History Main / ScrappyWeapon

** Axes in the early games border on UnusableEnemyEquipment because of how rare good axes are and how rarer good users are--some games, like ''VideoGame/FireEmblemGaiden'' and the second book of ''VideoGame/FireEmblemMysteryOfTheEmblem'', simply don't let you recruit any axe-users. The player isn't missing much; axes boast the highest weight of all weapon types, meaning that many axes drag the user's Speed to the negatives (letting them be doubled by anything that isn't another axe-user), and have the worst accuracy in an RNG system that ''isn't'' fudging the results. You could usually mark the point where the game is no longer throwing axe enemies at you as a "taking the training wheels off" moment. After ''VideoGame/FireEmblemThracia776'' introduced Constitution, they became significantly better due to weight becoming a nonissue, and by ''VideoGame/FireEmblemPathOfRadiance'', they were the best weapon type by far. (''VideoGame/FireEmblemTheBindingBlade'' was the main stumble in that path, due to axes having the worst hit rates in a game where accuracy is a going concern.)

** Considering the weaknesses of swords, the slim sword has been next to useless in almost every game after the SNES era. The advantage of "slim" weapons is low weight and high accuracy in exchange for less power, with the slim lance mainly being useful for frail Pegasus Knights who are restricted to a weapon type that's otherwise pretty heavy. But swords are ''already'' light and accurate, and there's no sword user in any of the GBA or Tellius games who gets weighed down by the basic iron sword. The SNES games had it closer to an upgrade over iron, with either better damage, a bigger gap in accuracy, or weight that actually makes a difference, but here, the slim sword is one of the weakest weapons in exchange for overkill accuracy and a piddling crit boost. It doesn't help that unlike the slim lance, which the aforementioned Pegasus Knights usually start with, the slim sword has to be bought from armories while also being ''more'' expensive than an iron, so you can't even take advantage of its miniscule upsides for free: it can at least be a ''little'' worthwhile to buy in ''TheBindingBlade'' where even the iron sword isn't always reliable, but you're better off never bothering for the other games unless you ''really'' need your UnskilledButStrong cavalier to land their hits. (It remained as weak as ever when it returned in ''VideoGame/FireEmblemEngage'', but there it comes with a sizable [[PowerNullifier dodge boost]] that gives it a much more useful purpose.)
** In ''Blazing Blade'', you have Lyn's final weapon, the Sol Katti. The Mani Katti was the main thing making Lyn useful for the majority of the story, being essentially a Rapier crossbred with a Wo Dao. Then the Sol Katti comes along in the same pack as the genuinely PurposefullyOverpowered Armads and Durandal, and you're expecting amazing power... when in reality, it has less Might than a Silver Sword. It has a high crit rate and is effective against dragons, but there's exactly one dragon enemy left in the game at that point, and said dragon barely gets scratched by the Sol Katti and has extremely good odds of killing Lyn in one shot. On top of that, the Sol Katti has a weight of 14, which is greater than most axes and far above a Silver Sword or Killing Edge, and Lyn has a Constitution of only 6 when promoted, meaning the damn thing cuts into her high speed and moves her from doubling every enemy to actively fearing getting doubled herself.

*** Knives. There are only three in the game, they have no ranged options, and the strongest (the Stiletto) has a whopping 8 Mt (the same as a common iron axe), meaning they do pitiful damage even when accounting for their slightly enhanced crit rates. They're also restricted to the game's thieves and sages, of whom only Volke has anything even resembling the strength to make such weak weapons work. On top of all that, to wield knives, sages need to give up the option to use staves--do you want the option to heal your allies and manage all kinds of helpful utility effects, or the option to forego your powerful spells that hit at range on an enemy's weaker stat to wield incredibly weak daggers that key off your abysmal Strength? (Incidentally, both of the game's prepromoted sages went the latter, as if specifically to nerf them after the sages from the [[VideoGame/FireEmblemTheBlazingBlade previous]] VideoGame/FireEmblemTheSacredStones games]] blew their earlygame counterparts out of the water.) Even after being significantly buffed in ''VideoGame/FireEmblemRadiantDawn'', it was still usually seen as the worst weapon type, such that knives didn't reappear until ''VideoGame/FireEmblemFates'', which completely revamped their role by allowing them to debuff enemies after attacking.

** All the dark tomes in ''[[VideoGame/FireEmblemRadiantDawn Fire Emblem Radiant Dawn]]'' for one simple reason: only two characters that can ever be recruited for your team can use them, and both of them can only be recruited on [[NewGamePlus the second-and-above playthroughs]]. This means all the dark tomes are BetterOffSold in the first playthrough, and even then only if you're aware that keeping them is useless. Besides that, most of the dark tomes are merely comparable to other tomes, except they have an advantage over "anima" tomes (fire, wind, and lightning) and a disadvantage to light. Unfortunately, a lot of bosses use light magic, which makes things even more of an uphill battle for those two characters.
** ''VideoGame/FireEmblemFates'' is the second game in the series [[UnbreakableWeapons where all weapons are unbreakable]]. To make up for it, the higher-ranked weapons have various negative effects attached to them. But it ends up making a lot of them so crippling that you'd rather stick to iron or steel weapons for the whole game. The silver weapons got hit especially bad, ''lowering your crit evasion, strength, and skill'' after each battle with it.

*** Many of the ranged physical weapons either cannot double attack (Javelins, Hand Axes, Throwing Clubs) or can ''only'' hit from two spaces away instead of having 1-2 range (Spears, Tomahawks). This makes them extremely annoying to use, and many players prefer the magic weapons (such as the Levin Sword) since they can still double ''and'' hit at 1-2 range.
** ''VideoGame/FireEmblemThreeHouses'''s poison weapons inflict DamageOverTime, which doesn't really harm enemies that much. Sure, you ''could'' use them on rather bulky enemies, but they usually have so much health all poison damage amounts to ScratchDamage or CherryTapping.

** Bows tend to suffer from this in "enemy phase"-focused games (that being, games where the enemies are sufficiently weak and numerous that the majority of kills are the result of enemies attacking the player and dying on the counter). This is because bows cannot counter enemies fighting at melee range, which is most of them, meaning a bow-user is a sitting duck on enemy phase. No matter how good their stats are, a character who can only ever kill one enemy per turn is going to come up short when others can kill three or four. This is especially the case in games that bite into the bow niche of being able to [[TacticalRockPaperScissors shoot down flying units]], whether by reducing their effective damage boost or simply making fliers too weak or uncommon to warrant a bow-user, and it isn't helped by the Archer class being notoriously undertuned statwise. In "player phase" games where individual enemies are strong, though, bows tend to be seen as a good pick, being the most reliable way to chip down enemy health without taking a highly damaging counterattack.

** Considering the weaknesses of swords, the slim sword in the GBA games is practically pointless. The advantage of "slim" weapons is low weight and high accuracy in exchange for less power, with the slim lance mainly being useful for frail Pegasus Knights who are restricted to a weapon type that's otherwise pretty heavy. But swords are ''already'' light and accurate, and there's no sword user in any of the GBA games who gets weighed down by the basic iron sword. The SNES games had it closer to an upgrade over iron, with either better damage, a bigger gap in accuracy, or weight that actually makes a difference. But here, the slim sword is one of the weakest weapons in exchange for nothing but overkill accuracy and a miniscule crit boost.

** Light magic in the post-GBA games has a tendency to be this (unlike in the Jugdral games, where it was easily the best magic type). Its main shtick is that it's a lightweight magic that generally doubles... but most wielders of anima magic can double anyway, which means light magic is just a weaker version. ''VideoGame/FireEmblemTheBindingBlade'' has one of the most pronounced cases, likely owing to it being the first game to turn light magic-users into a dedicated branch. Not only are light magic tomes worse than anima ones, but the only class that can use it is Bishop... a promoted class. Only one prepromoted bishop shows up, and he does so very late and isn't much of a fighter, so if you want to use a light magic character before then, you have to grind up the characters who can become Bishops--and they're both healers. Healing staves are a very slow way to grind XP, so unless you arena-abuse, burn out barrier staves, or promote very early, you're probably never going to have a light magic-user with a high enough rank to use Aureola.

*** Knives. There are only three in the game, they have no ranged options, and the strongest (the Stiletto) has a whopping 8 Mt (the same as a common iron axe), meaning they do pitiful damage even when accounting for their slightly enhanced crit rates. They're also restricted to the game's thieves and sages, of whom only Volke has anything even resembling the strength to make such weak weapons work. On top of all that, to wield knives, sages need to give up the option to use staves--do you want the option to heal your allies and manage all kinds of helpful utility effects, or the option to forego your powerful spells that hit at range on an enemy's weaker stat to wield incredibly weak daggers that key off your abysmal Strength? (Inexplicably, both the game's prepromoted sages picked the latter.) Even after being significantly buffed in ''VideoGame/FireEmblemRadiantDawn'', it was still usually seen as the worst weapon type, such that knives didn't reappear until ''VideoGame/FireEmblemFates'', which completely revamped their role by allowing them to debuff enemies after attacking.

* ''VideoGame/{{Minecraft}}''
** Golden Swords, which are only as strong as a Wooden Sword and breaks down twice as fast. While Golden Swords compensate their weaknesses by having higher chances of getting stronger enhancements, wasting rare gold resources for a weapon that won't last is a dumb move.
** Holy heck, tridents. On paper they sound fine, being a combination melee and projectile weapon that can use the Riptide enchantment to boost mobility and Channeling to call lightning strikes, but MasterOfNone is in full effect here: they have high attack but low attack speed, giving them damage output on-par with only an iron sword, and have less range and a harsher arc than a fired arrow. They need to be ''retrieved'' after each throw unless you luck upon the Loyalty enchantment, itself a slow and somewhat unreliable means of returning the item to your inventory. They only exist as a rare-drop from drowned: each drowned has a 15% chance of spawning with one, and ''then'' only an 8% chance of dropping it, giving you only about a 1% chance of ever getting your hands on one, and odds are it will be heavily damaged when you finally do get one. Drowned equipped with tridents are a pain to fight as they will pummel you to death with them until you manage to win an underwater fight with it. They can ''only'' be repaired by combining tridents or blowing the ''incredibly'' valuable Mending enchantment that you could have saved for a piece of Netherrite gear, or god forbid an Elytra, effectively making them too rare or too impractical for their mediocre abilities. Their only real practical use is to give them the Channeling and/or Riptide enchantments, the former makes it a somewhat more convenient replacement for a lightning rod and the latter makes it a limited but free replacement for Depth Strider (a common enchantment) and Rockets for Elytra flight, and Riptide is an exclusive enchantment from Loyalty meaning it ''removes half of the weapon's utility''. It's clear even Mojang was aware of this, as you get the "A Throwaway Joke" advancement for throwing it at an enemy.

* ''VideoGame/{{Minecraft}}'' has Golden Swords, which are only as strong as a Wooden Sword and breaks down twice as fast. While Golden Swords compensate their weaknesses by having higher chances of getting stronger enhancements, wasting rare gold resources for a weapon that won't last is a dumb move.

** The ever-so-infamous Blue Shells. They are almost impossible to avoid, and create a huge explosion that stops the victim for much longer than other items. This sounds powerful, but they only target the racer in first place, and can only be obtained by racers near last place, so it's ''very'' unlikely that the person using the Blue Shell will benefit from it. The is especially true from ''Double Dash'' to ''Wii'', where the shell has wings and flies directly to first place, ignoring everyone else in the way. At least in ''64'' and ''7'' onwards, the shell can also hit other racers on its way to its target, although it's very easy to avoid for ''them''. In short, it's an item whose sole purpose is [[DoWellButNotPerfect punishing players for being too good]], but provides zero benefit for the player using it.

* A lot of the weapons in ''VideoGame/TwistedMetal3'' and ''VideoGame/TwistedMetal4'' introduced by 989 Studios are lackluster at absolute best. Examples include the Mortar which rarely hits and is just as likely to hit you, the Rain Missile that rarely hits and only inflicts ScratchDamage with flames when it does, the Speed Missile which does ScratchDamage and doesn't even home in, the Auto Lob that rarely hits unless the target is ''very'' close range, and the Freeze Remote because why on ''Earth'' would you use this to freeze a foe instead of a homing freeze missile? Note the recurring theme of "never hits its mark" and "does barely any damage." There's a very good reason why no other studios have ever bothered to use these weapons, as you're better off avoiding their pick-ups as to not clutter your inventory.

* ''Franchise/{{Kirby}}'':
** Light in ''VideoGame/KirbysAdventure''. It's only useful for ''two rooms'' in the whole game where it's needed to light up the rooms, and has no use anywhere else. It can't even hurt enemies, either. Getting this ability from Mix is equivalent to getting nothing.
** Also from ''Kirby's Adventure'' is Ball, which is a nightmare to control. For this ability to be able to damage enemies, the player has to be bouncing around at high speed, which will most likely result in them landing in spikes or a bottomless pit trying to use it. Ball does see some use as a decent boss-buster, but this is mostly in the hands of skilled players like speedrunners, since for anyone else [[DifficultButAwesome it has a very high learning curve even there]].
** Jet is not a very popular ability among some fans due to how awkward it is to use. To use it, a player has to charge up power and release it to launch into enemies at high speeds, which leads to the player stopping to charge energy a lot, and is not as effective to use against bosses as other abilities like Hammer or Plasma. In the right hands, however, it's a [[DifficultButAwesome very useful ability]] for [[SpeedRun speedrunning]].
** For the number of fun and interesting combinations possible in ''VideoGame/Kirby64TheCrystalShards'', there are a few stinkers:
*** Burning + Ice gives Kirby the ability to... transform into a melting ice cube. It has abysmal range, only lasts about a second, and is not needed for any puzzles in the game, making it useless. It's typically assumed to be [[JokeWeapon an intentional example]] meant to mess with players for thinking [[ViolationOfCommonSense combining fire and ice would yield something useful]].
*** Spark + Bomb turns Kirby into a walking lightbulb that eventually explodes, which has poor range. It's only useful for lighting up a dark room for one puzzle.
*** Stone + Bomb lets Kirby use a pack of dynamite to blow up nearby enemies. This is very unreliable, as the dynamite takes a long time to blow up if it doesn't make direct contact, and the resulting explosion '''will hurt''' Kirby unless the player presses down to put on a safety helmet. If thrown at an enemy at point-blank range, the player won't have enough time to avoid damage.
** Mini in ''VideoGame/KirbyAndTheAmazingMirror''. It only appears for the few puzzles it's required in, but while using it, Kirby cannot run, fly, or call for help, and has ''no'' means of defending himself from enemies, which makes it all the more easy for Kirby to lose the ability by getting hit and forcing the player to redo the puzzle.
** The Ghost ability from ''VideoGame/KirbySqueakSquad'' sounds very powerful on paper: Kirby can possess any regular enemy by dashing into it, and then use its attacks. Unfortunately, the enemies in this game are so weak that, compared to any of Kirby's abilities, they feel like {{joke character}}s; most of them have low HP and are extremely slow, many have no way of attacking beyond CollisionDamage, and the ones that do have projectiles tend to have short range, weak attack power, and very laggy attacks. The ability is also completely useless against bosses, which [[ContractualBossImmunity can't be possessed]] and only rarely spawn [[FlunkyBoss flunkies]] that can be used against them. Ghost Kirby is especially disappointing considering that, to even unlock the ability, you have to collect all the pieces of the Ghost Medallion found in treasure chests, making it [[BonusFeatureFailure a worthless reward]].

