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Super spin makes Superman stand still while spinning, letting enemies pummel him.
Heat vision sends out a laser with the range and power of an ordinary punch.
Super breath 1 looks like an ice crystal, and does absolutely nothing.
Encyclopedia Obscura on the power-ups in Superman (NES video game)

Sometimes a game includes a powerup that just doesn't help.

In the worst case you grind, grind, grind, losing sleep and growing calluses. Every second day, a rare ingredient drops. When the final one drops, you combine them with trembling hands and are rewarded with a fancy glowing sword... that hits like a rubber chicken.

Some powerups are easier to get than that. But lame powerups disappoint, and frustrate, in myriad ways:

  • An Enemy Scan that doesn't provide useful information (unless the enemy in question is immune to scans).
  • Movement that sure is fast but perfectly uncontrollable.
  • Stealth movement that is so slow the player dies of boredom.
  • Speeding or slowing time when you have no earthly need to do so.
  • Distraction devices that have to be used right in an enemy's face.
  • An instant use upon picking it up, which almost never happens where it will have the best effect.
  • Something which replaces a far more useful ability.
  • Does provide an actual in-game benefit in pure numerical terms, but it's tied to something cosmetic (e.g. an Interface Screw, an Overly Long Fighting Animation, or just a really annoying sound effect) that makes you avoid it when possible.
  • Actually does serve a helpful function... that's confined to a specific area's gimmick (or in particularly bad cases, a single obstacle, such as a fire attack that only serves to melt one ice wall) and useless everywhere else, effectively turning it into a fancier door key.
  • The condition required is far too demanding or so overly specific that you rarely ever get to use it.
  • Requires a peripheral not included with the game to be of any use.
  • Eats up too many valuable resources when there's something else that isn't quite as powerful but has a far better output vs input ratio.
  • It comes with downsides that makes the game more difficult and not worth the trouble using.
  • Increases your score in a game where your score is completely meaningless apart from bragging rights. Bonus points if it's stashed in the same places and drops from the same enemies as the useful items.
  • The boost it provides is so minor that it's functionally irrelevant.

Related Tropes:

Sometimes this is just situational. Ice skates may work well on rinks, but throwing them at the player during the spy mission to make them lose their wall crawling boots means they still qualify. For hazards disguised as useful power ups, see Poison Mushroom. Compare Double-Edged Buff, Joke Item and Scrappy Weapon, both of which can overlap with this trope. Contrast Nerf Arm, which is the opposite of this trope (it only looks like a Joke Item, but its stats are perfectly fine). Also see Lethal Joke Item (a Joke Item that is surprisingly powerful through fulfilling hidden conditions or exploiting game mechanics), which can also overlap with this trope. See also Zonk, where the player is given a "prize" that isn't worth anything.


Examples

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    4X 
  • Unique Units in Civilization usually have a lot of bonuses over their standard counterparts, which then get lost when you research the techs from the next tier up. Even when they do keep the bonuses if they start as the unique unit and then upgrade, you also (usually) can't build your unique unit anymore once it becomes obsolete, so you have to keep a force of them alive for the whole game. For a perfect example, Poland in V has the Winged Hussar go from an all-around murderer with lightning movement to a specialized tank killer with less than half the speed, and the Zulu Impi loses its double-attack and anti-gunpowder abilities to become a bog-standard rifleman with whatever promotions it hopefully picked up.
    • In Civilization V, the Iroquois unique ability, The Great Warpath allows you to traverse between forests and jungles as if they were roads but that feature only works if you traverse through the forests and jungles, entering them still requires full movement points making this bonus virtually useless. Another downside is that forests do not really provide that much food for your own city thus making growth difficult. Their unique building, the longhouse also lacks the scaling production bonus effect in favor of a measly production bonus on forest tiles meaning that for the longhouse to work, you need to keep almost all of the forests alive meaning your cities will rarely grow tall. All in all, they are one of the few civilizations whose bonuses directly detriments the civilization growth. Compare the Celt's Druidic Lore ability which gives +1/+2 Faith per city near unimproved forests (which gives them an edge as a Religious Civ) and Brazil's unique "Brazilwood Camp" improvement, which gives a +2 Gold improvement on the Jungle tile (and +2 culture with acoustics as Brazilwood is used for instruments) while keeping the Jungle tile intact which gives the tile a total output of 2 Food, Science, Gold, and Culture.
  • Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri: the ability "Algorithmic Enhancement" allows probe teams to hack into enemy factions even if they have built the Hunter-Seeker Algorithm secret project, which usually makes bases immune to hacking. However, the success chances are so low that you might not even bother anyway. The ability is still useful against normal factions without probe immunity.

    Action Adventure 
  • In Batman: Arkham Asylum, one of the upgrades for the explosive gel is to go off automatically when an enemy passes by one. While this helps somewhat, it limits you to knocking over one inmate per explosive, one at a time, whereas without it you could make more elaborate traps that knock out a cluster of enemies simultaneously (which is important if you want to get takedowns before they get up). And once you get the upgrade, you can't turn it off. The upgrade, while absent in Batman: Arkham City, makes a reappearance in Batman: Arkham Origins.
  • The Legend of Zelda:
    • The Legend of Zelda:
      • The Clock is a wonderful one-use item which freezes all enemies on the screen — however, it has an annoying tendency to drop from the last creature you kill on the screen, rendering it utterly useless. It also will leave moving Peahats invulnerable, and it also prevents Wall Masters from spawning — which sounds great at first, but the path to the boss often requires killing every Wall Master in the room to open the door or gain a key.
      • The book, which is an upgrade for the Magical Rod. With the book, the rod's magic beams become fireballs when they hit something. Because said fireball has the same power as the fireballs emitted from candles, the Magical Rod becomes a weak weapon at best and a useless weapon at worst when used on enemies that are immune to fire.
    • Zelda II: The Adventure of Link lets you shoot sword beams when you are at full health. Unlike in the previous game, though, most of the enemies are completely immune to it. Additionally, the beam only travels a few feet before it disappears with a graphic like a popped soap bubble.
    • Normally, the Mirror Shield allows you to reflect projectiles and light beams, enabling the solution of several puzzles, but in The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, it's used twice: to block the feathers from the Evil Eagle and to get past the flamethrower obstacle en route to Level 8. Averted in the 3D remake, where it's useful for dealing with Beamos.
    • The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time:
      • The final reward for the Golden Skulltula token collection quest. It requries the player to collect every single token in the game, and the prize for getting them all is an endless supply of huge golden rupees, worth 200 apiece. Not only does the quest require the player to have already completed the majority of the game beforehand, but Rupees aren't that useful to begin with, since most of the items that Rupees can buy can be gotten more easily through other means. At least it's not the only prize you get, as certain milestones grant you other items.
      • One of those prizes is the Stone of Agony, which causes your controller to rumble if a Secret Grotto is nearby. However, in the original Nintendo 64 version of the game, rumble requires a Rumble Pak accessory, sold separately, meaning that the item does nothing if the player doesn't own one. The Stone is even worse on the Wii/Wii U Virtual Console release — the Virtual Console doesn't include rumble, so the item will never do anything. The revamped item for the 3DS remake instead plays a sound while making an icon appear on top of the screen, making it a lot more useful.
      • The Golden Gauntlets are the final item you get in the game, and they're literally only used for 2 stone pillars that must be chucked out of your path. They have only one use anywhere outside the final dungeon, and they don't even improve on the Silver Gauntlets' power to lift and hurl smaller boulders. Contrast that to their Titan's Mitt counterpart in A Link to the Past, where they bust the sandbox wide open.
    • The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask:
      • The Couple's Mask. It takes you three Termina days to unlock and does absolutely nothing, save earning you a Heart Piece and being required for 100% Completion. However, the sidequest gives you a lot of other useful items along the way, such as other masks, a possible empty bottle, and a beautiful-yet-bittersweet romance subplot.
      • At least the Couple's Mask is good for a Piece of Heart. Though also the result of several sidequests, some of which have strict timing, the Circus Leader's Mask has only one single practical purpose in the original version of the game: it makes a single sidequest easier. A sidequest that must be completed to get the mask in the first place! (While, yes, the game does have a "Groundhog Day" Loop mechanic, there's no real reason to complete this sidequest more than once unless you really want to see the Marshmallow Heaven scene) The 3DS version adds a new sidequest that requires the retranslated Troupe Leader's Mask, so it's not quite as useless as before.
      • Downplayed by the doubled magic meter, your reward for the arduous stray fairy quest of Snowhead Temple, the second dungeon. While it's not bad in its own right, especially since it's a permanent upgrade, it's overshadowed by obtaining Chateau Romani, which grants infinite magic, and is earned for completing the much easier (if longer) Romani Ranch sidequest which can be completed at the exact same time as the Snowhead fairy sidequest. Since every dungeon relies heavily on magic-consuming arrows and abilities, there's rarely a time where relying on a bit longer of a magic meter is a better alternative than just dropping 200 rupees on Chateau Romani each cycle and waiting until 10 PM at night (as that's when the Milk Bar opens up). The 3DS version further changes the doubled magic meter to the reward for completing the stray fairy quest of Woodfall Temple, the first dungeon, which is not only the easiest of the quests to complete but long before you can access Chateau Romani.
      • Your "reward" for finding all stray fairies in Stone Tower is the Great Fairy's Sword. It boasts an impressive 4x the damage of the Kokiri's Sword, but by the time you get it, all you have left is the Very Definitely Final Dungeon... which has next to no combat save for the "Link" dungeon. While it can be used against Majora, it leaves you defenseless against its projectiles and whips as it's a two-handed blade that can't be used in conjunction with your shield. Finally, even if you backtrack to fight some enemies with it, you'll find that it's barely stronger than your Gilded Sword and tends to maybe save you one or two swipes against foes. It's only useful if you rely on an exploit to beat Stone Tower before Great Bay, and even then it's a novelty at best.
    • The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker: Unlocking Blue Potions at the potion shop on Windfall Island requires you to collect Chu Jelly from 15 of the rare Blue Chuchus scattered around the entire map. You cannot receive jelly from the same Blue Chuchu twice and you'll need the item from the penultimate dungeon to reach at least 15 of them. Or you could just trade 4 common Boko Baba seeds in at the potion shop in the Forest Haven, accessible just before the second dungeon, making the tedious Chu Jelly sub-quest completely superfluous.
    • The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess:
      • The Spinner from the Arbiter's Grounds would be an awesome item if it retained its speed on the ground like it does on rails. Instead, it only carries Link a short distance before slowing to a crawl, and its attack has both low range and deals scratch damage. At least it's still somewhat useful throughout the game, but a huge letdown compared to how well it works during the boss battle of the Arbiter's Grounds.
      • The Dominion Rod is a contender for one of the most useless items in Zelda history. Its description makes it sound great, being a rod that can bring statues to life. In reality, all it basically lets you do outside the Temple of Time once Shad powers it back up again is move six obstacles out of the way — eight if you also take on the Cave of Ordeals — throughout the entire rest of the game, and once that's done it has no more use at all.
      • The Horse Call. In theory, it's great: a portable horse grass that you can use to call Epona anywhere in the game. Unfortunately, you don't get it until you're almost through the entire game and by then you can just use Midna to warp almost anywhere, with Link's wolf form being almost if not as fast as the horse to fill the gaps. Adding insult to injury is the fact that you actually receive the item earlier in the Hidden Village, but at that point it is called Ilia's Charm and can't be used until you show it to her again.
      • The powered up Master Sword obtained in lieu of a dungeon item from the Palace of Twilight is only marginally useful as it's able to one-punch Twilit Enemies (which are non-threats as the unpowered sword can kill them in one or two hits already) and clearing out Shadow Crystal Fog (like using the Lantern to clear poison fog). The power up doesn't work outside of the Palace of Shadow, which makes it nothing more than a form of dungeon key.
      • In addition to the weak dungeon items, the HD version also adds Miiverse stamps. They're effectively emojis that can be used in your Miiverse posts, so within the game itself they are completely useless. They're placed in existing chests, replacing consumable items that are found in older versions, so it can be rather disappointing and even frustrating to work for a chest only to get a reward that doesn't help at all In-Universe — even considering money isn't worth much in the game, at least finding rupees is situationally useful and helps out in the early game. It's become even worse after Miiverse has been shut down, as the stamps now serve no purpose whatsoever.
    • The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap has Picolyte, several bottled items that can be purchased from Beedle in Hyrule Castle Town. Beedle himself must be unlocked, and there are several varieties of Picolyte that you can unlock as well. Each type of Picolyte is a one-use item that temporarily increases the drop rate of certain items from grass and enemies, such as hearts, useable items, or Rupees. The problem is that each type of Picolyte lasts a mere 30 seconds, and they cost 200 Rupees each — an absolutely terrible cost-to-benefit ratio.
    • The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds has upgrades to your items as a reward for finding lost Maimais. Most are nice, a couple are Disk One Nukes, and then...
      • The Nice Sand Rod. The original variant is already at best an item tailored specifically for one dungeon and is almost never used, and the nice variant has longer-lasting pillars that go farther: the range of the original is never an issue, and more often than not you want the pillars to go down so they'll get out of your way.
      • Nice Bombs. They now have a bigger blast radius and do more damage than regular bombs. The issue is bombs are almost never used for combat, and they also hurt Link: basically this upgrade just makes it more difficult to use your bombs without getting caught in the resulting explosion. The most you can say about this upgrade is it allows you to do a couple of puzzles slightly quicker than normal.
    • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild:
      • Hearts are capped at 30, including extra hearts. That means you can't get extra hearts if they are already maxed. This can be annoying if you like to use the sword beam, which only works at full hearts. Strangely, you can still benefit from extra stamina even if it's already maxed.
      • As you progress, weapons you find can be equipped with modifiers that boost the stats of the weapon. One of these modifiers is 'Long Throw', which simply increases the distance at which you can throw the weapon. There are many problems with this: Weapons can only have a single modifier, so Long Throw fills that spot that could go to something more useful, most weapons aren't made with throwing in mind, with the exception of Boomerangs you must retrieve weapons you throw making it a poor offensive option in a sustained fight, and in the few cases where throwing range is relevant you already have a Bow to provide much more sustained damage over long ranges. The big mark against Long Throw however is that the game consideres it a 'strong' modifier, meaning that it replaces the much more universally useful 'Critical Hit' buff that the game only considers weak.
  • Lego Adaptation Games all feature Regenerate Hearts, which does exactly that. In a vacuum, this is pretty great, but but the issue is it is always unlockable after you unlock Invincibility. Why, outside of a Self-Imposed Challenge, would you ever want what amounts to extra hearts when you could have unlimited hearts? What makes it worse is Regenerate Hearts tends to be pretty expensive too, usually around three or four hundred thousand studs, so you really would rather save that money for the Game Breakers like Invincibility, the stud multipliers, or Pickup Ghost Studs.
  • LEGO Star Wars:
    • In The Complete Saga, some extras are obviously broken (Invincibility, x10 Studs), while others are clearly deliberately more jokey and worthless (Disguise, which gives all characters Groucho Marx glasses). Then there's Walkie Talkie Disable, which is so minor that many players can have it on for the whole game and never figure out what it does. It enables characters with a walkie talkie to disable droid enemies in the area by pressing the button that lets them use it. There are a grand total of two characters with these items, both of them are unlockable and only usable in Free Play, both of them are, in the grand tradition of minor characters in Lego Star Wars, almost completely useless (the Battle Droid Commander can't jump and lacks auto-aim on their blaster, the Imperial Spy has no attacks), and normally, using the walkie talkie as a playable character does nothing. Even once you do know how it works, all it does is disable a certain enemy type for a brief period in a fashion generally less efficient than just killing them, at the cost of playing an otherwise bottom-tier character.
    • In The Skywalker Saga, you can give Scoundrel characters an upgrade where their blaster becomes a Charged Attack that also ricochets. The charged shot doesn't deal that much more damage than a regular shot, and the ricochet really only helps in very confined spaces. The real problem, though, is that normally, holding down the fire button causes your character to rapid-fire their weapon; on Scoundrel characters, this instead causes them to start charging. Consequently, you now have to manually pull the trigger for each shot, which is much slower than rapid-fire.
  • Western-themed Zelda-clone Gunple: Gunman's Proof has the Scattershot: tapping A rapidly causes the character to fire randomly in all directions. Because the individual shots are so spread out and weak they are very unlikely to even hit a foe, and when they do they inflict Scratch Damage at most. Even when absolutely surrounded by enemies you'll have a much easier and faster time dealing with them one-by-one. Thankfully the powerup is actually very difficult to even use as it requires very fast button-mashing to activate, so odds are you won't trigger it by mistake and will forget it even exists in very short order.
  • Machine Hunter: The Type-3 Entertainer robots, introduced after the Type-1 and Type-2, turn out to be useless compared to their predecessors. For starters, its default weapon is a dinky little pistol (one, in a game even on foot, you go Guns Akimbo) whilst the Type-1 and Type-2 respectively have dual-machine guns and a Grenade Launcher. It is also slower than the Type-2, which has wheels, and while it has speed compared to later models (like the Type-7 Military), its lack of firepower means its speed boost is useless (for perspective, the Type-7 has friggin gatling-guns, and the fastest and strongest firing rate in the entire game). Not to mention Machine Hunters, in the process of possessing one machine from another, will be forced to have the old machine self-destruct in the process, meaning they practically swapped a powerful (or at least, useful) robot for a worthless Type-3. Most players will only, only inhabit a Type-3 if the robot they're using is damaged beyond repair (and then ditch the Type-3 the instant a better robot is available).
  • Metroid:
    • Many games include murderously hard puzzles whose reward turns out to be nothing more than a small increase to your missile or Power Bomb capacity. Even worse, the designers of fan hacks like Super Metroid Redesign take this as a challenge.
    • The Ice Beam from Metroid immobilizes enemies - and does a piddly one damage. The Wave Beam, which moves in a sine pattern to fix the Denial of Diagonal Attack issue, is far superior, but you need the Ice Beam to complete the game since Metroids can only be made vulnerable by freezing them. Later games soften the blow by not making them Mutually Exclusive Power-Ups, buffing the Ice Beam's damage, and making it so most frozen enemies take a One-Hit Kill from missiles.
    • Metroid Prime has the Flamethrower, the Plasma Beam's Charge Combo. Unlike the Super Missile (powerful with fast velocity) and the Wavebuster (automatically locks onto enemies for you), the Flamethrower has extremely short range and isn't powerful enough to kill anything quickly. Likewise, the Ice Spreader fires too slowly to be of any use and has a slight delay before the shot is made, though unlike the Flamethrower, it's at least useful against the final boss.
    • Metroid Prime 2: Echoes has similar problems with the Darkburst, Sunburst, and Sonic Boom. However, it does a slightly better job at making them Not Completely Useless - the Darkburst does ludicrous amounts of damage to Dark Samus (since Dark Samus is technically a "light world" creature), and the Sonic Boom can take off nearly half of the final boss's health with a single shot if the whole blast connects. The Sunburst is still fairly useless though, simply due to its extremely slow firing speed and ammo consumption.
    • Several of the upgrades in Metroid Prime 3: Corruption are letdowns.
      • In particular, beating the final Leviathan boss (Ridley, whose arrival is always a big deal) gets you the nearly useless Hyper Grapple. note 
      • The Hyper Ball: as long as you don't spend Phazon or wait too long, you can freely move into and out of the invincibility-granting Hyper Mode without ever losing any health. Before getting the Hyper Ball, you can drop bombs that cost no Phazon while in Hypermode. After you get the Hyper Ball, the bombs are replaced with an attack consisting of giant energy tendrils that don't really do anything aside from destroying Phazon growths in certain places. Without the Hyper Ball, then, Morph Ball Bombs are essentially a way to deal damage while invincible. (This is a very useful property against Mogenar.) note 
      • The Hazard Shield, while giving you boosted defense, is supposed to protect you from hazardous substances, namely acid rain and fuel gel. By the time you get this item, there's barely anything that requires this power up anyway.
  • The now-defunct Flash game Metroid: Elements has the Space Jump, which, in the actual Metroid games, is a big help, giving you a massive boost to your jumping ability. However, Elements doesn't let you control the height of your jump, leading to Samus always jumping the maximum distance and overshooting platforms, exacerbating the game's floaty and slippery controls.
  • Super House Of Dead Ninja features two of them. The flippers let you run on water, but are of only dubious usefulness as there's very little water in the game and you can usually just jump over it or have to swim through it anyway. The best reason to take the flippers when they're offered is so that the game will stop wasting valuable powerups on flippers! Still, they're better than the parachute, which slows the rate at which you fall. Falling doesn't harm you regardless of the height, but they can sometimes let you see something painful you're going to fall on and take evasive action... except you can generally achieve the same ends by grasping the wall and slowing your fall that way. So, really, it isn't of much positive use. Worse, the slow fall in certain rooms triggers nearby floor-snakes, making it impossible for you to get points for them, and can leave you vulnerable to certain enemies and bombs you would have otherwise sped past.
  • ToeJam & Earl has the rocket skates: Incredibly fast, hard to steer, impossible to stop. When used, they immediately launch the player directly south, regardless of what direction they were facing, and one can only change direction 90 degrees from one's current direction. (You can control which direction you blast off if you're already moving when you open the items menu — the characters' idle animations are always turned towards the player.) The skates are fast enough that one can cover a lot of ground in the time it takes to do a 180, and it's easy to wind up flying over the edge and falling to a lower level... multiple times. While there is a time and a place to use them, that time and place consists of "when there is absolutely no worse place to be than where you are right now." Probably an intentional Poison Mushroom, but they can actually be used on the bottom level (mostly water) to reach a secret area. And then you can jump off the secret area and be teleported back to the highest level you were on.
    • The game has a few presents that can either be good or bad depending on the situation, complicated by presents being tough to identify.
  • The Force Unleashed:
    • The Lightning Shield gives you a damaging aura. Unfortunately, it lasts far too short to be of any use, eats up force power like crazy, doesn't let you regenerate force power while it's active, and has a long windup that leaves you vulnerable.
    • The Wii version has this in trope in spades. All of the powers that work off of lightsaber combos are not only very weak, but are hampered by the lightsaber being tied to poorly coded Wiimote inputs. The one that takes the cake, though, is Dark Rage, which makes you regenerate pathetic amounts of Force Energy when you hit with said useless lightsaber attacks. It has all of the problems of Lightning Shield and has a habit of going off on accident when you try to dash away or block after a combo, then start being spammed like crazy without any input from you. Just to reiterate, it's a Force Energy regenerating move that doesn't give you enough regen to compensate for the loss of natural regen and has a tendency to leave you wide open when you try to back off in a fight.
  • Both the Super Charge and the Super Jump power-ups in Spyro 2: Ripto's Rage! and Spyro: Year of the Dragon. The Super Charge makes you run uncontrollably forward and is associated with painful segments like the Fracture Hills Door Sidequest, making its usage seem less like a power up and more like "Oh God it's THIS thing again". The Super Jump just throws Spyro high into the air once, effectively making it like just another bridge or floating platform found in every single level. Yay. They just don't compare to soaring through the air, turning Spyro's fire breath into a BFG, or both combined.
  • Brave Fencer Musashi has some great abilities and items, but they can't all be gems:
    • Nearly all the curative items are worthless, save for the ones with secondary effects like the S-Revive that automatically resurrects you upon death, because cheese is so insanely more effective it's really the only healing item worth carrying. It's cheap, it's available right at the beginning of the game without having to rescue anyone or perform any sidequests, it doesn't spoil, it heals HP and BP, the longer you carry it the more effective it becomes, and even when first bought it easily restores a cool 200 HP / BP. The only healing item that does better than it is the Neatball which is more expensive and restores 300 HP / BP, but said item doesn't age like cheese, which will eventually heal more than it, and it is only available late in the game after rescuing some people.
    • The Sky Scroll lets you fly, which you'd think would make it great, but unlike every other scroll that grants you new abilities to explore the world and help open the sandbox one-by-one, the Sky Scroll only works in the Very Definitely Final Dungeon so its "usefulness" is limited to floating over those spikes that were put there to give you an obstacle to bypass with the Sky Scroll.
    • The L-Glove is a unique specimen. On one hand an item that greatly increases critical hits would be very useful. What makes it this is you have to choose between getting the L-Glove or the L-Quilt, and the quilt allows you to fully restore HP, BP, and fatigue for free whenever you want. Compared to that, "doing a bit extra damage sometimes" is a spectacular letdown. That said, you can't use the L-Quilt in the Very Definitely Final Dungeon (you lose the ability to sleep), so if you can tough out not having the L-Quilt until the final stage it suddenly becomes very effective.
    • Played for Laughs with the various items you find that Connors needs to appraise. They always come with dramatic names that imply they may be pieces of the legendary armor, like "shield", "old sword", and "helmet", but when appraised these things become a frisbee, a shovel, and a bed pan. Let's hope Musashi didn't try that helmet on!
  • The Boktai series:
    • The Star Lens in the first game increases the rate that you charge up Sols merely by being equipped, and even more so if you hold down the A button, but completely disables your attack as a trade off. Simply put it's not worth it: there's rarely a time you can run around without an attack long enough to justify the little extra bit of Sols it gives you, and the amount of time wasted toggling it out for other lenses to attack and back negates any time you might have saved storing up Sols with this thing. Furthermore, the Solar Bank is a far more economic way of building up Sols even if you don't cheat (read: muck around with the clock to abuse interest), rendering this thing redundant at absolute best, and while you can speed up its charge rate by leveling it up, leveling up a non-combat lens takes so much time that you could again save Sols much faster by just playing the game normally. The only valid tactic with this thing is to leave your GBA out in the sun with a clamp on the A button, but that's only if you're willing to risk the damage it could take (those screens do not like direct sunlight) and, again, for all this effort you'd be better off just using the Solar Bank or charging Sols normally. As one final nail in the coffin, it only boosts the charge rate of Sols in the Sol Station: it doesn't speed up the rate that the Solar Tree recovers or affect the "Charged Energy" ranking at the end of a dungeon, which are the two things most people would want to use it for in the first place.
    • Also in the first game are the Dark Gun parts, your prize for beating the New Game Plus several times over while meeting specific conditions, and the only way to get a double S-rated gun that fires shots and spreads. Sounds great on paper, but the issue is its dark-elemental rendering it a Bragging Rights Reward at best owing to the way the game's Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors works: any undead-type enemy is completely immune to it, and while it does lots of damage to other enemies you can still ultimately inflict more by exploiting their elemental weaknesses with weaker frames. At the very least, you'd expect the Dark Gun to charge up in darkness rather than sunlight (which would make it worth using in spite of of everything) but no, you still have to inexplicably charge up its unique darkness-powered battery with sunlight. It's very telling that relying on only the Dark Gun parts is considered a Self-Imposed Challenge akin to the swordless run of The Legend of Zelda. At least it looks and sounds cool, though.
    • The second game has you lose your gun early on and spend most of the game relying on melee weapons and magic, and becomes this when you recover it late in the game owing to its atrocious energy consumption not being anywhere near worth using it. Most combat is close-range anyways, so its one unique attribute (that it's a long-range projectile) doesn't make it worth using often, and any time you need to snipe an enemy from a distance you can just as easily make noise to lure them into range of a melee attack anyways or, failing that, leave them alone and run past. Even more so when you do the bonus mission and unlock the Mega Buster, a weaker but much more economic weapon that knocks the solar gun out the park.

    Beat 'em Ups 
  • In Dragon Ball Z: Buu's Fury, the Elder Kai powers up Gohan, making him much stronger but taking away his ability to go Super Saiyan, just like he does in the show. The problem is that in game terms, "powering him up" means giving him a lot of level ups, which could have easily been achieved through basic Level Grinding, while going Super Saiyan is THE way to actually win fights because of its massive boost to speed. On top of that, the game's Boring, but Practical weighted training clothes reduce your character's speed. Normally going Super Saiyan more than makes up the difference and grants a power boost to boot, but with the Elder Kai's "powerup", this becomes impossible. The obvious option of simply not using the weighted clothes means Gohan will level up slower, which means even his slight theoretical stat advantage soon falls apart. This "powerup" single-handedly turns Gohan into the worst character in the game. What makes this even worse is that the early-game Great Saiyaman form gives Gohan a large speed boost just for being in the form, which is entirely determined by the plot, and never seen again past the World Tournament. The Elder Kai's boost does nothing of the sort. So we have a solid example of a way the developers could have easily avoided this powerup's massive suck, but for some inexplicable reason chose not to. The irony is that in the manga/anime, this power-up elevates Gohan into literally being the single most powerful non-fused being in existence, such that he doesn't even need to be Super Saiyan to wipe the floor with anyone, and of course that the anime actually featured a tactic similar to the game's mechanic of sacrificing speed for a "power boost"... which was soon decried as useless.
  • The Eyeclops helmet in Kid Chameleon has a default (green) beam that does no damage, but reveals invisible blocks, something that one can find for themselves through casual trial-and-error searching. Its secondary (white) beam does damage enemies...but only the Mooks you fight, and it only damages them the equivalent of one Goomba Stomp while draining your gem total like candy. The only thing you might want from it 90% of the time is the extra unit of life it gives you, when there's no other Power Ups to be found.
  • In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge, one of the item pickups can be a box of sushi. All it does is grant the player ten points and you can hear the Turtles react in disgust over it. This is mostly a Mythology Gag to the 1987 series' first episode where April and Donatello argue over pizza vs. sushi.

