History UselessUsefulSpell / ShinMegamiTensei

** ZigZagged with the Hama and Mudo series of spells, which are OneHitKill skills subject to the ElementalRockPaperScissors rules like the rest of the attacking elements. While they can give the player an out against DemonicSpiders that are resistant to everything else, ContractualBossImmunity makes them outright useless in boss fights.

*** ''Persona 4 Golden'' makes Naoto more useful by reducing the SP cost of Almighty skills, which means she now only needs 38 SP to cast Megidolaon rather than 60, and adding all four -dyne skills to her learnset; it also greatly increased the success rate of Hama and Mudo skills against targets weak to them, which actually makes the usually inaccurate spells more viable.

*** Chie's Dragon Hustle increases all allies' attack, defence and hit/evade for three turns, meaning that it's effectively three buff spells in one. This would be incredibly useful if only someone other than Chie got it, because it costs 150 SP. This can easily be over half her SP pool even in the endgame, because she focuses on physical attacks which are CastFromHitPoints. To make matters worse, Chie also gets Power Charge, which is a 2.5x boost to her next physical attack, so you probably want to save her SP for that. Unless you're willing to throw a lot of SP-healing items at her (which you probably aren't because those can't be bought), you're going to be using this spell extremely sparingly.

** Traesto straddles the line between this and AwesomeButImpractical. On paper, it does have a definite use, allowing the party to leave the dungeon and return to the entrance, the only way to change party members or access a save point before the boss in the original game. In practice, it's a waste of one of the limited skill slots. At the root of it all is the fact that Traesto costs a whopping 18 SP to use, putting it on the same cost level as Dyne-level spells, and the only two party members that can use it are Teddie and the Protagonist, two party members that desperately need to smartly use SP thanks to their roles as CombatMedic and [[JackOfAllTrades Wild Card]], respectively. Further compounding is the fact that Goho-ms, an item that fulfills the same purpose as Traesto, are available at the drug store for 900 yen. The move was made even more unnecessary when ''Golden'' allowed the player to continue from the start of the floor if they fell in battle, reducing the need to [[SaveScumming constantly exit the dungeon to save.]] For these reasons, and changes to dungeon design, it was removed entirely for Persona 5.

*** ''Persona 4 Golden'' makes Naoto more useful by adding all four -dyne skills to her learnset; it also greatly increased the success rate of Hama and Mudo skills against targets weak to them, which actually makes the usually inaccurate spells more viable.

** Each character in the game except the main character has a particular skill specialization (fire, ice, physical attacks, etc), and Naoto has light/dark skills as a specialization, which is a massive problem as described above. At worst, this trope can make Naoto's character ''as a whole'' next to useless, and many players don't even bother to level Naoto up or use the character at all as a member of their permanent party.

*** ''Persona 4 Golden'' makes Naoto more useful with a handful of other elemental attacks; it also made enemies weak to Hama or Mudo get automatically hit by them, which actually makes the usually inaccurate spells more viable.

** The Recarmdra spell. Its effect is great: revives and fully restores the HP of the entire party, and it's the only full-party revival spell in the game. The downside is it drops the caster's HP to 1. In many other SMT games it's great, but here only the protagonist can use it... and this game follows the WeCannotGoOnWithoutYou trope. If one of your other party members got it, it might have had some use, but risking an easy GameOver to fully heal your AI-controlled party members just isn't worth it.

** Heaven's Blade, the SecretArt of Michael, took a nerf in this game and plummeted into this trope. In ''Persona 3'', it was slightly stronger than Brave Blade and has a much higher crit rate. Here, it's less than half as strong as Brave Blade, and while its crit rate remained higher, it's not by much. Brave Blade's higher base power outweighs the crit bonus, and the ability to pass it around in fusion makes it leagues better.

** The Counter skill line was previously very useful in ''Persona 3'' as you get a 15-50% chance of reflecting any physical skill on you (Slash/Strike/Pierce), but it got greatly watered down in the transition to ''Persona 4'', going down to 10-20%. ''Persona 4'' also condenses all physical attack types into a single Physical element, so Null Phys or Phys Repel will always outclass High Counter. Phys Repel also appears around the same time you can access High Counter.