[-[[caption-width-right:349: Ah, yes, the ''Franchise/FireEmblem'' weapon triangle: swords, lances, and the bad one.]]-]

* The Power Bombs in ''VideoGame/SuperMetroid'' may look powerful when one explodes, but its use as an offensive item is dubious at best. Weak enemies are easily killed, but stronger enemies can shrug off the damage. Power Bombs also causes the game's framerate to drop, which is the last thing you want to happen if you're doing a SpeedRun. The only real use Power Bombs ever get are either breaking multiple blocks, destroying Power Bomb blocks, and opening yellow doors. In ''VideoGame/MetroidFusion'' and ''VideoGame/MetroidZeroMission'', they are much more useful as their blast reveals the nature of destructible blocks and these games lack the X-Ray Scope: they are invaluable in "scanning" entire rooms for blocks hidden in walls or to avoid those pesky pit blocks.

[[index]]

[[folder:First-Person Shooters]]
* ''VideoGame/{{ARMA}}'' 3: Fans who enjoyed the NATO faction were generally disappointed when the new "High Tech" group in the ''Apex'' expansion, CTRG-15, was saddled with an [=HK416=] that fired 5.56x45mm NATO rounds, a puny comparison to the 6.5mm rounds that the main force employed, especially since the main game already demonstrated that even the weakest armor in the base game [[ArbitraryGunPower was still almost too much for 5.56mm weapons to penetrate]]. This is exacerbated by the fact that the opposition, CSAT, also gained a special forces unit by the name of Viper that served as rivals the CTRG-15, but gained all of CTRG-15's benefits with none of the downsides of a terrible weapon - their primary new gun dealt the same damage as their basic one from the main game, and their specialist one was a far more versatile gun that not only dealt good damage in its main function, but could also fire .50-caliber rounds with less range but even ''greater'' damage, as well as better armor (which made the 416 even more useless) and a VTOL who's only downside to the NATO variant is a smaller carrying capacity (which doesn't even matter outside of the vehicle transport variant, since most players will never see the infantry transport variant of either at max capacity in most servers. Granted, clever NATO players with the vehicle transport variant do benefit from the ability to transport twice as many light vehicles, and the ability to transport some heavy vehicles).
* ''VideoGame/DeusEx'':
** The single-shot plasma pistol, that you could only carry one of at a time, and wasn't powerful enough to one-shot most mooks even with a close-range headshot.
** The actual plasma rifle itself is also regarded rather unfavorably. Although it can be applied effectively, it's still overwhelmingly the least popular heavy weapon; very few players use it. Even heavy weapon-specialist characters would pass on it, as their size means almost no character will carry more than one heavy weapon (and it's hard to ignore the GEP gun).
** If the assault rifle didn't have its grenade launcher, it'd be completely worthless. Each shot does anemic damage, requiring a five-round burst ''to the head'' to take out enemies. The recoil makes it completely worthless at range unless you're at least Advanced skill with Rifles. And the formula for enemy ammo drops means killing enemies with it will never get you any more 7.62x51mm ammo.
** The Light Antitank Weapon also combined the "can't have more than one" problem of the plasma pistol with [[InventoryManagementPuzzle greater space requirements]], but it did at least offer more raw power to balance that out.
* ''VideoGame/DeusExHumanRevolution'':
** The shotgun is also nigh-useless. It's [[ShortRangeShotgun ineffective at anything beyond close range]], can't be silenced, is useless against armor, and its inability to reliably get headshots lessens the amount of experience you get. Not helping is that unarmored enemies are ''much'' less common after just 20% of the way through the game. A PEPS is probably a safer bet, being more effective all around.
** The machine pistol. It's sufficient in the early game for taking out gangbangers, and it has a great rate of fire even when unmodded, but similar to the shotgun, it's nigh on useless against armored enemies.
* Some of the Missile power-ups in ''VideoGame/MetroidPrimeTrilogy'' have this problem:
** ''VideoGame/MetroidPrime'' has the Plasma Beam's missile combo, the Flamethrower. While all missile combos except the default Super Missile are situational at best, [[VideoGameFlamethrowersSuck Flamethrower is the only completely useless one]]. It shoots a stream of flames that has a short range and eats through your ammo like crazy (and unlike the similar Wavebuster, it does not home in on or stun the target). It's made even more useless when you consider that a charged Plasma Beam shot is the single most powerful weapon in the game — there's only ''one'' enemy in the game that can get hurt by it and isn't killed in one charged shot — so you could just be using that instead.
** Averted with the Wave Beam. True, the Power Beam fires as fast as you can press the button and gets the BoringButPractical Super Missile upgrade, the Ice Beam synergizes with Missiles to one-shot anything that can be frozen, and the Plasma Beam combines the speed of the Power Beam with devastating damage per shot. The Wave Beam fires slowly, and the charged shot's stun effect only lasts for about a second or so. The Wave Beam's missile combo, the Wavebuster, devours missiles too quickly to warrant using it on regular enemies and isn't great on bosses either. Aside from puzzles and opening purple doors, there's no real reason to use the Wave Beam once you get something better... until you realize the Wave Beam's stun effect [[StunLock lasts just long enough to charge up another shot]].
** ''VideoGame/MetroidPrime2Echoes'' has the Light Beam's charge combo, the Sunburst. It fires a large ball of light energy that travels about ten feet in front of you, comes to a slow stop, and explodes. It's useless against mobile enemies because they'll just move out of the way, and it's useless against stationary enemies because the explosion isn't anywhere near as powerful as it appears to be. The only conceivable way to damage something with the Sunburst would be for them to back up so they took damage during the entire animation.
** ''VideoGame/MetroidPrime3Corruption'' has the Hyper Missile, the game's replacement for the Super Missile and its elemental cousins. While in theory it appears to be a very powerful missile attack powered by Phazon, it's useless against enemies that are already immune to the standard missile shots. It also requires a huge amount of energy from the Energy Tank that is in use during Hypermode. Its only practical utility is to quickly drain Phazon when Samus's Hypermode malfunctions from being active for too long, to prevent her total corruption.
* Several weapons in your arsenal in ''VideoGame/{{Daikatana}}''; part of the reason for its terrible reputation is for the simple fact that it front-loads the vast majority of the terrible weapons into the first episode. The ion blaster's shots bounce off walls and can — and usually will — hit you. The C4 vizatergo launches proximity mines with a blast radius roughly equal to the range at which you can reliably place them near what you're trying to kill; if you don't end up getting caught in the explosion, your AI "[[EscortMission helpers]]" probably will. The Sidewinder eliminates the C4 thrower's range problem, but doubles down on accidentally pasting yourself with every other shot by [[ThereIsNoKillLikeOverkill wasting two rockets per shot]] out of your max of 50, combined with [[HitboxDissonance terrible collision detection]] meaning those rockets will still inexplicably blow up two inches from your face. The Shockwave launches an erratically bouncing ball that creates shockwaves whenever it hits a surface… which can easily kill you. It's rather telling that the ''best'' weapon of the episode is the shotgun that slowly wastes six shots with every trigger pull, [[RecoilBoost throwing you all over the room if you ever leave the ground]], simply because it's the only one of the set that can't ''actively'' hurt you as much as it hurts your intended target. Later episodes add proper weapons which prioritize damaging the target over the user, but still have their fair share of terrible ones for the same reasons as the terrible weapons from the first episode: The Eye of Zeus from the Greece episode hits every enemy in sight with lightning when the staff's eye opened, but if no enemies are on-screen, it kills you. Nharre's Nightmare in the Norway episode summons a demon that, like the Eye of Zeus, will turn on you and kill you if there aren't any targets. Finally, shots from the San Francisco episode's kineticore rebound off walls and (all together, now) can hit you. Sensing a pattern?
* ''VideoGame/GoldenEye1997'':
** The Klobb (or the Spyder on the manual), a weak, slow-firing, inaccurate SMG that was outclassed by literally ''every'' weapon in the game. A pistol would serve you better. The Klobb does 1/2 the damage of average normal gun damage that it takes '''two shots''' for a [[BoomHeadShot headshot kill]]! In fact, there was a Max Stats (007 Mode, all enemy stats cranked up to full) run for the Archive level where [[OneHitPointWonder a shot from any weapon was instant death]]. ''Except the Klobb.'' On that note, the Klobb was pretty cool in [[OneHitKill License to Kill mode]]. And its reloading sound is pretty sweet, too. As well as the design, which is based on the CZ Skorpion.
** Unarmed slappers. This does the the least amount of damage in the game. Unlike most shooters at this time, you start every level with a set amount of weapons and can't carry over weapons per level. The idea of saving ammo may sound tempting, but enemies (not bosses) in general have the same health and are subdued quickly. Plus, every enemy in the game leaves weapons and ammo when dead. Slappers may sound useful for stealth missions, but you already have the silenced weapons for that. Levels where you have only slappers only have better alternatives such as the Throwing Knife or a weapon right in front of you. Later levels where silenced weapons are no longer available contains enemies expecting your arrival and/or respawn at various points.
* In ''VideoGame/PerfectDark'', most of the weapons are pretty good, but there were a few that were nearly worthless.
** The Magnum is a very slow gun in a game where great automatic weapons are a dime-a-dozen, and its power just isn't enough to compete with them. On Perfect Agent, human enemies can often survive a chest shot from this thing, yet will go down almost instantly to a burst from any submachine gun - and a headshot is a one-hit-kill with nearly all weapons, so it doesn't have that niche, either. Combine that with an annoying pre-fire delay that makes aiming a lot tougher, and on one of the few guns you can't afford to miss with. It also penetrates through enemies, yet can only hit each target once - meaning that if an enemy's arm blocks a headshot, it only counts as an arm shot, despite the bullet technically continuing on a path through their head.
** The Shotgun has the same problems of slow speed and not enough power to make up for it, but also adds a pathetic attack range, with a pellet spread so unreliable it can completely miss from five steps away. Its sluggish reload animation is also strangely finnicky, sometimes interrupting you from shooting when you have some shells loaded.
** The Hand Grenade, being the typical unwieldy, time-based bomb in a game where you don't need that much firepower to take out enemies, and it's not present in the missions that have much sturdier enemies. Adding to the scrappiness is its alt-fire, 'Proximity Pinball', where it bounces off walls at high speed and detonates when it gets near anyone - hilarious, but usually just as dangerous to you as it is to others. There are several alternatives that make the weapon worthless, such as the two Grenade Launchers, the Mines and the N-Bomb, which have several advantages like an explosion that's much easier to control, a faster attack rate, several times more ammo, etc. The last kicker is that enemies in the campaign cheat when they use these grenades, as theirs explode the moment they hit the ground instead of after 4 seconds, resulting in a shockingly effective instant-kill attack that you get very little warning for.
** The Reaper is an alien (Skedar) gatling gun with very bad accuracy (you have to crouch to have any chance of hitting somebody beyond 5 feet), and even firing it in the first place requires you to bring the motor up to speed first. Its fire rate exceeds that of almost all other weapons in the game (only the Cyclone in its mag-dump secondary mode fires faster), but each shot does very little damage. Its secondary fire, which basically turned it into an enormous blender, was a mostly pointless melee weapon, with its only saving grace being that it can be used to spool up the gun and immediately begin firing.
* Tripmines from ''VideoGame/DukeNukem3D'' and ''VideoGame/HalfLife1'', due to their being defensive weapons in games where you're usually, if not always, on the offensive. If you plan on using them, your options are either setting up a trap and luring enemies into it (at which point it's usually just easier to shoot them) or putting them in select points to stop ambushes (which by nature only makes them useful if you already know the ambush is coming, which requires either having already beaten it once, thus already knowing which weapons you like and are good with, or an obvious HoldTheLine segment, which has its own problems). It's just an extra pack of explosives that never misses ''if'' it gets set off normally, but usually is less tactically valuable than a command-detonated pipebomb or satchel. Compounding the issue is that game designers seem to intentionally prevent them from ever being useful: for instance, both ''Duke Nukem'' and ''Half-Life'''s tripmines can be shot and detonated without the laser being triggered, so it'd make sense for players to be able to toss them at the feet of a bunch of enemies and then expend a single firearm round to blow them up, but the games insist on only letting you use them as intended by deliberately placing them on a wall or floor. If you ''can'' toss them from a distance, then there will invariably be an arbitrary arming delay of several seconds, more than long enough for your opponents to get past it unless you either stick so close you end up taking SplashDamage, or see the enemy from so far away that the only reasonable excuse for why you're using that instead of just shooting them is that you're completely out of ammo. About the only kind of game where they're really any good in the player's hands are StealthBasedGame[=s=], and even then only for messing around with a patrolling guard (and probably forcing yourself into a confrontation, since the AI [[TheComputerIsACheatingBastard usually cheats]] and automatically knows where you are once you alert any of them).
** Their one practical use in Duke is actually a bug; placing one completely stops your momentum for a moment, which can potentially save you from a fatal fall. Not too many places where it comes in handy, but it is a fun speedrunning trick.
* The grenade launcher from ''VideoGame/KingpinLifeOfCrime''. Most grenade launchers in video games either fire grenades that explode on contact with enemies, hold more than three rounds in a magazine, let you carry more than 18 rounds total (especially if the game's bazooka has a clip of five shots and an ammo cap of ''one hundred rockets''), take less than four seconds to explode, exist in games where enemies aren't smart enough to run like hell before the 'nade goes off, or some combination of the above. ''Kingpin'''s grenade launcher is not any of these things. It's so bad that not even the AI can figure out how to kill you with it.
* ''VideoGame/BloodIITheChosen'' has a few examples, mostly due to [[ObviousBeta lacking or glitched coding]].
** The Insect-A-Cutioner bug spray. While superficially another version of the aerosol can from the first game, it's generally useless due to the short range, low primary fire damage, long secondary fire prep time and the fact that its ammo is also shared with the assault rifle's underslung grenade launcher, a more damaging and altogether more useful weapon.
** The Singularity Generator, the ultimate word in AwesomeButImpractical. Its primary fire shoots a vortex that sucks in everything around it, but its eye deals absolutely no damage. The secondary fire (at least in older versions) creates the vortex with ''you'' as its eye - essentially a damaging tractor shield, as it moves with you. Both use up 50 energy cells, with which you can do more damage by using the [[ReflectingLaser Death Ray]] or the [[LightningGun Tesla Cannon]], both weapons you get way before the SG. Add to that the fact that the enemies you constantly face by the time you get it both frequently survive long enough to reach the eye of the vortex and deal big time damage at close range, and that you can crush the opposition it's effective against with your older weapons, and the gun's only usefulness is the 100 batteries it comes with.
** Berettas and Submachine Guns [[SortingAlgorithmOfWeaponEffectiveness are both worse in damage and/or accuracy]] than the Assault Rifle they share ammo with. After picking up the rifle, there's no reason to ever pull them out again; the only purpose they serve after that point is to pick up [[UniversalAmmunition bullets from dead enemies' guns]], since they're a fair bit more common but you don't actually get ammo from them if you don't have one on you, and even that's not imperative for long before far more efficient ammo boxes (which give you a hundred bullets at a time, compared to 12 per pistol and 20 per SMG) start dropping everywhere.
** The Howitzer. It eliminates the need to lead a target like with the other explosive weapons, but this was apparently seen as such an overly-advantageous gimmick that every other aspect was pounded into the dirt to make it useless: ammo is hard to come by, it fires slowly, using it in close quarters still hurts you with splash damage, and its damage is ridiculously low. The only upside is that it makes [[EliteMook Shikari]] flinch with each shot, but even that doesn't save it from being discarded as soon as another weapon comes along.
** Much like the Howitzer, the Flare Gun also has elements of this. Its fire rate is very slow, the flares cause damage with a second-long tic (enough for most enemies to recover from their pain animations and retaliate) and don't hurt enough. Its secondary fire takes a long wind-up time, has a minimal range, its damage is laughable, and due to a bug it doesn't set enemies on fire. The very plentiful ammo, the engine's lighting mechanics, and its great niche usefulness against Zealots (who teleport, and thus get knocked out of attacking you in return, with each hit) and [[BossInMookClothing Death Shrouds]] (which can become intangible) do guarantee it a permanent slot, but even then, the gun isn't nearly as fun or practical to use as most of the others.
* The Prankster Bit from ''VideoGame/TronTwoPointOh'' is the game's {{BFG}} and looks pretty cool, but the energy usage is obscene, the damage is overkill against everything you fight, and you get it so late in the game that you're literally unable to fully upgrade it. It's not even worth using against the final boss due to how the game handles damage dealt to it. And if you use it in too close of quarters (read: ''most'' of that final level), it stands just as good of a chance of killing you as it does of killing your target. Seriously. Stick to Sequencer and just go [[Film/TronLegacy Rinzler]] on your enemies.
* The ''Franchise/{{Halo}}'' series of games have several:
