Useless Useful Spell / Shin Megami Tensei

• The Shin Megami Tensei series usually averts this, as ailments and even instant-kill spells can become vital in turning deadly random encounters into cakewalks. Some bosses and minibosses can even be afflicted with ailments (if you're incredibly lucky) to turn the tide of battle in your favour. However, it does end up playing this trope straight from time to time.
  • In many installments, Almighty spells range between Awesome, but Impractical to this trope. On top of high mana costs, the battle systems of most installments heavily emphasize taking advantage of elemental weaknesses for tactical reasons beyond simply dealing extra damage. It doesn't help that similar-level physical attack skills approximately keep pace damage-wise, and are fueled by health, which is often a more readily renewable resource than mana, and has a bonus in scoring extra turns with a Critical Hit. From a magic standpoint, the individual elements can also be enhanced by Boost and Amp passives so a neutral hit from a boosted elemental spell often outdamages an Almighty skill.
    • This gets averted in the Devil Survivor games, where it's more likely for one to encounter enemies sporting multiple resistances and/or immunities, and attacking into even a resistance can impose a turn penalty. It's not unusual to encounter a boss that resists all magic, leaving Almighty skills as the remaining viable attacking option for a magic-oriented combatant.
  • The Drain Life and Drain SP spells fall into this if they restore a fixed amount. In theory, being able to steal health and SP from enemies sounds good, and both spells are highly effective when used against you. But when the protagonist tries using them on enemies, the amount of HP and SP they drain from enemies (and restore to you) is so minor that it's just not worth bothering with them. In some games, however, they count as proper almighty attacks that can be affected by buffs and debuffs, which greatly improve their efficiency and make them worth a skill slot, especially on demons that need to refuel mid-battle.
  • Zig-Zagged with the Hama and Mudo series of spells, which are One-Hit Kill skills subject to the Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors rules like the rest of the attacking elements. While they can give the player an out against Demonic Spiders that are resistant to everything else, Contractual Boss Immunity makes them outright useless in boss fights.
    • This is most visible in Persona 3 and 4, where your other party members have elemental specializations. Those who specialize in Hama or Mudo are looked down on because a boss fight will nullify about half their skill set. While Ken and Koromaru have alternative support spells and attacking options to fall back on in those cases, Naoto has to fall back on her expensive Almighty skills or medium-strength physical skills, and her Strength, Magic, and SP pool are not as good as the usual damage specialists.
    • In Persona 5, Hama and Mudo have even less utility compared to previous games, as there is now an entire line of light and dark attacks that still exploit enemy weaknesses, deal actual damage (so they work in Boss Battles), and have a near 100% hit rate (instead of 70-80% tops). Even when a weakness to Bless or Curse will greatly increase the accuracy of Hama or Mudo, those skills are also a fair bit more expensive than the standard damaging spell lines, chewing through the player's SP faster. The same applies to Persona Q2: New Cinema Labyrinth, since not only does it have the Kou- and Ei- lines, but landing instant kills with Hama and Mudo doesn't contribute to an All-Out Attack which is used for maximum rewards from a battle.
    • Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey has Horn of Fate, which casts either Mahamaon or Mamudoon, so in exchange for compressing both skills into one slot, you have a 50-50 chance of not hitting with the element you want. Also, there's a 10% chance of it accidentally affecting your team — a self-inflicted Total Party Kill is most unpleasant, even if the caster is largely resistant to it.
    • Shin Megami Tensei V finally remedies the issue by making Hama and Mudo function the same as a normal elemental spell; they hit and do elemental type damage, with the insta-kill effect instead being relegated to something that may happen if they are used on a target which is vulnerable to that damage type.
• Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne:
  • The "Anti-(element)" passives reduce damage from the corresponding element, but that's all they do. They don't count as a resistance so the enemy will still get a bonus turn from hitting that weakness despite the reduced damage. It's far better to find the "Void (element)" passives that actually replace a weakness with an immunity.
  • Red Capote, while That One Attack during Matador's infamous boss fight, is rather useless on the playable Matador, since it only maxes out his evasion and not also at least the Demi-Fiend's, and he doesn't even start with it, being the last skill he learns, not to mention it's exclusive to him. It has some use in draining press turns from enemies with all-hitting attacks, but by the time you can get it, you'll have Fog Breath to severely cut the enemy team's accuracy.
