otherwise never use. ...Which you can use to cancel his normal attacks, as it's easy to dodge and he always goes back to his first attack after it.
    • It is, however, very useful for the Large Cavern. Hovering at the top of the screen and spamming Globus is a viable strategy for most of the rooms. Also, several of the secret rooms in Final Approach require it.
    • You can also use the glyph you get for completing the Training Hall to get to Dracula's room without Volaticus, but that's more of a Bragging Rights Reward.
    • "Classicvania" games have the pocketwatch, which stops time...for five hearts...and then some enemies are immune to it. Haunted Castle's version of it is an exception; it costs only two hearts to stop time for four seconds.
  • Alucard in Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse. He can only wield a pocketwatch as a subweapon, he attacks with small projectile orbs that does abysmal damage and when upgraded, it shoots 3 projectiles, but each projectile deals the same abysmal damage so unless you're close enough, he won't dish out much damage. His specialty is to turn into bat and float, unable to attack, which would've been good if this was a Metroidvania, not a Classicvania. Lastly? He has a huge hitbox, making him easier to hit or drop into the Bottomless Pit.
    • His bat form is useful for getting past some tough areas: for example, there's one section where you have to cross a crumbling floor with three Bone Dragons blocking your way. It's incredibly hard to kill them without getting killed yourself in the process. Alucard can just fly over the dragons and avoid the section entirely.
  • The Excalibur sword in Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow. Sure it's pretty strong, and you get to hit enemies with the sword and the rock it's embedded in stuck on the end. Unfortunately, it's so slow to swing that it's nigh useless against difficult enemies.
  • In Castlevania: Circle of the Moon, there's a secret item crush triggered when you have at least 100 Hearts and no subweapon equipped. Since you can only swap but not completely drop subweapons after you've picked one up, you'd only be able to use this by intentionally avoiding picking subweapons up until you've attained a 100+ Heart maximum and the DSS cards necessary to use the item crush command (unless you use the "use any DSS combo" glitch). The requirements mean that indeed, you'd want to try this out maybe once at the most.
  • Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead
    • The advanced professions in older versions. Sure, being a Special Ops soldier, a martial arts blackbelt, or a cybernetic assassin might seem preferable for taking on the Zombie Apocalypse compared to being a hobo, chain smoker, or clown, but given that Cataclysm is an Endless Game, it is preferable to spend your character points on stats or traits that are permanently fixed once the game starts rather than on a profession whose starting skills and items may be obtained by any character with enough time and luck. Later versions have reduced this issue by splitting the character points among three categories, having professions only cost skill points, and making choosing a profession with starting skills cheaper than just buying the skills on their own.
    • Mutations. Becoming a bear or dinosaur and ripping zombies to shreds with your claws is cool, but most mutations come with severe drawbacks that make them not worth having. Most notable is the "Fast Metabolism" mutation that increases the amount of food you need, especially if you also get the "Carnivore" mutation, which ruins any chances of building a long-term settlement since you'll need to constantly seek new sources of meat.
  • Cave Story: The Level 3 Blade is the most awesome-looking weapon in the game, summoning the ghost of King to slash wildly at everything in a fair-sized area. The Level 2 Blade, however, can do damage more rapidly and doesn't have to wait to reload. The Blade also maxes out immediately on attaining Level 3, so you have to avoid taking hits if you want to keep it there.
  • Close Combat II has quite a few such units. Flamethrowers are devastating, but their crew are killed by rifle fire before they can engage as often as not. Flamethrower Tanks are more durable, but are usually overkill for fighting infantry, inadequate for fighting tanks, and cost a whole lot more than simpler vehicles. The entire Tiger tank line is considered overpriced. The British also have a Churchill tank that's capable of killing anything in one shot, but it takes a full minute to reload.
  • Cover Fire from Viva Game Studio has the Kriss Vector, FN-P90, MSGL, Rail Gun and SIG-556-LB which look good on paper but are disappointing in-game. The Kriss Vector and FN-P90 both have damage bonuses and critical hit bonuses (the FN-P90 having a larger critical hit bonus of the two) but because both guns uncontrollably burst out so much ammo that they keep hitting someone already dead and quickly run out despite having large magazines. Additionally the FN-P90 has the worst reload time in the game. The MSGL is the alternate weapon for the Demolitionist and it seems like an improvement on the RPG-7, having a multi-round magazine and other bonuses (as a Starter Equipment, the RPG-7 has no bonuses at all) - the problem is that the MSGL is short-ranged and does an arc which is especially bad as the Demolitionist is often just providing cover from a moving helicopter. Additionally the grenades move slower than the RPG-7's rockets and there's a delay before the grenade explodes - with all these disadvantages there are many times where it's impossible to hit an enemy with the MSGL. The SIG-556-LB has bonus to penetrate but enemies seldom line up - it'd be much better to have a damage bonus instead. As well the electricity stream is somewhat inaccurate and doesn't always hit where your crosshair is, still it is a pretty decent weapon. The biggest disappointment is the Rail Gun, it has the highest hitting power for weapons for Assault characters (equal to the starting AWM sniper rifle) and its penetration bonus is so high it'll always penetrate enemies. Having enemies line up is rare and it's even worse for the Rail Gun, it takes time to fire and despite having a bonus to ammo capacity it only has one shot. So you have to reload each time it fires and that takes a while.
    • Some of the unlocked characters are way too big. As a 3rd-person shooter game with rail-shooter elements, the characters Steve-Rex (a guy dressed in a dinosaur costume) and Always Alone (anthropomorphic representation of the meme) are way too tall and block much of what you may see in front of you. Meanwhile, Digit (uplifted gorilla) is too wide and the way he hunches ends up obscuring a surprising amount of what's coming left of you.
  • Crying Suns:
    • The Juggernaut Frigate can inflict enough damage to take out an entire hull bar with one attack. It's also the slowest unit in the game bar none and cannot be sped up in any way, so good luck getting it to the enemy battleship in one piece. And if it manages to reach the battleship and execute that one attack, it explodes.
    • The Heavy Nuke is the most powerful battleship weapon in the game, inflicting 100 damage to all squadrons in an incredibly large blast radius. It also has a two-minute long cooldown period between shots, the longest of any weapon. Compare that to the Plasma Nuke, which has a much smaller blast radius and inflicts only a quarter of the Heavy Nuke's damage, but also has a much shorter 25 second cooldown period.
  • Nukes in Cyber Nations. Using one on another nation inflicts massive damage to its military (including the loss of all defending soldiers), destroys massive amounts of land, tech, and infrastructure, and inflicts instant Anarchy (citizens take a massive drop in happiness, resulting in far lower collected taxes) for 5 days. Unfortunately, they're very expensive (and get even more so with each purchased nuke) and have strict requirements, one of which is having your nation be ranked in the 95th percentile or better. On top of that, every nuke launch is reported onto a publicly available page for all players to see, so if, outside of an inter-alliance war, you nuke a nation that's in an alliance, or are part of an alliance and fire a nuke without permission from superiors, you will be in very deep trouble.
  • Danganronpa: Planned murders tend to fall into this trap; it's no good creating an elaborate unsolvable crime giving yourself a perfect alibi when it has a lot of moving parts that, if they fail, all point back towards you. Of course, these are teenagers, so no surprise they're not very good at this whole murder thing.
    • The 3rd chapter case in Trigger Happy Havoc is a standout example; Celestia's plan gave her a great alibi (was part of the investigation) and an Orgy of Evidence against the intended Frame-Up victim. The problem was that it relied on the aid of a partner (who then had to also be killed) and several props (which could also be investigated) to create a strict narrative, so when the protagonists unravel that narrative, the culprit's role in the investigation starts to look artificial, and their continuing to push their story even when holes had been poked into it draws suspicion onto them. If they hadn't bothered with making a perfect narrative and had instead just made sure they were no more suspicious than anyone else (i.e. killing one guy at night when most people would be alone in their rooms and have no verifiable alibi), then the other students would've been reduced to guesswork.
    • The Rube Goldberg Machine that forms the method of murder in the first case of V3 needs a lot of precision and timing to be able to hit its intended target. When the survivors re-examine the scene in the sixth chapter with new information on hand, they discover the shot put ball actually missed; the only reason Rantaro died is because the mastermind killed him with their own hands and then set up the scene to look like the trap worked.
    • In V3, the culprit's attempt to frame Himiko for Ryoma's murder by creating a zipline from the murder scene and into the gym (where Himiko was setting up her magic act) is a clever idea, but it ultimately results in some evidence falling where the culprit couldn't retrieve them. Had the culprit merely left the body where the murder (which was itself simple- bonk victim over the head, handcuff victim to prevent him struggling, drown victim in sink) took place, they probably wouldn't have been caught.
    • The third chapter murder in V3 involves a seesaw trap set up in three different rooms to kill the victim without the culprit's direct input, but like the above, the elaborate setup leaves a a lot of clues behind once the investigation begins. In fact, the culprit had committed another murder on the spur of the moment (somebody walked in on them setting up their trap) that left very little evidence, but the culprit decided to go ahead with the plan because they didn't want to waste the trap- and in the end, it was the evidence found during the investigation of the second, planned, crime that allowed the heroes to pin the culprit for the first, unplanned crime.
  • In Dark Ball 2 you can unlock different forms for the bar you control. One of them, "Dark Halo", makes you invisible to the point where letting the ball fall or not makes no difference. Unfortunately, activating it requires either one life or three consecutive "Kharma Overflows" (which happen only when you get a bad power up), besides locking you with bad kharma for the rest of the level after its effect is over.
  • In The Dead Linger, one of the melee weapons you can find to slaughter zombies with is an electric guitar. While it may be awesome to run around bashing undead hordes with a Les Paul, the thing is rather slow and weak and takes up more space in your inventory than stronger and faster weapons.
  • Two of the most powerful weapons of Dead Rising, the Megabuster and Laser Sword, both count solely due to their unlock requirements. Getting the Megabuster required you to spend an entire playthrough killing zombies (likely done in the underground Maintenance Tunnels running over zombies with a vehicle nonstop) while the Laser Sword could only be acquired by playing Infinity Mode and lasting five days (which takes ten hours of real time to manage, in a mode where you can't save and quit).
    • Not that the sequel's any better. During gameplay, you come across a tiger and her trainer. After killing the trainer, if you can find and feed the tiger three steaks, it will join you like a particularly strong survivor. The main issues with this are: you have to kill her trainer without killing her (most first-time players would likely aim for the giant tiger first), you only get one shot at taming Snowflake since leaving the area causes her to vanish for the rest of the playthrough, you need to have brought three steaks to begin with (there's none in the area you fight her), and you have to dodge the giant angry tiger trying to maul you as you set the meat down for her.
    • 2 also has many combo weapons that require hard-to-gather components, multiple combination steps, an awkward deployment method, or all three. However, this is nearly the point, the awesomeness is usually there and the right ones do offer a large infusion of PP.
  • Def Jam Fight For New York has the Martial Arts Style as a primary style. The Awesome: You fight like Bruce Lee personally trained you, with a flurry of rapid-fire punches and kicks. The Impractical: Its style-specific finisher (move that KOs opponents without Blazin'), is a rebound kick/dive off a wall that requires the venue has an intact, nearby wall if one at all, the opponent be in the exact range of the attack, otherwise you stylishly fall, and the opponent not see you coming, which is virtually impossible in a one-on-one fight. Otherwise they simply block, move or counter your clumsy ass into the ground like Samoa Joe. Instead, it's best as a suplimentary style to any of the other four styles to wear the opponent down and mix up your attacks for a combo bonus, plus get the time bonus of finishing a fight in under a minute.
  • In the Descent games, most high-level weapons were this: most of the powerful cannons used up lots of energy, or were hard to use effectively. Or both. High level missiles were only useful for bosses, considering how few of them there were. Most of the time you could get through the games using only lasers, gatling guns, and basic, common missiles.
    • The Fusion Cannon was slow to charge, drained your shields if you charged it a bit too long, and was Nerfed in the second game. The Phoenix Cannon is a suped up ricocheting plasma cannon, but it chews through your energy too fast.
  • If you beat all the races in Dethkarz with all the car classes you're given the Templar, an awesome-looking secret car with all the stats maxed. Which means it's very fast... so much that it's ridiculously hard to control it.
  • Some of the Buster attacks from Devil May Cry 4 are dangerous enough in crowds that using standard attacks is safer and more effective. Then there's Nero's 'Showdown', which is almost impossible to pull off without getting screwed yourself. Showdown is a powerful multi-hit attack that takes an exorbitant amount of time to wind up, and if you miss the first strike then it takes an equally crippling amount of time to wind down. However, it does have a saving grace that all of Nero's sword attacks tend to have extremely wide swing radii and Showdown is a Devil Trigger attack (so your BFS wielding spirit is also in effect), so if it connects then all enemies within a few meters almost certainly will die.
    • Showdown is useful for killing de-cloaked Fausts and Mega Scarecrows fast, just so long as you stun lock them with Summoned Swords during the wind up animation.
  • Speaking of Devil May Cry 4, Nero's revolver, Blue Rose, has two barrels which allows him to fire both the top and bottom chamber at the same time. This of course has the obvious disadvantage that it turns a six-shooter into a three-shooter. Thankfully, in gameplay, Nero has a bottomless cylinder.
  • In DoDonPachi SaiDaiOuJou, Expert shot falls under this. You get the best of Shot type and Laser type...but in return, the game jacks up the difficulty to the equivalent of second loop in other DoDonPachi games.
  • DOTA 2 is a game that, due to the numerous patches and changes to elements over time, has a different flavor of gimmicky strategies every few weeks that are like this. However, one item in the game that was designed to be like this is the Divine Rapier, an item that gives a ridiculous amount of raw damage, but is one of the most expensive items in the game. What makes it impractical, however, is the fact that if you die while holding it, it drops on the ground, free for anyone else to take. Needless to say, it's generally only picked up if your team is on the verge of losing anyway.
    • Another more situational example is Aghanim's Scepter, a costly item that gives an ability upgrade to most heroes (usually their ultimate ability) but grants mediocre stat bonuses for its cost. These upgrades range from almost necessary note , to good, if you can afford it note , to only good in certain situationsnote , to being not at all worth the costnote . It's also frequently passed up by heroes focusing on attack damage, since the upgrade from the Scepter generally isn't enough to justify giving up gold and an item slot that could potentially be used on an item to boost their damage or survivability.
  • The Wizard's Meteor Swarm spell in Dragon's Crown. It's the single, most damaging attack the player could use in the entire game! However, its casting time takes so long that a) You're likely to get smacked out of your Magical Incantation before you could finish if you don't have a Sorceress or a Fighter providing defensive support and b) You'll deal more damage in the long run using a combination of your simpler, faster spells.
  • In the Dwarf Fortress player community, this is considered a great way to increase your level of Fun. Especially if it involves magma. Your dwarves are all going to die horribly anyway, why not make it as spectacular as possible?