    Fighting Games 
  • item asylum: The M1911 is considered to be one of the best weapons in the experience due to its insane time-to-kill ratio. Its upgrade, the Mad Noob's Shotgun, on the other hand, is a Short-Range Shotgun that lacks the damage needed to kill even in close range. This makes it incredibly appaling considering that other items are useful once they get their upgraded counterparts.
  • Super Smash Bros.:
    • Super Smash Bros. Melee has the Cloaking Device, which blocks damage but still lets people knock you around or throw you (how KOs happen in Smash Bros.), and makes it hard for you to see yourself while not really causing the computer any trouble. note 
    • Several Assist Trophies fall under this trope:
      • Devil, who moves the stage around, changing the boundaries and making it harder for both the opponents and the summoner to maneuver. His trophy description acknowledges how he isn't really helping.
      • Helirin doesn't help the summoner at all, only acting as a temporary platform—and a terrible one at that, as it slowly spins around so you can't even stand on it for very long.
      • Resetti doesn't do anything to help his summoner. The only damage he can do is explode, and that's only if somebody decides to hit him enough times.
      • Nintendogs will stand in front of the camera and paw at it like a glass window, obscuring most of the player's view.
      • Tingle is an odd case: His balloon spell does nothing, his hammer spell just spawns hammers that everyone can use, his fire spell causes everyone to start breathing fire, and his zoom effect only harms the summoner slightly less than it does the opponents. His banana spell is the only one that doesn't harm the summoner (it makes everyone else trip more often).
      • Isabelle spawns health-restoring fruit that any player can pick up. Fortunately, she always aims toward her summoner, and the summoner has the added benefit of automatically eating the fruit instead of having to grab it like everyone else. She didn't last.
      • Nightmare completely obscures the vision of everyone.
      • Skull Kid's three effects are flipping the camera upside-down, mirroring it, or turning every fighter invisible, affecting everyone — including the summoner.
      • Just like Devil, the Squid Sisters alter the stage by slowly zooming it in and greatly decreasing the blast lines. On one hand, you have less room to maneuver, but on the other, it is far easier to KO the opponent; especially since the screen eventually gets small enough that you can probably take out an opponent with 0% damage with one strong hit.
    • Some of the Poké Ball Pokémon qualify:
    • Wario's Final Smash in Brawl and 4 is an amazing ability, vastly increasing Wario's strength and speed, granting him flight, and making him invincible to almost everything in the game. However, one of its changes is to the Wario Bike, increasing its speed to the point that it's Too Fast to Stop. (The official website suggests that this was intentional.) Even if you have good enough reflexes to not kill yourself, not only will you most likely zoom right past your opponent without hitting them, but even if you do manage to hit them, the damage it deals is only a little more than regular Wario's bike.
    • Due to the procedurally-generated equipment in the fourth game, it's entirely possible to get, for example, an extremely rare Extra-Large Egg or Decadent Lollipop with the same Attack boost but a worse Defense penalty than a much less rare Rare Brawn Badge already in your inventory.
  • Dragon Install in the Guilty Gear games have been a... questionable use of half your Tension gauge.
    • In XX, Sol's Dragon Install makes him move faster and his attacks faster and generally deal more damage for a few seconds. After the timer runs out though, it comes with some nasty downsides. You lose all your Tension meter and Sol goes into a stunned state. It also stops instantly if Sol gets knocked down during it, which is actually better than letting the timer run out and eat a full combo. If you can't capitalize on it for those few precious seconds, it's a big waste of meter. Generally speaking, it's a much worse option than using a Roman Cancel. It's a bit better in Xrd where the benefits are more substantial, but it's still very risky to use for the same reason. And at least that version comes with a banger Theme Music Power-Up.
    • There's a hidden version of Dragon Install in XX where it puts Sol in permanent DI. It manages to be worse than regular DI in every way because it uses 100% Tension and also rapidly drains your health to 1 during it. That's if the opponent gives you the 2 whole seconds of startup to use it.
    • In -STRIVE-, Ky gets the Dragon Install instead. His version of Dragon Install has a hit portion that knocks back and it gives his special moves more hits and better frame data, and unlike Sol's, it lasts the whole round. The problem is not only does it require him to be at 30% health, it severely cuts down his Tension gain, which just makes coming back harder to do. It's also has a rather slow startup and easily punishable recovery. It has gotten some buffs in all front since release, but even then the low health threshold and the fact that combos in this game deal much more damage on average make it a risky investment.
  • Pandora Mode in Street Fighter X Tekken was intended as a comeback mechanic: if your active character had less than 25% health, you could activate it, killing the character and tagging in their partner with some significant stat buffs (i.e. free EX Special Attacks, a damage increase) that lasts for seven seconds. Thing is, once those seven seconds are up, the tagged-in character is automatically KO'd, ending the round in a loss—so unless you took down your opponent in that time, you were basically throwing the match. And Street Fighter X Tekken at launch was not a game where fights were typically over in seven seconds. A later patch buffed it considerably, including upping the time to 10 seconds and increasing attack speed, making it considerably more useful.
  • Mortal Kombat:
    • Mortal Kombat II: If you play as Reptile, you can turn invisible. While this is somewhat useful while playing against humans, it's completely and utterly useless while playing against the computer, which still knows exactly where you are all the time. Furthermore, since the invisibility is total, it makes it impossible for you to see the character, which makes the game harder for the player. Later games in the series have modified the ability so the invisibility is not total.
    • Mortal Kombat 11: The Terminator has a special ability where if he is reduced to or beyond less than 10% of his health on the final round, his skin burns away to reveal his robotic endoskeleton. The positives? It gives him an extra 10% hp to work with, he has hyper armor in this form, and it looks cool as hell. The negatives? He can't block, jump, dash, and almost all of his special moves and combo strings are locked out. That includes his Fatalities and Brutalities. Hardly worth the two ability slots it requires.
  • In Dragon Ball Xenoverse, the Kaioken abilities, especially Kaioken x20. Since the first game only gave Saiyans transformations, the other races were forced to use Kaioken until they were able to unlock Potential Unleashed. The three levels of Kaioken (normal, x3 and x20) used increasing amounts of Stamina to use and there was only one skill that restored Stamina unlike the Super Saiyan abilities, which used ki that could be easily restored any number of ways.

    First-Person Shooters 
  • In Call of Duty: Black Ops, the Death Machine can be this. It's a helicopter turret you can walk around with... at a very slow pace, with a slightly faster killing time than other weapons, except it takes a bit longer to spin up than it does for most guns to aim down the sights and put three in your chest. It's even worse in Hardcore, where every gun is a one hit kill save a few at long range, so it doesn't even offer faster killing. The Death Machine fares better in the Zombie maps; the rapid firepower and no reload really help with the horde of zombie rushing at you.
  • Daikatana:
    • The titular Sword of Plot Advancement can be upgraded over the course of the game through use. It does deal more damage and becomes a stronger weapon overall... but at the price of the giant sword in the middle of the screen becoming a giant sword in the middle of the screen that is also slathered in fancy glow effects. Have fun seeing anything that's going on!
    • Upgrade the jump, and it does what you would expect: it makes you jump higher, which is useful. What it also changes is that it now plays the distinctive "rattling" jumping sound effect from The Six Million Dollar Man. Every single time. In an old-school FPS, where you're expected to be jumping as much as you're able.
  • Deep Rock Galactic has several types of specialty brews that you can purchase and drink to gain beneficial effects for the next mission such as getting more gold from mining it, reduced fall damage, boosted max health, and so on. One of the special brews is Dark Morkite, which lets you get more Morkite from mining it. While Dark Morkite is pretty useful, its usefulness is greatly diminished by the fact that A) not every assignment will give you missions that have Morkite to be mined and B) the special brews are randomized every time you return to the space rig, so you can either have it when you don't need it or need it and it's not available. In the cases where you don't need Dark Morkite, you're basically stuck playing the next mission without a buff to the team.
  • While the RPG Elements in Deus Ex are a lot of fun, many of them aren't very useful. Top (or, uh, bottom) among these would be environmental training, demolition, aqualung, run silent and energy shield. While some pointless items can be blamed on insufficient balancing in the campaign, the issue of which are best and worst is a hotly contested one. The devs seemed to be at least partially aware of this since they are cheap. Being so cheap, some of these marginal skills are worth a single rank for the improvement the first level gives you. The prequel Deus Ex: Human Revolution has its own set of potentially useless or useful only in specific circumstances set of augments.
  • Doom:
    • Blur Artifacts in Doom, Doom II and Doom 64 are actually a negative facing projectile shooting enemies. They make you harder to see, with the effect that monsters have very poor aim when trying to shoot you. The problem is straight shots can be dodged because they're predictable, whereas stray ones' randomness can cause you to dodge into them. Against hitscan enemies, the partial invisibility significantly reduces their accuracy, rendering them far more manageable when fought in groups.
    • Doom 64 has the third upgrade for the Unmaker, which adds additional bolts fired off to the sides that fan outwards when you fire and converting it from a pinpoint-accurate laser minigun into a wild-firing laser spread gun. While this increases its effectiveness against hordes of enemies at short to medium range (which is something you'd probably prefer the BFG for anyway), it results in a lot of wasted cell ammo when shooting at the Unmaker's preferred targets: large single enemies like Cyberdemons kept at a safely long range.
    • Doom (2016) introduces "Saving Throw", a Rune which when equipped grants the Doom Slayer a once per-life Auto-Revive. This should be a great ability for less experienced players still getting used to the rhythm of combat, except it's actually the last Rune you unlock, well past the game's halfway point and after any encounter where a player might want that kind of safety cushion to help smooth out the game's difficulty curve. This kind of issue is likely a major reason why Doom Eternal lets you choose the order you unlock Runes, in-turn actually letting Saving Throw serve its intended purpose.
  • From Expert, an old Japanese FPS released in 1996:
    • The first stage gives you a choice of two firearms, your default pistol and a backup weapon, which is either an Uzi (not this trope) or a bigger pistol model that deals more damage, at the cost of having a slower firing and reloading rate. Problem is, all your enemies at the time can be killed in a single shot, even with your normal pistol, so having the other backup is more trouble than it's worth.
    • The third stage introduces a new Spread Shot weapon that opens into an arc of bullets, which have a painful tendency to spread too wide. You'll miss half your shots using said weapon and have your health shaved away by terrorists shooting back at you while asking, "how the hell does this thing work?"
    • You unlock a rocket launcher in the final stage, who finally allows you an advantage against those recurring Giant Mook enemies. It's also painfully slow, constantly low on ammo, and useless against every. other. enemy type. Ironically, the launcher should be useful against the terrorist leader, a muscular boss enemy... but you obtain the launcher after defeating said boss.
  • Fishgun have a couple that when equipped on your titular weapon, have less-than-desirable results:
    • "Slow Bouncing Bullets", a pickup that looks like every other weapon upgrade, but when equipped makes the fishgun shoots... slow and weak bouncy projectiles that barely covers twice your height and instantly hits the ground. It's useful if you're in platforming areas where your enemies are below you, but on ground level where enemies are on the same elevation as you it's better to collect a different weapon ASAP.
    • Then there's the "Stingray", which fires a straight, powerful bolt that takes a big chunk of health away from bosses, provided if you can actually hit anything with it. Said upgrade cannot be fired on automatic, and unless you combine it with the "Spread" 60% of your bolts will be hitting walls and thin air.
  • The Long Jump Module in Half-Life is tricky to use since it requires the player to be sprinting, do a crouch, and then immediately jump afterwards to do the long jump. The tutorial mode teaches you about the long jump fairly early, but you don't actually get the long jump upgrade in the main campaign until you're at the end of the game, albeit right before the only section of the game where you really need it... but that part of the game had its own issues, not the least of which was the addition of Puzzle Platformer elements that the LJM was supposed to make easier but really, really didn't. Black Mesa makes a point of overhauling it to be far more useful, streamlining the control inputs needed to activate it and adding the incredibly useful secondary property of rendering you completely immune to fall damage.
  • Shadowspheres are also dangerous in Heretic, more so than the Doom Blur Artifact example above. All attacks are slow projectiles, and enemies generally fire multiple projectiles at once. The most extreme example is D'Sparil, who will sometimes summon additional mooks. These mooks will launch a 3-way spread attack, and if D'Sparil summons enough of them, they will cause an entire area to be carpeted in shots. Not using the artifact is safer, since they only aim directly at the player. The artifact does have a few lesser known advantages, notably in making you immune to the undead warrior's axe projectiles, and preventing the iron lich's tornado attack from following you.
  • The Black Tarot cards in Painkiller tend to vary between Game-Breaker and this trope, especially considering how difficult some of these cards can be to collect. Some of the worst of these include Greed (which doubles the amount of gold found in breakable items, but which in itself already costs 2000 gold to place) and Divine Intervention (which allows the player to place any cards they want for free, but can only be earned at the very end of the game on the highest difficulty, by which point the amount of gold at hand is probably not an issue, and unequipping the card instantly removes all of the player's gold to boot).
  • In Star Wars: Battlefront II, you can gain access to certain elite weapons after doing well enough as a certain class overall and then, in the middle of a match, doing enough of a certain action (like getting enough headshots with a sniper rifle) in a single life. In general, these weapons are very useful - the elite pistol is one of the most deadly weapons in the game, for example, and the remote controlled missile is useful for hitting weapon weak points from a distance - but others are not, particularly the laser sniper. While it's supposed to shoot through units into others, this is undermined by the fact that its hit detection is terrible - things that look like direct hits are often not, and this is not helped by the trail of the laser being much wider than the laser itself, making it difficult to tell exactly where you hit. Even body shots are wonky, while headshots are completely out of the question, and in general, it's more effective to hit enemies with headshots one at a time then try your luck with the laser sniper. Worst of all, it only has one level of scope zoom as opposed to two. Unfortunately, snipers can't switch back to the regular sniper after having switched to the elite one - if you do so, you have no choice but to either try your luck or kill yourself and respawn with the regular sniper. Luckily, you don't have to use the elite weapons until you switch to them, meaning you can keep using the regular sniper by merely never switching to the pistol (leaving yourself relatively defenseless if ambushed) after activating the laser sniper.
  • System Shock 2 features an Exotic bioweapon made from and reloaded with worms. It has two settings, one of which harms annelids, one of which harms humans, hybrid humans, or any other variation thereof... including you. It does a lot of damage, but that's not much consolation when only two kinds of enemies count as "annelids". As well, worms are extremely rare compared to other ammo, and with a certain implant, piles of worms can be consumed for a considerable amount of health, which is usually far more valuable than throwing them at enemies so long as you have any other weaponry at all... and among the pistol, the shotgun and the grenade launcher, you certainly will.
  • TRON 2.0: Light cycle mode features a powerup that provides excessive, uncontrollable speed. The rub is it affects all players, not just the one who activates it. The computer's still better at handling it, though.
  • Team Fortress 2:
    • The Razorback is a Sniper secondary that prevents one backstab (and alerts the Sniper wearing it). The thing is, that's all it does. It protects from one backstab, and then it breaks, forcing you to go back to the Resupply Cabinet at your base for another one or wait 30 seconds for it to recharge. Many Spies simply ignore the Razorback altogether and just shoot the Sniper with their revolver, made easier since the Razorback also negates overhealing. Even worse, the other choices you may have are the trusty SMG (good mid-to-close range Ranged Emergency Weapon), the Cleaner's Carbine (also a decent Emergency Weapon, which can gain a few seconds of mini-crits on dealing a certain amount of damage), and the super-versatile Jarate that can extinguish burning teammates, reveal a cloaked/disguised Spy, and force any soaked enemies to take mini-crits! The only situation it arguably shines in is when you are near your teammates (e.g. on the objective with them), since its presence can potentially interrupt what would otherwise be a team-wiping chainstab, forcing Spies to either alert the rest of the team trying to shoot you down or ignore you and hope you don't take them out yourself (which, considering you still gave up your Emergency Weapon to equip the Razorback in the first place, tends not to be an issue for skilled Spies anyway).note 
    • The Cozy Camper stops you from flinching when hit and gives slight (1 per second) health regeneration, but ramps up all damage taken by 20%, effectively lowering the Sniper's max health without outright doing so. Unsurprisingly, the Cozy Camper's downside was eventually removed to make it actually usable.
    • Some upgrades in Mann vs. Machine buff the user to almost unrecognizable levels. Others... not so much. Aside from obviously flawed options like upgrading the attack speed of largely useless weapons, or bugged upgrades like Increased Afterburn Time, a few just don't work well with the game mode.
      • Knockback Rage lets you temporarily enter a state where your attacks have heavy knockback. On paper, this sounds useful, being able to send enemies flying and delay bomb-carriers—but nearly all attacks in Team Fortress 2 deal more damage up close, and if an enemy is hurtling back 30 feet, then you aren't getting that damage buff. That's not mentioning the fact that it also makes said enemies harder for your teammates to shoot when they're careening around the map. The only reasonable scenario to use this is where the bomb carrier is standing right near an Bottomless Pit, but that has its own problems since said upgrade is exclusive to the Heavy, and since his main niche is dealing damage, this is far less useful than it sounds. As if that wasn't bad enough, Knockback Rage also halves the Heavy's damage output while active (which the game does not tell you), making him directly worse at his job.
      • Disposable Sentry Gun lets the Engineer build a second Sentry... and said second Sentry is completely useless. It's somewhat like the Mini-Sentry associated with the Gunslinger, in that it can't be upgraded and has reduced health and damage compared to the Level 1 Sentry, but it also has to deal with a slower firing speed than the standard Mini-Sentry. It also doesn't benefit from building health upgrades and can't be Wrangled, and you can't even repair it; basically, this thing is going to go down in no time flat and not deal a whole lot of damage in the meantime. What really puts it in here is that it costs 500 cash to buy, making it one of the most expensive upgrades around.
      • Health Regen and Metal Regen have the same problem: the amount of Regenerating Health and regained metal is just too slow to actually help you out in a firefight, and in between rounds, there are much faster and easier ways to get it back. It doesn't help that they're outclassed by +25 Health On Kill in the former case and +50% Metal Capacity in the latter.
      • The 2-Way Teleporter upgrade, allowing players to teleport from the exit to the entrance in addition to the regular functionality, is far less useful than it sounds. In theory, this allows players to go back to base in the middle of a wave easily, except there are almost no situations where this is actually helpful; robots always spawn at the front lines from fixed locations (barring Spy Robots who usually find their way to the frontlines quickly anyway) so if you have to go back to spawn, it's probably because your team was overwhelmed in the first place, at which point it's a bit too late to be looking for a Teleporter. Even restocking ammo isn't a valid use for this since the Engineer's Dispenser exists, and you can't refill ammo at the upgrade station during a wave anyway.
  • Borderlands: Due to the games' weapon generation system, every weapon you pick up can have variations in damage, elemental properties, special ammunition, etc.. While this ensures a variety of different guns, when 90% of the weapons aren't worth using, the weapons you get as rewards for completing missions and such are often worse than the guns dropped by random mooks or found in dung and garbage piles. It's not at all uncommon for for a mission reward to be a worse weapon than something you found while completing it.
    • Borderlands 2:
      • E-Tech weapons: according to the lore, Hyperion research into Eridium and Eridian tech led to the development of guns that could shoot projectiles other than bullets, which Hyperion then licensed out to the other weapons manufacturers. Their rarity and stats make them competitive to purple-quality weapons on paper, so you'd be forgiven for assuming that they offer a viable alternative to conventional guns. Sure, the extra damage sounds nice, but they consume multiple ammo per shot, and they generally have reduced or no ability to crit, which means you'll end up using more ammo to do less damage in the long run.
      • There are quite a few skills throughout the series that are either ineffective or counterproductive. Gaige gets hit by this the worst: just about every skill that's meant to upgrade the killing power of her pet robot Deathtrap ends up decreasing its DPS in some way.
    • Borderlands 3: A number of unique weapons in the first two games get promoted to Legendary status here. Said weapons include blatant Joke Weapons such as TK's Wave.
  • Quake: The Pentagram of Protection works as your run-of-the-mill invincibility item... except it doesn't protect your armor. A not-so-savvy player will be tempted to pick one up as soon as it appears and run recklessly into the fray, only to be startled to find out afterwards that his protection is all gone when the effect wears off, and not just the pentagram's, but also that shiny Red Armor that he jumped through hoops and on pinhead-wide platforms to collect. In a game where even the most basic armor is the difference between living and dying, this can be catastrophic. This is only in the first game: the invulnerability power-ups in all following games cover the user's armor as well. The Game Mod Copper, among other improvements, fixes this, making the Pentagram of Protection behave the same as the rest of the series.
  • The Steroids and Beer in Duke Nukem Forever are meant to be a short-lived power boost, but to show they're active, they cover the screen in a heavy filter. (In the old games, Steroids just turned it slightly red.) This handily compensates for the increased survivability by ensuring you can't see half the enemies shooting you.

    Light Gun Games 
  • Dino Strike Wii grants you access to a crossbow grenade that deals impressive damage... assuming if you can hit anything. It's slow firing rate and tendency for fired projectiles to skew too much to the left or right ensures you'll miss raptors, pterosaurs or dilophosauruses, the game's common and fast-moving enemies, although the grenades works well on the slow-moving but considerably stronger ankylosaurs as well as being the only weapon capable of hurting the last boss, a T-Rex.

    Maze Games 
  • Pac-Man Arrangement (1996) has a variety of different colored capsules that appear at Pac-Man's spawn point that he can collect whenever he eats enough ghosts. While most of the capsules are worth 1000 points and grant access to different powers, the gold capsule is only worth 100 points and doesn't do anything else.

    MOBAs 
  • Heroes of the Storm:
    • One of Lt. Morales' heroics massively boosts a target ally's movement and attack speed temporarily. Originally, its Storm Talent upgrade caused her to also cast it on herself when used. Morales is a healer that deals next to no damage, making this an extremely minimal upgrade on a tier when heroes are supposed to get their most powerful stuff. Thankfully, it was later changed to the much better effect of making the stim drone more powerful and have a shorter cooldown.
    • Zeratul's Void Prison traps everything within it except Zeratul himself in Time Stop, preventing them from moving or taking damage. Its Storm Talent made it so that it no longer affected allies. This was a fairly situational upgrade, and could actually be a downgrade in some cases since you could no longer use it to protect your team from enemy heroics. This effect was eventually removed, although it wasn't replaced with anything and Void Prison simply no longer has a Storm Talent (not that it needs it; it's a very strong ability).
  • The ultimate ability of League of Legends character Sylas is stealing enemy ultimate abilities. Unfortunately for him, not every ult (Like Udyr's Phoenix Stance, Jayce's Transform Mercury Cannon and Zoe's Portal Jump) is really worth stealing. And he's rather let down when he does.
    Sylas: Hmph. I actually feel cheated.

    MMORPGs 
  • Granblue Fantasy:
    • Cosmos weapons have a second skill that gives buffs depending on the character's style, which hinders team building to get the full advantage. The weapon series eventually got reworked to no longer rely on character styles.
    • While Ultima weapons can have powerful effects, they're limited to wielders of certain weapon types and finding a good party that uses all the same weapon type can be quite difficult. Unless you're a Fire player where the only hassle is getting the 1-2 limited characters to complete your party.
  • Ragnarok Online has many pieces of equipment that on a glance should be better than others, but in reality they're not.
    • A rather popular example of this is the headgear Model Training Hat. It requires the headgear Apple of Archer and the weapon Book[3] to make, Book[3] itself is a rare drop from a teleport-happy Guild Dungeon only monster. What you get after making it, is a headgear that's......worse than Apple of Archer. Apple of Archer has no defense, but has DEX + 3 effect. Model Training Hat gives only DEX + 2. Sure, Model Training Hat has 2 defense point, but it's really not worth the effort to make, considering how more useful the additional 1 point of DEX is on Apple of Archer, compared to the additional defense on Model Training Hat, not to mention the effort it takes to get Book[3].
    • Some colored headgears can be made by combining the original headgear with color dye. The issue here, is that not only do color dyes take a bit of effort to obtain, what you get is also not better than the original headgear - the difference is literally just the color. You're spending all that time literally for a palette swap to make your character looks prettier.
    • Up until the change on how weapon ATK and character's natural ATK works in relation to card effect bonus, it's always better to use a low ATK low level weapon with many card slot, than a powerful weapon with only one, or two (or even none at all) card slot. This results in many low ATK low level weapons, at that time, become more highly sought after than powerful but only one/no slot weapons dropped by strong monsters and bosses.
  • RuneScape's much-hyped Invention skill ended up in this territory. The purpose of Invention is to build gizmos that add "perks" to your equipment. The perks are randomly generated from a list according to the materials you use, so they're highly likely, even if you use the right materials, to end up not giving the perks you wanted for your equipment, especially if your Invention skill level is low. Worse, some perks are deliberately bad. And for a long time, the only way to remove gizmos from your equipment was to destroy the equipment.
  • Tibia: A quest requiring the player to fight to the bottom of a dungeon of minotaurs rewards the player with an Iron Hammer. The hammer has no real sell value, and you can easily get a better one for a few hundred GP.
  • World of Warcraft:
    • At one point Death Knights had a mechanic called Runic Empowerment, that gave their main attacks that cost runic power a chance to instantly recharge one of their depleted runes. At the same time, the Unholy talent tree contained a talent that allowed Death Knights to replace that mechanic with Runic Corruption, that instead caused all of their runes to recharge much faster. Problem is, the talent took two talent points, and if there's only one point in it, the effect is much less useful than the Runic Empowerment it replaced. The advice knowledgeable players gave was that if the Death Knight planned to invest in Runic Corruption, they shouldn't put any points into it until they had the two talent points to max it out immediately.
    • Unlike most specs, the Dual Wielding fury warriors could pick from one of two 'ultimate' talents at the end of their talent tree. One let them simultaneously wield a two-handed weapon in each hand (with two-handed weapons doing more damage than one-handed ones), whilst the other gave a boost to damage when wielding a single-handed weapon in both hands. Even ignoring the badass factor of having a BFS x 2, the one-handed talent was useless. If in any doubt the player could search online and find that the Warcraft Wiki entry for the 1H talent was blank whilst the entry for the 2H talent consisted of a mathematical proof of why it was better.
    • With the introduction of Glyphs up until their retooling into pure cosmetics, some fell under this, or at least seemed to, depending on how you play the game. In general, any glyph with the word 'but' in the description probably wasn't worth it, since it took up a glyph slot to help and hinder the player in equal measure.
      • One Glyph that wasn't really subjective about this trope was the Monk's Glyph of Uplift, which replaced the Chi cost of one of the Mistweaver Monk's main multi-target heals with a (kinda steep) Mana cost. Players generally agreed that there was absolutely no situation in which you want to do this. Perhaps for that reason, the glyph was removed in patch 5.4.
    • Some talents fall into this trope depending on the expansion. For example, In Legion, Blood Dk's talent Soulgorge was deemed the single worst talent ever added for Dks. The effect made the gameplay much more tedious (needing to use a button you otherwise had no reason to) while offering no worthy payoffs whatsoever, which is the very reason it was removed by patch 7.2. Similary, Mark of Blood was a dk ability in Wrath that was eventually removed by Cataclysm. It was eventually re-added as a talent in Legion, and it has been widely mocked for being blatantly inferior and absolutely useless when compared to the other talents in that row. Even as of Shadowlands and several buffs, Mark of Blood is still useless.
    • The Artifact-quality fishing rod introduced in the Legion expansion suffered from this. Unlike all the other Artifact weapons you picked up, the "Deeplight Angler" lacked any Artifact Power, meaning that the first ability upgrade you got wasn't free. To gain Artifact Power, you needed to fish up more of the rare fish you used to unlock the Angler. However, the rare fish could only be acquired from "schools of fish", which were consumed once a certain number of fish were caught, and several mandatory-if-you-want-the-great-powers upgrade nodes would grant you the "power" to fish up an entire school in one cast. The problem? Catching the rare fish is pure RNG, and by getting the entire school at once you were reducing your chances of catching the same rare fish you needed to get more Artifact Power and get the preferred perks.

    Pinball 
  • The Mystery award in Lord of the Rings can be a cross between this and Annoying Video Game Helper at times, due to the way multiball stacking works. The game allows you to stack a Movie Multiball on top of many other things as long as the Movie MB is started last. But Mystery will often start a lit Movie MB, often in cases where it would be far more advantageous to start something else first.
  • Assembling the Toaster Gun in Junk Yard changes the Video Mode from running away from Spike to attacking him with the Toaster Gun. The mini-game where you run away from Spike is not only easier, it yields more points. Thus, assembling the Toaster Gun actually hurts your overall score.
  • The ball saver is easy to activate in Zen Studios' original virtual pinball table El Dorado, but it can work against you when you're trying to beat the Log Bridge mission, as it can launch the ball right onto one of the drop target obstacles that you're supposed to avoid.