  • Dante and Raidou's final skills (Showtime and Jiraya Dance, respectively) are essentially just a flashy Megidolaon. The issue is by the time you have them, you also have Son's Oath/Raidou the Eternal, which allows their physical attacks to pierce resistances (only in Remaster for Dante), meaning their AoE physical attacks typically hit harder than Almighty damage, are capable of gaining extra Press Turns via critical hits, and also come with a chance of ailments. And for the few enemies that repel physical (the only thing Pierce won't bypass), it's generally better to use Stinger/Tekisatu, a stronger physical Almighty attack with a high chance of instant death.
• Shin Megami Tensei IV:
  • Panic Caster gives a magic damage boost that's a little stronger than a single cast of Tarukaja, but it only affects the caster and inflicts Panic on them, leaving them unable to capitalize on the buff quickly unless you can cure the ailment. It's a lot easier to just use Tarukaja which doesn't have the downsides and affects the whole party too.
  • Blood Ritual buffs all the user's stats once each, but induces HP to One. It can be picked up near the midgame, but by this point you should be able to layer on Tarukaja, Rakukaja, and Sukukaja quickly across your party. You also get Luster Candy a few levels later, which doesn't have the downside and also affects the whole party.
• Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey:
  • Within the game is a series of spells that hit all enemies for "heavy" damage and have a chance to inflict status ailments — a Ma-dyne spell and a all-targeting status spell rolled up into one, if you will. However, the ailment rate is often pitifully low, each spell costs 65 MP (enough to cast Megidolaon), and worst of all, the damage output ranges from on par with Ma-dyne spells at best to no better than first-tier spells at worst.
  • From the same game, Tetrakarn and Makarakarn. Both spells grant each of the caster's party members a shield that reflects physical attacks (Tetrakarn) or magic attacks falling under the four main attack elements^note Fire, Ice, Wind, Thunder (Makarakarn). However, the shield not only dissipates upon reflecting an attack, it also does so at the end of the current turn, which means if the caster doesn't move before their enemies do, they'll most likely waste their MP, and -karn spells aren't cheap — they each cost 45 MP to cast! This has been rectified a bit in Strange Journey Redux which gives a speed bonus to any combatant using that skill.
  • Among the almighty spells in this game are three spells named Judgment, Holy Wrath, and Sea of Chaos, which do more damage to targets of certain alignments, but also hit your allies and the caster. In a game where random encounters can hit fairly hard, friendly fire is the least welcome element, and thus these three skills fall hard into this trope.
  • Laplace Curse is a passive that applies a free Debilitate to all enemies that you've fully analyzed at the start of battle. However, if you've fully analyzed an enemy, chances are you've already fought and defeated it enough times that you don't need the free Debilitate to beat it. (Yes, this includes the Fiends.) This skill also won't work on bosses as you don't get any analysis level on them, even if you've already fully analyzed their playable versions.
  • Lost Word is a Random Effect Spell that can heal, buff, or debuff either all enemies or all allies. While it costs about half as much as its equivalent skills (20MP compared to 35MP for Mediarahan or 50MP for Luster Candy or Debilitate), it's much more efficient to use the skills that don't have a chance of giving a boon to the enemy.
• Devil Survivor and its sequel suffer from this too.
  • Normal enemies die too quickly for status ailments to be useful, the only exception being the Stone effect which petrifies enemies and makes physical damage a potential one-hit KO, and bosses (and even some late-game enemies) are almost always immune to them. Buffs and instant kill abilities just don't exist or take too much time to set up.
    • The Curse (Mystic in base Devil Survivor) element, being tied to ailment skills, takes the brunt of this trope as Contractual Boss Immunity dictates that a lot of important enemies are immune to Curse. There are a few damage skills attributed to Curse, but because they are Percent Damage Attacks they are not very good for killing things with. Finally, Curse skills require the assistance of other skills to be very useful — while some Game-Breaker combos involving Curse skills exist for eliminating enemy mobs, they take up a fair number of your limited skill slots to be effective, while you could more or less do similar work with a damaging skill and maybe a supporting passive.
  • The Race-O and Race-D passives grant attack and defense bonuses against enemies with the same race. Given the wide variety of enemies you'll face, it's very difficult to justify dedicating a passive slot to either of these skills, unless specializing your team against a particular boss. Even then, there's a good chance a major boss will have a race that's not present on any of your playable characters or demon, making that passive slot a wasted one.
