Underused Game Mechanic

"We realized late in the game that we could not possibly make it work, but we couldn't cut it, so we just scaled it way back."

— Mike Stout on the Warp Pad from Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal

All games have mechanics — predefined methods that the players use to interact with the game world. Some of them are well-received, others not so much. And then there are mechanics that are cool and innovative... but only come up once or twice in play and are then never used again in the game or even in the entire series. This can happen for a variety of reasons — maybe it had to be cut out due to production problems, or the designers didn't realize it would be popular, or it was discovered to be a Game-Breaker and had to be limited in where it could be used, or just found that it simply did not work in practice and cut most of it out. The end result is that the players want more of it, and don't get any.

Supertrope of Useless Useful Spell, Useless Useful Stealth, and Useless Useful Non-Combat Abilities.

Contrast Scrappy Mechanic. Compare They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot. For a type of enemy that only appears once or twice through the entire game, see Unique Enemy. Can lead to Salvaged Gameplay Mechanic if a later update or installment makes fuller use of the mechanic in question.

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Examples:

• Pokémon
• Sonic the Hedgehog

Game Systems

• The Nintendo Entertainment System had tons of accessories (many which were from third parties) that either didn't gain enough traction in popularity or simply didn't work well. R.O.B. is a famous example for being a miniature robot that acted like a glorified controller, worked with only two games, and was quietly discontinued by Nintendo. (Its real purpose was to serve as a marketing gimmick to get stores interested in selling another video game console after The Great Video Game Crash of 1983.) The Power Glove is another big example, where the glove acted as a controller based on your arm movement. The Power Glove was only designed for two games, and while it could be used with other games via programming the glove, it hardly ever worked and Nintendo never gave it official support due to the glove not being made by them. The console also had an expansion port on its bottom that no accessory ever used.
• Super Nintendo Entertainment System:
  • The Super Scope was a light gun for the console similar to the NES Zapper. Unlike the Zapper, the Super Scope was wireless and required six AA batteries to operate. Very few games were made for the gun and it quickly died out.
  • Several hardware features of the console were used in very few games, if at all. Everyone knows about Mode 7, but if you know about Mode 6, you're probably a ROM hacker or homebrewer, since no official game actually used it. (BG modes 4 and 5 are also quite rare, but at least used.) There are even a few register settings that support things like rectangular sprites and splitting the screen vertically.
• Nintendo 64:
  • The Transfer Pak's selling point was letting people transfer data between specific Game Boy games and N64 games. Only sixteen games took advantage of such a feature, ten of which never left Japan.
  • The 64DD was an add-on for the Nintendo 64 where the system could read and write disks that held up to 64MB of storage and the console could connect to the internet. The accessory was a commercial failure in Japan with only 9 games made for the thing, and was discontinued before it could launch worldwide, with any games that were still in development for the device being retooled into regular N64 titles or Moved to the Next Console.
  • The microphone and Voice Recognition Unit only got utilized in a single North American release and two Japanese releases: Hey You, Pikachu! for North America & Japan and Densha de Go! 64 for Japan only.
• The Game Boy Color had a feature in late games that gave them enhancements if played on a Game Boy Advance. Obviously since this was utilized near the tail end of the console's life, only five games (The The Legend of Zelda: Oracle Games, Wendy: Every Witch Way,Shantae, and Medarot 5) ever used this feature.
• The e-Reader was a Game Boy Advance accessory that allowed players to scan cards to activate new items or levels in compatible games. The e-Reader sold poorly (likely because of the convoluted method for scanning cards; this could've been avoided had they simply built a cartridge slot into the unit) and Nintendo quickly discontinued it, leaving the accessory with very few games it could work with. The discontinued support also meant the GBA remake of Super Mario Bros. 3 had only half of its e-Reader cards available, which made the rest of the e-Reader exclusive content Dummied Out until Nintendo released the game on the Wii U with the e-Reader courses unlocked (though even then, you couldn't use any of the other e-Reader features like powerup cards).
• The Game Boy Player is a peripheral for the GameCube that can play any games from the Game Boy family. One feature it has however is some GBA games have rumble support if played on the Game Boy Player. Only Seven games ever used this feature.
• Nintendo GameCube:
  • The console had an expansion port that supported LAN play, but very few games actually supported the feature. Mario Kart: Double Dash!! is notable since LAN support theoretically made it possible to have up to sixteen players all playing at once (eight racers at once with two characters per kart), but you needed at least two television screens minimum to take advantage of it.
  • The first model of the GameCube had a digital AV port that was used by the component cables, which would allow the console to output up to 480i or, if the game supported it, 480p. The cables were sold exclusively at Nintendo's online store and they were quietly discontinued around two years later with Nintendo citing both a lack of demand (apparently only 1% of consumers bought the things) and production cost (the GameCube didn't actually output analog component signals; the cables had their own chip that converted the signal themselves). This resulted in a second GameCube model released sometime later that removed the digital AV port. This was also during a time when HDTV was relatively new, with Nintendo incorrectly predicting the speed that the format would be adopted. Because the component cables didn't sell a lot, the ones that remain are sold secondhand at very high prices. Despite the low adoption of the cables, however, a decent number of games supported progressive scan. The GameCube's successor, the Wii, has much more readily available component cables and was released during a time of rapid HDTV adoption, allowing more people to experience GameCube games in progressive scan.
  • A microphone accessory was made for the system and bundled with Mario Party 6. With the exception of Mario Party 7 (which had the Mic bundled as well), barely any games were made for the microphone afterward.
  • The Game Boy Advance to GameCube controller cable would link the Game Boy Advance to the GameCube and allow it to either be used as a controller or to transfer data between games. Not many games used the feature and many consumers passed on it when certain multiplayer games required each player to have a Game Boy Advance and the controller link cable, making it simply too expensive for most people.
• Nintendo DS:
  • PictoChat was fun to use at gaming-related social events such as Fan Conventions, but sadly (due to concerns from parents about child predators) the feature was not brought back for the Nintendo 3DS, causing PictoChat to basically go dead once the 3DS started to gain momentum.
  • One very rare feature the DS could do was closing the console and opening it back up to solve certain puzzles. Very few games (such as The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, Another Code and Hotel Dusk: Room 215) utilized this.
  • DS Download Play is a great way to get your friends to play with you even if they don't have their own copies of the game, to give them "lite" or demo versions of the game you're playing, and to try out demo versions of games at stores that have the infrastructure to offer downloads. While you can still do Download Play for DS games on a 3DS, only a select few 3DS games (such as Mario Kart 7 and Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS) offer this function.
• Wii:
  • The Wii Remotes actually have a small amount of read-writable data, allowing you to store a few things like Miis and a few games' data. However, likely because the amount of R/W data can be counted in single-digit kilobytes, only a few games outside the Mii Channel actually make use of this feature.
  • The Wii Zapper and Wii Wheel were plastic shells that housed the Wii Remote, allowing the player to pretend they were holding a gun and steering wheel respectively. Only a handful of games were made for those accessories and it was possible to play said games without the accessory at all; in fact, the prevalence of waggle on the system made them hindrances for most games outside of the ones specifically designed to be used with them.
  • The Wii Speak microphone was an accessory that hardly had any compatible games. Its main draw was using it with the Wii Speak Channel, which was a program that allowed friends to come together and talk to each other in voice chat. Almost no one used it all since you couldn't use the chat program while playing a game and voice chat was easier to use on PC. The program became effectively useless once Nintendo shut down their online services for the Wii.
  • Like the GameCube and Game Boy Advance before it, the Wii could connect to the Nintendo DS, and this time didn't even require a cable due to the consoles' support for wireless communication; sadly, even fewer games supported this than in the previous generation, probably due to the poor reception of the GBA-GameCube link cable.
  • The Wii supported more traditional controllers such as the Classic Controller and (in early models) GameCube controller, and while some major titles did indeed support them, a large amount of games that would have benefited from them do not.
• The PlayStation had a serial IO port on the back of the system that could be used to connect two consoles together for multiplayer with your own screens. A novel concept, but one that was Awesome, but Impractical for most consumers; a proper setup required two consoles, two TVs, and two copies of the same game (save for a few multi-disc games that supported it), which made the cost and overhead through the roof for most. Few games supported it, and the feature was completely removed on the redesigned PSOne model (frustratingly so, as it also had the LCD screen attachment that would have made it a lot more practical). While this kind of multiplayer allows for better visual performance and each player to have their own dedicated screen, most gamers saw split-screen and reduced framerate or resolution as an acceptable tradeoff if it meant not having to buy two of everything just to play a game with their family or friends.
• The PlayStation 2 had quite a few features that seldom ever went used:
  • The Network Adapter doubled in functionality for also opening the possibility of adding a hard disk drive to the console. There was a world of possibilities that were opened with this, but a very scant few games made any use of it (35 out of the several thousand in the library), and even fewer made remarkable use of it. A good majority of them used it to decrease load times and absolutely nothing else, while some used it to offer downloadable content, patches, or added functionality (such as more elaborate replays in the ESPN 2K5 games). Only one game outright required it (Final Fantasy XI). Sony more than likely opted to sweep it under the rug when people were using it more often to install homebrew or play pirated games (and as a result, people who didn't know what the space was for would use it to hide things, mostly weed). The redesigned slim model completely removed this functionality altogether (with an ethernet port built in so an adapter for that was no longer needed).
  • The DualShock 2 has pressure-sensitive face and shoulder buttons, meaning they can detect how hard they are pushed. This is also a seldom used feature, and most of the time only one or two of the buttons out of eight will have this functionality tapped into, and many players considered it a Scrappy Mechanic due to inconsistent differences in how much pressure was required between different functions of one button.
  • The i.Link connector (actually a common IEEE 1394 port, more frequently called Firewire) allowed another form of networked multiplayer. In the early days of the console, it might have been slightly more convenient as it didn't require the network adapter to be used (only a set of Firewire cables and a Firewire hub), but over time ethernet became the far more preferred method, and fewer and fewer games supported this form of networked multiplayer until it effectively died off when it phased out of the Slim model.
• PlayStation 3:
  • The PS3 can actually support up to 7 controllers at once. Good luck finding a game that doesn't cap at 4 players and actually makes use of this. Likewise, its two predecessors can also support up to eight controllers when using two multitaps, but again this was a fairly rare sight.
  • The PS3 controller had a motion sensor, but few games used it, fearing accusations of Waggle, and because of a lack of similar capabilities in the controller of its primary competitor, the Xbox 360, which made it a no-go for Multi-Platform games. Despite this, Sony would also include motion sensors in the PS4 and PS5 controllers, despite low adoption for similar reasons.
• Nintendo Switch:
  • The Switch does have native audio input support, and as such you can plug a headset into the audio jack for voice chat (as opposed to using the Switch smartphone app)... but only for a very, very small subset of games, such as Fortnite. And none of those games are first-party Nintendo games.
  • In November 2019, the Switch was updated to version 9.0.0, which, among other things, added a feature to invite members of your Friend List to online games. The only game that used this at its introduction was Divinity: Original Sin II, and it took 18 months for a first-party Nintendo game (Super Mario Party which released all the way back in 2018 and got updated for online play in 2021) to use it. Several longtime Switch owners only learned it was a feature when they played the mid-January 2021 rerelease of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Game, which also makes use of the Switch's invite function.
  • The Switch's settings have the option to select between menu themes, the successor of a similar feature on the Nintendo 3DS. The themes on the 3DS have the capability to alter the layout of the menu, display backgrounds, music and sound effects. The Switch only has two options — a basic light or dark theme, despite indications other colors were planned.
  • The Joy-Con R has an infrared camera on the underside, something that could be used for Augmented Reality features like that of Nintendo Labo kits, scanning barcodes of some sort, or checking the player's heart rate like in Ring Fit Adventure...but very few games use that feature.
• As part of its Game for Windows push, Microsoft hyped a feature called "Tray and Play", which allowed PC users to play their games as they were being installed, streaming it from the disc like on a game console. Despite some initial interest, the only game to make use of this feature was the much-loathed Vista PC port of Halo 2.
• DirectX has had a lot of different components added and deprecated through the years, with some getting more mileage than others:
  • DirectMusic is a bit of an oddball among the components in that it's not an interface that is programmed, rather more of a music manipulation engine to create effects such as a Variable Mix. While it was very neat in theory, it was rarely ever used due to it relying on sequenced music in an era where that was increasingly getting seen as old school, in addition to the fact that most game developers don't consider the high amount of effort to make proper use of it worth the payoff. Only a very small handful of games made use of it and it only lasted three versions (from 6 to 8) before being deprecated entirely, alongside most of the other legacy components.
  • Near the end of its useful life, DirectPlay was given voice chat capabilities. Owing to online gaming still being in its fairly early stages though, this wasn't used a whole lot either before it was pushed to the side in favor of Games for Windows Live.
  • Direct3D Retained Mode was meant to be a beginner-friendly 3D graphics mode akin to a Game Engine, where the programmer would build a "scene" that they could add and remove things from, as opposed to the more barebones Immediate Mode. Unfortunately, the performance took a drastic hit to make this ease of use possible, making it a generally very undesirable method. Only two games that sold in any significant capacity ^note LEGO Island and Rock Raiders made use of it and Microsoft didn't update it after version 3.
• The SuperGrafx was a short-lived Product Facelift of the PC Engine which boasted extra hardware while retaining full backward compatibility with the console's library and accessories. Although regular HuCards games could be programmed to take advantage of the SuperGrafx's specs, the only game to make use of this feature was Darius Plus and its promotional Boss Game variant Darius Alpha, to reduce slowdowns and flickering.
• Xbox:
  • The original Xbox had a memory card accessory that plugged into the controller port. This might have found some reasonable amount of use...were it not for the fact the console already came with a built-in hard disk drive for saving to begin with. Very few games natively support saving to the card, and some game saves are even digitally signed so you can't even copy them via the dashboard. As a result, the accessory was generally seen as situationally beneficial at best (such as for sharing saves between friends) and most tend to forget the console ever had a memory card to begin with. It didn't help that the memory card only held 32 MB when the HDD typically had a capacity of 8 GB.
  • The HDD itself was largely not used to its full potential on the original Xbox. Most games used it to store only paltry amounts of save data, or to cache data on in order to speed up load times. Only a handful of games supported meaningful downloadable content, and the console didn't have a Digital Distribution service, both of which would be come more prominent during the following console generation.
  • The original Xbox supported both 720p and 1080i HD ouput, something only 40-some titles took advantage of due to the obvious performance overhead and the scarcity of HDTVs at the time. What pushes this in "Underused" territory is that modders found out you can safely enable the 720p framebuffer on around a hundred more games, with minimal performance impact and no modification done otherwise.
• Given how short its lifespan was, the Dreamcast had a few of these:
  • The VMU had features beyond just being able to save games — it also doubled as a primitive controller screen for displaying game information and could even be used as a simple handheld game system when it wasn't in the controller. Unfortunately, very few games made any use of either feature, with most just opting to display the game logo while playing. It didn't exactly help that the device was extremely power hungry, which is a major issue when it uses coin cell batteries that are nowhere near as cheap to replace as alkaline batteries.
  • There was an official Sega light gun for the Dreamcast, called the Dreamcast Gun, that’s regarded as one of the best light guns out there. Sadly, it suffered a case of No Export for You due to Columbine happening before the Dreamcast’s North American release and Sega being worried about potential controversy. Even worse, the Dreamcast Gun was region locked, so even if one imported the thing it wouldn’t work with most North American games (other than Virtua Cop 2 and Demolition Racer: No Mercy). The result was American gamers having to use a MadCatz Gun, which was nowhere near as reliable as the Dreamcast Gun and fewer light gun games releasing for the Dreamcast.
  • It’s possible to connect a Neo Geo Pocket to the Dreamcast via a link cable. Other than some SNK games there were few games that could take advantage of the link cable, and the games that did had minor features such as easier character unlocks or data transfers. Not helping was the link cable being another case of No Export for You.
• The Sega Saturn's first party Mission Stick controller supported plugging a 2nd stick in the unused left/right port for dual stick gameplay. Sadly, the only game to support this feature is Panzer Dragoon Zwei.
• KDE Plasma, the Linux desktop environment that powers the Steam Deck's desktop mode, can be easily customized for a more touchscreen-friendly experience. However, the system ships by default with a mostly vanilla KDE desktop which is more akin to Microsoft Windows than a tablet-focused interface, since desktop mode is supposed to be used with a keyboard, mouse, and monitor connected rather than while using the Deck as a handheld.
• The iPad Pro's touchscreen normally polls at 120 Hz, same as the screen's refresh rate. It can poll at 240 Hz, which can be very useful for games that benefit from high poll rates, most notably Rhythm Games^note In fact, 240 Hz is still considered on the low end for rhythm games on more traditional platforms, with 1000 Hz often being regarded as the standard...but only when using an Apple Pencil. There is no way for app devs to make the device poll at 240 Hz when operating the touchscreen with fingers.

