"Dude, what the hell? This isn't multiplayer. I'm only in there for like three seconds!"
— Elliot complaining about Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening's hidden multiplayer mode during SomecallmeJohnny's review
This is when an extra, not necessarily unlockable, feature present in a game or other medium:
- Ages poorly because its very nature renders it obsolete (e.g trailers, video teasers, codes for websites related to the game etc).
- Does not work properly in the context of gameplay, often struggling to complete basic tasks other characters easily do, in the case of an extra character, or not meshing well with the rest of the game (in the case of bonus levels or items).
- Doesn't function as well as the player's other options prior to unlocking it, causing them to refrain from trying the unlockable out.
- Is useless no matter what, unlike a Bragging Rights Reward which exists as proof of player skill/or would be useful if only there was anything new to use it for.
- Lacks uniqueness and is rendered redundant by other, better options. It might even just be a recolour or a clone of an existing object.
- Isn't worth the effort to unlock, and in the worst cases feels like a slap in the face towards players who spent hours just to unlock this feature.
Though most of the bonus feature failures tend to be content within the medium, A Pre-Order Bonus and Downloadable Content can be also be these if they don't add anything of worth to the base game, actively make the experience worse or is content that is already on the disc but sold off as "bonus content". Note that in all of these cases "bonus" and "extra" refer to something that may not be found in normal gameplay; if you're not sure, a good litmus test would be the question "Could I conceivably play through the entire main game from beginning to end, 100% Completion notwithstanding, and not once find or utilize this feature?"
This most likely occurs due to a Cosmic Deadline. With the Almighty Deadline looming inexorably in the near future, many sensible developers would probably do the logical thing and make sure the game as a whole works properly and the main playable characters and scenarios are as complete as possible before working on giving Awesome McCoolname The Unlockable Anti-Hero Bringer Of Death some toys to play with.
Compare to Dummied Out (where the extra stuff was axed entirely), Joke Item or Joke Character (if they're intended to be bad on purpose), Bragging Rights Reward (if the optional content is rendered useless only because you've obtained it long after you've completed everything else in the game.), Misbegotten Multiplayer Mode (for when games introduce half baked multiplayer modes) or Sucky Single-Player Mode (for single player modes that are inferior to multiplayer).
Contrast Game Within a Game, where the extra content is a full-fledged game in and of itself.
Beware! Since the vast majority of examples deal with unlockable rewards and other goodies, spoilers ahoy!
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Examples:
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General
- DVDs used to label functions such as interactive menus and scene selections as "bonus features". At the time, this may've been considered novel but Technology Marches On and they're now considered standard functions of any DVD set. As a result, DVDs that label these as bonus features tend to feel barebones and the worst of them don't even have them, only allowing the viewer to watch the movie/show and nothing else.
- Trailers tend to suffer from this because their entire purpose is to promote new media. Once that piece of media comes out, the trailer becomes obsolete and at that point are only really useful for historical purposes.
- Some video games (e.g Rayman 3: Hoodlum Havoc, Rayman Raving Rabbids, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty etc) in the sixth and early seventh generations would give game clear codes that could be posted to a website related to the game to claim rewards and as a form of bragging rights. However, because those websites ended up deleted, those clear codes go from being limited in terms of function to downright useless because you can no longer access those rewards.
- Nintendo DS and Wii games would add content designed to make use of Nintendo Wi-Fi, with quality varying wildly depending on the game. Once it was discontinued on May 20, 2014, it meant that a lot of games would then have Nintendo Wi-Fi exclusive content that is completely inaccessible without alternate means. In the case of the Nintendo Wii, several channels were inaccessible, ensuring that players couldn't access them anymore (with the worst case being the Nintendo Wii Shop, preventing players from buying games such as Mega Man 9 legally without the help of future re-releases).
- Any form of media that has Scratch and Sniff as a bonus feature. Since Scratch and Sniff is a novelty by design, it eventually becomes useless once the consumer can no longer smell it.
Action RPG
- Blue Dragon: Awakened Shadow:
- You can actually refight story mode bosses after defeating them. But only in multiplayer, despite the fact that you can refight Door bosses, some of the sidequest bosses and the New World bosses freely in single player. Worse still, due to the Nintendo Wi-Fi servers going down years ago, it's now impossible to refight story mode bosses due to the Multiplayer being inaccessible.
- The final Superboss Arcane Dragon requires you to beat every Door boss and all of New World, and you'd expect an epic fight on par with Destroy who required you to clear a sidequest that spans the entire game. Upon entering the Extreme Door, it becomes quickly clear that everything about this boss seemed to be thrown together with the actual boss being a blue Palette Swap of Omega Dragon who is near-impossible to defeat in single player even at Lv.99. Your only rewards for defeating them are the Golden Helmet, which you likely won't need at that point and a second star on your save file.
- Fallout: New Vegas: The various pre-order packs, individually or collectively as the Courier's Stash DLC. While they do provide a decent advantage in the early game, limitations in the game's engine prevents DLC from interacting with other DLC, meaning the pre-order items don't work with DLC perks at all. This leads to strange, counter-intuitive and anti-synergistic scenarios, such as the pre-order shotgun being the only shotgun not affected by the otherwise outstanding "And Stay Back" Perk. Similarly, the Vault 13 canteen, a bottomless water source which your character periodically drinks from to regain a little health, is only truly useful in Hardcore mode note , the period between drinks and the amount of dehydration reduced/health restored per drink isn't significant enough to have much if any effect on gameplay, and the periods between drinks is calculated from real time instead of using the in-game clock (which means that wait or fast travel in hardcore mode will usually make the Courier severely dehydrated).
- Shiness: The Lightning Kingdom: The backer-exclusive Boss Rush dungeon is almost useless since there's nothing unique to win. It's the only place where you can obtain copies of the Shooting Star discipline, which is otherwise only dropped once by Reize, but since that dungeon only becomes accessible ''immediately before the final battles" anyway, it's almost pointless. Worse, the bosses are glitchy, some just won't attack and others will crash the game.
- Tales of Luminaria: The gacha was presented as the main way to get equipment to strengthen and customize characters, but the main story mode involved Level Scaling and cosmetic items were locked in each episode until it was cleared once. This meant that story-only players didn't have that much reason to invest in new equipment, and undermining the main monetization stream contributed to the game's death.
