Holding Back the Phlebotinum

"You talk big, Bo-Starr, but you're no match for my legion of invincible deathbots! ... Which I'm not going to be using!"

— Skullduggen, Bo-Starr and the Champions of Galastrom by Harry Partridge

The chance of Applied Phlebotinum being applied more than once tends to be inversely proportional to its plot-resolving potential.

If you've got an all-powerful MacGuffin, it'll either be used just once (with a possible No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup handwave) or everyone and their mother has one and it's a big free-for-all.

There's a good narrative reason for this: if you've got something that could resolve just about any conflict by waving it around, then obviously people would use it all the time and your stories would be dreadfully short.

This is why extreme power comes in small packages. Expect explanations about the Balance Between Good and Evil, crossing the Godzilla Threshold, not abusing your powers, or how You Are Not Ready to justify why we can't use the thing that would solve all our problems, and why the All-Powerful Bystander can't be bothered to lift a finger. Or maybe they do reuse it sometimes, but the stories we actually see are the times when they can't or won't. Whatever the in-story reason, the writers are protecting the plot by Holding Back the Phlebotinum.

If there aren't even such explanations, see Forgotten Phlebotinum. If they're actually holding back and not using the phlebotinum until they need to, see I Am Not Left-Handed. Sometimes, though, holding back may have bad consequences, one of which is that the power will burst out like a balloon if it's held back for too long— but expect this to happen when it's most dramatic to do so.

Compare The World Is Not Ready, It Only Works Once, or Reed Richards Is Useless. See also Limit Break and Drama-Preserving Handicap. If the all-powerful force is a character instead of an object, you've got Deus Exit Machina. If you try to use it again, you'll usually find that it was So Last Season. If not justified well, this becomes an Idiot Plot. If the reason for holding back is a good chance of hurting yourself or leaving yourself vulnerable after use, you're looking at a Death or Glory Attack. Could possibly be a result of Too Awesome to Use. If the power is rejected or discarded, rather than merely unused, it may be No Man Should Have This Power. If two distinct forces that are used separately sound like they would be even more powerful together, but a Hand Wave prevents the combination, it's an Obvious Rule Patch.