Action

• In the first Hotline Miami, you can take a Human Shield if you're holding an one-handed gun (such as a pistol) and use the "execution" key near a knocked-down enemy. It's rather hard to do in the heat of battle (especially since two-handed guns are more common than one-handed ones) and most players complete the game without doing it even once (except to get one particular achievement). The feature was removed from the sequel.
• DmC: Devil May Cry:
  • Mission 1 - "Found" allows Dante to launch enemies into unique environmental hazards such as spinning sawblades or rides. Unique environmental hazards aren't abundant in the next levels as they are mostly Bottomless Pits.
  • Mission 17 - "Furnace of Souls" is the only level where the platforming is somewhat a challenge and has large walls of flame rises up every few seconds that can harm and kill you when mistiming your jumps. With the flames causing more damage at a faster rate, when on higher difficulty modes. This being late in the game, no other levels have this gimmick nor something of similar platforming challenge.
  • Mission 18 - "Demon's Den" is the only level to have one complicated puzzle in the entire game, due to the actionized nature of the reboot.
• Devil May Cry 5 has the Cameo system. If you're connected to the internet and able to play online, then moments where the characters fight near each other should have "cameos" by players playing the level where they'd control said character in that instance online, even being able to fight alongside other players in limited co-op. In practice, cameos by actual players are rare when the level necessary for a cameo is unpopular (such as any of V's levels) leading to cameos by "The DMC Crew" (which just indicates AI controlled characters), it's so hard to affect the fights that other players are involved in when they cameo to the point that most people don't realize you actually can (you pretty much need to intentionally use wide AoE moves as close to them as possible or even directly try to affect their fight). It's also disabled entirely in Vergil's campaign and Turbo mode, both added to the Special Edition Updated Re-release one console generation later (playing Nero/Dante/V's campaigns with turbo mode disabled causes Cameos to work like normal, but now many players will be playing Turbo Mode or V's campaign themselves). While the mechanic is very cool when it works, the ultimate effect is making many players want a true co-op experience that the game clearly is capable of allowing, but no actual way to do so.

Action-Adventure

• ANNO: Mutationem: On the Skill Tree, Ann can unlock extra combat moves with enough Grombitz. These require proper inputs during battle, which makes them underhanded techniques compared to the more promptly used normal attacks by the use of a single button.
• Remember Me has only a few memory-altering minigames, which is particularly egregious in that these puzzles were a major selling point for the game during the pre-release promotion.
• Jak and Daxter:
  • Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy: Red Eco, easily the least common, only appears in two or three places and is vastly overshadowed by the use of Blue and Yellow Eco. The ability to fire blasts from Yellow Eco in particular makes the doubled strength of Red Eco almost feel redundant.
  • Jak 3: One new feature that many fans felt was disappointing was the implementation of Jak's new Dark Eco ability of Invisibility. Aside from a once-visited volcano level, it could only be used at the Monk's Precursor Temple monastery, denying the possibility of any stealth-based missions or tactics outside that location. That said, there is an unlockable ability to turn invisible by pressing the triangle button in Dark Jak form, but that only becomes available after completing the game.
  • Jak and Daxter: The Lost Frontier has the Eco teleport ability, which allows Jak to switch places with Precursor statues and only those statues. It's used for a few puzzles and is impossible to use anywhere else (due to a lack of said statues), something that isn't true of the other Eco powers.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past: In order to open access to Swamp Palace, you have to go into the Light World and open the floodgates in the shrine there, which will flood the first room in the Swamp Palace. This is the only instance of the player doing things in one world to change things in the other, despite all the potential puzzles it could allow.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening: The dungeon item for the final dungeon, Turtle Rock, is a Magic Rod. It has an unlimited number of uses and allows you to set things on fire from any distance so long as there's a straight line between you and the target. It's also only required relatively rarely in that final dungeon, and taking it back to other areas to mess around with it reveals that despite its high power (twice as powerful as the strongest sword you can get), there's a saddening number of enemies across the rest of the game that resist or are even immune to it.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time:
    • Din's Fire is a magic spell that sends out a shockwave of fire. It can be obtained quite early in the game, as the location is accessed using bombs, which you get by the second dungeon. However, Din's Fire is only required once for a trap room in the Shadow Temple, a fairly late game dungeon. Aside from that, its only other use for a puzzle is to open the same temple - but using it there is optional assuming you already have the Fire Arrows. As for combat, you can use the spell to attack enemies, but you'll never really be in a big enough fight that a large AoE fireball would be more effective than just using your sword instead. Plus, using them on Keese only sets them on fire instead of killing them, and many other enemies, even minor ones, are immune. Master Quest, however, makes more use of the item where every Temple after Forest needs either Din's Fire or the Fire Arrows.
    • Bombchus are mobile bombs that can crawl up the walls and ceiling, but the only time you ever actually need to use them is once in the Spirit Temple and in Ganon's Castle, both places being the last two dungeons in the game. It's simply easier to use regular bombs when you need to blow up something, especially as you can carry much, much more of those than you can Bombchus. The Master Quest version of the game does give Bombchus a bit more use, but not by a whole lot.
    • The Boomerang is required for the third dungeon where it's found, used once or twice in the Spirit Temple, and never needed anywhere else other than a few Skulltulas that are out of reach for Link's child form. It cannot be used when Link is an adult, where the Hookshot takes its purpose (reaching distant targets).
    • The Song of Storms is required to gain access to the Bottom of the Well and that's all it's ever used for outside of 100% Completion, whereas all other songs get a lot of use as a means of teleportation or for multiple puzzles. It's somewhat more useful in Majora's Mask: you only need it to make progress in Ikana Canyon, but it makes watering plants to grow them a lot less tedious (summon instant rain instead of having to go back and forth for bottles of water.)
    • You only need to dive underwater a grand total of three times to advance in the game; first one is in the first dungeon where you need to reach a button, the second one is used for a diving mini-game to obtain the Silver Scale, and the third occurrence is using said Silver Scale to reach a bottle containing a letter underwater. You can completely skip the Golden Scale, which is only used once at Lake Hylia's lab to impress an NPC for a Piece of Heart. The Silver Scale also opens up a useful shortcut between the Lost Woods and Zora's River.
    • The Iron and Hover Boots only get their most mileage out of the dungeons they were designed for (Water and Shadow Temples respectively). Ganon's Tower also makes use of them in their respective rooms, but that is it. Likewise, the Mirror Shield only gets any real use in the Spirit Temple and one section of Ganon's Castle, which are late to end game content. The Zora Tunic (underwater breathing) is only useful for the Water Temple. Blue Fire is only useful in the Ice Cavern, freeing a frozen King Zora, and one section of Ganon's Castle where the item's only purpose is to melt red ice. Light Arrows are obtained at the end of the game and are required, but it has zero use outside of its intended purpose and costs too much magic to kill stuff. The Ice Arrows, obtained fairly late in the game, can be completely skipped since they're optional. While freezing enemies is nice, there's nothing you don't have at that point that can do the same thing but faster.
  • Many of the optional masks in The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask are only needed as "keys" for one or two sidequests each instead of having a gameplay use. Standout cases are the Circus/Troupe Leader's Mask (which had a completely redundant purpose in the original game^note It makes Cremia's sidequest easier... but you need to help Cremia to gain access to the mask in the first place; the remake lets it activate a new sidequest) and the Giant's Mask (which is gotten slightly before the fight with Twinmold and only works in its arena). The Fierce Deity's Mask absolutely tears everything to shreds, but you can only obtain it after getting all 24 regular masks and the mask itself can only be used in boss fights.^note It can be used anywhere if you use a glitch, but interacting with certain NPCs can crash the game. By the time you even get the mask, you're a step away from the Final Boss.
  • Sidling in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker is only brought up during exploration of the Forsaken Fortress, and a few other select instances (such as Dragon Roost Island when visited for the first time, and Fire Mountain). There's also the Slippy-Slidey Ice World mechanic, used in one mini-dungeon and never, ever again.
  • Many items in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess are notorious for rarely being used outside of their own dungeons. The worst cases are the Spinner and Dominion Rod.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword only lets you pick up and temporarily use enemy weapons (a mechanic with decent importance in The Wind Waker; many enemies wield weapons, all of them are usable, and with different strengths and weaknesses that make them quite fun.) during the boss battle with Koloktos, where you have to use its giant cutlasses to hack away at its core. No other enemies in Skyward Sword drop usable weapons.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has only three points in the game where the Sheikah Slate is made unusable (disabling map and teleportation): all three in the desert, caused by the sandstorms, which are permanently cleared after completing certain tasks.
• Super Metroid:
  • If you ever use the Samus menu to toggle upgrades off, it will most likely be to switch between the Spazer Beam and Plasma Beam as they cannot be used simultaneously (and there are scenarios where you'd want to use one over the other — turning off the Ice Beam similarly has a few use cases), but it can also be used to disable every upgrades you've gotten so far bar Energy Tanks and your special select button weapons (Missile, Super Missiles, and Power Bombs). There is only a single reason to do this: when only the Charge Beam and one of the other four beams is enabled, selecting Power Bombs and then charging Samus' Arm Cannon activates a special attack, which is different depending on which of the other four beams was used. Aside from this mechanic never being explained and only making one appearance in the Attract Mode, the special attacks are not required for any puzzles or exploration, and are not particularly useful for combat given the inconvenience of disabling your other, more powerful beams. Thus, most players will play through the game without knowing these attacks exist, and if they do, they'll probably never use them. Disabling anything else is completely useless. Tellingly, the ability to disable upgrades does not return in any future games (though it was Dummied Out of Zero Mission).
  • The Reserve Tanks act as spare Energy Tanks that you can use manually or, well, keep in reserve to automatically replenish your health when you run out of it completely. A nice idea, but not the most convenient; the only way to refill them is to either collect energy pickups while your health is maxed out, or backtrack to Samus's ship, so the type of players that would benefit from auto-revives the most would need to maintain high health to make regular use of them anyway. To date, the only other game the mechanic has appeared in is Metroid: Samus Returns, and only as an extra you receive for scanning the Zero Suit Samus amiibo.
  • The Crystal Flash technique requires that Samus have fewer than 50 units of energy, no reserve energy, at least 10 of each missile, and at least 11 Power Bombs.^note Technically, Samus can perform the technique with only 10 Power Bombs if she's positioned in such a way that she'll pick up an 11th while performing it. However, the timing and positioning to pull this off are extremely finicky, and it would only ever be necessary to do this if she's only collected two Power Bomb upgrades. The player must then lay a Power Bomb and input a button combination (L + R + Down + Shoot), without moving or taking damage. Success results in a complete energy recharge. While cool, this ability is so situational that the only time you'll see someone use it is during a speedrun (some boss orders require you to pull these off with perfect timing to get through Lower Norfair early, since you'll be constantly losing health). Super remains the only entry in the series where Samus can pull off this technique.
• The developers of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time noticed players ignored most of the techniques using the Sands of Time, and made sequel Prince of Persia: Warrior Within integrate them more on the gameplay, such as moments that require slow motion or fast-forward.
• The early Tomb Raider games had the swan dive that could be performed by holding the walk button as you made a forward jump. Doing a swan dive into the water would push Lara deeper into the water whereas a normal fall into the water wouldn't submerge her as far. Outside of speedrun strategies, swan diving is never used for anything and it's not even mentioned in the manual. Missing your swan dive or performing it at a bad spot by mistake would instantly kill Lara with a neck snap due to the height.
• Poptropica:
  • At the end of Twisted Thicket Island, you get an amulet that gives you the powers of flight, super speed, and super strength, which you can switch between instantly. This is only used for the final boss battle, and then the island is over. As per most ability-granting items, you can't use it on any other islands. While you do get to use the amulet more in the bonus quest, this is locked behind membership.
  • On Counterfeit Island, you need to find the curator of the museum. She's on Early Poptropica Island, and when you visit her over there, you get a key that's added to your Counterfeit Island inventory. This is the only instance of one island requiring you to visit a different one, or an event being triggered on an island that changes another. Considering the nonlinear format in which the islands can be completed, this could have led to an interesting interconnected world, but is the only such instance of this happening in the game.
  • The Mighty Action Force Card Game on PoptropiCon. The minigame is incredibly fun as an Affectionate Parody of collectible card games, complete with unique abilities and cool card art. It's introduced in episode 2, and you play it three times, before it's sidelined in episode 3 as an optional minigame. What's interesting is that there's a variety of Dummied Out cards (which have completed stats and card art) and extra opponents in the game data, suggesting it was intended to play a bigger role.
• Record of Lodoss War -Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth-, the metroidvania based on Record of Lodoss War, gives Deedlit the ability to switch between two elemental familiars (fire/wind) in order to absorb magic damage a la Ikaruga or to hurt enemies of the opposite element. The starting section acts as a tutorial and shows that with the wind elemental you can hover in mid-air and with the fire one you can blow up explosive barrels; the latter use, however, never comes up again in any other point of the game.
• Batman: Arkham Knight
  • The game adds the option to use gadgets while gliding. The only place where this mechanic is required is as a condition to unlock one of the AR missions. This is particularly wasted given there are two flying bosses in Firefly and Man-Bat that could have been a way to introduce the new mechanic and better incorporate it into the game (instead one is fought by chasing with the Batmobile and then attacking with its ejection, and the other is barely a confrontation, only requiring Batman to dive onto him once he's directly above). The gadgets are also difficult to aim and some will ruin your combo.
  • While there are several endless combat challenges that only end when Batman is defeated, there's only one endless predator challenge. This is disappointing in that the one challenge that uses this concept (Endless Knight) was widely praised for the variety of ways to take down enemies and escalating challenge.
  • Harley's plants and Red Hood's bulletproof enemies are only used in their (extremely short) DLC campaigns and nowhere else; not even the predator and combat challenges designed with said characters in mind use these unique mechanics.

Beat 'em Up

• Fairy in the Shrek 2 game has the exclusive ability of using her magic to make teammates and enemies alike float into the air for a short time, with the allotted time being based on the targeted character's weight. However, Fairy is only playable in one level (where said ability isn't used for any puzzles) and a bonus minigame (where said ability doesn't function on any of her teammates or any enemy that isn't also present in her one level), ensuring you'll likely forget the ability exists before long.

Driving Game

• F-Zero GX: The arcade verson F-Zero AX is the only game in the series to increase the number of laps based on the track length, resulting especially in the very short Aeropolis: Screw Drive and Mute City: Sonic Oval tracks having decently long course times with 6 and 8 laps, respectively. In GX, these tracks are practically over as soon as they start, due to using the usual three-lap rule.
• Mario Kart series:
  • In the Arcade GP games, a shield appears around your kart whenever you powerslide, protecting you from projectile attacks. Despite helping cut down on the frustration of getting hit by attacks that you can do very little about (in the main games, you can trail a shell or banana behind you, or deploy a Super Horn in Mario Kart 8 but each is only good for one attack and requires getting them from Item Boxes first), it has yet to be put into a consumer-software Mario Kart game.
  • Mario Kart: Double Dash!! has the Baby Park course, which is a small oval-shaped track where each lap can be done in 10-15 seconds. As a result, it's a 7-lap course (5 laps in Mario Kart DS and Mario Kart Tour) whereas every other modern Mario Kart course is strictly 3 laps. Heck, even though the original Super Mario Kart is all 5-lap courses, they're retrofitted to 3 laps whenever they show up in later games.
• Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune:
  • In Maximum Tune 2, if all players in a 2- or 3-player VS match on a setup with at least one open cabinet hold down the red button during course loading, additional players cannot join in on the race. This was unfortunately not kept from Maximum Tune 3 onwards, meaning that an intense <4-player battle could be suddenly interrupted — yes, even at the very end — by a cardless player or a Griefer and there's nothing that can be done to prevent it short of forcing said player to decline challenging.
  • In Maximum Tune 3, when racing in a Tokyo sub-area or Hakone in VS, players can vote on the starting ramp. This was removed in 3DX onwards in favor of randomized ramp selection, which some players consider a Scrappy Mechanic.
  • In Maximum Tune 5, Extreme Versus Battle mode allows the players to drive the cars in reverse, oncoming traffic configurations. However, due to Interface Screw issues, this was deleted from 5DX.
• FAST Racing Neo got a post-release update patch to allow Supersonic and Hypersonic in online modes, but for whatever reason, FAST RMX did not get the same feature, limiting online play to Subsonic. So if you wanna race online with a top speed of more than roughly 750 mph, you're gonna have to dust off the Wii U.

Fighting Game

• Super Smash Bros.:
  • Super Smash Bros. Melee:
    • This game stands out by having the most "advanced techniques" in the franchise, the most prominent of which is wavedashing, a slightly Good Bad Bug movement method that defines the metagame to this day. Most of them were either removed or nerfed in Brawl onwards to streamline gameplay; nobody can agree on if this was a good idea or not.
    • This is the last game in the series to have individual "Break the Targets" levels for every fighter. Brawl reduces the mode to just five stages of increasing difficulty with a focus on item usage, 3DS/Wii U replaces it with Target Blast, and Ultimate lacks any version at all.
  • Super Smash Bros. Brawl:
    • This game introduces stickers as a counterpart to trophies, depicting lesser-known characters and objects from Nintendo's franchises. These stickers can be put on a fighter's "trophy stand" via an Inventory Management Puzzle, providing stat boosts or special benefits such as starting items. However, this feature is exclusive to the Subspace Emissary story mode, so stickers are useless when it comes to multiplayer. 3DS/Wii U also includes stat editing for fighters (and it works in every mode), but it's done with a simple three-slot system of equips, lacking the unique appearances of stickers, which did not make the cut. Ultimate has spirits, which effectively combines the two ideas.
    • Gliding is a rather peculiar recovery technique that only three characters can utilize. It was dropped in future installments.
  • Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U:
    • Custom Moves are alternate moves that you can give your character in place of their standard specials. For a majority of characters, these are unlocked at random through normal gameplay. Only the Mii Fighters and Palutena have all of them available at the start, with all the specials they have being radically different. The nature of custom moves and Mii Fighters meant that they weren't allowed in online play unless with friends, and the competitive scene completely rejected them. The DLC characters didn't have Custom Moves, and come Ultimate, custom movesets for any character outside the Miis were completely abandoned, with Miis also now being allowed for online play in any mode.
    • The Donkey Kong Country Returns stage "Jungle Hijinx" features a unique mechanic where the fighters can jump into barrel cannons that blast them into the background of the stage, where they fight on a separate plane and have a higher launch rate. This stage didn't return in Ultimate despite the uniqueness, as it was likely a victim of the new Stage Morph feature (it would be tricky to transfer the fighters to the new stage if they were split between two planes of interaction).
    • The Pyrosphere stage features Ridley (with his Other M design) as a boss character that can interrupt the fight, but unlike other stage bosses, Ridley will join a player's side if they deal enough damage to him, and he'll act like another fighter who can be KOed for points. Ultimate cut Pyrosphere from the stage roster and took Ridley with it, likely because it wouldn't make sense to include Ridley as a special fighter when Ridley's already on the roster.^note It should be noted that the Ridley in Other M is actually a clone of the original (hence the drastically altered design), but the general point stands.
• Tatsunoko vs. Capcom had snapbacks, a mechanic where you force your opponent's point character out and bring in their second character. It's an important mechanic in other versus titles, but in Tatsunoko vs. Capcom only three characters had moves that could force a snapback (Alex, PTX, and Gold Lightan). Thankfully, Capcom would bring back snapbacks as a universal mechanic in Marvel vs. Capcom 3.