** In many installments, NonElemental spells fall into this category as well. On top of high mana costs, the battle systems of most installments heavily emphasize taking advantage of elemental weaknesses for [[ExtraTurn tactical reasons]] beyond simply dealing extra damage. It doesn't help that similar-level physical attack skills approximately keep pace damage-wise, and are [[CastFromHitPoints fueled by health]], which is often a more readily renewable resource than mana, and has a bonus in scoring extra turns with a CriticalHit. From a magic standpoint, the individual elements can also be enhanced by Boost and Amp passives so a neutral hit from a boosted elemental spell often outdamages an Almighty skill.

** The Drain Life and Drain SP spells fall into this if they restore a fixed amount. In theory, being able to steal health and SP from enemies sounds good, and both spells are highly effective when used against you. But when the protagonist tries using them on enemies, the amount of HP and SP they drain from enemies (and restore to you) is so minor that it's just not worth bothering with them. In some games, however, they count as proper almighty attacks that can be affected by buffs and debuffs, which greatly improve their efficiency and make them worth a skill slot.

** Panic Caster gives a magic damage boost that's a little stronger than a single cast of Tarukaja, but it only affects the caster and inflicts Panic on them, leaving them unable to capitalize on the buff quickly unless you can cure the ailment. It's a lot easier to just use Tarukaja which doesn't have the downsides.
** Blood Ritual buffs all the user's stats once each, but induces HPToOne. It can be picked up near the midgame, but by this point you should be able to layer on Tarukaja, Rakukaja, and Sukukaja quickly across your party. You also get Luster Candy a few levels later, which is less risky.

* ''VideoGame/DevilSurvivor'' and its sequel suffer from this, despite being ''Franchise/ShinMegamiTensei'' games.

** Elemental "Wall" and "Break" skills place a temporary modification that grants resistance or neutralizes resistance to their element respectively. While it looks good on paper, either by covering a weakness or allowing a specialist to damage a NighInvulnerable enemy, the problem is how they consume a turn to execute, and that they wear off after 3 turns. "Wall" skills are very quickly obsoleted when the player accesses Resist passives, which cover weaknesses without consuming turns. "Break" skills may see fringe use on other party members, but the great variety of skills available to the protagonist makes it more efficient to include a wider variety of attacking elements than to spend a turn cancelling resistances.
** Tetraja sets up a shield that blocks one Hama or Mudo skill. It has the exact same "wasting a turn" problems as the Wall skills above, but it's made worse by the fact that enemies that use instant-kill skills are fairly uncommon, and for those that are, the readily-available Homunculus item will do the same thing without wasting a turn. It's also near-exclusively learned by the Protagonist's Personas, and with their MasterOfAll status they have ''far'' better things to be doing with their turns. It's situationally useful in the mainline ''Shin Megami Tensei'' games as it robs enemies of Press Turns, but that's not relevant in ''Persona''.

** On a more specific note is Chie's SecretArt, Dragon Hustle. It increases all allies' attack, defence and hit/evade for three turns, meaning that it's effectively three buff spells in one. This would be incredibly useful if only someone other than Chie got it, because it costs 150 SP. This can easily be over half her SP pool even in the endgame, because she focuses on physical attacks which are CastFromHitPoints. To make matters worse, Chie also gets Power Charge, which is a 2.5x boost to her next physical attack, so you probably want to save her SP for that. Unless you're willing to throw a lot of SP-healing items at her (which you probably aren't because those can't be bought), you're going to be using this spell extremely sparingly.
** Other unique skills granted by the party's ultimate Personas in ''Golden'' can fall under this trope. Teddie's Kamui Miracle is very similar to Oracle from ''3'', and even though it lacks the disastrous HPToOne effect, it's still a RandomEffectSpell that may harm you or heal the enemy. Kanji's The Man's Way can easily set up an All-Out Attack for extinguishing random encounters, but is nigh-useless in boss fights and has a poor success rate anyway.
** Traesto straddles the line between this and AwesomeButImpractical. On paper, it does have a definite use, allowing the party to leave the dungeon and return to the entrance, the only way to change party members or access a save point before the boss in the original game. In practice, it's a waste of one of the limited skill slots. At the root of it all is the fact that Traesto costs a whopping 18 SP to use, putting it on the same cost level as Dyne-level spells, and the only two party members that can use it are Teddie and the Protagonist, two party members that desperately need to smartly use SP thanks to their roles as CombatMedic and [[JackOfAllTrades Wild Card]], respectively. Further compounding is the fact that Goho-ms, an item that fulfills the same purpose as Traesto, are available at the drug store for 900 yen. The move was made even more unecessary when ''Golden'' allowed the player to continue from the start of the floor if they fell in battle, reducing the need to [[SaveScumming constantly exit the dungeon to save.]] For these reasons, and changes to dungeon design, it was removed entirely for Persona 5.