** ''VideoGame/HaloCombatEvolved'' has two: the Assault Rifle and the Needler. The former has a high fire rate and magazine capacity, offset by puny damage (particularly against shields) and obnoxiously-wide bullet spread. The latter suffers from being over-specialized. It does happen to be [[OverlyNarrowSuperlative one of the best weapons for taking on the Sentinels that show up in a handful of levels]], but against anything else its shortcomings become obvious: projectiles which, while homing in on whoever's in or nearest to the crosshairs on firing, are {{painfully slow|Projectile}} and deal anemic damage unless you dump half the mag into one guy. Doing that causes them all to create a rather large explosion that's an instant kill on most enemies, but for the amount of ammo needed to put down a single enemy in that manner, it's far more efficient to take a plasma pistol or rifle[[note]]That said, the Needler has since been RescuedFromTheScrappyHeap; from ''VideoGame/{{Halo 2}}'' onward, the needles fire and travel to the target faster, track their targets better, and explode upon hitting an enemy sooner (it was ''the'' go-to weapon for charging Brutes in ''2''). While it lost its dual-wield-ability from ''VideoGame/{{Halo 3}}'' onward, its power has continued to be boosted[[/note]].
** In ''VideoGame/{{Halo 2}}'', the Assault Rifle was replaced by the SMG. It's a downgrade, having all of the prior Assault Rifle's faults on top of now having high kickback forcing your aim off-target. Part of the issue is that [[AwesomeButImpractical it's designed]] to be [[GunsAkimbo dual-wielded]] — it's not half-bad in close combat when combined with a plasma rifle (blast away with plasma to take out a shield, then spray the SMG at the meaty bits) or a pistol (shred the shields away with a wall of lead, then hit the target directly with pistol bullets to the face), but it's completely useless when used on its own, terribly outclassed by the Battle Rifle in every other way. The Brute Shot suffers from the same sort of issue the Needler did in the first game, being great in melee due to its [[BayonetYa attached blade]], but bouncing its ammo off walls when not making direct hits, making it difficult to use at any further range. The Magnum pistol, which was ''very'' useful in the first game, got substantially nerfed, losing its scope feature and just becoming much weaker in most respects. All it gets in return is a faster rate of fire.
** In ''VideoGame/{{Halo 3}}'', the SMG's power is downgraded even further as part of a general nerfing of dual-wielding. The flamethrower is very difficult to use effectively, although it's hellaceous when used properly. Perhaps the scrappiest ''Halo 3'' weapon is the Mauler, a single-handed dual-wieldable shotgun that, when dual-wielded, has less power and ammo than the regular shotgun at the expense of disabling use of grenades and melee... yeah. Its sole saving grace is a GameBreakingBug that allows you to shoot and melee at the same time, generally considered cheating and annoying as hell.
** ''VideoGame/Halo3ODST'''s scoped and silenced SMG was still not as powerful as the assault rifle. Its main purpose was to deplete enemy shields before switching to the scoped pistol for a fatal headshot — and for swatting [[GoddamnedBats drones]] out of the air. It's also not actually silenced. A single perfect shot to the brain of an unaware enemy produces the exact same reaction as a grenade going off to the hyper-alert Covenant forces.
** In some circles, the shotguns from ''Halo 2'' onward are considered scrappies due to their [[ShortRangeShotgun wet-cough range]], unpredictable damage, and continually decreasing magazine capacity, plus [[OvershadowedByAwesome the presence of instant-kill melee weapons]]. That said, the developers seem to have realized this, having buffed their range and power considerably from ''VideoGame/HaloReach'' onward.
** The Suppressor in ''{{VideoGame/Halo 4}}''. Meant as the Forerunner equivalent of the Assault Rifle, its spread is so high that it has virtually no range save for point-blank. It's so feeble even enemies using it on Legendary difficulty are unlikely to harm the player.
*** The Pulse Grenade, the Forerunner grenade variant. Very difficult to hit someone with it, and its lack of immediate damage made it easy to escape from if it did connect. At most it was just an annoyance that kept players from advancing through an area for a few seconds. In ''Halo 5'' it was reworked into a more effective form with an EMP effect and post-impact submunitions, making it good for taking out multiple enemies and disabling vehicles.
** ''VideoGame/Halo5Guardians'' introduced many new weapons for the Warzone mode, all of which are meant to be upgrades, but some of which are really downgrades.
*** The Twin Jewels of Maethrillian, a beam rifle that fires two sniper beams instead of one and has bonus anti-vehicle damage. Problem is, not only is Level 7 REQ cost extremely steep compared to most anti-vehicle weapons, the two parallel beams were at launch too far apart to deal significant damage together. It was not uncommon to completely miss opposing players with ''both'' beams despite aiming directly at them. A later patch in the Memories of Reach update moved its beams closer.
*** The Oathsworn, a Mythic shotgun with a built-in Speed Boost. While not a bad weapon, as it's got increased fire rate and range compared to the standard shotgun, it's completely outclassed in power, range, accuracy, and reload speed by the Blaze of Glory, and the Speed Boost doesn't reduce the gap much. Additionally, the Blaze of Glory is a Rare weapon, while the Oathsworn is a Mythic, making the latter more expensive for less advantage.
*** ONI vehicles are supposed to be the strongest vehicle types, but the ONI Gungoose is considered a downgrade from the standard Gungoose. While most Gungoose grenades detonate on impact, the ONI Gungoose's bounce, making it extremely difficult to hit targets.
*** The Pool of Radiance, a Fuel Rod Cannon variant. While its projectiles creating post-explosions after the initial impact can be useful for locking down a choke point or damaging a big vehicle, the slow firing speed makes it not worth it. It's also too common for opponents to survive a direct hit.
*** The Echidna, a Hydra Launcher whose missiles fire vehicle-disabling [=EMPs=]. Due to its niche utility, as it's too expensive an EMP weapon compared to the Plasma Pistol and too weak compared to rocket launchers, the Echidna doesn't see much use except in Warzone Turbo where REQ levels don't matter and vehicles are extremely common.
*** The Talon of the Lost, an anti-vehicle Needler variant. Compared to most other anti-vehicle weapons, it has very short range, low power, and takes too long to deal significant damage. The Talon's only real proficient area is as a fairly cheap anti-boss weapon.
*** The River of Light, an Incineration Cannon variant that trades its charged shot from a single super projectile to a rapid fire mode. The trade harms its utility, since the super projectile was typically used on vehicles but the rapid fire tends to miss them or not deal as much damage. It's also less effective against multiple enemies due to the reduced area of effect from small rapid fire shots.
*** The Hunter cannons. Both variants reduce your walk speed and have low firing rates. The Wicked Grasp only fires small homing projectiles in bursts, making it basically a Boltshot with a movement penalty. The Berserker's Claw fires a powerful fuel rod, but the shot has to be charged first then has a cooldown, meaning there's no reason to use it in favor of an average Fuel Rod Cannon without any charge or cooldown.
* Most shooters (especially older ones) where their StandardFPSGuns ruthlessly fell prey to the SortingAlgorithmOfWeaponEffectiveness. In ''VideoGame/{{Doom}}'' for example, there was no reason to ever touch the pistol once you had the chaingun, or even the shotgun — which in both games you can acquire within a minute at worst. ''VideoGame/Doom2016'' tried to compensate by giving the pistol BottomlessMagazines, and ''VideoGame/DoomEternal'' just dropped the pistol entirely, in favor of letting you start with the shotgun and chainsaw. Many user-made maps for OG Doom also just give you a shotgun right away so you don't have to bother with the pistol at all.
* ''VideoGame/{{Quake}}'' has a similar problem of some guns becoming obsolete once you find better ones. There's basically no reason to use the nailgun once you find the super nailgun, as it both shoots faster and does more damage while using the same ammo. The double-barreled shotgun has a similar problem, although the regular shotgun is at least more accurate. Also, the grenade and rocket launchers use the same ammo, meaning few people bother with the grenade launcher once they have the much more useful rocket launcher: the only real exception is when you're overlooking a ledge with enemies lurking below, as you can toss grenades down without having to look over the ledge and risk getting shot at.
* ''VideoGame/{{Turok}}'' had a few:
** Turok 1 had plenty of weapons. The starting Pistol only becomes useful for the first minute of the game until you get the hidden Auto-Shotgun very early and the hidden Assault Rifle, both at Level 1. The shotgun is useless if you manage to find the Auto-Shotgun first. The Alien Weapon and the Shockwave is nowhere near as useful as the Pulse Rifle as the former 2 drains the more rare cell ammo like melted butter.
** Turok 2 had the tranquilizer gun in Seeds of Evil. Not only are more than half the enemies in the game immune to it, even when it works it does no damage and just knocks them out briefly (any damage will wake them up, meaning you'll have to kill them in one hit to be worth it). The Charge Dart Rifle, a futuristic taser that you get slightly later, fares much better in comparison; fewer enemies are immune to it, stunned enemies actually stay stunned, and hurting them while stunned won't end their electrical temporary paralysis.
* The Phoenix from ''VideoGame/CliveBarkersUndying'' is the last weapon found in the game, at about 30 minutes before the final boss. Not only is it quite weak compared to your arsenal (which by now include the [[SinisterScythe Celtic Scythe]], [[AnIcePerson the Tibetan War Cannon]] and the [[ShockAndAwe Spear Thrower]]), but each shot must be guided in first person. Except that it's too fast to be properly controlled.
* ''VideoGame/FirstEncounterAssaultRecon''
** Similar to the aforementioned Klobb, the Xbox 360 version of ''F.E.A.R.'' has the nearly-useless SM-15 machine pistol, which replaces half the spawns of the RPL submachine gun for a weaker, slower and less accurate weapon whose only benefits are A) it's the only other non-pistol weapon in the game that can be used GunsAkimbo (which is negligible since dual pistols are still superior in nearly every way), and B) it holds the most reserve ammo of any weapon in the game at 600 rounds.
** ''F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin'' has the Napalm Cannon, one of only two flame-based weapons in the game (the other is a new grenade type), which is prohibitively useless. Only two or three enemies across the entire game carry it, so you only get one reload for it when it's introduced and then have to play through half of the game to get another chance to use it. While anyone you can hit with it ''will'' burn to death, it also takes forever for even the weakest of enemies to die. Really, its only use is as a sort of slot-warmer for your fourth weapon slot until you can find the much more useful and common assault rifle to take up your fourth slot a level after it shows up - it doesn't even make an appearance in the ''Reborn'' DLC, which otherwise went out of its way to give more screen-time to guns that only showed up in one or two levels of the base game.
* ''Franchise/StarWars'' games:
** ''VideoGame/DarkForces'' had the mortar launcher, a large, cumbersome weapon with a slow fire rate that lobbed shells in awkward arcs and looked like a butt. It was found only rarely, and usually thermal detonators were plentiful and much more useful, having greater power, splash radius, ''and'' effective range. Its main use was setting off enemy mines, with occasional breaks to take pot shots at whittling down the game's DemonicSpiders, because unlike the other powerful weapons, it had knockback.
** ''VideoGame/JediKnightDarkForcesII'' had the bowcaster, which on the surface sounded great. Chewbacca's iconic weapon, with a ChargedAttack that fired spreads of plasma bolts, or fired a ricocheting plasma bolt to hit enemies around corners? Sounded useful... until you realized that the rate of fire was painful, the charged attack took a long while to get off and spread the shots out with huge gaps between small projectiles, and that the ricocheting shot could [[HoistByHisOwnPetard bounce back and hit you in the face]]. In the end the [[MoreDakka Imperial repeater]] ended up being a better use of energy cells.
** The game's ExpansionPack, ''Mysteries Of The Sith'' has probably the most useless weapon in the entire series, the Carbonite Gun. When used upon an enemy, it encases them in carbonite, which can be smashed with its PistolWhipping secondary attack. The problem with this is that it takes ''ages'' for the carbonite to set, uses a lot of ammo to do so, and requires the player to practically be in melee range to actually work. Hardly ideal when you're surrounded by goons shooting you up. To top it off, the effect is only temporary unless you smash them up and the melee attack is slower and clunkier than the game's two dedicated melee weapons.
** In ''VideoGame/JediKnightIIJediOutcast'', most people don't recall the [[TheParalyzer stun baton]] with any fondness. In previous games, Kyle used his fists and was not above punching out PowerArmor-clad MechaMooks. The stun baton was clumsy, did very little damage to anything more dangerous than a stormtrooper, and didn't actually knock anyone out so much as slowly shock them to death, only very briefly stunning them before they continued blasting you in the chest, and with no recourse to deal with the three or so other guys that are invariably also still blasting at you. Fortunately, the [[LaserBlade lightsaber]], which kills people in one hit and deflects blaster bolts from all his friends, replaced the stun baton permanently, and the bothersome little shock-prod never resurfaced in the game or its sequel, ''VideoGame/JediKnightJediAcademy''.
*** It did have [[NotCompletelyUseless one niche use, though]] — in portions of certain early levels where you would find yourself crawling through [[AirVentPassageway ventilation ducts]], you would often get swarmed by [[GoddamnedBats hordes of tiny, bug-like enemies]] that, while incredibly weak, were near impossible to hit with most of your weapons in such tight quarters. A few prods from the stun baton, however, would deal with them all in seconds.
** ''VideoGame/StarWarsBattlefrontII'' gets the Beam Rifle. Nearly every weapon in the game has some sort of upgraded version that can be unlocked for doing something with it a certain amount of times in one life and which trades one attribute to increase another — an upgraded blaster rifle that trades fire rate (fires in three round bursts) for extra power and accuracy, a precision pistol that trades the infinite ammo for higher power and hitscan beams, etc. The beam rifle is received for nailing a certain number of headshots with the standard sniper rifle, and gives increased power at the cost of literally ''everything else''. It's a one-shot kill with bodyshots now, which is the sole upside — that increased power comes with [[ComicallyMissingThePoint an inability to deal headshots, shorter range]], and [[HitboxDissonance wonky detection]] that generally makes you need two or more shots to kill one person anyway - at that point, you're seriously going to get more consistent results with the [[SniperPistol precision pistol]].
* ''VideoGame/PAYDAYTheHeist'':
** The B9-S silenced pistol is usually never used again as soon as the player unlocks better handguns. The pistol in question has low power and requires ''several'' headshots to kill someone quickly on higher difficulty levels. The weapon also has a low ammo count and its weak power will barely help you should you go into bleedout mode. The only time the silenced pistol is needed is for Diamond Heist and No Mercy, where stealth is required, since it's the only silenced handgun. Even then, the Mac-11 is a silenced submachine gun and is a suitable replacement for the pistol.
** The B9-S's primary advantages are low recoil and high ammo per magazine. It's useful for hitting things a long way away if your other weapons are shorter range (if you're using a shotgun, basically) or for taking out cameras and the like. Headshot damage will usually make up for the lack of base damage, but only within a set range of difficulty levels.
** Trip mines are also rarely used due to being a very situational item. Once placed, the trip mines can't be removed and you can only carry a limited amount of trip mines based on how many upgrades you have for them. While you can't trigger your own mines by mistake, a single cop can trigger them and will be killed instantly, even the [[SuperToughness Bulldozer]]. However, even despite the cops' tendency to bunch together, the power of the mines tends to be wasted on single targets unless you have a good guess on where the cops will go during assaults and have a healthy dose of luck on top of it. The explosion can also kill civilians, which adds a delay to your release should you be captured and imposes a penalty to your reward in the end. In short, the usefulness of the mines are limited and most people that are using them usually are doing it for the achievements. They were mildly improved in the sequel by allowing players to switch them between "blow up anyone who breaks the beam" mode and a less-situational "tag any enemy that breaks the beam" mode (thus giving them a purpose in stealth and letting them combo with a skill that lets the team deal increased damage to tagged enemies), and also pairing them up with shaped charges to quickly blow out locked safes and doors instead of having to slowly drill or pick them.
** The Locomotive is a short ranged secondary shotgun that falls short of its stronger cousin, the Reinbeck. The Locomotive has weaker power and a smaller magazine compared to the Reinbeck, can't hit targets from as far away, and requires more ammo pick ups to refill its reserves compared to other weapons. The phrase "[[MemeticMutation Buff the Loco!]]" became quite common on the official forums and it wasn't until ''VideoGame/PAYDAY2'' that the Locomotive got buffed to the point that it became an excellent secondary weapon to use.
** Sentry guns are far too situational to use. While they can provide good suppression when they are placed correctly, the sentries can't be moved once you place them down, they require you to give up your own ammo to replenish theirs, and they're not powerful enough to take out heavier SWAT and special units. Sentries tend to not last very long when several cops focus fire on the sentry to destroy them. They aren't much better in the sequel, even with the eventual addition of silenced versions that attract less attention and thus don't get shot quite as often.
* ''VideoGame/PAYDAY2'':
** Thanks to a weapon rebalance pushed out during the 2015 Crimefest event, some assault rifles and submachine guns are absolutely awful in accuracy, even with the right skills and gun mods, whereas other similar weapons still retain a good balance between accuracy, stability, and power. This was even worse when another change during that event buffed pistols to the point that they outclassed almost all of the assault rifles and submachine guns, with only the absolutely most powerful of them like the M308 and Cavity 9mm being worth using over even middle-ground pistols like the Crosskill, much less the stronger Deagle and Bronco .44.
** The two starting weapons are almost entirely outclassed by anything that comes later. The Chimano 88 is the player's first sidearm when they begin the game for the first time and, save for a high capacity and concealment, is near-completely outclassed by every other sidearm available; the Chimano simply doesn't have enough damage output to keep up, especially on higher difficulties where more power is needed to drop tougher enemies. The AMCAR, meanwhile, only really beats later guns with its rather high reserve-ammo count of 220; its damage is among the lowest in the game, the recoil is absurd for something with such a low rate of fire, and its accuracy is even worse than the Chimano's. Both weapons can be mildly improved with attachments, but by the time you have access to a decent supply of those, you're also going to have access to far better weapons that can put those attachments to better use — even ones not restricted by reputation level for if you [[NewGamePlus go Infamous]].
** Melee weapons with high charge times generally have a lot of power behind them, but are generally not worth it when you've got weapons that are only slightly weaker yet can pump out damage that rivals stronger ones in half the time.
* ''VideoGame/TimeSplitters'':
** In the second game, the Sci-Fi Handgun is often a bigger threat than the basic mook in [[ThatOneLevel Robot Factory]]. The lasers fired from the pistol always bounce off surfaces if they don't hit a target, and were fired in three-shot bursts, often resulting in your own lasers hitting you. ''Future Perfect'' allowed the reflection mode to be turned off (and it is by default), making this weapon far safer to use.
** The Lasergun fired a slow laser that had to be charged up to do any real damage, quickly eating up its ammo. The shield used by the secondary fire didn't last long and only served to burn ammo faster. It also had an irritating glitch where the Lasergun's "charge up" noise would become really loud and play endlessly at the spot you were standing when you were unlucky enough to trigger it. Its replacement in ''Future Perfect'', the Sci-Fi Sniper, fixes all of these issues.
* The ''VideoGame/{{Unreal}}'' series has the [[FunWithAcronyms GES]][[note]]'''G'''reen '''E'''xploding '''S'''hit[[/note]] Bio Rifle, an AwesomeButImpractical sort of grenade launcher that shoots small blobs of sticky explosive sludge, which deal quite a bit more damage than other fast-firing weapons and [[AIBreaker agile enemies can't dodge like they do straight-firing projectiles]], but do require the player to take into account the parabolic trajectory and slow travel speed of the shots. The secondary fire charges up the shot, making it able to OneHitKill anything that isn't a boss, but reducing its speed so much that hitting the target is easier said than done, and the range becomes so short due to the glob's weight that the resulting SplashDamage more often than not damages the player as well.\\