Beat 'em Up
- Battletoads, The multi-player mode suffers from unadjusted number of items, both players being able to hurt each other very easily (to a downright comical degree in level 2's case), and one of the levels becomes Unintentionally Unwinnable in the American version because of a programming error. If one of the players dies, both are sent back to the last checkpoint, and if one player runs out of lives, both are sent to the start of the level without giving the other player their lost lives back. Later Battletoads games for consoles mitigated this a little by offering an alternate two-player mode where the players can't hurt each other.
- Captain America: Super Soldier: You can only unlock two alternate costumes for Captain America (his WWII outfit from The Ultimates and his Classic suit from the comics). They need about 15,000 intel points and 25,000 each, which involves collecting every item in every area or farming out combat points in gameplay and challenge missions. Even once you get them, there is no New Game Plus, which means no chance to replay the game with either suit.
- Dragon Ball: Advanced Adventure: That most of the enemy cast is playable is a good, novel idea. But most of their movesets are very limited and not much fun to play.
- The Arcade mode of Final Fight: Streetwise is the game's only multiplayer mode, and "rough" is an understatement for its polish level. There are only four levels, enemy spawns are geared for two players so playing solo means dealing with huge mobs that surround you, there are only three lives and no continues to be had, food spawns are insufficient for two players, there's no lock-on. And to top it off, beating the whole thing yields no reward whatsoever, not even an "A Winner Is You" congratulations screen.
Fan Games
- Super Mario 63: Finding 32 of the 64 Star Coins allows you to swap your character to Luigi, but many things when playing as him fall flat. Aside from everyone still referring to him as Mario, there's also him reusing some of Mario's voice clips despite Super Mario 64 DS providing more than what should be needed, his inability to enter the final Bowser area unless you use the shortcut in the main lobby, a death loop that occurs with him if you die during the battle with Clown Car Bowser, and the fact that he will transform into Mario during many instances, including every cutscene.
Fighting Game
- In Bloody Roar 4, there is Career Mode, in which you have to battle multitudes of rounds among the same characters over and over while gradually progressing through a very tedious and confusing map. As a certain
game reviewer points out, among the other flaws this game has that seems all the more clear it's aimed to revive the series, the map can be fully completed and yet still leaves you with well over 800 more fights you must do in order to unlock the Very Definitely Final Hidden Character (everyone else is mercifully much easier and sooner to unlock and you will get everyone else long before you complete the map). So you have to fight repeat battles to make up the difference, and, guess what? The final unlockable character turns out to be Ryoho. No, not Ryoho & Mana you get right from the get-go, but Ryoho-the- incredibly-cheap-guard-cutting-dragon. Not only is he an incredibly cheap character to fight against as a boss, but also just as cheap as he is under your command and otherwise not terribly different from Ryoho as a human from the Ryoho you get with Mana. And there are a few other characters that are already unlocked for you early on that are also just as cheap and overpowered. Of course, this is assuming anyone bothered to go ahead and fight those repeated battles just to get that far to see Dragon!Ryoho.
- ClayFighter: Secret character High Five from Sculptor's Cut has an unfinished moveset, lacking certain normals and specials, with a single and pretty basic Super, and no Claytalities whatsoever.
- Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba - The Hinokami Chronicles: A limited event on Playstation allowed players to get a unique title and game avatar in relation to the then-upcoming Infinity Castle movie. However, this event required players to both sync their Crunchyroll account, and watch Demon Slayer on it...and was also only available in asian regions, making the title and avatar either impossible or very specific to get.
- Final Fight: Final Fight: Double Impact features the Street Fighter (1995) episode "Final Fight" as an unlockable bonus when you complete the game. Only problem? It can only be watched in a window, it is in low resolution, and can't be rewound.
- Indie Pogo:
- To a degree, the Heavy Metal augment can be this. It disables the auto-jump mechanic, but it is an augment (meaning they have to be on in order to use it), and it can only be used with four characters at launch.
- In one of the recent updates Heavy Metal was updated to be slower, losing a lot of appeal to many players.
- The Augment system as a whole is currently implemented poorly and inconvenient to set up. They don't have much going for them to make augments worth setting up either.
- To a degree, the Heavy Metal augment can be this. It disables the auto-jump mechanic, but it is an augment (meaning they have to be on in order to use it), and it can only be used with four characters at launch.
- Soul Series:
- Soul Edge: Your reward for beating Edge Master Mode (the game's Story Mode) with every character and getting all of their weapons is the bonus character, Sophitia!!, who is Sophitia without armor and her most basic weapon set. Players will have already unlocked Sophitia!, which is the same concept (a secret alternate version of Sophitia without her armor for Fanservice only obtained by collecting all of Sophitia's weapons).
- Soulcalibur II had secret characters Berserker, Assassin, and Lizardman, unlockable only through special means in the Weapon Master Mode. The kicker is that they can't be used in most game modes (including Weapon Master itself), and their moveset lists are inaccessible from the start menu like every other character. Additionally, they only have one weapon each, but they all have six costumes when two or three is the standard. This is especially aggravating because to unlock Lizardman, you needed to beat every stage in Weapon Master Mode, including the ridiculously hard bonus stages, and the fact that he was a full-fledged character in the first Soulcalibur (alongside Hwang and Rock, whose movesets were adapted into Assassin's and Berserker's). This is slightly made up for due to the fact that Lizardman and Rock become full-fledged characters again in Soulcalibur III and IV (and V in Lizardman's case).
- Li Long from Soul Edge reappears in Soulcalibur III... as a bonus character using a moveset usually reserved for created characters. He's expanded in Soulcalibur III: Arcade Edition, but fans still felt cheated. In a similar manner, Hwang and Amy also appear as bonus characters who use generic movesets. Whilst Li Long and Hwang went from being unique characters to being generic, Amy went from being generic to being a unique character of her own in Soulcalibur IV, meaning that this trope was reversed.
- Streets of Rage 4: The retro soundtrack option is not only compressed and low quality, it also only uses the soundtrack from 2 and its 8-bit counterpart.
- Tekken:
- The first game has the game Galaga remade for its loading screen. Beating all 8 levels simply rewards you with a differently suited version of Kazuya known as Devil Kazuya. Due to technical limitations, he really is just Kazuya in a purple suit, with none of the functionality of the Devil of later games (though the implication is that he is the same guy). Many players don't even bother. Many hadn't even seen him in action until YouTube came along. Interestingly, if you unlock Heihachi (who has to be unlocked by beating the game without losing), his matches will all be against Sub-Bosses, with the final boss being Devil Kazuya, but you don't unlock him this way. It's quite likely you were supposed to, but the game developers overlooked it.