    • In Adventurer mode, employing Kisat Dur will let you go wild on flashy stuff such as drop-kicking enemies, defend by catching their weapons and limbs in mid-air and subdue them with pinpoint vital strikes, but with the amount of stat and skill grinding it requires to be viable against more powerful opponents it's far less efficient than grabbing a steel axe and lopping off heads.
  • In flash game Epic War 3, the titan units are this. They're giant, have tons of health, do tons of damage, and just look cool, but take up a ridiculous amount of mana (which means you have to use less or weaker units and spells), are slow as molasses, and take so long to summon that you can easily beat even the Caves of Trials before they even show up. Worse, since the max populationnote  is only one for each of them, using another high-level unit with a larger population will usually end up dealing more damage per second than the titans!
  • The EMP torpedo in Escape Velocity Nova. Almost completely disables an enemy's shields and ionizes them, reducing their turning to near zilch, but weighs two tons a torpedo, moves very slowly, can hurt you badly if you're caught in the blast and will get any government shooting at you if they scan you and spot it in your weapons load out. If you have escorts that use EMP torpedos, the only thing you have to worry about is the blast radius.
    • Also the Vell-Os Winter Tempest. It does crazy amounts of damage, and it skips shields and goes directly to damaging the armor. If you're surrounded by small-to-medium ships, spinning around once with it active will kill them. Grazing large ships twice will kill them. The problem is, it will drain your energy completely in a couple of seconds.
  • The Last Word in Eternal Card Game is a relic weapon that has the potential to instantly kill your opponent. The cost? 9 power to play, another 9 mana to activate, and you have to destroy all of the enemy's units to be able to target your opponent, and it only has 1 armor to protect itself with.
  • Red Ivan, the trigger-happy explosives expert henchman in Evil Genius. His bazooka attack is one of the deadliest weapons in the game, but unless you micro-manage him during an attack, he'll probably end up doing as much damage to your base and your minions as to the forces of justice. Arming your mercenaries with flamethrowers is ill-advised for the same reason.
  • In Fatal Frame, the Type-Zero film is the equivalent of a rocket launcher in terms of sheer power. However, like most rocket launchers, it also has the slowest reload time and is very limited in quantity. Don't expect to ever get more than 5-6 in one playthrough.
  • In Forza Motorsport 3, players can drive SUVs and pickup trucks like the Range Rover Sport, and Dodge Ram SRT-10. They're amazing for battering cars around (but that will get you kicked out of the game), but they're so heavy that they plow through corners, and so huge that it can actually obstruct your view when in third person. In more recent Forza games, however, SUVs can be surprisingly fast and well-handling if tuned properly, and have an entire racing division devoted to them.
  • Microsoft's space sim Freelancer features a single-player campaign that raises the player to about level 18 and ends with only a portion of the available star systems visited; the maximum level cap is 38, and there are many more systems that can be explored, including Easter Egg worlds inhabited by monkeys and robots. Players also gain access to exponentially more powerful ships and weapons at higher levels, such as alien lasers that inflict massive damage and require no energy to fire. However, once the main campaign has ended, there is no storyline to follow except for missions that are randomly generated by the computer, all of which follow a given template. The player has no real motivation to reach the higher levels except for the sake of completion.
  • The Mortar in Gears of War, post-nerfs. It is great for flushing enemies out of cover, but it only has 3 shots at maximum, slows you to a crawl while carrying it, takes several seconds to fire, telegraphs its target, and locks you in place for several seconds after you fire. And on top of that, its range can't even reach the opposite end of Gears' small maps.
    • The Boomshot in the first game is a grenade launcher capable of one-hit killing anything even through cover (and it's invaluable on the final boss), but its ammo is so scarce (it must be obtained from dead Boomers, a rare enemy type) that you'll probably discard it after emptying a magazine.
    • The Hammer of Dawn from the same series could be considered one as well, both in-universe and multiplayer. It deals massive damage, outright disintegrating common enemies and wrecking even bosses, and it effectively has infinite ammunition; humanity even used it to crush the initial Locust invasions to give themselves a fighting chance. However, it requires an open sky to lock onto targets, making it useless indoors and underground, and the Kill Sat has to be in just the right position, giving you a window of only a few minutes at most to use it during the story mode. You also have to keep the laser designator aimed directly at your target for it to even fire, making it difficult to use against anything that moves quickly or erratically.
  • In The Godfather: The Game, the unupgraded Tommygun may fall into this. Tearing into enemy mobsters with a hail of bullets is awesome the first time, until you realise that your accuracy goes to hell with sustained bursts. Plus given that you will get torn apart fast if you stand out in the open rather than Take Cover!, you can't really make best use of it in a real combat situation, as opposed to a solo encounter. The best way to make use of the Tommygun is to get into close range — and then why aren't you using the shotgun? It's far better to stick to taking headshots with a handgun. The more complicated Execution Styles also fall into this — while you will get more Respect for killing enemies with them, the setup is complicated enough as to not be worth it. To elaborate: One of these, the Traffic Accident execution, requires you to have someone else assist you in running over your target. To do so, you'll need to be at a roadside. You'll have to kill any other enemies first, since you're vulnerable while dragging your to-be victim around. You also need to position your target just so, then give him the shove that puts him in the path of an oncoming vehicle. Far too much trouble.
  • Gradius ReBirth's Type E powerup configuration has the Vector Laser, which pierces through any object, even structures, is as wide as the Ripple laser, and looks cool. Unfortunately, not only is it weaker than the other lasers, but it cannot destroy the regenerating walls in Stage 2 or the destructible dot walls in the bonus stages. Which means if you enter a bonus stage or get caught behind a solid regenerating wall in Stage 2-2 or 3-2, you're fucked. The only way to circumvent this once you've gotten the Vector Laser? Switch to the Vertical Shot, which is probably the worst Gradius powerup ever: it shoots upwards and downwards, but not forwards.
  • Grand Theft Auto 2: The dual pistols. They fire much faster than the regular pistol and allow you to shoot two bullets at the same time, but the bullets don't go in a straight line, requiring you to keep it for groups of enemies.
  • Grand Theft Auto IV, since they took out the Rhino, Hunter and Hydra from its predecessor, San Andreas, the Annihilator Helicopter remains the only weaponized vehicle in the game. While it does indeed sport a pair of twin miniguns on either side of the cockpit, they are beyond impractical, if not completely useless. They do not auto-aim like the aircraft guns in the previous game (i.e. they fire directly forward at all times) meaning that to hit anything on the ground, you have to pitch the chopper forward at such an angle you either zoom straight over the target or crash (often both), but they also don't seem to do any more damage than handheld weaponry anyway. Furthermore, after just five seconds of firing, they have to reload.
  • In the online multiplayer mode of Grand Theft Auto V, players can purchase an Orbital Cannon as part of the "Doomsday Heist" content update, which can attack other players virtually anywhere (save for bunkers and apartments) and kill them in a single blast. To prevent players from abusing it, however, it comes with a handful of Necessary Drawbacks, the main one being cost: after purchasing the cannon for just south of a million dollars, it takes $500K to fire a single shot with manual targeting, and $750K for automated firing. Even if a player can overcome the cost barrier (either through grinding or Shark Cards), the cannon can only be fired once every in-game day, or 48 minutes in realtime.
  • Grief Syndrome, a Puella Magi Madoka Magica fangame, has various Signature Moves that turn a portion of the health bar blue (regenerates unless you take damage, at which it becomes permanent). Mami's is, of course, Tiro Finale, a BFG that fires a destructive blast capable of decimating most bosses. However, the gun itself is too long; the barrel is about a third the width of the screen, which means it does absolutely nothing to enemies at point-blank range. To make matters worse, it turns nearly all of the health bar blue, meaning if you take a hit after using Tiro Finale, you'll almost certainly die. (Which is fairly accurate, all things considered.)
    • Mami in general could be considered an example. She's the game's only character to mix ranged and melee attacks, she's very mobile, and she has the second-highest Soul Limit next to Madoka, but her mixed attacks have a deceptively small range and low damage, and when she dies, it takes a substantial chunk of her energy to come back (from 15% to 26%, the highest in the game). She's considered to be the hardest non-joke character in the game to play properly.
  • The Grinch (2000): A lampshaded example with the Grinch Copter, which lets the Grinch fly, but, to quote the narrator, "needs so many eggs it's almost absurd". A well used case of this, as it keeps the gadget from being overpowered and provides an in-story reason for why the Grinch made the rocket spring to enhance his jumps and the octopus climbing device to scale walls when he has a gadget to fly.
  • In Guardian Heroes, the character Randy has a super-powerful Kamehame Hadoken attack. The problem with it is that, for one, it costs a ton of MP, and two, it takes a long while to charge before firing, leaving you open to attacks from enemies. Worse still, if you get hit while charging, you will have wasted your MP.
  • In Gunz The Duel, a lot of moves qualify depending on the skill of the player, mainly because of how unlikely it is that you'll get in a situation where an awesome move will actually work. Then there's the usual useless moves like dodging which looks cool but it's slow and uncancellable and will likely get you killed. Those melee moves you see all the rookie k-stylers do? Nobody actually uses those unless they're out of ammo. Spamming shotguns? Better make sure you actually kill someone because you only get five shots per gun before you need to reload. Spamming a machinegun when you're not doing a quest? Please don't, you'll only get killed faster. Doing an über melee move that will land you a guaranteed kill? Better wait till you can safely close the distance because you will get killed if you don't. There's a good reason most players rely on the same basic tactics most of the time, all that other stuff is just too unreliable.
  • In the GBA versions of Harvest Moon (Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town and More Friends...), you can assemble the three Gems: when equipped, the Kappa Gem automatically restores Strength, Goddess Gem restores Stamina, and the Truth Gem displays both stats on screen. Handy, but at the time when you can actually get them (at least five in-game years in), most players will know the limits at which they can safely work their character, negating the need for the Truth Gem. Scarfing down some Elli Leaves or drinking a Bodigizer XL and a Turbojolt XL restore your health much faster than the Kappa and Goddess Gems would. All this still ignores the amount of effort needed to find all twenty-seven pieces of all three gems.
  • Sure, in the Hitman games, you can blow someone across the room with dual Silverballers and magnum ammo. If you want a challenge that is. Though it's spectacular to watch that civilian, target or mook fly across the room, most weapons are loud, take a long time to reload and will probably get you killed as you are surrounded by said mooks, all armed to the teeth.
    • Most firearms that aren't a silenced pistol tend to fall into this category, as they're either needlessly loud, can't be concealed or both.
  • The special sharks in Hungry Shark Evolution. Their special abilities often negate their boost speed, they're more vulnerable to certain enemies like the submarines because of their missing boost, and they don't retain their levels over multiple games (though they level up much faster to compensate).
  • Idol Manager: Out of three possible type of in-house shows, the tropes applies to the TV ones. They may bring in many fans, but remain massive money sinks in circumstances where a radio or Internet show with the same components will be bringing in enough of a profit to pay for the salaries of a bare-bones agency. TV shows also require more physical stamina from the idol(s) running them (90 points once a week, when a single completely rested idol has 100) than radio (30 points) or Internet shows (60 points). Both in terms of finances and the health of the idols, the sole TV show required by the game's objectives is best cancelled as soon as possible.
  • Ingress has pretty portal animations...that also reduce your mobile device to the speed of molasses and suck its battery dry. It's to the point where an illegal third-party client offers the option to turn the animations off.
  • Every weapon in Iridion II that isn't the normal shot or the search laser. Thanks to the game's accuracy-based scoring, the latter two are the only weapons that can be used to get a high score; the radial gun, for instance, fires a needless amount of bullets in a sweeping pattern, which means your shot accuracy is going to go out the window if you use it.
  • Jak and Daxter:
    • The second game's Dark Jak mode makes Jak take less damage (or he gets outright invulnerable with specific upgrade), makes him faster and stronger and he gains two moves that either kill everything onscreen or within certain rather large radius. It also takes about as much time to charge as it took Daxter to free Jak from prison, and said super moves revert Jak to his normal self. Therefore it will rarely see use. The sequel fixes this by giving you the possibility to activate Dark Jak even with the meter not fully charged as well as placing numerous Dark Eco vents on your path.
    • Vulcan Fury and Peacemaker. They dish out ludicrous amount of damage in short span of time, but the former chews through your ammunition insanely quickly and the latter has only 10 shots. And ammo for both can be hard to find in zones outside of the city.
    • The Supernova weapon in Jak 3: Wastelander kills all the enemies on screen. It also uses up all your violet ammo — the most powerful ammo in the game, and destroys every vehicle within certain radius, forcing you to go by foot or Jet Board. This also applies to the violet ammo itself, which can also be used to reverse gravity for all your enemies except for you. Cool? Yes. Practical? Not so much.
    • The Supernova again in Jak X: Combat Racing. It's the strongest weapon in the game (of course), destroying everyone in front of you and delaying their respawn for 3 or 5 seconds depending on whether your car is boosted by Dark Eco. However a) it is incredibly rare occurence to obtain it and b) when you do obtain it you have 10 seconds to fire it, otherwise it blows up your car, so you can't even reserve it for the best moment. And of course, there are possible moments when you overlook you got it and only notice after your car blows up.
  • In Jurassic World: The Game, Indominus rex. Sure, the thing is by far the most powerful dino in the game, but since it takes a full TWO DAYS to heal, you sure won't be using it much unless you have multiples or a lot of game bucks. And just getting one is costly enough, whether you get it with DNA or fuse T. rex and Velociraptor to get it, and the amount of food required to level the thing up. Some of the other legendary dinos border on this as well for similar reasons (T. rex and hybrids like Koolasaurus, Stegoceratops, and Ankylodocus for example).
  • KanColle: This trope is the bane of the Yamato class's existence, much like in real life. They are the strongest battleship class and can stomp most opponents... but they cost an insane amount of resources to build and sortie, which would probably be better off going to more resource-efficient ships for the most part. This bothers Yamato herself immensely; she'd like to be out there on the front lines using her massive cannons, but rarely ever gets the chance and spends so much of her time in port she's nicknamed 'Hotel Yamato'.
  • In the Facebook flash game, King of Kung Fu, the skill "Pet Charm" is quickly becoming this. It allows you to control one of your opponent's pets (many of which are quite powerful). However, the three most commonly used pets are immune to it, and most of the others are simply not worth the use of it taking up one of your 18 skill slots.
  • The Ghost ability in Kirby: Squeak Squad, which has the cool ability of possessing enemies and using their attacks against other enemies, but encounters a few problems. Ghost Kirby moves very slowly and has no method of dealing with anything that can't be possessed aside from a possessed enemy's attacks, and almost all enemies that can be possessed are both exceedingly weak, quite slow, and die in one or two hits. As another tidbit, Ghost Kirby, much like UFO Kirby, can't climb down ladders, meaning if you come to a section where you have to do this to progress, you have no real choice but to abandon the power.
  • The pistol in La-Mulana is half again as powerful as the Boosted Mace, hits instantly, and hits everything in its path. Problem? You get it pretty late in the game, and you can only get ammo by buying it at 400 coins minimum for 6 bullets per purchase, and you can carry a maximum of 12 bullets. It's only useful if you're trying to find all the ROMs, if you just want to massacre your way through the Dimensional Corridor, or if you're going for Hell Temple.
