Video games tend to give you awesome stuff to play with and immediately take it back, giving you little to no time for playing with it, be it awesome and flashy Infinity +1 Sword which you get to kill the final boss, an interesting and powerful character or a tank you get for only one mission.
Very common in Class and Level System RPGs, if you get your final levels and most powerful skills near the very end of the game.
A Super-Trope to:
- If it happens at the beginning of the game, it's A Taste of Power.
- If it's a character who appears too late, it's 11th-Hour Ranger. If it's a superpower, it's 11th-Hour Superpower.
- If it's a character who appears early and then leaves or falls behind, it's a Crutch Character.
- If this happens between games, it's Bag of Spilling.
- If it happens after finishing the hardest challenge in the game, it's Bragging Rights Reward.
- If your wonderful toy is lost because the game ends, New Game Plus fixes it, too.
Examples:
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Action Adventure
- Onimusha: Warlords features the unlimited-magic-attack, superpowerful Bishamon Sword... immediately before the final boss. And only if you've collected all of the random hidden collectibles throughout the game. Thank god for New Game Plus.
- Samus' Power Bombs in Metroid: Other M. In the beginning of the game, you're allowed to use it as a part of a tutorial. After Samus agrees to help Adam and his men on their mission, Adam forbids the use of Power Bombs due to how destructive they can be to humans. From there, you can't use Power Bombs for the entire game except at the very end when it is needed to beat the Metroid Queen and even then, the game never tells you that you can use the Power Bombs but will say you can after you beat the game and start the Playable Epilogue!
First Person Shooter
- Some have complained that the various vehicle segments in the Halo games are sometimes too short, with the Space Fighter segment in Halo: Reach being a particularly notable example. (These are somewhat mitigated, though, as crafty players can often find ways to keep those vehicles long after the level designers intended for the player to relinquish them.)
- JollyJack mentioned this in a "how to play" comic.
- Half-Life 2's super gravity gun, which you get ten minutes before the end of the game.
- Jedi Academy has the duel sabers/saber staff/three style single saber option only usable in the last set of missions. Mods exist to allow you to use them from the start of the game.
Hack and Slash
- Slashers love to do that. Devil May Cry 4 gives us Lucifer (a very interesting and unique weapon) and Pandora (a suitcase full of awesome) when it's almost time to say "Good-bye, Dante!" And this is why you get New Game Plus and Bloody Palace.
Platform Game
- Super Mario Bros.:
- Whenever Super Mario Bros. gives you a Starman, you'll probably get a nice stretch of enemy-filled land to exercise your invincible bashing capabilities on.
- Super Mario Galaxy gives you the Red Star powerup that grants flight in any direction... near the end of the game, and you can only use it in a handful of levels and the Hub Level. In a broader sense, many powerups such as the Fire Flower which traditionally last until you get hit are instead on a timer, forcing the player to rush to do everything they need with them and making it impossible to use them in levels they're not included in.
Racing Game
- Burnout 3: Takedown has "preview races" in which you and your opponents have much faster cars than you normally would for that point of the game.
Role Playing Game
- By the time you get the Dual Blade in the Lufia games, all that's left to fight are the Final Bosses.
- Lufia & The Fortress of Doom actually averts this, as you get the Dual Blade quite a bit earlier than The Very Definitely Final Dungeon. Then it gets taken from you and destroyed...and then you get it back just before the Final Bosses.
- In Lufia: Curse of the Sinistrals, the Dual Blade also comes with a nifty time-controlling power. Naturally, you only get to use this on the Final Boss. In New Game Plus, it gets Sword Beams...which likewise are only used for the True Final Boss.
- Jade Empire: most truly awesome styles (e.g. Dual sabers and Iron Palm), but especially the Jade golem and the Red Minister, which you get when the game is almost done. Thankfully, there is a ridiculously difficult Jade Master difficulty, in which they become upgraded from cheap immunity-bearing GameBreakers to essential life-savers.