- Despite everyone else — including Downloadable Content characters — having a vast array of customization options and an ending in the home port of Tekken Tag Tournament 2, Tiger Jackson does not.
First-Person Shooter
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 has "Spec Ops" mode, a series of brief co-op missions unrelated to the main plot or each other. Spec Ops itself isn't the Bonus Feature Failure, but rather its conspicuous lack of a matchmaking function, meaning it is the only multiplayer gametype in the entire series that can only be played split-screen or by specifically inviting another player.
- In Doom³: BFG Edition, it has the first two classic Doom games (based on their Xbox 360 ports) bundled together. While a nostalgic novelty for its time, and on PC it gave players a legitimate way to access the previously Xbox LIVE Arcade exclusive No Rest for the Living expansion for Doom II. After the turn of 2020, the BFG Edition's version of these games on PC would be eclipsed by their newer and enhanced Unity ports after they became available on Steam, GOG.com, and Epic Games Store, which offers improved visuals and sounds, many quality-of-life improvements (e.g. the option for 16:9 presentation, support for higher frame-rates), has fewer censorship changes in order to make the game available in Germanynote , and the ability to download curated mods (including No Rest for the Living, Final Doom, and Sigil (2019) among many others) plus sideload other vanilla-compatible WADs over the BFG Edition, making their inclusions on PC redundant and quite inferior by comparison nowadays. This is not an issue for 8th generation console and PC re-releases of BFG Edition by Panic Button, which stripped them out entirely in favor of the Unity ports.
- GoldenEye (1997): The Frigate's unlockable cheat is toggling the radar on/off in multiplayer. While this isn't bad on its own, it pales in comparison to the other unlockable cheats, and this cheat's exclusively for multiplayer, so it's useless to anyone who plays single player.
- Metroid Prime Series: The Trilogy Compilation Re-release kept the friend voucher system from Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, but made it so that you could only trade with friends who also had Trilogy; something made default by the game's limited release nature. The feature also required the use of Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection service, meaning that it became completely inaccessible after those servers shut down.
Hack and Slash
- Bayonetta: You can unlock Jeanne and Zero as playable characters, and they will also be integrated within the game's cutscenes and most scripted animations, making a huge case of Gameplay and Story Segregation. It can somehow work for Jeanne because she shares the same Umbra Witch body model and animations of Bayonetta, but it gets more jarring for Zero because his model doesn't interact properly with the other objects in the cutscene; for example, you can see the Scarborough Fair floating near him when Rodin gives said weapons in the Gates of Hell.
- Dark Messiah's online multiplayer play more like a bad Half-Life 2 mod than anything to do with Dark Messiah; ignoring the singleplayer game's brilliant combat system, spells, classes and with far worse graphics. Of course, it was made by a different company altogether.
- Devil May Cry:
- Devil May Cry 2: The Submachine Guns allow Dante to use rapid-fire against his enemies without needing to use Devil Trigger, which sounds great. Unfortunately, it's already outclassed by Dante's other guns in terms of raw power and function, not to mention that Dante's guns already have rapid fire during Devil Trigger regardless of your chosen firearm, making them completely redundant.
- Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening has a two player mode that is utterly worthless. When Dante is using Doppelganger style, or fighting alongside Vergil during Mission 19, a second player can press start on a second controller to play as Shadow Dante or Vergil. However, they are then subjected to camera issues, because the camera only focuses on Dante, leaving P2 attacking only empty air off screen. And since Shadow Dante exists for as long as Dante has juice in his Devil Trigger gauge, be prepared for a lot of dropping in-and-out as Player 2 unless the Super Sparda costume is in use.
- In Dragon Quest Heroes, defeating Atlas will grant the player the Elevating Orb. Said orb increases experienced earned by the wearer by 5%. The problem is that not only is Atlas the single hardest fight in the game by a long shot (meaning most players will be at level 99 anyway), but the Orb also only increases defense by 1 point, worse than any other armor in the game, including generic armor that can be bought the instant one unlocks the armor shop near the start of the game.
- Some of Drakengard 2's bonus content leaves much to be desired. The alternate costumes take up the same slot that players use for equipping accessories, and the costumes themselves don't really have any bonus attributes to make them worth equipping note . Additionally obtaining all 65 weapons unlocks... the ability to refight every boss in the game at a far higher difficulty. The first game allowed you to freely replay levels, including the boss fights, and yet in this game, you have to do at least 3 playthroughs on harder difficulties just to earn a feature that was already a default option in the previous game.
- In the video game adaptation of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (EA), Isildur can be unlocked as a bonus character, after only being playable in the Prologue tutorial level. But the game will treat him as a re-skin of Aragorn, since he will play literally every role Aragorn played in the levels, and even the dialogue and voice files will be the same. Particularly egregious is the fact that Isildur's version of the "Tower of Orthanc" Bonus Stage has the same script as Aragorn's version, down to Saruman referring to him as a "ragtag Ranger".
- The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (EA):
- Completing the game unlocks Merry, Pippin, and Faramir as playable characters. However, Faramir is just a skin swap of Aragorn and all four Hobbits are essentially skin swaps of each other (with Pippin and Merry basically being clones of Sam).
- Then when you finish all the levels in the game, you can play as any of the nine characters in all the levels, even where they weren't initially present. The problem? If they weren't originally meant for that level, the cutscenes won't even render them properly. The role the original character played in cutscenes will be taken by an invisible entity (though the original character's voice is still heard), while the player's character will just stand around somewhere in the background.
- Also, the characters will very rarely have any specifically recorded dialogue for levels they weren't originally in (Gandalf's narrations not withstanding). Instead, the dialogue spoken by the character they replaced will be totally removed from gameplay, although lines of dialogue directly addressing the original character will still be used throughout the level. This can leave conversations completely one-sided, as well as confusing, in certain levels. One notable moment is that both Éowyn and Merry have to be protected during the "Pelennor Fields" level, even when the player has selected Merry as their character.
- Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance: The H.F. Long Sword is unlocked by ranking first place in 20 extremely difficult optional VR missions. A more powerful Murasama sword can be unlocked simply by completing the story once on any difficulty. However, the H.F. Long Sword has the benefit that it can be used to achieve the "Naked and Unloved" title, since unlockables in VR Missions are not erased when starting a new game.