\\
In the first ''{{VideoGame/Unreal|I}}'', the alternate fire wasn't used as much due to the glob being fired prematurely, leading to self-damage and even suicides, while the primary fire wasn't as damaging.\\
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In the ''VideoGame/UnrealTournament'' series, the weapon becomes mildly more useful because multiplayer gameplay does occasionally require defensive weaponry, and filling a hallway with green goo is a decent way to make sure anyone passing through in the next few seconds is reduced to red salsa. It's still the least used gun in the game, though, especially since the globs just disappear in a handful of seconds.\\
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The ''[[VideoGame/UnrealTournament2004 200X]]'' games and ''VideoGame/UnrealChampionship'' sped up the rate of fire and the speed of the projectiles to give them better range than "hugging distance", but ''2004'' also introduced the Spider Mine launcher in Onslaught mode, which does the Bio Rifle's job for defensive play far better, and is still decent for actual offensive play against other players since the spider mines automatically track other players when they're close enough; the weapon only appears in the vehicle-based gamemodes, though.\\
\\
The weapon was combined with the Grenade Launcher (in what was called the "Canister Gun") for ''VideoGame/UnrealChampionship2TheLiandriConflict'', where the alternate glob gained a tracking feature, though it often took a backseat to other energy weapons such as the Shock Rifle and the Sniper Rifle.\\
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It took until ''VideoGame/UnrealTournamentIII'' to finally and truly [[RescuedFromTheScrappyHeap rescue the weapon from the Scrappy heap]], due to changes to the weapon's alternate fire, namely that it now can stick to a player, damaging them until the receiver dies or the globs disappear, whichever comes first, helping prevent self-damage in the process, [[DifficultButAwesome requiring the player to be at either close or mid range to his opponent in exchange for an almost guaranteed frag]].
* ''VideoGame/PlanetSide 1''
** The Beamer, the standard issue sidearm for the [[MachineCult Vanu Sovereignty]]. It's very accurate, small, uses the same ammo as their assault rifles, and even comes with an armor piercing mode. It also does piss for damage, uses up a valuable hip holster slot (better suited for a [[HealThyself medapp]], engineer tool, or [[HollywoodHacking REK]]), and the armor piercing mode makes it highly effective at being purple. The weapon was often likened to a flashlight, as it did a better job at making enemies glow than killing them. The Terran Republic's Cycler assault rifle is likewise regarded as nearly useless, as it has a huge magazine and good accuracy, but is so weak that players are better off using the Suppressor submachine gun. The Scorpion weapon system is a siege weapon, a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher which flies into the air, then detonates and sends shrapnel onto whatever is below it. [[EveryoneHatesMath It requires trigonometry to use]], as the detonation range must manually be set by right-clicking while looking at terrain — too soon or too late or too high or too low will cause it to deal negligible damage.
** In ''Planetside 2''s the Fractures, AntiArmor weapon for Terran Republic MAX PoweredArmor, was a bit overpowered against infantry… so the developers nerfed its AntiArmor capacity, giving it terrible velocity, spread, and dumping its damage, making it the worse anti-vehicle weapon by a significant margin. At release, the TR Pounders were completely useless because of one major flaw: convergence. The weapons were set to converge at 20 meters, making them go around vehicles or infantry that wasn't at exactly 20 meters. When the convergence was fixed, some considered the weapons to be a GameBreaker owing to their monstrous damage-per-second especially when the MAX is [[DualModeUnit locked down]].
* ''VideoGame/CallOfDuty'':
** A franchise-wide example would be the SVD Dragunov sniper rifle in the ''VideoGame/ModernWarfare'' and ''VideoGame/CallOfDutyBlackOps'' sub-franchise games. While the Dragunov was acceptable in ''Call of Duty 4'' for its good damage multipliers, the versions seen in ''Black Ops'', ''Modern Warfare 3'', and ''VideoGame/CallOfDutyModernWarfare2019'' (the reboot of ''Modern Warfare'') are generally hated for having high recoil, no one-hit-kill potential outside of headshots, and poor handling. The Dragunov is seen as a MasterOfNone, having neither the quick aiming and recoil control of the assault rifles nor the one-hit-kill potential of other sniper rifles.
** ''VideoGame/CallOfDutyBlackOpsII'':
*** In the multiplayer, the SMR is one of the most powerful weapons available, and is very accurate. In [[VideoGame/NaziZombies the Zombies mode]], it make the starting M1911 look amazing. It's a semi-auto in a mode where full-auto or burst-fire is overall better, it has low reserve ammo capacity (it only barely beats the M14, which in turn beats it when Pack-A-Punched; the only upside to the SMR is it isn't recycling [[VideoGame/CallOfDutyWorldAtWar four-year-old code]] to give it a paltry 8-round mag capacity on top of that), it's [[ArbitraryGunPower surprisingly weak]] even for this type of weapon, it's slow to reload, and worst of all, due to a glitch, it has noticeable bullet spread ''while you are '''aiming down its sights!'''''
*** In the multiplayer mode itself, the Executioner pistol. This pistol is unique in that it's a {{revolver|sAreJustBetter}} which utilizes {{shotgun s|AreJustBetter}}hells, allowing for a quick and easy shotgun as a secondary weapon, but the trade off is the damage from each shot is so weak that it takes [[ShortRangeShotgun extremely close-range shooting]] just to be able to bring down a target ''without'' using the entire five-round cylinder. To add onto the weapon's woes, it has horrible reload speed and ammo capacity. There are attachments and the Secondary Gunfighter wildcard you can use to improve this pistol, but it's still such a small gain that you're probably better off actually using a regular shotgun or even a ''knife'' over this pistol and use the spare Pick-10 points for shotgun attachments, any gun that's ''not'' the Executioner, perks, and any other wildcards you want.
** ''VideoGame/CallOfDutyAdvancedWarfare'':
*** The NA-45 sniper rifle, a two-shot weapon (as in, it fires two shots before reloading and both must hit a target one after the other to do any appreciable damage, necessitating double-tapping) that is widely regarded as one of the worst weapons in the entire franchise because of how complicated it is to use, its low magazine and terrible damage if both shots don't connect.
*** The crossbow is considered the worst primary weapon. It only holds one bolt compared to the ''Black Ops II'' crossbow that holds 3, is difficult to use effectively on account of the increased mobility, and isn't silent despite being a crossbow. As a result, it is one of the least used weapons in the game.
* Rocket launchers in ''VideoGame/Borderlands1'' are a joke: unless you're playing as [[MadBomber Brick]] and/or have the [[InfinityPlusOneSword Maliwan Rhino]], they deal ''very'' underwhelming damage for what you'd expect a weapon of this class to have, made worse by their small ammo pool and inherent sluggishness of operation, especially when they're single-shot[[note]]shoot once very slowly, then reload even more slowly to shoot slowly again[[/note]]. You can do far more damage per second or even ''per shot'' with a decent revolver or sniper rifle, none of which are harder to come by than a launcher of any quality. ''VideoGame/Borderlands2'' [[RescuedFromTheScrappyHeap rescued them]] from being BetterOffSold by '''drastically''' upping their damage output and making them the {{BFG}}s that they're supposed to be.
* ''Videogame/{{Tribes}} 2'''s Blaster became a scrappy weapon despite its many bonuses. It has infinite ammo (drawing from your JumpJetPack energy), extreme range, perfect accuracy, penetrates shields, and deals silly amounts of damage-per-second at close range. However, in the world's fastest shooter where players are skipping across the map at 200kph, the Blaster was godawful courtesy of its PainfullySlowProjectile and its infinite ammo gimmick becomes a drain because players need the jet pack energy to keep their speed up. Indoors, it is also a PinballProjectile that stands a good chance of nailing the user. However, the Blaster has a something of a cult following among the "bastards", who stand on top of mountains plinking at enemy flag defenders til they give chase.
* ''VideoGame/{{Doom 3}}'':
** The flashlight makes for an awful weapon. It swings terribly slowly and with range no greater than that of the fists (in the case of the PC version, ''even less'' range than them), to say nothing of the horrendously off-centered beam. And [[WhoForgotTheLights thanks to the graphical design of the game]], you ''have'' to keep switching your gun out for it, leaving you unprepared when you inevitably get ambushed. Once you have a flashlight GameMod like the famous "{{Duct Tape|ForEverything}}" or Sikkmod's headlamp and NightVisionGoggles, it has no practical use, and it wasn't really missed in the [[UpdatedReRelease BFG edition]][[labelnote:+]]that replaced the handheld flashlight with an armor-mounted lamp that is equally as off-centered and [[TenSecondFlashlight only works for a little while before having to shut down and recharge]], but at least lets you keep a gun ready[[/labelnote]] either.
** The shotgun gets a lot of this. ''DOOM'' as a franchise tends to make the shotgun the JackOfAllStats, but ''3'' plays ShortRangeShotgun painfully straight. The spread on it is so ridiculous that you won't hit half the pellets unless you shove it right up a monster's nose, and the damage is slightly randomized on top of that. You can fire it at an imp standing ten feet away three times and still not kill it. And to add insult to injury, [[TheComputerIsACheatingBastard the version used by the shotgunner enemy has an actually reasonable spread.]]
* ''VideoGame/Left4Dead2'':
** The game has a variety of melee weapons, with each of them having different reach and swing speed to differentiate them (since they all one-hit kill regular zombies). The crowbar is the worst melee weapon in the whole game; it has poor reach, swings very slowly, and has bad hit detection, which makes it possible to hit a zombie and ''not'' kill it. Similar weapons like the frying pan and the axe hit zombies more consistently. The pitchfork that was added in The Last Stand update is even ''worse'' than the crowbar due to how the weapon swings; every melee weapon swings from side to side, which can help you clear out a crowd of zombies in front of you. The pitch fork makes a jabbing/thrusting forward motion, which will ignore any zombie that's off to the sides.
** The Hunting Rifle was already not well-liked in the first game, being that it's slower, with less ammo and overall harder to use than the shotguns and [=SMGs=]/assault rifles. Then the sequel introduced a second weapon in its category, the Sniper Rifle, to which the Hunting Rifle is inferior in in every way except moving accuracy (which doesn't matter much for weapons you're ''not'' going to be moving and shooting with) and reloading speed (which the Sniper Rifle makes up for with twice the capacity). In addition, using the scope removes all movement recoil anyway.
** The ''VideoGame/CounterStrike'' weapons were implemented in the German version of the game to make up for the censorship the game had to go through and they were eventually made available to everyone with The Last Stand update. The Steyr Scout and Accuracy International AWSM are sniper rifles that high penetration, power, and accuracy, but their rate of fire is so laughably low that most players don't bother using them unless there's nothing else to use. In a game where zombies swarm you and you have [[EliteMook Tanks]] gunning for you, it's preferable to use any other weapon since they have a better rate of fire.
* ''VideoGame/HalfLife'':
** Snarks let you toss tiny, fast-moving enemies into combat, which seek out and attack your foes. Sounds useful — but their damage is pitiful and their health is low, so they don't do much more than annoy the opponent for a few seconds unless you toss in three or so. But you can only carry fifteen at a time and they're very scarce, so good luck with that. On top of that, snarks seek out the closest target, which includes you, so tossing them at the opponent to distract them and then moving in to finish them off often results in the snarks chasing and harassing ''you'' instead. Oh, and for a nail in the coffin, due to their AI coding, they ''don't attack alien enemies at all.'' Hell if they aren't fun to watch, though. And they're great for SequenceBreaking by tossing one underneath yourself and abusing physics to let it slowly push you up walls you aren't supposed to be able to scale.
** There's also the Hivehand, aka the Hornet Gun. The only good thing about it is that it can regenerate ammo, and that the hornet ammo can home in on targets around walls and such without the enemies ever being alerted to the player. Other than those, it's the most ineffective and useless weapon in the series, to the point where you'll hardly be using it at all. Its ''VideoGame/BlackMesa'' incarnation buffed its damage substantially, while also reducing the ammo counts for a bunch of other weapons, making it a reliable fallback option… though this also makes it a fair bit scarier in the hands of aliens.
* In ''VideoGame/HalfLifeOpposingForce'', the [=MP5=] really gets the shaft. The expansion introduces a wide variety of souped-up enemies, and the [=MP5=] hasn't received any sort of power boost to make up for that. Despite this, 99% of Black Ops grunts using it instead of the occasional shotgun, and the amount of ammo given out for it is in the hundreds thanks to the weapon pickups themselves providing more ammo, which just means that 9mm ammo is by far the most expendable thing in the game — to little avail.
* ''VideoGame/KillingFloor'' has the Light Anti-tank Weapon. When it comes to anti-armor launchers "light" is a relative term: it's the heaviest weapon in the game, taking up 13 blocks of inventory space (leaving you only enough room for your starting handgun and a machete as secondary weapons), and before the introduction of the Demolitionist perk it was surprisingly weak for its heavy size and ridiculous price tag, as even Scrakes and Fleshpounds would be able to shrug off a single rocket. It was improved mildly with Demolitionist, which increases the damage to something worthy of its high price tag and weight, while also reducing the cost down to much more reasonable levels as the perk is leveled.
* ''VideoGame/VermintideII'':
** You will hardly ever see a player using a [[{{BFS}} greatsword]], Kruber and Saltzpyre's two-handed swords especially, as while they may cut down ranks of fodder enemies with each cleave, they are ''woeful'' against armoured enemies like Stormvermin and [[DemonicSpiders particularly Chaos Warriors]]. Kerillian also uses two-handed swords that do have a long-range, armour-piercing thrust, but she has much better options for dealing with armoured foes (like the spear and the fan-favourite [[DualWielding dual daggers and sword & dagger]]).
** Speaking of our resident elf, weapon tiers will practically always put her one-handed axe at the absolute rock-bottom of the list. Its reach is abysmal and its horde-clearing ability is limited, which is supposed to be a NecessaryDrawback for the axe being great at chopping through shields and armour. But nearly ''all'' of Kerillian's weapons are at least decent against armour, and her elven glaive is even better at armour-cleaving while also being a much more capable horde-clearer. There's almost no reason to take a one-handed axe. Saltzpyre's one-handed axe also faces similar problems and is outshone by superior competitors, but a Ranger Veteran Bardin might be tempted by the one-handed axe's mobility and armour-cleaving (besides, what on earth are you trying to achieve if you are front-lining as a Ranger Veteran anyway?)
** Kruber's blunderbusses are the epitome of ShortRangeShotgun. Their dismal performance against anything other than unarmoured enemies at very close range relegates them to horde-clearing duty, and Kruber has a ton of good melee options for that role (like his greatsword, his mace and shield, or his Bretonnian longsword if you have the [=DLC=]).
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Role-Playing Games]]
* ''VideoGame/MountAndBlade''
** Practice Bows in if the player character is not built as an archer. You are doomed in any arena/tournament fight if you spawn with one and you aren't lucky enough to get a new weapon really quick as you can't fight at all in melee with one. Fixed in Warband, you will also start with a practice knife if you spawn if a bow. While it can't block, it can at least fight back and if you are strong enough disrupt attacks.
** Swords with thrusting attacks for mounted combat — they have neither the range to easily connect like pole arms, nor the simple reliability of slashing attacks.
** In the ''[[UsefulNotes/SengokuJidai Gekokujo]]'' mod, naginatas, and especially the practice naginata in tournaments — they're not particularly long (in fact, the practice naginata is no longer than the practice nodachi or kanabo) and slower than the alternatives, and which weapon you get in tournaments is random.
** At a unit-wide level in ''Gekokujo'', bow-using Ashigaru skirmishers. Even for regions that have them as their Elites, Ashigaru simply don't get enough levels in Power Draw to really be effective with bows like Samurai become, especially when Ashigaru skirmishers from a handful of regions, such as Owari, use flintlock, which are always devastating.
* ''VideoGame/{{Fallout|1}}'' has the Mauser pistol (also present in the second game), a one-of-a-kind weapon in ''Fallout'' and one of the rarest guns in the sequel. It's also the only weapon in both games to use 9mm ammunition, which is so rare its primary source is a glitch[[note]]The P90c uses 10mm ammo but comes loaded with 9mm when bought new[[/note]] and so must be carefully managed if one intends to use it. Obviously, the Mauser must be one of the most powerful small guns, right? Wrong: short of the completely-useless-after-the-first-five-minutes pipe rifle, it's the weakest — even the lowly 10mm pistol does more damage. Its only redeeming factor is a special very high bonus to accuracy, but by the time you can get it, your own leveling and the presence of various precision rifles make this trait pointless. One wonders why the devs even bothered putting it, and its very own ammo type, in the game at all.
* ''VideoGame/{{Fallout 2}}'' has the Pipe Rifle, which is a terrible weapon even by early game standards. It does lackluster damage, costs 5 AP per shot, and must be reloaded after every shot, which basically means you can only shoot once per round[[note]]You can shoot twice if you have 10 Agility, the Fast Shot trait and have the gun loaded at the start of the round, but you'll have to reload at the start of your next turn, meaning you can only get off 1.5 shots per round[[/note]]. The fact that this is your only means of ranged attack for the first few towns is one reason why the game suffers from EarlyGameHell.
* ''VideoGame/{{Fallout 3}}''