noreallife

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• The Lyrical Nanoha series actually gives a good reason for the tendency to wait until late in battle to use the most powerful "Breaker" techniques: these techniques do not use the mage's own power, but instead concentrate latent magic released into the atmosphere during battle. At the end of a fierce all-out battle, a Breaker can be a nuclear-scale attack; at the very beginning of hostilities, it's about as powerful and dangerous as a belch.
• In Blood+, chiropterans can only be killed by Saya's blood but Hagi is a stronger fighter. Only once in the series does Hagi think to borrow Saya's sword after letting her coat it with her blood. This case has some justification, since there's a time limit to how long Saya's blood remains effective once it's drawn. Red Shield previously tried to manufacture bullets incorporating Saya's blood but found them ineffective, and Saya herself often has to redraw her blood during the same battle. Given that Hagi and Saya end up being separated from each other in many battles, it's not an efficient strategy.
• Yu-Gi-Oh!:
  • In the very first episode the main character pulls off a miraculous come-from-behind victory by getting the five parts of Exodia in his hand for an instant win. In the third episode, a minor villain destroys the cards so suspense can be maintained in future duels.
  • Similarly, the Egyptian God Cards have a tendency to end up out of Yugi and Kaiba's reach when they would really help out. When possessing Jonouchi for a duel against Yugi, Marik forces Yugi to remove Slifer/Osiris from his deck lest Jonouchi immediately dies; when Yugi and Kaiba end up trapped in the Virtual World, they lose access to their God Cards because they don't exist in the Virtual World's card database; and in the Doma arc, the God Cards are immediately stolen, turned into energy sources for the Arc Villain's plan, and only recovered when the plan goes to hell at the end of the arc.
• Dragon Ball:
  • The Senzu Beans can cure any wound sans death. In the earlier stories there are literally hundreds of them around. In later books there are less than 10 at any given time, making the preservation of the Senzu a major plot point. This is justified by Yajirobe eating the majority of Korin's stock. In Trunks's Bad Future the plant died off, meaning no more beans at all. In Dragon Ball Z Abridged, it's handwaved that these couldn't be consumed by Goku due to a hole in his esophagus.
  • Mr Popo counts too. When introduced at the end of the King Piccolo saga, he far surpasses Goku (his lack of help in the fight against Piccolo Daimao is lampshaded by Goku), and later he is shown to be as fast as Goten and Trunks in their Super Saiyan states and unharmed by either of them. This is hand waved by his inability to leave the lookout, as he is its custodian who helps the Guardian of Earth perform their duties.
  • Hit from Universe 6 is somewhat handicapped in Tournament appearances, since he's an assassin by trade and his best combat techniques are lethal ones. When Goku fights him in a life-and-death fight outside the rules of a Tournament, Hit defeats him with one blow, an invisible ki-punch straight to the heart. Goku only avoided death right then and there by sneakily firing an energy blast into the sky that came back down and restarted his heartbeat.
• Most Mobile Suit Gundam series have a weapon or two that are used only once or sparingly.
  • The original Gundam had the Solar System and the Colony Laser. No reason's given for Solar System's only use on Solomon (Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin adds a brief scene of Zeon forces crippling it after its firing, and the war ended before it could be repaired), but the Colony Laser only had one shot because Ghiren was too anxious to use it, and fired it before it was fully ready.
  • The Solar System sees another use in Gundam 0083, which also sees its destruction, thus explaining why it isn't around in later works.
  • Zeta Gundam had Gryps 2, and that was damaged in battle and couldn't be used again without repairs.
  • Gundam Wing had Libra's cannon, which can't be fired serially because it burns out several components each time it's used. The Gundam Engineers, who were forced to work on Libra, added this defect on purpose.
    • The 5 gundams themselves turn out to be a case of this. The scientists had the resources and technology to make them a lot more powerful, but were afraid of the implications. The one Suit that doesn't abide to this is the Wing Zero, which quickly justifies these fears in it's first appearance.
  • Gundam X had the various Satellite Cannons, which required a direct line of sight to the Moon and required the Gundam to stand totally still for about ten seconds before it could be fired, which severely limits the situations it can be used in. In addition, a major theme of the series is that a superweapon as powerful as the Satellite Cannon should not exist, so the heroes tend to use it very sparingly.
  • ∀ Gundam:
    • The Moonlight Butterfly, which everyone was frightened over. While probably the most powerful weapon in the entire franchise, it also can't be used without absolutely titanic levels of collateral damage: if activated, it wipes out everything in range except the suit that activated it.
    • A novelization of Turn A reveals that the eponymous Gundam never used more than 5% of its true power throughout the series. This makes some sense, as Loran often deliberately held back in order to limit the destruction caused by battle. Though this does raise the question of why the Turn-X (the Turn A's equal in all aspects) was apparently also not up to spec during the series.
  • In Gundam Build Divers, it's explained that Trans-Am System can only be used safely by those with sturdy builds. Despite Riku having the 00 Diver, which is based on 00 Gundam, his build isn't up to snuff and after a GN Drive is damaged using it, he promises not to use it until he's strong enough to do so. Even when his build is up to snuff, he refuses to use it as he becomes afraid of overestimating his strength. He ultimately uses it when Tsukasa Shiba threatens to destroy the game.
• Shakugan no Shana: Alastor is here instead of Deus Exit Machina because his power is only ever used once, in a manner much more like a Wave-Motion Gun i.e, a weapon, not someone who really does anything. He isn't used again (besides the obvious) because there's a chance it could kill Shana.
• Played with in Code Geass with the FLEIJA warheads. At first, Suzaku has one and is swearing to whatever god(s) he believes in that he will not shoot it, until he gets careless and goes up against an opponent he cannot beat. This being Suzaku, he's unwilling to accept this fact, and when it finally dawns on him he immediately accepts death. This triggers the Geass Lelouch gave him last season, Tokyo goes up in a pink sphere of death and supposedly kills Nunnaly. In the final battle, Schneizel fires one about once every five minutes. Once Lelouch has control of the Damocles, he fires one to prove a point.
• A Certain Magical Index:
  • Index has all of the Church's forbidden magical knowledge stored in her functional memory but is not herself capable of actually casting magic... not that that stops her from taking down a golem using distracting phrases and safety pins. Of course, the end of the first arc makes it clear that she can use magic, and only everyone around her keeping her Locked Out of the Loop prevents her from essentially becoming a story-breaking Person of Mass Destruction.
  • Mikoto Misaka, one of the heroines of the series who's also the protagonist of her own spin-off A Certain Scientific Railgun, almost never uses her full powers in a fight. This is due to the fact that her full powers are pretty much inescapably lethal, and she isn't about to kill people. But on rare occasions she does get a chance to let loose on something that isn't human, and bystanders are often left stunned at the level of power she displays.
• Late in Fullmetal Alchemist, Alphonse actually gets a Philosopher's Stone that Kimblee dropped, but only after the brothers had decided they wouldn't use it for themselves even if they got it. In the earlier anime, the same thing happens except Kimblee doesn't drop the stone; Alphonse IS the stone, and when someone uses it for its supposed "no cost" transmutation power, it turns out that the stone gets used up after all - part of Alphonse's armor gets disintegrated.
• In the Chapter Black saga of YuYu Hakusho, Yusuke is joined by several psychics. One of them, Kaito, not only has the power to take anyone's soul that violates his rules but also prevent anyone from using violence in his territory. While this might have been useful during the ensuing chaos, the only time he is seen using his abilities is when Genkai is trying to prove a point to the heroes.
• Naruto:
  • Naruto faces this difficulty when it comes to the Kyuubi. If he drew on its power he could readily defeat many opponents who otherwise give him trouble, but when he does it quickly overwhelms his ability to reason. A large part of Shippuden revolves around his attempts to suppress the Kyuubi and find alternative powers. Later chapters see Naruto training hard to avert this trope. The strength of the opponents he must fight is such that he needs to master the full power of the Kyuubi and soon.
  • Madara does this after his ultimate attack is interrupted. He informs his opponents he could very well use it again and easily kill them all, but it'd be insulting to use the same attack twice in one fight.
  • There are food pills known as Hyōrōgan that can replenish enough of a person's chakra to allow them to fight for three days straight without rest and its only negative side effect is that you could gain weight if you eat too many of them. Naturally, we never see them actually utilized in a battle situation.
• Space Battleship Yamato: The Wave-Motion Gun mentioned above, a super-powerful cannon that frequently decimates the enemy but leaves the ship without power (therefore vulnerable) before and after use. Several episodes set up the ability to use the Wave-Motion Gun at the end. The gun was not -always- all-powerful, as Desler's version was once reflected back at him. By the second season, every ship in the newly-rebuilt navy had one, and dozens of ships all fired their superweapon at the Comet at once. No One Could Survive That!. Or maybe not...
  • The gun's sheer power was also a problem. The first time the crew fired it, they'd been trying to destroy an enemy base. Instead, they blew up an entire continent, and the ship itself was nearly caught in the resulting shock wave (no power, remember). They quickly realized that they needed to be careful with the weapon, otherwise they could easily wipe out a planet and/or themselves.
• Angol Mois of Sgt. Frog is The Lord of Terror, capable of destroying entire planets with her powers. Hence, despite the fact that she could be a big help (and considering the multitude of giant, planet destroying things they face, it would be a big help) she rarely uses her powers to fight. If she does, she'll either use the most minuscule amount she can, or get nerfed by a villain.
• Magi: Labyrinth of Magic: Sinbad has captured no less than seven dungeons, thus possessing seven metal vessels with djinni. All of these get stolen in his very first appearance, thus stopping him from steamrolling the plot.
• Sonic X: At the beginning of the second series, the Chaos Emeralds get scattered across the galaxy, preventing Sonic from using them to transform into Super Sonic and stomp the Metarex's forces when they invade his home planet. Then the heroes spend the rest of the saga gathering them in order to defeat the Metarex and restore their planet.
• Pokémon: The Series:
  • After Charmander evolved into Ash's strongest Pokémon Charizard, the writers used his disobedience and pride to keep Ash from using him to stomp his opponents, instead reserving him for the toughest foes. Then once he became obedient to Ash again, they semi-retired him by having him stay at the Charicific Valley to train, with Ash only calling him back for special occasions.
  • An infamous trend in the original series was Ash releasing or leaving behind his Pokémon immediately or shortly after they evolved into their final stage for random reasons, starting with Primeape.
  • Similarly, the writers used Ash's insistence on building up a new team from scratch (Pikachu aside) for every new region from Hoenn onwards as an excuse to keep him from using his previous Pokémon League-level Pokémon at the beginning of each sequel series.
• Ayakashi Triangle:
  • Garaku has an enormously-powerful Imagination-Based Superpower, but hardly ever assists the protagonist against strong foes because he wants Suzu to grow stronger without him. He's constantly spying on them to check their status, only interfering if he's sure they need his help.
  • Suzu's Split Personality Kanade has much better control over their powers than Suzu, but only uses it once. Eventually, Kanade becomes a Literal Split Personality, and loses access to her powers because they were tied to Suzu's body.