- The Sword of Etheria: Though the game does have a lot of decent bonus content, the video section of Galleries is a complete letdown because it only allows you to view 4 of the game's FMV cutscenes despite the game having a decent amount both in-engine and FMV cutscenes.
- Warriors Orochi 2:
- There's a HUGE roster of officers to unlock, and while several of them have suspiciously similar movesets, each of them is, at least, a BIT original. However, the hardest character to unlock, by an order of magnitude, is Orochi Z - his appearance in your roster basically signifies that you have achieved 100% Completion and then some. You have to spend DAYS just grinding levels, well after you have finished completing every scenario on every difficulty, to unlock the last Dream Scenario - and then beat that to unlock Orochi Z.
- Orochi Z himself is the Final Boss, so that's awesome. He's not JUST a Palette Swap of Orochi either, having different hair. However... firstly, he doesn't have his own set of weapons, like everybody else does - he just uses the same set as Orochi. Second, his moveset is less than half the size of anybody else, and he never learns new moves - though, granted, those few moves he DOES have are pretty powerful. Finally, every other character has a series of artwork - various design-sketches, posed character-models, screenshots from cutscenes they're in and the like - that are unlocked as you use them. Orochi Z has none. So effectively, once you've taken him into combat ONCE to check out all 3 of his moves, there's literally no point in ever using him again - especially since, by that point, you've already done basically everything in the game.
MMORPG
- In Champions Online there are three crafting schools, Weapons, Mysticism, and Science. Each of these used to have a single SPECIAL BONUS "crafted travel power" the player could claim/build. For instance, in Weapons the travel power was called the "R.A.D. Sphere." It required leveling your character's crafting ability up to the 300-400 range, buying the blueprints, crafting a few dozen items, which were each in turn crafted from a dozen other items apiece which you ALSO had to buy the blueprints for, then gathering another dozen or so increasingly rare dropped artifacts, then assembling them all together...with another blueprint. The result for all this running back and forth to the crafting table, spending a fortune in points, and scouring the countryside pummeling various monsters to get them to drop rare items? Your character got the power to crouch down, wrap his arms around his knees, and roll forward. At about running pace. It looks stupid, is ridiculously slow, and if you should actually wish to level this power up, you had to go through the above hunt-and-gather grinding rigamarole all over again to BUILD the next iteration.
The Mysticism and Science crafted travel powers were actually worse, being nothing more than bog-standard flight power with, respectively, some purple glowy dots and some electrical sparks tacked on. And with the April 2012 complete overhaul, these are now purchaseable outright with in-game resources, at which point they become available as normal powers to any toon you have. The epic grind for them no longer exists. - City of Heroes has several "accolade" powers that can be earned by accomplishing various tasks in the game. These powers are either small but significant passive boosts to hit points or endurance, or powers that need to be actively used. These latter active powers have extremely long, double-digit cooldown times, but can provide powerful effects for the short time they're up. The exception is the Crey CBX-9 Pistol (and its equivalent for villain characters, the Stolen Immobilizer Ray); this power is functionally identical to a weak level 1 power that most characters with access to don't even want, except slightly slower because the character first needs to draw the weapon to fire it. It also shares the same massive cooldown as the other active accolade powers, despite the power it's a clone of recharging in only 4 seconds.
- Final Fantasy XIV: The Atma relic weapons are statistically the exact same as the Zenith relic before it, only with the glow removed and the textures getting new colors. Considering that the items needed to make an Atma weapon only come from Random Drops, Atma weapons are underwhelming. It isn't until you go to the higher tiers for your relic that the weapon will actually improve. You can choose to ignore the relic weapons entirely and go for suitable alternatives.
- Mabinogi had an event that makes you play Bingo using a Roulette from an NPC who says he's always lucky. The Main reward for completing the Bingo board is a unique Bag that gives you more inventory spaces. Unfortunately, the Bag requires a Premium service in order to open, and as Mabinogi being made a Free MMO, this reward will go unused and will be gone by the time the event is over. Said NPC lost his lucky status after reappearing in another event. They've given out similar bags as a reward during their spring 2013 Vocaloid event. Same issue, although for people who do subscribe the bags are an improvement over what's normally available, and they're entirely up front in the description of the event what the limitation on the bags is. In general, the combination of Everything Fades (though bags actually don't), continual introduction of new things to the game which Permanently Missable Content applies to, and limited storage space for players can easily lead to feelings of this.
Pinball
- Baby Pac-Man: The Pacscalator function activated by shooting the pinball into the saucer after a power pellet was earned on that side. While it's great for being able to return to the pinball to sweep up some pellets, because you start closer to the bottom, the ghosts have more time to reach the bottom where the Pacscalator deposits you and kill you as a result, unless you only sweep a small number of pellets or happened to activate one of the lower pellets and chomp on one, eat some ghosts, and escape back into the pinball section.
- White Water: The "Hold Bonus" after shooting the pinball through Disaster Drop six times is completely useless. The bonus score is predetermined by how many rafts you have completed, and the R-I-V-E-R bonus multiplier resets back to 1X at the end of the ball even if you collected "Hold Bonus". Unofficial updates to the ROM chip software changes it so "Hold Bonus" actually is useful to the player.
Puzzle Game
- Picross: The Alt-World in Pokémon Picross are rehashes all of the puzzles into Mega Picross puzzles. Keyword is rehashes; all of the puzzles are more or less the same, just with a Mega Picross gimmick. In addition, Mega Picross doesn't give any Picrite rewards like the main puzzles do. (There are achievement medals for unlocking the mode, solving one puzzle, and solving all puzzles including Alt-World, and these do give you Picrites, but not nearly enough to make up for what you spent unlocking it.)
- Spin Jam: What do you get after toughing your way through the expert story mode? A Powerpoint-style slideshow of concept art set to the title theme music repeated 3 times, as seen here. Worse still, those exact same pictures can ALSO be unlocked by beating the infinitely more brain-breaking hard 100-round arcade mode with each character. Yay, that was worthwhile.
- Tetris: The Absolute - The Grand Master 2 PLUS offers the TGM+ and T.A. Death modes, neither of which have high score rankings. While Death mode is very popular and offers its own grading scale (M for completing the first half of the game in under 3'25", GM for that and completing the whole thing), TGM+ has no grading scale whatsoever.