    Platformers 
  • Balan Wonderworld has 80 costumes, most costumes have only one non-context-sensitive function, and said function replaces your default jump. Consequently, listing all the letdown costumes in the game would probably double the size of this page. In particular, any attack-based costume is useless, since it takes away your jump in a platformer without offering anything to replace it when a Goomba Stomp already handles everything (in the worst-case scenario, it's possible to find yourself in a place that requires jumping and inescapably trap yourself by accident). Other costumes serve only to bypass context-specific obstacles (i.e. climbing spiderwebs or pushing blocks) and are basically useless otherwise. Even the costumes that grant a mobility option superior to your jump tend to have at least one costume that outclasses them in their intended niche. On top of that, since you can only carry three at a time, picking up a new costume can mean losing an actually somewhat useful one for a useless one, or even an extra copy of a useless one. The most hated of all of them is Box Fox, which has the power of randomly turning you into an invincible but uncontrollable cube "when it feels like it." You keep any momentum you may have had upon transformation, so you can find yourself suddenly becoming a box while running around and forced to helplessly watch your character slide off a cliff and into the abyss thanks to the severe lack of friction.
  • Most of the luck-based passive shards in Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night are pretty worthless. To wit:
    • Pickpocket makes it so every blow to an enemy can trigger an item drop, theoretically giving you extra items. The problem is, even when leveled fully to Rank 9, farmed to Grade 9, and doubled down on as both a passive and skill shard, and even with a very high luck stat, it almost never activates. At the very least it can be obtained and wholly maxed out by the midpoint of the game, unlike...
    • Drain. It gives you the chance to drain health from an enemy with your attacks, but like Pickpocket it only occasionally activates and only drains a paltry 5 HP. That would be great for the early game, but it can only be obtained in the second to last dungeon, as a rare-drop from an uncommon enemy, and can only be fully upgraded by venturing a ways into The Very Definitely Final Dungeon. By this point, if your HP isn't in the high 1500s and you don't have fully upgraded Regenerate and Healing shards, then you're so good at the game that you don't need Drain in the first place.
    • Alchemic Bounty sometimes causes you to get more than one alchemic creation for the cost of one. Sounds great, except it only very rarely kicks in unless leveled up to Rank 9 (where it guaranteed creates five for the price of one), and it costs ludicrous quantities of silver and gold (27 of each which is prohibitively expensive) and alexandrite and bixbite (12 of each which are rare drops found in the final dungeon) to do this. By the time you're able to make use of it you've transmuted everything you could want or need save for going for 100% Completion, and even then it's much faster and simply far more economical to use Augment Gold to farm money and just buy extra ingredients rather than rely on the freebies given to you by Alchemic Bounty.
    • For a non-shard example, the Bloodbringer familiar can be equipped as a sword, with an attack power that increases as the familiar levels up. While its 54 ATK value when fully leveled sounds promising, the problem is unless you're spending ludicrous amounts of time grinding, it will never be more powerful than other weapons that you just casually have access to from random drops or from alchemy and is outclassed by the Bandit Blade, Valkyrie Sword, and Blue Rose, all of which match or beat its attack power with extra capabilities (the Bandit Blade is literally Alucard's Sword from Castlevania: Symphony of the Night) and are obtained much more easily than Level Grinding for hours upon hours. Furthermore, is the Bloodbringer is actually a fairly effective familiar: why forego a good ability for a subpar weapon when you can have said ability while using a better weapon?
  • Put it this way: You're playing Bomberman Hero, and fighting Nitros for the fifth time. Once he's beaten, he'll reveal that he had been brainwashed and gives you his power. Does this "power" involve board-game-based attacks? No, it's extra bombs and blast radius plus fully restored health. By this point you're likely to have max of both, and it's a one-time-only event - which means that, even though it's a letdown, if repeatable it could still be very useful in case you ran out of continues during the last stages and lost all your bombs and blast radius...but no.
  • Castlevania:
    • The original style games have an occasional Cross, which kills almost every enemy on screen. But it's always placed where there are only a few enemies, which you can easily handle without it.
    • The classic games also have the dagger subweapon. While better than no subweapon, it is widely regarded as the worst. Given how you smash candles to acquire powerups, this can result in accidentally grabbing a dagger and replacing a much more useful subweapon. Some places in the game specifically aim to do this, placing a dagger in an area where you may not have the time or space to smash the candle and see what comes out before grabbing it.
    • In Aria of Sorrow, the Killer Fish soul enables you to summon a fish which attacks enemies in your path. If you're not underwater, the fish just dies. The soul description does mention this side effect.
    • In Dawn of Sorrow, one of the bosses you face can copy the soul powers that Soma uses. So you can deliberately equip a weak soul for him to copy.
    • Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin's Owl Morph is a useful spell that transforms you into an owl, thus granting you flight. The problem is that not long after you get it, you find the Griffon Wing, which is a super jump that outclasses the Owl Morph in every way. You'll use the morph 3 or 4 times at most.
    • Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia features the Volaticus glyph, which is an awesome glyph that allows you to fly freely around the screen. So why is it a letdown? It's gained so late in the game that you barely get to use it unless you do the Bonus Dungeon Large Cavern. It does make Dracula much easier, though, since he's programmed to use an easily-dodged flame pillar attack over any of his other ones if you use it against him. It also allows you to fire Nitesco beams while moving, even backwards if you fired before moving.
  • Cave Story:
    • In this game enemies drop experience crystals that power up your weapons when you collect them and power down when you get hit, with three levels per weapon. Generally, you want to keep your weapons at the highest level possible, but with the Blade weapon you want to keep it at level 2. The Blade is a highly damaging weapon, but you can only have one shot of it onscreen at a time. The problem with the weapon's level 3 upgrade is that it passes through enemies, meaning that you have to wait for the shot to disappear before you can fire another. At level 2, the shots disappear after hitting an enemy, so you can fire as fast as you can press the fire button, more than making up for level 3's increased damage.
    • There's also the Nemesis, a weapon you can get by trading away the Blade in a sidequest. Unlike all other weapons in the game, it gets weaker as you collect experience, going from a massive piercing bolt of lightning down to a near-harmless rubber duck. And it only takes one of those dozens of experience crystals you'll be generating to level it up...
  • In Chester Cheetah: Too Cool to Fool, The air guitar makes Chester invincible. However, you have no control over Chester when he plays it, so you have to wait until he finishes playing it to control him again. This is particularly frustrating in Gator Alley, wherein the guitar power-up shows up as you ride the hippo across the water. Collecting the guitar causes Chester to fall into the water and die, so you have to duck under the guitar to avoid getting it.
  • Contra: After the first game, the machine gun has become a default weapon rather than a powerup. So a number of weapon pick ups are inferior than your base machine gun (for example, some Contra games the Spreadgun hits like a spitball). It's especially notable in Contra Returns where picking up a weapon may get you a gun that's much weaker than ones you can buy with in-game currency.
  • Crash Bandicoot:
    • The Super Powers in Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped range from Game-Breaker (the Fruit Bazooka) to "the Time Trials are actually possible now" (the Crash Dash) to "incredibly useful" (the Double Jump and Death Tornado Spin) to "am I doing it right? I don't think it's working" (the Super Charged Body Slam). What this "upgrade" to your body slam does is increase the range of its shock wave by around one box width, but this is something that will be useful in the game exactly one time, the bonus stage of Dino Might, and in a scenario tailor-made to specifically require it. Its only other "use" is it's possible with very careful positioning to use the shockwave to detonate Nitro crates without taking a hit, which should be handy but there's just simply never a scenario where this is actually necessary or useful when you can just jump over or walk around said crate. And when you do need to destroy Nitro crates because there is no Nitro switch in level you have Fruit Bazooka, which is of course much better suited for the task. You'll otherwise forget you even have it (it's rather telling that said bonus stage has an icon in the background reminding you the power-up even exists), and it's such a non-upgrade that the N. Sane Trilogy just up and lets you start the game with it.
    • Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex:
      • It introduces tiptoeing as a skill awarded for beating the first boss. This allows you to walk on suspended Nitro Crates which otherwise blow on contact. However, the main paths in levels never ever require you to use this, and for gem paths and Death Routes it's easier to wait until you can use the Double Jump and Death Tornado Spin combo to glide over the boxes, so many players will fully complete the game without using this power even once beyond plain curiosity.
      • Super Charged Body Slam gets it even worse here than in Warped. It is never ever needed, and to get it you must complete Red Gem path, so it's completely optional to get it. Seems like devs kinda saw how useful it was in previous game.
    • The Triple Spin that is unlocked at the end of Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time. Not only it replaces far superior Crash Dash, but on top it is also badly explained in the game itself so you won't get it to execute when you follow those instructions.
  • Earthworm Jim 2 features the Bubble Gun, which shoots harmless bubbles note , and the Barn Blaster, which kills everything on screen - as long as you're not hit during the five seconds you spend immobile trying to fire the damn thing. Not to mention that you probably won't have a chance to use the good stuff either - you can only actually use your guns in about half the stages in the game, and you lose them all if you die in any stage. The Bubble Gun is worse on the Sega Genesis / Mega Drive, which doesn't have the button to switch weapons (at least not on the common 3-button controller).
  • In Flimbo's Quest, the Superscroll. The point is to replace all the scrolls required for a level and send you straight through to the next level. However, it costs 2500, a scroll costs 400, and the most scrolls you ever need for a single level is 6!
  • Hell Fighter grants you power-ups via magic orbs. Blue ones grants you a nigh-indestructble Orbiting Particle Shield, brown ones turns your weapon into a Homing Projectile, and green ones... turns your projectile into a slow fireball. That you can fire one at a time and at a straight line ahead of you, absolutely undesirable when you're in an area crammed with enemies or on platforms and bridges where enemies are on top and below you. You also lose the previous power-up when collecting a new one.
  • There is an example occuring between two games in Jak and Daxter Series. In Jak II: Renegade Jak obtained 4 Dark Jak moves, last two being Invincibility and Giant Jak Mode. While their use in main game was very limited due to how long it took to collect enough of Dark Eco, post-game, especially with Infinite Dark Eco cheat on it was fun to play Godzilla in Haven City with Giant Jak. Come Jak 3: Wastelander and for whatever reason the last two abilities are lost and instead Dark Jak gets Invisibility and throwing dark projectiles. Sounds cool, but then you find out Invisibility can be used only next to specific (and very limited in number) statues and projectiles are slow and there is long execution time to pull them off and mainly serve to destroy obstacles. Essentially both new moves serve just to solve some puzzles and overcome some platforming challenges and that's it. You do get chance to unlock cheat to use Invisibility at will but it's still kind of letdown of what was before.
  • The Kirby games have several examples:
    • The Sleep ability can be this, when it's not an intentional Poison Mushroom. You sleep... and that's it. Upon waking up, you revert to normal Kirby. Its rare uses are: Kirby: Squeak Squad lets you restore health with it, and Kirby Battle Royale makes it a full-fledged power. Forgotten Land also lets you upgrade it to Deep Sleep, which not only fully restores Kirby's health, but can also give him a random status buff to his attack, speed, or defense (which entails doubling his health).
    • Depending on the game, Tornado Kirby and Hi-Jump Kirby can either be useless or absolute Game Breakers. Ball Kirby is incredible if used correctly, but the controls are a little fumbly.
    • Rick the Hamster's usefulness as an animal friend basically translates to "six extra hits at the cost of losing your ability to fly" in a game where health and extra lives are plentiful and you're more likely to die from falling down a cliff than from taking hits. While all the other animal friends have flashy abilities like vastly improved flight and swimming or a Double Jump, Rick's only real claim to fame is his traction on ice, but even that only makes him marginally useful in one world of each game, where slipping off a ledge is of little consequence to begin with due to Kirby's aforementioned ability to fly. It's worse in Kirby's Dream Land 3 where, for some inane reason, Rick was Nerfed even furthernote  while the others, at least, get improvements note .
    • Kirby 64:
    • The Mini ability from Kirby & the Amazing Mirror. It's used only to squeak through tiny passageways and only appears where it's needed, but as long as you have the ability you have no means of defending yourself without having to discard the ability.
    • Circus Kirby is probably the worst of the new powers introduced in Kirby: Triple Deluxe, as most of its attacksnote  either have very limited range or send Kirby bouncing around wildly and into potentially dangerous situations.
    • Kirby and the Forgotten Land introduces upgrading abilities to stronger forms, and while most of them become much more useful, Bomb gets the short end of the stick. In general the game's leap from 2D to 3D wasn't too kind to Bomb, but it's not mechanically that different from earlier games. Its first upgrade, Chain Bomb, lets you detonate multiple bombs at once for extra damage if they're close enough together, but this requires some setup and careful bomb placement around the enemy, which is often more trouble than it's worth. And then we get to its second upgrade, Homing Bomb; its speed and damage upgrade compared to Chain Bomb is negligible and its gimmick, giving the bombs wheels and letting them roll toward targets automatically, usually just makes chaining them for extra damage even more of a hassle.
  • Master of Darkness: You start with a weak dagger that has short range and low damage. You can acquire other weapons from the floating masks in the levels, but some will carry the dagger, dropping you back down to your weakest weapon.
  • Mega Man:
    • In Mega Man 3, while Rush Jet and Rush Coil are very useful utilities (Rush Jet bordering on broken), Rush Marine is generally seen as irrelevant because it can only be used in water, and there's only three stages in the game that contain any water to use it, and Rush Jet can do the job just as well. It can also be used against the Kamegoro Maker, but that boss is already one of the easiest ones in the game, and hitting it with Shadow Blades is a much more efficient way to handle it. Mega Man 4 made it slightly better by nerfing Rush Jet, but there are still very few places where the ability can be used at all. It was removed in Mega Man 5, and wouldn't return in any future sequels.
    • Megaman X 3: The Buster upgrade is strong but has an ungodly charge time and it stops you when you shot it at any charge level higher than the standard. It may not seem as much in theory, but it stops EVERYTHING you're doing. If you're holding onto a wall you will fall, if you're trying to get away from an enemy you will stop dead in your tracks and more than likely take damage, and it even ignores inertia as you will stop even if you shot while jumping. Worst of all, it's a spread shot, meaning you need to hit your enemy with most of it in order to do more damage, and that means getting dangerously close. Against enemies that have a tiny weak spot and the rest of their body clad in armor, it makes just a bit more of damage than a 3-level charged Buster. Really, you're better off just charging to the 3-level and ignore the other 3 charge levels, as 2 concentrated level 3-shots make more damage than a 6-level Charge Shot while also not gimping your mobility. The only reason people get it is to enable the Gold armor and getting Zero's saber.
    • Mega Man X5:
      • The Skiver's attack for Zero. The problem with it is how it's performed: attack while dashing. While this is well and good on its own, the problem arises in that it completely breaks a technique that is executed in a similar way (constantly attacking and dashing in place) that lets Zero do obscene damage to anything in front of him. It makes it worse than a letdown, to the point that it's an outright hindrance. Fortunately, you can potentially go without it by simply firing off the Shuttle without beating The Skiver, provided it works.
      • A similar problem exists with Zero's Z-Buster. It provides Zero with his only real means of reliable long-range firepower, but it has a slow rate of fire, each shot does very little damage compared to the saber or even X's own buster which has the advantage of speed, doesn't charge, and he has to stand completely still to fire it. It's much faster and even safer to just get in close and slash the enemy to death before they can counterattack, plus choosing the Z-Buster by playing Zero in the intro stage denies X his vastly more useful Fourth Armor for the rest of the game.
      • X can wear three different armors in this game. The starting Fourth Armor is highly useful and will get you through most of the game. The Falcon Armor, obtained by collecting scattered pieces of it, is generally seen as a borderline Game-Breaker for enabling a ridiculously effective "invincible flight" option. And then there's the similarly-obtained Gaea Armor. The intent with it is to be the Mighty Glacier option, increasing X's durability, letting him cling to walls indefinitely, giving him a faster-charging and stronger Charge Shot that can also destroy certain projectiles, and allowing him to walk on spikes, but these three advantages are horribly overbalanced: X isn't just slower, he also can't use special weapons, he can't airdash at all, he can't use Parts to upgrade his stats, and the Charge Shot has a shorter range than any of the other armors. The result is reduced offense, bad mobility, and an overall boring playstyle with few meaningful advantages; the Falcon Armor's flight alone does more to improve X's survivability than anything the Gaea Armor does save in specific circumstances. Its only real uses are getting certain upgrades stuck on the other side of massive areas filled with spikes or behind giant blocks that can only be broken with the Gaea Armor's special moves, which seemingly only exist to force you to use the Gaea Armor if you want to 100% the game, and to counter Rangda Bandga's spikes attack, but in order to reach Rangda Bandga you need to navigate a level that would be trivial to do with an air dash...that the Gaia Armor doesn't have and needs to contend with careful platforming.
    • Mega Man X6: Defeating Ground Scaravich grants Zero the ability to perform a strong dive attack that cannot be cancelled, mapped to Up+Square. You will repeatedly kill yourself trying to attack enemies and grab ropes in the game's Platform Hell sections if you're foolish enough to get this. The only saving grace is that you can unlock the end game without defeating Scaravich. For added insult to injury, it turns out this technique, if you're using Zero, is Sigma's weakness after going One-Winged Angel.
    • In both X5 and X6, extra lives become this. Normally you're forced to restart the level from the beginning if you run out of lives, but these two games let you continue from a Game Over right from the last checkpoint, making extra lives pointless at absolute best. These games throw extra lives at you like candy, since rescuing the very plentiful injured reploids grants extra lives as rewards, and since your only means to escape an unfinished level is a Game Over, the surplus of lives does more harm than good.
    • Mega Man Xtreme 2 has a borderline example: Each part of X's armor permanently takes up a slot that would otherwise be used to equip a different item. For most of the parts, that's fine, but the Head Part is only good for getting the Arm Part, and you can just complete that part of the task as Zero instead. You essentially make yourself weaker by getting it.
  • Mega Man Legends:
    • Late in the game you'll finally get your hands on the Shield Arm to defend yourself from enemy attacks, only to find that it can't seem to defend against jack-shit. It turns out all it can block are weak projectiles used by enemies way back at the beginning of the game, and these stopped being a threat to you a long time ago. Making matters worse is even if this wasn't the case and the shield could block anything, it takes up your only secondary weapon slot and you would still be better off taking another weapon instead of a shield. The worst part is you make this from the Marlwolf Shell, an item acquired from a fairly difficult boss, and the Mystic Orb, an item acquired by completing the annoying Balloon Fantasy minigame: your reward for accomplishing these is a useless item.
    • A little way into the game you get Mega Man's iconic helmet... and it actually weakens you. It does increase your defense a bit, but it also makes it very hard to be knocked down. The problem is that Mega Man is completely invincible once sent reeling and until he gets back up. Putting on the helmet just turns one attack that does some damage into a lot of attacks that do a lot of damage overall and trap you in a Cycle of Hurting.
  • Metal Slug does this all the time with its assorted varity of weapons... more often than not, the weapon pickup will turn out to be a complete letdown, since obtaining a new weapon will have player(s) forfeiting the weapon they're carrying at the time. Case in point:
    • Picking up a Drop Shot when you have a loaded Heavy Machine Gun or Shotgun. The Drop Shot shoots slow-moving, bouncing bombs that does minimal damage, can't attack enemies above you, and in order to ensure your bouncing bombs can actually hit something, you'll have to leap out of cover, rendering yourself exposed to enemy attacks.
    • Picking up the "Stone" replacement for your grenades. It throws stones, which doesn't explode, and sucks against enemy vehicles.
    • Any of the animals mounts if you're playing Ralf in the later games. While the infinite-use machine gun is nice (unless you're playing on easy mode and it's the default weapon instead of the pistol), you can't also use Ralf's powerful melee attack and he dies in one hit instead of taking two like when he's on foot.
  • Noah's Ark has a stone transformation that, in addition to additional health pool, gives immunity to environmental hazards and doubles stomping damage. However, it removes the ability to duck. In most chapters, the downside is negligible but in Egypt levels, the player needs to navigate tight corridors and destroy blocks. Inability to duck makes destroying blocks far more difficult, often to the point where the player gets caught by scrolling screen.
  • The Creepy Crag level in Plok has a snazzy looking cowboy outfit complete with a revolver you can get as a powerup. It does absolutely nothing but shoot out a flag with "BANG" written on it, and seems to exist only to regenerate Plok's limbs.
  • An early arcade shooter, Psycho Nics Oscar, gives you a projectile launcher that travels straight alongside any surface, even running along walls, which can easily target turrets and enemies in tricky locations... and a terrible choice in areas with platforming elements, due to the fired projectile capable of only moving while attached to flat surfaces, as the projectile will instead dive into a nearby gap making it impossible to hit enemies on an adjacent platform. It's also useless against airborne enemies as it's unable to hit anything not attached to a surface.
  • All four campaigns in Shovel Knight contain a set of armor that makes you look cool, changes some animations, and does nothing of actual value compared to the other sets, which variously grant the wearers things like stronger attacks or greater mobility. All of their descriptions even note their lack of helpfulness.
    Ornate Plate: [Shovel of Hope] Flashy! Acrobatic! Useless!
    Dandy Duds: [Plague of Shadows] Flashy armor that increases jubilance by 200%!
    Ghostly Garb: [Specter of Torment] Look more imposing and fearsome than ever before... but to no effect.
    Resplendent Cape: [King of Cards] Display your decadence! Useful only to impress.
  • In the original Silhouette Mirage, the parasite Grattoni was simply amazing especially at high level. In the North American version, Working Design had altered the balance of the Parasites by giving them an energy bar. Unfortunately this made the Grattoni also useless as it blew through its energy supply too quickly before causing any real damage to the enemy.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog:
    • The Speed Shoes throughout most of the games tend to be useful when you have a long stretch of ground and loops to run through, but if you get the item before a set of platforms you have to jump around on, the item then loses its usefulness.
    • Sonic 3 & Knuckles:
      • The Bubble Shield is a near total waste of time from Mushroom Hill Zone on if you're playing the game with Sonic & Knuckles locked on. The functions that set it apart from the other shields are that it doesn't disappear when it touches water, prevents drowning, and lets Sonic bounce higher. After Launch Base Zone, there's no more water in any of the remaining levels, so the Bubble Shield's water-related functionality becomes meaningless, and it's only desirable if no other shields are available or if you want to use the Sonic-only Bubble Bounce move (and even that can be outclassed by the Double Jump the Lightning Shield provides). Sonic & Knuckles as a stand-alone has no water at all, making it worse. It does still have the basic useful functions all shield items have, granting protection from ring loss for one hit and repelling some small projectiles, but it becomes otherwise rather unhelpful, and since new shields replace old ones, it's best actively avoided if you already have a Fire or Lightning one.
      • Hyper Sonic & Hyper Knuckles are this to some because they're a lot harder to control, they're a lot more susceptible to crushers that suddenly come from offscreen, and they sometimes die when they touch something that's not even lethal due to rushed collision detection.
    • Sonic Adventure 2 has several character upgrades which are completely useless to most of the gameplay and are only useful in particularly niche situations.
      • Sonic's Magic Hands, which allow him to turn one of his enemies into a held item, which he can then throw at another enemy - but to use it, you have to scroll through an action menu, and thus you can only use it while standing completely still and only on an enemy that isn't actively attacking you. Plus, it's impossible to aim the throw, which doesn't even have much range or do much damage. The default homing attack is superior in nearly every situation, though Magic Hands does make one enemy easier to overcome in Cannon's Core, and can be useful for Point Runs and enemies with shields.
      • Another Power-Up Letdown is the Mystic Melody, which each character can collect. It's extremely hard to find, isn't ever mentioned or even hinted at, and can only be used for either completing a mission to earn 100% Completion, finding shortcuts/power ups, or finding the missing Chao in the respective missions.
      • Knuckles' Sunglasses provide no useful function, just let you see and collect certain hidden items. They don't even come in handy in a specific situation. However, they do look cool and that must count for something. Rouge also has a similar item she can equip (the Treasure Scope), which is at least required for one of her missions.
      • For a situational example, there's the Magnetic Shield, which attracts rings towards you. Normally this is a good thing, but in cases where Sonic or Shadow are required to use the Light Speed Dash to follow a path of rings over a bottomless pit, having the Magnetic Shield when you reach those rings can stop you from making progress.
  • Super Mario Bros.:
    • Super Mario Bros. 3 has a handful of these.
      • The Anchor. Each world besides 8 has a super secret Mushroom House unlocked by collecting enough coins in a specific level. Around half of these contain P-Wings, which are among the most powerful items in the game. The other half contain anchors, which are not. Using an anchor stops the airship in each world from moving around if you fail to beat it. This is useless, because the airship only appears after you have cleared a path through most of the world getting to the castle in the first place, and doesn't appear at all if you beat the castle on the first try. Its only real use is in World 5, both so you don't have to go back and forth between the sky and the ground if you fail the airship, and to prevent a Game-Breaking Bug in the NES version that can make the airship fly off the World Map completely, making the game Unintentionally Unwinnable.
      • The Music Box puts the wandering Hammer Brothers on the map to sleep for two "turns". The wandering Hammer Brothers are fairly easy to defeat and you always get a power-up for doing so, so this is pretty pointless. Though it can be useful to skip a mandatory Piranha Plant-filled mini-level in Pipe Land. (All you get is a Mushroom in the second Piranha Plant level.)
      • The Frog Suit makes traversing water levels easier, but on land, it hops as opposed to walking, which makes it much more difficult to control and prevents Mario from building up running momentum. The only way to circumvent this is by carrying an object, but nothing in the game can be carried indefinitely. Worse than that, though, is that it's impossible to crouch while wearing the Frog Suit, meaning if you encounter a low obstacle that requires you to duck and slide underneath, you're hosed if you can't find a way to lose it.
      • The Fire Flower can be this in some levels. Although it's quite useful for taking out enemies, many bonuses are only available through using the block smashing, flying, and gliding abilities of the Leaf power-up. Usually the level design is generous enough to have a Leaf near any major bonuses, though.
    • The good old Fire Flower is this in Super Mario World, mostly because too many enemies in Dinosaur Land are strangely unaffected by fireballs (like the Dino Rhinos and Sumo Brothers), and the game-breaking Cape Feather does everything the Fire Flower does just as effectively and more efficiently. At least you get coins for killing things with it, though. Meanwhile, the Super Mushroom is usually pretty helpful, but it becomes another obstacle to avoid if you happen to have a more useful power-up in reserve, as the game will still keep giving them to you even in Super form and they'll replace whatever else you were carrying.
    • The Super Mushroom can also be a nuisance in Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins, since if you get it as Fire Mario or Bunny Mario, it drops you back down to Super Mario.
    • The Dragon Cap from Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 has an awkwardly long delay when firing up and dying off, short range, and simply lacks the utility abilities like the Bull Cap's ground pound and the Jet Cap's increased speed, jump height, and flight. Adding to this, is flaming enemies destroys them without awarding coins... in a game where coins are used in bonus games, you need coins to finish levels, and your total coins at the end determines your ending. It becomes evident in the game that even the developers must have realized this, as the Dragon Cap becomes increasingly rare as the game goes on and often only appears where it's required to solve a puzzle or bypass an obstacle immune to your other attacks, and you always find a powerup to get rid of it not long after.
    • Super Mario 64 has a few examples:
      • The Wing Cap. It supposedly allows Mario to fly, but it turns out to be Not Quite Flight and more like gliding instead. But even then, the physics are questionable at best.
      • While Koopa Shells are a great way to skate around quickly on land and atop water and lava, the underwater shells are generally worthless, as they give you a boost to your speed for about 10 seconds and then vanish. They also don't respawn, so you can't even use them more than once during a stage without reloading it.
      • Your reward for 100% completion: a cameo by Yoshi, who gives you 100 lives and a sparkly new triple-jump, then leaves forever. Not only are lives already an obsolete aspect of this gamenote , but you've already seen and done everything there is to see and do. Even if you went back and redid the old puzzles, it's unlikely that you'll die often if at all since you would have mastered all the steps by that point. Oh, and the new triple jump is shorter than the old one (in exchange for making Mario invincible for the jump's duration).
    • New Super Mario Bros.:
      • The Mega Mushroom makes you huge and lets you stampede through the level without fear of losing a life — except that as you go, you break pipes in half. Nine times out of ten you screw yourself out of 100% Completion that way. (At least the levels are replayable...) That is, when you don't die anyway because the level terrain is weak enough that your hulked-out protagonist literally breaks through the floor. If you can manage to get one into a boss fight, though, you have a one-hit kill... Unless it's Bowser Jr., who will just bounce off you until you revert.
      • The Mini Mushroom makes you tiny, which is good in that it allows you to enter areas that are otherwise inaccessible, increases your jump height and makes your jumps floatier and allows you to run on water... but it also slows you down considerably and makes it harder to stomp enemies (requiring a Ground Pound to hurt most of them). It also reduces you to a One-Hit-Point Wonder, so if you were Fire Mario, picking this up is actually worse than touching an enemy. And if you want to get every bonus, including access to Worlds 4 and 7 (without the World 4 Warp Cannon), you'll need to go some relatively long distances and fight some bosses with the handicap in place. Have fun.
    • Super Mario Galaxy has Spring Mario, which can jump really high but is a nightmare to control. It gets you both ways — the Spring is a requirement to reach certain areas, as well as to fight a boss that fires sorta-homing projectiles at you. But once you have it, you're stuck with it until you get hit. So, after being required to use it, if you want to precisely navigate some narrow platforms, you'll need to find an enemy to run into first!
    • In Super Mario 3D World:
      • All powerups other than the mushroom qualify if you're playing as the unlockable character Rosalina, simply because the powerup replaces her game-breaking Spin Attack.
      • The cannon launcher acts like a slower acting Fire Flower that fires straight and you can't stop it from continuously firing unless you hold the dash button to charge it up. It can also cause friendly fire damage to other players, something that no other power-up ever does. The only times you ever want the cannon power-up is to break certain walls that contain green stars.
    • Super Mario Bros. Wonder:
      • Despite being the game's main attraction, the Elephant Power ends up being this in practice. It lets you bust blocks and block projectiles by swinging your trunk, but it also makes you larger with a bigger hitbox, meaning attacks that won't normally hit a normal-sized character will hit an Elephant-sized character. It's abilities are highly specialized like the ability to shoot projectiles, that it cannot do without access to water, on top of the competing with the Fire and Bubble powers, and its ability to break blocks ultimately ends up being outclassed by the Drill Power, which also adds tons of extra utility.
      • Wall-Climb Jump badge certainly sounds cool, acting as a homage to the wall-climb glitch in the original NES game by making the player jump vertically up a wall before instigating a proper wall jump. However, not only are there few scenarios outside the badge's dedicated challenge levels where you'd want to do a wall-climb over immediately wall jumping, but it is completely invalidated in those scant instances by two other badges: the Parachute Cap and the Grappling Vine, as both allow the player to indefinitely ascend any vertical surface by repeatedly wall-jumping off and gliding/grappling back onto it. This is on top of other badges, such as the Boosting Spin Jump, that can grant the user greater verticality when they aren't near a wall.
      • The Invisibility Badge renders the player character completely invisible to everything... including the player themselves. It's just as disorienting as it sounds, as you cannot see where you are or what you're doing.note  It's one of the Expert badges, meaning its supposed to have an element of challenge to its use as a trade-off to its given perk, but the advantage of enemies not noticing you is really not worth the downside.
    • Mario Party 9: While the 1-10 Dice Block has the potential to give its user a greater roll than any other Dice Block in the game, it could just as easily give them as low a roll as any of the others.
  • Super Pitfall's gold ingots. They're the only powerup in the game that isn't hidden in any way, and they even flash bright yellow to draw your eyes... and they're also completely worthless. They provide no intrinsic benefit and there's no shop for you to trade the gold or anything like that, so the only thing they do is give you points. And Super Pitfall is not a game where most players ever care about high score.
  • Valis:
    • In the original PC-88 game, not only are the sword upgrades Mutually Exclusive Power-Ups, but you actually have to pay for them with your Life Meter whenever you pick one up (and the archaic joystick controls are of no help in avoiding upgrades/downgrades you don't want). If you don't have enough health at the time, the game summons a swarm of enemies to finish you off.
    • In Valis III, the Heroine, Yuko, has her sword's power "fully released" by Older and Wiser Nazetti with the implication that it will kill her. This has no in-game benefit; all it does is give her a fancy new set of armor. (This is possibly to preserve game balance with the other two characters.) This does not stop the difficulty from jumping up to Nintendo Hard, though.
  • Both the earthquake staff and sundial spells in the movie video game Warlock are equally useless; the former causes an essentially non-damaging earthquake that's only good for bringing down rock platforms or float crystals, and is really only mandatory for one level. The latter has two uses: used as a normal spell, you get transported back to the spot you collected it in the level, allowing you to keep all the items you gathered up til then, while resetting all the items and enemies you encountered in the level before the sundial's use. Or, if you die while you have it in your inventory, it acts as a 1-Up, letting you restart the level with all your items replaced by a single full regeneration spell. Since the game has a password system, the latter use is, well, useless, and the game is sufficiently Nintendo Hard that it's more prudent to rush through the game rather than attempt to stock up on every level.
  • The Boots of Lava Walk and the Cloak of Darkness in Wizards & Warriors. All the former does is let you ride a spout of flames in level 3 (useful for saving you about 2HP in the entire game), and the latter turns you invisible, but due to a glitch, enemies can still see you just fine.
  • Xargon: Beyond Reality has the hero start with a laser beam weapon. One of the upgrades to this is throwing rocks, and once you pick up the rock "powerup" you can no longer fire your laser. Fortunately, it resets at the start of each level. Also, if you've grabbed enough gems by the time you get the stupid rock, you can buy back your laser right away.

    Puzzle Games 
  • The three Charms in Candy Crush Saga all cost a hefty sum of real money and aren't really worth it. They were discontinued in June 2013, but you can still use them if you bought them.
    • The $17 Charm of Lives increases your maximum number of lives from 5 to 8, but regaining a single life still takes 30 minutes. There are some easier ways to get lives, and if you're using them, you don't need a Charm of Lives to save up 8 lives at a time.
    • The $40 Charm of Stripes lets you paint stripes on any candy once per game. This can be pretty useful at times, but many difficult levels have designs and/or requirements that render it too weak — it won't do much good if you for instance have to collect 30 striped candies or make a wrapped candy/colorbomb combo.
    • The $25 Charm of Frozen Time makes the timer stop while you're pondering in timed levels. Timed levels aren't that common in the first place, and the charm does nothing to protect you from bombs, which like to annoy you in timed levels. To make matters worse, timed levels were eventually removed completely from the HTML5 version of the game.