Comic Books

• Take a look at Batman who has access to space alien technology. He could use it to easily subdue criminals in Gotham. But no, whenever Batman is in Gotham, he is restricted to real world-level technology (or not too far away from). He's also had access to both a Green Lantern power ring and a Sinestro Corps ring, but turned down both for varying reasons. This gets lampshaded in JLA: Classified where he reluctantly opens his "sci-fi closet" and mutters that he hopes the GCPD never finds out about it.
• Birds of Prey:
  • Justified in the case of Oracle, who made the decision to forgo using any of the fantastic technology or magic that her friends from the Justice League could supply her with to cure her paraplegia until it can be made available to the general public as a show of solidarity with other disabled people. Then came the New 52.
  • Black Canary could defeat most of the relatively mundane foes with a single Canary Cry. She doesn't because she usually follows the Thou Shalt Not Kill rule, and a Canary Cry could kill an ordinary human at close range. One of the few times she did use the Canary Cry was when she fought a supernatural life draining killer named Harvest and it barely even phased her. There was one issue where she had an internal monologue lampshading this; as a martial artist she's trained to fight with her fists and her heart, and using her metahuman powers would be like bringing a bazooka to a boxing match. On this occasion Oracle had been kidnapped, though, so she was using the Cry right left and center with a 'screw them' attitude. Also, she tended to use the cry quite freely to break down doors, break through walls, knock out tanks, and so forth; she was just reluctant to use it directly on people.
  • Lady Shiva was briefly on the team, during which time she explicitly swore a no-killing oath in respect of Black Canary above, explaining why she didn't lay out every villain the team fought in five seconds flat.
• Cable has a techno-organic virus that his powers are constantly engaged in holding back, lest it overtake his body. The little left to him is enough to occasionally summon his oversize futuristic rifle back to him. Occasionally he boosts his powers with a staff called a Psimitar, but that just brings him up to normal Psychic Powers level (again, see Franklin). His full power is about the same as Jean in Phoenix mode. Naturally, he only gets to use it on rare occasions before whatever's stopping the TO virus proves not to be foolproof, or using his power this way burns it out, reducing him to familiar levels. His Age of Apocalypse counterpart X-Man got to use this full power more often, but writers clearly didn't know what to do with someone at that power level, so he was often half-burnt out power-wise, presumed dead, etc. Recently they played the "overtaxed his powers and is semi-permanently at a more manageable level" card. As of 2018, though, he's back, and if anything, stronger than ever - though also possibly insane. It turns out that a) his powers were restored and boosted by the Life Seed, b) he's dying. Again.
• Fantastic Four:
  • Franklin Richards, son of Reed and Sue, has absolute omnipotence as his top range. At first he was deliberately held back—a psychic Power Limiter kept him from rewriting the universe at age five and his Astral Projection powers he had when he was in Power Pack were all that seeped through. Using his total power later has burned out his powers completely, giving him the angst of being the only Muggle among the Richards family. In the Fantastic Five possible future, a similar overtaxing of his powers reduced him to the level of your average psychic character. Apparently something like this happening to him falls under You Can't Fight Fate: the Days of Future Past and Fantastic Force versions of adult Franklin are at a similar power level.
  • Uatu The Watcher is an embodiment of this trope. He is theoretically capable of using his vast power to intervene in just about anything, but refuses to do so for the sake of his vow of non-interference. (Not that he hasn't bent and broken his vow numerous times.)
• Look at The Flash; somebody who can run at supersonic or sometimes at faster than light speed, and whose perception of time when doing this gives him inhumanly fast thoughts should have ABSOLUTELY NO problem in dealing with villains who have ice guns or explosive boomerangs.
• The Incredible Hulk: Thor and the Hulk have clashed many times through the years, with the majority of their fights ending in draws. Just before a memorable clash in Peter David's run, Thor revealed that he had intentionally held back during all of those past encounters, as he was worried unleashing his full strength would cause him to lose control.
• In the Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics), there was the problem of Chaos Emeralds Are Everywhere, where Robotnik or Sonic had the means to grab a bunch of them to use in a superweapon/go Super Sonic. When Ian Flynn took over writing duties, he fixed that problem by bringing about the seven normal Chaos Emeralds.
• In John Ostrander's writing of The Spectre, the eponymous character and his partner Nate Kane were taking a train. Nate asks why don't they just take a plane because it would be a lot quicker. The Spectre responds, "If speed is your concern we can always do the mirror trick again." to which Nate Kane responds "Forget about it!"
• Spider-Man:
  • In Spider-Verse, the Spider-Man infused with the Enigma Force is this: he's powerful enough to eradicate the Inheritors on the spot, but he can't leave his Earth as the Enigma Force can only stay on that Earth. On the plus side, that makes that Earth a safe haven for the Spiders as the Inheritors will not go there and risk being killed.
  • This is the reason why Superior Spider-Man (2013) dragged on for so long—Avengers vs. X-Men deprived the heroes of a few good telepaths, the Fantastic Four were off on a time-traveling romp and Iron Man was off in space. That last one came back to bite Ock, though.
• In Star Wars (Marvel 2015), Anakin as a Padawan questions Obi-Wan as to why Jedi don't put kyber crystals into other weapons like spears or blasters in addition to lightsabers and tries to float some ideas by him. Obi-Wan cuts him off to explain that it's been done before (such as the lightsaber rifle seen in Darth Vader: Dark Lord of the Sith), and that The Order Doesn't Like Guns in order to ensure that they only ever harm those they intend to and that they're seen as peacekeepers rather than warmongers.
  • However, lightsaber lances have been shown to exist on several occasions but they're exclusively used by the Jedi Temple Guards (and Darth Bane on occasion).
• Teen Titans: As for the kid superhero Impulse, who could run at supersonic speeds, the reason that normal-speed villains could give him a hard time was that Impulse was such an impulsive thinker and was often his own worst enemy.
• X-Men: Almost every omega level mutant on the map is insane, either permanently or as the plot dictates, that way none of them can change the status quo in any meaningful way. Magneto is also only allowed access to the full scope of his powers as a villain; whenever he joins the X-Men he suffers some kind of Redemption Demotion that keeps him from making the rest of the team useless^note though it's justified in his case since his powers are explicitly more than his completely normal physiology can handle without degrading his body, starting with his nervous system. Thus, the more he uses his powers, the more insane he becomes. So it's less Redemption Demotion than Demotion Redemption. Given how other Omega–level mutants seem to degrade in sanity as they power up, this may be something of a common problem..

Fan Works

• In Kyon: Big Damn Hero, Haruhi's powers are filtered through Yuki to hold back the phlebotinum as well as make them controllable. Then she changes them even more so Closed Space isn't formed.
• Consciously averted in With Strings Attached; the author's stated philosophy is pretty much that if the four can solve a problem or win a fight in three seconds, that's what happens, and the plot will deal with it.
• Justified in "Frostbite". Queried as to why Biri didn't use her exothermic induction field (that's technobabble for "my tricorder has a flamethrower") to warm everybody up when they were freezing to death in the snow, she points out it would've lit them up like a Christmas tree on the Breens' infrared sensors.
• In Sonic X: Dark Chaos, Maledict explicitly holds back from using the Galaxy Crusher because he wants to conquer the Milky Way Galaxy rather than destroy it and because he's utterly terrified of the prospect that it could be hijacked by his enemies. Indeed, it's only Dark Tails and hordes of Shroud devouring the galaxy that convinces him to reactivate it.
• Averted in Nil Desperandum where Luluka, having memorized the blueprints for FLEIJA warheads in her previous life, liberally abuses them as part of her revolution.
• In the third case of Ace Attorney fangame Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney: The Contempt of Court, Phoenix's Magatama is stolen and replaced with a fake. The practical story reason for this only becomes apparent in the 4th case, where we find out not only was the defendant of Case 3 actually guilty, he's the overall Big Bad of the game. Let's just say that if Phoenix had the Magatama, a lot of Reveals would've been spoiled early.
• Constants and Variables: While she is no longer spread across the probability space, Elizabeth still has full control of her tear-based abilities. When Narcissa uses Legilimency on her in Ollivanders, she gets a brief glimpse of several alternate situations in the shop that she could see at any time (having placed a mental barrier to prevent them from overwhelming her), causing her to think that she is some type of Seer.
• In Pokémon Reset Bloodlines, Ash's Domain of Power Bloodline ability allows him to give his Pokemon an incredible temporary power boost. The first time he unwittingly used this power, his Charmander (a non-evolved Starter Pokemon) was able to defeat a Kingdra (a fully evolved Water-Dragon type Pokemon that is extremely resistant to Fire attacks) with a single Ember attack (Ember is the weakest Fire-type move). Once he becomes aware of this power, he refrains from using it in Pokemon competition battles because he considers it cheating. The trainer Red strongly disapproves of this attitude because he believes holding back is disrespectful to opponents. Red himself has no qualms against using his own Domain of Power Bloodline ability which allows him to calculate the odds of victory and plan accordingly. The two don't get along afterwards. Ash thinks Red is a cheater, and Red thinks Ash is deliberately mocking his opponents by not giving it his all. Ash is however willing to use his powers in life-and-death matters and/or when it's to help other people.