  • Strengthen is an Auto skill that turns all attacks to your team's weaknesses into neutral hits, denying the bonus damage or extra turns. By the time you get it, though, you can easily start using resistance passives to cover weaknesses, and the few demons with plenty of weaknesses to justify the use of Strengthen are often just never deployed anyway.
• Persona series:
  • Buffs and debuffs normally avert this, as they are vital spells for defeating bosses in most Megami Tensei games (Matador from Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne is notorious for being nearly impossible without hit/evade spells). The Persona series from 3 onwards, however, classify them into single-target and multi-target buffs. The issue here is that single-target buffs are most problematic as all buffs and debuffs wear off after 3 turns and are non-stackable. This means that if you want to buff the whole party using a single-target buff, by the time you've buffed the fourth party member, the first member's buffs are wearing off, turning the buff caster into dead weight as they can't capitalize on the buff. Single-target debuffs are still valuable as most bosses are fought alone, but multi-target debuffs get saddled with a degree of uselessness due to their increased costs and the rarity of boss fights involving multiple targets.
    • Shin Megami Tensei V reuses this kind of buff classification, and again, single-target buffs are a lot less useful barring specific early-game strategies. You also get Cautious Cheer off the Cirronups at level 30 which obsoletes Rakukaja and Sukukaja, and Matarukaja becomes available not long after.
  • Elemental "Wall" and "Break" skills place a temporary modification that grants resistance or neutralizes resistance to their element respectively. While it looks good on paper, either by covering a weakness or allowing a specialist to bypass an enemy's immunity, the problem is that they consume a turn to execute, and that they wear off after 3 turns. "Wall" skills are very quickly obsoleted when the player accesses Resist passives, which cover weaknesses without consuming turns. "Break" skills may see fringe use on other party members, but the great variety of skills available to the protagonist makes it more efficient to include a wider variety of attacking elements than to spend a turn cancelling resistances.
  • Tetraja sets up a shield that blocks one Hama or Mudo skill. It has the exact same "wasting a turn" problems as the Wall skills above, but it's made worse by the fact that enemies that use instant-kill skills are fairly uncommon, and for those that are, the readily-available Homunculus item will do the same thing without wasting a turn. It's also near-exclusively learned by the Protagonist's Personas, and with their Master of All status they have far better things to be doing with their turns. It's situationally useful in the mainline Shin Megami Tensei games as it robs enemies of Press Turns and protects the whole party (depending on game), but that's not relevant in Persona.
• Persona 3
  • Power Charge and Mind Charge. Unlike every other Shin Megami Tensei game where these spells give a physical or magic skill a x2.5 boost in damage, they only give a x2 damage boost in every version of Persona 3, equaling the damage two unboosted uses of the skill would inflict. Two casts of a single target -dyne spell is also cheaper than spending the SP to use Mind Charge on it. The only reasonable use is to save on SP spent by boosting the costly Almighty skills, or if the boss cannot be attacked during its turn (e.g. when the Final Boss uses Moonless Gown) but if you're doing that, there are usually better alternatives for damage.
  • The Recarmdra spell. Its effect is great: revives and fully restores the HP of the entire party, and it's the only full-party revival spell in the game. The downside is it drops the caster's HP to 1. In many other SMT games it's great, but here only the protagonist can use it... and this game follows the We Cannot Go On Without You trope. If one of your other party members got it, it might have had some use, but risking an easy Game Over to fully heal your AI-controlled party members just isn't worth it.
  • Some fusion spells can fall into this category, mainly because they consume a percentage of the main character's SP (as opposed to a flat number), which will make them cost more than a similar skill. The most problematic are Summer Dream and Valhalla — the former is a Random Effect Spell which can sometimes result in no effect, while the latter grants an ally temporary invincibility but cuts their HP and SP to 1 afterwards, putting them at incredible danger.
  • When Fuuka's Persona evolves to Juno, the first thing it learns is Oracle, a Random Effect Spell with five different outcomes. Four of them are generally helpful, being HP and/or SP recovery or ailment removal. The fifth sets the entire party's HP to 1, practically dooming them if it's rolled. On top of the risk of getting that deadly fifth effect, sometimes the other helpful outcomes may not be the best for the situation; it's generally more reliable to use healing skills or items of your own volition.
• Persona 4:
  • Each character in the game except the main character has a particular skill specialization (fire, ice, physical attacks, etc), and Naoto has light/dark skills as a specialization, which is a massive problem as described above. At worst, this trope can make Naoto's character as a whole next to useless, and many players don't even bother to level Naoto up or use the character at all as a member of their permanent party.