    Racing Games 
  • For many races in Gran Turismo 4, your prize is The Alleged Car (sometimes in an exclusive color), and you sometimes spend more money upgrading or purchasing a required car then you earn for the race.
  • In the finale of the Test Drive Overdrive, you get all your previous cars (including the Infinity Plus One Car Jaguar XJ220) barred away and replaced with the Infinity Minus One Car Ford GT40 which you have to race against a Viper Competition Coupe driven by two Big Bads.
  • In all WipEout games, you pick up weapons by flying over a weapons pad. Usually you simply have access to all weapons, but in Wipeout Fusion you unlock weapons as you go. However, the enemies get them as well when you do. Really all you ever want is shields, turbos, missiles (all available at the start) and quakes (unlocked after beating one race). However, as you beat more championships, more weapons are added... all of them either bad ones that dilute the weapon selection (autopilot, mines, flamer, rockets) or ones that are amazingly good but far more likely to be used against you (gravity-bomb). Worst of all, unlocking your team's superweapon gives everyone else on the track their super-weapon as well, which is just great when you're flying a Van Über whose super is a useless slow straight line projectile and end up unlocking your EG-R opponents' swarm weapon that removes half of your health and is completely inescapable.
    • The actual weapon powerups in the first Wipeout game, in particular the shield. There is a reason why the second game adds a "drop weapon" key and ensures you can't get the same powerup several times in a row, and why later titles do allow you to shoot out of your own shield. The first game doesn't even have a health bar and weapons are highly ineffective on the player, so you're involuntarily giving up the ability to shoot in exchange for immunity from the occasional enemy weapon hit, often for long stretches of time if you keep picking up shields and more shields.
    • Strategically-speaking, the RNG behind the weapon selection can often give you items that aren't useful, like Rockets when you're in first place (this isn't unique to WipEout, but is common in games without contextually-sensitive RNG). WipEout 2048 solved this by having two pick-up classes, offensive and defensive. This let you pick whichever is most useful to you, particularly in first place where you can get guaranteed defensive weapons like Bombs and Mines.
  • Mario Kart:
    • The Spiny Shell/Blue Shell... depending on the game. It's a powerful homing missile that fires straight at the player in first place... which is all well and good, but you generally only get it when you're in 4th place or below. The shell may completely screw over the person in 1st, but if you're that far back, this often has no actual effect on your position in the race. It's often best to either get rid of it so you can try for another, more useful item, or hold it while you try to get close to the front of the pack so the unblockable hit will actually give you a chance to move up.
      • In Mario Kart 64, Mario Kart 7, and Mario Kart 8, the Blue Shell takes out any player that is in its path on its way to the leader, which can be quite useful, particularly in tracks where there is only one main lane people stick to. In all other games in the series, the shell just focuses on the leader and has no effect on anyone else (unless they're close to the leader, and therefore within the blast radius, when it goes off).
      • Note that it is possible to get a Blue Shell while you are in first place (either randomly as a remote possibility, or from certain item boxes that always contain Blue Shells). If you fire it, it will just hit you. Fortunately, in Mario Kart 64, you can drag it behind you by holding the weapon button to protect you from most attacks from the rear. Just remember to wait until the game registers the change in position before firing it at anyone who passes you.
    • The Thundercloud item in Mario Kart Wii plays out as a double edged sword. If you get this item, it's used right away so you can't store it. Under its effects, you get a slight boost in speed and you can go off road without slowing down. However, if it goes off while it's on you, you shrink and lose speed. You can pass it to another player by bumping into them, but it sucks to be you if there's no one in sight.
    • The coin item in Super Mario Kart and Mario Kart 8 is a letdown, since you have nothing to defend yourself with until the next item block and it just adds 2 coins to your total. In Mario Kart 8, you can get the coin item even if you already have the maximum number of coins, meaning it's completely useless
    • The Feather item in Super Mario Kart, while a complete Game-Breaker in specific tracks, is generally useless. While you can use it to avoid an item thrown onto the track, most of the time you can just go around it. Using the Feather while on a curve can throw you off the track due to momentum.
    • The Bullet Bill is supposed to be a powerful item you get when you're in dead last. It transforms you into a bullet that speeds around the track, damages any other player you hit, and tries to let you catch up with the rest of the pack, but it always follows the middle of the course, and doesn't take shortcuts or the best racing lines, so the speed boost you get struggles to match what you could have done anyway on some tracks. It's even worse in Mario Kart 7 and 8, because it was made slower, so a skilled racer can easily do just as well without it, and surpass it with much better items. The duration of the item is also a problem; more often than not it will last even after you pass the next set of item boxes, so when it runs out, you have nothing else to help you. Furthermore, depending on when you use it, it can run out in the middle of a sharp turn or difficult section of a course, dumping you there and giving you very little time to change direction or otherwise recover. It's better to get two good items than one Bullet Bill. And you have no choice but to use it if you have it. You can't waste it or cancel it or trade it in for a different item.
    • The Blooper item in Mario Kart DS and Mario Kart 7 is made entirely useless thanks to having a map on the lower screen. While the item does make the AI slow down, more skilled players can play without being hindered by ink on the screen.
    • Bowser and Bowser Jr's special item, the Giant Shell, in Mario Kart Double Dash!! is basically a green shell, but huge and with more speed. Its size and bounce speed is powerful enough to knock out players and course obstacles alike, but thanks to the unpredictability of the shell's path, you will more than likely hit yourself, and it is hard to avoid because of its huge size.
    • The Golden Mushroom, depending on the course. If there's a lot of straightaways and not many bottomless pits, it's fine, providing several speed boosts before disappearing. The problem is that if there aren't, actually activating it means being flung off the edge of the track - and as long as it's still active, you can't replace it with any other item.
  • In several of the Need for Speed games it turns out that all vehicle upgrades are pointless. If the player uses an unmodified car, then the opponents in any given race will do likewise. However, paying for expensive upgrades allows the AI cars to equip comparable upgrades for free, negating the advantage. Then again, the games have such bad Rubber-Band A.I. that having a more powerful car probably wouldn't have helped too much anyway...

    Rhythm Games 
  • Theatrhythm Final Fantasy and its sequel:
    • This happens in a few cases with the stat boosts gained upon level up. A prime example is Cecil, who eventually gets all three levels of HP Plus via level up. The problem is that Cecil already is the Stone Wall in play with a huge bank of hit points; by the time he learns HP Plus level 3, equipping HP Plus level 2 already puts him at the Cap for hit points, and HP Plus level 1 edges him close to that point as well.
    • In Curtain Call's Versus mode, HP Swap switches your life bar with your opponent's. It can activate even when your opponent has less health than you, meaning you just lost a big chunk of HP and healed your opponent.

    Roguelikes 
  • In Ancient Domains of Mystery, once you meet certain requirements, you can pray to your deity to receive a pre- or post-crowning gift, a random artifact. While there are several extremely good artifacts you might receive, there are also some spectacularly terrible ones like Soaker note , Celestrix note , Black Thumb note , or the Black Tome of Alsophocus note .
  • Nethack takes crowning a bit further. With high enough luck and alignment, you can get "crowned" by your deity, granting you an extra skill slot note , several intrinsic resistances note , and possibly a gift note . However, it also greatly increases your prayer timeout, frequently denying you an important get-out-of-shit-free card in a game that's all about countering the many unique and creative ways the game tries to kill you.
  • The Binding of Isaac:
    • The Cat-O-Nine-Tails item. It is intended to be an upgrade to your shot speed, a boost that's entirely inconsequential at best and an actual hindrance at worst, since high shot speed makes it harder for the player to whip shots diagonally using their character's momentum. Rebirth fixed this by adding a damage boost to its effect, making it a genuinely useful item.
    • The "Special" attribute on some items, which actively skews the game away from getting more of such items, turns a few items into this. Getting something like Mom's Eyenote  or My Reflectionnote  becomes a lot less enticing when it means lowered chance of Mom's Contactsnote  or Dr. Fetusnote . Rebirth heavily cut down on special items, limiting it to just a couple very powerful pickups like Godhead and Brimstone. Later expansions fixed it even more, cutting two questionable special items from the list and switching to a direct item weight system for new rare items (reducing their chance to show up instead of reducing the chance of getting future items). Repentance outright removed special items, and moved everything to the weight system.
    • The Dead Cat, which gives you nine lives. The catch? It also drops your maximum HP to one heart, meaning that without the use of Soul Hearts, Black Hearts, or Eternal Hearts, you can take at most two hits before burning through one of those lives. Not so bad on earlier floors since you could still find an HP-increasing item to offset the drain, but effectively a death sentence on later ones. Of course, if your character doesn't have and can't get any hearts in the first place...
    • Boss rooms are supposed to provide boring but reliable stat ups, so it can be pretty disappointing when you're rewarded an item that doesn't boost any stats. Things like Pageant Boynote , Boxnote , and Marrownote  can be crushing when you desperately needed that HP or damage up.
    • Cursed Eye allows you to charge your tears by holding the button to fire a volley of five shots when fully charged. The main drawback is it robs you of holding the button to keep firing: since you can typically fire five shots in the time it takes to charge this thing it effectively just removes your ability to inflict run-and-gun Death of a Thousand Cuts attacks and tends to make fighting hoards and bosses much more difficult than before. Worse, is it has the annoying quirk of teleporting you out of a room if you take a hit halfway through a charge, which resets all the enemies in the room — you take a hit after clearing out 75% of the room and you get to start the entire fight all over again! If that isn't enough, this thing is effectively a Poison Mushroom when combined with certain other tear effects: if you get Tiny Planet and Cursed Eye, just save yourself the frustration and reset.
    • Guppy's Tail is a passive item that has a 33% chance of replacing a room clear award with a chest or locked chest, but also a 22% of replacing it with nothing at all. This means you're getting a lot more locked chests, but hardly any keys to open them with. If you want to use your meager keys to crack those chests open, you're risking your ability to gain access to item rooms and stores for reliable rewards. Getting this item early in the run means you don't get to build up a good arsenal of gear to take on the later levels, meaning you'll be lucky to survive long enough to even reach The Womb. The only real time you want to grab this thing is if you're one item away from becoming Guppy, or later in the game when you have a stockpile of keys to spare.
    • The aptly-named challenge Ultra Hard requires you to fight through the game with every curse except Curse of Darkness active, go through the more difficult Sheol path, and defeat the Superboss Mega Satan, with no heart drops of any kind. Your reward for this is Samson starting with Child's Heart, a trinket that has a 10% chance of replacing the room clear award with a red heart. In a vacuum, this is a decent prize as it synergizes with Samson's "take damage to boost attack power" gimmick, but if you're good enough at the game to beat Ultra Hard then its overall effectiveness is debatable. It's very unlikely that you'll need the extra healing, and while extra red hearts can be used to farm money from Blood Donation Machines, those machines aren't guaranteed to spawn on every floor — and this also reduces the chance of getting more important drops like keys and bombs. Despite all that hard work, Child's Heart will usually be swapped for a more reliable trinket ASAP.
    • Due to the way items stack and combine, some item combinations can make things so difficult that a run is, for all intents and purposes, impossible. For example Cricket's Body, which makes each tear split into four smaller ones that fly out on impact, and Ipecac, which turns your tear into a lobbed explosive, combine in a way that each shot effectively carpet-bombs the area with explosions that can hurt Isaac. That said, if you also happen to have Pyromaniac or Host Hat, both of which render Isaac immune to explosions, this basically lets you sweep the entire game.
  • In Enter the Gungeon, the Scattershot passive item ("Quantity Over Quality") triples your bullets, but decreases your accuracy and each does significantly less damage. Altogether this will be bad for your damage output, except under some very specific and rare circumstances.
  • In FTL: Faster Than Light you may be "blessed" with a repair arm which repairs your hull every time you collect scrap in an event. It deducts 15% of said haul to repair a negligible number of hull points that you could repair for much less in any typical store.
    • Made somewhat useful in Advanced Edition's Hard mode, where "haul" is typically quite small in a first place; in average, having hull repaired with Repair Arm will cost about as much or slightly less than in the shop. This means that instead of searching for shops to get repairs, player can instead visit another potentially profitable beacon, thus earning slightly more scrap in total. Doesn't make Repair Arm worth actually buying, still.
  • Noita has several perks that may make your life harder.
    • Taking the Boomerang Spells perk makes your spells arc toward you. Like the My Reflection item from The Binding of Isaac, this perk reduce the effective range of projectiles, and firing explosive or flaming projectiles becomes much more dangerous because they would fly into your face and harm you.
    • With the Essence of Light perk, your body periodically fires bolts of light in 8 directions. The problem is, you will take 1 damage from a bolt's explosion. So you shouldn't stand on the ground when your body fires bolts, or you will receive some damage.

