Tropes A to B (Adaptation-Induced Plot Hole, Arc Villain, Berserk Button, Beware the Silly One, Big Brother Instinct, Bowdlerise, Break the Cutie) | Tropes C to D (Call-Back, Chekhov's Gun, Cliffhanger, Combat Pragmatist, Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass, Curb-Stomp Battle, Dark and Troubled Past, Deconstructed Character Archetype) | Tropes E to F (Early Installment Weirdness, Famous Last Words, Foreshadowing) | Tropes G to J (Hate Sink, Heart is an Awesome Power, Hypocrite) | Tropes K to M (Laser-Guided Karma, Logical Weakness, Mass "Oh, Crap!", Moral Myopia, Muscles Are Meaningless) | Tropes N to P (Nice Job Fixing It, Villain, Oh, Crap!, O.O.C. Is Serious Business) | Tropes Q to S (The Reveal, Shout-Out, Spanner in the Works, Superpower Lottery) | Tropes T to Z (Wham Episode, Wham Line)
One Piece has plenty of useful powers that seem weak at first glance, as Word of God has said the Devil Fruits themselves don't become more powerful, the users just use them better with more creativity.
- Rubber Man Luffy, since among the other Devil Fruit abilities his one is rather low-tier until he starts inventing other uses for it. Especially noticeable when Luffy goes up against God Eneru, as due to his rubber body not conducting electricity Luffy was probably one of the few people on the planet who could've defeated him without needing a high level of Haki. Luffy also gets particularly clever with his abilities by taking advantage of the fact that his entire body, including heart, blood vessels, and bones, are all rubber. For his "Gear Second" technique he pumps his blood flow to a pressure level that would kill any normal human, giving him Super-Speed. For "Gear Third" he inflates his bones to increase his hitting power significantly, at the cost of speed. And for Gear Fourth, he combines all of these, inflating his muscles as with Gear Third, and pumping not just his blood, but his entire body, Gear Second-style, and combining all of these with every side technique he already has. The result can only be described as the most destructive balloon mankind will ever see.
- It eventually gets subverted as it turns out that the Fruit is actually a Mythical Zoan and one of the most unpredictable and powerful, having been reclassified by the World Government as a meager power so no one would know its true value. It's only because Luffy is creative with it that its full potential is brought out.
- The CP9 were this for Zoan-type Fruit users (ability to turn into an animal) since until then animal powers were rather lackluster compared to most Paramecia (get a super power) and all Logia (become a nigh-invincible force of nature). Until then the only notable Zoan user was Chopper who had to use special medicines to tap into different forms in order to fight effectively. But the CP9 leader points out that Zoan fruits also grant the user extra animal-like strength and alter their bodies (like growing claws) and since all of CP9 were highly powerful martial artists, in their hands Zoan Fruits became utterly terrifying by making already powerful fighters that much stronger. That is, Paramecia and Logia powers are additive, whereas Zoan powers are multiplicative: They can't make a weak person strong, but they can make a strong person even stronger. Nowhere in the series is this more evident than the Animal Kingdom Pirates, a whole fleet of Zoan-type users who have taken over huge chunks of the New World and is led by Kaido, a Zoan user said to be the "King of the Beasts."
- Kaku boasts about gaining the power to turn into a giraffe
◊ AND becomes more powerful thanks to it. When he reveals his power, everybody in the room laughs at it (including his own teammate) despite him warning them not to underestimate the destructive power of the giraffe. When they persist, he gets angry and combines his power with his Tempest Kick to cut the Tower of Justice in half from the inside. - Further proof of the power of Zoans: when Kaido decided he needed to turn the balance of power between the Four Emperors of the New World in his favor, despite his personal belief that Haki is the greatest of all powers, the plan he came up with was creating mass-produced Zoan fruits to power up his underlings. Even though what he got was a Shoddy Knock Off Product, he was still confident that a few hundred watered down Zoans would be the edge he needed.