Racing Game
- Video Game/Burnout: The Tuned Super in Legends PSP can't be used to complete any World Tour races because you won't even unlock it until after you've earned your final gold medal (it requires 75 gold medals in racing events to unlock and there are 75 race events in the whole World Tour). The US and World Circuit Racers will unlock before unlocking the Tuned Super, which makes it feel like a missed opportunity (it also means that, despite having technically different unlocking conditions, the Gangster Boss is actually unlocked at the same time as the Tuned Super since unlocking the Legend GP events necessitate getting Gold across an entire vehicle series and the Gangster Boss requires a Gold in every Legend GP).
- Crash Team Racing: Completing the first four gem cups unlocks the first four bosses as playable characters, so fans were incredibly incensed and let down when they beat the final cup, which was incidentally much harder to even gain access to in the first place, and were handed Fake Crash instead of Nitros Oxide. Justified however, as the developers later explained they originally did intend to have Oxide unlocked in the purple gem cup but were forced to dummy him out when they were unable to adapt his unique kart and larger size for play without glitches or messing up the game: Oxide is almost fully functional if accessed via a cheat device, and you'll even hear unique lines from him when you control him, but he'll crash the game if used in multiplayer due to overflowing the game's memory and his huge hovering kart makes it difficult to see the track. The remake rectifies this by scaling his kart down to roughly the same as everyone else's as well as promoting him to playable.
- F Zero:
- The final unlockable course of F-Zero GX is Mute City: Sonic Oval, a beginner-level course that consists of a NASCAR-style oval. It's not even used in the AX Cup; you can only play it in Time Attack, Practice, and multiplayer. It's also on the wrong place in the AX Cup course listing; in F-Zero AX, it's the first course in the list rather than the last.
- Completing the Ace League in F-Zero 99 unlocks a decal for your machine that changes it to its respective Suspiciously Similar Substitute from the Satellaview BS F-Zero Grand Prix games. Though the acknowledgement of a long-forgotten game was cool, this was initially somewhat disappointing due to the BS vehicles not getting any alternate palettes or decals unlike the original four. Fortunately, the 1.5.5 update made them usable in Team Battle (previously, they would transform back into the basegame machine) and the 1.6.0 update gave them proper palettes and decals to unlock, thoroughly removing them from this trope.
- Jet Ion GP: After completing every single cup in the game, your reward is a few VS-Mode exclusive courses called Night Train, which are nothing more than a set of courses with bland level design and visuals with the music being its only redeeming trait.
- Knight Rider: The NES version allows you to start with maxed out shields/gas/acceleration in Mission mode if you complete the Driving mode twice and play the Mission campaign. However, due to a Game-Breaking Bug, the game will crash at the upgrade screen before the Miami mission.
- Mario Kart:
- Mario Kart 64: The game introduced the ability to save Time Trial ghosts to race against later. However, you need the Nintendo 64 Controller Pak to use this feature, and it takes up all but two pages on the Pak for only two ghosts. In addition, you can't save your ghost if you crash into anything, fall off the track, take too long to complete the race, or even pause the game. Finally, the feature flat-out doesn't work in the Virtual Console version since it doesn't emulate the Controller Pak.
- Mario Kart: Double Dash!!: The seldom-advertised LAN mode. On one hand, it enabled more than four players to compete in Mario Kart for the first time ever, up to 16. On the other hand, it has some weird limitations: you can't choose your own characters or kart (the game will select for you before a race), Bob-Omb Blast isn't playable in this mode, and King Boo and Petey Piranha cannot be played as in this mode, even if you unlocked them. You also have to choose a track in the Settings menu instead of immediately before a race, which is much clunkier.
- Mario Kart Wii: By getting a star rank in all 150cc Retro Cups, you unlock the Jetsetter/Aero Glider as a kart. Unfortunately, said kart also has terrible stats in everything except top speed and weight, meaning anyone who unlocks it will likely never find a use for it in the actual game.
- Mario Kart 7 has a few unlockable gliders you can earn. However, some of them are just a copy of the Super Glider in terms of stats, basically giving no bonus, and the rest are just a copy of the Peach Parasol in its bonus stats. This also includes all the golden parts that take so long to get, even if used together.
- Mario Kart 8 Deluxe: If you make the grueling effort to complete the 200cc version of all cups, you get rewarded with... Gold Mario. A number of players will admit that they were expecting something more than just a Palette Swap of an existing character for completing the game's hardest mode.
- Sideswiped: The Nerai minigame unlocked at the end of Mission Mode has absolutely no purpose outside of a minor distraction and offers zero additional functionality. In addition, the exceptionally difficult bonus events unlocked at the same time serve no purpose as, by the time you get there, you'll already have enough money to buy absolutely everything you could possibly want, making their massive cash prizes useless.
- The Simpsons Hit & Run has several cheats that are total misses (not counting the cheats that are intentionally screwy for fun, like "drunk driving mode"). "High acceleration" and "no top speed" make the car spin out of control almost constantly, and will actually make missions more difficult to complete. "Grid mode" turns on some sort of weird debug mode that puts gridlines everywhere which lag the game so badly it becomes nearly unplayable.
- Finding all wrecks in an area in Test Drive Unlimited 2 grants you a free car if you have the garage space for it. The first wreck you assemble is a Volkswagen Beetle. A C4-class car (Which means you can actually enter it into some competitions, unlike the B2-class V8 Buggy you find next) with a top speed that can only exceed 85mph with massive tuning or the much simpler method of driving it off a cliff. At least the V8 Buggy you get from the next ten wrecks is useful for exploring. Another 10 gets you The Citroën 2CV (also C4 class), even worse than Beetle. It tops out at about 70 mph, even after tuning. Then again, what do you expect from a car with only 18 horsepower?
- Wipeout 64 and Wip3out both had a challenge mode that went nowhere. The former unlocked all of its bonus content after completing the basic sets of challenges, but then presented you with "combo challenges" and then "gold challenges" which basically amounted to getting gold on the previous challenges. Your reward? A different menu screen. The latter unlocked tracks, ships and Phantom difficulty as rewards for winning in single race mode; the challenge, eliminator and championship modes were completely useless and unlocked nothing other than the next challenge, leaving you with nothing to show at the end. Bonus points because it wasn't explained anywhere how you were actually supposed to unlock content. And the very first Wipeout ended with a championship with no reward other than some scrolling text promising "Wipeout II, coming soon".