** The game brings back the Mauser pistol, (or at least a Chinese knockoff of it, based on the real Shanxi Type 17), as the Chinese Pistol. It no longer suffers from having unique and unreasonably-rare ammo, now sharing with the 10mm pistol, but it has 2 fewer shots per magazine, is no faster or more accurate, does less than half the damage of its American counterpart, and does not have a silenced version. Its only saving graces are that it sells for a fair deal of cash (which combines well with its low weight and how common it is in the hands of Raiders in the early game), and that it has more than twice the durability of the regular 10mm. The latter is useless, as the low damage makes degradation versus damage dealt approximately equal to that of the 10mm, but with twice the ammo usage, so there's really no reason to keep even one on-hand unless you're going to sell it as soon as you get back to Megaton or find a wandering merchant. The unique variant is slightly more useful, as it is capable of [[KillItWithFire setting enemies on fire]] in addition to the base damage and even better durability (approximately three times as much as the regular 10mm pistol). In spite of this, it's still probably one of the least powerful unique weapons out there (even weaker than many regular weapons; it only deals more damage than the regular Chinese pistol due to the fire damage) and is only good for supplementing another firearm or for lighting up occasional pockets of gas. Something a laser pistol can do as well as hit three times harder and not waste good 10mm ammo.
** There's also the .32 Pistol, which does less damage than the starter 10mm pistol which you probably fled Vault 101 with ''hours'' prior, has an unusably small ammo capacity (5-shot cylinder) and uses ammo that, while plentiful, is much more useful when loaded into the far stronger and better-ranged [[BoringButPractical Hunting Rifle.]] Wild Bill's Sidearm in ''The Pitt'' DLC is actually pretty decent, doing more damage than other common pistols at 10 points of damage (albeit only one more point of damage than the regular 10mm) and the only pistols that hit harder are energy pistols, the very rare and inexplicably [[GlassCannon flimsy]] [[HandCannon scoped .44 Magnum]], and Colonel Autumn's 10mm pistol.
** The Big Guns branch as a whole gets this, since not only do a lot of them fall in the AwesomeButImpractical or [[VideoGameFlamethrowersSuck flat-out useless]] pile, but it's a separate tree from the common guns that make up most of the game's arsenal, and it's very hard to find a Big Gun in reasonable condition. This means you don't really use things like rocket launchers outside of hairy moments, but you also have to invest a lot of effort to ensure you aren't better off with a shotgun in those moments. It's not for no reason that future games removed Big Guns as a skill and let its weapons be governed by the same bonuses as more practical ones.
** The Sawed-off Shotgun breaks easily, only holds two shots, is unusually rare (making it hard to repair outside of merchants so it'll never be at 100% for long), doesn't do all that much damage, and has an effective range of about two feet. It's barely even worth carrying back to sell once you loot it off one of the few raiders in the game that carries it.
** The Combat Shotgun is better at slightly further ranges, is common enough thanks to tripwire traps that it can actually be repaired in the field on occasion, and due to a [[GoodBadBugs bug]], the total critical damage is applied when any sub-projectile gets a critical hit (through chance or a sneak attack) instead of the same value divided by the number of shots per discharge, resulting in obliterative sneak attack crits (when ''all'' the buckshot subprojectiles crit). The named variant called "The Terrible Shotgun" found in Evergreen Mills can kill the nearby Super Mutant Behemoth in ''a single sneak headshot''.[[labelnote:How does it all work?]]If the shotgun is in perfect condition and with a Small Guns skill of 100, the weapon deals 80 damage with an extra 40 damage for critical hits. However, this weapon fires 9 pellets, so because of this when the weapon is '''fired outside of V.A.T.S.''' (something very important to note) and scores a critical hit, the critical hit for each pellet is counted individually. This means that if '''all''' pellets make contact, the weapon will deal 440 damage (80 base damage, plus 9 extra 40 critical damages). While sneaking, it doubles to 880 points of damage. In addition, if the player has the Better Criticals perk, the damage will increase to 1240 (880 + 440 extra points from the perk). If you manage to score a headshot (not an easy task due its high spread of 6), then that damage doubles again to 2480. That's 480 points more than the five super mutant behemoths' hit point count! You can kill a twenty foot tall mountain of mutant muscle in a single shot... if every pellet hits outside of V.A.T.S.[[/labelnote]] However, this comes at the cost of similarly-terrible durability, and if you ''don't'' get critical hits then enemies will still just shrug off the buckshot like it was a passing breeze.
** Grenades also feel like this most of the time. In theory they should be awesome, but in truth they are very a situational and hard to use weapon. First off, they usually don't deal a whole lot of damage to a single entity. Their charm is theoretically that they can hurt a lot of different people at once; however, in the game it is difficult to find situations where people are huddled together within a grenade's effective radius and will stay that way until it detonates — and usually when they are, it's also within a group of other explosive objects like [[EveryCarIsAPinto the abandoned nuclear-powered cars]] that either would do just as much damage to the enemy with a couple much cheaper bullets, or will cause a chain-reaction that kills the player as well. Most frustratingly, however, is that VATS isn't designed to use them, and even if it does manage to lob a grenade right at an enemy's feet, they will usually run away before it explodes. This is made worse by the fact that manually aiming with them in combat is difficult and takes some practice, which will cost you expensive grenades. They're fortunately common enough that you can just sell them to make some quick and easy cash, but even on that front they fall short of similar weapons: land mines do just as much damage, can easily be thrown in the path of approaching enemies (who will fail to react to seeing you place it in their path, unlike with grenades), and are so common as part of pre-placed traps that you can sell them for a better chunk of caps than grenades and still have plenty left over to actually kill things with. Alternatively, bottlecap mines deal ''five'' times the damage and are insanely cheap to make versus their assembled value (ten caps plus a few other odds and ends found basically everywhere to make something that sells for a base of 75), especially with multiple copies of its blueprints allowing you to make two or three mines for the same amount of components.
* ''Videogame/FalloutNewVegas'' also has a few.
** First of all, there is the .357 Magnum Revolver, which is essentially an only-slightly-improved version of the .32 pistol. It does rather low damage, being the weakest revolver in the game, it's single action (especially troubling if you took the Trigger Discipline perk, which increases accuracy at the cost of fire rate for every weapon), uses the same ammo as the infinitely more useful Cowboy Repeater rifle, and unlike every other revolver it can't use a speed loader, forcing you to load all six shots painfully slowly. Its strength is meant to be its higher damage per shot, which lets it punch through higher damage threshold than the 9mm - or it would, if any moderately armoured enemies existed at the stage of the game where using one at all was a good idea. Even with the "Cowboy" perk, there's no point to using it over the normal 9mm Pistol, which has the same DPS and doesn't use valuable rifle ammunition. Averted with its unique variant, [[BlingBlingBang Lucky]], which is far more useful than its normal variant, with the former's higher DPS and Critical Chance.
** The Single and Caravan Shotguns fire the low damage 20 gauge rounds, and [[ShortRangeShotgun suffer from the usual weakness]]… and can only fire one or two shots respectively before reloading. To make things worse, the damage is divided between a large number of low-damage projectiles, each of which have their damage reduced by the target's damage threshold. Fortunately, the Shotgun Surgeon perk helps with the damage threshold problem, and much better 12-gauge shotguns that can be modified and take a wider array of ammo types make an appearance in short order.
** The Sturdy Caravan Shotgun from the ''Courier's Stash'' DLC has its own set of problems. It deals slightly better damage than the regular version, is much more durable, and doesn't have the same Guns skill requirement to use effectively… but, due to shoddy programming, it is not affected by either of the shotgun-centric perks and doesn't count for shotgun-focused challenges. Both versions of the caravan shotgun are also hard to use with slug rounds due to the strange decision to use the raised screw from the release lever as a rear sight rather than screwing it in properly and using an ''actual'' sight that [[InterfaceScrew doesn't completely block your view of the target at any range where slugs would be worth using over buckshot.]]
** The Sawed-off Shotgun hasn't gotten much better since ''Fallout 3''. Its only good point is that it's an improved holdout weapon, allowing you to take it into casinos, but there are much better weapons for the role. Against anything tougher than unarmored raiders, its saving grace comes with the "And Stay Back!" perk added in ''Dead Money'', which gives each shotgun pellet a 10% chance to knock an opponent to the ground. As the gun shoots 14 pellets per shot, almost every firing results in your target collapsing in a heap; since its reload time is faster than how long it takes for the target to stand back up, [[CycleOfHurting no individual enemy will survive as long as you have enough ammo]].
** The Laser RCW is this if you don't invest in it. The RCW does less damage per shot and per second than a 9mm submachine gun (15/139 vs 19/171), and its (hard-to-come-by) Electron Charge Pack ammo is better reserved for the Gatling Laser or Tesla Cannon. Electron Charge Packs can be easier to acquire by recycling the cheap energy cells in bulk to make more (especially with the Vigilant Recycler perk), and there exists a weapon mod that recycles 1-in-4 shots (effectively giving you 25% more ammo). The RCW can be maintained with plasma rifles and the dirt-cheap Recharger Rifle (if you have the Jury Rigging perk) essentially making it the poor man's Gatling Laser with lower costs and weight. In addition, the "Laser Commander" perk makes the RCW far more useful in most situations, thereby [[RescuedFromTheScrappyHeap rendering its issues moot and making it a worthwhile weapon]].
** The Recharger Rifle. Even for a [[SortingAlgorithmOfWeaponEffectiveness starter weapon]] its damage is absolutely pathetic, being 25% weaker than the 9mm pistol. On top of that it's extremely fragile, inaccurate, and [[ArsonMurderAndJaywalking just plain ugly]]. Even worse, it does not benefit from the "Laser Commander" perk despite it being a laser weapon, thanks to a programmer's oversight. The point of it is to have a viable early energy rifle when microfusion cells are rare, but you'd be better off selling the gun and just using the caps to buy some extra ammo. With the Jury Rigging perk you can use these to repair the much better Laser RCW as well.
** The Automatic Rifle was added in the ''Dead Money'' add-on. As one of the heaviest guns in the game and requiring a maxed guns skill and very high strength, it offers extremely inefficient use of expensive .308 ammo, a tiny magazine, very high spread, and low DPS compared to the submachine guns that it competes against. Plus, like everything else added in ''Dead Money'', you can't find it anywhere in regular gameplay after you've finished the DLC; for the weight of one, you could free up nearly half the space necessary for one of the far more valuable gold bars.
** ''Dead Money'' also adds demolition charges, supposed to be explosives made for construction purposes rather than killing people, and the only actual weapon you can acquire from the vending machines in the Sierra Madre. While you're stuck there, they're a good weapon - no Explosives skill requirement for very nearly the same damage as a frag mine (one point more, even) with the added bonus that, being explosives, they easily dismember the ghost people to prevent them from [[ImplacableMan getting back up]]. Once you get back out into the normal game and have access to regular frag mines again, though, the downsides become obvious — it sells for the same price and deals the same damage, which does nothing to justify weighing three times as much as a regular mine, or the fact that the only way to get them is through the vending machine in the abandoned bunker that lead to the Sierra Madre — you're just as well off taking advantage of a bug where placing a demo charge then disarming and picking it back up turns it into a regular frag mine so you can carry three times as many for the same weight, then just forgetting about them once you're done with the DLC.
** ''New Vegas'' also introduces "Fatigue Damage", which can knock enemies unconscious for a short amount of time when dealt enough fatigue damage. However, there's only six of such weapons in the game, and are all hard to come by (Boxing Gloves, Boxing Tape, the Cattle Prod, Flashbang grenades, the Compliance Regulator, and Beanbag Shells for shotguns). Unless you're going for a pacifist run, knocking enemies out isn't nearly as beneficial as straight-up killing them.
** Throwing weapons, such as spears, hatchets, and knives, are a mixed bag — they do a decent amount of damage (moreso with poisons and perks) and are silent weapons. However, for some reason they are hard to find, with throwing knives being nearly impossible to obtain. Combine that with weight and the fact that you cannot retrieve any thrown weapons, even if you miss, and they become more trouble than they're worth.
** The Silenced .22 Pistol and Silenced .22 SMG are both incredibly disappointing weapons. Both have silencers integrated in them and have increased Sneak Attack damage, but that's undercut by the fact that they are severely underpowered and outclassed by other weapons with Silencer modifications, such as the 10mm Pistol or the .45 Auto Pistol. They also use the .22LR round, which is rather common, but BetterOffSold, especially since it can be broken down at workbenches (netting you lead and gunpowder to make bigger pistol rounds) but can't be built ([[ShownTheirWork since it's a]] [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rimfire_ammunition rimfire cartridge]]).
* ''VideoGame/Fallout4'' has several weapons (particularly in the DLC) that are more {{Joke Item}}s than anything else, but a few meant for serious use instead qualify as this:
** The Gamma Gun. It is quite effective against human enemies, but radiation damage is either largely or completely ineffective against ghouls, synths, power armor-wearing humans, super mutants, and most wild creatures. You can modify the guns to do extra energy damage that can harm these baddies, but it's far more sensible to just stick with weapons that primarily deal ballistic and/or energy damage, since there are no enemies that have complete immunity to those two damage types.
*** [[NotCompletelyUseless The only good use]] of the Gamma Gun is lowering the health of Legendary human enemies so that it won't regenerate to full, which can be annoying. It's still incredibly situational.
** One would think the Broadsider would be an epic overpowered weapon, being a smooth-bore naval cannon modified to be portable and fired by hand. It isn't. It's heavy, short ranged, inaccurate as hell and does less damage than a conventional missile launcher or gauss rifle. Which is basically what regular Cannons are on their own, which is a given, and is supposed to be more of a volley type of weapon than a practical singular one. Still, at least it has novelty value...
** The Cryolator is also this. On paper it sounds like an awesome weapon; it shows freezing ammunition, can be upgraded to fire ice pellets for enhanced damage and can be acquired early in the game provided enough investment is made in the Lockpicking skill [[SequenceBreaking (or have Dogmeat fetch it)]]. In practice, ammo for it is nonexistent and it chews through it like crazy (as in, it spawns almost nowhere in the game, not in loot containers, not on dead bodies, nowhere) and only Arturo in Diamond City sells any, usually around 151 shots. Those 151 shots will cost about 2200 caps, making this weapon expensive to fire and pointless to scavenge ammo for.
** Institute laser rifles/pistols are the weakest weapons that use Fusion Cells, are huge and take up a large portion of the screen, which can obscure your view of your surroundings, and are [[ArsonMurderAndJaywalking ugly to boot]]. They have a higher rate of fire than pre-war laser weapons, but that's it.
* ''Franchise/FinalFantasy'':
** Any weapon with randomized damage, e.g. axes, especially once your attack power goes high enough that randomization only hurts your damage potential.
** In ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyI'', a bug meant that instead of weapons having individualized critical rates, their crit rate was instead linked to their index number. This made a number of weapons meant to compensate for low damage with high crit rates completely worthless. A key example is the Vorpal Sword, which has damage on-par with the common Mythril Sword and shows up pretty late--it's meant to have a 30% crit rate, but at that point, you're well into the SortingAlgorithmOfWeaponEffectiveness and every other weapon has a 30% crit rate.
** In ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyII'', Bows are considered the worst weapon type for various reasons. The first is they are the game's only two-handed weapon, meaning that you can't equip shields, a piece of equipment that is valuable to raising agility due to increasing your evasion in a game where a character increases agility by dodging attacks. Second is that they are catered for characters who stay in the back row, a row which is a bad idea to put characters in as not taking as much damage prevents them from gaining a higher amount of hit points, which means a low max HP and as such any attack that can hit the back row will shave off most if not all of a character's HP. And third if you're playing the original and ''Pixel Perfect'' versions, bows give a massive penalty to magic compared to staves and knives, making them a poor fit for magic-focused characters who'd be the best fit to put in the back row to begin with!
** Certain weapon classes in ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyXI'' have been hit by this as time and patches went by. In particular, two-handed weapons were looked down on for a long time due to differences in the damage and accuracy calculations for them versus one-handed weapons. This was thankfully adjusted, but other issues have come up from time to time for certain jobs or weapons.
** ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyXII'' has several weapon types that perform differently from one another. Axes, bombs, and hammers do randomized damage, which can be good for low level characters, but the inconsistent damage can seriously hamper a character's damage output by the halfway point of the game. Bows and crossbows can allow characters to attack at long range, but bows have horrible accuracy in bad weather and crossbows are simply inaccurate altogether. Guns can ignore an enemy's defense and evasion, but they are the slowest weapons to use and the gun's attack power is based on the gun and the bullets loaded and said bullets are not easy to find if you want something more than what the shops offer. It also doesn't help that a lot of late game bosses and side quest enemies have a resistance to gun damage, making the defense piercing aspect moot anyway. Pole weapons do damage based on the enemy's magic defense, which would be handy if [[GuideDangIt you knew which enemies have low magic defense anyway without looking up a guide.]]
** ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyXIV'':
*** During the 2.x ''A Realm Reborn'' era, any armor or weapons that focused heavily on Skill Speed (and to a lesser extent, Spell Speed) over more useful stats like whatever stat determines your class's damage. This is because Skill Speed only affects the cooldown timers on the already short (2.5 second base) Global Cooldowns applied to all regular weapon skills. It took hundreds upon hundreds of points in Skill Speed to reduce the cooldown by even a ''tenth'' of a second. Spell Speed is ''slightly'' more useful, since it also affects the casting speed of spells, which generally takes less time than the global cooldown. This was done because XIV's dev team, especially the Realm Reborn team, felt that Haste was too powerful (only a handful of the battle classes/jobs get any Haste-like ability), and so it was intentionally nerfed.[[note]]This was likely a reaction to its predecessor, ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyXI'', where Haste was the stat every class was expected to cap ASAP because of how much it increased your DPS by lowering the time between melee hits, allowing you to use your [[LimitBreak Weapon Skills]] more often and reducing the casting time of both offensive and healing spells. This was further made more broken by there being multiple types of Haste, which each had a unique cap with a universal hard cap applied to them all collectively.[[/note]].
*** When the ''Heavensward'' expansion released, Skill and Spell Speed got a massive buff, and the devs felt comfortable enough to bring in more Haste-like abilities that buffed Auto-Attack Speed as well. Instead, the new Scrappy Weapons and Armor are anything with a heavy focus on Determination. A generic stat that boosts damage dealt and healing received, which received a nerf at the same time as the buffs to Skill/Spell Speed, a single point in Vitality or your current class's main damage stat provides a much larger boost than several points of Determination.
*** ''Stormblood'' and ''Shadowbringers'' had further rebalances and reworks of the attributes and stats. The Main Attributes[[note]]Strentgh, Vitality, Dexterity, Mind, Intelligence[[/note]] were limited to being boosted purely by class level and gear, with materia for them phased out. This put the focus of materia slots on secondary stats[[note]]Critical Hit, Direct Hit, Determination, Skill Speed, Spell Speed, Piety, and Tenacity[[/note]] for player customization. Determination got enough of a boost to be considered useful after improving other key stats for the player's class. The role of Scrappy Materia Upgrades became the Tank-Role exclusive stat of Tenacity, which is intended as a general boost to all things useful to a Tank but has to be kept necessarily weak to prevent tanks from become overpowered. Tank Players who hit the level cap instead tend to focus exlcusively on adding Direct Hit materia to their gear for the improved chance of dealing "mini-criticals hits" for higher DPS.
%% Zero Context Example, give examples and descriptions of such skills. * Certain skills in ''VideoGame/GuildWars'' are either completely useless or completely outclassed, although this changes from time to time based on buffs and nerfs. Some are also useless because they're absolute clones of others.