    RPGs 
  • Fallout:
    • Fallout and Fallout 2:
      • An unnecessary number of Perks only give flat bonuses to skills when you have more skill points than you know what to do with by level 12 or so. Others are incredibly situational (Silent Death has 6 separate prerequisites that have to be fulfilled for its double damage to take effect), useless in general (Adrenaline Rush maxes out the easiest stat in the game to max out normally, but only when you're on death's door), or too weak to matter.
      • The Bruiser trait increases Strength by 2 at the cost of 2 Action Points. Since stat points are interchangeable at character creation, and you get 1 Action Point for every other point of Agility, you can get the same benefit at half the cost by relocating two points from Agility to Strength (and even that's not a great idea given Agility is the One Stat to Rule Them All).
      • Armor Piercing ammo for 5mm and 10mm guns tends to actually be worse against heavily armored foes than Hollowpoint ammo. This is due to the way that damage is calculated: Armor Piercing ammo deals half damage but ignores some of the target's resistance to normal damage. The problem is that it doesn't ignore the flat damage reduction that the target has. This means that any target with damage reduction of about five points or more tends to take no damage at all from Armor Piercing ammo. Not to mention, crits ignore armor completely, which means characters with high Luck or a habit for aiming at eyes will do far more damage with hollowpoints.
    • The change of engine between 2 and Fallout Tactics makes the formerly Boring, but Practical Bonus Move useless 90% of the time. In previous games, it grants 2 AP that can only be used for movement. This allows melee characters to close faster and all characters to move tactically while saving their real AP for attacks and items. The Tactics version increases how much ground a character covers per AP spent, which means it's only useful when a melee character is pursuing a new target.
    • In Fallout 3, most of the Perks are suboptimal to the point of uselessness:
      • "Nerves of Steel", a level 26 perk that boosts your AP regeneration by 1 point per 10 seconds - so inconsequential that it took slow-motion analysis and careful reading of the game's code to ensure that the perk even works. Compare to a level 20 perk, Grim Reaper's Sprint, which maxes out the player's AP every time they use AP to get a kill. This situation is somewhat improved in Fallout: New Vegas, where Grim Reaper's Sprint is heavily nerfed to grant only +20 AP for a VATS kill, and Nerves of Steel improved to speed up AP regeneration by 20% instead of a flat value.
      • Any of the skills that grant +5 to two skills / Size Matters (+15 to Big Guns) / Tag (+15 to any skill) are a waste compared to Educated (+3 skill points per level, for a final total of 78 skill points assigned as you see fit if you take it as soon as it becomes available) and Comprehension (+1 for every skill book you find, of which there are 324 out there). (Tag! was far better in the older games, as tagged skills also doubled the points you invested in them, meaning it could advance a barely-used skill to 100 in a single level.)
      • Rad Resistance (+25% resistance to radiation) is pointless when rad-resistant environmental suits and plentiful anti-rad meds make managing your radiation levels trivial.
      • Nerd Rage gives extra 20% Damage Resistance and boosts your Strength to 10 when you're below 20% Health. Strength is only useful for melee characters, who are likely already at or near 10 Strength and won't last long in close quarters with enemies even with the extra DR, which may go to waste anyway if you're already near the 85% cap.
      • Mister Sandman allows you to silently and instantly murder a sleeping NPC. There are few good reasons to do so, and in those situations, a sneak-attack-headshot will likely One-Hit Kill them anyway.
      • Cannibal lets you chow down on corpses to gain health and lose karma. There are many easier ways of gaining health, and evil characters can lose karma more profitably by going on a slaving spree or robbing townsfolk blind.
      • Night Person gives +2 to Intelligence and Perception between 6pm and 6am. Except the big advantage to Intelligence is giving you extra skill points on level up, which does not take temporary boosts like this into account. Only the Perception boost makes much of a difference, so you might as well take Intense Training and get +1 Perception 100% of the time instead of +2 50% of the time.
      • Swift Learner gives a percentage boost to experience; great, right? Except that it's already incredibly easy to hit the Absurdly Low Level Cap. "Here and Now," which instantly bumps you up to the next level, has the same problem. It wasn't much better in the older games, either.
      • Infiltrator and Computer Whiz allow you an extra attempt to force a lock or hack a computer. The lockpicking game is easy enough that there's no reason to ever force a lock, and the hacking minigame already allows you as many attempts as you want by just backing out of the minigame before using up your last attempt and starting over.
      • Solar Powered gives you +2 Strength and a Gradual Regeneration while outdoors during the daytime, but it's too slow to make a difference in battle (1 HP every 10 seconds when you likely have a couple hundred HP), and if you care about Strength, you've likely already got it maxed by the time the perk becomes available. To add insult to injury, in the vanilla game, taking this perk means forgoing the other two far-more-useful Level 20 perks, Ninja and Grim Reaper's Sprint.
    • Fallout: New Vegas:
      • Consider the mutually exclusive "Elijah's Last Words" and "Elijah's Rambling" perks. Either one is obtained by completing a very difficult DLC, finding a hidden message, and giving it to Veronica, one of your companions. The first increases her Melee Weapons speed and gives her a chance to knock down enemies with every melee hit while the second greatly increases your melee Critical Hit damage. Too bad she's an UNARMED specialist and her Melee Weapons skill can never rise above 18, making this promising-in-theory ability absolutely useless if given to her. You're better off just keeping it for yourself, given it comes with no karma or reputation loss.
      • Most consumable items have their effects multiplied by a value dependent on player skill in Medicine or Survival, including the negative ones. So, for instance, drinking Vodka in hardcore mode will increase dehydration by 25 at minimum Survival skill and 75 at 100 Survival.
      • The K9000 Cyberdog Gun in Old World Blues can be upgraded to the FIDO gun, but because FIDO can't use the weapon mods that the basic K9000 can, it actually has lower DPS. It also requires a higher strength score and Guns skill to use, and worst of all switches from the cheap, easy to find .357 ammo to .44 Magnum ammo, which is expensive, harder to find, and (in Hardcore mode) weighs more.
      • The perk "Junk Rounds" lets you craft bullets from tin cans and scrap metal. This sounds pretty good, but the recipe to do so is one scrap metal, five tin cans, and the appropriate shell casing. Per bullet. That means if you want to make enough bullets to fill your starting pistol's magazine, you have to lug 78 pounds of nearly-worthless garbage to the closest reloading bench. And even the garbage is more expensive than most bullets in total, so even if you somehow do find yourself with no ammo and a roomful of cans and scrap, you'd be better off finding a merchant and trading it for bullets.
      • "In Shining Armor" gives a +2 Damage Threshold when wearing glasses or reflective helmets and a +5 while wearing metal armor, against energy weapons. This would be situational-but-good... but according to its listing in the game's files, it's not "energyweapons", it's "energy." Since the former is the actual descriptor for energy weapons, that one missing word means that the perk actually does nothing.
    • Fallout 4:
      • 4 reworked the games' Skill Scores and Perks system, merging Skills and Perks, turning most of the Skills from the previous games into perks with multiple levels. As a result, the perks that used to be skills (governing things like weapon damage, crafting ability, healing item effectiveness, and sneaking) are so potent and often-used that all the other ones seem weak or overly situational. Often, you'll only consider the latter if level restrictions keep you from ranking up any of the former more—and since you can hold onto perk points indefinitely, you may save them up until you can.
      • The third rank of the Explosives perk doubles the blast radius of all explosives you use. While good for most explosives, it makes it very difficult to use the Fat Man without killing yourself.
      • Lead Belly reduces radiation taken from eating and drinking, eliminating it at higher levels. However, cooking most radioactive consumables will already remove all their radiation while boosting their health restoration (and sometimes provide other benefits) and giving some experience. The ones that can't be used in crafting, like pre-war food, generally restore very little health.
      • The .38 receiver weapon modifications changes a gun's ammo to the very common and cheap .38 rounds at the cost of a moderate damage penalty. However, these mods all have high Gun Nut requirements, causing a number of problems: By the time you get a Character Level high enough for the necessary levels of Gun Nut (2-4 depending on the gun), you'll probably have a steady supply of the standard ammo. The .38 receiver replaces other, more powerful receivers Gun Nut will make available, making the actual damage penalty much more severe. Finally, just having one level of Gun Nut will let you mod a pipe gun (the only weapon that normally uses .38 rounds) to do just as much damage per shot as most rechambered weapons and with a higher rate of fire.
      • Rapid automatic receivers increase fire rate and decrease damage even more than regular automatic receivers. One would think you'd be exchanging ammunition efficiency for a higher damage rate, but the math works out to "rapid" weapons always doing less damage per shot and damage per second than automatic weapons with the same level mod. The only time they're really worth anything is when they're used on a Legendary weapon with an effect that triggers per hit which isn't base the weapon's damage.
      • The lasers and plasma guns have "splitter" mods that increase damage while splitting it between multiple projectiles with high spread, basically turning them into the Tri-beam Laser from Broken Steel and Multiplas Rifle from New Vegas. But the damage increase is ridiculously small (only +2 or +3 for weapons that start with damage in the 20s and get higher), so you're basically just giving your gun terrible range and accuracy for little benefit.
  • Endless Frontier — When combat robots Nacht and Abend join your team, they act as a Power-Up Letdown: they share a character slot with Gespenst, whose provides the best support attack in game. Since the robots take turns to appear whenever you summon them, the support attack become less reliable. This is somewhat made up by the fact that after they join, Haken gains a new special skill that involves calling them to gang up on a single enemy. While this attack can't be comboed into or out of, it also isn't a subject to Forced Evasion and it does roughly the same amount of damage as Haken himself would've done with his full set of attacks, if not more.
  • Etrian Odyssey:
    • Etrian Odyssey:
      • Landsknecht's Arm Heal is more or less a trap to make ignorant players waste their skill points. Like any skill, one can place up to ten points in it, which is a lot considering all characters have a hard limit of 73-78 or so points total to spend on everything, including all their useful skills, stat boosts, and their prerequisites. Level 1 Arm Heal is a head skill (meaning it can't be used if the Landsknecht's head is bound) that self-cures bound arms for 2 TP. In other words, one uses it when their arms are bound, their head is not, and it's somehow deemed more useful to spend the Landsknecht's turn arm-healing instead of having the medic do it or simply using non-arm skill-requiring regular attacks. But hey, at least it's practically free. Needless to say, its being worth even a single point is hotly debated, but not even its most dedicated fans advocate maxing it, as the only additional perks are that the cost of using it drops to 1 TP at level 5, and 0 at level 10.
      • Protector's Provoke, a skill to goad enemies into attacking the Protector instead of anyone else, has a success rate way too low even at level 10 to be reliably used for the usual keeping-everyone-else-alive tank purposes.
      • Medic's H. Touch, a skill that heals the party for very low TP, but can only be used outside of battle and can only heal up to a certain percentage of their maximum health — for example, if the cap is 10% and someone has 100 HP, it will only heal for as much as it takes to bring them up to 10 HP, and is completely useless if they have more than that. The cap at level 10 is 40%.
      • Fortunately, Provoke and Arm Heal (renamed "Unbound" as it is now no longer arm-specific) are dramatically improved for the sequel, and H. Touch is removed entirely. (The Medic's Limit Break in the sequel is technically called "H. Touch," but the actual move and effect are extremely different.)
      • Protector's Anti(element) skills will completely block attacks of the corresponding element at level 5. If you upgrade them to 6 or higher, you will absorb the attack's damage and recover health, but this also lets through any secondary effects. This has been fixed in various ways in other games: in 2 and Millennium Girl absorption prevents status effects and 3 required mastery just to completely nullify the damage.
    • Each sequel attempts to avert Empty Levels by having each point placed in a skill do something, like increase its effects, decrease its cost, or dramatically increasing its efficacy in exchange for a cost increase. Sometimes the increase in strength of the skill is not worth the raised cost. Other times the cost of the skill is so low that any savings in TP look insignificant at higher levels. Some passives actually scale so poorly past a certain point that further investment becomes a waste.
  • Fate/Grand Order tended to enjoy throwing out near-useless skills in its early days.
    • Altria variants had an unfortunate habit of being given Intuition/Instinct, which gave free critical stars in such quantities as to be virtually useless. When upgraded to its full potential, it could secure a one-turn crit, but most characters with the skill lacked the star weight or critical boosts to put those crits to work. Many characters with the skill have since had it upgraded to provide some other benefit, usually to the point that the crit stars are largely irrelevant.
    • Clairvoyance and its variants are often considered even worse than Instinct, though they largely fit the same niche. It boosts the ability of its user to generate stars, but most characters with Clairvoyance have low hit counts, few Quick cards, unfitting classes, or all three, so they struggle to generate stars anyway. And while Instinct just gives you the stars right off the bat, Clairvoyance requires you to make a few attacks first to pay off. Even then, nearly any given Assassin has better star generation even with Clairvoyance up. For some idea of how undertuned the skill was, when EMIYA's version of the skill was buffed, it more than tripled the boost, and added a sizeable crit buff to sweeten the deal.
    • Skills that reduce the effectiveness of enemy Noble Phantasm attacks get a lot of ribbing from the playerbase. They do lower the damage numbers of the strongest attacks in the game... but these attacks are only used by certain bosses, and they tend to only use them once every few turns. And enemy Noble Phantasms tend to have overkill damage, so even with the effect up, unless it's AOE and facing class disadvantage, usually an enemy Noble Phantasm still kills the target easily. The standard response to one is to use a skill that grants invulnerability or evasion for a turn to avoid the damage completely, not to tank it, and even if you do want to try tanking it, effects that grant Attack Down, Damage Cut, or Defense Up would do a much better job. The worst version is likely Aesthetic Appreciation E-, used by Caster Gilles. Not only does Gilles struggle to survive in most battles, much less against the game's strongest enemies, but the skill only reduces NP strength by 11% at max level; 89% is still going to one-shot Gilles with room to spare, and in the few situations where it would make a difference, it would still leave him with so little health that the next attack will finish him off.
    • Boudica's Vow to the Goddess is probably the most infamous, increasing her damage against Roman enemies... of which there are barely any, and Boudica's damage against them is so lousy normally that it still barely scratches them. It eventually got buffed to stick the damage increase on the whole party, and added a party-wide crit damage buff on top of that, and it's still considered somewhat unimpressive. Funnily, it did get a pretty massive indirect buff with the existence of Romulus Qurinus, who has the ability to apply the Roman trait to enemies.
    • One of the biggest examples would be Ortinax Mash's Black Barrel upgrade. Given it's spectacular use in story, and the fact that it was meant to strengthen her otherwise underwhelming kit, you would have guessed they would have turned her NP into something on par with her former form or even drasically improved one of her skills. Nope! It instead merely buffs her first skill, which aside from increasing the Buster and Crit Damage buff, offers an defense pierce buff for one Buster Card. Needless to say, this was heavily derided as one of the worst strengthenings in F/GO's history (even the other buffs were made to specifically address common issues to the point where the servant in question is at least usable), and combined with the absolutely poor timing of the buff (right in Lostbelt 5.2, to be specfic), it's a major letdown when you finally get it.
  • In most Final Fantasy games:
    • Reflect spell is a disappointingly Useless Useful Spell. Normally, the spell is supposed to reflect enemy spells back at the caster. However, few enemies in most of the games use actual spells rather than unique monster attacks (which are not reflectable); many of the enemies who are actual spellcasters will use magic that can't be reflected or have a passive ability that makes all their spells ignore Reflect. The most common creatures that cast spells are typically elementals, so reflecting their spell back on them will heal them. On top of that, Reflect also reflects friendly spells, like Cure and Esuna — which makes healing or buffing your party much more difficult. Reflect can be a Game-Breaker under the right conditions, but players will tend to ignore it as overly situational.
    • The Gravity spells also fall into this. You got a spell that can cut an enemy's HP in half? Awesome! Oh, wait. Most of the enemies and bosses are immune anyway, and any enemies that are not immune can easily be beaten with a few sword whacks.
  • In the original, the class change granted by Bahamut in the mid-late game is normally really good; it gives more possible equips, allows Fighters and Thieves to learn magic, and lets White Mages and Black Mages get their final spells. But the Black Belt, who actually gets held back by equipping weapons and armor and can't use magic? Well, he gets nothing. In fact, for some reason, the Master actually has less Magic Defense growth than the Black Belt, meaning it's actually a downgrade. This was fixed in the Dawn of Souls remake, which made it so that Master also alters the Black Belt's damage formula to be better.
  • In Final Fantasy III for the DS, one of the level 6 White Magic spells — the second highest level a normal white mage can get — is Stona. All it does is remove the petrification status effect, which you can easily remove with a Gold Needle (which have been available for some time by this point). And due to the Level MP system the game uses (like with pre-GBA Final Fantasy I), this clunker shares MP with the more useful Haste spell.
  • Final Fantasy IV
    • Meteor (Meteo), in spite of how it is hailed as the ultimate spell, but when you finally get it it manages to be this in spite of dealing an impressive 9999 damage to all enemies simply because there are far more economic options to damage enemies. It costs a whopping 99 MP and takes forever to cast, meaning by the time you've finally gotten this one out of the box that character could have easily dealt as much if not more damage using less flashy moves like Firaga (Fire 3) or Bio (Virus), and for less MP and without tying one of your characters up for as long as Meteor. Even its one perk, that it hits all enemies for 9999 damage and ignores reflect, is largely irrelevant because all the enemies who you'd need to inflict so much damage on are bosses who attack solo anyways and rarely use reflect. Even all of that aside, the only character you'll get who can reliably use Meteor is Rydia who is a summoner (caller) who has summons that drastically outperform Meteor anyways.
    • And then there is Ultima in DS version that can be generated by Twincasting with Cecil and Rosa. So what do you think, it is worth it to use spell that costs twice as much MP as Meteor (99MP of both Cecil and Rosa), takes longer to cast and robs you of both healers in the team when Meteor was already enough to hit the Damage Cap? Made worse by the fact that at least on first playthrough giving Twincast Augments to Rosa and Cecil means robbing yourself of much more useful spells such as party-wide attack buff or double HP.
    • The DS version gives you Inferno after beating Rubicante. It does more damage than essentially any other spell in the game. The problem is, it also hits your own party, and hard enough that you can kill your entire party in one hit even from full health. Expert players will equip their characters with fire-resistant items and Cursed Rings to avoid this. Though the Cursed Rings are normally a Poison Mushroom, they upgrade "resist element" to "absorb element", so a properly equipped party can use Inferno to damage the enemy and heal themselves. However, it is among the best abilities for raising a character's stats once that character reaches level 70.
  • Final Fantasy VI has several:
    • Due to a bug in the code, the Evade stat is never checked; the "Magic Block" stat is used to determine evasion rates for for both magic and physical attacks. Since shields primarily boost Evade, they're virtually useless. This was fixed in the GBA rerelease. However, certain shields are good for blocking elemental attacks, particularly the Paladin Shield (which adds at least 20% to the MBlock stat on top of absorbing or blocking most elements)
    • If you max out Terra's Magic and then use her Morph skill, her most powerful spells will do very little damage due to an integer overflow in the damage calculation. (But then, her level 1 magic will hit for max damage, so you don't really need the powerful spells that much anyway.)
    • The Crusader Esper, the most powerful summoned monster in the game, can only be gained by fighting a series of eight dragons all around the world (two of which are in The Very Definitely Final Dungeon). Unfortunately, when you summon Crusader, it also damages your party, which makes it basically useless. There are other benefits to having it, though, since it's the only non-losable Esper that teaches Meteor, and the only Esper anywhere that can teach Meltdown — two of the most powerful spells in the entire game.
    • The Meltdown spell itself can be one of these, since it damages the party when you cast it. If your party members have Fire-absorbing gear, it's not such a problem. Quake is similar, but it can be mitigated by the Float spell. Probably the worst example, besides the aforementioned Crusader, is Whirlwind/Tornado; not only can it reduce your party members to critical HP, no equipment in the game will block it... and the percent damage it deals makes it a Useless Useful Spell anyway because any enemy you would want to use it on will resist it just fine.
    • In general, many of the later spells seem underwhelming because it's relatively easy to get Ultima before you get the opportunity to learn spells like Meltdown, Meteor, and the like. Ultima is what it sounds like, and will quickly destroy almost all enemies within 1-2 rounds by the time you're over level 40 or so.
    • In the GBA port, they added the ability to run without having to equip the Sprint Shoes relic. The relic hasn't been removed from the game, though, so equipping the Sprint Shoes and having autorun turned on makes your character move uncontrollably fast. Some players rather like it, though, so it's unclear whether this is intentional or a Good Bad Bug.
    • If Sabin has learned the Soul Spiral blitz, which sacrifices his life to revive all dead party members, then you can no longer use him in the Dragon's Neck Colosseum (which allows you to enter your characters in automated one-on-one gladiatorial battles). He will almost always open with that move, making you instantly lose the match and, consequently, your wagered item. Similarly, if Strago has learned either Transfusion or Self-Destruct, you run the risk of blowing a round on a pointless suicide. Gau can also have a chance, depending on which Rage he opts to use.
  • Final Fantasy VII has several as well:
    • Magic Defense is based entirely on the character's intrinsic "Spirit" stat; pieces of armor that supposedly boost magic defense actually do nothing. Luckily, the PC rerelease (2012) version fixes the glitch.
    • The Kjata summon. In theory, it should be fantastic; this is an attack which hits the Fire, Ice, Lightning, and Earth weaknesses on all of the monsters in the battle. However, the internal logic is actually reversed, and multi-elemental attacks use the strongest defense on the list — if even one of those elements is blocked or absorbed by a creature, then all the damage from Kjata is blocked or absorbed, no exception. In effect, multi-elemental attacks are worse than single-element attacks, because more creatures are left unharmed by them.
    • Aerith's final Limit Break, Great Gospel, is one of these. While it's a great Limit Break, Aerith is lost so early in the game that you have to know what you're doing to actually get the power and train Aerith up to the point that she can use her level 4 Limit Break — and then you lose her and all that work was for nothing! note 
    • The HP<—>MP Materia. It's treated as the ultimate Independent Materia, which is found in a secret cave that can only be accessed with a black or gold chocobo. Putting it on switches the character's health and magic values around, which means they can have up to 9999 MP, but only a maximum of 999 HP. It sounds like it could turn a character into a risky but powerful Squishy Wizard who could cast spells with absolute impunity without ever running out of juice. Unfortunately, by the time you get it, restoring your MP shouldn't be an issue anymore and you'll regularly face enemies that can do over 1000 damage, which makes the materia more debilitating than anything.
  • Final Fantasy VIII has a couple:
    • Diablos is an extremely difficult optional battle, but defeating him lets you recruit him as a GF. Then you realise that he deals gravity-based damage, making him almost useless as a summon since 99% of the game’s bosses are immune. Fortunately, his innate Junction abilities make up for his lacklustre power in a fight.
    • After Rinoa becomes a Sorceress she gains the Angel Wing Limit Break, which puts her in a berserk state where she fires off powerful magic. Unfortunately, this means that she’ll burn through stocks of offensive spells completely at random and you lose all control of her unless she’s KO’d or petrified. Rinoa will also never use cure magic while berserk, forcing you to look after her while she goes nuts. The Power-Up Letdown also extends to the main story, as Rinoa becoming a Sorceress has no effect on her magic stat. Subverted if you know the specific Elite Tweak,note  which makes her an incredibly powerful and fast damage dealer.
    • Gilgamesh summon. He replaces the Odin summon, if you have Odin with you during the fight with Seifer in Lunatic Pandora - Seifer kills Odin, with Gilgamesh appearing later into the fight and substituting Odin from then on. Thing is, while Odin is guaranteed to kill all enemies when he appears, Gilgamesh selects randomly between 4 attacks, one of which is the infamous Excalipoor. Unlike Odin he can appear in boss fights, but he can't kill them and even the maximum damage he can deal is not that helpful at this point of the game. To top it off, he can appear during the battle with Adel when she has Rinoa chained to her, killing the latter thus instantly losing the battle for you.
  • Final Fantasy IX:
    • Trance, unlike VII's Limit Breaks, can't carry over from battle to battle. If you happen to hit Trance while in a fight with a bunch of common mooks that you're perfectly capable of one-shotting without it, which statistically is bound to happen far more often than not, then too bad, it's wasted.
    • The ultimate summon, Ark, is only attainable by beating Optional Boss Hades in the final dungeon, which gives you the chance to synthesize two Pumice Pieces for the Pumice that teaches Garnet its skill, or by beating the strongest Superboss in the game, Ozma, which gives you the Pumice directly. By the time you can get Ark through the former method, the only major boss left to use it on is Ozma, and it seems good because it exploits Ozma's Shadow weakness after a lengthy sidequest. However, by the time your party is prepared for Ozma, other characters have more reliable ways to hit the 9999 damage cap which Ark struggles to reach. The true letdown part, however, is that the Pumice Pieces are the only equipment in the game to absorb Shadow, which is almost necessary to survive Ozma's lethal Doomsday spell. The full Pumice does not do this. Thus, synthesizing Ark actually handicaps your party against Ozma.
  • Final Fantasy X:
    • There is Triple Foul, the final ability in Wakka's section of the Sphere Grid. It inflicts sleep, silence and blindness at the same time. Sounds great, but by the point you get it, you'll probably be nearing The Very Definitely Final Dungeon, where most enemies have either resistances or outright immunities to the relevant statuses. Even in situations where enemies have neither, you really only need one of the three statuses to kneecap an enemy until they're dead, making this a bit pricey and rather redundant, especially compared to the other end abilities, namely Entrust, Bribe, and especially Quick Hit.
    • Full Break (exclusive to PAL and later versions of the game) is even worse. It is locked behind several Lv. 3 or Lv. 4 Locks and costs 99MP to cast, all for a chance to inflict all four breaks. There is rarely a need to use all four breaks at once, and when you do, it's better to stick with Auron's Banishing Blade Overdrive which always inflicts them as long as enemy is not immune to them.
  • Final Fantasy XI has "Balrahn's Myriad Arms" (known as "Mythic Weapons" among the player base). Despite taking longer to complete than Relic Weapons, the true Infinity Plus One Swords of the game, Mythic Weapons are almost all significantly less powerful. Mythic Weapons require you to clear a large number of one-per-day missions, get a huge amount of rare materials, and kill several difficult bosses to gather the materials for a single attempt at the final fight that earns the actual weapon. All of which adds up to nearly a year of playtime to earn the thing (or more if you fail the final fight several times). Compare to Relic Weapons, which require a fraction of the time, a few relatively easy fights, and a massive amount of Dynamis currency (which is expensive, but easy to get if you have the cash to buy it).
  • Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth: Maxing out Kiryu's Soul level changes Weapon Attacks into much stronger Heat Actions while he's in Brawler style... stronger in that they deal more damage, but they're worse otherwise. The weapon Heat Actions are strictly single-target and provide no additional effects that the equivalent Weapon Attack may have inflicted, meaning Kiryu can no longer swing a bicycle around to hit and stun a group of enemies — it will instead just hit one of them without stunning.
  • In NEO: The World Ends with You, Jinxed clothing items return, but there are new problems, too. One of these is the Buttercup, a dress that gives +222 to HP and Defense, one of the highest stat buffs in the game, and has an ability called Hands Off. The description for this ability says it "prevents battles from automatically starting." Sounds cool, right? Well, no. It sounds like it gives you the chance to attract as many Noise symbols as possible to chain them all without the battle automatically starting: but what it actually does is prevent you from attracting Noise symbols in the first place, meaning you can't do any non-story battles at all as long as one of your party members is wearing it.
  • Persona 5: In Royal, all of the Phantom Thieves can achieve a Third-Awakening that further powers up their Persona, gaining a Secret Art in the process. Of all of them, Akechi's Hereward proves to be the least worthwhile, as he is only available starting from the 2nd to last day before the Final Boss, who isn't exactly affected by the new Psy resistance and Rebellion Blade since they have no Psy skills and cannot be knocked down in order to make the most of Rebellion Blade. To add insult to injury, because Mementos is not accessible that late in the game, Hereward isn't even usable for the NG+ Superboss.
  • Pokémon:
    • Pokémon that evolves via evolution stone will learn fewer moves than their unevolved forms or, more often, will not learn any moves from leveling up at all. It's advisable to get your Pokémon to the level of the last move you want it to know that it learns through level-up before evolving. Thankfully, this was changed in Pokémon Sword and Shield, where the evolved stone evolution can relearn any move its pre-evolved form had. Say hello to level 15 Arcanine with Flamethrower before the first gym.
    • The fifth gen adds a lot more examples courtesy of its Eviolite item, which boosts the holder's defenses by 1.5x (but can only be held by a mon that has yet to evolve). While in many cases better stats overall tend to counterbalance the loss of Eviolite, there are some mons that are made substantially better by the item than their evolved form. One good example is Dusclops; its stats heavily lean it towards becoming a Stone Wall, and its evolved form Dusknoir only marginally improves its bulk, aiming for a Mighty Glacier build with higher Attack—since Dusknoir functions poorly in this role, due to a pitiful physical movepool and its Attack being only average, Dusclops is considered much better.
    • Type: Null of Pokémon Sun and Moon was once considered an example: it has a somewhat-above-average 95 in everything except Speed. And what's more, it has an okay ability in Battle Armor and can use Eviolite, making it a fine Mighty Glacier. And then, in a touching scene, Type: Null breaks off its control helmet and evolves into Silvally... which doesn't help it much. Silvally's only stat gain is bringing Speed up to the same okay-ish tier as all its other stats. Its ability changes from Battle Armor to RKS System, which allows it to change its type to correspond with special held items. Problem? Those special held items do nothing besides change its type, meaning that all it allows Silvally to do is be a mediocre Pokémon of any typing. And obviously, it can't use Eviolite anymore. As a result of this, Silvally was considered worse than its pre-evolution. However, Type: Null eventually ended up untiered like most Silvally types, and the few Silvally types that did manage to have a niche in the lower tiers did so almost solely due to their type.
    • Surskit possesses a unique design (a water strider), a typing (Bug/Water) that was completely unique for four generations, and pretty good stats for an unevolved Pokémon. When it evolves, it becomes Masquerain, which changes its design into a fairly generic moth and alters its typing to the fairly common and competitively awful Bug/Flying. Its stats do increase somewhat and it's the only Bug-type with the excellent ability Intimidate, which lowers opponents' attack. However, it's still outclassed by Butterfree, and until Generation VII, it actually lost a few points of Speed.
    • The fifth generation introduces the concept of "Hidden Abilities", new abilities available to various Pokémon, but only ones obtained in a certain way (usually by catching them through the now-defunct Dream World). However, a number of these Hidden Abilities are considered useless, either because the ability itself is bad, or because what the Pokémon already has is considered much better. A couple examples:
      • Delibird, as usual, seems to get it the worst. Its Hidden Ability is the sleep-preventing Insomnia, which doesn't seem too bad, until you remember that one of its original abilities, Vital Spirit, does the exact same thing.
      • Light/Heavy Metal as Hidden Abilities are relatively useless for the aforementioned reasons- the only Pokémon who have the Ability usually don't worry about Heavy Slam, Heat Crash, Grass Knot, and Low Kick, since they're heavy enough that it doesn't matter much and those moves are too gimmicky to use reliably. Several of them, including Metagross, are so heavy that they still take maximum damage from Low Kick and Grass Knot, even with halved weight. Bronzong also suffers because both of its regular Abilities remove one of its weaknesses (especially Levitate, against the omnipresent Ground-type moves). Aggron doesn't really benefit anyways, as it already has the maximum weight for Grass Knot/Low Kick to do most damage, and Heavy Slam gets full power + STAB even without Aggron's Ability; its original Abilities (Sturdy lets it get in at least one move without dying to Earthquake or a Fighting-type move, and Rock Head has only three recoil moves to work with, one of which is at least STAB Head Smash) are better than Heavy Metal.
      • Scizor is particularly bad in this regard. Unlike some of its brethren, it actually is light enough for Light Metal to be factored into the damage it takes. On the other hand, it's already so light that Low Kick and Grass Knot weren't doing anything much to it in the first place (both moves would have a power of 80, and Scizor resists Grass Knot and is neutral to Low Kick). For the most part, all the ability does is make Scizor take more damage when it gets hit by Heat Crash or Heavy Slam. Meanwhile, one of its standard abilities is the phenomenally good Technician, which enables the powered-up Bullet Punch and Bug Bite that makes Scizor worth using to begin with. However, Light Metal did get an (incredibly niche) actual use with the introduction of Mega Evolutions as Mega Scizor has Technician anyway, so Scizor intended to Mega Evolve would run Light Metal solely to reduce the damage taken from switching into Low Kick (which sees some use in multiplayer because it deals high damage to a lot of Legendaries).
      • Starmie gets the Hidden Ability Analytic, which increases the damage it does if it moves last. However, Starmie is a Fragile Speedster, so it's widely agreed upon that this will rarely happen... unless it's punishing a switch-in.
      • Tyranitar, like Scizor, is an example of both reasons. Its original ability is Sand Stream, which automatically causes a Sandstorm once it arrives on the battlefield, which is a highly useful ability in the metagame. Its Hidden Ability, however, is Unnerve, which prevents opponents from using Berries, and is widely considered to be situational at best.
      • One other Pokémon that gets Unnerve is Mewtwo, whose other ability, Pressure, effectively halves the opponent's PP, which is much better against Pokémon with powerful moves that only have a few chances to use it anyway. (Granted, Pressure itself isn't great since Mewtwo had become a Squishy Wizard by Legendary standards when abilities were introduced, but it's still by far the less situational option.)
      • Jellicent has the Hidden Ability Damp, which stops self-destruction moves like Self-Destruct, Explosion, and Mind Blown. Being a Water/Ghost-type, it resists Mind Blown and completely No Sells Self-Destruct and Explosion. Granted, this could still see use in Double Battles and maybe save it from an exploding Alolan Golem with Galvanize, but Jellicent's original two abilities are still considered too much better to bother.
      • Rotom's alternate forms, as of Pokémon Black and White, change type, keeping the Electric typing and adding a second. Rotom's Fan Form becomes Electric/Flying, a good typing. However, its ability remains Levitate, and both Levitate and the Flying-typing will cancel out Ground-type moves, effectively giving it a double immunity. Of course, you could also give it an Air Balloon to make it triple.
      • Togekiss gets Super Luck as its hidden Ability, which gives a 6.25% boost to the Critical Hit ratio. Which would be fine and dandy, because you could just use a move with a high-crit ratio... but it doesn't get any moves with high crit-ratios. Its other usable Ability, Serene Grace, which has the immensely useful (and annoying) property of doubling the rate of additional effects, is far more useful than Super Luck.
      • The Ability Pickpocket steals items upon getting hit by a contact-based move. Only problem is, nearly all of the ability's users are Glass Cannons, so they wouldn't last long with their item; besides, they'd have to go into battle without an item (and virtually every Pokémon carries an item in advanced play). While Weavile doesn't really have a choice (it's much too fragile to use Pressure effectively), the Seedot line has the speed-doubling Chlorophyll and the reduced-sleep Early Bird to work from normally, which are better. Barbaracle is much better at taking hits, so it's better at it.
      • Pickpocket's counterpart Magician, which activates upon hitting the opponent rather than being hit, has proven to be not even better. Aside from the existing going-in-without-an-item issue, Klefki has a much better ability in Prankster, which has made it an indispensable support Pokémon — without it, not so much.
      • Wobbuffet gets Telepathy as its Hidden Ability, which makes it immune to ally attacks. While it does make it slightly more useful in double/triple battles, keep in mind that its original Ability Shadow Tag (prevents enemy from switching) was what made it a Game-Breaker in the first place, and even with Telepathy, Wobbuffet is still garbage in Doubles due to its inability to pro-actively do anything.
      • Medicham was also an example before Generation VI introduced Mega Evolutions. It has Telepathy as well, which is worse considering its natural Attack stat is terrible, so it needs its regular ability (Pure Power) to double it. But since it got a Mega Evolution, Medicham's Telepathy Ability is Not Completely Useless in doubles/triples; it turns into Pure Power anyway when it Mega Evolves, so you can switch it in while its ally uses a spread attack that would otherwise hurt it. Pure Power in its normal form wouldn't be of any use because you would Mega Evolve it right away.
      • Any Steel or Ground-type Pokémon with Overcoat (nullifies damage from sandstorms and hail) as a Hidden Ability. Because of their types, they're already immune to sandstorm damage. This is averted in Generation VI, where Overcoat gains the additional effect of making the user immune to spore and powder moves, which is very useful considering those kinds of moves can cause crippling Status Effects like Sleep and Paralysis.
      • Trapinch was given Sheer Force as its Hidden Ability, which doesn't look so bad considering its high Attack. However, after evolving a Trapinch to Vibrava and then Flygon, its Ability switches back to the default Levitate, and you'd be pondering why Trapinch has a Hidden Ability in the first place.
      • The Rhyhorn line gets Reckless as its Hidden Ability, which increases the power of moves that inflict recoil or crash damage on the user. The only eligible moves they can learn are the Normal-type Take Down and Double-Edge. Reckless Rhyhorn can only learn Double-Edge if obtained from the defunct Dream World, making it nigh-impossible to obtain the move and ability combo without cheating. Even with the Reckless boost, Rhyperior can do more damage with Earthquake and Stone Edge than Double-Edge for less risk, and its standard abilities (reduced damage from super-effective attacks and ability to redirect Electric-type attacks in double battles) are light-years better than Reckless.
      • Darmanitan has Zen Mode as its Hidden Ability. When Darmanitan's health drops below 50%, it changes form from a Glass Cannon to a Mighty Glacier, and gains an additional Psychic-type and much higher stats overall. While it sounds good in theory, it's anything but. If Darmanitan recovers its health to above 50% in Zen Mode, it will revert back, so good luck tanking hits with less than 50% HP. Furthermore, regular Darmanitan has a fantastic Attack stat but its Special Attack is abysmal, while Zen Mode Darmanitan has an abysmal Attack stat but a fantastic Sp. Attack stat. Essentially, this means a Darmanitan have to waste at least one move slot for a special move, and waste EV points for its Sp. Attack stat, to take advantage of its Zen Mode, which won't activate until its health drops below 50%. And to cap it off, Darmanitan's non-Hidden Ability is Sheer Force, which heavily buffs the power of all moves with secondary effects (at the price of removing those effects, but that's a small price to pay), making it hit much harder than Zen Mode Darmanitan. This means, ironically, that you'll almost never see a Darmanitan trainer that makes use of the species's signature gimmick. Galarian Darmanitan's Zen Mode gives it a direct stat bonus and is thus far more useful, though surviving hits is still an issue with its paper-thin defenses, so it still faces stiff competition from its regular ability Gorilla Tactics which allows it to hit like a freight train right from the get-go (at the cost of locking it into a single move, which may not matter too much depending on which move you pick).
      • Durant receives Truant as its Hidden Ability. An ability whose only use is to balance out Slaking. Its effect is that the Pokémon attacks one turn and the next will do nothing. The only use for the Ability is for Durant to use Entrainment to give the Ability to other Pokémon and cripple them; useful against the AI, but any human player worth their salt will just switch Pokémon.
      • Ferrothorn gets Anticipation as its Hidden Ability. Upon switching in, Anticipation... tells you whether the opponent can hit Ferrothorn super effectively or is packing a one-hit KO move. And that's all it does. It doesn't even tell you what move they have, which might at least be useful (knowing the opponent has a Fire-type move would be pretty helpful, as Ferrothorn really doesn't like Fire). Needless to say, this is a huge step down from its regular ability Iron Barbs, which damages attacking enemies on contact and can actually rack up quite a bit of residual damage due to Ferrothorn's tankiness. And just to add insult to injury, its own pre-evolution Ferroseed gets to keep Iron Barbs, meaning that if you obtain a Ferroseed through any means that can give it a Hidden Ability, it's entirely possible for it to go from a good ability to a crappy one on evolution.
    • In Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire, the Super Rod is an example of this. Sure, it lets you fish up Pokémon unavailable via the Old Rod and Good Rod, but it also expands the games' fishing Scrappy Mechanic from a max of 3 "Oh! A bite!" checks to 6, making fishing with it much more tedious than necessary.
    • Generation 7 introduced Z-Moves, once-a-battle effects that supercharge a regular move into one with devastating power. For the most part, they work as intended... unless the move you choose to supercharge is Acrobatics. Acrobatics has the unique effect of doubling in power if the user is not holding an item, which results in it being the one attack in the game that's actually slightly stronger than its Z-Move counterpart (110 attack vs. 100 attack), since the user is holding a Z-Crystal.
    • While every Mega Evolution is stronger by adding 100 points to their BST (along with sometimes changing ability and/or typing), Latias and Latios are actually weaker Mega Evolved because they can't hold Soul Dew, which boosts their special attack and defense by 50% (amounting to a 120 point boost). Though in Latios' case, Mega Evolution is Not Completely Useless due to giving it a respectable physical attack stat. As of Sun and Moon, however, with the Soul Dew nerfed, Mega Latias and Latios get a bit more use. Mega Tyranitar also got this and still gets this from time to time; yes, it is extremely powerful, but it is also just Tyranitar with higher stats and no other changes, and while it has its uses as a Mega, most people will concede that regular Tyranitar is good enough as is and doesn't use the Mega slot that could be used on something with more potential to change the game.
    • The Gigantamax forms in Gen 8 already only have a different appearance and a different version of one type of max move. That being said, quite a few of them manage to be worse than just a regular Dynamax of their respective mons.
      • Gigantamax Corviknight loses Max Airstream for G-Max Wind Rage, which removes terrain and breaks moves like Light Screen and Reflect. The problem is, the effect of Max Airstream is to boost speed, which Corviknight needs desperately, and the former effect can be achieved by simply not Dynamaxing and just using Defog.
      • Gigantamax Drednaw loses Max Geyser for G-Max Stonesurge, which sets up Stealth Rock. Drednaw's Hidden Ability is Swift Swim, which means you'll usually want to have the rain that Max Geyser sets up instead, not to mention that Stealth Rock is widespread enough (and Drednaw can learn it anyways) that you usually don't need to waste your Dynamax just to set it up assuming you don't use the move in VGCs.
      • Gigantamax Orbeetle loses Max Mindstorm for G-Max Gravitas, which sets up Gravity instead of Psychic Terrain. Gravity does next to nothing for Orbeetle outside of boosting Hypnosis' meager accuracy, which it can't use while Gigantamaxed anyways.
      • Gigantamax Eevee loses Max Strike for G-Max Cuddle, which infatuates the target. Not only is infatuation a lot more situational than the reliable Speed drop from Max Strike (infatuation only works on opponents of the opposite gender while Speed reduction works on basically everything), but Eevee that can Gigantamax lose the ability to evolve... which, given Eevee's horrendous base stats, means it tends to do absolutely nothing compared to a Dynamaxed (or even non-Dynamaxed) Eeveelution. Gigantamax Pikachu suffers from this as well as not only does it also have terrible stats, but G-Max Volt Crash's ability to paralyze Ground-types only works in Double and Max Raid Battles, with Dynamaxed Raichu having more bulk and being able to use Max Geyser and Max Overgrowth to get rid of Ground-types.
      • Gigantamax Charizard was originally considered an example: It trades Max Flare for G-Max Wildfire. The former summons harsh sun, which will boost Charizard's fire moves and boosts Charizard's special attack by 50% if it has its Hidden Ability, Solar Power, turning it into a potent sweeper. The latter merely causes non-Fire enemies to lose one sixth of their health every turn for four turns. This changed later on, however, as the ability to deal constant damage to all opponents at once for several turns straight became very valued, and in formats where a separate sun-setter can support Charizard the G-Max variant actually sees a lot of use.
  • Phantasy Star Online has several rare weapons and armor that are upgradable. Most of the time, the upgraded form is simply better than the original, as is to be expected. However, a few of the weapons also lose the ability to chain 3 attacks together in a combo, meaning they actually do less DPS than their unupgraded versions despite having higher attack power.
  • Secret of Evermore:
    • The Magic Gourd. To get it, you have to trade the merchant for a Chocobo Egg, a relic which boosts your hit points. And the Gourd's effect? Doing absolutely nothing. The creators couldn't even remember what the Gourd was supposed to do while they were programming it in.
    • Also, the Silver Sheathe. It's easier to obtain, as you only need to trade 10 Spice and a Golden Jackal for it (or the Sun Stone, but don't), and it boasts that it boosts all sword attack powers by 25%. However, thanks to a glitch, its effect is always applied, even if you don't have it, thus its only uses are to screw you out of the Sun Stone (if you don't know better) or to be traded along with 75 jewels for the Armor Polish.
    • The Spider's Claw, the axe you recieve for beating Thraxx. It's a little bit stronger than the Bone Crusher and can cut grass, but not only is it a lot slower but it's only two points stronger than the Bone Crusher thanks to the Silver Sheathe glitch mentioned above. This translates to a noticably slower weapon that won't do noticably more damage against anything. Worse, is the Horn Spear, which has even higher attack and has a charged projectile attack that's basically necessary to defeat Salabog, is acquired from a Mini-Boss quite literally five minutes later than the defeat of Thraxx.
    • Hard Ball. Right out the gate it is notably weaker than Flash, and it is in fact the weakest offensive alchemy in the entire game. Even when levelled up fully it can only manage a few hundred hitpoints of damage, something your basic attack was capable of as early as mid Prehistoria. It's only real strength is it's cheap to cast and uses ingredients that aren't used by many other alchemic formulaenote , so it can always reliably be cast, but even with that benefit there's rarely a reason to even bother equipping it.
  • Secret of Mana has a magic system where the player opens the Ring Menu and pauses the game, selects the spell, then the target - the target doesn't unpause until all of the spell components have hit, but you can still open the menu while the fireballs/crystals/spinny air knives are in mid air and basically spam spells on bosses until out of magic. The more you use the spells, the more they level up and get stronger. From about level six of nine, there's an increasing random chance to "critical" the spell for bonus damage - but during the special animation that plays, you can't open the menu, so by improving your spell you essentially cheat yourself out of being able to combo.
  • The Aestevalis mechs from Super Robot Wars W may be lacking in offensive power, but they have the Field Lancer attack, which has the ignore barrier attribute in a game where many of the toughest bosses have barriers, so they'll often come in handy. When they're upgraded to Aestevalis Customs, they lose said attack. Even worse considering that all the Aestevalis Customs are Game Breakers in Super Robot Wars R. On the other hand, they become useful on all terrain (instead of making you change frames like crazy for each level), and it's not like you can't remove barriers with Volfogg's Melting Siren or anything, making said trait redundant.
    • Dependent on the stage, in Super Robot Wars GC, the Layzner's upgrade into Powered Layzner or the Layzner MK 2 becomes this. On one hand, its mobility (which was already very high) goes through the roof, and this is augmented by the power-up his unique ability gets (V-Max turns into either V-Max Powered or V-Maximum, both of which raise Mobility more and the latter of which raises movement range more). On the other hand, if you've been putting a lot of money into Layzner's weapons (which you want to, Layzner's ability to damage things is already very low), they get NERFED. And if you get the Mk 2, which is usually a better upgrade, you lose the only move that hits past range 4. If you aren't going to make use of his great movement range, Layzner upgrading destroys its ability to help you.
  • In Terra Battle, the A rank stat-boosting Companions are actually worse than their B rank counterparts. This is because the B rank Companions offer active "Stat+10%" buffs, which are stackable. In an average boss battle, that means a steady +40% buff in stats note . In comparison, the A ranks only offer passive, non-stackable "Stat+5%" buffs.
  • Ultima VI has numerous spells that don't actually seem to do anything useful, like lighting or dousing candles note , making ordinary objects disappear, or even causing a solar eclipse. The game also has a spell that is the very definition of Awesome, but Impractical: Armageddon, which kills everything in the game except yourself and Lord British. Great... except for the fact that the game is now Unwinnable — it must be beaten by diplomacy, not combat.
  • A lot of artefact items in Dungeon Crawl are even worse than their non-artefact counterparts.
  • The sub machine guns and assault rifles in Parasite Eve have very misleading x3 and x5 bullet modifiers. The total damage is actually divided among each bullet, and sometimes not all of them will hit. In a game of limited ammo, these are a liability. The actual ability that lets you perform two actions in one turn (allowing you to attack twice without having your power reduced) doesn't show up until very late in the game.
    • Weapons that have elemental modifiers are too situational to be of any use and you do less damage to enemies that resists certain effects. You are better off not using elemental effects at all.
    • Parasite Eve 2 has some pieces of armor that let you see how much HP a targeted enemy has left. The armor pieces that have this feature tend to have poor HP bonuses and have very few pockets to carry items in. Naturally, all bosses are immune to having their HP being scanned.
  • The World Ends with You rewards good relationships with store clerks by unlocking hidden abilities in the equipment you purchase from them. Unfortunately, Square Enix felt that some of these unlockable abilities were so "awesome" that they should come with drawbacks. One example is Platform Shoes, an expensive late-game item that can only be purchased from one store in all of Shibuya. It grants a sizable defense boost, but unlocking its ability causes even the weakest enemy attacks to knock you down. By this point in the game, most enemies Spam Attack unavoidable projectiles guaranteed to Stun Lock you while wearing the shoes. The game power-ups your expensive and rare equipment by making them suicidal to wear.
  • In the first Diablo, Mana Shield absorbs less damage at higher levels due to a bug. Also, leveling up Chain Lightning causes you to run into the sprite limit in one shot, causing disappearing lightning sprites and making it unreliable.
  • In Diablo II, regular Lightning is vastly better than Chain Lightning in all aspects, all of the necromancer spells except the direct damage line get worse as you go down the tree, putting too many points into Energy Shield causes you to run out of mana, and Cleanse gets worse at higher levels due to a bug again. Putting too many points into Evade causes you to stunlock yourself. For a while Zeal used to add more hits as you put more points into it, until it locked your character in place for about five seconds while flailing away at nearby monsters - and if the first attack misses, all of them miss. No lifesteal, no way to cancel out of it, you're dead. GG.
  • In The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, gaining access to the Master level spells of the Destruction school requires a lot of grinding, including through low levels where using spells as your main damage-dealer results in a much harder game, then finding and completing a special quest. When you finally get them, you find that they require two hands instead of one, take an insanely long casting time during which you're very likely to get interrupted by an enemy attack, and even if you do get one off, they do less damage for the magicka and less damage per second than lower-level spells, and since Destruction damage doesn't scale with level, Can't Catch Up to archery or swordplay. ...Congrats?
    • There is one exception in Lightning Storm, which sends out a sustained lightning bolt that does high damage over time for an acceptable magicka cost, with extreme range and hitscan speed that make it perfect for destroying enemies like dragons at long range. Compared to spamming the lower tier Lightning Bolt, it deals somewhat less damage for a whole lot less magicka... which makes it great up until the point when your character can achieve -100% magicka cost and the formerly prohibitively expensive Lightning Bolt trumps it. Unfortunately, for many characters the free casting comes before achieving the Master level destruction spells, relegating Lightning Storm to the same heap that Fire Storm and Blizzard reside in.
    • The reward for turning in the Skeleton Key in the Thieves Guild storyline. While the powers given in for turning in the key range from situational to very good, they can all only be activated once per day and require you to give up the only unbreakable lockpick in the game. The only reason to actually turn the key in would be because of the achievement/trophy, or because they have 100 Lockpicking and don't want to legendarynote  the skill.
    • The Disarm shout. The ability to knock your enemy's weapon out of their hand, then kill them with it or chuck it away with Telekinesis sounds useful until you discover that, even with all three words, it has no effect on anything stronger than a typical bandit.
  • In Alpha Protocol the first level stealth armour actually lowers your Sound Dampening rating compared to casual clothes. You need the second level to even get parity, and the third, highest tier in order to exceed what casual clothes offernote .
  • Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura has several backgrounds that give you free items or money. While this can potentially make early game easier, good equipment and funds aren't hard to acquire (even in the first town, if you're patient), so the initial "bonus" becomes useless almost immediately. You're better off with a background that improves your stats. The Niezsche Poster Child background gives you a percentage bonus to experience points in exchange for increasing your critical failure rate. What Could Possibly Go Wrong? For starters, unless you patch the game to remove the Absurdly Low Level Cap, it's easy enough to run out of character points halfway through even without it, especially on lower difficulty settings. Critical failures, on the other hand, have a tendency to damage or destroy your weapons, or inflict various injuries on you. The only character types who would want this background are pure talkers who never fight (and who are thus neither making hits nor receive the extra experience from hitting enemies), and even then it's more efficient for such characters to take a background that boosts Charisma.
  • In Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, certain party members can become Jedi through interactions with them. Almost everyone ends up worse off for it. Unless you know the specific interactions that allow you to train them as Jedi and know how to milk as much Influence as you can, party members will become Jedi quite late in the game, leading to them never developing enough Force Points to be useful. Becoming a Jedi allows causes a character to lose out on the feats they'd naturally gain from their base class, and often the Jedi class synchronizes poorly with the base class.
    • Atton loses out on Sneak Attack, which lets him do massive damage to unaware or stunned enemies (which Sniper Shot or the Player Character's Force powers are easily capable of handling. He also gets fewer skill points, and his Scoundrel class already provides an identical Defense boost to Jedi classes' Force Sense.
    • Mira doesn't get the automatic feats that drastically improve her damage and accuracy with blaster pistols (to the point where she can gun down Jedi with ease). Precise Shot can be purchased later; Targeting cannot.
    • The Handmaiden loses out on her feats that improve her unarmed damage. Even though the Jedi classes get the Unarmed Specialist feats themselves, unlocking higher tiers of the feats are based on their Jedi class level rather than total level, stunting her unarmed damage growth.
    • The Disciple doesn't lose out on any free feats... but his stats as a Soldier translate very poorly into the Jedi Consular he becomes.
    • Bao-Dur gets hit the hardest. On top of losing his unarmed feats like the Handmaiden, Bao-Dur's electric arm prevents him from using any armor that doesn't inhibit Force powers, other than the +1 Defense Miner Uniform obtained at the beginning of the game. He also becomes a Jedi Guardian, which completely ruins his exceptional skill growth.
  • Undertale pulls this on purpose with the Real Knife, an Infinity +1 Sword with 99 damage, and the locket which gives 99 defense, found only at the end of a No Mercy run. (The next-best armor in the game, the Temmie Armor, provides +25 defense, and most others provide less than half that). In the end, the real knife is no better than any other weapon in the game, because the only fight left at that point dodges every single attack you throw at it until it ultimately dies in one hit like most every other enemy you've encountered. Likewise, the locket is useless in the final battle as the final boss only deals one damage per attack (the twist being that the final boss has the unique ability to attack up to 30 times per second compared to your 92 maximum HP), and no matter how high your defense is, an attack can't be reduced below that. That awesome equipment has exactly the same effect as if you fought that enemy naked. Hope being a genocidal psychopath was worth having some higher stats just for their own sake.
  • Baldur's Gate II:
    • Before the final confrontation with the Big Bad in Shadows of Amn, you get immunity to +1 weapons and non-magical weapons. Which is completely useless because you are not going to meet anyone with such weak weapons in the upcoming battle. Even in the expansion Throne of Bhaal, disposable mooks have at least +2 weapons.
    • Some High Level Abilities are basically useless. For example, mages can learn to write some minor scrolls which by now won't add anything to your spell thesaurus, and you can't even profit from selling because by the time you can learn to do this you're swimming in money and already packaged with overpowered gear found while questing.
    • The personal questline of Dorn in the Enhanced Edition will ultimately earn you a powerful two-handed sword that has additional damage against devils or demons, depending on your choices. With a bit of cleverness, you can get an ultimate version that has both bonuses. Unfortunately, this requires Dorn to lose his blackguard status, with all its inherent special abilities and powers which are more useful.
    • The final upgrade of the Flail of Ages turns it into a powerful +5 weapon with additional elemental damage... and applies the Free Action status effect to the wielder. While in early game it would have proven useful against enemies that can stun or cast Hold, by the time you get the ultimate Flail of Ages you won't have such problems anymore, while Free Action also prevents you from applying useful spells like Haste as well. Many players avoid upgrading the weapon because Haste is so important against final bosses and elite mooks that it can't be renounced (this is a bug introduced with the Enhanced Edition, the original game doesn't have this issue). On top of this, the Enhanced Edition adds another problem: thanks to a bug in the coding, if an enemy is immune to one of any of the five types of elemental damage that the Flail of Ages inflicts when fully upgraded, it becomes immune to all the flail's elemental damage. Given that the final damage type added is Poison, which something like half the enemies in the game are immune to, this is a huge penalty that will cost you a significant portion of the weapons damage.
  • Dragon Age: All games in the series have potions that provide temporary buffs like increased melee damage or granting resistance to elemental attacks. Unfortunately, all of them have extremely short durations, making them generally useless.
  • In the downloadable 3DS title Witch & Hero 2, you unlock the witch's two magic attacks from the first game as you play and can upgrade her magic. Leveling up her spells generally makes her attacks stronger, shoot more frequently, and fire more projectiles in one wave. Storm's fire rate gets lowered to slightly above what it previously was each five levels it gets while adding one more projectile. However, at level 20, it permanently goes back down to two projectiles while not really improving in damage, and its max level fire rate is the same as it was at first level, turning it from arguably the best spell in the game to the worst spell in the game.
  • In Dark Souls, if you accomplish the very difficult feat of killing the tutorial boss before you get your starting equipmentnote , you are rewarded with his awesome looking giant hammer. It is very powerful, yes, but its Strength requirement is so ridiculously high that when you finally have enough to use the damn thing, the big log that was just lying on the ground in the swamp — which requires 18 less Strength to use and is 10 pounds lighter in a game where equipment weight matters a lot — will actually do slightly more damage than it because of its superior scaling (assuming both are upgraded to the same level).
  • In addition to a lot of Joke Items in EarthBound (1994), it also has a couple of these:
    • The bicycle that you can acquire in Twoson is free and speeds you up greatly. Too bad it can only be used when you are by yourself. By this point in the game you are about 45 minutes away from recruiting Paula, who will be a permanent party member, and getting through this particularly difficult portion of the game will require the Teddy Bear item to absorb some damage... which counts as a party member and thus prevents you from using the bicycle. Basically you'll get to putt around Twoson just about long enough to get to like the bike, and then it will be nothing more than a useless wasted slot in your limited inventory space.
    • The Bag Of Dragonite tends to be only moderately useful at best and outright dangerous at worst, despite the game treating it as such a valuable Too Awesome to Use item. It's a one-time-use attack item that not only has a chance of only doing minor damage (as low as 100 HP) but also has a chance of killing one of your own party members, and even its highest damage output is nothing one or two PSI attacks can't accomplish. For one final nail in the coffin it's not even effective at all on the Final Boss.
  • Mass Effect has the high explosive weapon upgrade, which basically makes guns into rocket launchers. The problem is that they also instantly overheat your weapons, making them useless for a few seconds. That, combined with the fact that the game has plenty of grenades, makes high explosives fairly useless. It still works well with the shotgun; explosive rounds and a few other upgrades give it an absolutely monstrous knock-back effect, without increasing the cooldown time beyond the maximum. Since it takes longer for your victim to stand up than it takes for your Über-shotgun to cool down... It's also devastating with the sniper rifle, which very nearly overheats after every shot anyway.
  • Cyberpunk 2077 has the Dagger Dealer perk, which lets you throw knives. Sounds cool, except that a) knives are not disposable throwaway items, and any knife worth using as a weapon is going to be as expensive as any other weapon, b) throwing a knife destroys it; you can't retrieve it once it's been used in this fashion, so you might as well be throwing thousands of burning Eurodollars at your enemy, c) even throwing lots of cheap knives at your opponent requires you to open your inventory and manually reequip a knife between each throw, and d) even if you don't plan on using the skill regularly, it makes it impossible to block in combat with your knife, since the "aim knife" button replaces the block button. Not to mention the intended benefit of a silent ranged kill is filled much better in its niche by a gun with a Hollywood Silencer.
  • Fable:
    • The Lightning augmentation is a downplayed example. Most of the game’s tougher enemies are not vulnerable to lightning damage (some are even resistant to it!) except guards, which good heroes will rarely have to fight.
    • The Guile skill increases stealth, reduces store prices, and increases how much stores will pay you for goods. Unfortunately, the game has Useless Useful Stealth and the quantity of goods at shops is far more important for determining prices.
  • Klonoa Heroes: Densetsu no Star Medal: Guntz talks big about the gun that lets him use his first super move, but while said attack should hit a lot more times than Klonoa's 3-hit tornado attack, the bullets cannot be aimed, don't hit near him and don't even seem to be properly assigned as yellow attacks in the first place. To highlight how useless it is, Pango has the same random super except his thrown bombs collide with edges of terrain to actually blast cornered enemies a dozen times.