Real Time Strategy
- Dawn of War: Dawn of War 2's Anniversary Edition cannot install the original Dawn of War 2, instead installing the first expansion on top of it, despite both games having their own slot on Steam. Dawn of War's Anniversary Edition, however, doesn't have the same problem.
Rhythm Game
- The True Final Boss of DJMAX Technika's Heartbeat Set, "Area 7", obtained by finishing the first 3 stages with at least 95% of your notes being "MAX"es (you get the normal Final Boss, "Colours of Sorrow", if you don't). Not only does it have an awkward chart, but it has a lower max combo, meaning that getting this song instead of CoS is actually harmful to your score. So to get an optimal score on this course, you will need to Do Well, But Not Perfect on the first 3 stages.
- Guitar Hero allows you to pay a fee to import songs starting from World Tour onwards to later Guitar Hero games (up through Warriors of Rock). However, due to music licensing costs, many songs are excluded from this feature. While the amount of songs offered with each export pack varies, World Tour and Smash Hits are downright embarrassing, only offering a meager 37 out of 86 songs and 21 out of 45 songs respectively. At that point, you're better off playing the songs on their original games.
- Um Jammer Lammy: For whatever reason, Ma-San's little personal movies after the credits, as well as those viewed through PaRappa's storyline, have a seriously choppy framerate and subpar sound mixing, presumably to fit them on the disc without sacrificing the overall picture quality for all the FMVs. It's enough to make you think your disc is defective until you see that they're the same way in the PSN Store's downloadable version.
Roguelike
- Nuclear Throne: Some of the so-called "alternate" costumes for various characters are really just glorified Palette Swaps or give them a single added accessory, sometimes not even that much (e.g. Melting's B-skin is just him but slightly more melted, Eyes' B-skin is just him wearing 3D glasses, Y.V.'s B-skin is just him with his eye closed, etc.).
Shoot 'em Up
- DoDonPachi DaiFukkatsu for mobile devices (DoDonPachi Resurrection outside of Japan) has Hibachi as a playable character in Arrange Mode, unlocked by reaching and defeating him on one credit or inputting a cheat code (which wears off when your game ends). However, his special shot requires that you tilt your device to aim, making it tough to use in a moving vehicle and outright useless on a tablet.
- ESP Ra.De.:
- Psi features the Irori's Room mode, where you can decorate the rooms of and dress up the three(later four) ESPers, as well as take part in bite-size missions involving playing the game itself. Unfortunately, going into Irori's Room will force landscape orientation if you were using portrait orientation in the other modes, meaning that if you were playing the other modes in portrait, you'll have to turn your TV back for this mode. Furthermore, going into this room resets your screen configuration for the other modes, forcing you to set them again when you go back into those modes.
- Psi's Arcade Osarai mode has you practicing sections you recently died at (similar to Ketsui Deathtiny's Bonds of Growth mode). However, it only applies to deaths incurred in Arcade mode; deaths in Arcade Plus mode (with the rebalanced scoring and the new Final Boss) are not used in this mode.
- Gradius V and Ikaruga have continues that increase for each hour of play, culminating in "free play" (unlimited continues) after a set number of continues obtained. But if you improve yourself at either game, by the time you unlock free play, you most likely won't need it anymore. Gradius Gaiden is a similar case, save for the increasing credits; you start with 9 instead of 3, and they never go up save for when you unlock free play.
- Panzer Dragoon': The game has an unadvertised "wizard mode" which bumps the framerate up to 30, but it does so by just speeding up the game to hit that mark, meaning you lose the intended accompaniment of the music. Not to mention that it often drops back down in busier sections of the game, and cutscenes are capped at 20 frames anyway.
- Raiden Fighters: In Aces, Score Attack mode is locked at 60 FPS (NTSC television speed) and cannot be set to 54 FPS (original game speed). Also, all difficulties beyond Arcade or below Normal are not available in Xbox Live mode.
- Touhou Eiyashou ~ Imperishable Night has, as unlockables, solo versions of each team (Reimu only and Yukari only for instance, as opposed to Reimu and Yukari). However, this works by essentially locking your shottype to focused or unfocused. Human characters still can't shoot through familiars, making stages much worse, and youkai characters can't shoot familiars, causing problems with a number of bosses. In addition to this, Remilia's options have a bit of lag when you try to move them when she's solo, and you can't focus to center Youmu's ghost half anymore. Just to make things worse, most solo characters are missing a large portion of their phantom gauge, making them difficult to score with. Except Youmu, whose shortened gauge makes her the best character to score with, even if she's awkward to use.
Sports Game
- By beating Backyard Skateboarding, you unlock Old School Andy. He's a Palette Swap of Andy MacDonald, a character available from the start.
- Dark Summit: Unlocking the other operatives can be a bit of a letdown since they each have to restart the story from scratch, re-unlock all the special moves and lack any extra costumes or boards like Naya had. On the bright side, their default gear is equivalent to Naya's best gear right out the starting gate, making earlier missions a lot easier.
- Live Powerful Pro Baseball: A common unlockable in the Pocket games allows you to swap the title screen to one featuring the local Yabe lookalike for one power point, but the illustrations featuring them often suck in comparison to the default ones featuring the Power Pros.
Stealth-Based Game
- Metal Gear:
- One of the most hyped features of Metal Gear Solid: VR Missions was the fact that players could finally control Solid Snake's old war buddy Gray Fox, aka the Cyborg Ninja. This feature was so much of a selling point that Gray Fox's face is not only used on the packaging illustration, but also on the actual title screen itself. Despite all the effort required to unlock him (which is even more complicated in the Japanese Integral version, since it required the player to complete the main game and trade data using the PocketStation memory card), he only has three missions out of the 300 actually featured in the game (that's literally 1% of the game) and they're all set in the same stage with only slightly different objectives between each: the first mission involves destroying a set number of stationary dummy targets, the second mission involves killing a set number of Genome Soldiers, and the final mission involves assassinating Solid Snake, who appears as a head-swapped Genome Soldier patrolling the area.
- Some of the unlockable bonus camouflage from Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater wouldn't be worth picking up for free, let alone actually going to the effort to obtain:
- Spider Camo is unlocked by beating The Fear non-fatally and greatly increases camouflage in dark areas at the cost of draining your stamina immensely. Considering that eating food to maintain stamina is key to surviving, the Spider Camo is far more detrimental than it's worth and outclassed by several other camos that can do the same thing.