  • In Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain, you acquire the Soul Reaver, which both looks awesome and kills in one hit. On the other hand, it's a two-handed weapon, prohibiting magic of any sort, had a one hit combo which takes as long as two hits from the regular sword, and it drains your magic bar. As a result, the mace and the other swords are much more useful in the long run.
    • Raziel's version of the Reaver in Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver 2 could also qualify. It's a pretty powerful weapon and becomes more so if used constantly, but it destroys the souls of those it injures and kills (depriving Raziel of his major food source), and if overused will leech away Raziel's health.
  • In rail-shooter Left To Survive from My.Games, all the Special Weapons except perhaps the miniguns suffer this. While powerful, they all share the same disadvantage of needing to charge up by killing enemies first unlike your normal weapons. Additionally they have only a miniscule amount of shots, with the exception of the minigun weapons which have a ton of shots. Especially disadvantageous is the automatic pistol The Jolly Roger. It's very stylish looking being a double-barrelled revolver with two spinning chambers - one within the other and it's rate of fire matches a minigun. Unfortunately it only has 6 shots so most of the time, it's used to dump its shots on a tough target and then automatically revert back to your normal guns.
    • Heavy machine guns and automatic shotguns sound good on paper, but they have serious drawbacks. HMG weapons do good damage per shot but they have significantly smaller magazines than other machine gun types. Additionally they have awful accuracy between shots. For automatic shotguns, they do relatively low damage and have bad reload rates which their high rate of fire can't make up for. Between a double-barrelled shotgun and an automatic shotgun, the double-barrel can put out more lead or energy bolts than the automatic equivalent simply because its reload rates are so good.
  • The Legend of Zelda has this in several games.
    • Zelda II: The Adventure of Link has the Thunder spell, which does heavy damage to every enemy on screen. But the cost for the spell is extremely high — with a fully leveled magic power and fully extended magic meter, one casting of Thunder still drains half your magic. And this is Zelda II. You'll be needing that magic for healing.
    • In The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, bombchus qualify. There's a finite amount of them available and there's no part of the game where they're particularly useful, let alone necessary. Although bombchus get points for making battles against Iron Knuckles quite easy, allowing you to dispatch them far, far away from those huge axes.
    • The Ice Arrows and the Skulltula Family's renewable 200 Rupee reward also count. Having a source of infinite money is nice, but collecting all the Gold Skulltulas to get it takes almost the entire game to complete, at which point money really isn't an issue. And the Ice Arrows look cool and cause double the damage of a normal arrow when the freezing effect works, but enemies that can be frozen generally are not the ones that need to be frozen, thus making the difficult sidequest needed to obtain them into something of a fool's errand. Their one saving grace is that they're an instant kill on like-likes and the fact that they work on Armoses greatly simplifies an otherwise very annoying puzzle in the Spirit Temple (even then, your boomerang and hookshot can also do the job).
    • The three Goddess Powers in Ocarina were all hideously expensive to cast (Roughly half of the small Magic bar and two fifths of the boosted Bar) and their utility is questionable to say the least:
      • Din's Fire might be the least impractical; it burns everything in a 12 foot radius, but rarely you do fight enough enemies at a time to justify the cost, and it won't do much to minibosses. Its only justified use is opening the entrance to the Shadow Temple.
      • Nayru's Love made you invincible for its duration, but also impedes the use of items that also use the magic bar. Good on paper, but it can only be acquired around 70% into the game, when you have enough hearts to not worry about health anywhere but boss fights. The kicker? Not only is it useless against the Final Boss, he also requires Light Arrowsnote , which also drain magic, to beat in his first form. Nayru's Love is highly useful during 3-Heart runs, where an Iron Knuckle can easily 1-shot an unprotected Link.
      • Farore's Wind might be the most worthless of them all. You use it as a Warp Whistle inside of a dungeon. You need to have been where you want to warp already, it fades upon warping meaning you must cast it again if you want to keep the warp point, and you need to get through an overly complex dialog for what it does every time you cast it. Enough progress to justify its use would imply one has already opened a Door to Before or acquired the dungeon's resident item which usually serves the same purpose. It's also pointless as an Escape Rope, since saving and resetting the game will do just that, for free. The only times it's handy are for pulling off weird glitches and during specific speedrun setups.
    • The Giant's Knife is a two-handed sword that's stronger than even the Master Sword, but ends up breaking after a few swings, and can be repaired for a steep fee. A Chain of Deals is required to get a version that doesn't break when used.
    • The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. The Fierce Deity Mask requires you to get all the masks in the game, and then beat the boss. The boss is made incredibly easy with the FD mask, and then it's only usable in boss rooms after the end. And the Giant's Mask, incredibly awesome concept (giant Link!), but only usable against one boss.
    • The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap
      • The Pegasus Shoes, typically a top tier item in the games it appears in, are really only useful for crossing swamps and bumping into things. The roll maneuver is almost as fast, requires no charge time, is safer to use and is easier to control. The Pegasus Shoes also require an item slot in this game, making it almost a Nerf relative to the rest of the series.
      • Link can get Remote Bombs from Belari. Although they can be detonated at will, Link can only set up one at a time instead of two as with normal bombs. Because the player has to hit the item button to set off the Remote Bomb, it is also harder to set up a throw with it.
    • Twilight Princess:
      • You can eventually purchase 3 different varieties of bombs, the third of which is bomblings, which crawl along the ground and then explode (exactly like the Bombchus of previous games). However, they're more expensive per-bomb and you can carry fewer of them than of the other varieties, and there aren't really any situations in which they're actually any better than regular or water bombs. Most players will fill a single bomb bag with bomblings just for variety, and then never end up using any of them.
      • Bombchus were mainly used in OoT and MM for blowing up rocks that are on walls, ceilings, or out-of-reach areas. In TP, this is better done with Bomb Arrows, which are faster and more precise, and all that's required is regular bombs and the bow and arrows. It doesn't help that the bow is available quite a bit before bomblings.
      • Twilight Princess also includes a very expensive suit of Magic Armor which causes you to, when hit, lose Rupees instead of health. In theory, this could turn you into a nigh-indestructible juggernaut protected by his cavernous pocketfuls of gems, but it practice it's pretty useless because you end up running out of money (which is difficult to re-acquire) very quickly; stockpiling potions is easier and more effective. The armor also drains Rupees continuously — even if you don't get hit at all, 999 Rupees will only last you a few minutes — and when you run out of money its only effect is to make Link walk really slowly.
      • The Horse Call, which allows you to call Epona anywhere in Hyrule field, eliminating the need to find horse whistles. It's a neat item — at least it would be if it wasn't given to you about 3/4s of the way in the game, by which point, the player can have Midna warp them around Hyrule and has access to most, if not all, of the points you can warp to.
      • Link's wolf form itself quickly becomes this: sure it's awesome to be able to literally rip out your enemies' throats, but he can't block attacks, his only ranged attack takes a while to charge and can backfire if he runs into a wall, and most annoyingly, can't finish off or attack downed enemies (when most of his attacks make enemies fall down).
    • The good bee in A Link to the Past would attack enemies for you and, more importantly, not attack you. Unfortunately, it isn't anywhere near as helpful as fairies or potions, dealing Scratch Damage, easily being lost, and limited by Contractual Boss Immunity. The one boss exempt from that is Mothula, but one bee isn't strong enough on its own and having more than one for that one fight takes up too many valuable bottles.
    • Horses end up being rather impractical in Breath of the Wild. While having a mount is fun, and they provide increased movement speed as usual, the more vertical nature of the world greatly limits their capabilities, given that they can't glide or climb like Link can on foot. They can be used to traverse the roads to avoid Yiga archer and Blademaster ambushes after killing Master Kohga and freeing Vah Naboris, but said Yiga are barely a threat and the player likely has access to a considerable amount of shrines by then.
      • This also carries over to Tears of the Kingdom, especially since you can now construct vehicles for transportation. They tried to make them more useful by allowing you to attach a towing harness, which can be handy for carting stuff around before you've built up a supply of resources, but odds are you still won't use horses much outside of missions they're required for.
      • The Royal Guard series of equipment are a black and purple palette swap of the Royal series, boosting staggering high attack for the weapons (it's possible for the claymore to have an attack stat in the triple digits) and high defense for the shields. One letdown is that they are almost completely confined to Hyrule Castle, but the biggest deal-breaker is how quickly and often you need to deal with them breaking as their durability is horribly low.
  • Lobotomy Corporation seems to be built around this for a lot of concepts, with some weapons and a lot of monsters providing benefits for an absurd amount of risk.
    • Few things encompass this quite like Der Freischütz and his weapon. You can pay energy for them to fire a bullet across the facility. While there are situations where it's useful, far more often it causes more collateral damage than it's worth, and if you rely on it too much or don't work on him for a meltdown, he'll just fire it at random, almost guaranteeing death among your Clerks and Agents. His weapon in an Agent's hand isn't as collateral damage inducing, but it's also the only weapon in the game that doesn't care if what it hits is friend or foe. Sending in agents with the gun alone or with people who can tank its damage is generally the only way you'll get use from it, but it's the best weapon for dealing with Amber Ordeals by far.
    • Item Abnormalities are incredibly useful, but tend to have some sort of caveat. Mis-using them can cause the Agent to die or go mad on the spot. And those are the nicer ones. But proper use can cause agents to handle much tougher challenges than would be reasonably possible.
    • ALEPH abnormalities range from Hard but reasonable to manage to this. Alephs are the most dangerous kind of monsters in-universe and give the most energy out of all Abnormalities, but all of them are capable of breaching and causing their own kind of hell. The ones that are reasonable have clear guidelines on who not to send to work and what kind of work to avoid, but the absolute worst ones are capable of breaching because the game hates you more than usual today.
    • Child of the Galaxy gives Agents regenerative abilities for the day, but if they work on anything that isn't him, his counter will go down. If it reaches zero, everyone who worked on him for the day dies. While the counter can go as high as 5, it drops like a rock if any such people die, only preventing further disaster if the counter is maxed out when it happens.
    • Little Red Riding Hooded Mercenary can be contracted to fight other Abnormalities. As a WAW class, she can total a lot of monsters in the facility. However, if things are bad enough that you need to actually use her, chances are it's better to just restart the day. She's also worthless against anything that resists Red damage and Aleph abnormalities will generally no-sell anything she does without proper support. And all of this isn't taking the possibility of you having Big and Will Be Bad Wolf into account; even on duty she's much more interested in killing that Wolf than anything you sick her on, even if it's still in containment. On the other hand, if the Wolf howls near her room (which it only does after breaching its cell), she'll go after it for free, and she always wins without outside help. Which is good, because her attacks hurt your people in the process and it's thus better to go in an elevator off to the side until it's over.
    • The Queen of Hatred will actually break out to assist your facility, fighting breaching Abnormalities or Ordeals and healing your people in the process. However, she only does this during Second Trumpet situations, where either far too many dangerous things are out for her to handle, or a lot of your strong people are dead already. The Queen also has to be sane when hell breaks loose; if she's going crazy at the time, you will not get this support. Also, she'll lose her shit and become part of the problem if too many people continue dying since she considers it her fault.
    • The Knight of Despair will bless the first person to get a good result with her for the day. They take half damage from all sources except Pale, which does double damage instead. Pale damage is deadly without the damage boost, but rare enough that it's usually not too much of an issue. If the blessed person dies anyways, Knight of Despair will go on a rampage of revenge. She's also very strong as far as WAW abnormalities go and is one of the few sources of said very deadly damage.
    • Melting Love grants whoever works on it in any way besides Repression a regenerative heart. Useful under certain circumstances, but the person with it is effectively a Patient Zero that will spread a virus that turns people into slime minions. Managed well, it's not too big of a deal, but an inattentive manager can end up with a facility full of people slowly turning into slimes. If it spreads too far, Melting Love will just breach, taking its Patient Zero with it, in a rampage across the facility. Oh, and with most other benefit giving abnormalities, it still breaches if whoever it blessed dies. She's also an Aleph class, and while easier than most Alephs she still won't be easy to put down.
  • In Luck be a Landlord, the Dove prevents any adjacent symbol from being destroyed and permanently gives an extra coin for each symbol it saves. It looks good on paper, but in practice, not so much if it ends up "saving" something you want destroyed such as Reroll and Removal Capsules.
  • Magical Battle Arena has a classic usage of this trope. Yagami Hayate can dish out a ton of damage and freeze enemies that are on nearly half of the entire battlefield. The catch? It takes an impossibly long time to charge.
  • Marco & the Galaxy Dragon: At one point, Hara (Marco’s scooter) gains the ability to fire a powerful laser from his headlight. Unfortunately, firing it even once uses up all the gas in his tank.
  • In Mario Party 5 and 6, the Bullet Bill Capsule/Orb lets you steal 30/20 coins from any opponent you pass, as well as pass roadblocks without triggering them. However, you cannot buy Stars, choose your direction at junctions, or experience other board events.
  • The Matrix: Path of Neo has an awesome, unlockable combo called "The One". It's just too bad that it has about thirty buttons to press, along with joystick movements on console versions. Even if you start it against an enemy, unless it's a very powerful one, that enemy is likely dead by the time you're, not even, half finished. Thus, making it practically useless.
  • The bigger a weapon is in the MechWarrior videogame series, the more likely it is to belong here. Huge cannons, lasers and missiles make big booms and do a lot of damage, but they invariably have serious drawbacks that make them less efficient than a wise application of medium weaponry. Extremely large ballistic weapons have little ammo per ton and take a lot of space inside a mech, while large missile systems — not to be confused with the Boring Yet Practical ones that simply spew dozens of small rockets — add to those drawbacks the problem of being very vulnerable to anti-missile systems. As for energy weapons, the really big ones typically produce massive amounts of heat; your mech can dish out a lot of hurt every now and then, but while you're waiting for it to cool down you'll receive a lot of damage from less fancily-armed mechs that can chain-fire their medium lasers pretty much all day long.
  • The lightning in MediEvil. Powerful (if slow) distance attack, but when you're out of ammo, it's gone forever; it can't be wasted at all.
  • Mega Man:
    • Mega Man (Classic):
      • Heat Man's Atomic Fire in Mega Man 2 looks very cool, especially when fully charged, but does very little damage, if any damage at all. What's more, the amount of energy it uses is obscene (with a full energy bar, you can fire off two fully charged shots maximum), and unless you're fighting Wood Man or Wily Machine 2's first form, other weapons will likely do the job just as well. It gets better in Mega Man: Dr. Wily's Revenge with a more useable ammo consumption rate, but getting hit while charging fires the shot early, and you get it very late in the game.
      • Oil Man's Oil Slider. For some reason the designers left him with no other form of attack, despite augmenting many of the other Robot Masters, forcing him to slide around like an idiot if he wants to do any damage at all.