* The enemy weapons you get off Aces in ''VideoGame/ValkyriaChronicles'', tend to fit this trope early on, as the marginal increase in power compared to regular Gallian weaponry does not make up for the severe drop in both accuracy and range. While the rifles and machine guns improve to the point where they become viable options, captured sniper rifles consistently have less than half the range and accuracy of their counterparts, which eventually become capable of scoring long-range headshots with almost every shot. The exception is enemy [[VideogameFlamethrowersSuck flamethrowers]], as they are generally more powerful than their Gallian tier equivalents.
* ''VideoGame/TheElderScrollsIIIMorrowind'' has Polearms. Though fans have been lamenting about their loss (each game in the series that has followed does not include them), it's rare to find someone who actually ''uses'' them. A major factor is that they're two-handed weapons, meaning you cannot use a shield or light source in your off-hand, while doing damage on par with one-handed weapons.
* ''VideoGame/WorldOfWarcraft'':
** Fist weapons until Mists of Pandaria, and Polearms pre-Burning Crusade. Both were hampered by the fact that there were just ''not enough'' in the game, and the ones that were there were overshadowed by better weapons. It didn't help that Dagger specialization for rogues was much better than fist weapons, whereas sword or mace at least gave damage output or a chance to stun. Burning Crusade remedied this by adding more polearms to the game, although they were most commonly used by hunters for stats. They were officially RescuedFromTheScrappyHeap later on, especially around ''Legion'' when Survival Hunters became a melee class that preferred staves and polearms.
** The fourth expansion added ''Franchise/{{Pokemon}}''-like pet battles. Many pets have very weak movesets, although none are truly useless. There are, however, instances of very rare pets that are effectively identical to much more easily obtained alternatives.
* The ''Franchise/MassEffect'' series has a fair share of examples.
** ''VideoGame/MassEffect1'':
*** Due to the SortingAlgorithmOfWeaponEffectiveness and RandomDrops in the first game, several guns were rendered completely useless five minutes after you picked them up because you'd immediately find another gun of the same type with objectively better stats.
*** Sniper rifles for Shepard - unless you're a Soldier or Infiltrator (or take Sniper Rifles as your bonus skill on NewGamePlus), you can't zoom in with the scope (defeating the entire purpose of sniping), and even if you do have training for it, you need to put to put a ton of skill points into it to stop the damn thing from shaking. The environments are small enough for perfect aim with pistols or assault rifles (and [[GameBreaker the former]] is available for ''every'' class). A Sniper rifle of any power will (almost) overheat from a single shot and take seconds to cool down, making it useless for the ZergRush that every fight devolves to. And with the game's infamous "permaheat" bug, every shot with a sniper rifle carries a risk of forcing a saved-game reload.
*** On the upside, in the squadmates' hands, sniper rifles equipped with high-explosive ammo turn into a perfect-aim rocket launchers [[BlownAcrossTheRoom that eject enemies from the level]].
** ''VideoGame/MassEffect2''
*** The Shuriken was the most useless weapon in the game. It's a weak, inaccurate machine pistol that doesn't even have the benefit of a fast firing rate, since it shoots three round bursts. It did less damage and had worse accuracy than the Predator pistol, which you got before it.
*** The Tempest the submachine gun that replaces the Shuriken wasn't much better. High rate of fire and ammo capacity but horrible recoil. Good luck keeping the thing on track. The only submachine gun worth using in the game is the Locust, which combines good damage with good accuracy and recoil but only available in a paid DLC.
*** The Katana and Scimitar shotguns had an effective range of about five feet, and even point blank weren't powerful enough to one-shot basic mooks. To get any use of them you had to get in an enemy's face, exposing yourself to automatic fire. Literally the only reason to ever use them in battle is if you're out of other ammo for other weapons and have melee enemies like varren coming up close. They were so bad that the game designers created the Eviscerator shotgun as a free DLC to replace both of them.
*** There's a reason no one uses the Avalanche heavy weapon; it's simply a waste of power cells. While the freezing effect is nice, the Cyro bullets for other weapons do the same thing. Most other Heavy weapons have either more ammo or better damage, as the Avalanche has only 50 damage with 30 cells.
** ''VideoGame/MassEffect3'':
*** The Shuriken, Katana, and Scimitar are still terrible, with the re-introduction of weapon mods doing little to compensate for their faults.
*** The AT-12 Raider shotgun has the worst accuracy in the game and only holds two shots. Its redeeming quality is supposed to be very high damage, but the Wraith does more damage, so there's no reason at all to pick up the Raider.
*** The Geth Pulse Rifle, which was considered a decent weapon in the second game and great in the first, has moved into Scrappy Weapon territory in ''3''. It's been nicknamed the "Geth Piss Rifle" by the community simply because it does low damage overall. Not helping matters is the competition from the Particle Rifle, which has a similarly high fire rate but also benefits from having infinite ammo and a beam that increases in damage as the trigger is held down.
*** The [[NailEm Kishock Harpoon Gun]] sniper rifle. It has a number of features that sound great on paper: great spare ammo capacity and reload speed for a single-shot sniper rifle, shots that can be charged for extra damage, a higher headshot damage multiplier than normal, and perhaps most importantly, the ability to ignore the "shield gate," a massive damage reduction that occurs when excess damage shatters an enemy's Shields or Barriers and goes on to their Health or Armor. However, the weapon's projectile is slow-moving and requires a lot of aiming compensation, charging shots is extremely inefficient from a DPS perspective without producing enough extra damage to justify it, 40% of the shot's damage is dealt in bleed (meaning it actually deals relatively little damage up front, and even common infantry can potentially survive a headshot), and the scope is of such a low magnification that the weapon handles more like an assault rifle with a scope attached than a sniper rifle. The result is a weapon that is so bizarrely balanced and has such a ridiculous learning curve that [[ButtMonkey even after numerous patches and tweaks, it remains, along with the Shuriken, the only weapon in the game that the Mass Effect Wiki advises against using]].
*** The Viper sniper rifle got nerfed hard in this game, having its firing rate lowered and the clip size reduced from 12 to 6. Combined with the buffs given to other guns, the Viper just looks pathetic; the [[HandCannon Carnifex]], for example, not only does more damage, but it also weighs less and can easily be modded to hold more shots. Still in multiplayer, the Viper can be a literal PoorMansSubstitute for the Carnifex, since the former is an uncommon weapon and the latter is a rare, which means that you'll probably max out the Viper first unless you're particularly blessed by the RandomNumberGod.
*** Phoenix Adepts and Vanguards use Shock Batons for their melee attack. Said batons are slow and don't do a lot of damage, and leave you exposed the entire time.
* ''VideoGame/ChronoTrigger'':
** Lucca's "ultimate weapon", the Wonder Shot, randomly inflicts 10%, 50%, 100%, 200%, or 300% damage. It does not deal 200%/300% enough to make the gun worthwhile.
** In the UsefulNotes/NintendoDS remake, Marle gets the Venus Bow, which is guaranteed to do 777 damage. The problem is that this means critical hits are impossible, and if she gets confused, that 777 guaranteed damage can be turned on your own teammates (which is bad when they can have at most 999 HP).
* In ''VideoGame/UltimaVII'', the Firedoom Staff. A fairly potent weapon, it had the problem that you don't control your party members and so they are likely to wander into the blast radius of the fireball. It was manageable, though, if you wanted to. What you should never, ever do is give this weapon to any party member, because they will promptly start blowing up the entire party by not caring one whit about who is going to get caught in any given explosion.
* ''VideoGame/MonsterHunter'': All weapon classes are useful in some way or another, so how scrappy they are tends to depend on whether you're hunting solo or with a party:
** Sword & Shield is widely regarded as a poor choice for solo hunts. Although S&S users have generally high elemental or status ratings on their weapons, amazing mobility compared to other melee classes, a shield for blocking attacks (including those ever-annoying flashes and roars), and can use items without sheathing (making them excellent support in multiplayer), the damage-per-second and reach leave much to be desired. And unlike most other classes, the S&S class doesn't have a hard-hitting special attack or SuperMode. Thankfully, Capcom seems to have recognized this last drawback and has given the weapon its own charged heavy slash in ''4U'', among other improvements.
** All Gunner classes (the Bowguns and Bow) can be this in solo hunts as well, due to sacrificing attack power in exchange for allowing attacks from a safer distance. It's possible to defeat most monsters as a solo Gunner within the time limit, but unless you have the correct technique and armor skills, it will usually take much longer than just coming up close and whacking away with a good melee weapon. Also, Gunners have to use separate Gunner armor, which means having to farm for more drops. On top of all that, Gunner armor has only a fraction of the raw defense of Blademaster armor despite boasting higher Elemental resistances, which means if a monster reaches you and starts beating you up, your health is going to be ripped apart like toilet paper.
** In multiplayer, weapons with long sweeping reaches tend to be loathed due to the knockback and tripping when accidentally hitting other players, the usual culprits being the Longsword, Switch Axe, Charge Blade (in axe form) and Hunting Horn (otherwise a stellar support class due to its AreaOfEffect buffs and healing). Unless the monster is big enough that everyone can spread out to avoid hitting each other, it is hard to avoid interrupting other players' combos with these weapons.
* ''VideoGame/ShinMegamiTenseiIV'' has the Almighty Rounds, purchasable in the members-only area of Ginza. Hooray, bullets that are Almighty-elemental and thus can't be reduced in damage, reflected by, or nullified by 99% of enemies! Except said members-only area requires investing a costly 165,000 Macca to enter, and the bullets themselves are horribly expensive, moreso on Master difficulty where they cost a whopping 1.3 million Macca. Last but not least, they're not even that good, with only 20 attack power, which is about the strength of most early-game bullets. In short, [[AwesomeButImpractical mostly-unblockable bullets that are expensive and just too weak to be worth it]].
* ''VideoGame/TheWorldEndsWithYou'':
** The Anguis pin in the first game, despite having the highest raw damage number in the game, fails in practically every other way imaginable and then some. First, it's highly inaccurate - in a game where enemies move constantly, this is a big problem. Second, it never reboots, meaning ItOnlyWorksOnce per battle ''chain'' - if you string 16 battles together, you'll only have a single use of Anguis in ''one'' of those battles, and in a game where most battles are either chain battles or long battles, this is a huge problem. Third, the Anguis pin is considered a Reaper-class pin. The player is only allowed to wear one Reaper-class pin into any battle chain, meaning using Anguis takes away from a wide variety of pins that actually have consistent use. What brings Anguis from merely being a bad weapon into the area of players utterly loathing it with a passion, however, is mastering the pin. Anguis takes a ''ridiculously'' long time to master. You can have 99% of the pins in the game mastered, and then spend '''days''' just mastering that one last Anguis pin. And there's a piece of equipment that requires a fully mastered Anguis pin to buy. If you want the game to acknowledge HundredPercentCompletion, you need to have everything in your inventory, which means ''both'' a fully mastered Anguis pin '''and''' the piece of equipment you use one to buy. This means going through the trouble of mastering the pin '''''twice'''''. Small wonder people have been known to (deliberately) misspell it as the "Anguish" pin...
** In the second game, ''VideoGame/NeoTheWorldEndsWithYou'', Kinesis-element Psychs are reliant on randomly-appearing "large objects" for their best damage output and for Beatdrops, making them one of the most awkward types to use due to relying on luck.
* ''VideoGame/SaltAndSanctuary'': Bows and Crossbows are absolutely terrible at all tiers, due to somewhat lackluster rate of fire and ''pitiful'' damage that gets outclassed by daggers two tiers below in terms of damage per strike. Their range may be better than any other weapon in the game, but it's still lackluster to the point of the projectiles flopping like NERF darts halfway, and since it's a 2D platformer the extra range isn't too much of a benefit, since you can't see past the screen. That, and if you want range most magic spells have you covered, and are much stronger anyways. Literally everything in the game outclasses them because of these facts; even daggers, which are widely acknowledged to be fun but rather underpowered due to their high attack rate and combo capacity allowing ''some'' kind of offense.
* ''VideoGame/DragonQuestVIII'', unlike most ''Dragon Quest'' games, actually tied certain skills to your weapon, on top of certain special attributes (ie, whips hitting groups of enemies, boomerangs hitting all enemies). Unfortunately, due to the skills available as well as the accessibility of certain weapons, it developed:
** Scythes and clubs. Most of them were available only via alchemy and when you did have some of them, axes had much higher attack power and better skills attached to them such as Hatchet Man and its upgrade Executioner. Thankfully, clubs in the 3DS version were RescuedFromTheScrappyHeap with Morrie. His abilities with the clubs function very similar to axes, allowing clubs to become a feasible weapon. Almost too powerful, as Morrie's fist weapons become OvershadowedByAwesome.
** Knives. In the [=PS2=] version, only Jessica could use them, plus she was a SquishyWizard who had access to whip abilities, considered very overpowered. Later on, knives vanished because they would allow Jessica to use swords - but her attack power was so low that not even the Falcon Blade or the Über Falcon blade could let her catch up. Much like with clubs and Morrie, Red in the 3DS version enables for knives to become useful. As a fighter, she is much more equipped to use knives than Jessica, and when she learns swords she will be able to deal good physical damage. However, this is only one option - most players actually believe Fans to be Red's signature weapon.
** Unarmed, for everyone but Yangus. Yangus's strength was high enough that he was able to keep up with everyone else, however they lack the power of axes. For everyone else, they will be lacking as fisticuffs does not give them as much access to the utility that picking and committing to a weapon skill does.
* The sequel, ''VideoGame/DragonQuestIX'' averted this during the game's main story - one way the game is balanced during the 30+ hour main story is the fact that there is ''always'' a weapon available to you. So you decided to use a fan or a bow? Well guess what - you'll find a weapon upgrade available in the next town. Unfortunately, this still happened in the post-game - many of the weapons like attacking staves and fans became useless as they do not have as many possible damage multipliers, such as Falcon Strike, Multishot, or Multithrust. In addition, while upgrades for them post-game do exist, the raw attack power of swords and the regenerative powers of rods outclasses all of them.
* In ''VideoGame/XenobladeChronicles2'', Shield Hammers are almost universally considered the worst Blade type. They are meant to allow their user to serve as meatshield tanks, but of the two designated tanking members of the party, Mòrag is an agile evasion tank who doesn't suit this role, and Tora can't resonate with any Blades other than Poppi anyway. Aside from this, Shield Hammers almost universally have a low damage output, their attacking animations are very slow, and they're hard to use in a Driver Combo as neither Rex nor Nia have Driver Arts with them. The exception is Finch, who grants her user an Agility bonus, making her useful to equip on Mòrag. The DLC introduced a much better Shield Hammer in Poppibuster, but also introduced [[VideoGame/XenobladeChronicles1 Shulk]] as a GuestFighter who makes his Driver a much faster MovesetClone of the Shield Hammer, making him outclass each and every Shield Hammer in the game.
* In ''VideoGame/Nioh2'', [[DualWielding the Hatchets]] are a kind of zoner's weapon in a game about multi-layered, fast-paced melee combat. Their range is pitiful, their melee combos are abysmal and have limited utility, their ki use is high, and Dual Swords are much faster and do more damage; the primary advantage Hatchets have is [[ThrowingYourSwordAlwaysWorks being able to throw them]] for admittedly decent burst damage. In practice, it leads to "Throw axe, dodge counterattack, rinse and repeat" play that many players find boring.
* The ''Franchise/{{Pokemon}}'' games have a few moves which players despise using.
** Frustration. It's a full-power Normal-type attack which grows in power the less your Pokémon likes you, maxing out at 102 base power at 0 happiness. The problem? Your Pokémon's happiness goes up just by walking around with it, leveling it up, and using items on it, while reducing its happiness requires you to let it get knocked out or use a set of bitter healing items on it. The move's counterpart Return, which maxes out at 255 happiness instead, is a much more viable option; Frustration, meanwhile, is an exercise in frustration to use in-game, and only a seriously StupidEvil trainer would consider using it. It does see more use in competitive settings where happiness can be set manually, though, as it's effectively identical to Return there.
** Submission in the [[VideoGame/PokemonRedAndBlue gen 1 games]]. It's a mediocre Fighting-type attack, with 80 base power and only 80% accuracy — in comparison, other types like Fire, Electric, and Ice have moves with 95 power and 100% accuracy, and their less accurate options have 120 base power. However, Submission doesn't just have low accuracy as its only drawback: it also [[CastFromHitPoints damages the user with every use]], dealing 1/4th of the damage inflicted. What really forces Submission into this status is that it's the most powerful Fighting move in the game with wide availability, with the stronger High Jump Kick only being learnable by Hitmonlee, so most Fighting-types are forced to use a crappy STAB move to deal acceptable amounts of damage. And as the cherry on top, two of the most powerful and widely-used Normal-types in competitive play are Snorlax and Chansey, both of which have huge HP and low defense, so Submission will severely damage the user even if it does hit. Later generations, fortunately, added much better Fighting attacks with superior power, more reliable accuracy, and more manageable drawbacks.
** Wild Charge is essentially the modern counterpart to Submission, but for Electric-types — while it has 90 base power and perfect accuracy, it still inflicts recoil damage, when most recoil moves have 120 base power or more.[[note]]Volt Tackle is an Electric move with 120 base power and recoil, but it's the SecretArt of Pikachu.[[/note]] As such, physical Electric-types have to make do with a mediocre STAB move, while their special counterparts can instead use Thunderbolt, which has no recoil damage and comes with a chance to paralyze the target. If you can't bear the recoil, your only other option is to use a move like Thunder Fang or Thunder Punch, which are quite weak.
[[/folder]]