    Run and Gun 
  • Fester's Quest for the NES:
    • You play as Uncle Fester using various guns to kill invading aliens. If you can get past that premise, you discover your initial weapon is nearly useless and only serves to kill the odd enemy to get a power-up for a better one (which moves in waves, meaning it can pass by enemies and get blocked by obstacles). The second power-up gives you the third gun, which is bowling balls being shot in a spiral pattern (again it can miss enemies and be blocked), but at least it's stronger. The problem here is that you can still pick up power-ups that downgrade your gun into near uselessness!
    • The third gun is useless in many situations as well, considering its wide firing pattern and inability to pass through walls. In narrow corridors, you become unable to hit enemies at all, even at close range!
  • Certain games in Metal Slug series have guns that are counterproductive to fighting whatever boss happened after you pick up those guns. Case in point: the Drop Shot and Iron Lizard, which fire bouncing metal balls and remote-controlled bombs that travel along the ground respectively. Both are useless against airborne enemies.
  • Contra:
    • The "flamethrower" in the original might as well be a Poison Mushroom. It shoots "fireballs" that travel in a spiral pattern at a hideously slow rate across the screen, have a similarly slow rate of fire, and difficult to make accurate hits with and very easily to be blocked by obstructions. It's the one weapon in the game where it's better to keep your Boring, but Practical loadout gun.
      • The Laser Gun in the NES versions of both the above and the sequel (Super Contra) can't be fired rapidly. A second shot will cancel the first beam if it's still on-screen. While it's destructive and pierces through most enemies, players who keep spamming the shoot button will find the weapon useless.
    • In the arcade version of Super Contra, the Spread Gun is already disappointing compared to other games: normally, if firing another spread would overflow the maximum number of bullets on-screen, the gun will fire partial spreads or single shots instead. However, the Spread Gun in Super Contra only fires full spreads, and if it can't, you can't fire at all until a previous spread has completely cleared the screen. In addition to that, the Spread Gun "upgrade" makes it even worse — it increases the number of shots per spread from 3 to 5 and the number of bullets on-screen from 9 to 10, which means a drop from 3 spreads on-screen to 2. Thus, your effective firing rate becomes abominably low, which, in Contra, is likely to get you killed.
    • Contra Returns changes the power-up system, so instead of a type of weapon like Laser or Spread Gun, you are given a random purple or gold weapon with limited ammo. While this beneficial when you're just starting off and have the C grade Assault Rifle, most people can earn purple and gold weapons quite quickly, so picking up a weapon drop often leads to getting a weaker weapon than what you carry.

    Shoot 'em Up 
  • Battle Garegga: Anything that could be considered an upgrade to your ship will turn up the Dynamic Difficulty. Thus, in order to keep the game manageable, you'll need to keep your shot power and option count down. This is mainly true of the early stages, for the last one or two stages, you'll need all the firepower you can get. That and small power ups raise it more than big ones.
  • Danmaku Amanojaku ~ Impossible Spell Card: Using the Yin-Yang Orb as a sub-item supposedly decreases the size of your hitbox, which should be pretty useful in a Bullet Hell game. Unfortunately, it's somehow bugged in a way that makes it only work on lasers, which makes it completely useless against most of the attacks in the game. Even most of the attacks that do feature lasers tend to be more reflex-based than precision-based, so the orb a poor choice against them too.
  • The laser in Darius is like this. After you power up your regular shots, you get the laser... which is worse than regular shots because it's so narrow. Worse yet, you have to get the laser because powering it up will give you the legitimately good wave weapon. Later games in the series changed this, sometimes making the equivalent of the laser actually useful. And if you die? You'll lose upwards of six powerups! "Okay, I almost have the laser! What? A huge battleship "Fatty Glutton" is approaching fast? Nooooooooo!"
  • Gradius: the speed-up powerup is useful for the first few iterations, making your slow-as-molasses ship move more like a starfighter should. However, the last few levels make the ship fairly difficult to control, especially for new players. This is a hazard because everything, environment included, is trying to kill you. note 
    • Gradius ReBirth's hidden Type E configuration allows you to get the V. Shot which grants you the ability to fire simultaneously up and down...at the cost of being able to fire forward. It also has the Vector Laser, which can pierce through structures, but it's weaker than the main shot, and can't destroy combustible walls, which means if you get trapped by Stage 2's regenerating walls or go into a bonus stage, you're screwed. Double is this in most games up to Gaiden, because selecting it halves your fire rate.
    • About half the Edit Mode weapons in Gradius III AC, such as the hard-to-control Control Missile, the completely worthless Spread Gun, and a ! powerup that resets your primary weapon to the normal pea-shooter.
  • Some of the Raiden games have the Plasma Laser, which locks onto enemies, but does less damage than the spreadshot and regular laser.
    • Raiden Fighters has a special Slave formation that causes your Slaves to automatically seek out enemies and latch onto them, allowing them to be easily destroyed. But unlike other Shoot Em Ups, Attack Drones in this game have limited health (too many hits to a drone and it's destroyed). Not just that, but on some stages, they can destroy targets you don't want to destroy, such as the Miclus-hiding turrets in Raiden Fighters Jet Simulation Level 05.
  • In Power Strike II, Spin Shields come in three different color-coded varieties that augment your main shot: Red makes it more powerful, blue allows it to pierce through enemies, and yellow makes each bullet slightly wider (but not enough to make a real difference). Once you have two Spin Shields, getting a new one will overwrite the older shield. While having two yellow Spin Shields is better than none, and Spin Shields have finite durability, it can be irritating to finally get a red+blue combo...only for those shields to turn yellow either because you mistimed grabbing a cycling Spin Shield pickup or because you didn't have enough room to safely dodge a yellow pickup.
  • In Sigma Star Saga, you can customize your cannon with different styles of firing, bullets, and effects on impact. There are multiple cannons (firing directions) which are basically devoted to firing only vertically, only backwards, etcetera. Usually, they all have one use somewhere, like in a mini-boss battle, but with these kinds of battles being random battles, you're usually best off with just your good old "Shoot Straight" cannon.
  • Sylphia grants your titular character Elemental Powers based on fire, water, plant and earth, and occasionally the last one can fall into this trope. The Earth Power-up fires slow-moving boulder projectiles that couldn't even hit the other side of the screen (while every other element can hit the other side immediately), instantly drops down moments after being shot and isn't even as strong as the Fire power-up, which is the first obtainable element. Although it is good for attacking enemies behind Sylphia, and a good defense-based power-up thanks to the Orbiting Particle Shield.
  • In 10tons's Tesla vs Lovecraft, there are 6 Epic Perks. 4 of these are amazing, but Tesla's Death Ray and the Theseus Paradox have issues. The Death Ray gets you a powerful energy whip which is amazing in the early stages of the game when there's only a limited selection of weapons and perks. Unfortunately the Death Ray cannot be improved by any method and if you get it, you can't pick up any weapon after that so you're stuck with it. With Theseus Paradox, Tesla will make a clone of himself after each teleportation, up to 3 clones at a time. The clones will automatically fire at enemies like a sentry turret. Unfortunately your clones are only armed with the lacklustre Tommy Gun, so they do awful damage. Additionally the clones can't take much damage before dying and even if they aren't attacked there's only a limited duration for a clone.
  • Tyrian has the odd property that if you boost the power of your main weapon above what your reactor can sustain, your firing rate drops to near-zero. Thus, until you get the best reactor in the game, you're better off not fully leveling all your weapons. Furthermore, the game contains a few "powerups" in arcade mode that turn your main weapon into something that doesn't shoot forward anymore (highly impractical) and one in story mode that turns your weapon into a hot dog. The hot dog, however, is actually a badass weapon.
    • In story mode, the game occasionally drops unbuyable special weapons. Just pray that you don't accidentally pick up one after you get the SDF Main Gun, making for a downgrade from arguably the strongest weapon in the game.
  • Zanac: the shield powerup causes the Dynamic Difficulty to go batshit.
  • Heavy Weapon has your first level of Spread Shot. This changes your shot into a double shot, which makes aiming somewhat weird because you will not have a shot that goes straight. Not that big of a problem until the third level where you fight trucks, and aiming your gun directly at them will cause your shots to hit the ground if you are too far away.
  • In Adventures of Dino Riki, one of the power-ups transforms Dino Riki into Macho Riki, which lets him shoots psychic projections of himself at enemies and take a hit without losing health. Unfortunately, the fact that Dino Riki reverts back to using throwing rocks after getting hit and the fact that the fireball weapon is much, MUCH better make this power-up more trouble than it's worth.
  • Fire Shark has the common blue and green powerups. Once you get the rare red powerup (deadly flamethrowers that sweep the whole screen), these will replace it with the blue Spread Shot or the green wave laser (decent, but pale in comparison to the flamethrower). Worse still, once these powerups appear on screen, they will bounce all over the place a few times before disappearing. Which means you will want to avoid them along with the fast-moving enemy bullets!
  • Once you get the L (Orange laser) powerup in Soulstar for the Sega CD, avoid the C (circle laser) powerup at all costs. The circle laser has a faster rate of fire, but is very weak. Using it in the exploration levels is suicidal.
  • In Enigmata 2: Genu's Revenge, there are "rare" bonus weapons that can be upgraded to superweapons by collecting one of the three "common" bonus weapons. Of course, if you get it then touch another bonus weapon powerup, it gets overridden. Thankfully, this is one of the very few Shoot Em Ups that actually has a way to subvert the trope- a specific skill (Bonus Lock) prevents your bonus weapon from changing when the skill is turned on.
  • Eschatos on Advanced mode causes your shot power level and multiplier to drop by one each every time you pick up one of the "F" items, which clear the screen of enemies, making them a liability whether you're playing for score (because of the multiplier) or survival (your shield capacity increases, but less firepower makes enemies take longer to kill). This wouldn't be a problem if the "F" items could be stocked up for later use instead of being triggered immediately.
  • The old Asteroids clone Asterax has its unique selling point be that you can buy boosts to improve your ship, giving it stronger weapons, better shields, or increased speed. But because of just how that game works, the most reliable strategy most of the time is to only move your ship when you absolutely need to. It's difficult to aim your shots if you're on the move, and the ship's momentum means that getting it to come to a dead stop is a bit tricky, meaning moving too often will usually result into you careening into an obstacle. Increasing your speed just makes the controls even more slippery. Consequently, this also means that the Crab, the Mighty Glacier ship, is really the only one worth using.
  • The Void Rains Upon Her Heart has the Bloody Nails gift, which automatically uses a panic if you would get hit. This has some obvious benefits, but it also has the problem of being anti-synergistic with numerous gifts that encourage you to get hit instead of using panics.

    Simulation Game 
  • Slime Rancher has a lot of crafting options. Some are cool, some are merely decorative, and then there are these:
    • The Chicken Cloner, which is capable of duplicating any adult chicken you shoot into it. The problem is it only has a 50% success rate, and if it fails it just destroys the chicken. In other words, on average, you walk away with the same number of chickens you put into the bloody thing, so it's just not worth using: if you need extra chickens you're better off gathering them up elsewhere rather than risking the ones you have in this thing. Not to mention, it costs a hefty number of resources to produce, including the uncommon hexacomb (which you're much better off using to build drones) and strange diamonds (which you're better off using on warp tech).
    • The Med Station. On paper it's fine, a pad that restores health when standing on it. In practice it's largely useless as your health replenishes on its own so fast there's really no need for it and so few slimes are aggressive it's practically unheard of to not be able to just run away or retreat to safety. Also, it's not free: it drains energy so it can't even restore you to full health in a pinch but only up to 250 HP, and if you have full energy you are far better off using it to haul ass to safety rather than on slightly faster health restoration. Also, it's not convenient: you can't just carry one with you to build for use in a pinch since it has a two in-game hour cooldown after being placed before it can even be used. Finally, the one place it would be useful, The Wilds where every slime is an aggressive Feral Largo, is a location where you can't even place utilites like the Med Station in the first place. Even if you decide it would be useful to place one in farming areas where Tarr like to appear, like the Overgrowth near all the Honey Slimes or the areas where Phosphor Slimes spawn at night, you would be much better off just building a Hydro Turret to help you fight them rather than a Med Station to heal your injuries.

    Stealth-Based Games 
  • The Hitman World of Assassination Trilogy has a wide variety of unlockable guns. Unfortunately, most of them pale in comparison to the default ICA19 pistol (and its many reskins). The sniper rifles are quite useful, but the shotguns, SMGs, and assault rifles fall behind for a number of reasons. They're very loud, most of them can't be concealed, and they're only legal to carry while wearing specific disguises. Even the extra damage of the bigger guns doesn't help much because the default pistol is capable of one-hit-kill headshots anyway. As a result, they're really only useful if you're going loud or attempting a "Kill Everyone" challenge, and even then you're better off using your loadout slots for something else because the same weapons can easily be taken from fallen guards.
  • In Splinter Cell: Double Agent for the Nintendo GameCube, it's possible to get a wood-carving knife in the prison level that enables you to use lethal attacks. However, due to a programming bug, Sam uses lethal attacks just fine without it; he quite literally stabs and slashes with his balled-up fist and can kill enemies by doing so. Once you have the knife there is no getting rid of it, and since it's metal, it prevents you from passing through metal detectors without triggering an alarm.
  • Played with in most of the Metal Gear Solid games with the cigarettes. Smoking them drains your health, but allows you to see infrared lasers so you know how to bypass them. You typically get the thermal goggles fairly early, quickly making cigarettes useless. However they tend to be fairly useful if you know how and when to use them:
  • Starting with Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, they began dumping loads and loads of weapons on the player (as opposed to the "one of each kind" mentality previous games used). Sad to say, most of these weapons you will never end up using as you typically get your hands on the Penultimate Weapon for Snake fairly early that you will become comfortable with using, and everything else you get simply won't be as effective, too clumsy to use, or just not worth mastering to begin with. If nothing else the developers anticipated this, and also started the Backpack mechanic in this game: weapons and items you don't intend to use can be stashed away, leaving your inventory far less cluttered and allowing for you to quickly cycle through items you do use.
  • Every weapon carried by an enemy in Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes is less effective than your starting load-out. The only reason you would ever want an enemy's weapon is out of desperation if you were out of ammo in the middle of a gunfight. It was done intentionally to show what goodies Snake and Mother Base could get their hands on, but came as something of a letdown as it was the first game in the series that averted Unusable Enemy Equipment.