Hack-and-Slash

• Dynasty Warriors 6 introduced new mechanics to the series such as grab attacks ^note outside of weapon attack combos, dodging, the need to break down doors to bases before entering them, on-map duels, and attacks after winning weapon locks. However, due to the poor reception of DW6 (mostly due to the Renbu battle system, cut characters, etc.), they decided to scrap all of these features come DW7.
• In the Legend Mode of Hyrule Warriors, the monster officers are the player's main army in missions starring the villains. However in Adventure mode, the player's army is always composed of Hylians and Gorons. This applies even in missions involving the villains fighting the heroes of the series, creating scenarios like Monster Lord, Ghirahim, commanding an army of Gorons to fight Goron King Darunia and his army of monsters. You can get monsters on your side, but only when they start out as neutrals who you can you recruit, not as your main army.

Platform Game

• Donkey Kong Country:
  • Barrel cannons are more common in this game than the second and third, and many of them either rotate or move back and forth, but the kind that rotate while moving are found only in Snow Barrel Blast.
  • DK has a Hand Slap move that's extremely situational, with almost no practical use. It's to the point that many players are not even aware of its existence and think that his down special in Super Smash Bros. was created for that series, rather than starting in his own.
  • The second and third games have some rare barrel types, too. The rotatable barrels with time limits are in a few levels in Donkey Kong Country 2, but the movable ones appear only in Fiery Furnace, including a single one without a time limit in a bonus area (there is also only one rotating one with no time limit, found in the last stretch of Klobber Karnage). In 3, the rocket barrels and tracker barrels each show up in one level in Cotton-Top Cove as the level gimmick and nowhere else.
  • Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble! introduces Dixie's ability to lob Kiddy Kong into the air, at which point he smashes into the ground, potentially revealing secrets. The very first stage, Lakeside Limbo, has you use this to access the first Bonus Barrel, which is the only time most players will use this move, as any further uses for it only yield Bear Coins (the main currency, which is given out liberally without the need to smash the ground open).
  • Also in DKC3, Kiddy can skip on water up to three times in a row. This is only brought up in the manual, and the only practical use for it ingame is for a bonus in both Tidal Trouble and Riverside Race. It's hard to time, as it requires that you roll off a ledge, then press jump when Kiddy is about to hit the water. If you have to get across water, it's usually more efficient to use Dixie's helicopter twirl to just float above it.
  • The wooden crates were introduced in DKC2 and acted as another projectile type, basically a barrel that couldn't roll, and they commonly appeared in the pirate ship levels, as well as various other themes such as the swamp. In DKC3, however, there is only one of them in the entire game, found about 1/3 of the way through Barrel Drop Bounce.
  • Certain animal buddies have a very limited role. In the first game, Squawks only appeared in a single level, where his purpose was to light up your path. However, later games gave him considerably more to do. In the second game, Squawks' original role was transferred to Glimmer the Angler Fish, who only appeared in one level as well. Quawks (the purple parrot) only appears in one level, while Clapper the Seal only shows up in two, and he essentially functions as a glorified stage element, cooling down the otherwise damaging hot water when jumped on and doing nothing else.
  • For being the most iconic Power-Up Mount of the series, Rambi is oddly underused in the original Donkey Kong Country. Each other animal buddy (Enguarde, Winky, and Expresso) shows up in four levels, while Rambi only gets three. And he doesn't get to do much even in those levels, since you only get him about 2/3 of the way through the already very short Jungle Hijinxs, he doesn't show up until over halfway through Oil Drum Alley and doesn't help you with the platforming gauntlet at the end (and is easy to miss if you don't know where he is), and in Manic Mincers, the only level where he is theoretically available for most of it, the main hazard is an invincible obstacle that gives Rambi just as much trouble as the Kongs if not more.
• Kirby
  • Kirby: Squeak Squad features an ability mixing system where you can combine two ability bubbles to make a new ability. While this usually creates a preexisting ability, there are a few special abilities that can be made with certain combinations. The problem is that there are only five of these (not counting mixing two Sleeps to get Ghost), you don't get the scrolls that let you create them until the last third of the game, and they're just elemental versions of Sword and Bomb, not providing much extra combat capability. It's basically a watered-down version of Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards' ability combination system.
  • Kirby: Planet Robobot included more in-depth amiibo support than most other Nintendo games. During gameplay, tapping an amiibo would give Kirby a specific copy ability depending on what amiibo was scanned (scanning Mario would give Kirby the Fire ability for example), or a random one if the figure wasn't supported. There were even special skins and rare abilities like Smash Bros. and UFO that could be received by scanning Kirby-series amiibo. None of this would make it into the following game, Kirby Star Allies; scanning any amiibo just heals you and gives you a few extra picture pieces, and Kirby-series figures give you stronger healing. It also went barely used in Kirby and the Forgotten Land and Kirby's Return to Dream Land Deluxe.
  • One of the stage gimmicks present in Kirby and the Forgotten Land are Captured Roulettes, which are boxes that alternate between displaying a captured Waddle Dee or a Gordo, and turn into the thing they're displaying when broken. Even though they're one of the figures Kirby can obtain, suggesting they'd be a recurring puzzle element, they only show up twice in "Invasion at the House of Horrors" and never appear afterwards.
• Ratchet & Clank: Practically a staple trope of the franchise thanks to certain gadgets and mechanics that show up with only a few levels to go:
  • Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando
    • One of the three new robots that can assist Clank is the Lifterbot, which can lift up blocks for Clank. Or rather, it can lift up the singular lift block in the game for Clank, and then wait until Challenge Mode to be used again. The Lifterbot was intended to be used more than just the one time, but they couldn't get the section in.
    • The Hypnomatic gadget is used for only three very brief segments, all in levels at the tail end of the game.
  • Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal
    • The Warp Pad is a gadget that lets you place a temporary location you can warp to at circular panels on the ground. There are two of these panels in the entirety of the game, which both appear in the same level, and one of them can be bypassed by using the Charge Boots instead. It was originally supposed to be usable anywhere, but Insomniac quickly realized this could be a total Game-Breaker and would require extensive testing of every level to make sure it didn't create any bugs, and by then it was too late in production. So they had two choices: either cut it entirely, or heavily limit it.
    • Giant Clank is used a grand total of once, in a miniboss fight in Holostar Studios.
  • In Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction, Ratchet picks up the Heli-Pods which, outside of an extremely brief tutorial section, are used for an optional level path on Ardolis and are then forgotten about until another optional area in the midgame level Zordoom Prison. Since it's optional, players have often missed this and then stumble into a level soon after that requires them, for just one instance, causing many players to get stuck not knowing how to get past.
  • In Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time, the Time Bombs after you recover Clank. While Clank uses them a lot in his own levels, they are eventually unlocked for Ratchet too... and he never has to use them, except if you feel like slowing enemies down. Which you by no means have to, as by this point Ratchet's arsenal is about as powerful as it can possibly be, and no enemies are fast enough to require it. According to the Insomniac Museum, there were puzzles intended for Ratchet that would require using Clank's Time Bombs, but they were cut for time.
• In Sheep, Dog 'n' Wolf, we have a mechanic where you can keep running in the air for a few seconds after running off a cliff (in typical Looney Tunes fashion). This mechanic isn't put to any practical use anywhere outside the tutorial, although it is useful when you accidentally sprint off a cliff and need to recover, or to make crossing bodies of water quicker.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • Super Mario Bros. 2 requires you to ride Birdo's egg in World 4-3 in order to cross the large body of water and advance to the rest of the course. No other course does this.
  • Super Mario Bros. 3:
    • The Goomba's Shoe was the only way Mario could defy Spikes of Doom and enemies with them, and it made World 5-3 a memorable course... and only 5-3, because the shoe isn't found anywhere else, can't be taken out of the course, and proceeded to disappear from the series without a trace. Even the game's official guide written by Nintendo Power laments that it appears nowhere else. The GBA version added an e-Reader course that uses Goomba's Shoe, but it wouldn't properly return until Super Mario Maker, where the shoe and its variation Stiletto of it can be added to courses. To a lesser extent, there's the Hammer Suit; beloved for being a Game-Breaker, but it has yet to return to the series, though it can at least be used in any level.
    • Pink Note Blocks only appear in five courses, two of which are in World 1.
    • World 8 has map gimmicks that aren't used anywhere else. The second map screen have course tiles you can skip over, but if you are unlucky, a hand will pull Mario in and you're forced to play the course. The third map screen is in complete darkness except for the small circle of light surrounding Mario. All this does is make navigating the map trickier.
  • Super Mario World:
    • The red, blue, and yellow Yoshis appear only in Star World, and only once or twice each: red in Star World 1 and 4, yellow in 3 and 5, and blue in 2 only. Alleviated in the GBA remake, where after finding them the first time you can then obtain them in any other course based on what power-up you are holding at the moment. ^note Small Mario gets the standard green, while Super Mario gets yellow, Fire Mario gets red, and Cape Mario gets blue
    • The Switch Palaces tend to be used to simply make the game easier, which can be counter-intuitive considering the difficulty of finding three of them, and also to make some secret paths more accessible. However, the idea of using Switch Palaces to open up access to new paths (or even open up more challenging alternate routes within courses) wasn't used as much it could have been, while skillful use of the Cape can even bypass the need to find a Switch Palace in some cases. Fortunately, ROM hacks are one means of playing with features like this.
    • Yoshi's Island 3 is the only course containing the large swinging platforms, except for a single other one in one bonus area in Chocolate Island 3.
    • Valley of Bowser 3 is the only one with the numbered platforms, which act as a timer to how long you can stand on them until they fall.
    • The game has 3-UP moons that grant three extra lives when collected. Only seven courses have them (one in each of the seven main worlds) and they're usually in out of the way locations that most players will never find unless they purposely search for them.
    • The Sunken Ghost Ship uses a goal sphere (marked with a "?") to end the course instead of a goal tape or boss, similar to the ones dropped by minibosses in Super Mario Bros. 3. It's the only course that does this, possibly because the last room of the course is vertical and regular goal points do not work correctly in vertical courses.
    • Silver P-Switches turn certain enemies into silver coins that grant the player extra lives when enough are collected. The item is hardly ever used, only appearing in a select few courses.
    • Some of the Special World courses noticeably have unique mechanics that don't show up anywhere else in the game, such as the rising and falling tide in Mondo, or the berries that add to the time limit in Funky.
    • The large spikes that rise and fall from the ceiling are common in the three rooms that have them. However, there are only two that come out of the floor, one each at the end of the first room of Wendy's castle and Valley Fortress.
    • A few of the terrain objects are oddly rare, particularly in the underground tileset. Climbable fences only appear in the first room of Iggy's castle, the last room of Ludwig's castle, and door 2 in Bowser's castle (and the rotating doors not even in the second). Many of the underwater slopes are left unused, including all gradual ones. The non-animated water itself appears mainly in Vanilla Dome 2, with Vanilla Dome 3 and Valley of Bowser 3 each using it in a single bonus room and Valley of Bowser 1 having one small pool. Lava slopes and edges appear only in Vanilla Dome 3 and 4 (the bonus room in the latter), including a single right normal slope in the latter and two left normal slopes, one in each. There is also only a single turn block containing a flower found in Chocolate Island 5 and a lone "continuous star" block in Star World 2.
    • The sloped conveyor belts in castles are quite underused, despite being the only sloped tiles available in the castle tileset. Morton's and Ludwig's castles have one each, while Larry's has two, and that's it. (They're also available in athletic levels, where they are outright unused, along with the flat conveyors.)
  • Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island:
    • One of the last rooms in 4-4 has a 3D tilting board platform in the middle of the room over a lava pit. It seems to serve no purpose other than to make the last red coin more dangerous to collect (the room contains no enemies), and the sprite does not show up anywhere else in the game.
    • There is also a strange pink round platform with a double arrow found only in a bonus room of 4-6.
    • There is a variant of the flipping spike platform that has two platforms with a switch in the middle, and hitting the switch causes the platforms to rotate 90 degrees at a time and then pause. It's completely unused, despite being fully functional.
    • The colored triangle-patterned moving platforms are in many courses in the game. However, the first room of 6-4 is the only place where you can find them with their alternate graphical style.
    • Perhaps justifiably, 3-4 has an almost unique graphical tileset throughout the course (except for the very beginning because the tileset gets swapped a couple screens in); outside of it, the background is only found in one room of 3-3 and the foreground only in two small rooms in 6-4 (with a different palette to boot).
    • The "Watermelon Seed Spitting Contest" minigame can be found behind one locked door in 2-6...and nowhere else in the game aside from the minigame cheat menu, unlike every other minigame, which all appear at least 3 times each in one form or another. (And it's a shame, since that was probably the most fun minigame of the bunch and is guaranteed to give you a Super Watermelon, which has 3 times as much ammo as a non-storable watermelon of the same type and cannot be obtained from any other minigame.)
    • The ability to make Yoshi's eggs skip across water is only actually put to use in 3-8, including its boss battle.
  • Super Mario 64:
    • Unfortunately, the Wing, Metal, and Vanish Caps suffer from this. The Wing Cap, on top of being difficult to control, is only needed for a few stars. The Metal Cap does make you near-invincible, but since platforming takes precedence over combat, it's basically just used for the odd puzzle here and there. The Vanish Cap is even more underutilized and basically just serves as a key to get a handful of stars, and it shows up in areas where its own invincibility properties are basically useless. The DS remake mitigates these somewhat by tying them to specific characters, though while Luigi is sure to get plenty of mileage out of it, Wario probably won't be seeing much use outside of a Self-Imposed Challenge or Wario/Metal Cap-specific courses anyway.
    • If you have the Wing powerup equipped and hold the jump button after a jump, your character will slow their fall with the wings. This is never told to the player, though it does make sense if you're familiar with the Mario series' standard of gliding powerups. Even if you're aware of it though, it requires you to have the powerup at all and be doing regular platforming with it - an unlikely scenario considering the main use of the Wing Cap is for its Video Game Flight. And since the game's platforming is designed for characters who don't have the ability to glide, this move doesn't have any places where it can do anything you couldn't already do either with regular jumps or by just initiating flight and maintaining cruising altitude over to where you're trying to go.
    • In DS, Luigi has the ability to run on water. Sounds neat, but he can only do it for two seconds before he sinks in, and he can only run on it, which requires the ground to extend into the water, like at a beach shoreline; if Luigi jumps onto water, he falls into it like normal, so this ability has very few levels it can be used in, and has very little use anyway, as it basically only lets you go a little bit farther along a surface of water before needing to swim through it, something that the fastest swimmer in the game doesn't really need in the first place.
    • Two of Mario's attacks tend to never go used by most casual players. The slide kick does basically exactly the same thing as the dive but with one extra step required, and tends to only see use to pull off a few glitches. The roundhouse kick is even more of a joke — it's pulled off by having Mario crouch and then pushing the attack button, but the only added utility is that it attacks in all directions where the punch only attacks in one. You will rarely if ever find yourself in a situation that calls for this, and even if you do, your first instinct will probably be to jump out of the danger instead of trying to fight your way out. Reportedly, this attack was supposed to be used as the only way to kill certain enemies, but this didn't happen and as a result most players end up never using it.
  • Super Mario Sunshine:
    • Yoshi's use is fairly limited. He has a host of abilities, but the only one that gets any real use is spraying juice on blockades. His flutter jump is outclassed by the FLUDD nozzles, and turning enemies into platforms is only utilized in a single mission, which also makes changing Yoshi's color (which creates different platform behaviors) unnecessary outside of another single mission. He doesn't even show up much, only being needed for about one episode per course (sometimes only to open up a secret area) and some Delfino Plaza secrets.
    • The FLUDD's Squirt and Hover Nozzles are critical to the gameplay as the default equipment, and the Rocket Nozzle's vertical boost is very convenient. The Turbo Nozzle, in spite of its water-running capabilities and speed boost, is not nearly as useful; courses are more vertical than horizontal, and since secondary nozzles are Mutually Exclusive Power-Ups, it's hard to justify swapping out Hover or Rocket for it. Similar to Yoshi, it gets most of its usage as a key for Delfino Plaza secrets, and its only dedicated Shine Sprites are one in a bonus course and one in Delfino Airstrip.
  • New Super Mario Bros.:
    • The Blue Shell is fun to use due to its defensive capabilities, improved swimming ability and shell slide (also, nice to have the Blue Shell not be the object of fear and hatred for a change), but it appears far too infrequently as it's absent from all normal ? blocks (while there's an enemy that drops it, said enemy only appears in a multiplayer course), and none of the courses are really built around using it. It's also one of the few powerups that hasn't appeared in any other New series games, though the Penguin Suit is a Suspiciously Similar Substitute.
    • The game also has quite a few platform types that appear in only one course, even if there is no reason for them to be so rare. Among other examples, 1-2 is the only course with the see-saw logs, 1-Castle with tightropes, 3-A is the only one with the groups of 3 rotating platforms (despite the equivalent in Super Mario World being noticeably more common), 4-5 is the only one with the "drawbridge" platforms, and 6-3 is the only one with the large floating logs. At the end of 2-6, there is a pipe blocked by a cork that can be pumped up to pop the cork out, which never shows up again.
  • New Super Mario Bros. Wii:
    • Yoshis appear in a lot of the game's advertising, but they only appear in six courses, and unlike Super Mario World they cannot be taken out of courses.
    • Regarding platform types, the Spine Coaster only appears in 8-7, which is a hidden course.
  • Super Mario Galaxy / Super Mario Galaxy 2:
    • Red Stars give Mario the ability to fly indefinitely until they wear off and let him magnetize collectibles towards him by spinning. There are only two of these Stars in the whole game: one in the Gateway Galaxy in a Purple Coin mission, and the other in the Comet Observatory for reaching a few 1-Up Mushrooms (at a point where you won't need many since the final course is likely open already). They're never used in a boss battle, and they don't return in Galaxy 2.
    • The Boo Mushroom lets Mario float and pass through gates, but is cancelled by light and causes Boos to chase him. It only shows up in three missions across three galaxies, none of them lasting very long, and it doesn't have a boss battle since it can't attack. In Galaxy 2, it's found in Boo Moon Galaxy for one mission and nowhere else.
    • The Fast-Foe Prankster Comet only alters two missions in Galaxy (the other four Prankster Comets modify at least four missions each), both revolving around Tox Boxes, so it never gets to affect normal enemies or bosses. It's replaced by the Double-Time comet in Galaxy 2, which speeds up the course's obstacles instead of enemies, but this is also used for just two stars.
    • Rightside Down Galaxy utilizes two walls to flip gravity. One being the blue wall that points down, and the other being the red wall that points up. But most players may not remember that there were also third and fourth wall types. These were a purple wall pointing left and a green wall pointing right. Their only appearance was at the very end of Rightside Down Galaxy where the player was being thrown in between gravity fields and had to aim for the star. They don't return in Upside Dizzy Galaxy. Had these types been used more, it would've made for more complex platforming and puzzle solving.
  • Super Mario 3D World only has one "regular" desert course with its own music^note The game has a "canyon"/"mountain" theme as well, but based on the music and the overworlds of Worlds 2 and 4 the game considers the two to be distinct. There is another "true desert" course, but it is based on riding Plessie, not platforming in the form of Conkdor Canyon, which is unusual since deserts have been a Mario series staple and the whole second World Map has a desert theme.
  • Super Mario Maker 2:
    • The game has the concept of "extra game styles", which utilize unique mechanics and don't allow levels in progress to be converted to them, unlike the main game styles. While the menu seemed to make room for multiple extra game styles to be implemented in future updates, 3D World was the only one ever included in the game.
    • Story Mode features a small handful of levels where Mario has to transport shimmering, gray-colored Stones to the exit, and has to solve puzzles and overcome obstacles while carrying them. Unfortunately, they don't appear in any of the other levels, and they're also exclusive to Story Mode itself (meaning that players cannot make their own levels with them and thus take further advantage of them). This situation also applies to the stray Toads and certain clear conditions, as they also appear in a few levels of Story Mode, yet they're not available for level creation either.
  • Super Mario Bros. Wonder:
    • The game gives the player many kinds of badges to help them based on their preferred playstyles. The Dolphin Kick Badge lets the player gain a burst of forward momentum speed while swimming. However, the number of underwater courses are so incredibly few in number that the badge itself is practically never used except for those few courses.
    • The Super Star grants the player the iconic invincibility power, but the item itself is incredibly rare to find and appears more often (though not by a whole lot) in the Wonder Flower sections of the course, thus the power of being invincible is hardly used.
• Crash Bandicoot:
  • Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped introduced the Slot Crate, a slot machine-like crate with changing pictures representing the prizes inside. They only appear in six levels in the entire game, three of which are in the first Warp Room. Curiously, they are far more common in some of the later games, especially the GBA titles.
  • Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex:
    • The game introduced Invisibility Boxes. There are three of them in the entire game, two of them in the same level. Especially jarring when considering the amount of crates in this game.
    • The tiptoeing ability lets you walk on bridges made of Nitro Crates. Too bad there are about three places where this is useful, and even then it's quicker and simpler to just use the Double Jump + Death Tornado spin combo, as all of the Nitro bridges are in optional parts of levels. Many players get the Golden Ending without tiptoeing once.
  • Crash Twinsanity introduces Nina Cortex, in her official series debut, as the game's third playable character alongside Crash and her uncle Neo Cortex. Though she plays similarly to Crash, she has a unique grappling hook mechanic to set her apart, opening new avenues for exploration and crate destruction. Unfortunately, Rooftop Rampage, Nina's intro level, is also her only level. You only get to play as her once more afterwards, very briefly during the first phase of the Final Boss fight.
  • Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time has three extra playable characters, Cortex, Dingodile, and an alternate universe Tawna. Each brings with them fresh new mechanics that change up how players approach the game. After their introductory stages, each of their (few) subsequent stages only devotes the first two thirds to actually playing as the new character, with the last third being a harder remix of the final leg of a stage Crash/Coco already completed.
• Spyro the Dragon:
  • Spyro 2: Ripto's Rage! has the Dragon Shores level as a 100% Completion bonus, with its ultimate reward being a power-up gate that turns Spyro's fire breath into a permanent Superflame. This upgrade could then be carried over into a new save file, allowing you to run through the whole game with a long-range fire blast that bypasses many puzzles and breaks two of the boss fights. Spyro: Year of the Dragon does not continue this tradition; clearing the Super Bonus Round only nets you the final dragon egg and no extra powers.
  • Spyro: Year of the Dragon: Enchanted Towers has both Spyro and Sgt. Byrd playable in its main portion, letting you switch between them via a warp gate. Exploring the same area as two different characters had a lot of potential, but this is the only level that does this; in all other levels, companion characters are restricted to their own areas.
• Banjo-Tooie utilized tiptoeing. By pressing the control stick only slightly, you can tiptoe silently, which allows you to sneak through certain areas without being noticed by NPCs. It's used for two Jiggies in the first level, and then never again.
• Shantae and the Pirate's Curse: The magic lamp has an entire button dedicated to using it, which seems like overkill considering that it's only used to suck up the dark magic of the Cacklebats (which could have been replaced with the magic being automatically collected) and to carry scents to certain characters (which you only do twice in the game). In short, it's just a glorified way to obtain certain items.
• Pac-Man World
  • The first game allows Pac-Man to use the Pac-Dots he picks up as ammo for taking out enemies. Only a few enemies in the game outright required this for defeating them, and the butt-bounce is a far more versatile ability that doesn't require consumable ammo to use so most players rarely ever used the dots for killing enemies. The other two games don't even give them this function: World 2 uses Pac-Dots as standard Gotta Catch Them All collectibles, while in World 3 they only serve a Follow the Money purpose and just add to your score.
  • Pac-Man World 2:
    • Helivators went from being a major platforming element in the first game to being a One-Scene Wonder from the level "Volcanic Panic" in this one.
    • There are swimming controls and mechanics just like the first game... even though there's only two levels in the whole game with swimmable water in them, both in the first world. The Under the Sea levels have completely different controls, and Metal Pac-Man gets more use in bypassing fire/lava than for sinking into water.
    • There's also the shrinking power pellet, which gets used twice, once to exit a level and once to enter a secret room, neither moment having notable utility or lasting more than a few seconds.
• Ape Escape 2: Most of the vehicles encountered throughout the game could qualify, as they only appear in two levels each (with the exception of the rowboat, which appears in three). Special mention goes to the Pipo-Mech - it first shows up in the Vita-Z Factory, where it's extensively used in the second half of the level to bash down doors and traverse a series of tunnels before battling an enemy mech Mini-Boss. After this level, it's shelved and doesn't appear again until the Moon Base - 14 levels and 5 bosses later - where it only shows up in a single room for the purpose of battling another mech identical to the last one. This means it is both the first and last vehicle the player gets to use.
• In Sly 2: Band of Thieves, one of the end-game missions gives Sly a new ability, the Mega Jump, which launches him to insane heights. Despite its incredible usefulness in exploring the levels and finding Clue Bottles, it's only used for that one mission and is then removed. Luckily, there is a cheat code unlocked at 100% completion that lets you assign the move freely, and you can use an Episode Restart code to replay any episode. It can even be used to force an entire game restart with all your current moves, including the Mega Jump!
• In Mega Man X4, there's the Weapon Tank. In theory, the Weapon Tank is a very big help as it allows you to restore weapon energy when you've ran out. However, in practice, you'll probably rarely use it. For X, this is because this will be negated by the Helmet Part, which grants X unlimited ammo outside of Charged Shots. For Zero, this is because he only has one kind of attack that requires weapon energy, you'll only need it for one boss and it recharges itself via damage.
• Tribal Hunter:
  • The underground cave has a path that is blocked by a pressure plate that can only be pressed down if Munch is heavy enough. The plate requires that Much be at 450 fullness or more and getting most of the Mushroom Poppers at this point in the game will cap Munch's weight to 440 until he defeats the Slime King and pays him 3000 coins to expand his weight capacity. No other place in the whole game uses a weight requirement to proceed.
  • The slime mechanic is heavily featured in the underground cavern where slime monsters are very common (a select few areas in the Piglands also have them). Munch's magic skill is replaced with a slimeball if he ingests a slime monster and a few gates require him to feed dragons slime so they grow fat enough to weigh down the pressure plate they're sitting on. Once you're done with the underground and crystal caverns, slimes and the mechanics behind them pretty much stop existing for the rest of the game.
  • The cursed/posessed effect has Munch grow bigger from ghosts which he cannot get rid of unless he either sits at a checkpoint or exposes himself to light. This is only used in the Darklands and Darkdread's Castle.