- Kaku boasts about gaining the power to turn into a giraffe
- Paramecia powers (which includes the protagonist's Rubber Man abilities) are perhaps the greatest example in the series. They don't have a straightforward concept like Logia or Zoan fruits, allowing for the most outside-the-box thinking and diversity in the application of a single fruit's powers:
- Scratchmen Apoo can control sound effects, thanks to the large number of onomatopoeia in Japanese, he can do such things as cut anything or anyone that can possibly be cut under normal conditions.
- Wapol can merge anything into his body by eating it; as one result, he invented a metal so useful he was reappointed a lesser king by the World Nobles.
- Brook accidentally combined the power "to not die once" with getting lost, with the result being functional immortality and inhuman abilities including a weaponized Ghostly Chill and soul control good enough to perform astral projection and exorcisms in the blink of an eye, not to mention his new skeletal form is so lightweight as to allow for Super-Speed and completely immune to a variety of attacks.
- Bartholomew Kuma, with the ability to push things, is one of the most powerful characters in the story, especially since his power includes the ability to push abstract concepts like pain and exhaustion.
- Baroque Works Member Mr. 3's power allows him to create an endless supply of candle wax from his body. He was also able to make this wax hard as steel and make keys out of it, but its greatest use didn't come in until he used it to stop the flow of the Warden Magellan's impossibly corrosive and utterly deadly poisonous flood. He's is a stand-out example, as he was ranked higher than Mr. 5, who has a much more impressive power (being a living bomb) because Mr. 5 was "some idiot with a devil fruit" while 3 put effort into actually mastering his.
- Donquixote Doflamingo's String-String Fruit allows him to create strings, which doesn't seem that powerful until you consider he can make them thin enough to cut most material, and most people, and have it be almost invisible. This culminates with the birdcage, a dome of thin string large enough to surround an entire island and, as it closes on itself, cut almost everything in its path, including entire buildings. The second main use of his string is to use it to manipulate the movement of one or multiple people, an ability he can use to make someone unwillingly fight for him, or frame someone for a crime he didn't commit. Doflamingo also uses his Devil Fruit to create a string clone of himself, or make a rope with hundreds of strings and use their friction to set it on fire. All of these abilities end up making Doflamingo one of the toughest enemies of the manga.
- In the Doflamingo Pirates, we also have Sugar, a little girl who ate the Hobby Hobby Fruit. It gives her the ability to turn people and animals into Living Toys. The secondary abilities of the fruit are what really make it shine. It also allows Sugar to create verbal contracts that essentially brainwash the toys into doing whatever she wants and there's nothing they can do about it. Anyone that knew who the toys were before their transformations will forget all about them, so it's not like their families or friends will seek revenge. The Hobby Hobby Fruit also halts the aging process the moment they eat it, so Sugar isn't really a "little girl". And all it takes to become a toy is by lightly touching the victim, no matter how strong they are. Sugar is far from a powerhouse, but if this fruit was consumed by a Lightning Bruiser in his/her prime, it could easily be a Story-Breaker Power.
- Also from Doflamingo Pirates, Diamante's power is Flutter-Flutter Fruit, which allows him to flatten and convert anything into clothlike form, which can then be returned to normal at his convenience. While it's never shown whether he can actually do this to enemy combatants, he can do it to himself thus allowing him to dodge most physical damages. The biggest sell of the fruit though is that it allows him to become a Walking Armory, loaded with tons of various weapons in compact form, culminating with a series of confetti launchers which launch tons of confetti into the air.... which are really heavy spiked balls. The flattened items keep their properties, such as Diamante's cape actually being a block of metal he affected as well as being able to change the shape of his sword (he made it into a club and may even be denser than it looks like the block.) Diamante can also apply his powers to the ground — while he can't flatten it, he can still make it ripple and billow like cloth, limiting his opponents' mobility.
- Donquixote Rocinante has the Calm-Calm Fruit, which allows him to do things silently or create spherical regions around him where no sound can get in or out. Although he uses it for its direct purposes of telling things to people without letting anyone else know and to get undisturbed sleep, he shows what the power of silence can really do when he storms Diez Barrels's hideout: He effortlessly enters, shoots out the lights, grabs what he wants, and leaves causing a lot of destruction and injured bodies around him that nobody notices until it's too late. Because gunshots are silent inside his sphere of influence, as are the screams of the people he shoots. It's the perfect power for an assassin. He also uses this ability to securely sneak Trafalgar Law out of the area and into the Navy's custody, where he'll be safe.