Films — Live-Action

• Iron Man Films:
  • In the second film, he actually raises this point himself when testifying to the Senate commission. He calls the suit (or rather himself) the new nuclear deterrent. As a result of his influence, the world's experiencing a long-lasting period of peace and will continue to do so as long as the suit remains under the control of a stable, trustworthy entity. The irony is that he's an alcoholic dying guy who later uses above-military grade weaponry to explode glass in a crowded room and considers himself "stable and trustworthy".
  • Another example of this trope in the second movie are Iron Man's wrist lasers. Extremely powerful and likely capable of handling anything Vanko could have thrown at him, but they could only be used once.
    • And equally pointedly and quickly averted in The Avengers (2012), when Stark first casually uses the above form of them during the Helicarrier fight, to cut through debris and help salvage the situation, and then in the new suit used in the climactic battle, he's upgraded them to be reusable and (per JARVIS' commentary) draw from the suit's main power supply.
    • Though one wonders why he never tried to deploy them against Thanos... although Thanos easily handles visibly much stronger attacks.
• In Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, the cursed Aztec gold. While it does come with some downsides, it provides those who steal it with immortality, and lifting the curse doesn't come with an excessive cost. Logically, one would expect the heroes to go temporarily get themselves cursed before fighting the various villains in future movies. Conveniently though, the island containing the Aztec gold sunk to the bottom of the sea after the events of the first movie, preventing them from obtaining it.
• In Star Trek:
  • The Genesis Device would undoubtedly still have been enormously useful as a planetbusting (or, indeed, nebula-busting) WMD, even if design flaws in the prototype made it useless for its original purpose of planetary terraforming. Fortunately, the ST writers made sure to end that particular movie arc with the device revealed to be unstable due to the use of protomatter, which presumably accounted for its abandonment, even though it would've made a hell of a weapon despite the instability, and even though the inventor of the technology, Carol Marcus, was still around (despite being removed from the franchise after one movie).
  • Also, as the third and fourth movies showed, the Klingon Empire was none too thrilled to see the Federation have a planet-killing weapon. Had the Federation been able to salvage the research, there could easily have been a war.
  • A non-phlebotinum example: in "Whom Gods Destroy", a shape-shifting impostor captures Kirk and copies his appearance to escape the asylum planet where he is imprisoned, only to be stopped due to Scotty refusing to beam up the Captain without saying the proper response to the code phrase "Queen to Queen's Level 3". The code phrase had never been mentioned before and would never be mentioned again, even in situations featuring impostors running around (such as "Turnabout Intruder" where the omission is quite glaring). Not to mention Garth's shapeshifting power itself, which he was "taught" by the natives of Antos IV. If the skill can be learned, why doesn't the Federation send its intelligence agents to Antos IV to acquire shapeshifting ability themselves?
• Averted in Star Wars: While the original plan was to use the Death Star once and rule by fear, the Empire does use it every time they can.
• In Quest of the Delta Knights, a made-for-TV movie popularized by its appearance on Mystery Science Theater 3000, the Delta Knights were an organization dedicated to finding Archimedes' lost inventions, and using them to "bring the world out of the dark ages." In the end, the heroes decide to destroy the inventions because "the world isn't ready for such power." Of course, most of those inventions were used heavily in the Renaissance Period, the time period in which the movie is set.
• In Pacific Rim, Gipsy Danger spends the movie punching various kaiju and even using a ship to batter one. Only when it's absolutely critical do they remember that they have an Absurdly Sharp Blade that could end pretty much any kaiju with a single strike. Naturally, this is brought up in How It Should Have Ended, where the robot then stands guard at the portal beheading any kaiju that pokes its head out.
• In Doc's letter to Marty in Back to the Future Part III, he mentions that the DeLorean's flying circuits had been destroyed by the lightning strike that sent him from 1955 to 1885 in the previous film, meaning that the car can never fly again (but it can still drive, and Doc decides to stay in 1885 for at least a bit, so he drains the fuel to prevent corrosion, then hides it for Marty to retrieve, refuel, and return to 1985). Later, when Marty takes it back to 1885 to save Doc, he accidentally tears the fuel line, so now neither of them (well, the same one at different points in its timeline) can fly or drive (Mr. Fusion only powered the flux capacitor and time circuits, not the internal combustion engine), and Doc and Marty spend much of the movie thinking of a way to get it up to 88 miles per hour. This ensures that Doc stays in 1885 long enough to fall in love with Clara.

Literature

• Animorphs:
  • The instant maple and ginger flavored oatmeal is only referenced in one book. In their defense, as Jake points out, battles that involve oatmeal will never really end up being historical.
  • Also, if Erek King (a powerful robot in human disguise) could fight, the war would be over in about a week. Unfortunately, while he recognizes the necessity of the kids' cause, he himself finds violence to be too horrific to participate in (largely because his memories of the experience never fade— as a robot, every single thing he's experienced remains day-one fresh; not a good combination with humanlike emotions) and is programmed to never commit any violent act. After having that prohibition removed once, he horrifically slaughters hundreds of enemies with his bare hands, and... is utterly distraught, puts the prohibition back, and tells the others he's never doing anything like that again. After seeing the fruits of his work, nobody protests.
• In the third Grey Griffins book, Ernie gains superhuman speed as the result of some weird fairy blood magic or something. But he can't use it. How come? Because it'll hasten his transformation into a changeling. If that's not enough, Natalia is given a magnifying glass that lets her see magic. She tries it out in a world filled with magic, and it nearly blinds her. Too much magic, dont'cha know.
• In Hero.com, the eponymous website first offers a free one-hour trial with a limit of one superpower. If you want to get more powers, more variety, and more time with them, you need to pay up. In the sister series Villain.net, the protagonist doesn't need to pay (with money, anyway), but he can only use four at a time and the powers have an unspecified time limit. Villain.net itself was ripped off of Hero.com by the bad guys, and they don't completely know how it works.
• In Dragon Bones, Oreg is a powerful mage, can make himself invisible, can teleport in certain circumstances, and is trained as an assassin. He is never sent to assassinate anyone. No one explicitly discusses why not, but it is made clear that the delicate power balance of the country could be disbalanced if the king were to be killed. There is also the fact that Oreg is a slave who cannot be freed. Ward doesn't approve of slavery, and seldom gives Oreg any orders other than the usual ones he gives as tactician and leader of their mercenary group. He doesn't seem quite comfortable with exploiting Oreg's abilities, so this phlebotonium is only applied if and when Oreg decides to do so. The main enemy also has a mage-slave on his side, and it might be dangerous to mess with him. Oreg doesn't seem to like murder, which is understandable as, like Erek from Animorphs, he would have to live with the memories. (He's more or less immortal.)
• Harry Potter has the Time Turners, which are used for Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and never again in the original series, with the only explanation being that 1) it ran on a Stable Time Loop model, meaning you couldn't actually change the past with it, just view it from a different angle, and 2) repeatedly time-traveling was driving the character doing it nuts. The plot of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, however, revolves around them.
• Reign of the Seven Spellblades: Chela is revealed in volume 2 (episode 11 of the anime) to be a "morphling" half-elf—i.e. she ordinarily looks human but can temporarily switch to elf form as a Super Mode. She rarely does so, preferring to reserve it for the Godzilla Threshold since she wouldn't actually grow in skill if she relied on it too much. Also, in volume 2 she was enjoying her duel with Stacy too much and wanted to drag the fight out, since it was the most she'd interacted with her estranged half-sister since they were twelve, and during the Tournament Arc in the year 3 books she was directly forbidden by their father from using it as a condition of being allowed to join Stacy's team (he's one of the judges and wanted to avoid the appearance of nepotism).