Puzzle Game

• In La Statuette Maudite de l'Oncle Ernest, the insecto-robot has a total of ten forms, but the robot is only useful three times in the whole game. Half of its forms don't even need to be used, but the game still forces you to unlock them all to participate in the trials to unlock the eye of Shiva.
• Tetris:
  • The Tetris: The Grand Master series introduced the Initial Rotation System, which lets you pre-rotate the next piece by holding down the button corresponding to your desired rotation direction in the small delay between when a piece locks and when the next piece spawns. Tetris: The Grand Master 3 introduces an offshoot of this called Initial Hold System, which lets you swap out the next piece with whatever is your current Hold piece immediately once said next piece spawns. Both features are extremely useful at high gravity but have not seen wide adaptation to main Tetris games, not even to such games that do feature maximum drop speed such as Tetris DS.
  • Tetris: The Grand Master 2 introduces "sonic drop", where you can quick-drop a piece but without locking it, making filling in overhangs much faster. (To compare, a "hard drop" instant-drops the piece and locks it in place immediately.) It has unfortunately never been used in a main Tetris game; you have to use the also-non-locking-but-slower soft drop instead.
  • Double/co-op mode, where two players share one extra-wide field, can be a fun exercise for friends who like playing Tetris together, but very few Tetris games have it (Tengen's unlicensed NES version of Atari Tetris, Tetris: The Grand Master 2 PLUS, and Tetris Kiwamemichi which notably allows four players to use the same playfield at once).
  • Until the late 90s, "lock delay" (pieces having a delay between when they touch down and when they become locked in place) was mostly exclusive to Tetris games by SEGA and Jaleco; the first game to include it is SEGA's 1988 Tetris arcade game. Nintendo's NES, non-Color Game Boy, and SNES Tetris games as well as Atari's arcade Tetris game and accompanying NES version, all of which are more well-known in the West, don't include lock delay despite being a good way to curb frustration at higher drop speeds.
• The Witness:
  • A criticism that's sometimes said about the game is that the environment is seldom integrated into the main puzzles. Most puzzles involve drawing a line across a panel depending on symbols written on it, with only some areas involving the world itself into the puzzles. The environmental puzzles are completely dependent on the world, but that doesn't prevent some people from thinking the panel puzzles are lacking.
  • The Y symbol found in the quarry puzzles is seldom seen outside the quarry. There are four puzzles that use it: one in the ghost town, another in the windmill basement, another in the mountain ground floor (technically four, although they're all part of one, big puzzle), and another in the caves. That's it. The reason has probably to do with the way the game reutilises the symbols in areas different to the one that introduces them. In later puzzles, the game tends to combine several symbols to make more complex puzzles, or otherwise adding a gimmick that creates a variation on previously seen puzzles. However, by its own nature, the Y symbol must be combined with other symbols, which means its introductory area already exhausted all possible ways to combine it with other symbols, and its reliance on other symbols makes more difficult to add gimmicks specifically designed around it, as opposed to more simple symbols that can easily have gimmicks.
  • Similarly, while tetrominos are used very often in puzzles, the blue, hollow tetrominos are seldom seen outside of the swamp (what's more, the swamp only uses them in the last puzzles). Again, only three puzzles use them: one in the vault near the desert ruins, another in an optional part of the treehouse area, and another in the caves. It's not clear why this happened, although a theory could explain it. It's been reported a glitch where, when pairing hollow tetrominos with the exact same number of solid tetrominos, the game automatically cancels them among themselves, without bothering to check if the shapes are also the same (as it does when the number of hollow and solid tetrominos isn't the same). This could lead to many unintended solutions, except that there was a good bit of Developer's Foresight, and existing puzzles involving hollow tetrominos are carefully designed so that it's completely impossible to even input such a solution. However, the presence of this glitch may have forced the developers to reduce the number of puzzles involving those glitched tetrominos.
• Mouse is a sliding-puzzle game by Magma Mobile. In the tutorial there is a level which introduces a breakable block, which breaks when you click on it, freeing up sliding space. In the bonus store, you can even buy a bonus that earns you a coin whenever you break a block. However, outside of the tutorial levels, there are no other breakable blocks in the entire game.

Real-Time Strategy

• Pikmin:
  • Pikmin 2: Bulbmin are a secret sixth type of Pikmin, being tiny Bulborbs controlled by parasitic Pikmin. Once freed from a wandering adult Bulbmin in a cave sublevel, they can be added to the squad and have immunity to the four elemental hazards. Unfortunately, it's impossible for them to leave caves since they can't go inside an Onion or the Hocotate Ship, so they get left behind unless you use a Candypop Bud to turn them into one of the other Pikmin types. They don't spawn if you have 100 Pikmin already, so you can only find them by entering a cave with a smaller group or by losing Pikmin beforehand. Finally, they appear in three of the fourteen caves plus two Challenge Mode levels; the sole place you can get good use out of them is the Submerged Castle, since only Blue Pikmin can enter it.
  • Pikmin 3: Purple Pikmin and White Pikmin are left out of the story mode, instead appearing in Challenge Mode and Bingo Battle. In Challenge Mode, they're only used in some of the "Collect Treasure" stages, and they lose most of their powers from Pikmin 2 (Purple Pikmin no longer stun or do high damage; White Pikmin have no poison obstacles or buried treasure to interact with, and deal much less damage to enemies who eat them), so they exist just to carry objects either at a faster pace or with less Pikmin needed per object.
  • Pikmin 4:
    • While most of the returning Pikmin types have their share of spotlight, Winged Pikmin were Demoted to Extra fairly hard. They are found in only one cave prior to saving Olimar, and in said cave their use time is shared with Red and Yellow Pikmin. Their Onion is found in the last area of the game and obstacles unique to them such as Flukeweeds or bamboo gates have been removed. Because their unique pathfinding and habit of carrying things in shortcuts through pathways is gone, their primary use is shrunk to just carrying things over conveyor belts and mud pits.
    • The idea of duplicate Onions, where there are more than one Onion of a given color and collecting the copy will net a free bonus to that type of Pikmin. However, only Yellow and Blue Pikmin have more than one Onion, so this only comes up twice in the game.
• Warcraft III:
  • The "Spirits of Ashenvale" mission had a unique mechanic where it was possible to obtain lumber from destroying Night Elf tree structures, yet it's seen nowhere else throughout the game. Even though 3,000 lumber coming from Trees of Life sounds way overpowered, it makes sense in context when you realize that Night Elf structures that absorb the Wisp worker are technically trees.
  • Sea warfare, which was a major component of Warcraft II, takes a backseat here. It didn't exist in the original Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos game, and while the Warcraft III: Frozen Throne expansion brought back naval combat ships, they were still limited to only being in the single-player campaign, and only for certain missions since it wasn't possible to build shipyards. The player could only purchase ships from pre-placed shipyards.
  • Due to the original final level being cut^note Originally there was going to be a level after "Twilight of the Gods" where the player has to destroy the three Undead bases from the previous level. It was eventually cut due to being awkward and uninteresting after "Twilight of the Gods" which functioned as a much better Grand Finale, players can't make chimaeras in the Night Elf campaign for Reign of Chaos.
• The Battle for Middle-earth II introduced naval combat to the series. Unfortunately, the whole concept clearly wasn't ironed out much, likely due in large part to Tolkien's Legendarium not being heavy on sea battles—there are only eight ship units in the game total (four elven ships for the "good" factions, four corsair ships for the "evil" factions), and the two sides are barely a step above Cosmetically Different Sides (both have an arrow-shooting attack ship, a siege weapon ship, a transport, and a suicide ship, which function in largely identical fashion). Add in the fact that there are a lot of maps which feature no harbors, a lot of the ones that do feature harbors make ships Cool, but Inefficient at best, and only one mission in each campaign features ships (which is essentially the same mission played from different sides), and it's hard to blame a lot of players for forgetting the game has naval battles altogether. Even the game's expansion pack didn't add any new ships.
• Stellaris: The Espionage system. Players agree it's a cool concept, they just want it to be worth using. There are massive opportunity costs to getting the technologies researched and sacrificing the use of envoys who could be doing other things and all that effort and cost is sunk into performing clandestine operations that are so inconsequential the other empire might not even notice they happened.