- Hornet Stripe is unlocked by beating The Pain non-fatally and wards off spiders, leeches and hornets, while also making hornets follow you harmlessly and attack guards instead. This ability is so esoteric that you will never find any real use for it outside of The Pain's boss fight. Even then, any of your guns would be more far more useful in that fight and in general.
- Fire is unlocked by beating The Fury non-fatally and reduces explosion damage and grants immunity to catching flame. This would sound useful except this is a game where stealth is the main priority, and ideally you'll want to avoid enemy fights. It also has a low camouflage index, making it rather useless considering most of the game takes place outdoors. Ironically The Fury's camo is actually quite useful against The Fury himself, but that means you'll still have to beat him once without it and carry it over into a New Game Plus.
- The Nine National Face paints, rewarded to the player for getting all 27 ranks in Snake Eater 3D. Not only do they all grant poor camouflage indexes, but they grant absolutely no abilities whatsoever. Compared to the much easier to acquire green and brown face paints that grant unlimited grip or oxygen (respectively), such a difficult to acquire prize being only a Cosmetic Award is a fantastic fail.
Survival Horror
- Operator's Side: The player can find hidden "chips" that unlock new commands, most of which are minigames or otherwise purely cosmetic. However, the "Taunt" command borders on being a Poison Mushroom due to being a combat command that not only does nothing and leaves Rio wide open, but sounds similar enough to commands such as "[shoot] tongue" or "turn [left/right]" that the game will often misinterpret the latter as the former.
- Resident Evil:
- Resident Evil 1: The Director's Cut contains many improvements over the original 1996 version. However, despite what the subtitle implies, it still retains all the censorship of the earlier version, apparently due to a localization error.
- Barry's Samurai Edge handgun from the 2002 Resident Evil (Remake). It has three rounds at a time in quick succession and has infinite ammo, but it's only marginally more powerful than the default Beretta and its probability of blowing off zombie heads isn't much higher, either. It's certainly useful early in the game, but it'll get banished to the item box at the exact same time the regular handgun normally is since your shotgun, magnum and grenade launchers still outclass it by a mile.
- Resident Evil Code: Veronica lets you play as Albert Wesker in the Battle Game. You remember, the same guy who runs across walls in bullet time and bitch slaps Claire Redfield effortlessly? Yeah, in Battle Game he can't do any of that and gets only a knife to play with. While it carries on the usual thing of villains having tougher inventory sets to play with in minigames, it's still a bitter pill to swallow. You can get a Colt Python with which to fight Alexia. However, not only does it not have infinite ammo like everyone else's guns, but whether you get it or not depends on luck.
- Resident Evil 0 has two of these:
- You can unlock Leech Hunter on Easy but if you unlock the E rank reward from said mode (sub-machinegun ammo), it won't be useful at all there since you can't obtain the sub-machinegun in that difficulty level.
- Besides gameplay differences, Wesker Mode in the HD versions is pretty much the same deal as the main game, only with Wesker's model instead of Billy's and nothing else was done to acknowledge the change (besides a few written lines).
- Resident Evil 4 is big on this trope:
- There's the Hand Cannon, a souped-up Magnum with massive stopping power and the ability to go through multiple enemies per shot. You get it by getting the best rank with every character on every stage of Mercenaries mode, which comes out to 20 perfect runs. By the time you're skilled enough to do this, you've probably unlocked and bought the Chicago Typewriter (an infinite-ammo tommygun, made available by clearing Separate Ways), Infinite Rocket Launcher (an RPG with infinite uses, made available just by beating the game), or even just fully upgraded the standard Magnum, which makes the Hand Cannon look pretty pointless in comparison. The 2023 remake remedies this, making the Hand Cannon easier to obtain note and even allowing you to do this before starting a new game.
- The PlayStation 2 and PC versions introduced the P.R.L. 412, a futuristic anti-Plagas weapon that is only obtained after beating Professional (hard) Mode, which means there isn't much of any reason to use it, since the player's probably finished everything by then anyway. It's not even particularly great, being a slow charging laser that serves mostly as an unlimited supply of flash grenades (except with worse range) unless you spend the time charging it to full power, in which case it kills Plagas villagers instantly, but not much else. Even worse, a weak flash can kill the final boss immediately.
- Using the Raccoon Police Department/"pop starlet" outfits for Leon and Ashley makes Ada wear her "Assignment Ada" tactical outfit during the main game. The original PC version and the PS2 version miss out on seeing this because Ada only appears during cutscenes in the main game, and these ports use pre-rendered cutscenes that were derived from a playthrough with the normal outfits, with no alternate versions of these scenes being recorded for the other outfits.
- Finishing Resident Evil 5 unlocks the New Game Plus where you play the exact same campaign over again, except as Sheva instead of Chris. Um... yay. It boils down to getting to do about six or seven slightly different things in the otherwise identical campaign, making it look monumentally lame when compared to Separate Ways of the previous game or even the Game B modes of Resident Evil 2. Even that wouldn't be so bad if they didn't foist an Interface Screw on you: Sheva's entire screen is mirrored, which takes a lot of getting used to and which most people won't bother doing for the sole purpose of playing as Sheva. The following game learned their lesson from this one, letting you toggle the screen at will and choose which of the two characters you want to play as right at the start, and rewarding you with an entire fourth campaign starring Ada Wong for beating the game.
- Resident Evil 6 has Ada's campaign which used to be single player only. Fans complained about it since it meant they couldn't play Ada's campaign with a friend. Capcom later added a generic Umbrella soldier named Agent to be Ada's co-op partner. Almost no effort was made in making Agent actually work like a proper player character; Agent does not possess the grappling hook, thus an Agent player has to wait for the Ada player to move ahead and get teleported next to her. Agent also cannot solve any of the puzzles nor open any briefcases since only Ada can do that. On top of all the above, Agent can't even open doors. Overall, Agent is just being strung along since they can't do anything besides kill things and they don't even appear in cutscenes either.
- Resident Evil Village: Some of the pre-order bonuses would be questionable even if you hadn't paid extra for them:
- The Albert-01 is severely nerfed from its appearance in the previous game, and is only useful in the very early parts of the game because, while it has a 10% power boost over the base LEMI, it can't be upgraded at all; it doesn't even have an infinite ammo option to unlock. The moment you find and equip the LEMI's compensator, the Albert-01 effectively becomes a waste of inventory space.