      • There's also the Spark Shock in Mega Man 3; the fact that you can't switch weapons while enemies are paralyzed from it makes it a far less useful weapon than the much-maligned Top Spin. They did fix it in Mega Man III, however, making it a much better power overall.
      • Mega Man 10's Commando Bomb can inflict heavy damage on enemies, and can even pierce some armored enemies, but bizarrely enough if you fire it directly at them, it only does minimal damage; you have to aim it at the floor/wall/ceiling adjacent to the enemy for it to explode and cause damaging shockwaves. You can also change its direction twice in mid-flight, which sounds cool, except that usually you really only need to do so once, and if you accidentally (or intentionally, to dodge an enemy's shots) move Mega Man sideways after setting the bomb on a vertical path, you will change the bomb's trajectory again, missing your target.
      • The Thunder Wool from the same game is even more powerful than the Commando Bomb against stationary enemies, since it can hit them with two powerful zaps, but good luck actually hitting anything. The weapon launches a cloud that travels up and to the side a bit, then zaps anything below it with deadly lightning. But if the cloud hits an enemy before it reaches the top of its arc, it does minimal damage and dissipates before it can zap anything.
    • Mega Man X:
      • A lot of X's helmet upgrades tend to fall under this. Aside from the secret armor upgrades, the SNES ones, and their Gameboy Expies, aren't much use once you memorize where they'd be useful. Play style or character preference does the same to most of the PS1 ones as many reduce weapon energy usage (which neither Zero nor the Ultimate Armor really need), the Shadow Armor speeds up sword attacks, and the Gaea Armor has no stated function at all. Aversions are X4 (game play is set up so weapons are still useful), X7 (attracts power ups from further away), and X8 (a weaponized form of X1's part and a quick charge, though the Nova Strike makes weapons useless again).
      • Mega Man X3 has the basic version of the buster upgrade, but only the basic version. At full power, you can fire two charge shots that, with the right timing, could overlap into a five-shot barrage that could hit nearly anything on screen. The problem is that you have to get to full power, which was two levels higher than the basic charge shot, otherwise you're shooting a full charge and a half-charged shot that won't do anything. You can get one of two enhancement chips, though you'd want the overpowered version, that gives a reserve of charge shots to get around this, but the energy consumption is huge, and you can only recharge it by taking damage, but the amount of damage needed to recharge a single unit is absurd. If you get Zero's beam saber though, charging to full power creates a new shot combo that will include a wave of energy flung from the saber after the cross shot that can take off over half a boss's energy meter. The saber won't add to your charge time, and is included in the shot reserve upgrade. Add on top of that the fact that the screen wide shot is slow, making it possible for opponents to dodge it.
      • The basic version of the X3 armor is this trope. The completed Mega Man X2 armor had three useful attacks, but you could only use the X3 scanning feature when you first enter a stage.
      • X1 and X2 have the Hadouken and Shoryuken enhancements, respectively. Both can kill most enemies in a single shot; however, using them requires X to be at full health and standing perfectly still, rendering them completely useless for most bosses. Finding them can be a pain too.
    • Almost half the special weapons in Mega Man Legends are of this variety. The laser sword, for example, is slow, does only moderate damage, and has no range... in a 3D game where every enemy both has projectiles and deals contact damage. The only really useful special weapons are obtained within the first few hours of gameplay, and by the end of the game even they become useless because your buster gun is more powerful than any of them are and is actually practical for killing things. Add in the facts that you have to collect several items to even build them and then spend several thousand zenny just to power them up to their full potential, and honestly, there's little to no point to even bothering with them.
      • The Shining Laser and Active Buster deserve special mention, though upon final upgrade they become even more powerful. The Shining Laser has extremely low capacity (it more or less uses one ammo per frame), but can kill the final boss, notorious for his defense, in about four seconds with its final attack upgrade. The Active Buster fires rapid-fire homing missiles and costs more than every other Special Weapon in the game barring the Shining Laser combined. You can aim with the Shining Laser and you are completely immobile with the Active Buster but with a maximum homing rating it will seek enemies behind you. The breaking point? Both weapons gain unlimited ammo upon the final energy upgrade and when fully upgraded are the strongest and third-strongest weapons, with Active Buster being at the limits of every stat besides attack, in the game when everything is said and done.
      • The Vacuum Arm and Drill Arm manage to avoid this to an extent. The Drill Arm can do some hefty damage if you pay to increase its Attack stat, but its primary use is for destroying certain barriers that are found in the ruins of both Legends games. The Vacuum Arm doesn't do any damage, but it makes collecting the zenny and health considerably easier and more efficient, which is good when you're grinding for the funds to buy health and armor upgrades.
    • Mega Man Battle Network series:
      • Some individual chips can be classified this way: They offer great attack power or range, but are addled with a very situational activation condition or are available in unwieldy codes.
      • Though some of the Program Advances are quite powerful, and worth including in an appropriate deck, others are nearly impossible to use, especially those that require three copies of a chip in with letter codes in alphabetical order (preventing you from using any other chip that turn) or require four or more different chips all with the same letter code.

        A popular combo for a while in the third game was "Disco Inferno". Without going too far into details, it causes the entire field to explode in a giant blaze (awesome) and deal amazing damage. The combo also required five chips in the correct order (including the Program Advance that forms the combo) and could be circumvented by using any of the staple defensive chips, raising one's shield, or simply stepping back and firing the buster.
      • Going Dark Soul in Mega Man Battle Network 4: Red Sun and Blue Moon and Mega Man Battle Network 5: Team Colonel and Team ProtoMan opens up access to the incredibly powerful Dark Chips and their adjacent Evil Chips. If you're dark enough, taking lethal damage instead unleashes a berserk mode where MegaMan turns invincible and attacks automatically at random. However, using Dark Chips always saddles you with a bug for the rest of the battle on top of a permanent Maximum HP Reduction, and while in Dark Soul, you are locked out of the damage-doubling Full Synchro, any useful Double Souls, and even certain Mega Chips.

        The fourth game also imposes an untold Video Game Cruelty Punishment by blocking your access to Dark Chips against the Final Boss, robbing you of your greatest advantage from going Dark while leaving you to all of the disadvantages during the fight.

        Dark Chips in the fifth game can be inserted into the folder and have their own chip codes, but you can only hold a maximum of three Dark Chips in a folder and they have an immense 99 MB capacity to keep you from setting them as a Regular Chip. This reduces the consistency of seeing your Dark Chips and makes it difficult to go Dark in this game. However, the Dark Chips are much more useful if you use them for a Chaos Unison.
    • The Rogue forms in Mega Man Star Force 2 are based on the rejection of Brother Bands and give you a nifty black-armoured version of your Super Mode, as well as a regenerating protective barrier and a bonus to all sword cards. These transformations are also neutral, meaning you don't have an elemental weakness that would cancel it. Sadly, the sword power bonus isn't particularly useful because a lot of enemies are very nimble and hard to hit even with lock-on, nor are the available sword cards all that impressive as a theme, especially since they only cover three of the four elements. It prevents you from using Mega Cards, so you lose out on some of your biggest damage sources. Since the Indie Proofs that fuel it take up all six slots of your Real Brothers list when in use, it reduces your budget for equipped abilities, too, and shuts down the abilities that automatically put you into tribe form, should you have them equipped. To drive the nail in the coffin, the Rogue transformations' Limit Break can only be used in multiplayer, and doing so cancels the Rogue form for the rest of the battle. Ultimately, you're giving up too many perks for a few situational skills.
    • Giga Cards enter this trope in Mega Man Star Force 3 due to changes in the Custom Screen. In this game, the Custom Screen display has a degree of disorder to it, meaning that cards can now overlap each other. If a card is overlapped, it can either be used as a situational support (effects differing based on element or your Ability Waves) or as the only card you can select that turn. To offset their power, Mega and Giga cards have larger icons, increasing the odds of those cards overlapping or being stuck underneath other cards. Giga cards with their gargantuan icons thus become really unwieldy to use as they block off the ability to form combos with your cards.
  • Metal Gear:
    • In Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, Arsenal Gear, according to Solidus. It requires other Metal Gears to guard it, along with a small army. Without the requirements to support it, in his own words, it's just "a gigantic coffin".
    • In Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, at one point Sigint will discuss the possibility of a bipedal tank. He mentions an American (Huey Emmerich, Otacon's father) proposed the idea, and he himself considers the idea ridiculous, as tanks already have treads to cross difficult terrain — as far as he is considered anyone who takes the idea seriously is a nutjob (adding to the joke, the fourth game reveals Sigint is Donald Anderson, the man who funded Metal Gear REX in the first game in the series. Also, the M63 and the RPG will probably only see much use during the Shagohod chase sequence, when you have infinite ammo and that's only if you don't care about killing soldiers as that prevents you from getting the coveted "Foxhound" rank. The M63's firepower is impressive but it chews through ammo very fast, and a heavy, cumbersome rocket launcher that can destroy a small area isn't much use to a one-man sneaking mission.
      • The Shagohod from Snake Eater is the grand-daddy of Metal Gears, and also hideously impractical even by the standards of Metal Gears. It cannot walk as it has no legs (a screw assembly provides locomotion) and it has all the handling qualities of an oil tanker. And to use the nuclear weapons on-board as intended requires a 4.8km (3 mile) stretch of runway that faces your intended target. An RPG barely scratches the paint on the armour and a surface-to-air missile launcher and a 100 barrel volley gun provides a lot of punch, but it's just a glorified tank at that point. Ironically in some respects it's actually Boring, but Practical compared to REX or RAY.
      • The Spider Camo, which can be acquired by defeating The Fear non-lethally, keeps your camo level absurdly high, even whilst walking/running, but it comes at the cost of eating through your stamina at a very quick pace, so using it only when absolutely necessary is the smart thing to do whenever utilizing it as the effect stops completely once your stamina is fully depleted.
      • In a gameplay-related example, your final choice in the game can unlock the Single Action Army for use in your next playthrough. It's undoubtedly fun — you can spin it on your finger and ricochet shots off background objects like Ocelot does — but its damage isn't noticeably better than your standard M911A1, it can't be silenced, it only holds six shots and you can't move while firing it. You also can't CQC with it equipped (only pistol-whip), which puts you at a disadvantage in short-ranged combat.
      • Another New Game Plus reward is the Tuxedo. Gives you that James Bond debonair, but it offers no value as camo save in dark areas, and you can't use CQC or your knife while it's equipped. Your radio team also berates you for wearing it. Players generally only use it when they want to show off their skills.
    • Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain: Many of the cooler toys are hideously expensive and also cap your mission rating if you use them. For example, Fire Supportnote , Stealth Camo P.P.note  and the PARASITE Suit, which gives you the abilities of the zombie Super Soldiers you fight throughout the game. D-Walker could also be arguably this in any situation that isn't a straight firefight: something of a Jack of All Stats combining the abilities of all other Buddies, but it is far more expensive to upgrade and deploy than any of them; plus while it's fast in wheeled mode it handles worse than a three-wheeled shopping trolley, it is incredibly difficult to use in stealth missions because of how tall and conspicuous it is, and unlike the animal companions that are largely ignored, any enemies that see D-Walker will try to destroy it.
  • Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance: Lampshaded in-universe. Sundowner has a pair of machetes that can form into a single scissor-like assembly, dubbed "Bloodlust", on one arm. Raiden, Boris and The Doktor all question the tactical validity of such a weapon; given what a psychotic individual Sundowner is, it's quite likely that the sheer cruelty of the weapon is what attracts him to it.
  • Metroid:
    • Metroid: The Wave Beam does more damage than the normal or Ice Beam, can hit the various crawling monsters, can destroy several rocks quickly and can shoot through walls. Unfortunately, you need the Ice Beam to reach certain areas and to kill the Metroids in Tourian (even if you decide to skip the Metroids, freezing them with the Ice Beam is still the better option for doing that). The Wave Beam is the best weapon to beat Kraid with, however.
    • Metroid II: Return of Samus: The Plasma Beam is the most powerful gun you get, but it fires a straight shot that can't penetrate certain enemies' armor, unlike the Wave Beam. The plasma beam and the spazer are close together, so getting rid of it isn't too hard if you think it's too impractical.
    • Super Metroid has several of these, one of which is only shown in a demo upon completion of the game:
      • The Crystal Flash: set off a Power Bomb and press and hold down L, R, and Down when you have at least 10 missiles, 10 Super Missiles, 11 (when you do it) Power Bombs and under 50 Energy with nothing in reserve tanks: doing this encases Samus in a sphere of energy and uses up her ammunition to fill up her energy. This one is helpful in a pinch if you're trying to get out of wherever you are, but performing it is tricky and it doesn't work well for speedruns.
      • The Blue Suit. A glitch on the Draygon boss allows the player to kill it via shinesparking and be kept in a state of pseudo-dashing. During this time, pressing down prepares a single-use shinespark (not using it then causes you to revert back to blue suit), pressing Y cancels out of the blue suit altogether, and stopping on sand also disables it. However, as long as you are in blue suit mode, anything you touch takes damage, and you have no invincibility frames when you actually do end up taking damage, but you can use the shinespark in all sorts of places the developers didn't consider, which can lead to some amusing glitches. Reason for its impracticality? Well, apart from the obvious (you can't shinespark without losing it, etc.), landing on a row of spikes is effectively death, and you can't save, quit, load the game and keep it. It's also not even practical for a Tool-Assisted Speedrun due to not being able to run.
      • The Super Missiles pack the biggest punch in the game, and can destroy bosses far more quickly than regular Missiles can. However, they are far rarer than regular Missiles (only 50 Super Missiles compared to 230 regular), are fairly slow to fire, restocking ammo is quite difficult (only some enemies drop Super Missile ammo, and Missile Stations don't restock them, only your ship does) and sometimes have unexpected side effects — for example, while they kill Phantoon faster, they also trigger a unique retaliatory attack where he swings a chain of fireballs across the screen eight times in a row. If you can use them well, they are very deadly, though — they're the best way to push Crocomire to his death, for example, because they knock him back the furthest compared to Samus' other options.
    • In Metroid Prime: Hunters, the Omega Cannon fires what are pretty much man-sized nukes and is normally the 11th-Hour Superpower used to defeat the final boss. In multiplayer, however, where it is available on one map, it boasts a massive One-Hit Kill radius and blinds everyone in the area... and you are not immune to any of this, meaning it's really easy to kill yourself with it. Though admittedly, it is also really funny.
    • The Power Bomb in Metroid: Other M somewhat qualifies for this. It's the strongest weapon in the game, and you can only use it for one fricking battle. And that's after being devoured by a Metroid Queen. After beating the game, however, it is freely available, though it has a recharge time of 2 minutes, which renders it kind of useless in battle, as most fights against regular enemies take less than a minute. Then again, they at least have an actual use for killing things in that game, as outside of a few niche uses it has generally been used solely for finding more power bombs in most others.note 
    • In Metroid Dread, it's once again the 11th-Hour Superpower, Samus's Metroid Suit. On one hand, it replaces her regular beam with a gigantic Wave-Motion Gun that blasts through just about anything and kills everything in one shot. On the other, it also overrides several functions needed to navigate the environment (meaning that hacking to get it early turns the game unwinnable), and since it's Samus's Metroid DNA going out of control, including the Energy Absorption power that she's now unable to turn off, attempting to pilot her spaceship with the upgrade would only destroy the ship. This nearly gets her killed until she finds a way to disable it.