    • This is also brought up in Persona 4: The Animation, during the boss fight with Shadow Naoto and Margaret.
    • Persona 4 Golden makes Naoto more useful with a handful of other elemental attacks; it also made enemies weak to Hama or Mudo get automatically hit by them, which actually makes the usually inaccurate spells more viable.
  • The Counter skill line was previously very useful in Persona 3 as you get a 15-50% chance of reflecting any physical skill on you (Slash/Strike/Pierce), but it got greatly watered down in the transition to Persona 4, going down to 10-20%. Persona 4 also condenses all physical attack types into a single Physical element, so Null Phys or Phys Repel will always outclass High Counter. The only advantage High Counter has is its availability — Phys Repel appears on Rangda and Girimehkala but you'll need to grind them until they learn it, while you're bound to find a Persona that learns High Counter quickly if you want to use it.
  • In Golden, after you've maxed out a party member's Social Link, you can spend time with them in the month of January to trigger an evolution to a third Persona, which upgrades their resistances and unlocks a new Secret Art for them. The strength of those skills tends to vary.
    • Chie's Dragon Hustle increases all allies' attack, defence and hit/evade for three turns, meaning that it's effectively three buff spells in one. This would be incredibly useful if only someone other than Chie got it, because it costs 150 SP. This can easily be over half her SP pool even in the endgame, because she focuses on physical attacks which are Cast from Hit Points. To make matters worse, Chie also gets Power Charge, which is a 2.5x boost to her next physical attack, so you probably want to save her SP for that. Unless you're willing to throw a lot of SP-healing items at her (which you probably aren't because those can't be bought), you're going to be using this spell extremely sparingly.
    • Teddie's Kamui Miracle is very similar to Oracle from 3, and even though it lacks the disastrous HP to One effect, it's still a Random Effect Spell that may harm you or heal the enemy.
    • Kanji's The Man's Way can easily set up an All-Out Attack for extinguishing random encounters, but is nigh-useless in boss fights and has a poor success rate anyway. He can learn Dizzy Boost to increase its success rate, but that passive shows up much, much earlier in his Social Link and has likely been discarded by that point.
  • Traesto straddles the line between this and Awesome, but Impractical. On paper, it does have a definite use, allowing the party to leave the dungeon and return to the entrance, the only way to change party members or access a save point before the boss in the original game. In practice, it's a waste of one of the limited skill slots. At the root of it all is the fact that Traesto costs a whopping 18 SP to use, putting it on the same cost level as Dyne-level spells, and the only two party members that can use it are Teddie and the Protagonist, two party members that desperately need to smartly use SP thanks to their roles as Combat Medic and Wild Card, respectively. Further compounding is the fact that Goho-ms, an item that fulfills the same purpose as Traesto, are available at the drug store for 900 yen. The move was made even more unnecessary when Golden allowed the player to continue from the start of the floor if they fell in battle, reducing the need to constantly exit the dungeon to save. For these reasons, and changes to dungeon design, it was removed entirely for Persona 5.
  • Heaven's Blade, a physical skill found only on Michael and Metatron, took a nerf in this game and plummeted into this trope. In Persona 3, it was slightly stronger than Brave Blade and has a much higher crit rate. Here, it's less than half as strong as Brave Blade, and while its crit rate remained higher, it's not by much. Brave Blade's higher base power outweighs the crit bonus, and the ability to pass it around in fusion makes it leagues better.
• Persona 5
  • The game introduces a few skills that work well when the party's being ambushed, like attacks that grow stronger in that situation. However, being ambushed is the worst situation for a player to be in, and the stealth mechanics while dungeon crawling make that situation very easy to avoid. Naturally, these skills are also less useful in boss battles where ambushes are nonexistent (barring a midboss and a superboss). This hinders the utility of those skills, and the most useless of them all is Thermopylae — a buff skill that raises all 3 battle stats for the entire party but can only be used while being ambushed. What's worse is that some enemies possess said skills, and because the player is doing the ambushing most of the time, those enemies can make full use of them to make life difficult for the player. Royal, however, vastly improves ambush skills with the trait Vitality of the Tree, which allows ambush-only skills to be used in normal battles, including bosses.
  • Weather-dependent skills like Climate Decorum tend to be a waste of a moveslot, as only Mementos is affected by weather and only at specific times of the year, and their benefits aren't good enough to outweigh how incredibly situational that is.