    Strategy Games 
  • In The Battle for Middle-earth II, various evil factions can learn the ability Untamed Allegiance, which lets them take over the spawn points of the map's local Neutrals, Critters, and Creeps. This sounds cool, but it's extremely map-dependent—a lot of maps don't have creeps at all, and many of the ones that do only have weak ones like Goblins or Spiderlings, or have the spawn point in a really impractical place. And even in the case of the relatively strong ones, like Cave Trolls and Fire Drakes, the price to buy them is way too high for their underwhelming effectiveness—not helped by the fact that you have to spawn them in one at a time. Also, it means you can't use them for farming XP and gold.
  • Dawn of War:
    • Dreadnoughts can be upgraded with a heavy shotgun barrel that looks awesome and does a decent amount of damage. However, they can effectively use it only at range, while dreadnoughts actually shine in melee, and they now have one less arm for close combat engagement. Most players won't upgrade and let their friendly walker go on a rampage.
    • In the Dark Crusade campaign, a few wargear upgrades - most notably Eliphas ascending to Daemonhood - actually reduce power compared to the earlier version. In that case, it's not so much because the Daemon Prince is bad; it's just that a fully-equipped Eliphas is so strong that turning him into a Purposefully Overpowered endgame unit actually sets him back.
    • In Soulstorm, one upgrade of the Sisters of Battle allows Immolator flame tanks to spread flames around them in a circle. Most of the times this power is Cool, but Inefficient, and for those occasions where it is actually useful, it's way cheaper and quicker to just equip some Battle Sister Squads with flamethrowers (note that this point applies to the standard flame attack of the Immolator too: basically you'd buy this tank mostly for the melta upgrade that turns the primary attack into anti-tank, if you need it).
  • Dawn of War II:
    • In Last Stand mode advancing your characters can be problematic. Your Space Marine Captain just got Fearsome Shout! Hurray! Now do you want to give up your jump-pack, 75 hit-points or your only close combat ability for it? The Ork Mekboy's Deffgun is even worse... how about a gun that actually kills enemies instead of just suppressing them?
    • The terminator armor is awesome, but if you equip Thaddeus with it, you have to renounce to his powerful jump pack which can deal a lot of damage and is more versatile, allowing to quickly cover terrain, capture special buildings without alerting garrisons, knock down groups of enemies, do a blitzkrieg. It is better to give that armor to Tarkus instead.
    • All Cyrus' weapon upgrades that are not his sniper rifle are less powerful, less versatile, and more risky.
  • Final Fantasy Tactics Advance/A2 boast the Last Berserk/Crit:Berserk ability. Equipping makes the equipped unit lose control and attack enemies randomly, with only a slightly greater attack, when it has low Hit Points, which is basically the opposite of what you'd want. Equipping no ability is better than equipping Last Berserk.
    • The passive ability Doublehand lets you sacrifice using a shield or two-handed weapons to increase attack power by... 8 points. In a game where the unarmed cap for attack is 249, and the average unit gains that much attack in four levels. To make it even worse, the Attack Up ability, which has no cost beyond using up that ability's slot, raises attack by 35.
  • Fire Emblem:
    • In games which use Constitution, units almost always get a boost to it upon promoting. This is great for most units since it lets them wield heavier weapons without getting slowed down, but in the case of Warriors, Berserkers, or Generals, which tend to have high Constitution anyway, it often makes them so heavy that no mounted unit in the game can carry them.
    • If you max out your defense, enemies fail to do any damage to you. In most games, this is great... but in certain ones, it will cause the enemy to avoid attacking the high-defense character, either ignoring them to pursue weaker targets or simply surrounding them until they can find easier prey. This is problematic, because easily the best way to take out a large number of weak enemies is to lure them into attacking a target that can kill them in one round; if they aren't attacking you, then that means the only recourse is to pick them off one at a time.
    • Miranda in Fire Emblem: Thracia 776 promotes into the Mage Knight class, which provides her with a mount and sword use. In any other game, this would be great—but Thracia is the only game where being mounted has a significant downside, namely the need for mounted characters to dismount and reduce their movement indoors. This means that if you have her promote to Mage Knight and then dismount, she actually loses mobility compared to her unpromoted self—and most of the remaining maps are indoors anyway. Oh, and usually her Strength is so crappy that sword skills are 100% meaningless.
    • Hector's promotion to Great Lord in Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade is by far the worst of the three promotions. He does gain a lot of Speed and Resistance, which is helpful for a character with his slow-but-strong stat layout, but gaining the use of swords doesn't help him at all—he hits harder with axes, there aren't any swords he cares about using, and the advantages of accuracy and weapon triangle are negligible at that point. What's more, he's also the only one of the three Lords (and one of the few characters, period) who doesn't gain Movement on promotion, which leaves him stuck at his sluggish 5 Movement when nearly everyone else should have at least 6 and often as high as 8 or 10. And compounding this further is that the promotion also raises his Constitution: though this does mean he isn't slowed down by any axe except Armads, it also means that only three promoted units in the game can carry him, which will make him largely immobile... which is problematic for a character who has to be trundling his way to certain objectives and seize points. And on top of all that, it also makes him an armored unit, giving him a weakness to anti-armor weapons he didn't have before.
    • About half of the promoted class skills in Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones suffer from this.
      • General gains the skill Great Shield, which provides a percentage chance based on enemy level to negate the damage from one attack. Thing is, since it's based on enemy level and maxes out at 20%, most of the enemies to trigger it are unpromoted (and so don't do any real damage to a Mighty Glacier General anyway), and it's not reliable enough to be counted on against the enemies that would threaten a General.
      • Sniper gains the skill Sure Strike, which adds a percentage chance based on your level for an attack to always hit. Except both of the game's main archery units have really high Skill and bows have good hit rates to begin with, so chances are they already had 100% hit on most enemies. And even if they didn't, a guaranteed hit isn't very impressive if it only happens 20% of the time. Not to mention to gain Sure Strike, Neimi needs to pick Sniper instead of Ranger, which offers the much more useful advantages of a mount and sword use.
      • The Lethality skill of Assassin will instantly kill an enemy 50% of the time if the character crits. Nifty—except if a raised Assassin got a crit, chances are they just killed the enemy anyway. Oh, and it doesn't work on bosses. Not to mention Thieves trying to break into the class have to give up on stealing, while Myrmidons miss out on the crit boost from Swordmaster.
      • On the other end of the spectrum for Thieves, Rogues gain Pick, letting them open doors and chests without needing a lockpick. Unless you obsessively open every door and chest, never steal any lockpicks from other Thieves, and never buy chest keys, you will never be at risk of running out of lockpick uses. At least you can still steal as a Rogue.
      • Most promotion paths cause a character to gain movement, and promoting a character from Knight to Great Knight does provide a pretty impressive boost from 4 to 6. However, you can also promote Cavaliers, which start with 7 movement, into Great Knights. This reduces their movement, which effectively nullifies the whole point of being a Cavalier in the first place, not to mention making them much more susceptible to terrain. Hope being able to use Iron Axes was worth it.
    • Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance:
      • Kieran's Gamble ability. It halves his accuracy and doubles his critical-hit chance, but he's already somewhat inaccurate and his crit chance is terrible (so doubling it will do almost nothing). Much better in the hands of a sniper.
      • Ilyana's Shade skill (causes enemies to think of her as if she can counter them and has a Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors advantage, which means she is placed lower in their targeting priority) certainly sounds like it'd be helpful on a frail Squishy Wizard. The thing is, as a mage, Ilyana can already counter the vast majority of enemies, and therefore already occupies a low slot in the targeting priority unless the enemy is convinced it can kill her, which will override Shade. Shinon's Provoke, which has the reverse effect, is similarly not that helpful; he's a sniper who can't counter melee attacks, so enemies already love targeting him.
      • Mia's Vantage skill allows her to strike enemies first when they attack her. This skill is amazing if you have the attacking power to kill the enemy on that first hit, and incidental otherwise. Mia is a sword-user (weakest weapon type) with unimpressive Strength, meaning she tends to struggle with one-shotting enemies while critting them.
      • Corrosion is also pretty useless. It has a chance equal to the user's skill to weaken the target's weapon durability by the user's level divided by 4. This means that on a 20/20 character, Corrosion can take off 10 points of durability... when most weapons have at least 20. The odds that you'll get enough Corrosion procs to actually break an enemy's weapon before you kill them is pitifully low, and if you do manage it... Well, assuming they aren't carrying a second weapon, you've just disabled a single enemy in a much less practical way than killing them would have been. Worse, Corrosion can potentially proc on droppable rare weapons like the Rune Sword, lowering the number of uses the player can get get out of them.
      • The Parity skill negates all support, terrain, and skill bonuses in combat... on both sides. Support bonuses are exclusive to the player, terrain bonuses are almost completely insignificant in this game (particularly once Parity is available), and enemies with combat skills are vanishingly rare (and Nihil also blocks those skills while letting you keep your own), so 98% of the time, the skill either does little to nothing, or deactivates your advantages while doing nothing to the enemy. Radiant Dawn made it better by adding considerably more enemies with strong skills and significant terrain bonuses, and tweaking it to only activate when you want it to, effectively turning it into a poor man's Nihil.
      • Every class has its own "mastery skill" that requires an Occult Scroll to learn. Scrolls that are in very limited supply, and some of these skills are just not worth it. The Sniper mastery skill Deadeye is the biggest offender: a Skill/2% chance of doubling accuracy, which is useless since Snipers almost never miss anyway, and half that chance again to put the enemy to sleep. Even though Sleep can be useful sometimes, it's not worth it with that low of a chance. Almost as bad are Roar, which gives up the unit's move to immobilize an enemy for 2 turns... except most bosses are immune, and Vortex, which allows the unit to use a pathetically weak 1-2 range Wind Magic attack... and the only person who gets it is an 11th-Hour Superpower capable to tearing most enemies to shreds physically anyway.
      • The Renewal skill scroll also counts. Restoring 10% of your max HP every turn isn't all that great to begin with, but the worst part is you can only get it by refusing Reyson's offer to join you. Reyson is an extremely useful ally capable of letting up to 4 characters move twice in one turn, and refusing him means you also lose Janaff and Ulki, two decently powerful Crutch Characters... and there's a super-powerful enemy in the next chapter who can only be convinced to retreat if you have Reyson. And in the Japanese version, it was even worse, as it only worked on Elincia and Ena, two characters who already had Renewal to begin with.
    • In Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon, the two Sword of Plot Advancement items, Falchion and Starlight, both fall into this. To obtain Starlight requires you to sacrifice the Starsphere and the Lightsphere, two powerful and versatile held items that can be used by just about anyone—one negates the game's Breakable Weapons mechanic, letting you spam powerful and expensive weapons that are otherwise only limited by use, while the other negates enemy terrain advantages, making it great for bypassing the throne or gate defenses of bosses. So what do you get in return? Well, Starlight has the same damage and accuracy as existing tomes like Thoron and Excalibur, a paltry fourteen uses, and its only unique trait is being able to damage one specific boss who's otherwise invincible, Gharnef—who, on top of that, is a Skippable Boss. So why fight him? Well, defeating Gharnef is how one obtains Falchion—and Falchion is even worse. It's locked to Marth, who is a pretty subpar fighter to begin with, and it has the same damage as a common Silver Sword. It does effective damage to dragon enemies, including the final boss, but a forged Wyrmslayer or Dragonpike does a much better job of bringing down common dragons and can be used by just about anyone at that point, and on higher difficulties, attempting to kill Medeus with Marth is more or less suicidal. (This is notably different than in earlier games, where Marth could ably take on Medeus with the Falchion in hand.)
    • Upon obtaining the Binding Shield in Fire Emblem: Mystery of the Emblem, you lose access to the four Spheres you've collected, which all have their own unique and useful properties: the Starsphere's statboosts, the Geosphere's critboost aura, the Lifesphere's passive healing, and the Lightsphere's terrain-ignoring. In return, you get the Binding Shield, an item which certainly sounds amazing—it instantly kills all Earth Dragons on the map at the start of every turn, and Earth Dragons are the most powerful enemies in the game, with similar stats to the Final Boss of the first campaign. The thing is, you only really fight Earth Dragons in the final chapter, and since the Shield instakills them when you start your turn, they're at best part of the map's gimmick and at worst a nonissue, and it's not too hard to kill the Final Boss before the Earth Dragons can even get any attacks in. It's not quite useless, but as it's supposed to be the combined form of all the Spheres (along with the villain-exclusive Darksphere and its invincibility), it's still rather disappointing that it doesn't inherit any of their abilities. The remake puts a band-aid on the Binding Shield by letting it give the same all-around statboost the Starsphere gave, which helps out Marth quite a bit—though it's still a bit of a downgrade, as it effectively locks the item to Marth.
    • In Fire Emblem Engage, upgrading Leif's bond level past 9 causes him to obtain the Master Lance—which is downright godawful on a lot of units thanks to its lackluster accuracy, low might, and extreme weight not compensating for its ability to automatically double. By itself, this isn't too problematic—just don't use the weapon—except that Leif's signature gimmick is Adaptability, which causes a unit Engaged with him to automatically switch to the "most favorable" weapon when attacked. This can result in him auto-switching to the Master Lance against a sword-wielding enemy to try to get a Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors boost... ignoring everything else about the Master Lance, and resulting in the unit in question suddenly being handed a weapon with the offensive power of a rubber chicken and the weight of a truck. Because of this, many players will actively recommend trying to make sure Leif doesn't hit bond level 10.
  • Summon Night: Swordcraft Story 2 introduces a fishing game. The top prize at 1500 points is a Luxury Fishing Rod which... lets you catch slightly better fish, including the best fish. If you've been painstakingly grinding for 5 hours, accumulating 30-40 points per go, hoping for a Disc-One Nuke, it's a complete letdown.
  • Heroes of Might and Magic 3 has several skills that are mind-bogglingly bad, at least compared to other skills in the game. Note the existence of the Witch Hut, which teaches a skill for free, chosen at random. Even worse are the Scholars, because while a Witch Hut can be checked for its usefulness by sending in an expandable hero, the Scholar disappears after use. Many a Load Game is used upon visiting one to find one of the following:
    • Learning increases the rate at which you gain experience. In other words, it's a skill you get while levelling up that makes you level up faster. Possibly viable, if it weren't for its atrocious scaling, which means you'll gain maybe one additional level throughout your hero's entire career for the three levels you spent training in this skill. A few mods increase the usefulness of Learning by giving a hero who has it free experience out of combat and even allowing them to learn new spells at random.
    • Eagle Eye gives your hero a chance to learn a spell cast by the opponent's hero in combat. Yes, you might get lucky and steal an opponent's Blind spell, but things like Expert Earth magic and Prayer+Expert Water Magic just pale in comparison. Plus, you can't steal level 5 spells even on expert level, which are much harder to come by, and much more valuable to steal.
    • Scouting increases the hero's line of sight. It's not bad to dispel the Fog of War, but again not exactly as useful as most other skills.
    • Navigation increases your movement speed over water. Very useful on water-based maps, completely useless on land-based maps.
    • Mysticism is atrocious. At maximum level, it allows a hero to regenerate a whopping 4 spell points per day... in a game where the mana total of a hero that relies on spellcasting usually reaches the hundreds. Many mods make Mysticism replenish a percent-based value to increase its usefulness.
  • A few ships in KanColle suffer from this, mainly by trading their increased resupply/repair resource requirements to a comparatively small boost in stats; Some even have a decreased luck stat, which is important for dealing critical damage.
  • Skeletal Mastery in Warcraft III, depending on your preferred strategy. Without it, necromancers raise two melee skeletons from a corpse, useful for raising large amounts of Cannon Fodder to get in the enemy's way. With it, one skeleton is a Squishy Wizard that can attack air, but far less durable. Seeing as the basic Undead ranged unit has the ability to immobilize air units and bring them down to earth anyway...
    • There is an option to reveal the entire map for all players during the game, which makes the Night Elves' Ultravision useless.
    • The Vorpal Glaives upgrade causes the Glaive Thrower's attacks to deal damage in a line, while also allowing it to attack trees. The problem is, an un-upgraded Glaive Thrower deals splash damage in a circular area with its projectiles, which the upgrade completely removes, making it much worse against groups of enemies since the much narrower linear splash is nowhere near as good at nailing multiple enemies. As such, the upgrade was eventually reworked to instead increase the projectile's speed.
  • In Valkyria Chronicles II, Cosette has the Klutz Potential, which causes her firing accuracy to be lowered. However, after the Yuell Mission, it gets replaced with Blood Trauma, which reduces her AP to 0 when fired at, making it the worst Potential in the game. After the Doerfein Mission, however, this gets replaced with Beautiful World, allowing Cosette to take another turn.
  • Treasure Planet: Battle at Procyon:
    • The Warsloop in the campaign replaces the Torpedo Boat as the players command ship in Mission 3, despite being a more expensive ship with more guns (1 light gun and 4 medium guns compared to the Torpedo Boat's 1 light gun and 2 Torpedo Tubes), it is actually a downgrade, as the 2 extra guns it has do not make up for the loss of the Torpedo Tubes in firepower. The Warsloop isn't even much tougher than the Torpedo Boat and is slightly slower and a larger target.
    • To a lesser extent, the Mortars, although they do a lot of damage, have a massive blast radius and huge range, the projectile travels incredibly slowly, making it very easy to dodge, especially at long range, and to top it off a partial hit will often cause less damage than the stantard heavy weapons. Fortunately, it can be fixed with mods.
  • In 10 Minute Space Strategy, when starting a new game you can give your empire a trait "Escape", which gives every spaceship destroyed in battle a 10% chance of fleeing to one of your colonised planets. What the game neglects to mention is that whatever lucky ship that manages to escape will nullify every movement point a fleet already stationed at that planet had, leaving them immobile until your next turn, which can be infuriating if you wanted to send said fleet right on that turn.
  • StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty:
    • The Wraith can be upgraded to evade 20% of attacks when cloaked, but given that it's already a Fragile Speedster, a 1/5 chance to dodge an attack doesn't do that much to improve its survivability.
    • Diamondbacks can be upgraded for +1 range, but the whole point of the unit is that they move fairly quick and can attack while moving — if a unit is out of range, it's probably because you aren't controlling them well or you're retreating, and +1 range won't do that much to improve their ability to kite enemies. That aside, the Diamondback is a very niche unit anyway and the campaign has little usage for its kiting abilitiesnote .
    • The Shrike Turret touts that its an auto-turret that lets Bunkers contribute to base defense even if they're unmanned, but if you're building Bunkers and not manning them, you're doing it wrong. Besides, the firepower it offers is only equivalent to an un-upgraded, unstimmed Marine — not a lot. The counterpart upgrade, +150 HP for Bunkers, is far more useful.
    • Regenerative Bio-Steel lets all your mechanical units slowly regenerate health, but the regen rate is very low, even lower than Zerg natural regeneration, so it's very inefficient to rely on that for healing. Besides, you can see on the same screen that Science Vessels with Nano-Repair are coming on the Protoss research tree and they'll heal your mechs way better. And for extra irony, Science Vessels benefit from Cellular Reactor, the other upgrade on the same tier as Bio-Steel.
    • The third tier of Zerg Research is often noted for being underwhelming. The Hercules Dropship typically chosen by default as the Predator robot is a niche-use anti-melee robot that costs a whopping 100/100 minerals/gas respectively and is merely a mechanical alternative to the Firebat. On the plus side, the Hercules Dropship gets kudos for being virtually as tough as a battlecruiser (500 HP!) and a safer way to ferry an army around the map than the Medivac. Drop play isn't a major part of the campaign however.
    • The final tier of Protoss Research has the Orbital Strike option that let's you air-drop all your Barracks infantry to rally points. It has some use, but you lose the stellar Tech Reactors that let you double-build any combat unit, save for mercenaries and conserve a hefty sum of real estate in your base.
  • StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm: After completing the Zerus missions, Kerrigan is way more powerful and a third column of abilities is unlocked for her. Unfortunately, most of them fall into this trope; Automated Extractors is the major benefit she gains, everything else is either not as good as something in the first two columns or of circumstantial superiority over them. This is most apparent in the mission where you're locked into using her new abilities, where her first two abilities are inferior versions of the two abilities she already had.
  • Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2: At the top level of veterancy (Elite), units gained a souped-up version of their original weapon. Unfortunately, in some cases oversights led to that version lacking some ability the one at lower veterancy had - probably the two most prominent was that Elite Chrono Legionnaires could no longer fire over walls, and Flak Troopers did less damage than at the Veteran stage (while it got a double-burst ability, the combined damage of the two bursts, even disregarding armour, was less than that of the one burst of the Veteran).

    Survival Horror 
  • Resident Evil has the Flamethrower, an exclusive weapon for Chris' scenario. The Flamethrower isn't too powerful, its range is pitifully short, and there's no way to refuel it. The Flamethrower appears again in Resident Evil 2 and it has the same weaknesses, along with it taking up two inventory slots. It's at least extremely effective against the otherwise hard-to-kill ivy creatures, but there's only about five of them in the game, four of which appear in a hallway you only ever need to visit once, and it's a better option to just run past since you have a higher chance of taking a hit if you try and get close enough to fire on them with it.
    • The Assault Rifle in Resident Evil 3: Nemesis. As an unlockable with infinite ammo, it's a decent weapon. However, you can also earn it as a final loot drop from Nemesis on Hard mode, but it happens very close towards the end of the game where you're probably packing the Magnum and Grenade Launcher.
    • The Bow Gun from Resident Evil 2 is barely stronger than the handgun and has a slow rate of fire, making it of little use to Claire (and a massive kick to the butt for players aware that Leon gets the very useful shotgun instead). Its only use is that it's a silent weapon, meaning you can fire on (the blind) Lickers without them hearing the shot, but you're still better off using the handgun and alerting them to your presence due to the handgun's higher firing rate and superior stopping power. The Bow Gun would return as a much more useful weapon in Code Veronica, where it was given a much higher rate of fire (albeit at the cost of normal shots being ever weaker than the handgun) and the ability to fire explosive bolts.
    • In Resident Evil: Outbreak, most of the weapons made by David are far less useful than the items that go into their creation. Building the (still rather useless) flamethrower robs you of the lighter and insect spraynote , and building the quickly-broken spear may give you better range, but David is much better with the knife that is lost forever when you do.
    • The Self-Defense Gun from the REmake is so useless it's practically a waste of code. It's a gun that comes with one bullet, can never be reloaded, and is found fairly late in the game (You'll at least have the shotgun and, as Jill, the grenade launcher at this point). It does fairly impressive damage but it's nothing a dozen or so bullets from the handgun won't accomplish so there's really no reason to carry it, and it doesn't even have the decency to vanish from your inventory after use like every other one-time-use item in the game. Its only real purpose is triggering a unique cutscene against the giant shark, an act that requires ludicrously good timing and simply isn't intuitive to do since your first instinct is to run your ass off, and it's actually rather easy to encounter the shark before you even pick the damn thing up in the first place.
    • In Resident Evil 4, beating all four of The Mercenaries minigames with 5-Star ratings gets you the Handcannon for free, which can be upgraded by unloading $790,000 on it to get infinite ammo and 99.0 attack power. Sounds great, right? Except it utterly pales in comparison to the Chicago Typewriter which is obtained much easier, by beating the Assignment Ada minigame and paying $1,000,000. It is statistically weaker (10.0 damage), but that's still enough to One-Hit KO most normal foes, and it's an infinite ammo machine gun with a firing rate of 0.1 seconds, meaning even bosses fall to it in mere seconds. Basically, for $200,000 more and doing a much easier sidequest, you get a weapon that does the same damage as the Handcannon in one second of firing and is much easier and more effective to use.
    • Played for Laughs In-Universe in Resident Evil 4 (Remake) when Jack Krauser unleashes his "true power", a fierce and mangled-looking claw that replaces his left arm. Leon immediately notes that he's not any more dangerous with that thing than he was with a knife, probably less so now that he can't hold a gun, and wastes no time mocking him for it.
      Leon: So THAT'S your true power? I'd ask for a refund!
      Jack: You're gonna regret that smart mouth of yours.
  • The Silent Hill series has some unlockable-for-New Game Plus weapons and other things that aren't up to snuff as prizes for beating the game go. The Hyper Spray from 2 doesn't deal a lot of damage unless you got a 10-star End Rank (and hurts James to boot!). The Flamethrower from the third game doesn't deal as much damage as you'd think, and also completely lacks any stopping power, which means the monsters are free to keep moving closer and attack. It can't even be used to bypass the deadly moth puzzle / Fetch Quest. The costume code you get for beating the third game on EVERY difficulty setting including the masochist ones... Something like that should yield the most broken powerup-costume ever, right? Alas, no.
  • Silent Hill 4: The Room has more of these than any other in the series:
    • The chainsaw is fairly "meh" for what you have to go through to get it, as it's awkward to wield and doesn't actually give you much of an advantage over most enemies in the game.
    • The SMG that you can unlock for Eileen might make the game easier for you, but the ending you get is dependant on how much damage she takes in the game and giving her a weapon makes her endanger herself by engaging enemies more. That's bad enough, but simply holding the SMG deteriorates Eileen's state over time, effectively making it a borderline Poison Mushroom.
    • Silver Bullets. There are only three in the entire game, and while they have the seemingly impressive ability to instantly down the invincible Victim Ghosts, they don't stay down long enough to be worth using in the first place. Made worse by the fact that one of the bullets can only be found in Eileen's Room, which is so late in the game there are no more ghosts to use it on anyways.
  • Five Nights at Freddy's 4 has the "Fun With Plushtrap" minigame, which lets you skip two hours of the next night if you win. Skipping a third of the night sounds awesome, but the problem is that A) you're skipping the early hours when the enemies are not as active anyway, and B) you are really unlikely to survive a new night on your first try even with the 2 hour discount, but Fun With Plushtrap is not repeatable and if you die, your bonus is lost.

    Third-Person Shooters 
  • Jet Force Gemini has a myriad of bombs that really don't have any practical use and make scrolling through your weapons slower. It also has Fish Food as a weapon. It has a few uses beyond being a Joke Item, but not many.
  • Every Ratchet & Clank game has at least one of these.
    • In the first game, after turning enemies into chickens with the Morph-o-Ray, you can suck them up with the Suck Cannon. This lets you get Suck Cannon ammo from enemies too big to suck up normally. Plus, due to a helpful bug, this actually gives you more Bolts than just killing the enemy. The Gold Morph-O-Ray turns enemies into giant chickens, which can act as decoys but are too big for the Suck Cannon, cutting off your source of free ammo and extra Bolts.
    • Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando has four, though the two latter versions are really mild:
      • The Lava Gun upgrades into the Meteor Gun, which is vastly inferior in its primary utility of crowd control despite hitting harder and having a longer range. There are better ranged weapons than the Meteor Gun, although it is at least somewhat effective on larger enemies if you use the Lock-On mod. Fortunately, Insomniac learned and changed the upgrade to the Liquid Nitrogen Gun in the sequel, keeping the weapon good.
      • The Clank Zapper allows Clank to zap enemies with lightning when he's with Ratchet. However, not only is the weapon pitifully weak, it also doesn't appear until Challenge Mode, and it costs 1,000,000 bolts. By the time the weapon is available, you no doubt have at least one weapon that can empty out a room in a few shots, and by the time you have enough money to afford the Clank Zapper, you also have the option to buy either of the other two items with a one million bolt price tag; the RYNO II or the Carbonox Armor cost the same amount of bolts as the Clank Zapper, but both of them are vastly superior to it.
      • The Megarocket Cannon is a downplayed example. It's not worse in any way than its starting form, the Minirocket Tube, but the secondary effect that it gains is merely the ability to charge up and release up to four missiles at once. The problem is that charging it takes enought time that you could achieve better DPS just by rapidly tapping the fire button.
      • The Seeker Gun is the only weapon that has its ammo count decreased when it upgrades to HK22 Gun (from 25 shots to 20). Downplayed, as it now fires 3 projectiles instead of one per shot, but when compared to Hoverbomb Gun which fires 5 mines instead of one when it upgrades to Tetrabomb Gun while its ammo clip stays the same, it really feels undeserved.
      • The Lightning and Acid weapon mods deal an amount of extra damage so low that by the end of the game enemies are too tough for it to matter much, and once you go into Challenge Mode their effects are completely cosmetic.
    • In Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal:
      • The RY3NO's final upgrade at level 5 into the RYNOCIRATOR. While the previous levels shot multiple missiles/lasers that targeted enemies and either one-tapped them or dealt massive damage to anything that could survive, the fully upgraded version shoots an energy ball into the air in front of Ratchet that flashes the screen and destroys everything on it (so if an enemy is off the screen or hiding behind an object, they won't be hit). The range reduction means it can only damage bosses if you get up close to shoot the energy ball through them, and it takes longer to damage enemies than the previous versions did. It can also break certain missions by destroying transport ships before they leave. In the Challenge Mode speedrunning community, they outright use save files that have this weapon at V4 because it's much more useful at that stage.
      • The Rift Inducer is a mild version, as its final upgrade only grants it a shock effect that deals damage to enemies near the rifts. Then again, how would you improve a weapon that already kills in one hit every small to middle enemy within the radius of its shot?
    • While it isn't technically an upgrade, the RYNO V from Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time disappointed many players by having a poor effective range and missiles that don't lock on to enemies and instead fly about randomly, from a weapon line famed for being overpowered death guns for couch potatoes. To a lesser extent, this also applies to the other two free-firing RYNO weapons: the RYNO VII and the re-imagined RYNO.
    • Perhaps as a reaction to fan responses over the aforementioned Lava Gun, the PlayStation 3 titles have many weapons that do not gain significantly useful functionality when they are upgraded, with effects that are usually unnoticeable and not very useful. They feel worlds away from the days where upgrading a shotgun would give it a beam of death, or a sniper would gain rounds that exploded.
  • Grand Theft Auto IV allows you to unlock remote-detonate car bombs, which at first seem like a very useful way to bypass the obligatory car chase scene that happens nearly every time you are sent on a mission to kill someone. But you have to place them in the car first, and because of the mission design, there are only a few times where you get a chance to go to your target's still-standing vehicle before moving on, as they usually start out with it in a cutscene or have it placed in a position you can't access beforehand.
    • Satchel charges in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas fall into the same trap. They're only required for a few missions and they have very little use outside any mission where your target is already on the move. They're fun for a quick laugh if you want to screw around, but the money spent could have been used for other guns.
  • In the online Cartoon Network game The Fright Before Christmas, the player controls Billy, Mandy, and Grim to fight endless hordes of evil toys. Each interchangeable character gets a choice of five buyable weapons. The most expensive, and supposedly most powerful, of Mandy's weapons are a handful of marbles and a pan of popcorn. The marbles are a three-projectile weapon that move in an arc, but are too small to hit more than three enemies, which becomes a major problem in the later levels with increasingly insane numbers of toys. The popcorn pan, to its credit, is more powerful, has a wider range and would be a better choice...if it weren't so difficult to control. To make matters worse, both of them are used up the minute they hit an enemy. Most players find more success with Mandy's third weapon, a doll thrown like a ninja star that consists of one projectile, but slices through hordes of enemies like butter.
  • Some of the upgrades to the fortifications players can build in Gears of War 3's Horde Mode are not worth the money:
    • The first two levels of the barricade fortification are great. They slow down enemies trying to pass through them, giving players more time to deal with them and making them easier targets. The last two levels, however, are a let down in several ways. The barricades are changed to laser fences that make it impossible for enemies to pass through at all, which is much worse than it sounds. First, this just means enemies will repeatedly attempt to pass through until the barricade is destroyed, turning a manageable trickle of enemies into a sudden surge when the fence drops and every enemy comes through at once. Second, because of this, laser fences are regularly destroyed every round and must be fully repaired, making them much more expensive to maintain. Third, enemies will continuously recoil in pain while trying to pass through, which makes them much harder to shoot accurately because of all the moving around they do. Finally, the lasers deactivate if a player gets near to allow the player to pass through, which also allows enemies to pass unimpeded, unlike the lower level versions.
    • The final level of the Decoy fortification turns it from an immobile target dummy into a real, computer controlled-soldier. While cool in theory, in practice the soldiers are dumb as rocks and can't be given orders, leading them to make suicidal decisions in combat. When other fortifications are destroyed, they can be repaired to the same upgrade level they were between rounds for a fraction of what they cost to build (including the lower-level Decoys), but if the max level Decoy, gets killed all of the investment put into building it is gone and it has to be rebuilt at the full price from level 1.
  • Saints Row IV has the Tornado upgrade for your sprint power. It causes swirling air currents that pick up and damage any cars, people or debris you pass while you're sprinting. Sounds cool, but it can't be turned off, it doesn't do enough damage to enemies to be worth bothering with, and if you try to stop you frequently get clobbered by the vehicles and debris you're towing.
    • It's not entirely without use, though. Once you purchase this upgrade, the Mayhem missions become trivially easy. Just run around the city and watch as the Tornado rips up every single sign, piece of fence and pedestrian around you for a massive combo.

    Tower Defense 
  • Bloons Tower Defense:
    • In the sixth game, Hero Unit Quincy's level 7 upgrade is making him shoot arrows that explode on contact every third shot. Unfortunately, the explosions area are too small so more often than not his regular Roboteching, bouncing arrows will hit more targets. Both of them do the same amount of damage anyway. This was fixed in a later patch where his arrows explode on first contact, but can still bounce to other targets.
    • Laser Blasts upgrade on the Supermonkey. Usually Supermonkeys shoot darts which can't pop frozen and Lead bloons. Laser Blasts replace the darts with lasers which can pop frozen Bloons, but still can't pop Lead. However, lasers also can't pop Purple Bloons (which darts can pop). You'll face Purple Bloons no matter what, but frozen Bloons can be avoided by simply not using freezing attacks, so the tradeoff is minimal, if not worse. Fortunately, the next upgrade after that, Plasma Blasts can pop Lead bloons, as well as doubling the Supermonkey's attack speed.
  • Infinitode 2:
    • Any upgrade that increases Rotation Speed and Projectile Speed, past a certain level:
      • Rotation Speed affects how fast your towers can rotate and aim at enemies. This means, once your towers can reliably follow the target's movement, there's no point in boosting it anymore. It's even more pointless since most towers are naturally fast enough anyway.
      • Projectile Speed is even more pointless since most projectiles are fast enough even at base level and they can't miss. Only Venom Towers have slow enough bullets for a boost to have an effect.
    • The Minigun has the Hot Bullet ability, which causes enemies it targets to get inflicted with Burn debuff, so it takes even more damage. However, Burn effect overrides the much more useful Freeze (slow enemy movement) effect. The slight increase is damage doesn't justify losing the slowdown.
    • Laser is a tower that shoots a laser in a straight line, heavily damaging all enemies the laser hits. However, its upgrades disagree with its function.
      • High-frequency Laser upgrade triples the laser damage, but makes the laser only capable of hitting a single enemy. Considering a well-placed Laser will certainly hot more than three enemy, this is an overall decrease in damage. It's only useful against bosses, which are rare, and are better dealt with using Snipers.
      • Mirror System halves the laser's damage, but shoots three lasers instead of one. Theoretically this improves its total damage, except that the other two lasers are fired at such awkward angles they more often than not end up hitting nothing.
    • The Flamethrower tower as a whole. Its basic attack deal Burn status, which heavily damages enemies over time. But as said above, Burn overrides the more useful Freeze effect, making the tower basically unusable. There's the Cold Fire upgrade, which lets the Flamethrower not inflict Burn. Unfortunately, a majority of the Flamethrower's damage come from the effect, so its damage is completely gutted.

    Gamebooks 
  • In Blood Sword, having armour is better than not having armour. Unfortunately it's only in the first book that armour has a good chance of preventing a character from getting hurt. Every book after, your enemies's damage potential goes up astronomically (reducing damage by 2 points means a lot when the enemy does a single dice of damage, not so much when even weak foes do 3d6 or more). Additionally it's only in the last book where you'll find armor that's superior to what your character's start with.
  • Some of the early Fighting Fantasy books had this for weapons and armour you found. That's because those items would grant you an improvement to skill that only works to compensate if you've been crippled somehow. So if you burnt your hand or sprained your ankle, then the improvements from your newfound sword, helmet, shield and armor will start kicking in but only enough to bring you back to original skill level. Magic swords did have the benefit of allowing you to hit enemies that were immune to normal weapons but in those books, you'd seldom encounter foes like that. Later books gave real benefits to finding new weapons and armor.
  • Some of the magical weapons that Lone Wolf finds are only useful for a single book or two, such as the jewelled mace. Sure they are some of the only items that can be brought over to the Grandmaster series of books, but they offer no benefit over a normal weapon.
  • In J.H Brennan's Saga of the Demonspawn, the 3rd book has Fire*Wolf transformed into a bigger (8 inches taller!), more beautiful golden warrior. This gives him completely new set of stats. Unfortunately while the stats are at minimum good or even excellent (with his Attractiveness score actually beyond anything that can be rolled), the stats are actually worse than what you may have rolled for Fire*Wolf in the first book. Worse yet, this new Fire*Wolf build is heavy on looks and charm, but surprisingly low for combat stats like strength. In the Video Novel adaptation from Tin Man Games, they pragmatically didn't alter any of your stats, when Fire*Wolf is transformed.

