Basic Trope: This item apparently has a use for something. Too bad the developers didn't put that "something" in the actual game.
- Straight: Ice skates give you "extra movement speed and turn speed while on an icy surface". There are no surfaces in the game that count as icy.
- Exaggerated:
- In addition, the skates are considered too special to pawn for money.
- The ice skates are purely a novelty item, they can't even be equipped.
- Downplayed: There is one area with icy floors, but chances are you'll get through it long before obtaining the skates.
- Justified:
- The skates are just a Joke Item you get for completing a figure-skating sidequest.
- The skates are just an Easter Egg referencing a previous game.note
- Inverted:
- The skates always provide a speed boost, but they're supposed to be an intentionally bad item to teach new players that high speed doesn't mean everything. This means nothing due to a Good Bad Bug allowing you to build up endless speed while wearing them, thus clipping through arbitrary parts of the game.
- One particular item has so many uses that you can speedrun the game glitchless with just that item.
- Subverted: You beat the Disc-One Final Dungeon, and - woah, look how big the new Slippy-Slidey Ice World is!
- Double Subverted: ...but soon enough, you realize that the ice skates just give you a special animation when moving on icy floors, and doesn't actually increase your speed or any of that.
- Parodied: A series of Contrived Coincidences always prevent you from using the ice skates: the shopkeepers won't accept it as Shop Fodder due to the skates having some stains on the inside, every icy dungeon in the game requires you to wear hiking boots at all times, and attempting to freeze a surface while in possession of ice skates will cause everything around you to spontaneously burst into flames.
- Zig Zagged:
- The ice skates can be your best friend in the few quests taking place in a cold environment... but outside of it, they're completely useless; they don't even provide a passive stat boost like other environment-specific footwear.
- The ice skates are a rare item you can find multiples of, and seem useless as they can neither be sold nor equipped. Later in the game you're asked to collect them for a guy who forgot to buy christmas presents to his family. However, even after the quest has been completed, you can still find ice skates but now they have no use at all.
- Averted: As a bit of Black Comedy, the ice skates also double any damage done to an enemy being used as a Body Sled (a move you'll be pulling off a lot).
- Enforced:
- QA discovered a Game-Breaking Bug that lets you build up infinite speed anywhere where there's an icy surface. The "icy" property is subsequently removed, but in spite of redesigning all of the areas with ice physics as their main gimmick, nobody remembered to remove the ice skates that are supposed to be used in them.
- Christmas Rushing forced the developers to leave the ice skating levels out of the main game, but left the skates in the game due to DLC plans that never came to fruition due to the company folding.
- Lampshaded: "Ice skates, huh? Those will be very useful for all of the snow-filled crevices we'll find here in Planet Heck... wait, no."
- Invoked: The Big Bad raises the local temperature so high that any ice that was there before is now melted.
- Exploited: A vendor offers you the ice skates at a large price just to get your money.
- Defied: A large-scale Freeze Ray introduces icy floors to practically every level and gives you an advantage over the enemies.
- The developers made sure the ice skates had some use as an item which could be traded to somebody who actually needed it.
- Discussed: "Ice skates? Those seem awfully specific-use." "Yeah, but it's not like they do nothing. They have blades on them, you know."
- Conversed: "See? I told you. The skates do nothing. There's no reason to get them, just like this game's expansion packs - zing!"
- Implied: One NPC's dialogue is "I got some top-class ice skates from the auction house last week. This week, I'm pawning them off at a different auction house."
- Deconstructed:
- The sidequest you go on to get the ice skates is one of the most fun parts of the game, but because the ice skates don't do anything, no-one ever takes the sidequest.
- A coding issue results in the save file becoming unplayable after obtaining too many ice skates, which you gain from random sources and cannot remove from your inventory. Sure, it takes millions of ice skates to happen, but it's not impossible to do so by accident.
- Reconstructed: Eventually, the game's fanbase evolves enough to appreciate all of the details of the game, and not just trying to do as "well" as possible in it.
- Played for Laughs: Attempting to equip the Instant Death Blade That We Forgot to Assign an Actual Damage Value So Don't Use It causes the PC to tell you "It might get worn down in combat, shouldn't we save it for later?"
- Played for Drama: The useless item Alice can pick up is Claire's teddy bear which says it helps calm her sister's panic. Claire dies before any event which could damage her morale. The teddy bear becomes a Tragic Keepsake whose uselessness and Alice's refusal to sell add pathos.
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