!!Examples by genre:

** Cruisers end up being this in most of the games; they can counter Submarines just fine but tend to be very shaky against anything else, and their bloated price doesn't help matters. They can attack air units, but if any of them gets the first strike - even measly Battle Copters - it will quickly cripple them. Anti-Air guns perform much better for a fraction of the cost. Being a boat, its movement also tends to be very limited; many of the games don't allow boats to cross shores, bridges, or even rivers, so unless the map design devotes a huge chunk of space to these units, there won't be much they can do. Yet in ''Super Famicom Wars'', they somehow manage to be ''much worse'' - their price is even more unreasonable, and the only units they can attack are Submarines and Copters, both of which ''will'' take nearly half their health in return unless the Cruiser has a terrain advantage. In all the games and like naval units in general, you don't want to use them unless the map design absolutely forces you to.

** The Spark Shot in ''VideoGame/ResidentEvil2'', exclusive to Claire Redfield, has exactly one use -- fighting William Birkin, something you can also effectively do with her Grenade Launcher. Beyond that, it is borderline worthless, taking three shots just to put down a normal zombie, plus it takes two inventory slots and only comes with twenty non-replenishable shots anyway. It was buffed into a much more useful weapon in the game's [[VideoGame/ResidentEvil2Remake remake]].

** The Slingshot in ''VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaTwilightPrincess'' was already disliked by a majority of players, due to having a limited range and only doing scratch damage, but it was at least surpassed quickly by the Gale Boomerang in the first dungeon and the Hero's Bow during the second, meaning its use is confined to the game's prologue where it's at its most practical. This isn't the case in ''VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaSkywardSword'', where the slingshot is obtained before entering the first dungeon, and isn't upstaged by the bow until the fifth. Even worse, not only does this make the slingshot your only means of ranged combat for most of the game, but several puzzles you'll come across revolve around its ability to merely stun enemies as a means of making it past them when you could have just killed them if the game had given you something stronger. In short, the game takes the qualities of the slingshot that make it a Scrappy Weapon in the first place and exploits them to make things more difficult for the player.