RPG — Eastern

• Etrian Odyssey IV: Legends of the Titan: The Scarlet Pillars overworld introduces the concept of using FOEs as bait for other FOEs, via luring a Dreameater into a position where a Dinogator will attack and eat it. Unfortunately, this is used exactly once to reach an optional maze, and no other overworld FOEs interact with each other. This concept is later revisited in the fifth stratum of Etrian Odyssey V: Beyond the Myth (where a FOE can be lured into another, namely a Clawed Fiend, which in turn attacks it and knocks it down), and is put in greater use there.
• XenoGears: If not preserved correctly, main party Gears will run out of fuel, which almost every action consumes some of. Using the "Charge" command can help regain it, but it'll only restore 30 fuel out of literally thousands of the original amount by default: using it during Hyper Mode multiplies the amount of fuel gained by 10, but doing so wastes a turn of Hyper Mode on a non-offensive action, which only lasts for 3 turns by default and is hard to trigger outside of special ways to trigger it on command.
• Persona:
  • Persona 3:
    • This is the only mainline game where teammates are separate entities from the main character, meaning if they get spotted by an overworld Shadow, it will chase them like it would to the MC. It is also the only game that allows the player to split up the party in-dungeon entirely to quicken exploration or instruct them to fight the Pre Existing Encounters to ease Level Grinding or to let the player focus on other things while they fight. Range also matters when healing the teammates outside battles while exploring — an out-of-range teammate will not be affected by any attempt at healing. Despite Persona 4 sharing the same basic dungeon exploration mechanic, the teammate mechanics from 3 do not apply here, let alone Persona 5.
    • Typically, in a Persona game since 3, a player's Social Link progression stops mid-way until something is resolved, either because of the game preventing the player (like getting caught in a story progression that prevents a full use of free time), the character suddenly being absent for story reasons, a request tied to the character not being finished yet, or insufficient social stat(s). However, Persona 3 Portable has Akihiko's Social Link from the female route, which is impossible to max out early because later ranks are blocked off until a certain date. When that happens, he can not be hung out with, even just to spend time and gain SL points, until then. Most of the time, this distinction is applied for "special" characters who already have unique schedules or circumstances to begin with, but the later rank progression tends to be automatic with little to no player initiation^note For example, Adachi in Persona 4 Golden and Akechi in Persona 5 Royal. or mechanically unique.^note For example, Ryoji also from Portable runs a gimmick where every single rank is tied to a date and thus cannot be skipped, even ones that require manual interaction by the player. Yoshizawa from Persona 5 Royal requires not only her first 5 ranks completed but also the Third Semester being unlocked in the current run. This is not the case for Akihiko here, as once that date is passed, his SL can be resumed like any other regular SL, the reason being that the later ranks are dependent on what happened on 10/4. The only later game with a similar mechanic is Persona 5 (Royal) with Sojiro, whose Confidant rank progression stops until Futaba joins the team, and his later ranks depend on Futaba having revealed herself.
    • Also from the female route from Portable, notably, Shinjiro's Social Link is the only one where his romance route can only be accessible by spending time with him after reaching rank MAX. No other Persona game does this.
  • Persona 4:
    • Ai's Social Link is unique in that it branches midway through. After you talk her out of jumping off the roof, you have the choice of whether to ask her out. If you do, you and Ai will date for a little while until she breaks up with you, and if you choose to not be friends afterwards, the link will break (the only time this is possible in the fourth game). If you do not ask her out, you will remain friends for the second half, and can get a Relationship Upgrade at the end.
    • The Reverse/Break mechanic for Social Links returns from Persona 3, but only two Social Links can Reverse (Naoto and Ai) and only one can Break (Ai, see above), and all these are only possible via specific dialogue options very early or very late in the link. As it's used so rarely it may as well not exist, the Reverse/Break mechanic was removed entirely from Persona 5.
    • Naoto is the only Social Link whose Christmas Eve event has an alternate outcome (and a bonus reward in Golden) depending on one dialogue option picked during the rank MAX event, when this never matters for any other SL.
    • The Fusion Forecast only appeared in this game and nowhere else, and it's not hard to see why. If you fuse certain Personas or use certain Arcanas in a Fusion on a specific day, you get a minor bonus. The thing is, you can only see this one day in advance at a time, the buffs are mostly random and rarely that helpful, and the chances of you even wanting to fuse that specific Persona on that one day are so low that it's not really worth using.
  • Persona 5
    • When one of your characters is knocked down with an elemental weakness (except for Joker), the Hostage Negotiation mechanic forces you to either pay that enemy something, talk the enemy into letting them go, or do nothing and watch that party member get one-shotted. However, the mechanic doesn't trigger in boss battles, and only rarely triggers in random encounters. A player might go through all of the seventy-plus hours of gameplay and never see this happen, despite getting passive bonuses that make it easier to get away with negotiation. New Game Plus, which lets you retain monster database information, makes it even less likely.
    • The garden sees far less use than in the previous game. In Persona 4, the garden is unlocked in late May, and you could choose to plant many different types of crops, from tomatoes that can restore a small amount of SP to wheat that can open gold chests to eggplants that can protect you from instant-kill skills. In P5, the garden is unlocked at the end of October, near the end of the game, and you can only plant SP-restoring vegetables. Royal addresses this somewhat, adding two additional types of vegetables, which can grant a Charge or Concentrate effect when used on a party member, and makes the garden useful for longer as a result of adding another month of gameplay and a new Palace.
    • A few of the romanceable Confidants (Takemi, Chihaya and Ohya) have hidden Event Flags throughout their rank up scenes. If you don't hit at least one of these and try to give them a Love Confession, they'll reject you. This was an interesting way to give the love interests agency and show that they aren't automatically attracted to the player character (especially where there's an age gap), but in practice the flags are in responses most players will end up picking naturally, those following a guide will always pick them, and only these Confidants have them. Tellingly, this mechanic went virtually unknown for a long time. Something similar was done in the fourth game, in which you must tell Naoto "I'm glad you're a girl" and on a later rank choose to "protect Naoto" to be able to ask her out.
• While Dark Cloud 2 and Dark Chronicle do allow more freedom in building the towns than the first (wherein you simply placed buildings), in practice you were limited with having to fulfill certain conditions, many of which had to be done in very specific ways with little room for deviation. The second game gives you maps with extra restrictions, which would have made the player think more creatively. However, the city-building is in practice more of a Sidetracked by the Gold Saucer.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Final Fantasy VI introduces the Limit Break system to the series, known here as a "Desperation Attack". Unfortunately they only trigger when a character uses the Attack command^note which you won't use after the halfway point because magic and/or character special abilities are far superior at low health^note Which requires that HP be at 10% of the character's max HP, which is suicidal at low levels, and while the window is larger at high levels, as previously mentioned your options are much better at that point 1/16th of the time, and never in the first twenty-five seconds of combat^note Most random encounters will end in less than 20 seconds, and battles in which you could use the Desperation Attack, like boss battles, you won't want to have low HP because that could easily end up with a KO'd character. Because of these restrictions one can go through multiple playthroughs and never once trigger a Desperation Attack.
  • Final Fantasy IX
    • There's various equipment that grants resistances to holy and shadow elemental attacks. While the general defense boost is what most players would be using them for, there's only a few enemies in the entire game that use holy and shadow attacks and they're either an Optional Boss or the end game bosses.
    • Steiner's Charge! skill has every party member with low HP attack an enemy without using a turn. While it would be incredibly handy, the fact that it only works on characters that are near death and the risk of said characters being knocked out being high makes the skill hardly used, if ever.
  • Final Fantasy X is well-praised for its CTB (Conditional Turn-Based Battle) system, in which battles are turn-based and there is a window showing the timeline of turns for all combatants. When you highlight a skill that will influence when the character's next turn will come up (usually, more powerful skills will delay the next turn, weaker skills and item usage will make the next turn come sooner), the timeline will reflect the change, allowing you to better decide whether the skill is worth the change in the turn order. Despite being regarded as one of the best implementations of turn-based combat in the series, if not the entire genre, subsequent Final Fantasy games largely dropped it in favor of going back to real-time combat.
• Shadow Hearts:
  • A Malice mechanic is alluded to in Covenant, but, like its apparent plot significance, never comes up in-game.
  • From The New World explains "Will" as the good counterpart to Malice, and it's explained that too much Will is as bad as too much Malice. But there is no gameplay mechanic about Will or Malice.
  • The vampires mechanics in Covenant and From The New World can feel this way too, if only because of how little the game mentions them or how utilizing it often uses rare and/or expensive in-game items.
• In The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel III, there is the stance system where players can switch between one style where the attack is stronger but targets only one character or the attack is weaker but it targets a small group of enemies. Only Juna Crawford gets this ability and unfortunately by halfway through the game, players will just use her area of effect crafts that have a bigger radius to attack even more enemies with.
• Paper Mario: The Spike Shield badge from the first two games allows Mario to jump on all spiked enemies without taking damage. That's easy enough to guess. What many people don't realize is that it also allows Mario to safely use his hammer on enemies with front-pointing spikes, which is because there are very few battles between both games that are like this.^note Spear Guys, Bristles plus their dark variants, and some of Cortez's weapons Similarly, there's the Ice Power badge, which makes Mario damage-proof when jumping on fire-based enemies and makes him stronger against them, the only of which between both games being Lava Bubbles and their variants, Pyro Guys, and the Lava Piranha during its second phase.
  • Paper Mario 64 has the Repel Gel, the strangely rare and forgettable item that grants invisibility. It only appears in a few, mostly hidden select areas and can't be bought unlike most other battle items (the only renewable source of them is as a drop from purple question-mark Li'l Oinks). Additionally, Mario can count on Lady Bow's Outta Sight to turn invisible easier (though it's only for one turn and Bow must recharge), which only helps making Repel Gels obsolete. Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door replaced them with the much more common Repel Capes and Boo's Sheets.
  • Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door:
    • Boat Mode is the least utilized of the four paper abilities, with the boat panels required to activate it only appearing in Rogueport and its sewers, Pirate's Grotto, and a single room in Palace of Shadow.
    • Though the Ultra Hammer is required to smash stone blocks (in a downgrade from Paper Mario 64 where it was possible for the Super Hammer to smash them), it's actually needed to smash only a handful of these. Even worse are the metal blocks (again behaving differently), being solely found in two rooms of the Riddle Tower from the Palace of Shadow.
    • Elevator blocks are prominently featured in Hooktail Castle. After that, they only return briefly for another single room in Palace of Shadow.
  • Paper Mario: Color Splash: Enemy Cards are dropped from battles, and allow Mario to summon an enemy in front of him. Rather than acting like the partner system of the first two games, these allies attack automatically, and are so weak that they will often die in one hit. Considering the abundance of these in the game (one for nearly every enemy), they aren't particularly desirable.
  • Paper Mario: The Origami King:
    • The game's partner system is underused by the end, as you don't have a lot of partners, they can fail to attack enemies at times, and they are completely absent during boss battles. Due to the combat's focus on defeating enemies in one turn, and the partners' lack of control, they feel more like bonus damage if you fail a puzzle than actual party members. Despite the engine being able to support four partners at maximum, you can only have one at a time (two in very specific circumstances, often lasting only a single battle).
    • The Rabbit Espresso and Turtle Tea, which respectively increase or decrease Mario's movement speed, could have interesting uses, with the former being a potential Anti-Frustration Feature, but you can only buy them in Toad Town, they're consumed immediately upon purchase, and their duration is so short that it's hard to tell just what their use is supposed to be in the first place (the drinks seem to last longer if you buy multiple at once, but the increase is minor).
    • There are only three real-time boss fights in the entire game, all against Paper Machos, compared to the twelve turn-based ones. These all revolve around waiting out an attack pattern, then hitting the boss with your hammer. No Magic Circle abilities, cheering, or even much variance in arenas. These real-time ones are also the only battles to not be changed in the Replay Mode.
    • The rainbow Magic Circles allow you to turn into any Vellumental, which could make for some fun puzzles and critical thinking. Sadly, they're introduced too late to be relevant, first appearing halfway through the purple streamer. Their first use is a tutorial, and there's no stakes if you get it wrong, so you can brute force your way through each option rather than thinking it through. Rainbow Magic Circles appear again at the end of the streamer area, in a puzzle that spells out exactly what you need to do. They're absent from green streamer, and only show up again during the final boss battle.
• Mario & Luigi:
  • Superstar Saga has a lot of unique mechanics due to Early-Installment Weirdness. It's the only game in the series where you can swap the positions of the brothers (which also makes it the only game with the High Jump field move), the only game to have the elemental hand powers, and the only game with its unique kind of Bros. Attacks (instead of being minigames, they're a series of Action Commands where messing any up reduces the moves' power).
  • Partners in Time has the Bros. Ball field move, which has Mario and Luigi form a ball shape, letting them move faster but preventing them from jumping. Not only has the move never appeared since, it isn't very useful for fast travel in Partners in Time either, since it can't be done while piggybacking around the baby brothers. There are a few speed challenges done with it, but later on it's just used for flattening the babies for certain puzzles.
  • A major mechanic of Bowser's Inside Story is Bowser inhaling enemies/bosses so Mario and Luigi can fight them inside his body. One boss this happens to, the Stone Blooper (part of the Sea Pipe Statue), has an unavoidable attack where it deals minor damage to Bowser by drilling into his insides^note A common misconception is that Durmite can also hurt Bowser like this, but its "Straw" attack is a plain heal despite the animation showing Bowser in pain. This is the only time this happens, and it isn't a big deal as it's the first major boss of the game. There's a Dummied Out item that lets the brothers heal Bowser while fighting inside of him, which was likely cut because nothing else in the game warrants using it.
• BoxxyQuest: The Gathering Storm has a button-mashing rhythm minigame that shows up exactly once, in a random back corner of an obscure bonus area themed around "randomness". It comes out of nowhere so fast it could almost qualify as a Big-Lipped Alligator Moment. The Picross minigame qualifies too — there are four puzzles in the entire game, and of those four, the first is a tutorial and the second is a gag. They're also all skippable, and you don't get to try them again if you choose to skip them the first time.
• Eternal Ring incorporates a day/night cycle. However, the only apparent effect this has is NPC Scheduling in the very short-lived Doomed Hometown and nothing else.
• Kingdom Hearts 3D [Dream Drop Distance] introduces a new mechanic, Flowmotion, which lets players endlessly climb surfaces by combining air-dashes, Wall Jumps (which are performed by air-dashing into a wall, and let you air-dash again), and very generous Jump Physics that let you turn around mid-jump. Because this is so abusable, there are special walls which prevent wall-jumping so you can't just skip all platforming sections... or rather, there is a single wall in the entire game that does that, in The World That Never Was, the final level, even though there are multiple points in the game that you clearly weren't meant to just wall-jump and climb over, but you can.
• Xenoblade Chronicles 3 features a rare example of this trope Played for Drama. Early in Chapter 1 you're given a tutorial on the Flame Clock. As soldiers of a Colony, the party has to feed their Flame Clock with the Life Energy of enemies and will suffer stat penalties if the Clock runs low. At the end of the chapter, the party become Ouroboros and are freed from the Flame Clock system, and you never need to worry about this mechanic again.
• In the very first Deception game, you're able to add rooms onto the Castle of the Damned. While this might have been meant to be a way to add some additional strategy to the goings-on, the simple fact of the matter is that keeping the castle at its base size means less time running and chasing after invaders to kill them, and unlike later installments, there's no Non-Standard Game Over if an invader reaches the inner sanctum of the castle, so adding rooms to delay their progress isn't a factor, either.
• In Octopath Traveler, the vast majority of bosses are either Flunky Bosses, or fight alone. In contrast, only three boss fights in the entire game are Dual Bosses^note Mikk and Makk, Tressa's Chapter 1 bosses; Mystery Man and Shady Figure, Ophilia's Chapter 3 bosses; and the Snake Charmer and Giant Python, the bosses of the Quicksand Caves.
• Yakuza: Like a Dragon: The very first thing you do in the game is chase someone on foot in the style of an Endless Running Game similar to those also found in Judgment. This scene is important enough to get tutorial pop-ups, but this ends up being the only time in the entire game you actually do one of these sequences.