Live-Action TV

• Babylon 5:
  • Early in the series, the heroes discovered an ancient superweapon on the planet below. To prevent it from being misused, one of their allies took charge of it, but promised to help out whenever he could. He was then conveniently absent whenever the weapon would have been useful. The forgetfulness was lampshaded later when, needing power to boost a La Résistance broadcast, Franklin suggests to Ivanova they use the super weapon on Epsilon III to help. Ivanova then realizes that only an idiot would not realize the obvious, and beats a hasty path to the planet below.
  • On at least one occasion, it was mentioned that they tried to contact him, but their transmissions were being jammed by the forces attacking the station.
  • They do use it as a holographic PA system and for spying, though.
  • Other attempts at justifying this were set up. Amongst other things, when a large group of Shadows attacked, they purposely moved very close to the station, so that the weapon couldn't fire. Oh, and in the payoff for the Chekhov's gun, it's used to solve a Time Paradox.
  • In Severed Dreams, Sheridan specifically stated that he wanted to keep Draal secret and keep the fight between Earth forces (although he used Draal's holograms openly in the same episode.)
  • The spinoff Crusade featured a brand new class of ship with an extremely powerful main weapon. So as not to make the ship all-conquering, firing this main weapon drained the ship of its power, leaving it vulnerable for up to a minute, thus ensuring it was only used as a last resort.
• In the remake of Battlestar Galactica, season 3, much fuss is made over how Cylons aboard some ships were completely wiped out by a space object that carried a virus that can instantly infect every single humanoid Cylon in the universe thanks to their Downloading ability. The Cylons run away, leaving the human fleet to find it later. Turns out the virus is just a childhood disease like measles, but the Cylons don't have the antibodies to fight it. There's some worry that Sharon will die (she doesn't). Now the human fleet holds a weapon that can completely destroy their enemy completely if just used. And what do they do? Chuck it out the airlock! Admiral Adama isn't comfortable with using bioweapons. So that entire arc is basically pointless filler, and a trump card that could possibly save humanity if the Cylons attack (as they often do) is lost forever.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • During season five, Buffy comes into possession of a powerful magic hammer, which is completely ignored up until the final episode, where it is suddenly pulled off the shelf and used to quite handily beat the villain, a frigging god, into submission. After this impressive display, the weapon is never seen or mentioned ever again.
  • Xander also gains a level in badass by the mystical implantation of military fighting prowess. Seasons later, he explains that it fades over time and has mostly just gone.
  • A justifiable example occurs when the Scoobies used an Enjoining Spell to destroy the Big Bad of Season 4. The following episode showed that there were magical consequences of using this spell, as the First Slayer tries to kill them in their dreams.
  • Over on Angel, the reason why Willow (basically god-like in her powers by the end of BtVS) doesn't step in during the Illyria arc and help Fred, previously established as a good friend of hers, is that she's "on another astral plane". The (insanely stupid and out of character, but guest-star-availability-motivated) reason Giles doesn't bother trying to contact her is that Angel now works for Wolfram & Hart, and the Scoobies fear that he's turned evil. Again. Some more.
• Doctor Who: In "The Girl in the Fireplace", when the main characters discover a spaceship filled with time portals which its repair droids are using to stalk Madame de Pompadour until she's a specific age, the Doctor offers a vague comment that they've become part of events to explain why he can't just use the TARDIS and they have to rely on the portals. The real reason is that the TARDIS could easily solve the conflict, to say nothing of negating the tragedy of the ending.
• In The Flash (2014) and Legends of Tomorrow, Firestorm is able to fly and shoot energy blasts, but his main power from the comics - the ability to transmute any kind of matter into any other kind of matter - is a later-discovered ability and something that takes a lot of time and concentration to use, because if he could just turn anything into anything else with a wave of his hand, you'd have a guy who's arguably as overpowered as Superman on a team with much more down-to-earth powers. Even so, he's the most powerful member of the team, and events often conspire to keep Jax and Professor Stein in different places so they can't fuse into Firestorm right away.
  • Legends has the Forgotten Phlebotinum version in Damien Darhk. (He was less bad about it on Arrow, as he wasn't directly confronted as often.) He'll slaughter Redshirts en masse with a few gestures, but never uses his full power against named characters. At one point, the Legends have their hands full with a super-powered enemy... who Darhk casually kills when he walks in. He then tells the Legends that it's time to die... only to pick up a sword and fight hand-to-hand. There's been serious fan discussion on why he might not want to win, given his refusal to just magically snap everyone like twigs (it'd work on even the super-powered team members, except for steel-skinned Nate, who he could probably still life-drain) and claim easy victory.
• One episode of GoGo Sentai Boukenger had Natsuki (Bouken Yellow) charge Ultimate DaiBouken into battle while the other Boukengers are fighting mooks. She proceeds to help her friends by trying to attack the mooks with DaiBouken, sending friend and foe flying, showing why this trope is sometimes a good idea.
• Heroes:
  • They had to do this permanently to Peter. His power is the ability to use the powers of whoever is around him. Eventually he learns to retain them, meaning his power is every power he's encountered ever, making him so all-powerful, so invincible that... using him would solve the problem in a second and utterly wipe out the special effects budget. Therefore, he'd spend most of the season with a king-sized Idiot Ball shackled to him, and his moments of cutting loose tended to be flashing lights seen from offscreen. So to make him usable at all, they had him run afoul of a power-stealing Big Bad (who was killed off before he could wreak too much havoc), and when his powers were restored by Super Serum later, they were much weaker: he can only store one power at a time, and must actually touch you to 'download' it. This put him back in the same weight class as the rest of the cast, resulting in a much more usable character.
  • Hiro, too, in that being able to go back in time to fix things every time something goes wrong could be a bit of a Game-Breaker. They first tried using a variant of Mind over Manners, with time travel instead of telepathy, but eventually nerfed him, too.
• In Kamen Rider Den-O, The Lancer Yuto Sakurai/Zeronos is debatably more powerful and skilled than Ryotaro/Den-O. However, he has to leave matters in Ryotaro's hands several times because he has a limited supply of the cards that allow him to become Zeronos, and more troublesome, using them causes people to forget his existence.
• Power Rangers:
  • This was actually given a Hand Wave pretty early in the first season, where Zordon explains that one of the core rules of being a Ranger is to never be the one to escalate a battle. Only use more powerful weaponry as necessary to defeat the Monster of the Week.
  • Many additional rangers were supposedly more powerful than their teammates, so as a counter, they were often given some kind of limitation to prevent them from swooping into the fight and running rings around the others. The most common excuse is that they are kept in reserve for when things go bad. Or they were busy doing something else. (Particularly, when Tommy becomes the White Ranger, he spends a lot of time fighting Goldar somewhere far from where the other Rangers are battling. Part of this is due to Real Life Writes the Plot; Power Rangers uses stock footage from its Japanese counterpart, and when five of you use Zyuranger suits and one of you uses a Dairanger suit, there's no footage of everyone versus the same foe.)
• Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis frequently did bring back old phlebotinum, but occasionally it's shown that various political organizations and red tape often make it difficult to pull them out quickly, as a lot of it is being examined or stored by other organizations at Area 51. Whenever they get something truly shattering and usable, it tends to get blown up eventually culminating in the destruction of Area 51 itself during the Atlantis finale.
  • There was also an interesting case, in which the cast had to trick the Goa'uld into believing that they are doing this, when in fact It Only Works Once, as they'd be defenseless to an outright attack at that moment.
  • Probably the most egregious case is the Kull warrior armor that made its wearer Nigh-Invulnerable. Even after building a weapon they could use to kill the supersoldiers without damaging the armor, by stopping the effect of the ancient healing device used to give them life, no effort is made to collect armor sets for SG teams.
  • This trope is used sometimes to provide variation on recycled plots. For example, "Arthur's Mantle" rehashes the plot of the much earlier "Crystal Skull" when Cam and Sam are transferred to an alternate dimension. They immediately remember "Crystal Skull" and run off to find Daniel, who should be able to see them since he has also been to an alternate dimension. It turns out that they are in a different alternate dimension, so Daniel can't see them and they have to find a different way to communicate.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation:
  • In the episode "Darmok", the command crew learns that the two words "Darmok" and "Jalad" both refer to a particular body of myths and legends. They learn this by querying the ship's computer. So who does nobody think to say "Computer: Cross-reference: Darmak, Jalad, Tanagra?"
  • Early in the series, it was established that the Federation had the technology to erase specific events from a sentient being's memory. This is almost never used to solve a problem, because each time it would be useful (e.g. "Suddenly Human", "Homeward"), the process was handwaved as simply not working on the brain structures of the aliens of the week.
  • In "Rascals," the medical problem of the week is solved by sending the affected people through the transporter with their older, saved patterns; i.e. loading a backup from when they were okay. The fact that the transporter can be used like this should theoretically solve literally all medical problems and even all ageing itself, so of course it is never used like this again.
• Star Trek in general, in fact, tends to do this a lot with its more mundane gadgets as well as the shiny new MacGuffin Of The Week.
  • In any typical episode from any series, if any of the crew are trapped somewhere, you can expect something to go wrong with the transporters. Send a shuttle craft? That ion storm that's blocking the transporter already downed the last one, which is why the away team is trapped, so it's best not to go throwing away another one. Try to air-drop some supplies? The ion storm will destroy them too.
  • Likewise, if the ship is trapped in some Negative Space Wedgie, expect not only the warp engines but the impulse engines and thrusters to go offline, the dilithium crystals to be drained of power/shut down to prevent their being drained of power, and whatever can get the ship free to be in tragically short supply at the moment.
  • In less dramatic moments, you can also expect the tricorders to have no readings on what this strange new phenomenon the crew are investigating is, and sensors to be either broken or giving unreliable readings.
  • By the way, if this is another holodeck-gone-wild episode, don't expect the holodeck's built-in safeties to work. Either the computer's not taking orders today, or the villain of your favorite holodeck adventure still knows how to trap you in a dungeon or force field when the safeties keep his ray gun from destroying you. There's also a good possibility that one of your enemies is at the controls trying to get you killed, having successfully locked out all of your teammates who are trying to rescue you.
  • Also, when Starfleet created a weapon that could destroy the entire Borg collective, Captain Picard refused to use it. This caused him to get reamed out by an Admiral in a later episode.
  • The TOS episode "Patterns of Force" introduced the subcutaneous transponder, which can lock onto the landing party and beam them up if they are out of communication for an established period. You'd think it would be standard issue for every landing party, given how often communicators get taken away. Not only is it never mentioned before or after, it's not used for that purpose in the episode. It's used to make a laser out of light bulb to escape a cell.
  • In Star Trek: Picard, Seven has apparently forgotten from Star Trek: Voyager the several times they used nanoprobes to bring people back from death.