- Also there are these little things called 'Harmonious combos' that can you can use as soon as you are through with the practice fights but which are unfortunately denied to the player later on. These godlike moves are mostly only useful in the first chapters of the game as the story progression introduces you to a number of enemy types that these combos will not work on (monsters, demons, ghosts) and from then on when you actually are fighting puny humans it is usually an important battle for the plot, and your devastating combos will not work in those either.
- In Shin Megami Tensei I, Law-path players are granted three outrageously powerful seraph companions for a time in the final dungeon. However, they have to give them up in order to fuse a necessary MacGuffin.
- Tales of the Abyss does this twice.
- First, they give you Jade Curtiss, who is less a mage and more a tactical nuclear weapon (since he's about 40 levels higher than you are). He helps you out during an unwinnable boss fight. His power is then promptly sealed and he's reverted to party level.
- Quite a bit later, they give you Asch, who is basically a better version of your main character with better equipment and a lot more skills. He's only available for a short time, as well. (Later on in the game, he comes back, but by then he sucks).
- While not exactly a weapon, a bicycle is available during a small section of EarthBound. The bike lets you get around faster in outdoor areas, is capable of outrunning most enemies, and comes with its own background music (with optional bell-ringing sound effects). Following on the heels of your new bike is a second party member, who renders your single-seat bike useless. Heck, the bike comes at a time when you can start buying teddy bears, which follow you like party members, and they render the bike useless too. This actually leads to one of the strangest secrets in the game: a sound effect that can only be heard by riding the bike in the swamp. This is only possible by beating the final boss, ditching all your partners in the extended epilogue, heading to the swamp, and, of course, remembering that you have an otherwise-useless bicycle in the first place.
- Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days and Kingdom Hearts II: Roxas Dual Wielding Oathkeeper and Oblivion.
- The Final Fantasy Legend has the King equipment to collect in the very first world. It is some of the best equipment in the game, but you have to give it up to advance the plot.
- In Super Robot Wars: Original Generation 1, the first time your units get to combine into SRX, it only lasts 3 turns and you won't get this ability back until near the end of the game. You also only get 2 of the best characters on the last mission of the game.
- Some of the better Guest Star Party Members are like this, for instance, in Final Fantasy IX, Beatrix is only with you for one short but fun section of the game.
- The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel has two Guest Star Party Members, Instructor Sara and Angelica, both of whom are extremely overpowered but only with you for a very short time. Another example is Sara's Master Quartz, Thor. While she's with the party it's locked to her and can't be removed, but it's extremely powerful, causing every attack to restore HP and SP. You won't get it permanently until nearly the end of the game, and not only do you have to earn all 3 Lionheart Medals, but it's one of two rewards you can choose (the other being an equally powerful Master Quartz that you haven't seen before), so it's possible to not get it back.
Third Person Shooter
- Some people find those missions in Red Faction: Guerrilla when you crush random stuff on a Nigh-Invulnerable mech best and painfully short.
- The final weapon which requires near 100% completion in Gun comes when there is nothing (as the only things not required are non-combat missions) to use it on.
Turn Based Strategy
- In the fifth prologue of Project × Zone, Chris and Jill arrive with a MAP attack that deals a lot of damage compared to what you can pull off at that point in the game. Naturally when the stage ends, you won't have access to any MAP attacks for awhile unless you Level Grind Frank and Lei-Lei/Hsien-Ko.
- Yamato's Wave-Motion Gun is shown multiple times throughout Super Robot Wars V but isn't usable for most of it.
Wide Open Sandbox
- Assassin's Creed combines this with A Taste of Power immediately after tutorial.
- Da Vinci's flying machine in the sequel. We saw more footage of it in the trailers than was actually available for use in the game, sadly.
- In Assassin's Creed III, the carpenter at the Davenport Homestead tells Connor that he found designs for Da Vinci's flying machine and has built it. Connor immediately goes to the cliff overlooking the homestead's bay, climbs onto the flying machine, leaps from the edge...and promptly flies right into the water.