** Weather-dependant skills like Climate Decorum tend to be a waste of a moveslot, as only Mementos is affected by weather and only at specific times of the year, and their benefits aren't good enough to outweigh how incredibly situational that is.

** The game introduces a few skills that work well when the party's being ambushed, like attacks that grow stronger in that situation. However, being ambushed is the ''worst'' situation for a player to be in, and the stealth mechanics while dungeon crawling make that situation very easy to avoid. Naturally, these skills are also less useful in boss battles where ambushes are nonexistent (barring a midboss and a BonusBoss). This hinders the utility of those skills, and the most useless of them all is Thermopylae -- a buff skill that raises all 3 battle stats for the entire party but can ''only be used while being ambushed''. What's worse is that some enemies possess said skills, and because the player is doing the ambushing most of the time, those enemies can make full use of them to make life difficult for the player. ''Royal'', however, vastly improves ambush skills with the trait Vitality of the Tree, which allows ambush-only skills to be used in normal battles, including bosses.

** Dante and Raidou's final skills (Showtime and Jiraya Dance, respectively) are essentially just a flashy Megidolaon. The issue is by the time you have them, you also have Son's Oath/Raidou the Eternal, which allows their physical attacks to pierce resistances (only in Remaster for Dante), meaning their [=AoE=] physical attacks typically hit harder than Almighty damage and also come with a chance of ailments. And for the few enemies that repel physical (the only thing Pierce won't bypass), it's generally better to use Stinger/Tekisatu, a stronger physical Almighty attack with a high chance of instant death.

* ''VideoGame/{{Persona}}'' series:

** Power Charge and Mind Charge. Unlike every other Shin Megami Tensei game where these spells give a physical or magic skill a x2.5 boost in damage, they only give a x2 damage boost in every version of Persona 3, equaling the damage two unboosted uses of the skill would inflict. Two casts of a single target -dyne spell is also cheaper than spending the SP to use Mind Charge on it. The only reasonable use is to save on SP spent by boosting the costly Almighty skills, but if you're doing that, there are usually better alternatives for damage.

** The elemental "Wall" skills now raise the resistance of the party to one element. However, because you have a large playable cast at your fingertips, it's usually a better idea to deploy characters that don't have the weaknesses you need to cover. Sub-Personas also only have six skill slots and each party member can accommodate a maximum of three buffs at a time, which raises the opportunity cost of using a Wall skill over anything else.

** Traesto straddles the line between this and AwesomeButImpractical. On paper, it does have a definite use, allowing the party to leave the dungeon and return to the entrance, the only way to change party members or access a save point before the boss in the original game. In practice, it's a waste of one of the limited skill slots. At the root of it all is the fact that Traesto costs a whopping 18 SP to use, putting it on the same cost level as Dyne-level spells, and the only two party members that can use it are Teddie and the Protagonist, two party members that desperately need to smartly use SP thanks to their roles as CombatMedic and [[Wild Card JackOfAllTrades]], respectively. Further compounding is the fact that Goho-ms, an item that fulfills the same purpose as Traesto, are available at the drug store for 900 yen. The move was made even more unecessary when ''Golden'' allowed the player to continue from the start of the floor if they fell in battle, reducing the need to [[SaveScumming constantly exit the dungeon to save.]] For these reasons, and changes to dungeon design, it was removed entirely for Persona 5.