Multiple Media

• BIONICLE:
  • The six Toa Mata's Mid-Season Upgrade into the much more powerful Toa Nuva is nearly immediately undone by the six Bohrok-Kal robbing their Nuva symbols, rendering their newfound powers moot and forcing the Toa to battle them in other ways, like collecting the Nuva masks. Said masks are held back in a similar way in the following arc, as the Toa would be way too powerful with them — the villages keeping the masks are attacked and some are destroyed, though Tahu is the only one who loses his new masks permanently. In the Mask of Life arc, the Toa Nuva are sent away to the island Voya Nui where they don't have access to their other masks.
  • Tahu is entrusted with the Mask of Time to only use it if it's absolutely necessary, as it contains the power of time itself and misusing it could end reality. Tahu and his Toa team face many challenges after the Bohrok-Kal steal their Elemental Powers, including a confrontation with the Toa-killing monster Rahi Nui, but he keeps the mask a secret, fearful of what it might do. Only when the Kal are about to win and become all-powerful does Tahu reveal the mask — it's near useless as it can only slow down the Kal and Tahu almost passes out from its power. Thankfully, his teammate Gali uses the few seconds while the mask is active to think of a solution. They never use the Mask of Time afterward, due to the risks involved.
  • Exo-Toa armor gave the Toa strength and firepower at the cost of blocking their elemental powers. During the Bohrok-Kal arc, when the Toa were robbed of their powers anyway, they still couldn't use the Exo suits because they vanished after a cave collapse. Turns out the Exo-Toa can switch to an autonomous mode when no one's using them and simply walk off to whatever place they need to guard. By the time the Toa locate them, the Kal are savvy enough to destroy the suits before the Toa get there.
  • Elemental and mask powers are standard for any Toa hero. Combining six elements creates an impenetrable crystal that can trap the strongest of foes. Yet in the Metru Nui arc, the Toa Metru can't use either for most of the story because their elemental powers have depleted on their first couple adventures and they're too untrained to use mask powers. Only at the end do they have access to both and use them successfully. During the Visorak arc, they idiotically walk into the Visorak's trap whose venom mutates them into freaks and blocks their mask powers. They still retain access to their elements but can't combine them because they're too busy bickering and behaving like beasts, having to split up.
  • The Mask of Time Duplication can easily be abused to create an army of whoever uses it, but its owner happens to be Makuta Bitil who already has so many powers that he rarely needs to resort to his mask. When he does, he carefully uses his past selves in a limited capacity for fear of a Temporal Paradox that would erase his present self. Anyone else specifically avoids this type of mask as its power is culturally considered immoral for being an affront to the natural order.
  • Brutaka had a Mask of Dimensional Gates with which he could take himself or his enemies anywhere, even other dimensions. Instead, he mostly used it to cause chaos for fun or as an indirect threat. Later on, the story at least gave the justification that the mask got damaged in battle and became unreliable, then it got destroyed.

Podcasts

• After Taako from The Adventure Zone: Balance manages to buy the ridiculously over-powered Flaming Poisoning Raging Sword Of Doom, he uses it solely as a fashion item and refuses to give it to Magnus or Merle until the second-last arc.

Professional Wrestling

• This has become a recurring complaint about Finn Bálor's Demon King form. In kayfabe it makes no sense for him to not use it against someone like Brock Lesnar, only to throw it away on someone like Baron Corbin. The closest thing to an explanation dates back to his first feud with Bray Wyatt, who challenged Finn to face him without using the Demon. From that point on Finn mostly wrestled as himself, save when someone really pisses him off. (The actual reason Finn doesn't use it much most likely comes down to how WWE books underdog stories.)