    Tabletop Games 
  • Dungeons & Dragons 3.5's Prestige Classes—special classes that can only be taken after reaching a certain qualification—have a lot of duds, if only because there are hundreds of them. Certain feats are also completely worthless:
    • Any casting-based class that provides less than full advancement is rarely worth taking, because it's rare for any class features to make up for being behind. Even worse is if the prestige class fails to provide any casting advancement in favor of either adding bonus spells per day or providing a completely new spellcasting progression (both of which ensure that you'll be saddled with a lot of weak spells that aren't able to accomplish nearly as much as the more powerful spells you'd have had access to without the prestige class).
    • The Arcane Archer. Its primary ability (enchanting every arrow you fire) can be duplicated by simply owning any kind of magic bow, and despite requiring casting skill and having some of its other features key off casting, the class doesn't have a casting advancement.
    • The Duelist attempts to lock the player into a traditional "fencer" fighting style (rapier and no shield or offhand, no armor, etc) and provides them bonuses while doing so. The problem is that said fighting style is terrible in 3.5, due to having bad durability and abysmal damage, and the Duelist doesn't do nearly enough to drag you out of the hole.
    • The Reaping Mauler, a grapple-centric class, has similar issues. Grappling with Grappling Rules in 3.5 is already not a fun time, but when you're a grappler who can't be greater than Medium-size due to the class's requirements, can't wear armor when you lose your Dexterity bonus while grappling and need all the AC you can get, and whose features key off Wisdom, of all things, rather than the Strength or even Constitution that a grappler would actually need... well, suffice to say it's not going to make grappling a better experience.
    • Dracoliches gain undead immunities, the standard phylactery dealie, and some minor abilities. None of those really make up for losing their Constitution score in the process, which usually ends up halving their HP.
    • The Order of the Bow Initiate. Supposedly a group of Warrior Poets who treat archery as a form of Zen, their primary feature, Ranged Precision, lets them fire a shot with a moderate damage boost. What's the problem? Ranged Precision doesn't deal damage to certain targets, can't be used at long range, and most importantly, only fires one shot per turn. Meanwhile, most archery builds are based on using full attacks to get as many arrows in the air as possible, since arrow base damage is fairly low—meaning that most of the time, the single boosted shot of an Initiate pales horribly in comparison to the six or seven shots fired off by a regular archer. (For added comedy, one of the prerequisites for the class is Rapid Shot—a feat designed for the above strategy, that can't be used with Ranged Precision at all.) The class also has pretty intensive feat requirements for something meant to be entered at 6th level, making it hard for any character aside from a pure fighter to qualify, locking out better archery classes like rogues and scouts, which get bonus damage comparable to the Initiate, but can actually use that damage with full attacks to multiply it several times over. In short, it's a class that requires you to be a subpar archer... and then makes your archery worse.
    • The Shining Blade of Heironeous's gimmick is to give their sword magic enhancements... but only off a very limited list (Shock, Holy, and Brilliant Energy). Activating this ability requires a standard action, you can only give one enhancement per activation, so you need to spend multiple turns to get your sword fully charged, the enhancement lasts for only a few rounds and goes away if you aren't touching the weapon, and it can only be used, at most, six times per day. This is the Shining Blade's only ability, aside from advancing divine spellcasting... which it does so at half rate, meaning maxing out Shining Blade puts you five levels behind on spells. At one point on the WOTC forums, someone put out a challenge for a build where the Shining Blade wouldn't constitute this trope. The "winner" was a 12th-level paladin/1st-level Shining Blade - for the uninitiated, paladin level 13 is an Empty Level.
    • The vast majority of druid prestige classes are this. In their case, it's not for being poorly balanced—it's because the druid is universally regarded as a Game-Breaker, with its Voluntary Shapeshifting, powerful pet, and good-sized spell selection. Consequently, any prestige class that only advances or specializes in one of the three comes out as being worse than just taking more druid levels. It's worth noting that the Planar Shepherd, one of the few prestige classes that does advance all three, is universally banned.
    • Some magic item abilities hit this trope as well. By far the most useless was the Spell Resistance enchantment for magic armor in 3rd Edition. It came in three flavors: Lesser, Moderate, and Greater, which granted Spell Resistance 5, 10, and 15, respectively. What made these useless is the way Spell Resistance worked in 3rd Edition: a creature would automatically negate the effects of a spell cast on it unless the caster could overcome it by rolling a D20 and adding their caster level- if the resulting number was equal to or higher than the target's Spell Resistance, the spell worked on them. A Spell Resistance of 5 was therefore completely useless against all but the lowest level spellcasters, and 10 and 15 weren't much better. The effects were clearly ported over from 2nd Edition without bothering to check their power, since in 2nd Edition magic resistance was a percentage check (5%, 10%, or 15% to completely negate a magic effect), which actually did provide a functionally useful defense.
    • The Great Cleave feat. Cleave was a feat that gave you a free attack once per round if you dropped an enemy with a melee attack. Great Cleave functioned the same way, but could be used as many times per round as you successfully killed someone. In theory, the earliest you could qualify for the feat was 4th level, but in practice, unless you were playing a fighter, you couldn't get it before 6th. As fighters did not have a reliable way to significantly boost their damage as they leveled, aside from the reliable old Power Attack, and enemies that were weak enough to be dropped in a single melee attack would likely be starting to get scarce at 6th level, this was a major issue. Most of the time, if you could drop two melee enemies in a single hit at that point, they probably weren't much of a threat to you anyway.
    • An abnormal number of feats only provide very small, flat bonuses (usually in the +2 or +3 range) to certain skill checks. Skill checks are some of the easiest things to boost in the game, between crafted items, masterwork tools, or simply pouring all your ranks into it; it's not uncommon to see skill-focused adventurers with a +12 or more by 5th level, quickly turning those bonuses into a drop in the bucket. Combat Casting is one of the most notorious, because it's almost directly obsoleted by Skill Focus (Concentration), which provides a +3 bonus to all Concentration checks, rather than a +4 bonus for one application of Concentration checks.
    • Due to clumsy wording, a strict reading of the Focused Lexicon feat (meant to make it harder for certain enemies to resist Truespeak) actually makes it harder for the user to use Truespeak against those enemies.
    • Dodge is probably the most infamously worthless feat: it provides a +1 bonus to AC against a single foe that you designate. Even at very low levels, a +1 to AC (equivalent to about a 5% chance of working) is rarely going to block an attack, and because it only works on one enemy, it's useless against, say, a bunch of enemies attacking you at once (one of the few situations where a +1 to AC might reliably save you from a hit or two). There are multiple feats that simply provide a flat +1 or more to AC, which are still bad, but render Dodge obsolete. What really puts it in this category, though, is that the designers decided to make Dodge a prerequisite for forty different feats, and multiple prestige classes, which is a bitter pill to swallow for anyone interested in them.
    • The binder vestige Agares provides immunity to fear, among some other features. This wouldn't be too bad, except binders at the level where they can use Agares already have fear immunity as a class feature. Even binders with Improved Binding to bind Agares earlier only pick it up one level before it becomes redundant.
    • Probably the silliest example of this is the Mountebank and Risen Martyr, which both have about the worst capstone feature you could ever ask for: both classes are based on pacts with higher beings, so when you reach the max level in those classes, it results in the being you made your pact with deciding your time is up. In the Mountebank's case, you get turned into a demonic thrall and placed under permanent mind control, while in the Risen Martyr's case, you Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence—as in, you die. Whoops. At least the Risen Martyr required your character to be dead before you could take it, so it was more of a "you can either take this prestige class to keep playing with the character until the end of the campaign, or roll up a new character."
    • A particularly hated example is the Frenzied Berserker, a class meant to "upgrade" the Barbarian but with downsides so harsh that it makes the player an active detriment to the party. The upside is that it changes your Barbarian's Rage into a Frenzy that gives larger bonuses to your attacking stats and multiplies the damage bonuses from using Power Attack, except Barbarians are already notorius for how fast they annihilate targets even by the standards of 3.5 edition. The downside is that the player can now be forced to Frenzy whenever taking damage (even when out of combat and taking damage from traps), and if there are no enemies around while in a Frenzy, the player is now forced to attack their teammates. In short, it's a class whose only real purpose is to give an excuse to kill your friends.
  • In Yu-Gi-Oh!, a number of cards have "upgraded forms", usually requiring another card or other conditions, on top of the base form, to summon. Frequently these forms are not worth the effort for them.
    • Larvae Moth is pretty hard to summon: play Petit Moth, a very specific monster with bottom-grade stats and no effect, then equip it with a card that changes it into a mediocre Stone Wall, and then protect it for exactly two of your turns, at which you can tribute Petit Moth for Larvae Moth at last. For all your effort, it goes from 300 ATK to... 500 ATK. For comparison, common low-level monsters even at the time tended to average around 1400-1600, and they required no more work than Petit Moth to play. You basically sunk three cards and multiple turns of effort to turn a monster with terrible stats into one with still-terrible stats that can't benefit from Normal Monster support because its summoning condition counts as an effect (and it doesn't have any others). The higher Moth forms have an identical condition (bar the number of turns required), but they at least have tolerably high stats to push them into "awful, but someone might try building a deck around them for the cool factor" territory. Larvae Moth isn't even on that level.
    • Blue-Eyes Shining Dragon requires you to Tribute the already impressive 4500 ATK Blue-Eyes Ultimate Dragon to summon it. Though it gains a rather helpful form of targeting protection and an ATK-boosting effect, it also starts with only 3000 ATK, and said effect requires at least five other Dragons in the Graveyard to bring it up to the level of its lesser form. Though given the summoning conditions, there's a good chance that four of those dragons (Blue-Eyes Ultimate Dragon, plus the three Blue-Eyes White Dragons used to Fusion Summon it) are in your Graveyard already, making this a Downplayed Trope.
    • The very practical Cyber Dragon has a few branch "upgrades", and one of them is the very terrible Cyber Barrier Dragon. While it has a respectable 2800 DEF, its purely defensive effect only takes effect when it's in Attack Position, where its paltry 800 ATK leaves it vulnerable to most monster attacks. The only thing it does in that position is negate the opponent's first attack each turn — you don't even get to control if it triggers or not. It's definitely not worth giving up a Cyber Dragon for.
    • Jinzo - Lord, despite being summoned by tributing one of infamous monsters in the original series, is arguably a downgrade. Its ATK is a whole 200 points higher than the standard Jinzo, and its only additional effect is being able to destroy the opponent's face-up Traps and do 300 damage for each—not only will opponents rarely be controlling enough face-up Traps for this effect to deal anything significant, but standard Jinzo negates Traps anyway, so if your opponent is playing a field of Continuous Traps, then letting them stay out and uselessly clog up the opponent's field is arguably better. On top of that, its name means that it can't benefit from cards that require the original, like Cyber Energy Shock and Everlasting Alloy. There are some circumstances where Lord is marginally helpful, such as using a Jinzo summoned through Returner's effect (which would normally die during the End Phase) or tributing the weaker and easily-summoned Jector instead, but even those don't warrant using a card that can only be summoned by tributing Jinzo over the easily-summoned standard variety.
    • Red-Eyes Black Metal Dragon is Summoned by Tributing a standard Red-Eyes equipped with Metalmorph. A standard Red-Eyes with Metalmorph has 2700 ATK, and REBMD has 2800, so it's already barely an upgrade. What puts it into downgrade category is that Metalmorph has a secondary effect (which REBMD doesn't get) of heavily boosting your Monster's ATK when it attacks, meaning that Metal Dragon is actually a big step down from its lesser form in terms of offensive power, and only marginally better in terms of defense. There's also the matter of it only being able to be summoned from the Deck, not the hand. On top of that, the standard Red-Eyes is also the centerpiece of a variety of support cards, and a Normal Monster, which gives it even more support cards.
    • Life Stream Dragon was heavily hyped-up as the true form of Power Tool Dragon. Summoning it requires Summoning Power Tool, then Tuning it with a Level 1 Tuner... but on reflection, it's better to just keep Power Tool. Life Stream does have 600 more ATK, but Power Tool's effect allows you to add Equip Spells to your hand, meaning its ATK can be much higher. Life Stream can also make your LP 4000... but that's only useful if you're already on the verge of losing, since players start with 8000. Life Stream can also make you immune to effect damage, but there are plenty of cards that do it better, and this is inherently situational. Life Stream attempts to duplicate Power Tool's destruction-dodging effect, but without the ability to search out Equip spells, it's much worse at it. Finally, Life Stream is a Tuner... but it's also Level 8, which makes the number of cards you can Synchro Summon with it sharply limited at best. The only real advantage is being immune to effect damage, and it doesn't outweigh the advantages of Power Tool at all.
    • Few RUM-based cards are outright upgrades over their starting counterparts and many are situational improvements at best. Not helping matters is that not only would you need to get the correct Rank-Up Magic card, but the monster you have to upgrade off may be overcosted or at an inconvenient rank.
      • Mechquipped Angineer upgrades into CXyz Mechquipped Djinn Angeneral—it gains 800 ATK, but swaps out its extremely useful protective abilities (able to save any of your monsters from destruction for a turn) for wholly unimpressive position-switching and burn effects.
      • Number C5: Chaos Chimera Dragon boasts exactly one legitimate advantage over its unupgraded form, Number 5: Doom Chimera Dragon—while Doom must choose between two effects at the end of the Battle Phase (attaching a card from the opponent's Graveyard to it as material or sending a card from their Graveyard to their Deck), Chaos gets to activate both at once. Aside from that, they share the same effect of gaining 1000 ATK for each attached material and being able to attack all opposing monsters, but Chaos also gains two massive downsides: first, to activate the "attack all" effect, it must detach a material (something Doom doesn't have to do), and second, to activate the Graveyard effect, it forces you to pay half your life points (something Doom does for free). Curiously, Doom Chimera Dragon was released second, meaning it managed to Power Creep its own Super Mode.
      • Number 92: Heart-eartH Dragon cannot be destroyed by battle, and forces the opponent to take any battle damage its controller would have taken when it does battle (which is likely to be hefty, considering its original ATK of 0), its detach effect can banish all cards that the opponent Normal or Special Summoned or Set that turn, and if it's destroyed while it has Xyz Materials, it can Special Summon itself from the Graveyard, gaining 1000 ATK for each banished card. This results in a monster that, while difficult to summon, can dish out tons of damage, banish cards en masse, and return with massive stats when killed. However, while its Number C form, Heart-eartH Chaos Dragon, has 1000 more original ATK (which is not nearly enough to do any attacking with it) and retains the immunity to battle destruction, it lost every other effect possessed by its previous form. Instead, it has a comparatively mediocre effect that increases its controller's LP by any battle damage they inflict on the opponent, and the ability to negate the opponent's card effects for a turn if its original form was attached (as opposed to banishing them). Keep in mind, this is the Ranked-Up version of a Rank 9 monster. To say it's not worth it is a massive understatement.
    • Synchro monster Arcanite Magician has the effect of placing two Spell Counters on itself when summoned, both of which grant it 1000 ATK, and its upgraded form, Arcanite Magician/Assault Mode, has the same effect, but starts with 500 more ATK. However, where Arcanite Magician can remove a counter to destroy one card on the field, Assault Mode can remove both its counters to destroy all cards on the opponent's field. This seems like an upgrade... only removing both its counters turns it into a pitiful 900 attacker, meaning the opponent can easily flatten it. And more dangerously, where the original can remove the counters from anywhere on your field (like, say, a Magical Citadel of Endymion that can easily accumulate dozens of the things over the course of the game, meaning it can already effectively nuke the field), Assault Mode can only remove them from itself. It still has its uses, like replacing a burnt-out Arcanite Magician, but it's hardly the straight upgrade that most other Assault Modes are.
    • "Savior" Synchro monsters, also known as "Majestic" in the TCG version, are great upgrades over their original form, except for one seriously heavy drawback: They return to the Extra Deck during the end of the turn and summon their weaker form into the field, leaving you -2 in terms of cards for a huge boss that only lasts a turn. Not to mention, they require a specific Tuner monster to summon, one that literally has no use other than to summon these Synchro monster upgrades.
    • The venerable Gate Guardian is the fused form of Sanga of the Thunder, Kazejin, and Suijin, requiring all three on the field and then tributing them to summon itself. It has a colossal 3750 ATK, but it's also just one big monster with no other effects, making it rather easy to deal with. And Sanga, Kazejin, and Suijin already have pretty impressive stats and their own effects (even if said effects aren't that useful), and three monsters are by nature harder to get rid of than one. Simply equipping Sanga with United We Stand or something similar would give it even more ATK without needing to lose multiple monsters. This means that even in a deck that can somehow consistently summon the big guy, he's considered to be something you only bring out for bragging rights.
    • Vampire Genesis, one of the earliest Structure Deck boss monsters, requires you to banish Vampire Lord to summon for a beefy 3000 ATK body and the ability to revive Zombie monsters by discarding higher-level ones from your hand. The problem is that Vampire Lord at the time was the best Zombie monster in the game because if he was destroyed by card effect rather than battle, he would revive himself the next turn, making him difficult to get rid of once he hit the field. Summoning Genesis requires you to remove the Zombie ace monster (so he can't even be revived) for a monster that loses that protection in exchange for a clunky revival effect that's outdone by the Book of Life copies that come with the Structure Deck.
  • Older White Wolf games like Exalted and Old World of Darkness tend to make how many dots you have in a Background more representative of how impressive the Background is, rather than how useful it is. As such, it's usually better to take only 3 Dots in a background rather than a full 5, as the latter often dips into Awesome, but Impractical, with mentors being nigh divine entities that are too busy to pay attention to you, reputations being world spanning names for yourself that draw endless public scrutiny, and backers being massive conspiracies who own you.
  • As a rather hastily done marketing tie-in, the Serenity RPG had a number of these. One strong example was Healthy As A Horse, an ability that improved your hit points. It cost exactly as much as upgrading your Constitution one rank did, gave exactly as many hitpoints as raising your Constitution did, and provided none of the other benefits of raising your Constition. Even if you'd already maxed your Constitution out (something you were highly unlikely to do in a normal game), taking it was still of dubious value given how damage worked in the game: typically the difference meant you were looking at being left alive with a Career-Ending Injury rather than simply being dead.
  • Shadowrun: The Drake character type. In theory it sounds awesome: you're a human (or elf, or dwarf...) with the ability to shapechange into a small dragon at will. In practice, it's actually terrible. When transformed, you gain innate armor... that's too weak to protect you from even the weakest gun and can't be combined with any other type of armor. You gain significant boosts to your physical stats... but can't actually use any weapons or tools to take advantage of them. You gain an elemental attack... that's weaker than just using an ordinary gun or spell. And if the fact that you're a Drake ever gets revealed, you'll have every one of the megacorps trying to capture you so they can dissect you to figure out how you work. And on top of this, the karma required to create a Drake character is enormous, meaning that you'll be significantly lacking in skills and equipment compared to a normal metahuman character.

    Wide Open Sandbox 
  • Minecraft
    • Leather armour. It's less commonly found than higher-tier armours, more expensive and difficult to craft, provides far less durability and protection than even gold armours, has a far more situational secondary purpose than gold armour (namely, immunity to freezing damage, which you only take from powder snow, which inflicts it at a very slow rate, can be broken well before you die or even start taking damage, and isn't too hard to distinguish from regular snow — and leather boots also allowing you to walk on it isn't that much better), and can't even be recycled into scraps the way gold and iron equipment can be smelted into nuggets. By the time you get to a point where you reliably have enough leather to make any of this equipment, you will at least have full iron gear and will likely be getting into enchanting, where the leather is far too valuable for crafting bookshelves to be wasted on this stuff.
    • Gold tools provide some perks to be sure by working fast and getting better enchantments, but they have such poor durability that they're just not worth using in favor of the more Boring, but Practical iron or diamond gear. While there is a renewable source of gold in the Nether (farming zombified piglins), this is too dangerous and time-consuming to be wasted on gold gear: if you're going to spend that much time faffing about in the Nether, it could be far better, and far more safely, spend deep in the Netherrack digging Ancient Debris to craft Netherrite gear.

    Other 
  • The DS version of Science Papa has the first upgrade for the mortar and pestle, which is a machine which is automated, rather than the first mortar and pestle which requires you to break things up manually. Despite being an upgrade, it loses out to the default for two reasons; it doesn't stop automatically even though it processes independent of you, which can cause you to get a worse rating on the task, and it's possible to finish the base mortar's minigame in about three seconds, when the first upgrade can take 15 to 20 seconds for the same work. That said, the second upgrade, the "Jaws" Mortar, is much more effective as it also works automatically but will also automatically stop processing at a perfect rating without you needing to turn it off, leaving you free to do other tasks without the risk of ruining the mortar's work.

Non-Game Examples

    Anime & Manga 
  • During the Cell Saga of Dragon Ball Z, Trunks assumes a higher form of Super Saiyan which greatly increases his strength by bulking his muscles up to a huge degree. However, while he is dominating the battle at first Cell soon turns the tides and begins beating Trunks down. A Cell himself explains, the form drains energy very quickly and is too cumbersome for speed — since all Cell had to do to win was dodge Trunks sluggish movements until the Saiyan tired out, it was far less effective than the "weaker" forms of Super Saiyan.

    Fan Works 
  • In Peter Chimaera's DIGIMON 2: RETURN OF DIGIMON, the titular character creates a Robot Body to better fight against evil forces. However, the only time he uses it, his opponent, Evil Digimon, managed to survive the battle. When Digimon fights against Evil Digimon without the Robot Body, he utterly defeats him. This implies the Robot Body features no real advantages over fighting without it.

    Film - Animation 
  • The Mini Mushroom's status as one is acknowledged in The Super Mario Bros. Movie, with Mario getting beat up horribly by DK after mistaking it for a Super Mushroom. This trope is also exploited in the climax, where the heroes forcibly feed Bowser one in order to easily imprison him.

    Literature 
  • Cradle Series: A "Goldsign" is a Mark of the Supernatural that someone acquires when they advance to the Gold stage, which is considered the first step of a real sacred artist. Many goldsigns are purely cosmetic, but the better ones have some side benefit that preferably synergizes with their Path. Yerin's sword arms mean she is never unarmed (which is important because her Path absolutely requires a weapon to be at all useful), while Jai Long's Nightmare Face is theoretically a powerful weapon but is so horrific he keeps his face wrapped in bandages at all times. In Reaper, Lindon's sister Kelsa becomes the first person on the Path of the White Fox to gain a goldsign in centuries: A cute little fox tail made out of foxfire. It's theoretically a useful weapon (as the fire inflicts spiritual damage), but it would be awkward to use in combat.
    Kelsa: I still hate it.
    Jai Long: It could be worse.
    Kelsa: It's not practical, even if it can burn people. Snowfoxes have claws and teeth. I could have gotten those.
  • So I'm a Spider, So What?: After absorbing the energy of a Fantastic Nuke, Kumoko ascends to godhood... and becomes much weaker as a result. While mortals in this setting can grow to great strength by gaining levels and powers in an RPG-like manner, all of these abilities are provided by "The System" that the gods placed on top of the world's magic to prevent it from being depleted. After becoming a god herself, Kumoko no longer has The System's assistance and is limited to the same abilities as a real-life human until she manages to learn real sorcery from scratch. Zigzagged in that this will eventually make her stronger than she was previously.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Kamen Rider:
    • Played with in Kamen Rider Kuuga. When Godai first transforms into his Dragon form, he appears to be weaker than his default transformation, feeling like this trope. However, he initially doesn't realize his Rider powers run on Multiform Balance and that Dragon Form is a Fragile Speedster as opposed to his Jack of All Stats default form. Once he realises the strenghts and weaknesses of his new form, it's no longer a letdown.
    • Played for Laughs in Kamen Rider Decade. The titular character is able to turn into all Kamen Riders from past shows, with the caveat that he has to unlock them first. After unlocking Kamen Rider Den-O, he tries to use it against Kamen Rider TheBee and Gattack, but discovers the form only spouts its associated catchphrase, rather than actually being useful in combat.
    • Kamen Rider Gaim sees Micchy get his hands on the Yomotsuheguri Lockseed near the end of the show, which is advertised by its creator as a Deadly Upgrade which will let Micchy finally defeat Kouta. Said creator opts not to mention that deadly also means painful, and the Lockseed proves so agonizing to use that Micchy does more writhing on the ground with it than actually attacking, making it by far his weakest form.
    • Kamen Rider Ghost gets the Grateful form halfway through the show, which looks like a Next Tier Power-Up and has an impressive array of abilities that should make it one. However, the opponents introduced in the same episode have the ability to strike Ghost with paralysis from anywhere in the world if he tries to use it, making it worthless.
    • Kamen Rider Build has a villainous example with the Washio brothers, who normally form a Bash Brothers pair using the Gear Engine and Gear Remocon powers, but can give both powers to one brother to form Hell Bros. While it's allegedly much more powerful, being reduced to a single combatant takes away the teamwork and skill at covering one another's openings that made the brothers dangerous in the first place, while the power increase isn't nearly enough to keep pace with the growth of the heroes. Hell Bros only wins its first fight through an underhanded ploy to make their opponent stop fighting back, and then never wins a fight again.
    • In a DVD spinoff for Kamen Rider Zero-One, Kamen Riders Vulcan and Valkyrie receive new Super Modes that are powerful, but unstable and painful if not actively harmful. While Vulcan is bullheaded and reckless enough to make sure his enemy gets wrecked as badly as he does when he uses his, Valkyrie is more cautious and she gets thrashed because the pain keeps her from fighting effectively.
  • Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue: Played with when the Lightspeed Solarzord debuts. Its component zord, the Max Solarzord, had previously shown it could beat Diabolico's most dangerous monsters on its own, so combined with the Megazord it should be strong enough to handle Diabolico himself, right? However, nothing the new formation has does anything to hurt Diabolico. Just make him angry. Then it subverts the trope hard when the solar panels absorbs his attack and sends it right back at him in the form of an Alpha Strike.

    Webcomics 
  • Homestuck: It's possible, through care and training, to get a Fiduspawn to mature into a stronger form, such as a Horseaponi becoming a Horsaroni. However, these advanced forms only change a little in size and appearance, don't become much stronger, and really only need to eat more.

    Western Animation 
  • Mighty Ducks: The Animated Series: "Monster Rally" sees the Ducks utilise their new vehicle, the Mega-Migrator X2, after the original Migrator is damaged in battle. However, while the Mega-Migrator is larger, when the Ducks tries to use it in battle the weapons either miss their target or fail to deploy at all, the vehicle ultimately exploding when the original engine is stolen for their enemy's current vehicle and they try to improvise with the enemy's original engine. After the original Migator is repaired, Tanya (the Ducks' Gadgeteer Genius) shows the other Ducks the plans for the Hyper-Migrator X3, but their cold reaction prompts Tanya to conclude that the original Migrator is fine as it is.
  • Steven Universe: Alexandrite, the powerful fusion of Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl, can come off as ultimately impractical. In spite of having incredible strength and access to all the weapons of lesser fusions, they need a great deal of focus to maintain stability, or they’ll easily unfuse. As such, they do not bode well for casual situations like dinner, where the components’ conflicting personalities cause issues in socialization. However, their biggest issue is their subpar luck/success rate in battle; their size makes them an easy target, and they’re easily overpowered by stronger giant characters like Malachite and Steven in his monster form, or attacks from Aquamarine and Blue Diamond.

    Other 
  • Seanbaby pointed out several of these on his Useless Power-Ups page - though the Feather is more of a particularly nonsensical Plot Coupon, others include a defensive spell for countering an attack nearly no enemies use, an invisibility power that makes it impossible for you to see where you're going but doesn't impede the enemies, and an attack that requires you to touch the enemies in a game with Collision Damage.
  • Software updates for programs, mobile phones, and the like can sometimes be this. It is not at all uncommon to receive an upgrade, only to find said software or device is now slower, less compatible, has no recognizable improvements other than a few cosmetic changes, or even lacks features that a previous version had. This can even push into Poison Mushroom territory if the upgrade was intended to stop homebrew apps from running, of if a glitch in it causes it to not work at all.
    • Likely the most extreme case of this was the "Other OS" feature on early PS3s. It originally allowed people to install a Linux operating system on their PS3 for bonus functionality, and PS3s had even started to be used in computing clusters due to their low price-point for their high power. But then a hack was found using it, so Sony patched it out, and anyone who didn't upgrade lost access to the Playstation Network, which handles essentially all of the online functionality of the native OS. A class action lawsuit was actually filed about this (by the military of the USA no less), though it ended up getting dismissed.
    • Youtube's updates are also this for anyone with a below par internet connection, as each update seems to be an arms race between Youtube trying to limit buffering and force quality reductions, and viewers who want higher quality videos and would rather pause and wait for it to buffer rather than watch a 144p mess of pixels that's vaguely in the shape of their favorite Lets Playernote .
    • To most users who rely on third-party add-ons, Firefox Quantum was this, owing to the countless add-ons no longer being compatible with it and how genuinely difficult it is to downgrade to Firefox 56.0 and keep it that waynote . Of course Quantum actually had countless valuable new features and bug fixes, but many users didn't feel this justified the loss of add-ons they liked or relied on.
    • A fairly infamous case of this in gaming was a netcode update for Street Fighter V. According to the developers, it was meant to fix the poor netcode of the PC release. What it mostly did was shut down a widely-used mod that improved the netcode, dropping the game's online back down to near-unplayable territory.
  • In the magical world of cellular phones:
    • One unlucky user had his iPhone X outright explode after being upgraded to iOS 12.1. It was theorized to have either been a defective battery or charger, but the possibility that a glitch in the update caused the phone to exceed its safe limits was noted to have theoretically been possible. Either way, in the words of Comic Book Guy, "Worst update ever."
    • And of course there's the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 that had two separate defects, a design flaw that could short the battery terminals and a welding defect that pressed too much on the battery. Anyone unfortunate enough to have upgraded to the first release of these phones were at real risk of having the thing spontaneously blow up in their pocket. Numerous injuries, a worldwide ban on air crafts, and an investigation likely to cost Samsung billions later, this was one hell of a letdown for users and the company alike. Humorously, one Grand Theft Auto V modder took advantage of this by swapping out sticky bombs with Note 7s.
  • Fast Startup in Windows 10. It is actually, in effect, a form of hibernation where ram is dumped to a file and stored, and then loaded up in order to start the computer faster than normal as the machine can just refresh itself with the stored ram rather than reloading the kernel, drivers, and system state individually. The issue is this causes tons of small bugs due to incompatibilities from drivers and devices designed for a proper cold boot (just to name a few, this is a common cause of the "90b system fan error" in HP laptops, mounting issues when using disk encryption, and USB driver errors when using an externally powered USB Hub), can cause no end of issues with software updates that expect a proper boot, and will even prevent the hard drive from dual-booting if multiple operating systems are installed. The amount of time it saves, around 30 seconds on a regular hard drive and only about 5 on an SSD, is rarely worth the problems it can cause. If you still need a form of fast startup — even with it disabled — then the hibernate function works just fine and as an added bonus, also lets you pick up where you left off with whatever programs were open.

 
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Blue Mushroom

While the Red Mushroom makes you grow giant, the Blue Mushroom does the opposite, which is useless in a fight.

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