  • Minecraft:
    • Golden Armour and tools. The tools are the fastest in the game, gold armor can hold better enchantments than anything else, and they all look really cool, until we find out that Notch opted for the realistic structural density of gold, rather than the JRPG version, leaving you with what amounts to some "slightly tasteless evening wear." In addition to the pathetic durability, gold armor is less defensive than leather, gold swords deal about the same damage as wood swords, and gold pickaxes can't harvest anything beyond coal and regular stone (and its variants).
    • For general use, TNT is good to destroy a wall or the like, but only a quarter of the blocks it destroys get dropped as items, on average, so it's a pretty terrible idea to use it when mining for valuable ore. As of update 1.14, this no longer holds true.
    • Outside of flashy machines, asthetic purposes and setting up things behind the scenes in adventure maps, the uses of advanced redstone is surprisingly limited when it comes to the survival aspect of Minecraft. Sure, you could set up a complicated system of pistons and dispensers that drop lava to weaken mobs from a mob spawner... Or you can set up a simple water dropper system that does the same exact thing, without the headaches of needing to know advanced redstone circuitry. And while setting up piston doors is a massive boon, considering how long they take to open and close, you're usually just better off with a standard wooden door; especially if you're rushing home being chased by a Creeper. Ultimately, a lot of the crazy redstone contraptions you see for survival Minecraft on YouTube often have much simpler, more compact alternatives that aren't nearly as resource intensive as redstone is.
    • Totems of Undying are awesome, in that they allow you to cheat death. If your health reaches 0 while holding a Totem, you don't die and start rapidly regenerating health. They're impractical in that you have to be holding it for it to work, so that means either rapidly scrolling to it if you're about to die, or constantly holding one in your off-hand, meaning you can't use that for anything else. Plus, they don't remove the thing you died to in the first place, so if you got caught in a zombie horde, the totem won't protect you from a second death. They're also VERY hard to get, as they're only dropped by Vindicators, which require you to trigger and beat a raid on a village, or raid a woodland mansion, which are NOTORIOUSLY hard to find. Finally, unless you're playing Hardcore-mode, Death is Cheap, and you respawn either at your bed or at the world spawn. The worst that can happen is that you have to run back to find your items before they vanish.
  • Minecraft: Story Mode: Soren mentions that he loves this sort of thing right before asking you to activate a switch that releases about a dozen Iron Golem security guards.
  • In Michael Jackson's Moonwalker on the Sega Genesis, you can perform a special move that makes everyone on screen dance themselves to death. Unfortunately, it costs half your life.
    • And you can get a powerup that transforms Michael into Humongous Mecha Michael, but it is completely useless for any level other then the second to last one, as you can't rescue children with it equipped, so all you can do is blast away at infinite Respawning Enemies for a minute or so.
  • About 90% of the available Plasma Blade combos and almost all of the Boosters in the 3-D Castlevania-styled action game Nanobreaker serve no real purpose other than to put on a (somewhat nifty) laser light show for your opponents. For that matter, if it doesn't hit all around you or deliver a quick instant kill, it was essentially useless against the game's swarming Orgamechs.
  • Nasuverse:
    • The Broken Phantasm technique of Heroic Spirits: by pouring more prana into a physical Noble Phantasm than it can hold, it becomes Made of Explodium, detonating on it's next use. However, doing so breaks the weapon, severely limiting the Heroic Spirit's ability to fight further. The exception to this rule is Fate/stay night's Archer, whose Noble Phantasms are all disposable copies. For him, Broken Phantasms are both awesome and practical.
    • Artoria's Noble Phantasm, Excalibur, is basically a Sword Beam with the power of a small nuke. A direct hit from it would incinerate all but the most powerful Servants. However, it eats up so much magic and causes so much collateral damage that she tends to avoid using it unless the Godzilla Threshold has been passed. Her Alter counterpart has no such compunctions, and ends up being pretty terrifying for it.
    • Lampshaded by Fate/hollow ataraxia, with Avenger's pair of... really weird claw-swords named Tawrich and Zarich. While they look nasty and painful, as far as weapons go they aren't very useful in a fight. Standard blades would work much better for stabbing or cutting. It's yet another sign that he really is the weakest Servant who could possibly be summoned into a Grail War.
  • In Ninja Gaiden (NES), there's the spinning slash and fire shield.
    • The spinning slash is a powerful attack that turns you into a Sonic-like buzzsaw when you attack in the air. With the right angle, this thing makes short work of bosses, even causing a One-Hit KO on the first boss. However, the bad thing about the spinning slash is that it activates every time you attack while jumping, meaning you can run out of special attack energy if you're not careful. This can be averted if you know how to nullify it: holding down while attacking.
    • The fire shield is essentially your invincibility mode, allowing you to blaze through obstacles while it's active. However, instead of restoring the previous item you had once it runs out, it disappears, leaving you without any.
  • The gameplay of Oddworld inevitably leads to this due to the teetering level of power of the protagonist Abe depending on the situation.
    • In Abe's Oddysee, its remake Oddworld: New 'n' Tasty! and the original game's sequel Abe's Exoddus, several sub-areas can be cleared solely through grenades by standing out of view, cooking the grenade and throwing with perfect timing as to kill an approaching slig. However, it is normally more practical to just blow up a chant supressor to possess a slig and shoot all the other sligs.
    • Oddworld: Soulstorm allows almost all challenges to be solved in a large variety of ways, so some will be less practical than others.
      • The Shrykull power that had very specific uses in other games can be saved for when the player wants a total screenwipe. However, since Shrykull charges are rare, it is usually better to use other methods.
      • The Flamethrower is the most expensive craftable item in the game, and can reliably kill most enemies as long as you get the first shot. It does come with the drawback of speading uncontrolable fire everywhere, making it just as likely to kill you or your followers as anyone else.
  • Orcs Must Die! Unchained has quite a bit of fancy traps with varying levels of flashiness. Some, such as the Tesla Coil are almost never seen in loadouts due to just how expensive they are. Players get much more use out of floor spikes and arrow walls.
  • The Neddle of Fury in Otogi: Myth of Demons jacks your attack way up, letting you tear though enemies with ease. But lowers your defense a lot and disables your magic, most of the time you're better off with magic.
  • Outzone The Super Burner — an incredibly powerful flame thrower which kills even the tough enemies instantly. However you probably won't last long with it due to its limited range and the fact you can only fire in the direction you're moving.
  • Phantasy Star Online has a long list of weapons that requires ultra specific circumstances to obtain weapons that are no better then most other commonly dropped weapons. These weapons have underwhelmingly weak attacks coupled with special effects and animations found in no other weapons.There are however a few weapons that have insane stats nearly maxing out several stat categories, but by the time you can use them you're more than 70% to the max level cap and can easily solo most the dungeons, or they require you to be a specific race and class. Great example of this is the Olga Flow weapons. There is one for each class, they require a maxed stat for the class's specialized stat you're using, but they deal insane damage and the effects are only triggered at 10%> HP. Reverse to this is the insanely rare weapon Sealed J-Sword, dropped by a Gi Gue on 1 specific player ID color with a drop chance very similar to that of winning the powerball. The sword you put the work in to get is completely disappointing, even unsealed it is barely a step above the market trash you can purchase from merchants.
  • Pirates: Legend of the Black Buccaneer likes to play with the player's idea of the usefulness of certain abilities. One ability that you receive after the first dungeon is the ability to summon zombies that fight for you. The problem? They drain your health, can only be summoned at certain spots (justified, as they're probably graves or voodoo ritual spots. They can be found nearly everywhere, so thats good), can only be summoned one at a time, and move so slowly, that by the time they can actually be useful, you will have lost half of your health to the enemy, and half your health as price for the slow moving zombie. The exact opposite happens when you fight through a huge hell-like arena, killing demons, and your reward is the ability to cut down plants. Seriously, except its an extremely useful ability, due to the amount of plants around the early parts of the game.
  • Plantasia:
    • Roses yield the most mana, but take the longest to grow, which can make growing them impractical in levels with shorter time limits.
    • Planting same-colored flowers next to each other and then waiting for them to bloom all at once is a usable strategy for getting extra mana, but don’t wait too long or the blooms will disappear before you can harvest them. Especially with flowers that are particularly slow to bloom, such as berries and roses.
    • Upgrading your gardening tools helps get rid of rocks, pests, and weeds faster, but don’t spend too much on them or you won’t have enough mana left to buy flowers.
  • Plants vs. Zombies has the Chomper, a plant which can One-Hit Kill any zombie that enters its range. The only problem? After it eats a zombie, it takes forever to chew it up and swallow its meal, leaving it open to attack during that time. You could put some Wall Nuts in front of it, but because of the Chomper's short range, any more than one will render the Chomper unable to attack. Thus, it'll likely only be able to eat one zombie before it's dead meatvegetable matter.
    • Put a second Chomper behind the first, though, and if the zombies eat your Wall-Nut, the Chomper behind the chewing Chomper will take out the first zombie to come at it. You still have only increased the kill count from one to two.
    • Among the bumper crop of new plants introduced in the sequel, we have the Bowling Bulbs, introduced in Big Wave Beach. Three onion bulbs roll down the lane and rebound off any zombies they hit, causing them to potentially do a lot of damage. The problem? When all three bulbs have gone and there are still zombies on a row, only the smallest and weakest bulb will ever roll down. The other two considerably stronger bulbs won't ever recharge unless there are no zombies on the row. Although they have one of the best Plant Food abilities in the game, the bulbs are otherwise situational at best and are vastly outclassed by a number of the other plants that the game offers. This, however, only applies to a Bowling Bulb below level 3 — at level 3, it will regenerate and roll the medium bulb, and at Level 7, it will roll the largest bulbs.
  • Prinny: Can I Really Be the Hero? has the skill Prinny Raid, which you get from losing all 1000 lives on one playthrough. Performing the skill has Prinnies rain down from the sky and damage all those in the way. On top of that, you're invincible the entire way through. So what's so bad about that? Well, those Prinnies are your extra livesnote  and you're throwing them away just to kill a bunch of things on screen when you could have just killed them yourself.
  • In Project Zomboid:
    • Combat. Period. As you can be infected by a single bite or scratch from a zombie, melee combat is highly risky against any number of zombies higher than three at a time. Firearms are safer to use but firing one will attract zombies from all over the map to your position. And Molotov cocktails and other improvised explosives do the same but also run the risk of potentially burning down your safehouse or killing you.
    • The Police Officer profession. Being a former police officer gives you more skill when using highly impractical firearms and not much else.
  • [PROTOTYPE] has a number of high-end moves like this, such as the Bulletdive Drop, which has awesome damage but has horrible prep time and is difficult to aim or hit anyone with since it has poorer tracking than the other drop moves. Available earlier in the game is the artillery strike, which requires an intact officer disguise and a stationary target (when most of the targets you'll be facing move rather quickly), has a small area of effect, and takes several seconds to call in. It's usually simpler to just chuck a car at the problem.
  • The Raiden series has the Bend Plasma weapon (a.k.a. the purple "toothpaste" laser), which can twist around to continuously hit enemies that it touches, often damaging enemies that get in its way. However, it doesn't just bend — it turns and loops, potentially several times, causing ludicrous figure-eight lightshows which are a pretty distracting sight when you're trying to dodge enemy fire. It also deals less damage than the spread shot at point blank or the blue laser.
  • In Raptor: Call of the Shadows, if you hold off on the fire button, you regenerate health. Problem is, it takes far too long to generate any decent amount of health back, and most of the things that kill you in that game do so by ramming, which is best countered by, well, shooting them first.
    • It sees use on a couple of bosses, where it's easy to dodge circles around them until you're back up to full health, saving valuable money on repairs.
  • Ratchet & Clank weapons often edge into this:
    • Ratchet & Clank (2002):
      • The Walloper is a boxing glove that's much more powerful than the wrench and doesn't use any ammo. However after a punch, Ratchet is immobile for half a second, leaving him wide open to any remaining enemies and unable to dodge incoming fire. Some players ignore this because of how hilarious it is to see enemies fly back fifty yards after hitting them with it.
      • The Defensive Drone Device seems neat in theory: it deploys six drones that seek out and blow up any enemy who gets too close. However it only has 10 ammo (60 drones total), they only block incoming fire by chance, and each drone can only blow up once. That's problematic because the strongest enemies almost always keep their distance and use ranged attacks, while the one-hit swarmer enemies will quickly close in and use up all your Drones, a massive waste of ammo. Small wonder Insomniac reworked them into the Shield Barrier for the sequel, which blocks incoming fire and damages enemies who touch it, making it far more useful.
    • Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando:
      • The Synthenoid surrounds you with four robots that automatically shoot anything nearby. Sounds cool, until you realize they're quite weak, disappear after firing a certain number of shots, can only be used three times to top up your drones (regardless of how many are still around), can only get ammo by buying them from Vendors, and can only effectively kill one-hit enemies and thus is extremely difficult to upgrade.
      • The Hoverbomb Gun shoots a powerful floating mine, which can either float in a straight line or be directed by the player, and has unlimited range (the upgrade shoots a cluster of five mines, and each mine is more powerful than a RYNO II rocket). However the mines travel extremely slowly, don't blow up when they touch an enemy, and since the camera stays focused on Ratchet (unlike with the Visibomb Gun), it's very difficult to tell when you should detonate them. Oh, and the mines blow up if Ratchet gets hit while trying to direct them. The only practical use is as a makeshift stealth weapon (in which case the Pulse Rifle is a better bet), or on bosses if you lack the RYNO II (which can fire its slightly weaker rockets far faster than the Hoverbomb Gun can).
      • The Zodiac costs a ridiculous 1.5 million bolts, with ammo costing a further 10 thousand bolts per shot (though thankfully it can be found in crates). The weapon itself takes two seconds to charge, before vaporizing all enemies on screen. However the weapon can only hold four shots, and if Ratchet fires it while standing still, being hit will cancel the attack while still using ammo anyway. Oh, and it doesn't have any effect on bosses. Much more practical is to let rip with your 100-round rapid-fire R.Y.N.O. II, for just a mere one million bolt purchase, and a hundred bolts a shot. Considering the amount of enemies ever on screen, the R.Y.N.O. II can take out what the Zodiac can in almost the same amount of time.
      • The Tesla Claw from the first game becomes this. The ammo capacity is boosted even beyond the first game's healthy supply, however the shift in gameplay style toward a heavier shooter emphasis means that you'll be facing a lot more opponents that are just too far away for the Tesla Claw to reach. And the weapon can't be modded or made stronger by levelling up, so it immediately starts in Can't Catch Up status. Thus, the wicked awesome crab claw that shoots lightning that saw a lot of use in the original game — to the point that the gold version renders nearly every other weapon superfluous — will probably spend most of its time sitting unused in your weapons list. The Visibomb Gun suffers similar fate here.
    • Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal:
      • The Infector is a weapon that infects enemies so they attack their allies rather than you. Very fun, except it also deals damage to the target, so smaller enemies are quickly killed before they can be of any use. As well, stronger enemies require repeat infections to keep under your control and take longer to turn in the first place. It's often much better to shoot them with more traditional weapons.
      • The Holoshield Glove is mostly useless. It projects a giant shield that blocks enemy fire, however Ratchet is more than nimble enough to not need it at all (and it gets XP from taking enemy shots directly). The upgrade appears at least marginally useful because it leeches health from enemies to Ratchet (making it useful in arena challenges, especially its resident Marathon Level) and can fire a counterattack shot. However enemies must be close enough for the leech effect to work (when the shield is supposed to protect you from, you know, ranged attacks) and the latter is too weak to matter.
  • The Blunderbuss in Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare. It's stupidly powerful and is very easy to obtain ammunition for, but can only load one shot at a time and has a very long reload animation, meaning that unless your first shot obliterated every enemy in the area, you're going to have to spend a lot of time running away as you reload. Oftentimes it's much more Boring, but Practical to equip a less powerful weapon with a larger magazine.
  • Red Ninja: End of Honor has the Fundo, the second combat attachment for your weapon. Unlike the default Blade, which cuts and impales enemies, the Fundo bludgeons and entangles them. This can be used to do all sorts of cool tricks like dragging enemies to your position to stab them, hang them from a beam, or tie them to a pole. But these are hard to pull off and in general, the Blade has better damage output. That said, there are a few boss fights where the Fundo is useful or even necessary.
  • In Resident Evil 0, you can, for the first time in the series, have two characters in the same room shooting at zombies for the entire game, whenever you want. While this may sound like an awesome and much-needed bit of help, it's ultimately impractical since the character you aren't controlling is controlled by the AI — which does a piss-poor job of managing ammo and helping you out when you're getting attacked. It will routinely waste shots on enemies who can't be hit (such as a zombie in his "getting up" animation), or fire more than enough bullets to drop a zombie. In a game where ammo is already scarce, bringing your AI partner along mostly just increases the difficulty by emptying the ammo that you worked so hard to secure. Not to mention that the AI does nothing to avoid enemies and simply stands their ground while firing. This means you'll often have to use hard-earned healing items on a stupid AI partner who could've easily avoided an attack.
  • Resident Evil: From Umbrella's perspective, the Neptunes, T-Virus-infected great white sharks. Although successful in proving the T-Virus can infect marine organisms, the Umbrella team found there's not much you can do with giant zombie sharks. And then there's the issue of transporting them. So the poor creatures were just left in a giant aquarium to live out their wretched unlives.
  • Resident Evil 4:
    • The Mine Thrower has the firepower of a grenade in a homing shot, but the ammo is even rarer than Magnum, so it's typically not worth the inventory space. Also unlike a Magnum, you can end up killing yourself with it if you aren't careful.
    • The Matilda burst-fire pistol looks cool, but the other handguns use bullets much more efficiently and take up less space. It's also a New Game Plus weapon, so you'll probably have unlocked the best guns with all the upgrades anyway.
    • The Punisher is generally agreed to be the weakest choice of handgun. With the exclusive upgrade, each shot punches through up to five enemies... but that only matters for trick-shooting, and if a large group is bearing down on you, probably a smarter idea to reach for the shotgun or a grenade. It also lacks firepower for the mid and late game; it's weaker even than the basic Handgun you start with when fully upgraded, and it's full power isn't even twice that of the base power.
    • The Broken Butterfly has ludicrously high damage when fully upgraded, but those final two upgrades only come in the third-to-last chapter of the game. Until you get that last upgrade it's weaker than both the Killer7 and (in most versions of the game) a fully upgraded bolt action rifle, the latter of which also uses the vastly more common rifle ammo. Fully upgrading it is also ludicrously expensive, costing about as much as fifteen RPGs before it becomes any better than the alternatives.
    • The 2023 Remake adds a new weapon, the CQBR. It's a fully-automatic, American-style assault carbine. It shreds basically anything unfortunate enough to be on the business end of sustained fire, ideal for targeting boss weak points. But it still takes rifle ammo intended for single-shot weapons and is parceled out accordingly, leaving you with only 4 or 5 rounds per pickup. Which means once the initial magazine is used up, you'll hardly ever have the ammo spare to be using it in full-auto anyway.
  • Resident Evil 5 has two character-exclusive bonus weapons that fall under this umbrella. Chris gets a gatling gun that shreds anything in its path; however, it takes several seconds to spin up, leaving you wide open to attack, and the aim reticle constantly wanders, making it extremely hard to hit anything at range. Also problematic is the fact that it has a huge ammo backpack that blocks a big chunk of the screen, making it harder to spot dangers and even aim other weapons (though on the upside, it can also block some enemy bullets). Sheva gets a longbow that deals a whopping 1500 damage a hit (on level with most of the sniper rifle weapons)... but it has no aiming reticle at all, so good luck hitting anything with it. In both cases, you're much better off saving your 50,000 bucks and just maxing out your favorite base-game weapons so you can purchase the infinite ammo upgrades from the Bonus Features menu.
  • Resident Evil: Revelations keeps the partner mechanic used in parts 5 and 6, but with an added tweak that your AI-controlled partners are now invulnerable, need no inventory management, and have infinite ammo reserves. Sweet! The catch is, killing enemies is entirely on you; baddies will react to your partner's gunfire, but it doesn't actually do any damage to them at all. Crap.
  • RollerCoaster Tycoon has the Air-Powered Vertical Roller Coaster. While it isn't hard to build to a decent excitement rating (unlike several other roller coasters that are outright Useless Useful Rides), it is quite expensive to build and has the second-lowest capacity of any roller coasters in the game (at a maximum of 16 guests), so it's not generally the most efficient coaster to build even if it showed up early on in most parks (which it doesn't, with the sole exception of Megaworld Park).
  • R-Type Final features 101 different ships to play through the game with. A few of these ships have "Final Charge" Wave Cannons, that can be charged up to truly devastating levels and kill anything, including every single boss, in one hit. The problem is that building up to the Final charge level requires forty-five seconds, in a game that sends waves and waves of enemies at you. Even bosses will likely require you to be constantly shooting in order to get rid of some of their projectiles. The only time it's useful is against the final boss, when every other ship gets it automatically (though it's not called such).
  • RuneScape have perfect examples in hydrix jewelry — amulet of souls, reaper necklace, deathtouched bracelet, and ring of death. They have the best stats in the game and even come with their own combat passives. The problem? They all degrade extremely quickly, especially in comparison to other degradable equipment, and can only be repaired by using expensive onyx gems on them. Not to mention, there are other jewelry with better passives with a tiny bit less stats that either degrade much more slowly or not at all, so they fall into the wayside. This has been now averted after an update that massively buffed them, making them truly powerful for their cost.
    • Even worse are enchanted Ascendri bolts. Although they are level 90 bolts with level 94 damage, how the system works in terms of calculating damage actually caps it to level 90 damage. So you would think that their own passive effect of gaining 1% more adrenaline per hit would be nice... right? Wrong. They only activate for basic abilities and autoattacks only, and every time the passive activates, a bolt is automatically destroyed. And with each bolt costing over ten thousand coins (for comparison, conventional level 90 ammunition costs 180-500 gp with no chance of getting destroyed on abilities), it's a bank breaker to the extreme for extremely little gain.
    • Yet another example is the level 85 lava whip, an upgrade to the once popular abyssal whip. In addition to being one of the coolest-looking weapons in the game, it has a special attack that drags your opponent over to you in player versus player combat, even over obstacles they otherwise cannot traverse. The downsides? The special attack requires a whopping 75% of your adrenaline and you cannot use it to drag monstersnote . On top of that, it costs almost as much as the stronger level 90 drygore weapons, and in order to recharge it, you have to sacrifice multiple abyssal whips.
  • The topdown shooter Running With Rifles gives officers the ability to call in artillery, which gives a fantastic show of explosions and can make an entire assault wave vanish in seconds. Of course, if you do use it, it's best to run as fast as you can because it has a massive area of effect that most certainly includes where you are, and shot drift ensures that something you didn't want to get hit will get hit.
  • In Sailor Moon: Another Story, you start off with the Holy Grails of the present and future that can power up Sailor Moon and Sailor Chibi Moon (respectively) into their Super forms. Sounds awesome, right? Except Super Sailor Moon and Super Sailor Chibi Moon lose all of their attacks and combo attacks in exchange for one attack each. You've given a power-up to two characters who are better used for healing than for attacking, and taken away their healing abilities.
  • The Flamethrower in Saints Row 2. Sure, it sets your opponents on fire, which will normally kill them. But it has limited range, combined with the fact that enemies running into you while blazing will catch you as well, maybe torching that bastard isn't the best idea.
    • Similar to the flamethrower, there is also the final upgrade for the Tek Z-10 SMG in Saints Row: The Third which fires incendiary bullets. Given the close-range nature of an SMG, similar situations break out, only with a "flamethrower" firing in excess of 800 RPM with the potential for a stray bullet igniting someone you aren't aiming at. Doing this in a crowded area will likely cause most of that area to burst into flames. Yourself and allies included.
      • Note that this does become somewhat more practical later in the game if you purchase Immunity to Fire. Any allies following you are still at risk, of course, but upgrading them gives them enough health that they can survive being burned without fear of being downed from the damage. Of course, by the time you've even got access to all these upgrades, you're probably close to invincible anyway and almost out of stuff to do in the game.
  • Scarface: The World Is Yours. Drug-runs run the risk of gang retaliation. Pulling into the parking lot of a be-seiged business you own and machine-gunning all the bad guys? Awesome. But it attracts cop attention. So if it's one of the 'cheaper' places it's just ever-so-much cost effective to finish the run and use and inconsequential amount of the cash to repair the damaged place. Same reasoning is behind the rocket launchers. Plugging the car of assassins is fun; but more practical to outrun.
  • The S-Rank units in SD Gundam Capsule Fighter. While there are a number of amazing units in the S-Rank category, only a handful of them can be used in the Expert Co-Op modes that net you rare B-Rank unit blueprints and nine times out of ten, it's either the Neue Ziel or the Heavyarms Custom (Endless Waltz). In PVP mode, the effect is even greater, granting or losing the most points in Normal (+5), Boss (+25 if a boss/killed by a boss) and Grid (-5), only have 1.7 lives (your second life only has 70% HP) in Death mode and putting your unit in a ship for Grid and Tag takes up half of the space allotted, meaning you must use weaker units to get the most of your ship.
  • Shattered Steel has the huge rotary cannons. Flashy, noisy, powerful and perfect examples of the More Dakka philosophy, a Planet Runner armed with them can make short work of pretty much everything. However, somewhat ironically for a game whose tagline is "In the future you don't rebuild — you reload"... you can't. You get the 750 rounds at mission start, and that's it. Finishing them relegates you to only secondary weapons, which are powerful but themselves limited. Finish those as well, and you might as well reload the mission — and choose the lasers as primary weapon instead, which do less damage and sound a lot less awesome, but regenerate their charge when you're not using them.
  • Pyramid Head's Great Knife in Silent Hill 2. It would be an awesome one-hit-kill weapon — if you could wield it effectively. As it is, equipping it slows you down to a crawl. It takes forever to bring it to the ready position. You can't move while it's in the ready position. It's so slow to move in striking that an enemy with any mobility at all will simply step out of the way. And the recovery time is so long that you're a sitting duck when you miss. On the plus side, it's the only weapon that has any effect on Pyramid Head, its sheer bulk knocking him off balance... but even then, you're generally just better off keeping out of the way. The Great Knife's only real use is in dark areas, if you equip it and turn off your flashlight and radio; monsters, particularly Lying Figures, will assume the sound of it scraping along the floor is from Pyramid Head himself and start to run away from James.
    • Likewise, the secret chainsaw weapon is certainly awesome (it's a goddamn chainsaw!), but James has to start the saw each time he readies it, holds it off to the side so enemies can't walk into it, and swings it so slowly that there's almost no chance of ever hitting an enemy before they can hit him.
    • The regular Submachine Gun is Silent Hill 3 is highly damaging, but it burns through ammo very quickly and you can't freely aim it until after you start firing, forcing you to waste bullets while you point it at enemies that are higher or lower than you.
    • Silent Hill 4 takes this to another level. You can gather a whole arsenal of melee weapons, ranging from golf paraphernalia to demonic pickaxes... but the golf apparel breaks easily and the pickaxe is hard to use, so it's back to using Ye Olde Rusty Axe.
    • Also in SH4 (granted on a New Game Plus mode) is the submachine gun that Eileen can use, which is very powerful and keeps her at long range for her to use freely without placing her in harm's way. Unfortunately, the recoil on her takes its toll and hurts her, causing her to get possessed twice as easily, so it's really Schmuck Bait. Perhaps that's what you get for handing the injured person a machine gun and making her fight for you instead of protecting her like you're supposed to.
  • Silhouette Mirage has seven different weapons to utilize, and all are useful in certain situations; however, in the western version by Working Designs, the gameplay is reworked so that weapons drain your Mana while in use; this renders most of them (Gluttony in particular) effectively useless, as they drain energy far too quickly for the damage and end up being much more of a detriment than a help, particularly toward the end when bosses start getting extremely large amounts of health. In that version, you're generally best off just sticking to your basic Sloth shot, particularly as it's a third the price of the Japanese version at Level 6, extremely energy efficient, auto-fires at max level and is quite powerful to boot.
    • All versions of the game also let you spend a third of your energy bar to pull off a powerful "Parasite Bomb" that fires all your weapons at the enemy simultaneously and makes you invincible for a few seconds, or flip your Silhouette/Mirage attribute sides. Neither is particularly useful, however; hampering all of your weapons' effectiveness for some one-off damage or a spot of mild convenience against a few bosses is generally a pretty bad strategy.
  • The hidden bonus cars in The Simpsons Hit & Run certainly look cool, but they all have downsides that make them inferior to the standard unlockable vehicles. The rocket car in Level 1, for example, is very fast but controls poorly and has the durability of tissue paper, requiring you to drive slowly lest you lose control and total the thing in two hits. The bonus cars that don't have glaring flaws generally have unimpressive stats compared to what you'll unlock in the course of playing the game normally. Not helping matters is the fact that the hidden cars cannot be summoned at phone booths, so you'll have to go out of your way to pick them up in the first place and you can't take them out of the level they're found in even if you wanted to.note  In the later stages of the game, you have plenty of vehicle options which outclass the bonus cars in almost every way and can be freely taken into other levels.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog:
    • Several games offer a "Perfect" bonus for collecting every single ring in a stage; the Genesis games offer a 50,000-point bonus and Sonic Adventure 2 gives you an A rank regardless of your score. However, given that getting hit knocks your rings out and you typically can only get a limited number of them back afterwards, and that you'd have to do some very thorough exploration that in 16-bit games will likely take you to the 10-minute limit, the Perfect bonus is virtually never worth it. Made worse in the Gamecube Sonic Adventure ports — almost every level in both Sonic Adventure 2: Battle have rings that are inaccessible through normal means, meaning it's impossible to legitimately get the perfect bonus in those stages.