Role-Playing Games

• The reboot of Campus Life has this in effect for the students on Campus. Being a Massively Multiplayer Crossover, many characters can do magic, shoot energy beams, teleport, etc, etc... However, doing so will get them in serious trouble with the Campus staff. To a more meta extent, this is also why Planet-Busters such as Goku, Saitama and the like are banned from the RP. The only ones allowed to reach the power scale are usually the Big Bads of the respective arcs, and usually they end up being the Final Boss of said arc.
• In Dino Attack RPG, the Einstein Device, being an Instant-Win Condition, had to be held back until the very last moment. This has been justified since the Einstein Device was largely experimental, leaving it unfinished and untested by the time of the Final Battle. Most of the later stages of the battle were devoted to finishing the device, which was also dangerously close to malfunctioning at the time, and it could not be fired until Viper had a clear shot at Dr. Rex.

Video Games

• Justified and invoked by the player in countless games with consumable items and other limited abilities. While you could go all out and spam your healing items, buffs, one-shot attacks and such to turn every encounter into a curb-stomp battle that style of play may cause you to quickly run out, so many players will instead hoard most of their consumables until boss fights or other pivotal encounters.
• Assassin's Creed:
  • After retrieving the Apple of Eden from the Borgias in Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, Ezio rarely uses it again unless he really needs its power and knowledge. His ally Machiavelli encourages him to use it more often, but Ezio refuses since he doesn't want to become too dependent on it. Eventually it stops working for Ezio entirely since the Apple itself tells him it is time to relinquish it so that future generations of Assassins can use it.
  • In Assassin's Creed: Unity, the Sword of Eden is portrayed as very powerful and in the hands of the Big Bad capable of draining Arno's health very quickly with lightning bolts. Conveniently during the final battle it loses its power, leaving it a powerful but ordinary sword.
• Sunset Overdrive The player forges the sword Excalimune a very powerful sword that's all kinds of awesome cutting down enemies like butter. Of course it ends up getting nerfed to a standard melee weapon skin by the time the mission is over.
  • The player still gets to unleash its power during its weapon challenge though.
• Wing Commander Prophecy features an alien Wave-Motion Gun the protagonists stole and mounted on their space carrier, then realized they had no way to safely recharge it. Or as one character put it:
  "...a fire-and-forget weapon... we fired it once, and now we can forget about firing it again."
• In Star Control, the Ur-Quan don't bring their ultra-massive super-duper Precursor battleship the Sa-Matra into play in the first war until it looks like the Alliance of Free Stars may actually stop them. Once it is brought into play, though, the war winds up pretty quickly to an Ur-Quan victory. It's never brought into play afterwards, mostly because it's being held as the prize fought over between the Ur-Quan Kzer-Za and the Kohr-Ah. They also don't use it during the end of the Doctrinal Conflict, when the Kohr-Ah are winning. This is presumably because it would be cheating, since that was the only reason the Kzer-Za beat the Kohr-Ah last time.
  Part of the lore suggests, apparently, that at least part of the reason that the Ur-Quan are so hesitant to use the Sa-Matra is because it's practically a religious artifact to them, representing the power to ensure that nobody can ever enslave them again (long story). Using it except in direst need presumably gives too much credit to the opponent and debases the Sa-Matra itself.
• In God Hand, Gene wears a Deitic Brace on his arm in order to seal off the full power of the eponymous God Hand, requiring a bar to be filled first before he takes the Brace off and goes to town. But considering the game's difficulty, it makes some people wonder why he can't just leave the brace off. The answer is that by sealing off the power of the God Hand, Gene is able to build it up so when he does release the Brace, he's virtually invincible. This actually makes Gene a more effective fighter than Azel, who doesn't use a Brace.
• Ragnell in Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance, in which Ike had apparently been carrying Ragnell since his father's death but doesn't pull it out until encountering the Black Knight. The same sword is held back again in Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn, but you get it earlier and there's a reason Ike doesn't have it up to that point.
• Metroid: Other M: Adam Malkovich, Samus' "Commanding Officer," must give her permission to use mission critical items, such as her Morph Ball, Super Missiles, and others. The real annoyance in this game is that Samus isn't actually under Adam's command. She does it to protect any survivors on the station, and for the sake of the Galactic Federation Marines she's commanding. And for some reason, she doesn't turn on several purely defensive upgrades until Adam tells her to, even at serious risk to herself. Samus then counters this trope midway through the game. Once she's lost contact with Adam, she then cheekily transmits on his designated frequency a request for authorization for several of her upgrades, saying that if she doesn't hear him counter it he must have approved.
  Word of God states that this is merely a case of Values Dissonance, that Samus was acting properly according to Japanese military and social traditions, and that the one-woman army space-pirate stomping ultra-badass that she was before this (it being an interquel set almost immediately after Super Metroid) was because she was under orders to be so, and after this because she was essentially a ronin following her own orders. Even in Japan, many people cried foul because of how suicidally stupid the decision was in the first place, since as-stated she wasn't actually IN the chain of command she was following. It would be like a civilian airline pilot refusing to activate several of the plane's systems in the middle of a storm because an army Colonel on board hadn't told him to.
• In I Miss the Sunrise, when the crew finds a strange Lesser that seems to recognize Tezkhra, but who Tezkhra says he's never seen before, it should be easy to confirm who's telling the truth through a simple trip to the Typelog archives. However, Tezkhra apparently deletes files he deems "unnecessary", so, even if he did know the Lesser once, it could be impossible to tell.
• In Touhou Project, the Spell Card Rules of Gensokyo restrict the ways in which magical powers can be used for combat, explicitly to give super-powerful youkai and squishy humans more even footing.
• In Injustice: Gods Among Us this is how the main universe Superman is treated, mostly because the Insurgent Batman doesn't trust him and has to be given reason to. Once he does come over, this goes MUCH smoother.
• In various Super Robot Wars games with sequels, if one game ends with a character armed with a powerful mech, they'll usually start the next game with a weaker mech. Sometimes, this is a handwaving example, like finetuning a machine; sometimes it's due to the plot of a series. For instance, the Super Robot Wars Alpha series will always have Kouji Kabuto, Amuro Ray and the Getter Team abandon Mazinkaiser, Shin Getter Robo and Nu/Hi-Nu Gundam in favor of Mazinger Z, Getter-1/Black Getter/Getter G or the Re-GZ because of various problems along the way.
• In the Blade of Galadriel DLC of Middle-earth: Shadow of War, Eltariel has the same Ring of Power as Talion and thus has the power of Domination, but refuses to do so since enslaving Orcs goes against her personal morals. She instead recruits willing followers by helping them out and earning their respect.
• Copy Kitty's framing device is that the game takes place inside of a computer simulation as part of main character Boki's training to hone her Power Copying ability for use against the opposing Construct army. In the hard mode campaign (which is canonically Boki's second run through the simulation with tougher enemies,) the Burst Krijyl boss is replaced with a space-bending Hypercube Krijyl, stated by Savant to be one of the most powerful Constructs in existence, and what Boki is fighting is a toned down version because even after going through the entire simulation once, Savant believes she's not yet ready to face one at full power.