- In a more literal version of this trope, the author states that Sanji is able to set his leg ablaze without hurting it because his heart burns hotter.
- Nami's Tempo, before it was upgraded, was basically a party gag that she managed to rework into being able to create lightning and summon storms, among other weather control capabilities which only improved further as time went on. Even without taking storm-brewing and the newly defected Zeus into account, there's quite a few powers out there that get severely weakened in a downpour, which saved the crew's asses more than once during Totto Land.
- Most of the Charlotte family have food-related abilities, which are generally just as dangerous as the more conventional powers among the family.
- Charlotte Cracker can create and control biscuits. This, apparently, allows him to create and control a living suit of armor, made entirely out of them. This suit looks indistinguishable from a real human (by One Piece standards at least) and is strong and durable enough to give Luffy a hard time. In fact, Luffy had to go into Gear Fourth to crack him open... and then Cracker easily creates five of them. Even better, since he doesn't have a limit to how many biscuits he can make, he theoretically can just keep creating more and more supersoldiers in place of destroyed ones as long as he wants. The only weakness he has is they're still entirely edible, even if super-hard. With just a bit of water, the biscuits soften up like normal, which is a bit of a problem with a high-capacity Big Eater like Luffy, especially when he has a weather-conjuring crew member like Nami.
Cracker: I simply control my perfectly crafted masterpieces and make new ones, if the situation calls for it! That's the power and beauty of my biscuits — saying that my strength is limitless doesn't do it justice! It took you everything you had just to defeat one guy, who was nothing more than one of the infinite amount of biscuits I have at my beck and call... I literally only have to lift a single finger!- Sibling and fellow Sweet Commander Katakuri has the power to create, manipulate, and become mochi (or rather, the sticky rice dough used to make mochi), and while he can't quite create soldiers out of them, he easily puts most Logias in the manga to shame and even makes the Admirals look a bit unimaginative, easily creating gigantic striking limbs with size only limited by his desires, tanking blows while looking like he actually got damaged, entrap enemies and even imitate Luffy's techniques except better just using carefully-manipulated mochi, among other uses in an absurdly huge repertoire. And while it's also edible, it's significantly harder to eat due to the rate of production (not to mention Luffy doesn't like eating mochi, probably because his own Rubber Man status means it's harder for him to chew), and Katakuri can always fall back on (and combine this power with) his top-tier Charles Atlas Superpower if needed. Little surprise he was Luffy's strongest opponent up to that point and really shown how much he needed to improve. Luffy still wins by virtue of being more endurable than Katakuri and also earning the Commander's respect.
- Charlotte Smoothie is a lesser example, but still here. Her Juice-Juice Fruit allows her to wring juice out of things (including people). While her main use of this power is making tasty beverages for Big Mom's parties, she can also do things like wring poison out of herself and use absorbed juice to grow to colossal size. Plus, her fruit can be a swift death of anyone she grabs.
- O-Tama ate the Kibi Kibi no Mi, which allows her to create dango. Despite Tama herself unable to eat it, she is able to tame various animals if she feeds the dango to them. Sounds weak, right? Then it turns out she can also tame the SMILE users due to them being part-animal, with her also gaining their allegiance. Tama uses it to convert several of Kaido's men to her side and later during the Raid, she singlehandedly turned the tide against Kaido due to it.
- Jewelry Bonney ate or rather, was infused with the Age-Age Fruit, which allows her to change her age, or temporarily change the age of other things. Good for a disguise, and the latter power has useful potential applications, but it still wouldn't seem like it stacks up to the powers of her fellow members of the Worst Generation, such as Eustass Kid's Magnetism Manipulation or Trafalgar Law's ability to cut you to pieces without killing you in the process. But then we find out that she can instantly grow into extremely powerful older versions of herself based on how strong she COULD become, and suddenly her infamy makes a lot more sense.