  • Divine Judgment and Demonic Decree are skills that halve an enemy's remaining HP, and are Bless and Curse-based respectively. Naturally, they will fail to work on bosses, regardless of their Bless or Curse resistance, while normal enemies that are vulnerable to those skills can be killed more efficiently through a normal beatdown. The trope gets zigzagged, however, when you're not the one using those skills. Some bosses will use those skills on you, and if they get reflected, those skills actually work, reducing their HP and shortening the fight.
  • In Royal, like in the definitive versions of its predecessors, your party members get a Secret Art. Yusuke's Hyakka Ryouran is a bit of a letdown. It does the same thing as the aforementioned Dragon Hustle, but by the time you get it, you will have access to the Persona Attis, which has the above-mentioned Thermopylae and the Vitality of the Tree trait, and Thermopylae is much cheaper. Zigzagged as Yusuke is at least able to save Joker a turn of setup, allowing him an extra turn to attack... or do literally anything else, really.
  • Akechi's Secret Art Rebellion Blade is a downplayed example, as while it genuinely hits extremely hard, its side effect of dealing 1.5 times the damage to downed enemies is completely useless, as by the time you get the ability the only fight left is against the Final Boss, which cannot be knocked down. It also costs a staggering 99SP. The only fights where this skill can unleash its true power are the bonus Velvet Room battles... many of which are DLC only.
• Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth:
  • Oddly enough, the straight examples in this game are some of the highest tier elemental damaging spells. Specifically, Ragnarok, Thunder Reign and Phanta Rei. While these spells would normally be very useful, they happen to be exclusive to Surt, Thor and Odin respectively, all of whom are primarily physical Personas that don't boost SP much, so equipping them to spellcasters is a waste. In earlier games these skills could be passed down to more suitable Personas, but not here, leaving them ironically a waste of a skill slot for their respective Personas.
  • When the Personas of the party evolve, they learn a fourth skill that goes into their empty slot. Some are incredible, like the protagonists' Heat Riser and Debilitate, or Yukari's and Yukiko's elemental amp skills, but others are... not well-optimized. Bad eggs include Mitsuru's Punisher skill, which sounds like more of a joke than anything as it utilizes her weaker Strength stat and breaks binds for more damage, Naoto's Powerhouse passive, which only interacts with her expensive Megidolaon skill, and Yosuke's Death Needle, which has an instant-kill effect that interacts very poorly with his low Luck stat.
  • Summon Ghost and Summon Demon are strong almighty spells that can only be used while a Circle is active. These require a lot of setup and skill slots — you first need a Circle to establish, and you likely want a passive that improves the success rate of its bind/ailment. In-battle, due to Circles lasting 3 turns, you would be spamming the Almighty skill as much as possible right after the Circle is set. Doing so will burn through your SP bar incredibly quickly, and it proves to be inefficient in a game where your SP capacity is quite small.
  • The elemental "Wall" skills now raise the resistance of the party to one element. However, because you have a large playable cast at your fingertips, it's usually a better idea to deploy characters that don't have the weaknesses you need to cover. Sub-Personas also only have six skill slots and each party member can accommodate a maximum of three buffs at a time, which raises the opportunity cost of using a Wall skill over anything else.
• Persona 5 Strikers:
  • Tetraja and other forms of instakill protection. Normally, instakill protection is great to have, especially since in most games the protagonist's death means an insant game over. Here, however, you only get a game over if all of your selected combatants go down at once, plus you can physically dodge them here as this is an action game. Not only that, but on most difficulties only a small handful of bosses (one of which is a dire shadow) actually have them, making Tetraja a waste of a moveslot most of the time. Instakills don't start being widely used until the New Game Plus exclusive Merciless difficulty, and if you're even playing Merciless, you probably have the skills and resistance passives to neutralize instakills anyway.
  • Lucifer's Shadow of Grief passive. Lucifer is a powerful persona, unique to New Game Plus, who comes loaded with great supporting abilities and a ton of useful resistances, but this ability doesn't live up to being learned only by maxing out his level to 99. It causes drain passives to also restore SP, which sounds powerful, but by the time you have it you will long have had better methods of SP management such as Soul Thief and the advanced cooking recipes. It also can't be passed on via fusion, and Lucifer himself only comes with being able to drain Curse attacks, meaning you'll have to dedicate skill slots to other drain passives (which you don't even get access to until right at the very end of Merciless Mode) instead of other, more useful skills to truly take advantage of it.