    • Sonic Adventure 2 has Sonic's magic Hands ability. Useful on about one enemy in the game in Cannon's Core, only accessible after you have beaten most of Hero story, and it's usually much easier to homing attack enemies. However, the power to magically turn enemies into nothing like that is awesome, just that enemies have no health bars, which were introduced in Sonic Heroes.
    • Shadow the Hedgehog:
  • Spore has the Planet Buster, which is Exactly What It Says on the Tin. However, buying even one of them is ridiculously expensive, and actually using it — even on an uninhabited planet — is against the Galactic Code and can instantly spark a war with every empire within several hundred parsecs. Besides, it deprives you of a planet to conquer, which is usually the reason you'll be attacking the planet in the first place. It's pretty pointless, really, unless your objective is to get certain Acheivements or to make a Youtube video with an epic conclusion.
  • Stardew Valley:
    • Want to know the best way to make money? Just grow some hops and throw them into a keg to make Pale Ale. They grow every day once mature, are cheap to buy and when processed have a 12x increase in value. But there's a catch... or three. First, they grow in a trellis, meaning you can't move through them. This not only limits how you plant them but also slows down the gathering process. Second, hops grow faster than they actually process, meaning you need about twice as many kegs as plants, but kegs are hard to make and in that number take up a lot of space. Third, if you've planted a lot of them, you have to gather and process them one by one every single day, a cumbersome and annoying process. As a result, most players just opt to use Ancient Fruit, which is harder to get and doesn't sell for quite as much average daily profit, but is much easier to plant, manage and process.
    • Starfruit is the highest value crop you can grow once processed, beating out even Ancient Fruit in sheer profit per item. However, you have to pay for the seeds every time and unless you're using a greenhouse or the ginger island farm you can only get two harvests per year whereas Ancient Fruit lasts for three seasons and will have 8-9 harvests in a year. Sweet Gem Berries, meanwhile, are hard to get, expensive and only available in low numbers. They also can't be processed, so once you have kegs or jars they lose a lot of value.
    • Almost all late game animals are cooler than cows or chickens, but also less valuable. You can even hatch dinosaurs in your coop, but they only lay one egg per week and it's not valuable enough to match what a simple chicken can do. Pretty much the only exception is pigs, which can dig for truffles. Truffles sell for a lot and they can dig multiple up every day.
  • The Tricobalt torpedo in Star Trek Online is the most powerful torpedo weapon in the game. Fully skilled up and with weapon consoles that boots its damage, the torpedo can hit for 30,000-40,000 damage in a single shot; most fully skilled Cruisers(tanking class) only have 40,000+ hull hitpoints and 8000 shield points. The drawback? The torpedo takes 30 seconds to reload, compared with 6 seconds for a Photon Torpedo and 8 Seconds for a Quantum Torpedo, it cannot be overloaded with special weapon powers that can be done with other torpedoes, and unlike most other torps, it's incredibly slow flying and you can shoot it down with beam weapons, making it useless against a player with a good eye and fast reflexes. NPCs shoot them down fairly regularly too. Another problem is that torpedoes do about 10% of their normal damage on shields, so if the shields are up, you may do 3000 damage with it if you're lucky, and that's less than half the shield strength of a target ship.
    • It also takes 4500 skillpoints to fully skill up, and as skillpoints are very limited at max level, they should be spent wisely — a Quantum torpedo launcher takes 2700 skillpoints to fully skill up.
    • The Tricobalt can be great in an escort against big ships. If you can drop enemy shields and get close enough so that they can't retarget and hit it.
    • There's also the Federation Dreadnought Cruiser, better known as the Enterprise-D from the final episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Bulk of a Cruiser, firepower of an Escort, stealth of most Klingon and Romulan ships... And you'll probably be hard pressed to actually zoom into action and spend most of your time broadsiding and leaving your powerful Phaser Spinal Lance weapon to gather dust.
    • There's also the Transwarp consoles on the Advanced Heavy Cruiser series (re: the Excelsior and the Enterprise-B) Unlike the other, unlockable ones, this one allows you to warp to just about anywhere in an instant. The catch? Remember how it was sabotaged in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock? It still is here. Which means, you got a 50/50 chance of it going "CLUNK".
  • In the NES Strider game, Hiryu gains a number of Tricks as well as an upgrade to his Cypher weapon that, for the most part, could easily be ignored in favor of just hacking and slashing. The two that really hit this trope is the "Warp" Trick and the "Earth" Trick. Warp allows Hiryu to return to Blue Dragon upon using it what Earth shakes the screen and kills most enemies in one hit. However, Warp is gained so late in the game that it's easier to just push on through and use "Medical" to heal up and there are very few, if any, times that you need to use Earth to clear out enemies as there are only one or two enemies on screen at a time.
  • The Hammer Suit in Super Mario Bros. 3. You can 1-hit kill almost anything, including a number of enemies that otherwise cannot be killed (including the Koopalings), but the slow arc of the hammers can make actually hitting your target difficult, especially with the fast-moving Koopalings, and you lose the ability to slide on slopes. The Fire Flower, though weaker, is a lot more direct and easy to use, and a lot more common.
  • Two of the three colored Yoshis found in Star World in Super Mario World are basically useless gimmicks. While Blue Yoshi's ability to fly with any color shell in his mouth opens up countless new opportunities for exploring and shortcuts, Red and Yellow Yoshi are hardly obvious improvements over plain ol' Green Yoshi. Red can turn any shell into fireballs, yet this eliminates any opportunity to spit shells as projectiles, a more versatile, reusable weapon. Yellow Yoshi can "ground pound" when he has a shell in his mouth, but given a lot of enemies are immune to this, it requires close proximity, and Yoshi can already eat/stomp most bad guys, this attack doesn't make him much stronger in any useful way. There are no puzzles or areas that require red or yellow's special talents to clear, either.
  • In Super Mario Kart, Bowser and Donkey Kong, Jr. have the highest top speed. In order to make use of this it requires about a lap and a decent amount of coins to get up to speed and relies on the player not colliding with any objects or other karts to stay there, which on the harder tracks can be next to impossible.
  • Super Robot Wars lives on this trope. Many attacks sure look cool and are stronger than others, but the overall cost is usually greater. Case in point: Cybuster's Cosmo Nova only has a single shot, and requires a very high Willpower rating. It's the machine's best move, but you'll usually end up using the weaker Akashic Buster more often, simply because you can squeeze off many more attacks with it and sooner as well.
    • There are entire robots like this: massive, powerful combining juggernauts that require you to devote multiple deploy slots (to send out all the parts) and have nothing but over-the-top power attacks that suck energy like crazy. Like everything else in Super Robot Wars, you generally want to use the more robust components to sweep up the enemies and then start hammering the boss with the high-end attacks.
      • The SRX gets hit with this stick in Original Generation when combining first works; it only lasts three turns, dodges like a brick, can barely harm the R-Gun Rivale with its attacks, and a single hit by the Rivale's ridiculously overpowered weapons will push it to the brink of obliteration.
      • During an Earth route scenario in the SRX's first game, Hayato then informs the SRX team that the time has come to change out their engines, saying that only when combined as one can the SRX show its true power. The new engine uses Tronium, which requires a vast gaping plot hole to explain how it could be developed so quickly. The bad news is that at around three minutes of time at full throttle, the engine is likely to meltdown and explode — and the pilots surely won't make it through alive. For wanky game mechanical reasons, this means that the SRX can only stay combined for three turns, and once the pilots separate again they won't be able to recombine that battle.
    • This trope is actually invoked in universe with the Alt Eisen. It was the prototype for a proposed Gespenst Mk.III line of mass-produced mechs, and while it packs a lot of punch it's also incredibly difficult to operate, to the point that Kyosuke is the only person who can use it effectively.
    • Alto's Special Command "Dance of Wings" in Super Robot Wars UX. Alto learns it on Scenario 50, so there aren't many enemies left that it works on to be useful.
    • Super Robot Wars Judgment gives us a few examples of this. One example is Great Zeorymer of Hades Project Zeorymer. It's a powerful unit that grants the player the usage of attacks used by Zeorymer and its main bad guys. However, you only get a few stages to play with it and it A) requires you to skip virtually every other hidden secret to get it, and B) to not field the Zeorymer at all unless the mission forces you to... Which translates to getting to use him for about eight missions before the upgrade, and 18 (out of 52) after.
      • Another is the X-Aestivalis Kai, an improved version from Martian Successor Nadesico that doesn't implode when its Gravity Cannon is used. However, its Gravity Cannon is its only weapon and since it acts like the other Aestivalises, it needs to stay within range of the Nadesico to be very effective.
  • Surviving Mars: Stirling Generators as starting prefabs. Yes, they net a lot of energy. Yes, you need energy to run your first buildings. But they are totally not cost-effective, and piling them up as prefabs in your starting payload will only utterly drain your funding and limit your space. Many games failed just because inexperienced players fell into what is almost a Schmuck Bait (the game suggests them) and bought these power generators, thinking they would make a great start for the colony. They don't. You can bring the materials required to build them in site and it will be way cheaper. But before you research the tech required to build Stirlings, you can put online your outpost with some solar panels and batteries with good placements in many small electric grids. And it will wonderfully work, without spending all the money needed to bring in Stirlings and their mainteinance.
  • Surviv.io has the rare M134 minigun. Ridiculously massive ammo capacity and rate of fire, but at the cost of a massive reload time, and even worse, a HUGE movement speed penalty while holding it, which gets even worse when firing, making you a sitting duck, especially when there are multiple opponents nearby. It can be devastating in the right situation, such as a 1-on-1 engagement where you can easily shred through whatever cover your opponent tries to hide behind, but you'd better keep a more versatile backup weapon on hand too for other scenarios.
  • The Graviton Gun in Syndicate Wars meant death to anyone on the wrong end of it, recharged quickly, and also emitted tendrils of energy that disintegrated eight other people when you fired it. So, unless you cared about collateral casualties, it was great. Except that it cost three times as much as the Satellite Rain and by the time you developed it, you were probably on the last levels, where you couldn't resupply your agents (or you cheated like a bastard). Using it on the Columbo Orbit Station is a good way to get your agents killed, as everyone on board carries a High Explosive bomb that detonates after their deaths, which will take the entire station with them.
    • And the Satellite Rain counts too. It's a Kill Sat which strikes the ground with beams of death that will knock down buildings and kill anyone in the target area. But with the delay between firing and impact, it's hard to get the enemy to stay in the target area, and it doesn't really do anything a mine or a nuclear grenade can't do more easily, other than looking twenty times more awesome.
  • The nuclear grenade launcher in Take no Prisoners makes a fairly large boom, but the radiation of its projectiles hurts you too every time you fire it.
  • Terra Invicta: The Pion Torch is a super-rocket that uses a mixture of water and antimatter for fuel, it's a very light drive that has the power output of much heavier and larger drives allowing very rapid acceleration around the Solar system... but fuelling it takes tons of antimatter (and remember antimatter is incredibly rare). One tank will use up the yearly output of multiple supercolliders. It's absolutely stupid to use pion torch drives as the basis for your battleships, and the only case use you might need a ship with one is to carry an agent from Earth to the Outer System and your strategy hinges on them being there yesterday, costs be damned.
  • Terraria:
    • The Bundle of Balloons gives you a quadruple jump, but requires three Shiny Red Balloons and the three primary double jump bottles (normal, Blizzard, and Sandstorm) to make. Balloons only appear in chests on Floating Islands and even then likely only once or twice. You either have to create additional worlds to farm for more or fish up Sky Crates from Floating Lakes. The Sandstorm Bottle is even worse, as it can only be found in a chest in a Pyramid, a structure which isn't even guaranteed to spawn in a world, and even if it does you may not get the bottle. Getting it means creating world after world in the hopes that one will eventually spawn the bottle. Assuming you do all that, you have an admittedly helpful item that still needs to be paired with a horseshoe to prevent fall damage, and which will be rendered obsolete by wings.
    • The Star Cannon is one of the highest-damaging weapons in the game before you hit hardmode. It fires Fallen Stars, which only drop at night in limited quantities scattered across the Surface of your world, and are not reusable once fired.
    • The Shadow Orb or Demon Heart. A magic item that creates a dim light source that slowly follows the player around. Other lighting items and abilities are both more practical and give better light. At best it is good as a back up — even if it's your only independent light source, you'll still find yourself pulling out those torches so you can see more clearly what you caught in the corner of your eye.
    • In the words of the Demolitionist: "Why purify the world when you can just blow it up?" Dynamite and Bombs are the best ways to clear the Corruption, but you need so many of them that you'll quickly run out of money. While bombs can be farmed for free along with the other components to make the upgraded sticky bombs, the more powerful and effective dynamite remains a very expensive alternative at 1 gold and 50 silver apiece.
    • The Starfury might drop stars on whatever you point it at, but it doesn't work well underground due to potentially frequent cavities above the one you are in. It no longer uses mana, but relying on the falling stars to deal the bulk of your damage becomes less dependable without pure open space or fully solid material above you to the top of your screen.
    • The Sniper Rifle has the highest ranged single-shot damage in the game and the ability to scroll the screen, but it has a very low rate of fire. The weaker, faster-firing weapons can usually dish out almost as much punishment, with less penalty for missing. The Sniper Scope can give any gun the ability to scroll, making it even less appealing. And finally, to put the cherry on top, a new item introduced in 1.3 is infinite basic ammo, meaning you can't even use it to try and preserve your ammo.
    • The Drill Containment Unit. Crafting it requires 40 bars each of Hellstone, Meteorite, Chlorophyte, Shroomite, Spectre, and Luminite, the latter only dropped by the Final Boss and even then you have to beat him at least twice just to get enough. Once you've crafted it, you have a flying mount that chews through all kinds of terrain faster than anything in the game, operates underwater, and is fairly fast (equal to Hermes Boots and slower than the UFO mount). In exchange, precision is extremely difficult and it prevents you from using weapons while you're riding it. And, of course, by this point you've beaten the entire game.
    • The Suspicious Looking Tentacle, dropped from the Moon Lord in Expert Mode. It's a light pet whose main function is to inform you of when an enemy or treasure is nearby, but you should already have a Cell Phone that does exactly that, while letting you keep the Wisp in a Bottle, which is a better light pet.
    • Many of the Expert Mode-exclusive boss items can be considered this. While rendering slimes neutral, increasing regeneration while standing still, or making bee-related weapons more powerful sound good in theory, in practice you are unlikely to want to leave one of your more mundane accessories behind to make room for an Expert one.