* The ''Franchise/{{Pokemon}}'' games have the move Frustration. It's a full-power Normal-type attack which grows in power the less your Pokémon likes you, maxing out at 102 base power at 0 happiness. The problem? Your Pokémon's happiness goes up just by walking around with it, leveling it up, and using items on it, while reducing its happiness requires you to let it get knocked out or use a set of bitter healing items on it. The move's counterpart Return, which maxes out at 255 happiness instead, is a much more viable option; Frustration, meanwhile, is an exercise in frustration to use in-game, and only a seriously StupidEvil trainer would consider using it. It does see more use in competitive settings where happiness can be set manually, though, as it's effectively identical to Return there.

** The Slingshot in ''VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaTwilightPrincess'' was already disliked by a majority of players, but it was at least surpassed quickly by the Gale Boomerang in the first dungeon and the Hero's Bow during the second, meaning its use is confined to the game's prologue where it's at its most practical. This isn't the case in ''VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaSkywardSword'', where the slingshot is obtained before entering the first dungeon, and isn't upstaged by the bow until the fifth. Even worse, not only does this make the slingshot your only means of ranged combat for most of the game, but several puzzles you'll come across revolve around its ability to merely stun enemies as a means of making it past them when you could have just killed them if the game had given you something stronger. In short, the game takes the qualities of the slingshot that make it a Scrappy Weapon in the first place and exploits them to make things more difficult for the player.

*** Stone + Bomb lets Kirby use a pack of dynamite to blow up nearby enemies. This is very unreliable, as the dynamite takes a long time to blow up, and the resulting explosion '''will hurt''' Kirby unless the player presses down to put on a safety helmet.

** Knives. In the [=PS2=] version, only Jessica could use them, plus she was a SquishyWizard who had access to [[WhipItgood whip]] abilities, considered very overpowered. Later on, knives vanished because they would allow Jessica to use swords - but her attack power was so low that not even the Falcon Blade or the Über Falcon blade could let her catch up. Much like with clubs and Morrie, Red in the 3DS version enables for knives to become useful. As a fighter, she is much more equipped to use knives than Jessica, and when she learns swords she will be able to deal good physical damage. However, this is only one option - most players actually believe Fans to be Red's signature weapon.

** [[WhipItGood Whips, scourges]], and [[EpicFlail flails]]. In this case it's because they tend to be absurdly powerful due to how the game handles chain weapons. While a human in adventurer mode can put them to good use, they're Scrappy in fortress mode, as none of them can be [[UnusableEnemyEquipment manufactured by dwarves, only scavenged off goblins]].

* The harpoon gun found in ''VideoGame/TombRaiderII'' and its sequels. While it gives you a means to attack underwater, Lara's swimming controls are too clunky and limited for this to be of any use, as unlike on land you can only really hold your position and fire as enemies either barrel in on you like a bat out of hell and land a hit (and become too close to accurately hit) or are scuba divers with harpoon guns of their own who will be steadily draining your health with attacks while you attempt to attack them. You will ''never'' kill an enemy with this thing without losing some health, and probably more health than you'd lose just avoiding them. To make matters worse, ammo is surprisingly scarce for the thing, its projectiles move slowly, it's not much more powerful than your basic pistol, and you have to reload it every four shots unlike pretty much every other weapon in the game. Really, the weapon's only real use is for players going for an [[SelfImposedChallenge all-kills run]], as in any normal scenario you're better off either luring aquatic enemies near shore and firing on them from the safety of dry land, or just swimming away and dodging their attacks.

** Probably the worst weapon in the game is the Reaper, an alien (Skedar) gatling gun with the worst accuracy of just about any weapon you'll ever see in a first person shooter (you have to crouch to have any chance of hitting somebody beyond 5 feet), and even firing it in the first place requires you to bring the motor up to speed first. Its fire rate exceeds that of almost all other weapons in the game (only the Cyclone in its mag-dump secondary mode fires faster), but each shot does very little damage. Its secondary fire, which basically turned it into an enormous blender, was a mostly pointless melee weapon, with its only saving grace being that it can be used to spool up the gun and immediately begin firing.

** ''F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin'' has the Napalm Cannon, one of only two flame-based weapons in the game (the other is a new grenade type), which is prohibitively useless. Only two or three enemies across the entire game carry it, so you only get one reload for it when it's introduced and then have to play through half of the game to get another chance to use it. While just about anyone you can hit with it ''will'' burn to death, it also takes forever for even the weakest of enemies to die. Really, its only use is as a sort of slot-warmer for your fourth weapon slot until you can find the much more useful and common assault rifle to take up your fourth slot a level after it shows up - it doesn't even make an appearance in the ''Reborn'' DLC, which otherwise went out of its way to give more screen-time to guns that only showed up in one or two levels of the base game.

** The game has a variety of melee weapons, with each of them having different reach and swing speed to differentiate them (since they all one-hit kill regular zombies). The crowbar is the worst melee weapon in the whole game; it has poor reach, swings very slowly, and has bad hit detection, which makes it possible to hit a zombie and ''not'' kill it. Similar weapons like the frying pan and the axe hit zombies more consistently. The pitchfork that was added in The Last Stand update is even ''worse'' than the crowbar due to how the weapon swings; every melee weapon swings from side to side, which can help you clear out a crowd of zombies in front of you. The pitch fork makes a jabbing/thrusting forward motion, which will pretty much ignore any zombie that's off to the sides.

** The game brings back the Mauser pistol, (or at least a Chinese knockoff of it, based on the real Shanxi Type 17), as the Chinese Pistol. It no longer suffers from having unique and unreasonably-rare ammo, now sharing with the 10mm pistol, but it has 2 fewer shots per magazine, is no faster or more accurate, does less than half the damage of its American counterpart, and does not have a silenced version. Its only saving graces are that it sells for a fair deal of cash (which combines well with its low weight and how common it is in the hands of Raiders in the early game), and that it has more than twice the durability of the regular 10mm. The latter is just about useless, as the low damage makes degradation versus damage dealt approximately equal to that of the 10mm, but with twice the ammo usage, so there's really no reason to keep even one on-hand unless you're going to sell it as soon as you get back to Megaton or find a wandering merchant. The unique variant is slightly more useful, as it is capable of [[KillItWithFire setting enemies on fire]] in addition to the base damage and even better durability (approximately three times as much as the regular 10mm pistol). In spite of this, it's still probably one of the least powerful unique weapons out there (even weaker than many regular weapons; it only deals more damage than the regular Chinese pistol due to the fire damage) and is only good for supplementing another firearm or for lighting up occasional pockets of gas. Something a laser pistol can do as well as hit three times harder and not waste good 10mm ammo.

** ''Dead Money'' also adds demolition charges, supposed to be explosives made for construction purposes rather than killing people, and the only actual weapon you can acquire from the vending machines in the Sierra Madre. While you're stuck there, they're a good weapon - no Explosives skill requirement for very nearly the same damage as a frag mine (one point more, even) with the added bonus that, being explosives, they easily dismember the ghost people to prevent them from [[ImplacableMan getting back up]]. Once you get back out into the normal game and have access to regular frag mines again, though, the downsides become obvious — it sells for the same price and deals just about the same damage, which does nothing to justify weighing three times as much as a regular mine, or the fact that the only way to get them is through the vending machine in the abandoned bunker that lead to the Sierra Madre — you're just as well off taking advantage of a bug where placing a demo charge then disarming and picking it back up turns it into a regular frag mine so you can carry three times as many for the same weight, then just forgetting about them once you're done with the DLC.

** In ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyI'', a bug meant that instead of weapons having individualized critical rates, their crit rate was instead linked to their index number. This made a number of weapons meant to compensate for low damage with high crit rates completely worthless. A key example is the Vorpal Sword, which has damage on-par with the common Mythril Sword and shows up pretty late--it's meant to have a 30% crit rate, but at that point, you're well into the SortingAlgorithmOfWeaponEffectiveness and pretty much every other weapon has a 30% crit rate.

* The sequel, ''VideoGame/DragonQuestIX'' averted this during the game's main story - one way the game is balanced during the 30+ hour main story is the fact that there is ''always'' a weapon available to you. So you decided to use a fan or a bow? Well guess what - you'll find a weapon upgrade available in the next town. Unfortunately, this still happened in the post-game - many of the weapons like attacking staves and fans became useless as they do not have as many possible damage multipliers, such as Falcon Strike, Multishot, or Multithrust. In addition, while upgrades for them post-game do exist, the raw attack power of swords and the regenerative powers of rods outclasses just about all of them.

*** The biggest advantage of the AC/2 is heat conservation: AC/2 shots generate significantly less heat than a Large Laser, PPC, or LRM launcher, allowing for long-range sniper battles. The AC/2 is also, pound for pound, lighter than the aforementioned weapons as well, though ammunition makes up the difference. However, recoil mechanics (every subsequent shot has reduced accuracy until you stop shooting for a while), minimal damage (same a Medium Laser), and most worryingly ammunition concerns (AC/2 ammo holds more rounds per ton than most other weapons, which is a huge problem in the event of an ammunition explosion) makes the AC/2 limited in functionality and usage at best.

* Just about any melee weapon in the ''VideoGame/{{Tenchu}}'' games (at least ''Wrath of Heaven'') that you can get from a dead {{Mook}}. Especially as they get rid of your one-hit stealth kills. The higher-scoring need-for-powering-up stealth kills. The you're-a-ninja stealth kills. (Well, yeah, the fun-to-do stealth kills.)

* The [[LittleUselessGun .38 Special]] in ''VideoGame/JaggedAlliance 2''. Pistols, in general, are relegated to EmergencyWeapon status early on as it is, and revolvers in particular are considered inferior because they have to be reloaded about three times as often as everything else, so that's two strikes against it before we even get to the fact that it does ''lousy'' damage and has poor range and accuracy even by pistol standards. You're almost better off with a knife.[[note]]In the case of Michael Dawson, one of the few mercs that starts with the .38 in his inventory, you ''are'' better with the knife.[[/note]]
** While just about every weapon in the game has at least a niche use, Rocket Rifles are particularly useless. Only available in Sci-Fi mode and requiring you to find and capture a weapons lab in the middle of nowhere, Rocket Rifles ''seem'' like the InfinityPlusOneSword of the game. However, they have pathetically small magazines (5 rounds), take a significant amount of time to fire, and most importantly, cannot accept ''any'' weapon modifications (in a game where a laser aiming module and a sniper scope is considered easy mode). For these disadvantages, you get a piddling amount of armor penetration, and some extra damage. Sniper rifles and assault rifles are far more reliable. And that's not even mentioning the fact that Rocket Rifles are keyed to a specific user, so if that user dies, the Rocket Rifle is completely useless.

** Missiles are this in the first game on pre-deploy maps, since the game likes to give them to you on maps that ''don't have enemy air units''. Missiles cannot target ground units at all meaning its only purpose on such maps is to block enemy units and take attacks, and since it's wheeled give it poor mobility and it is lacking in armor, it's not even all that useful for ''that'' purpose. Later games don't hand these units out on pre-deploy maps unless the enemy has either aircraft or an airport.
*** Even then, most players ''still'' don't use Missiles much even when they aren't forced to. The above-mentioned poor movement combined with their range (they can only hit up to five squares away) means that air units can generally either avoid them or fly right up to them and destroy the Missile before it can even do anything. Then add in their cost, and Anti-Air tanks[[note]](which are also good against Infantry/Mechs and are about ''half'' the cost of a Missile to boot)[[/note]] are most players' preferred ground unit for fighting enemy air forces.
** Cruisers end up being this in most of the games; they can counter Submarines just fine but tend to be very shaky against anything else, and their bloated price doesn't help matters. They can attack air units, but if any of them gets the first strike - even measly Battle Copters - it will quickly cripple them. Anti-Air guns perform much better for a fraction of the cost. Being a boat, its movement also tends to be very limited; many of the games don't allow boats to cross shores, bridges, or even rivers, so unless the map design devotes a huge chunk of space to these units, there won't be much they can do. Yet in ''Super Famicom Wars'', they somehow manage to be ''much worse'' - their price is even more unreasonable, and the only units they can attack are Submarines and Copters, both of which ''will'' take nearly half their health in return unless the Cruiser has a terrain advantage. In just about all the games and like naval units in general, you don't want to use them unless the map design absolutely forces you to.

** The Devil Axe. In its debut game, it's by far the most powerful axe, but it has a sizeable chance to just straight-up hit you instead. It also tends to be very heavy and inaccurate to the point where the chance of you actually hitting the opponent is far outweighed by the chance that you either die by missing and getting doubled or kill yourself with it outright. The only games where the axe sees actual use are ''VideoGame/FireEmblemTheBlazingBlade'' and ''VideoGame/FireEmblemTheSacredStones'', where it [[PowerAtAPrice gives an unusually high 8 weapon experience per use]] (even if it backfires or misses, ironically making its low accuracy a boon here), the DS remake of ''VideoGame/FireEmblemShadowDragon'', where [[DiscOneNuke it's obtained very early]] and now has incredibly ''high'' accuracy [[EarlyGameHell in the part of the game where it matters the most]] (not to mention being in a game with [[SaveScumming mid-chapter save points]]), and ''VideoGame/FireEmblemThreeHouses'', where it simply reduces your health by a flat 10 after combat.

*** Pretty much all the effective weapon varieties fall into this, due to the game changing the effective weapon formula from x3 to x2, and also making most of them have either bad base damage or ridiculously high weight. Consequently, they go from "highly effective against their designated targets, subpar against anything else" to "barely passable against their designated targets, you may as well be using a cardboard tube against anything else." The Armorslayer gets the worst of it, due to weighing so damned much that basically nobody can use it effectively. This also has the side effect of making bows almost useless.

* In ''VideoGame/XCOM2'', you have a lot of flexibility with regards to customizing weapons, with tier 3 weapons able to mount three different weapon mods. This makes weapons that ''don't'' let you customize them more difficult to use, such as the unique weapons unlocked by the Tactical Mission Pack. While it is cool using a cobbled-together laser weapon or a barely-functional plasma weapon, their lack of customization means you'll only use them when you need to. The weapon modifications aren't ''bad'', but they are specific to a certain playstyle that may not mesh with your methods.
** The biggest scrappy by far, however, is the Plasma Blade, the tier 3 sword for Rangers. While the Arc Lance was a straight upgrade to the Sword, doing 1 more point of damage and having a good chance to stun the target, the Plasma Blade removes the stun function and adds a ''lower'' chance to inflict burn, while increasing damage by one more point. However, enemies on fire ''can still move and attack'' (though they can't use special abilities), while stunned enemies are completely vulnerable, being stuck in place and unable to do anything. Even more than that, some enemies are ''immune'' to fire damage, while even Sectopods can be stunned. The one extra point of damage on the Plasma Blade generally isn't worth losing the utility of stun on the Arc Lance.