RPG — MMO

• DC Universe Online has Legends, a system that lets you play select PvE and PvP instances as one of several DC heroes and villains, each one having a mixture of abilities that the player can normally use. It was seemingly orphaned just a few years after its introduction, as very few Legends instances are available and no new characters have been added since around 2015, with the last one being a reskin of Supergirl based on her live-action show, and the most acknowledgment it's had since then was in the introduction to the Hall of Legends hub added in 2021.
• Final Fantasy XIV:
  • For a time, the game had elemental resistances, which were in the game since 1.0. When the game was remade as A Realm Reborn, the elemental stats were extremely downplayed to the point where you'd be forgiven for not even knowing that it was even in the game. While you could meld a ton of elemental materia to your gear so that you could take less damage to an element, you'd also be sacrificing other stats like critical hits and spell speed. Only a handful of boss fights utilized elements, and even then, the fights were scripted so you didn't even need to bother with elemental materia for those fights. The elemental stats stuck around for years until sometime after the Stormblood expansion where it was removed entirely from the main game and given a slight retool to be used for the Eureka content.
  • The game had elemental potions which temporarily boosted your resistance to an element. Like with the elements in general, the elemental potions saw very little use and they were eventually removed from the game. Players who still had the potions could use them to obtain various pigments so that they can craft dyes of various colors.
  • There are potions that can cause a variety of status effects on enemies when used. However, the strongest version of these potions only work up to enemies at level 50. Unlike regular healing potions and ethers that gotten stronger versions in each expansion pack, the status-inducing potions never received any updates, thus they go unused.
  • Adventurer Squadrons were introduced in A Realm Reborn, a side quest system that allowed the player to create a squad of NPC units that you could level up, train, send on missions, and even customize. Despite being a mechanic that has some amount of customization, the entire process has been largely ignored after release save for being able in Stormblood to take them into dungeons to level them up. They are currently capped at level 60, the max level for Heavensward, the first expansion, and has gotten no updates as of Endwalker, the fourth expansion.
  • While you're forced to join a Grand Company early on in A Realm Reborn, there's nothing stopping you from never utilizing them. Content related to Grand Companies doesn't go past A Realm Reborn and there has been no new content for them for years.
• The Lord of the Rings Online is positively littered with mechanics that were introduced and then faded from attention later on as the Dev team focused on the next big thing.
  • The base game included Fellowship Maneuvers (originally called Conjunctions, or CJs): Powerful team moves that required each member of a Fellowship to input a different type of command that resulted in an overall attack/heal/power restore/etc. The developers felt that usage of these maneuvers by skilled players trivialized certain boss fights, so their power was cut down in the next expansion to only be slightly better than normal attacks. After that, the FMs unintentionally became something of a suckers move as the damage from a successful team attack became less than the team members simply continuing to attack normally, something that has only gotten exponentially worse since then as the effects never scaled properly. FMs were reintroduced as a major mechanic in the Dunland expansion for one Raid Battle, but are otherwise considered useless since then.
  • At about the same time, the developers introduced helper quests to encourage assisting certain characters with quests that were otherwise no longer popular. The most common of these were the class-specific quests in the 6 Moria 6-man instances. This idea was never announced very strongly, was inconvenient due to needing to go to a remote physical area to pick up/turn in the quests, gave only middling rewards anyway, and was never implemented past the Moria expansion. It is simply way more common to ask a kin-member or World Chat for help, especially since the instances in question could be trivially completed in about 5-10 minutes by a higher-level character.
  • Skirmishes were strongly introduced with the Mirkwood expansion, and three instances from the Moria expansion were reworked to become skirmishes. Volume Three and the Dunland expansion added two additional skirmishes, and thus the most recent skirmishes are almost ten years old. However, Skirmishes actually did stay fairly popular for years afterwards as they provided relatively light-weight challenges for kin-members or PUGs to do group activity while also getting rewards such as Marks, Medallions, gold, XP, and deeding, and you could occasionally get some decent gear at the Raid level. Unfortunately, the gear that drops from them now is stuck at level 100 (current level cap is 130), and thus is considered junk.
  • There are other miscellaneous things including Warsteeds, Hobbies, Epic Battles, etc. that were introduced but later see little attention.
• The Secret World has some players feel this about the investigation quests. The player base tends to remember these quests first when talking about the game, albeit sometimes for the Guide Dang It!/Genius Bonus nature of some of them.
• World of Warcraft managed to avert this after a few years in several ways. Originally, Naxxramas was considered to be a very good dungeon mechanics-wise, but the steep barrier to entry meant most of the playerbase would never see it. In addition, several dungeons that are rarely run anymore had unique mechanics that newcomers (or people who missed them in the day) would never see. However, Naxxramas was moved to the entry-level raiding dungeon in Wrath of the Lich King and several mechanics have been incorporated into other bosses since then.

RPG — Mobile

• Character costumes in Disney Heroes: Battle Mode were an interesting way to represent each character's history and having a unique collectable item (thread pieces) involved in unlocking them. Despite this, the concept has been mostly abandoned since 2019 and Elsa, the one character to get a major design change since then, was merely updated to her Frozen II design with no means of actually using her original design.

RPG — Western

• Cyberpunk 2077: As part of the game-overhauling Update 2.0, big changes were made to the loot system: healing items and grenades were changed from consumable items to abilities with regenerating charges and clothing items, previously the main source of protection, were made largely cosmetic with rare secondary effects. While this definitely meant that players no longer had to scrounge environments after firefights to make sure they were topped up on medkits and armor, the old systems became somewhat vestigal: medical containers throughout the world that once contained medical supplies now hold crafting supplies and Shop Fodder, and a quarter of the Equipment screen is dedicated to largely useless clothing items (which still have rarity levels, which now serve only to determine the item's sell price and what level materials are gained from disassembly).
• Dragon Age:
  • In Dragon Age: Origins, BioWare initially intended for every playable character to become a Grey Warden potentially. Originally, Bioware wanted for the taint to infect all of the companions, meaning the player would have to make them into a Grey Warden. This mechanic was incorporated into Awakening in a way, but there are very few consequences gameplay-wise for not making Nathaniel, Velanna, and Sigrun into Grey Wardens save for Nathaniel who isn't available as a companion and disappears from the game. ^note You can either execute him or let him go, but there is no option to recruit him without making him a Grey Warden.
  • Origins also had a unique mechanic during the Fade portion of the Mage quest where the player "shapeshifts" between several different creatures in order to solve the puzzle to escape the Fade realm. However, not only is this mechanic seen at just one point throughout the game, the player never gets to have that good of an experience playing around with the shapeshifting since it's used during said Fade portion, which is considered one of the least liked parts to play through in the game.
  • Post-Origins, the Rogue class' iconic Stealth ability becomes practically useless, since your non-stealthy party members are hard-wired to follow you even if you order them to stay back. Its only use is to quickly de-aggro yourself when surrounded and to shift positions, similar to the Tactical Cloak in Mass Effect. In DAO, by contrast, a good enough rogue could scout out the entire map, stealthily disarming traps right under the enemies' noses and thus making upcoming fights a lot easier.
  • Despite being singled out and heavily maligned by pretty much everyone except for straight-up villains and darkest anti-heroes, gameplay-wise Blood Magic provides just another set of purely combat-oriented spells, only different in that they need to be Cast from Hit Points. You cannot use it to influence people outside of combat or commune with demons (the two applications chiefly responsible for this branch's bad rep), and no one really cares that you use it, not even people who should be very strongly opposed to it, such as Wynn (a staunch loyalist) or Alister (a templar trainee and an all-around boy-scout). In fact, you can make Wynn herself a blood mage, and she won't care either! Notably, there was a deleted interaction where exposing yourself as a blood mage while saving the mage guild from annihilation would make Wynn report you, leaving you no choice but to fight her and all other mages and templars to the death unless you manage to bluff your way out - that's how serious they take it.
  • It's very easy to gloss over that the trap-making crafting skill is a thing in Origins since you'll hardly, if ever, rely on traps for battle. There's a single Sidequest in the town of Lothering that acts as a trap-crafting Video Game Tutorial where the player needs to make a couple traps for an NPC, but after that, players will most likely never use trap-making again. Unsurprisingly, trap-making doesn't return in Dragon Age 2 or Inquisition.
• Deus Ex: Human Revolution:
  • Like in the original game, certain doors can be broken by using grenades or bullets. However, unlike the original game, this is almost never a good idea, because the game doesn't distinguish between destructible doors, you don't have the resources to do this with any regularity, and it's very easy to hack doors to open them or find passwords, meaning it's only something you would do if you're just really tired of the Hacking Minigame. The game even has a system where it displays a door's health... but only after it's been unlocked, at which point you have no reason to care about that. This is particularly funny in the case of vents, where you can destroy them as well—despite the fact that vents are never locked and can be opened by pressing one button.
  • Adam is equipped with retractable hand blades, but they can only be used for instant take-downs that happen in cut-scenes activated with a prompt. No actual melee combat is allowed, and you cannot use the blades on the environment, like to cut through doors or climb walls Wolverine-style. Similiarly, the arms themselves can be used to punch through specially designated weak walls, but they're very rare and again, you cannot break anything else or punch enemies except in the same pre-rendered take-downs.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • The series has long struggled to sate fan interest in Player Housing. First introduced in Daggerfall, player houses were simply a very expensive place where you could safely sleep for free and, due to a glitch, weren't even safe for storing loot. Nonetheless, they proved popular and were expanded upon in Morrowind, where you could build your own estate complete a mansion, at least one shop, and a guard tower as part of the Great House sidequest lines. (Another was added for the Bloodmoon expansion.) Again, these proved extremely popular but fans demanded more options and more freedom with them, leading to countless Game Mods relating to player housing. Oblivion offered even more options, allowing the purchase of a home in each major city ranging from a one-room shack to a full-blown (albeit haunted) mansion. DLCs then added additional options in the Fighter, Mage, Thief mold. Again, it wasn't enough for the fanbase, who churned out countless more mods with additional places to live and more freedom in decorating them. For Skyrim, Bethesda hired the creator of one of the most popular Oblivion housing mods and gave the largest assortment of options to date including the Hearthfire DLC, which allows the player to build a new house from scratch with immense freedom in designing its layout, storage options, and more. This still wasn't enough, as one again, a plethora of housing mods exists to expand upon these options even further. Ironically, Bethesda may have found the answer in their Fallout sister-series, introducing a very popular, full-blown settlement building mechanic in Fallout 4. ES fans can only hope that something similar is added into The Elder Scrolls VI.
  • In Morrowind, Vampirism exists in the game and you can become a vampire yourself, though its quite well hidden. All of the mechanics one would expect are present — a health draining spell, taking damage from sunlight, increased attributes, etc. — and there are three vampire clans you can join who will provide the only services you can get while a vampire. However, it all feels extremely underdeveloped. Only your clan leader will have unique dialogue, they only give 2-3 quests each, and you can only perform eight other vampire-specific quests from other sources. 99% of NPCs (including fellow members of guild and factions) will refuse to speak with you, if they're not outright hostile. The only exceptions are members of the Mages Guild and House Telvanni, but even then, you can only perform the vampire-specific quests they have, not their normal questlines nor use their services. Overall, it feels like a major source of wasted potential. Later games would build upon it, allowing you to continue to accomplish almost everything in the game while a vampire.
• Fable:
  • Stealth: It's necessary for exactly one quest and only slightly usable for one more^note And in the latter case, it's far easier to simply shoot the guards with a bow or fireball. Otherwise, it just slows the hero to a crawl while not really keeping others from spotting him. Worse, there's functionally no difference between being fully trained in Guile (which improves stealth) and putting no points into it at all.
  • Players can show off their trophies to earn additional renown. The amount earned is equal to one tenth of the trophy's worth in gold times the number of people who see it within the time limit minus the ones who don't^note For example, if five out of six people see a trophy worth a thousand gold, the player earns four hundred renown. However, renown is extremely easy to earn by completing quests or simply killing monsters. And since early trophies are worth rather little, by the time a player gets a valuable enough trophy to earn significant renown, their renown is high enough to make it pointless anyway.
• Fallout: New Vegas:
  • Despite it appearing frequently in Fallout 2, the player's companions do not have the ability to talk with each other in this installment, even in main story missions. While they'll certainly talk to the player, and certain NPCs will remark on the presence of certain companions (disparaging Raul, for example), there is no interactivity, even in cases where companions may have wildly differing opinions (Arcade's outright hatred of Caesar's Legion versus Raul's passive reaction, for example). The only time this does occur is in the Dead Money DLC, when the player comes back to the Sierra Madre Fountain between missions and can witness characters walk over and talk with each other. However, this feature doesn't always trigger, and given how few companions are in the DLC and potential conversations there are (one instance has Dean attempt to talk to Christine, who is temporarily mute due to his machinations), before walking off after a few seconds) that players may not even encounter a single instance of it.
  • Karma, unlike the Reputation System, has far less presence in this title than previous entries in the series, to the point of being meaningless. The player will receive positive or negative Karma for actions they take in the gameworld... which doesn't factor into any meaningful dialogue or gameplay choices, save for a single choice at the end of the game where the player can choose to duel Legate Lanius one-on-one if they have Good Karma, and a Level 50 Perk based on the player's Karma. All of the player's Companions have no problem with the player being either an angel or the Devil Incarnate... save for Cass, a Companion who is most likely to be recruited past the midpoint of the main story, has a quickly-finished Companion Quest, and gives the player several warnings before leaving permanently. And even worse, some of the best weapons, items and armor in the game must be taken off otherwise-essential characters, either through killing or reverse-pickpocketing them — both of which award negative Karma anyway.
  • In the basegame, the player will amass thousands of spent shell casings in any one playthrough, with no way to utilize them... that is, unless you take a specific Perk (Hand Loader) that unlocks several recipes, allows the player to craft more damaging types of ammo and can save them many caps in the long run. The problem is that ammo is so cheap and plentiful across the vendors in the game, there are so many caps to be found throughout the Mojave Desert (even by selling the ammunition you don't use) and the pool of recipes is so small (6 recipes in the basegame, 6 unlocked by the Gun Runners' Arsenal DLC and one unlocked by Honest Hearts) that it's not worth wasting a Perk Point on, especially when the normal leveling system limits the player to a total of 25 total Perk Points. The Junk Rounds Perk from Dead Money (the first DLC expansion) attempted to get around this by letting the player craft ammo through alternate methods... and was even more disparaged when players discovered that it was next-to-useless, due to requiring extremely specific items (undamaged, unbent tin cans, which are far rarer than the standard tin cans) and is much more prohibitive to craft, despite being introduced in a DLC that's full of junk cans.
• Fallout 4:
  • The Sole Survivor's followers can actually talk to each other in this game. Unfortunately, unless it's related to certain quests, it only happens when the player is exchanging one follower for another. It would've been a great opportunity for them to at least have conversations with one another when they were at, say, the same settlement, or comment on other companions' affinity quests and the like.
  • A more downplayed example, but 4 greatly expanded on security terminals in comparison to both of its predecessors, allowing for a lot more opportunities to use the local Protectrons, turrets, and spotlights against enemies thanks to the Total Hack holotapes. What's disappointing, though, is that the game's more realistic level design makes it so that one is usually only able to access these terminals after they've already cleared out/disabled the Protectrons/turrets/spotlights in question, making the aforementioned holotapes pretty useless the majority of the time.
• Mass Effect:
  • In Mass Effect, the player could suffer from "Hazard Damage" by staying out of the Mako on planet surfaces for too long, with destinations on the Galaxy Map specifically having "Hazard Levels" relating to their danger to Shepard and the crew. Come the following game, this mechanic was completely disregarded, save for a single instance during Tali's recruitment mission where the player could suffer heat damage if they stayed in direct sunlight for too long. The mechanic was gone entirely from Mass Effect 3, though the Ark Mod restored unused environmental hazards that were intended to be included entirely within the N7 missions, including acid rain on Benning. This trope was then defied when Mass Effect: Andromeda went back to the original game's method of hazard damage, with the additional caveat that hiding inside the Nomad will not stop the player from taking damage.
  • The first game featured "Spectre Master Gear", high-end weapons which were sold at the C-Sec Academy/Requisitions Officer on the Normandy (and at your apartment, once the Pinnacle Station DLC is completed), and could only be acquired by amassing more than 1 million credits and being at least Level 50. Come the sequel, these weapons completely disappeared and no further reference was made to them, despite the player having opportunities to accept/reaffirm their Spectre status in the sequels and presumably having access to top-of-the-line weapons.
  • In Mass Effect 2, usage of the Hammerhead being limited to DLC, such as the Firewalker Pack and Project: Overlord content, really limited the vehicle gameplay that the first Mass Effect had much more of when it came to driving around in the Mako. It then got even worse with Mass Effect 3 where vehicle gameplay was practically non-existent.
  • Mass Effect 3 had the War Asset Map. The game makes you believe that gathering up armies all across the galaxy was going to lead up to one massive all-out battle on Earth that took into account the choices that were made regarding each bit of asset that was added into the player's army that Shepard brings to Earth. Apart from a few minor cinematic differences, this wasn't the case one bit. None of the war assets gathered up have any effect on the gameplay.
    • Notably, this is defied in the Priority Earth Overhaul mod, which was designed largely to give a purpose to many of the game's major War Assets during the final mission (in contrast to their non-appearance in the vanilla game). The London Hub is expanded with additional units, races and encounters, the Rachni will show up to help Shepard and their squad during the No Man's Land sequence, and the Destiny Ascension will be blown up if it was previously saved in the first game. However, the mod also plays this trope partially straight, as it will give status updates as to War Asset losses (largely done to Alliance forces) that don't actually change the War Asset score, but were simply put in for immersion.
• Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords: As you near the end point of the Peragus chapter, Atton stops you with "I have a bad feeling about this", foreshadowing an upcoming dangeous encounter. The game makes it seem like his intuition will cause him to chime in with an Ominous Save Prompt, but this is the only time in the game this happens, and it can be done because he's a mandatory party member. It's possible this was meant to come up more often, but the game was Christmas Rushed and mountains of content were cut.