    • The Coin Gun is probably the ultimate example. Firing platinum coins gives it a base damage rate of over 1700 HP per second, more than almost any other weapon; but this is rather unsustainable, given how long it takes to earn a single platinum coin (you can buy every single NPC store item with less than 20) and the fact that it fires 8.5 of them per second. Firing silver coins instead makes it much more efficient (10,000 silver coins = 1 platinum coin) and comparable in power to the Star Cannon, but this requires a lot of fiddly coin crafting.
    • Gem robes give you a massive boost to your mana pool pre-hardmode, but the defense of them is so paper thin that it's often far more worth it to go for the meteor armor or jungle armor first and skip the robes altogether.
    • The "Djinn's Curse" vanity pants from the Desert Spirit. When equipped as a vanity item, it gives you fancy Fog Feet. If used as armor, it grants a slow fall ability similar to a Featherfall potion. While the latter is cool, the Desert Spirit that drops it only appears in Hardmode, so it's far more efficient to make the effort to earn a pair of wings. You also likely have a Lucky Horseshoe or better, meaning fall damage is not an issue, anyway. On top of that, it grants no defense when used this way, which is sacrificing a fourth of your overall defense for something that wings do even better without that drawback.
    • In hardmode you get access to drills, which look neat and have constant hitbox while in use, making them good for raw DPS. However, their range is incredibly short, making hitting anything with them difficult, and pickaxes ultimately have a higher mining speed than drills, on top of getting melee modifiers, which can further increase their mining speed, which in turn makes drills even more pointless by comparison.
  • In 10tons's Tesla vs Lovecraft, the Epic perks — Theseus Paradox and Tesla's Deathray are interesting but very disappointing. The first lets you create a clone when teleporting, but they're too weak while the second gives you a strong weapon for early on. Problem is that it takes time to reach an enemy and it can't be improved by anything. In addition to those, there's the Ball Lightning Gun. This is the final weapon available on normal mode and without the DLC. It shoots a lightning ball that sends a stream of lightning at enemy near its path, making it great for crowd control. It takes a while to reload and it only has 1 shot in its magazine. Now with the DLC, having low ammo is actually good as there's a number of powerful new perks that only work when reloading. Unfortunately the Ball Lightning Gun is unique in that the reloading perks does not affect this weapon, making this weapon inferior to the Grenade Launcher and BFG (Big Fusion Gun) that come after.
  • Tetris:
    • T-Spin Triples ("T-Spin" being the name for the act of fitting a T-piece into a tight space) are impressive to pull off, and in games that recognize them will award more points and send more lines of garbage to your opponent than even a Tetris. However, setting up a T-Spin Triple requires a very precise and difficult setup compared to a Tetris, and can easily leave you with a mess that is costly to fix. Some games, in an effort to Nerf T-Spin Triples due to higher-skill players being able to pull them off with regularity, will only net the same award for a T-Spin Double if you do a TST, making it outright Cool, but Inefficient.
    • In versions of Marathon mode that use a "Goal" system (as opposed to the more traditional "clear x lines to beat the game"), Tetrises become these. Because they progress you to the goal much faster than other, lesser types of line clears, they can actually deprive you of scoring opportunities.
  • In Theta vs Pi 7, the Golden Shield definitely counts. It’s lets you kill all the enemies within a two-screen radius at once (with the exception of bosses, though you can score a hit against them without touching them or even aiming). However, it’s depleted after one use and you need to have a regular shield (which only normally come up once a level) before you can even find one.
  • The Hunter weapon in the Thunder Force series, a homing weapon that can pass through structures to hit enemies. While it allows you to happily fire away without any thought to aiming, it inflicts pretty poor damage, making it less-than-ideal for enemies that don't die in one hit. It also cannot destroy destructible walls in Thunder Force II through IV.
    • The Wave shot in Thunder Force V is a microwave-style Wave-Motion Gun that pierces everything, but like the Hunter, it's pretty weak.
  • Tiny Heist has the Pistol, which has 4 shots and can instantly kill your target. It will alert the whole floor and sound the alarm, though.
  • The final unlockable car in Tokyo Xtreme Racer Zero is an extremely powerful Nissan Fairlady Z... but just like its inspiration, the Devil Z from the Wangan Midnight series, it's a challenge to drive.
  • The "Drop" gag track in Toontown Online. A drop gag has better-than-average damage, but if the targeted cog isn't hit with another gag beforehand, it will likely miss. It's also completely useless against lured cogs, since it's guaranteed to miss in that situation.
  • Touhou Project's Marisa has her infamous Master Spark, which looks cool, but leaves her wide open. She later states she's trying to find a way to splinter the attack to make it weaker, but cover more range because "it doesn't matter what hits your opponent in danmaku".
  • The Doomerang in Ty the Tasmanian Tiger, a remote-controlled boomerang, that can one-hit kill any enemy. The downside? It leaves Ty standing there defenceless, prime for attacking. It doesn't even go that far, either, so you can't just snipe enemies from 50 feet away.
  • The GAU-19 from Uncharted 2: Among Thieves is the most powerful gun in the game, able to tear through most enemies like paper. Unfortunately, you can usually only get it from super-tough, heavily-armored enemies, it goes through ammo really quickly, it drastically slows Drake down, and you can't take cover while using it.
  • In Wacky Races Starring Dick Dastardly & Muttley, there is The Crimson Haybailer, which it possess the ability to fly without a power-up, however, it also possess NO Grip, which forces you to use a power-up to stand on the ground so you could make a turn without having to stop your car/plane, The Crimson Haybailer, however, is specially useful in tracks that have water sections (One of them have a really large shortcut, which no other car, except for The Crimson Haybailer can take).
  • War Thunder:
    • Certain high speed jets such as the English Electric Lightning or the early F-104 Starfighter models are jewels of acceleration and will make you delight how fast can you climb. The problem is that they turn like bricks, have very poor missiles that can be easily dodged by fighters, low ammo count, and are thus poor suited for the game low altitude furball dogfights. You basically have to play a support role, point from above to an oblivious enemy such as one already engaged with a teammate, guess the right angle of attack, and have a good aim during your pass, and hope your target doesn't change direction. In reality these airplanes had the role of fast interceptors that could quickly scramble and reach slow nuclear Soviet bombers and lock their missiles on them, but this role is not represented in-game. Downplayed with later Starfighter variants which at least get access to advanced missiles that make hit-and-run and boom-and-zoom tactics more effective.
    • Bombers and strike aircraft / attackers are often this during air battles, as while they could theoretically win a match alone thanks to their bomb payload, the gameplay doesn't offer much room and makes them sitting ducks against fighters, with only a few exceptions note . You might be happy to have unlocked the iconic B-29 Superfortress, but unhappy to see jets swarming to you screaming "mine! mine! mine!". You need to hope that nobody decided to climb at start and that enemies get distracted by your teammates, so that you can drop your bombs and score precious points.
    • Many early aircraft have poor performance (handling, acceleration, top speed), but devastating firepower in the form of heavy cannons. Or rather, it should be said that they have devastating firepower but poor performance. In the end what counts is managing to get a firing solution against an enemy and if you struggle in doing that, there is no use in having autocannons, which only increase your battle rating. Often they also have very low ammo and low muzzle velocity, meaning that you need to be really good in marksmanship to make every shot count if you don't want to return to base too soon. The line between Difficult, but Awesome and Awesome, but Impractical is very thin here and most times, if you are not a veteran, it's better to fly an aircraft with lighter weapons, which usually are good enough to deal with opponents anyway, but much faster and nimbler.
    • Early cold war heavy tanks, like the Object 279, often get uptiered against enemies that can easily penetrate them due to the use of chemical rounds or advanced anti-tank rockets, negating their advantage in the form of armor. You can deploy light tanks that have equivalent firepower, much greater mobility, some special features (like scouting), and basically the same survival chances (if not paradoxically greater when shots simply pass through the entire vehicle side to side, without detonating inside).
  • The setting of We Happy Few revolves around Joy, a drug which allows the citizens to suppress the memories of the Very Bad Thing they did to Nazis and puts them in a constant "happy" mood. Problem is, they also fly in a murderous rage if someone isn't happy (for example, you). You can voluntarily take some Joy to temporarily make you "blend in", allowing you to avoid suspicion (even from Doctors, who can detect if you are off your Joy at a glance) unless you do something blatantly unlawful; you can also pass through the normally inpassible Joy Detectors. However, it lasts only a few moments, it gives you massive hits to hunger, thirst and stamina, and taking too much Joy in a short timespan will make you permanently addicted.
  • Not strictly a spell, but the Plasma Bolt weapon in WipEout tends to fall under this. It charges up for two seconds, then fires a straight line projectile that instantly kills the target? Great! Until you realise it usually isn't about kills (and when it is, you usually don't get this weapon) but about winning the race, and what you really want to do is not slow down to aim a plasma bolt and probably miss anyway, but hit the target with anything ASAP and overtake. Regular homing missiles are almost always a better idea. The weapon could have been more useful in the later games where you often end up competing with the ship in second place for a lap and eliminating this ship would give you an easy win, but its damage is severely reduced in recent titles.
  • Xenon 2 Megablast has the Super Nashwan Power, which can be purchased in between half-level sections. It gives you a fleeting glimpse of awesomeness, upgrading your ship as far as it can be upgraded at any stage of the game, only to take it all away again after ten seconds.
  • In Xenonauts, there's the Singularity Launcher. It's the last infantry-weapon you can research, and sets off a HUGE explosion — easily two or three times great in area than anything you could do with even the Fusion Explosives that comes before it. On top of that, it's got great range, and remarkable accuracy. In the right situation, it could annihilate an entire squadron of entrenched aliens with a single shot. However... such situations are liable to be rather rare, in what little remains of the game at that point. Using it inside a UFO is practically guaranteed to destroy something you were hoping to recover and needless to say, any aliens caught in the blast will have their equipment junked as well. More problematically, it's so heavy that it can only be wielded by someone wearing Predator Powered Armor — a clumsy Mighty Glacier suit that lacks the flexibility and flight-capabilities or the more advanced Sentinel Battlesuit. Worse yet, the Predator is too clumsy to use anything BUT the heaviest of weapons — so you can't pack a sidearm for use in situations that warrant something less than the most extreme explosives in the game. And even WITH the strength of that massive suit behind it, the Launcher is so heavy that it'll slow the unit down by a margin of over 30% — leaving him or her lagging far behind your less encumbered troops, not to mention having to practically remain stationary for the turn if he actually wants to FIRE the thing. Oh, and if you want to bring any extra ammo for it, that'll slow you down even more. Comparatively, the basic Rocket Launcher is available right from the start of the game, with incremental increases in firepower as you develop better explosives — and with Fusion Rockets, it's quite capable of pulping most aliens in a single shot. A well-trained soldier can easily carry it AND several rockets AND a sidearm, without any encumbrance.
    • It compares interestingly to the Blaster Launcher from the original X-COM: UFO Defense, a remote-controlled missile-launcher capable of destroying enemies from around corners and the other side of the map. Most likely, the refusal to include such a weapon in Xenonauts was a deliberate choice on the part of the designers, since it was kind of overpowered in the original...
  • X-Universe:
    • Missile frigates and bombers in X3: Terran Conflict can level entire sectors and lay waste to whole fleets by pouring huge salvos of missiles into them at extreme range. Fielding them requires the player to build up supporting industry to manufacture munitions and a strong supply line to deliver them. The same job can be done for roughly half- to two-thirds the money and with much less prep time with a Boreas or Osaka destroyer that has the player at the helm. It doesn't help that in stock X3TC the AI doesn't know how to use their missile spam properly: it launches missiles singly rather than as massive barrages. (This last problem is fixed to a frightening degree in X3: Albion Prelude.)
      • Mitigated by the fact you only have to build the supporting industry and supply lines once. Late-game players looking for Self Imposed Challenges have little problem fielding M7Ms and M8s.
    • With that said, M2 destroyers are also Awesome, But Impractical as the player flagship. They're tough, powerful, and also really slow. They're also too big to dock at the vast majority of stations, and they can't carry any fighters for use as shuttles. For day-to-day operations, most players favor the high-end M6 corvettes (which don't need a shuttle), M7 frigates with docking ports (the Panther and Shrike are common choices), or the faster M1 carriers.
    • On the other side of the spectrum we have M5 fighters; they exist solely to be ridiculously fast and hard to hit, but the faster they are the less heavily armed they tend to be, resulting in the equivalent of mosquitoes: lightning-quick and almost impossible to hit, but also unable to deal any significant damage to shielded objects — and if something does manage to shoot them it's instant goodbye. Handing them over to the AI pilots also tends to result in them splatting harmlessly against anything possessing significant mass.
    • Through care or an exploit, Terran Conflict players can capture the carrier-class Terran #deca, and reverse-engineer it. Effectively gate-maximum size and with enough hangar space for fifty heavy fighters, it's a massive and frightening machine that dwarfs most other ships. Outfitting it with any weaponry, however, requires farming Kha'ak destroyers, and the resulting equipped ship is extraordinarily capital-intensive compared to most of the other options.
    • The ATF Valhalla, an enormous super-M2 that has 14 gigajoules of shielding, 32 Point Singularity Projectors, and 24 Starburst Shockwave Cannons. However, it is absurdly slow and hard to maneuver, and its size gives it some huge blind spots in its turret targeting. And it's so wide that it can't fit through jumpgates. Seriously, when it enters a sector in Terran Conflict, it bangs into the gate rim and loses its shields, reducing the ATF's trump card to a sitting duck. There's a good reason it doesn't spawn in vanilla TC. This last behavior is corrected in Albion Prelude, where the Valhalla warps in next to a jumpgate, not inside it.
    • Capital ships in general will ruin your hard earned reputation through no greater fault on your behalf than commanding one. Wherever you attempt to enter a sector, you should check the upcoming area's traffic if you can. If there is a merchant fleet anywhere near the jumpgate, your Capital ship will spawn on top of a number of them, destroying them instantly. Your ship will also be stripped of its shields and take a respectable amount of expensive to repair hull damage.
  • Getting a screen-clearing Yosumin in Yosumin!. Sure, you're wiping the entire board, and it's great if your target goal is removing a certain amount of colored Yosumin, but they aren't counted as Super Sets or Square Sets despite technically fitting the criteria for both, which means if the level goal revolves around sets, you're better off clearing almost the entire board.
  • The Field Shutter in Zanac, which is a shield that protects your ship from frontal attacks. Sounds good until you discover that it pisses off the AI and makes it throw more enemies at you.
  • The House of the Dead spinoff, Zombie Revenge has a giant drill weapon that is pretty much useless. It's slow and cumbersome, breaks after about two or three uses and only appears once in the game. You'll often completely miss your target due to how slow it is, but when you finally manage to stab the drill straight through a zombie's torso and rip him to shreds from the inside, it makes the effort all worthwhile.
  • zOMG! has the Fire Rain ring, which rains fire on surrounding enemies, ranging from flickers at low rage to firey meteors at high rage. Looks great, but rendering all that fire causes enough lag to give it the nickname "Lag Rain", which is not good when you're surrounded by angry enemies...


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