Visual Novels

• Quite a few Servants in Fate/stay night and the various other Alternate Universes of the Nasuverse have incredibly devastating Noble Phantasms that could destroy the competition easily, but could just as easily take out plenty of innocent bystanders if used recklessly.
  • Saber from Fate/stay night has a Sword Beam that can destroy Cthulhu and could one-shot almost any Servant with a clear hit, and even the likes of Berserker would probably burn through most of his 12 lives from a hit. The problem is the fact that, in addition to her Master Shirou being unable to efficiently supply her with mana and thus limiting her available uses of it, the fact she's fighting in an urban location more often than not and her own chivalrous code means she would never unleash it with innocents at risk. At one point, she thanks her opponent Rider for unleashing her Noble Phantasm and flying into the sky, because now she doesn't have to risk collateral damage on the streets and there's nothing in-between the two of them but air, allowing her to unleash it without restraint.
  • Gilgamesh has a Sword Beam that puts Saber's to shame, to the point if he used it at full power he could wipe out all life on the planet, and potentially the planet itself. Obviously, since he would prefer to rule living subjects rather than a dead wasteland, he never lets it go that far, though with the other abilities he has he rarely needs that level of power anyways.

Webcomics

• Pretty much anything Time Travel related in Sluggy Freelance.
  • The Ray Gun that can freeze someone in time or blast them into the past runs out of juice after two shots. Both attempts at building a Time Machine break down after their first use. Time-Turners are gathered up and destroyed by wizards and quickly forgotten about. And, while Timeless Space can be used for Time Travel, it's such a Crapsack World and the Physical God in control of it is such a Cloud Cuckoo Lander that no sane person would ever go there of their own free will.
  • The technology of 4U city includes Nanites that can completely rebuild a dead person from a backup and portals that can predictably enter any location within any dimension at any time you want. For obvious reasons, bringing back such technology would break the story, so 4U!Riff, a self-loathing Jerkass forbids his younger Alternate Self from bringing any of it back home.
• Order of the Stick:
  • Where Xykon holds back the Monster in the Darkness from revealing itself because of how incredibly powerful it is. While it has a very childish demeanor, the times it has given us a taste of what it can do we have seen it create a massive chasm in the ground just by stomping, and launching the most powerful paladin of the Sapphire Guard miles away during a contest of "Who can hit the lightest."
  • While the Monster is powerful, the reason Xykon keeps in Darkness is purely theatrics; The lich wants to dramatically unleash his beast following a speech on how helpless the heroes were. He tried this once during the first arc, but was cut off before it got anywhere.
  • As Vaarsuvius grows more and more powerful, (s)he gets held back more and more for the same reason. Even with his/her absolutely crippling personality flaws and with conjuration, one of the most useful schools of magic, chosen as a forbidden school, there is too much risk of him/her overshadowing the rest of the Order. As a result, (s)he is increasingly disabled, separated, or otherwise removed from the action as the story progresses.
• In the Jet Dream Remix Comic, J.E.T. D.R.E.A.M. has developed its own beneficial and voluntary feminization treatment, but it's apparently only available in limited amounts for the very best J.E.T. T.E.E.N. recruits. Also, a recruit is not eligible for the treatment until after his 18th birthday. This explains why J.E.T. T.E.E.N.'s Elle-Boys don't all just become girls, and why there are so many Elle-Boys in the Jet Dream Auxiliary Corps.
• In unOrdinary, John Doe has traumatic experiences that force him to repress his Purposely Overpowered ability.
• In The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob!, we eventually learn that the alien Nemesites have vastly more powerful technology than we've previously seen them use, but they prefer to avoid using it. Voluptua says it's best to set some limits to avoid decadence, claiming many civilizations who thought they were on a path to technological godhood have turned themselves into vegetables addicted to V.R. and such. As for the really powerful weapons, those can make a situation messy very quickly, particularly the sentient Mechanical Abominations called Butterflies of Iron.

Western Animation

• Kim Possible:
  • Despite achieving status as a regular gadget, Kim hardly ever uses her super-powerful, all-purpose battle suit, which received a weakness in the initial episode of the series' return. Would've made the missions even easier for her. After Cousin Larry got it however Kim might have felt to just let him have it.
  • Ron's Mystical Monkey Power, that by creating a Battle Aura can defeat ANY opponent, is hardly used and quickly forgotten until the special episodes where Ron can prove his manliness. The lack of Mystical Monkey Power Kung Fu is even lampshaded. Justified in that Ron is terrified of monkeys. And the power itself is...well...pretty powerful. He nearly killed Monkey Fist in their first fight, and understandably for a pacifist like Ron, that's pretty scary. His refusal/inability to use it may be a psychological block...one he overcomes in a big way in "Graduation" when he has to save the world and the girl he loves.
• The android AMAZO as seen in the Justice League Unlimited episode "Return" and "Wake the Dead". Here is a being with the powers of a god (think Dr Manhattan) who defeats the entire Justice League and shifts the Green Lantern homeworld of Oa to another dimension in one episode, has a Heel–Face Turn and is later called in to defeat a resurrected Solomon Grundy in another episode. However, this Grundy ended up being able to absorb AMAZO's power, rather than be instantly obliterated. AMAZO realizes his very presence is making him stronger, so he departs the Earth and is never seen again in the series. The writers may have wisely concluded that his presence would for the most part, render the Justice League completely irrelevant.
• This trope was used regularly in Aladdin: The Series to keep Genie from solving every problem with just a magical handwave.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • Used in the Season 2 finale when the Changeling invasion moves into full swing, Princess Celestia immediately calls upon the Mane 6 to get the Elements of Harmony to stop them. However, thanks to overwhelming numbers, the heroes are stopped by the Changeling army before they even manage to reach the Elements, much less use them. The trend continues in the next episode, the Season 3 premiere. Although that was less of The Worf Effect/Curb-Stomp Battle and more of Secret Test of Character mixed with the fact that the Crystal Ponies already have their own version of the Elements of Harmony in the form of the Crystal Heart. In the Season 4 premiere the Mane 6 have to sacrifice the Elements to save the day, depriving them of their phlebotinum.
  • In Equestria Games, the unicorn magic disabling spell helps snap Spike out of his Heroic BSoD by making him the only one capable of saving the day.
• Combining this with The Worf Effect, W.I.T.C.H. had a number of powerful characters come the second season for the heroes - Elyon, the Oracle, and Kadma. All three are captured by Nerissa.
• In the first season of Avatar: The Last Airbender several dangerous situations were resolved by using the Avatar State, allowing Aang to become stronger than any threat he might plausibly face. It wasn't easy to trigger and wasn't exactly safe, but it was a definite conflict killer if it ever came up. So as soon as the second season started an Earth Kingdom general pointed out that if Aang was in the Avatar State he would be able to crush Ozai with ease and worked on trying to get him to unlock it at will. However, the point of the episode was to show that it's too dangerous and he was generally but not completely kept from using it for the rest of the series thanks to the numerous drawbacks.
• Played for Laughs in one episode of Star Trek: Lower Decks. Captain Freeman, having gone completely mad after learning the entire Engineering crew have not been relaxing the way she wants them to in the spa they're sent to, is shoved into a machine said crew cobbled together using a turbolift and various other parts which completely destresses her. Once they are all gone, the director of the spa orders the device Thrown Out the Airlock as it would ruin her business.
• Early in the fifth season of Miraculous Ladybug, the wearer of the Bunny Miraculous escapes into the distant future to keep its power of time travel away from Hawkmoth. Given that he nearly tore the time-space continuum to shreds (and nearly won, retroactively) during the brief period he had it, it's an important safety measure.

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