Rhythm Game

• In HarmoKnight, The main character's two sidekicks Lyra and Tyko have their own gameplay styles different from Tempo's (Lyra uses a bow and arrow, while Tyko has his pet monkey, allowing him to attack two enemies at different heights at the same time). Sadly they're used only in very few levels, and only for a third of them.
• crossbeats REV., unlike the original CROSS×BEATS, lets you raise your scroll speed setting above 5.0, up to 8.0. This is useful on especially slow songs if 5.0 is still too slow for you. Even though C×B continues to be updated today, it still caps your speed setting at 5.0.
• In spite of being a "DJ simulation" game, only two out of six types of beatmania cabinets offer headphone jacks: beatmania III and beatmania II, both of which are no longer in production. Given that beatmania IIDX is the More Popular Spin-Off and the IIDX cabinet is by far the most common of the beatmania cabinets in circulation, this is rather glaring, given that headphones can be very beneficial to Rhythm Game players in arcades that are noisy (which is to say, almost all of them). Even when Konami designed a new IIDX cabinet to coincide with beatmania IIDX 20 tricoro's release, they still neglected to add any headphone jacks!
• The original Keyboardmania has, for each song, separate difficulty ratings between charts. For some reason, this was ditched in the next two games, which simply have the same difficulty rating across each song's charts.

Shoot-em-ups

• Ikaruga's Late Export for You GameCube port has Conquest Mode, a practice mode that lets you practice parts of stages rather than just whole stages, lets you watch professional replays to understand the best routes for scoring and to figure out useful strategies when playing for the Dot Eater rank, and lets you slow down the game to further refine strategies. Unfortunately, it was not added into the subsequent Xbox 360 or Steam ports.
• Touhou Project:
  • Most early games will show a post-game statistics screen, such as the percentage of the game completed, how many lives you lost, how many bombs you fired, how many spellcards you captured, etc. This was sadly abandoned starting from the 10th main game, Touhou Fuujinroku ~ Mountain of Faith.
  • Spell Practice was introduced in the 8th main game, Touhou Eiyashou ~ Imperishable Night, allowing you to practice individual enemy spellcards that you've reached; to compare, Practice Start only lets you start from the beginning of any stage you've reached. For whatever reason, it was scrapped for the 10th, 11th (Touhou Chireiden ~ Subterranean Animism), and 12th (Touhou Seirensen ~ Undefined Fantastic Object) games^note the 9th game, Touhou Kaeidzuka ~ Phantasmagoria of Flower View is a versus-style shooter unlike most other main games, but was mercifully brought back for the 13th game, Touhou Shinreibyou ~ Ten Desires and beyond.
• Stellavanity has a variety of useful widgets that can be shown on the sides of the screen such as character starts, a system clock for those prone to Just One More Credit, and points needed until the next extra life. Unfortunately, if the game is set to vertical orientation (for use on a monitor rotated 90 degrees), something a shmup enthusiast is likely to use if they have a monitor they can lay on its side, these widgets are not available.
• Thunder Force V features a "Direct" control option that assigns each of the five weapons to its own fire button, alongside the traditional option of "cycle through weapon list" buttons and a single fire button. Direct weapon switching was sadly not kept for Thunder Force VI.
• Gradius
  • The first release of Nemesis, the export version of the original game, is overall harder than the Japanese original with more punishing Dynamic Difficulty and tweaked stage variables, but balances it out by implementing an Anti-Frustration Feature which greets the player with a lot of power-up carrying enemies appear whenever they die and respawn at a checkpoint, making it easier to get back into fighting shape. Despite the series reputation for punishing recovery (to the point the Unstable Equilibrium trope is called "Gradius Syndrome" in some circles), none of the following games implement anything like this besides the 2-player mode of Gradius Gaiden spawning 5 power-up capsules when one of the players dies.
  • Gradius Gaiden allows the player to rearrange their power meter, allowing for more practical setups like Option in the first or second slot (instead of the fifth), allowing the player to beef up their firepower very quickly. No other game in the series has allowed the player to do this, not even later ones; the closest the series has gotten to a gauge edit in any other game is the Japanese arcade version of Life Force, in which player 2 a differently-arranged but still preset power meter.
• Real Space 2 and 3 have a surprisingly robust AI system - at least for their age and genre - which is capable of handling freeform and randomly generated combat conditions. Unfortunately, this potential is best shown in the title screen background of each game, which consists of randomly generated ships fighting each other in fleet battles, using their actual in-game AI. Actual gameplay consists of a series of scripted missions involving fighting against either predetermined enemy arrangements, or quasi-random spawns of predetermined ship types, to achieve a specific objective. The same AI and game engine could easily have been used to make a more free-flowing and dynamic conquest game, where you destroy enemy units (and outposts?) to secure enemy-held locations (planets?), possibly for benefits such as additional friendly spawns or technology. Or even just a free play survival mode for each game where you fight against an infinite spawn of enemies, with an infinite-but-restricted (so it doesn't snowball too far and the mode remains challenging) spawn of allies to back you up.
  • Real Space 3 also demonstrates the potential to give the player control of ships besides UFS Antaris. Unfortunately, this is only used to let you fly specific capital ships for specific missions (as well as a spy shuttle for a Stealth-Based Mission). If the aforementioned free play mode was implemented, it would also be cool to be able to play as any (suitably programmed) capital ship you wanted at any time, such as by unlocking each ship after the mission you first pilot it in.

Simulation Game

• The Ace Combat series is rife with examples of mechanics that are the centerpiece of a single installment and are then completely abandoned by later ones:
  • Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere had complex Story Branching with Multiple Endings based on the player's gameplay inputs, such as following a certain plane or shooting down a specific target. Every mainline game since then has had a largely linear story with a single ending, and even those who had minor story branching framed these choices as explicit menus.
  • Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War had an intricate wingman interaction system to issue orders or even talk to them at set occasions and a Tech Tree that unlocked more advanced versions of planes as you used the previous version (e.g. unlocking the F-14B "Bombcat" after making enough kills with the initial F-14A). While both mechanics were slightly refined in ACZ and ACX, respectively, the tech trees have been absent from mainline installments for 15 years (until Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown), while wingman interaction has never been re-used since.
  • Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War revolved around a Karma Meter named "Ace Style," which dynamically determined the enemies you'd face and their dialogue depending on your conduct at the battlefield. It has never been used again.
  • Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation had the Operations System, where almost every mission consisted of several simultaneous sub-operations and you won if the majority of them were completed. No later game reused the same system.
  • Ace Combat: Assault Horizon Legacy had the Maneuvers system, where sticking close to an enemy filled a gauge on the HUD that then allowed you to slip behind that enemy at the press of a button, or dodge incoming missiles by pressing the button and an indicated direction on the circle pad at the same time. The feature did not return for Infinity or 7.
• In RollerCoaster Tycoon, the Air-Powered Vertical roller coaster could be considered this. It's admittedly not the most efficient ride out there due to low capacity, high cost, and large space requirements, but it can still get high ratings. Unfortunately, it only appears in the Loopy Landscapes expansion, usually only after quite a few other roller coasters have been researched, and never as one of the starting rides.
• Gliding in Freespace 2: Shivan ships are equipped with side-mounted thrusters, which allow them to strafe in addition to all normal aircraft axis. As the player fights the Shivans the entire campaign, this obviously doesn't come into play much, but one optional mission has the player use a captured Shivan fighter and it's actually possible to use the side thrusters. However as the gliding key is unbound by default and the mission briefing doesn't call attention to it, most players don't realize it's possible to strafe in the vanilla game.
• War Thunder has high explosive shells for tanks, which have less penetration but more explosive effect and thus would be useful against fortifications occupied by infantry... except that there is no infantry in game and you have to fight other tanks, against which they are almost useless since they can't penetrate most armor, unless you are good enough to always find a weak enough spot that can be penetrated anyway (which is not guaranteed considering also long range engagements). When they are effective (i.e. against light vehicles), usually there is no point in firing them in place of regular shells, since changing the loaded shell for such cases takes precious time and that more ammo stored in the hull means more chances of being detonated by an enemy penetrating round.
  • The only exception is with howitzers or Soviet 152 mm tank destroyers, which only use high explosive shells, but considering the large caliber, they will deal a devastating hit anyway.
  • Hydroplanes were this until the introduction of naval battles, where their ability to land on sea can be used to quickly cap a strategic zone. Unfortunately, there are very few hydroplanes, most are very weak compared to other planes that can be crewed (as the American OS 2 U), very limited in availability as gift vehicles during timed events (as the German Ar 196 and He-51 B-2/H) or premium vehicles that must be bought (as the German BV 238, which is also gigantic and unsuitable for capping). And many historical hydroplanes that could be added are still missing as of 2020.
• Zettai Zetsumei Toshi has a lot of systems that seem better intended for an open-world resource-management survival game, which instead hang awkwardly off the more linear, puzzle-based reality. Collectable compasses have existed since the beginning, but don't see much use besides decorations, and mechanics like item-crafting and the holler button rarely get more than two or three uses per game simply because of how limited the options are. The holler button in particular is practically The Artifact by the 4th game, existing purely due to inertia, while literally nothing in the game requires it.

Shooter — First-Person

• BioShock had the Item Crafting machines U-Invent, which aside from being required to make the Lazarus Vector at one point, can be ignored fully, even if it includes three of the Gene Tonics that can upgrade the character. Hence its removal from BioShock 2.
• Deep Rock Galactic has a perks system that players can use to suit their playstyle. One perk that goes nearly unused is "It's a Bug Thing" where the harmless loot bugs will spontaneously explode if you go near them, allowing you to grab the minerals inside them without having to shoot them. Considering that higher difficulties practically require you to use certain perks to prolong your survival and the loot bugs themselves are extremely weak to gunfire, it's a given that almost no one uses the perk.
• Halo:
  • Halo 2 made non-playable allies able to drive vehicles, when previously only human players could take the wheel. The multitude of internet videos of NPCs failing miserably to drive anywhere, not crash, or not kill any of their own allies shows just how useful allowing that was.
  • Halo: Reach introduced the Fireteam mechanic, which causes encountered NPC troopers to join your side as an accompanying squad. However, you have no command over any of these troopers (who aren't exactly intelligent guys) so unless you can give them powerful weapons they'll just be cannon fodder. Additionally, the mechanic isn't available on every level, meaning often times you may encounter troopers but they won't accompany you, rendering them meaningless if you wanted support fire or someone to carry heavy weapons.
• Gearbox's Opposing Force expansion for Half-Life offered a few gameplay mechanics not seen in any of the other games such as a grappling-hook with an unattached wall-barnacle and rope climbing.
• In Left 4 Dead 2, Valve touted how campaigns can have randomized paths so that players would have to pay attention to their progression and not be able to simply speed through the most optimized pathway. The extent of the random paths can only really be seen in the cemetery section of The Parish campaign where its layout is randomized every time the map is played and there are several kinds of paths the players can be set on. Other campaigns have random paths as well, but they're only boiled down to just one path being open while the other is sealed off. Many levels don't use randomized paths at all, but rather more than one path but with the more standard randomized weapon and item drops along them, and most community made campaigns also don't use this feature. Luckily, there is a Game Mod that improves on this feature for the vanilla campaigns: Random Object Spawner.
  • The Sacrifice campaign also introduces a Heroic Sacrifice mechanic where a player must sacrifice themselves in the finale in order to ensure the others escape safely. This mechanic isn't used in other campaigns since said campaigns aren't themed around sacrifices, but when it comes to custom campaigns, almost no one ever uses it.
  • Propane and oxygen tanks are rarely used by players due to how unwieldy they are to use. They are essentially explosives you can move and place, but they have to be shot to trigger their explosions. They are designed to be traps, which would be handy for holdout segments, but the zombie horde usually never funnel through the same path each time and if enough zombies crowd around the explosives, you won't be able to see and shoot them (doubly so with oxygen tanks due to their narrow and slim size). Oxygen tanks have it worse since there's a two second delay before the blow up, making it very difficult to use effectively.
• Overwatch
  • The limited-time Junkenstein's Revenge brawl, in a departure from the usual PvP format, has players assemble in teams of four to destroy hordes of robot zombies and four bosses before they all wipe at once or the door they're defending gets destroyed. Though it received an Updated Re-release in 2017, it's still restricted to one month out of the year and the PvE formula hasn't yet been used in any other context except Uprising, which ran through April 2017. This one was much more in-depth, a team of four running through capturing points, defending an objective, and escorting a payload in what was Tracer's first mission. Similarly to Junkenstein's Revenge, it was popular among players as a breath of fresh air from the usual PvP. Also similarly to Junkenstein's Revenge, it became unavailable after the event's end. Subsequent years would see the event return with new campaigns, but they remained limited to the month in which the event ran; the idea of PvE modes that weren't limited to yearly events ended up being saved for the Mission-Pack Sequel.
  • Horizon Lunar Colony has a low gravity zone, where the sound is muffled to the point of being almost muted, gravity is lowered... and it's only present in a very small, out-of-the-way, area of the map. Voluntary from Blizzard, as they have stated they didn't want the whole "Moon/space" thing to dominate the entire map, but there could have been a middle ground.

Shooter — Third-Person

• Warframe tends to accumulate these, but one in particular stands out from the War Within quest: Operator mode. Completing the quest allows you to step out of your Warframe as your Operator, but there's barely any point to doing so. You can use it to get past security measures in Spy vaults, clear off damage resistances from Sentients and Shadow Stalker, and destroy Kuva Siphons, and that's about it. It doesn't even tie in with the Focus system, which seems like it should be a logical fit. Somehow, it's even got an underused mechanic of its own. Towards the end of the quest, you get to use Transference to possess the Golden Maw that has been harassing you for a while; all you can really do as the Golden Maw is move around through the bones, and nothing like this ever comes up again.

Stealth

• The two DLCs for Dishonored, The Knife of Dunwall and The Brigmore Witches, allow the player to buy "Bribes" for each mission, which add little things like item caches, additional NPC characters who will give you intel or a sidequest, or additional Runes/Bonecharms for a nominal fee (in a manner similar to the Thief series). Trouble is, not only were these DLCs the only time this mechanic was used (it doesn't appear in any capacity in the sequel, despite drawing heavily from the DLC plotline), but one of the DLC Achievements, "Enough Coin to Disappear", actively requires you to avoid them if you're not going for 100% Completion, as there's very little money between both DLCs, and you need to have collected 10,000 Gold across both of them to get the award — not so easy if you've been spending several hundred gold each mission instead. More notably, "The Brigmore Witches" includes the only instance of an Old Save Bonus being used in the franchise, which carries over the player's reputation, Gold and Bonecharms — another idea that was missing from the first game to the sequel.
• Hitman: Blood Money allows you to sedate people who are already sleeping, but this only lets you to steal their clothes, and in most cases there's a better way to obtain a disguise. In case you were wondering, yes, guards can see the difference between someone who is sleeping and someone who was sedated while they were sleeping, so it's not even a way to hide bodies.
• The first two Acts in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots allow the player to slightly influence the dynamics of the battlefield, via Snake having the ability to befriend members of the local militia by aiding them in gunfights or "gifting" them consumable food like Noodles. However, there are only a handful of areas you can do this in, the local militias in the Middle East and southern Africa stop being a factor entirely after Act 2, and the only real point beyond making them non-hostile is a couple of special items (music tracks) that can only be obtained by gifting enough food to the soldiers. Beyond a single trailer where this was shown off, it's not even clear that you can gift them items — Otacon makes reference to aiding them in battle, but says nothing about the ability to hand them items or befriend them enough to have them confer benefits. Despite the following game in the series utilizing similar locales and giving an even larger reason for letting Snake (or his predecessor) interact with non-hostile entities (particularly the children in Africa and the troops onboard Mother Base), the only thing you can do in the latter game is beat them up to boost their morale.
• Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain:
  • While enemy surveillance cameras played a large part in the series up to this point, and even in the preceding title, they are virtually non-existent in this game, despite being set up to have greater functionality. Of note, the only locations within the gameworld that have any cameras at all are Nova Braga Airport and OKB Zero — none of the other outposts, major bases or locations in the single-player mode have them. This is despite enemy guards proclaiming at several points (in free-roam and during missions) that "additional cameras" have been installed at key sites. While gun cameras will be added if the player has a high level of lethal engagement, this does not apply to normal cameras. However, enemy cameras have greater prominence within the FOB mode, where players can install various types of cameras throughout their base.
  • The Battle Gear is set up to be a major asset Huey builds throughout the game, and its arrival is heralded by several cutscenes showing it in various states of completion. In gameplay, however, it can never be used in the battlefield, and can only deploy (offscreen) in Combat Deployment Missions. According to Word of God, the Battle Gear was intended to be used in free-roam, but was cut prior to release due to balance issues. It doesn't help that Dummied Out data suggests it was intended to have much greater functionality, including an assortment of upgrades that could be researched.

Survival Horror

• Eternal Darkness has a couple. Six characters can wield a torch, but only the first character, Anthony, actually uses the torch to interact with the environment by burning away part of the scenery; it's just an optional weapon for everyone else. Even the game's much-celebrated Sanity Meter counts, because sanity effects don't do anything to actively hinder your progress, plus it's incredibly easy to recover sanity with the second spell you acquire.
• The blue herb in several of the classic Resident Evil games cures you of poison, but the amount of enemies that can poison you and the areas they appear in are so minimal that the item may as well not exist. Later games would ditch the blue herb entirely while Resident Evil 2 (Remake) brings it back with both the poison curing feature and the ability to mix it with a red herb by itself to give yourself a buff that prevents poison and reduces damage taken.
• Resident Evil 3 (Remake) had several instances of this, primarily revolving around game mechanics that were dialed down from the original game:
  • The original PSX version had a notable risk vs. reward mechanic where the player could receive unique weapon parts (which could be combined to create more powerful guns), packs of first aid sprays or even infinite ammo for a weapon (only on a second playthrough and onwards) if they fought Nemesis head-on instead of opting to run when the game gives you the choice to. This had the effect of rewarding risky gameplay (even at the beginning of the game) with better items and weapons to take on the undead with. The Remake reintroduces it, but gives the player far fewer meaningful reasons to use the mechanic — the only two drops of note are upgrades for the starting handgun, you're just as likely to get the drops accidentally (especially given that Nemesis, in the early areas, can be felled with a single hand grenade or electrical box overload and a handful of subsequent shots), and the areas where you can get said drops are generally limited to the early game. Shooting and felling Nemesis any time after receiving the two drops will net either Shotgun Shells or Flame Rounds, which (while still useful) aren't worth the likely investment needed to make it worth the risk.
  • The original also had very powerful drops be your reward for taking down Nemesis, giving you access to insanely valuable items like the STI Eagle 6, the Western Custom, two First Aid Spray Cases, an Assault Rifle, and (if you've beaten the game once) infinite ammo for the weapon of your choice. This risk/reward mechanic was one of the big cornerstones of the original game. Because the remake reduced most Nemesis counters to boss battles or Press X to Not Die setpiece cutscenes, and dramatically weakened him during the few times you do encounter him during gameplay, this entire mechanic barely gets used at all. Even when it is, your rewards are poor at best like generic ammunition and a couple of mediocre handgun upgrades.
  • The Drain Deimos that can infect Jill with parasites and they kill her if you don't use a green herb to purge them. Since the Drain Deimos only appears in the substation area and you spend only a few minutes in there, the parasitic infection mechanic is a one and done deal.
• In Resident Evil 6, certain scenarios will have two of the player characters meet another two player characters where they all team up to take on the big threat to the group as a whole. It's possible to have four players playing together this way, but everyone has to be at the same point in the story for it to happen. Due to the game already being out for more than a decade and most of the player base having already moved on, the odds of two people running into another group of two players at the same point in the story is effectively zero.
• In Pathologic, the Haruspex's unique ability to extract human organs for use in herbal medicine is a major part of the plot and his character... yet in gameplay terms, they're rarely worth the trouble. Organs and herbs take up a ton of inventory space you could be using for barter items, and store-bought drugs are about as effective.
  • While Pathologic 2 makes herbal tinctures much more useful (as they are the only means of diagnosing illness and far outclass store-bought drugs in immunity boosts), organ brews retain the problem of being only marginally more effective than store-bought antibiotics while taking much more work to acquire. To make this even worse, organ brews take up twice as much inventory space as commercial antibiotics — and inventory space is at a premium in this game. You can, at least, now sell organs to Var for money, but as you can get more money from looting houses or killing muggers that's rarely worth the trouble either.

Tabletop Games

• Arkham Horror 3^rd Edition: The Influence skill sees little use in the core game, as it's a social ability that's unrelated to the main mechanics of fighting the Ancient One and most Influence-based rewards can be obtained with more useful skills instead. Later expansions recognize this and add many more applications for Influence, including one story path where it's a key mechanic.
• Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition has the Inspiration mechanic. You get a one-shot bonus usable at the player's discretion to make a roll more likely to succeed as a reward from the DM for role-playing your character. Unfortunately, the bonus is rather moderate in comparison to what the characters can typically do, you can only store one "charge" of Inspiration at a time, and it has to be announced in advance, so most players will forget about it or otherwise treat it as Too Awesome to Use and thus see little use in the game. Many groups that wish to see the mechanic in gameplay will tweak it by improving the benefit (such as making it retroactive as a "second chance"), and/or increasing the frequency with which you can acquire Inspiration.

Turn-Based Strategy

• Advance Wars: Days of Ruin:
  • A large portion of the campaign acts like an extended tutorial that holds off on introducing major mechanics, mainly the completely revamped CO power system. You won't get a chance to use these mechanics until about halfway through the story.
  • Special terrain types like ocean mist and radar towers are completely absent from the campaign, only appearing in trial maps and multiplayer.
• In Disgaea 5: Alliance of Vengeance, you can upload your Netherworld to the Netherworld Network for others to research and get invaded by during Item World runs, rather than just encountering Netherworlds generated by the game itself or Stray Lost Armies (also game-generated). In practice, even if you make sure to have network features enabled (which also enable things like user-submitted Nether News headlines), user-generated Netherworlds are scathingly rare to encounter, and one can spend hundreds of hours on the game without encountering one, ever. And even if you do encounter a user-generated Netherworld, equipment names are set to their defaults and generic unit names use the usual random name pool instead of being the names set by their respective users (presumably to avoid Video Game Perversity Potential), meaning that you may as well be fighting the army of yet another computer-generated Netherworld.
• Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War
  • The game gives the player the ability to dismount Seliph after he promotes to Knight Lord, letting them switch between on-foot combat and mounted combat. There is basically never a time where you would want to do this (barring maybe a brief desert section in Chapter 7, and even that's a stretch and requires Seliph to be very overleveled), since mounts in Genealogy are notoriously broken and a mounted Seliph can do essentially everything a dismounted Seliph can while also having a host of beneficial features. You'll most likely dismount Seliph once out of curiosity, see what it does, and then wonder why it exists. By the account of the game's creator, it was added solely because they thought some players might prefer Seliph's pre-promotion sprite (there were plans to have all mounted characters have the option, but space issues forced them to give it up). This is in contrast with the games before and after it, Fire Emblem: Mystery of the Emblem and Fire Emblem: Thracia 776, which had dismounting as a feature of all mounted units, and had many maps that more or less required its use.
  • The game is one of many in the series to feature the Triangle Attack, a situational but powerful move where three specific units surrounding a single one can trigger an automatic crit when one of them attacks. Unlike every other appearance, though, it is an enemy-exclusive move, used by two teams of minibosses (one shows up twice, the other shows up once). On top of that, since the first team consists of mages (who tend to attack at range) and the other consists of falcoknights (who tend to fly away after attacking) and therefore neither tends to bunch up around enemy units, it is very rare that you will ever see the Triangle Attack in action.
• Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade: Even though the only chapter objective in the campaign is to have Roy seize a gate or throne, the game supports other objective types that only appear in a handful of easy trial maps. Several of these maps were only available from real life events and are probably lost forever, making them a different kind of underused.
• Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones: The Summoner class can create Player Mooks with 1 HP, which have a lot of tactical applications. This ability hasn't appeared in any other game in the series (summoned monsters in Gaiden were AI controlled), only three characters can become Summoners and of those, one is a Trainee who takes a long time to get there and another can only be obtained by completing the Bonus Dungeon three times.
• In Fire Emblem: Three Houses
  • In Fire Emblem: Awakening and Fire Emblem Fates, the ability to talk to certain units on the battlefield (usually allied green units, but also some enemies) was a crucial way of recruiting them, and sometimes obtaining items from friendly NPCs, and both games provided brief tutorials introducing the mechanic. Three Houses, however, features this mechanic much less frequently, and there are few cases in which it gives anything more than some optional dialogue.
  • Dark Seals are unique promotion items that allow access to the Dark Mage and Dark Bishop classes. The issue is the classes are male-only, and among the three characters who learn Dark magic (Hubert, Edelgard and Lysithea) only one of them is male, and Hubert is only playable on one of the game's paths... which happens to be the path where Dark Seals are the least accessible. Many of the skills benefiting Dark magic are also learned by Dark Knight, a class anyone can access.
• Fire Emblem Engage features one instance of an otherwise hostile unit who can be recruited by talking to him- specifically, Lindon, an Elusian NPC who is encountered as an enemy in Chapter 18 and will join the player if Alear or one of the two Elusian princesses, Ivy and Hortensia, talk to him. Because this mechanic does not appear anywhere else, some players fail to realize Lindon is recruitable and end up killing him by mistake.
• The reputation in Shattered Union changes too little over the course of the campaign to have much impact. Reputation can only change by 5 points per mission, while moving to a new tier requires 130 (that's at least 26 missions to move one tier). A side effect was that firebombing an entire city had the same effect as torching a few fields. One Let's Player upped it to 50 per mission in the game files to have at least some impact, and still had to cause some indiscriminate destruction just to get the numbers up.

Visual Novels

• The latte art minigame doesn't come up as much in Coffee Talk because only one order requiring it comes up early in the game, while in Episode 2, it only comes up on the first and last days. Other than those, you can serve lattes without making art and you won't get penalized for it. The only other reason to play it is for the Art Takes Time achievement, where you spend a total of one hour playing it.
• Danganronpa:
  • Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc has the oddball "Re:Act" mechanic. To progress in certain dialogue scenes, you need to press a button and choose a purple-colored phrase in the other character's statement; otherwise the dialogue just ends abruptly and must be restarted. Once or twice, it's used to let the player explore several dialogue branches in any order, but the rest of the time, it's just regular dialogue with extra steps. The mechanic doesn't show up that often, and is not present in any of the sequels.
  • Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony
    • The game introduced the ability to lie during trials. By holding down the button to fire a Truth Bullet, it turns into a Lie Bullet with the inverted meaning—for example, Character A's testimony about seeing Character B turns into testimony denying seeing Character B. Only two or three times does the player actually have to lie (one of which being the tutorial of how to use lies), while the other times, Lie Bullets are just an alternate solution to certain segments with no lasting impact on the rest of the trial. In fact, they're pretty counterintuitive to use (the only clue that a segment can even be passed by lying is that the background music is subtly different, which the game never actually explains) and have the terrible side effect of costing your health while you're aiming, which makes the player not want to use it anyway.
    • In a stark departure from the previous games, you actually have two playable characters this time around. You start off the game playing as Kaede Akamatsu, before switching to Shuichi Saihara midway through the first trial, with ends with Kaede being executed for the murder. While Kaede has her own Free Time Events with her classmate, she's only playable in Chapter 1 and can't be chosen in School Mode, which means you'll have to play Chapter 1 repeatedly to fill out her Free Time Events. Some players even wanted to be able to play as Kaede for the entire game or choose whether to play as Kaede or Shuichi.
    • At the end of each trial, you can choose who to vote for as the culprit. For the most part, the rest of the cast realizes who's responsible, and even the culprit knows that they're finished, so your vote doesn't affect anything. The only real significance of this feature comes up at the end of the game, when you must refuse to vote (which is punishable by death) in order to cause the killing game to end without hope or despair winning.
• Ace Attorney:
  • Justice for All and Trials and Tribulations give you the ability to present profiles as evidence in court or when talking to people during investigations. The issue is that the times where profiles are needed are slim to the point where you can easily forget that you need to present profiles to progress. Later games would restrict profiles to only being used when it's required to do so.
  • The first case of Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney features a 3D diagram of the crime scene in the first case that you can manipulate in the courtroom to see possible contradictions. Despite being potentially useful, it was sadly not used after this particular case.
  • Apollo's "Perceive" ability lets him focus on a witness's body language to see if there's a tic he can spot, which clues him in on the witness hiding something. The mechanic is used a lot in Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney, but in later games, it's barely used at all; for example, in Dual Destines, Apollo uses it during his investigations, but Blackquill refuses to allow him to use it during trials, until the final case (in his original game, there was at least one cross-examination per case that could only be solved through Perceive). Same deal in Spirit of Justice where it's used the exact same number of time, five. It's arguably worse, as it's only used in two cases, the second case, and final case.
  • Similarly, Psyche-Locks, formerly used quite often in Justice For All and Trials and Tribulations, has also become this in Dual Destines and Spirit of Justice. In the former, it's used, depending on how you count it, 5 to 7 times. Two of those seven are not broken in gameplay, but story progression (one isn't even broken onscreen). Only counting ones that are broken onscreen and in the main game, it's only used twice. (3 of the 5 are in Turnabout Reclaimed, a DLC case) In the game after it, it's only four times, and, once more, it is only used twice in the main game, and both times are in the same case, the third one.
  • The DLC case from Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Dual Destinies boasts the comeback of the forensic investigation we saw back in Rise from the Ashes and in Apollo Justice... except it was simplified as heck. Luminol tests now need a single spray on the right area to reveal the bloodstain (as opposed to the multiple touches you had to do before), and the fingerprint search and analysis is done for you by another character while you're in court.
  • Gyakuten Kenji 2. Fingerprinting is back! And it's used exactly once.
  • Professor Layton vs. Ace Attorney: Puzzles with Contradictions are specifically puzzles that cannot be solved without some missing element. The concept in and of itself is an amazing new twist on the formulas of both original series, but it is only used once in the entire game, albeit at a critical point. Also, you are again able to present profiles in cross examinations, but it's never used.
  • The Great Ace Attorney has the jury system. At certain points in the British court cases, the jury will decide that the defendant is guilty, and you must convince four out of six of them to change their minds by seeing which jurors' explanations of their verdicts contradict each other^ExplanationOne juror might say that the four passengers on an omnibus paid 20 pence, while another might say that the fee for an omnibus is 4 pence, so you pit them together to prove the possibility of an additional passenger. in order to resume the trial. The feature comes up a total of five times in the latter three cases of the first game (the first one takes place in Japan and the second one lacks a trial phase), but only three times total in the second and third cases of the second game (the first trial is in Japan and the fourth and fifth are an extra-long case that spans two chapters, and take place in a closed court without a jury.)
• Shinrai: Broken Beyond Despair
  • While the game is somewhat short, there's only three sequences in which you investigate areas. One is an optional tutorial in which you look at the decorations around the party area. The second is a fairly simple puzzle the first time Raiko goes to the breaker room (Open the window, check the breaker, check the shelves, get the broom to retrieve Raiko's cell phone, check the shelves again for a screwdriver and open the breaker). The third is the investigation of the crime scene.
  • There is also only one occasion in which you have to select a certain spot on an image (a fairly common puzzle in Danganronpa and Ace Attorney), namely at the end where you choose which room was the crime scene (and if you get it wrong, someone else will point out the right answer). Said mechanic could have been used earlier on, when pointing out how Rie got back from the breaker room so quickly, but instead, it's a simple evidence presentation prompt.
• Highway Blossoms: In the Next Exit DLC, the story not only features Switching P.O.V., between the perspectives of Amber (the sole POV character in the original game), Marina and a third-person narrator for the Trio, but it allows you to choose between Amber and Marina's POV for certain scenes. Unfortunately, this only happens twice - in one early scene in the RV and a later scene in the candy shop.

Wide Open Sandbox

• Endless Ocean: Blue World lets you stock a private reef with various kelp, coral and props to attract various species of fish. Attracting said fish doesn't really do anything aside from let you occasionally flush them out in order to make a little money from your conservation efforts, and unlike the Aquarium, the reef is located inside of an existing area, making casual travel to it just to admire it a hassle.
• In Minecraft, the 2020 April Fools update, aka the infinite snapshot, adds literal billions of procedurally generated dimensions to the game, as well as some Easter Egg ones, such as "library", a Great Big Library of Everything inspired by The Library of Babel. While most are Eldritch Locations, some generated incredible Scenery Porn, causing many to regret they would go away once April Fools' Day ended.
• The main selling point of Watch Dogs: Legion was the ability to recruit virtually any NPC in London to join La Résistance, each one with their own perks and effectively turning any one of them into the "main" character. While it's been widely praised both for its mechanical design (it's no small feat for a game to generate a seemingly infinite amount of characters with their own distinct appearances, backgrounds, schedules, and abilities) as well as its thematic relevance (on top of being an evolution of previous Watch_Dogs games' NPC-scanning mechanic, recruiting your own Ragtag Bunch of Misfits gels well with the game's anti-authoritarian narrative), much criticism was also placed on the fact that in practice, it's almost useless for gameplay. Aside from a minor perk or few per character, all of them play almost entirely the same (everyone of every age and background is able to hack, drive cars, operate drones, and fight with guns), and due to the fact that each one of them is pretty much expendable and the game presents so many different ways to complete missions, players are given no real in-game incentive to explore recruiting new characters aside from the optional permadeath and their own curiosity, especially when certain NPCs can be made more or less difficult to recruit based on your behavior. This also put constraints on the game's plot, which is still designed to revolve around a singular "main" character divorced from any of their randomly-generated personality, mitigating the collective aspect and leaving no true character arcs or personal stakes to get invested in.

Other

• Dead Ahead Zombie Warfare: Among 100+ missions in the game, negative weather effects are used in less than 10 missions total, and almost all of those take place during the first half of the game.
• In the Google Chrome Dinosaur Game, you can make the T. Rex duck under mid-height pterosaurs by holding the down arrow key, making it one of two actions that the T. Rex is able to take. This is not stated anywhere in-game and you can just as well pass them by jumping.
• GemCraft: Wizard Towers act as "boss levels" in Chasing Shadows, using a special unlocking mechanic where you either need to shoot the locks with gems or cast spells on them, and you lose the level if the tower is not opened by the last wave. In Chasing Shadows which introduced them, they appear pretty regularly, but in the next entry in the series, Frostborn Wrath, there is only a single Wizard Tower in the entire game, and the unlocking mechanics are retained just for the sake of that single tower.
• In The Order of the Stick, a Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition-inspired RPG Mechanics 'Verse, Vaarsuvius defends their use of Counterspells as "a legitimate, if seldom used, means of neutralizing a spellcaster". It does force Vaarsuvius to act entirely on the defensive, relying on their allies to do the damage.
• In the point-and-click adaptation of The Death Gate Cycle (simply called Death Gate), spells consist of individual runes. Normally, you just select the right spell from a menu, but you can also assemble runes manually one-by-one. This may seem like a potential way to stumble into new spells, but a linear point-and-click adventure is not exactly the right kind of genre for such shenanigans, so this never actually happens. This ability to assemble rules manually is used once in the entire game, in an admittedly beautiful one-off puzzle. While mirroring a spell does not create any new spell, it WILL cause your magical double to mirror your rune motions, therefore casting the spell. This allows you to defeat your double by tricking him into casting Self-Immolation.

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