- The Mr. Raccoon and Mr. Everywhere weapon charms. Being cosmetic, they have no functional use, but their silliness and cuteness might be fun for a little Mood Whiplash. If you happen to not enjoy the look, you'd be wise to just let the Duke keep them: once they're put on, they cannot be removed.note
- Resident Evil 1: The Director's Cut contains many improvements over the original 1996 version. However, despite what the subtitle implies, it still retains all the censorship of the earlier version, apparently due to a localization error
- Silent Hill 3 has the Heather Beam and Sexy Beam, two move sets that you can unlock for New Game Plus. While being able to shoot eye lasers sounds like the coolest thing to have in this game, it's surprisingly underwhelming. The raw damage is worse than some of the weapons found in the normal game, the attack takes a while to start up, and it uses Heather's stamina as ammo, which runs out quick and leaves her exhausted. They also take a really long time to unlock - you have to kill 333 enemies in total, which will take at least 2 playthroughs to accomplish, but likely more if you weren't specifically aiming for it from the start. By comparison, the infinite ammo SMG is another bonus weapon you can unlock after just 1 playthrough, and it's far more effective in every way. The only reason you actually need to use the beams is to see the UFO ending, which requires getting kills with them. However, some unlockables require you to beat the game as much as ten times, and since the UFO ending stops the game at the halfway point, this indirectly makes the beams very useful for cutting down the amount of grinding you'll have to do.
Third-Person Shooter
- Deep Freeze: The only unique reward to beating the game with Expert difficulty (itself requiring you beat the game once on Normal difficulty) is an alternate, seemingly rough-draft version of the game's intro with some unused footage.
- Most of the higher-up skins unlocked in Gears of War 3 are simple reskins of existing characters. For example, "Civilian Anya" is the same character as "Anya Stroud," albeit minus her armor and with a different hairstyle. Anya's basic form is available by default—"Civilian Anya" isn't unlocked until level 45.
Turn-Based Strategy
- Final Fantasy Tactics:
- Byblo joins you as a Guest-Star Party Member when you fight the Optional Boss, and if he survives, he joins your team afterward. Is he any good? Well... he's a monster unit, which means he can't use equipment or change classes. He's nowhere near as strong as the other special monster unit you get, Worker 8, and doesn't have Worker 8's innate magic immunity. His skills are thoroughly mediocre, and (being a monster unit) he'll never learn more. The best thing you can really say about him is that he has innate Poach, but teaching that to human units is easy. Waste of a character, to be honest.
- Bonus character Cloud Strife can also fall into this category. You get him at the end of a fairly long sidequest...and he's level 1. In addition, to use his unique abilities, you need his special weapon, which is only obtained by having someone with Move-Find Item step on a particular tile in a particular place (though at least, unlike all other Move-Find Item spaces, there's only one possible item to get), and is only so-so in strength. Even worse, his skills target panels instead of characters, meaning that unless you go out of your way to prevent it, his target will likely end up moving out of harm's way before it goes off. If you have the patience to get his sword and level him up though, he's a decent party member, and doing the sidequest also nets you several other party members and good rewards, so it's not really a waste. The Ivalice Chronicles remaster/remake fixes a lot of these issues by making Cloud's level around the party's level when recruited, having his required special weaponnote when recruited, having charge time of most of his moves reduced, and having some abilities learned from other jobs.
- Final Fantasy Tactics Advance is a two-in-one combo. It has several unlockable characters; some of these are unique characters that cannot change classes or learn new abilities, while others are merely normal units with special sprites. One, notoriously, doesn't unlock until after you have nothing you can possibly do with him. Some of the special characters can't even enter the water, all because they don't have sprites drawn of them being in the water. Feather Boots can fix this since it makes the wearer walk on the water rather than in it. Especially bad with Ezel Berbier, who is locked into a class with high magic attack growth and low physical attack growth, and has no ability to learn any skills that use his magic attack stat.
- Final Fantasy Tactics A2: Al-Cid, who can't even change jobs and whose abilities revolve solely around having female characters in the party. Some people may see Adelle's Heritor job as this, with only decent Growths and abilities that don't make up for the growth.
- Fire Emblem:
- In Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones, you can earn several special party members by going through the two bonus dungeons, the Tower of Valni and the Lagdou Ruins. These characters are all characters who existed in the main story as Non-Player Characters, some of whom were even bosses. Sounds cool, right? Unfortunately, you can only unlock these characters after playing through the entire main campaign, meaning all you really can use them in are the dungeons in which they are unlocked and random battles on the world map. Worse still, the vast majority of them are some of the worst units in the game, due to coming with high levels, poor base stats, terrible growth rates, and being unable to support other units; even the best among them are easily outmatched by units you recruited in the main campaign. The only ones with any useful equipment or skills are Ismaire (who comes with a unique weapon), Valter (who has an exceptionally rare item), Caellach (likewise), Riev (has a strong class in Bishop and an actual utility in the form of unusually high Defense) and Lyon (who has a unique class capable of summoning phantoms, as well as a unique infinite-durability tome and a rare staff); the others come with various generic weapons and Shop Fodder. Even for completionists, recruiting Lyon may be more trouble than it's worth, because getting him requires you to fight through the Lagdou Ruins three times. Just to rub salt in the wound, they are, for whatever reason, unable to be used against other players in the Link Arena.
- Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance is similar, featuring enemy characters that can be played post-campaign. Unlike Sacred Stones though, there is no post-campaign, so instead you can only play with them in six bland "trial" chapters (three of which require an Old Save Bonus, and are just copies of levels found in the main game), which have no story or named enemies in them. Also, it requires a downright silly number of playthroughs to unlock them; you don't get the first until finishing the lengthy game three times, and the Big Bad requires fifteen full passes of the game to unlock. It doesn't help that most of them, barring the last one recruited, are rather lackluster and only worth looking at due to their rare equipment.
- Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade, like Path of Radiance, also has characters unlockable for use in a series of dull trial maps (though Binding Blade only has five unless you were lucky enough to win more in promotional events), and has similarly silly requirements for unlocking them (the last one, Guinevere, requires a full nine passes through the game to unlock). To make it worse, most of them are markedly inferior to your normal units anyway; in particular, the first one recruited, Narshen, is too weak to survive much of anything in the trial maps. Only Guinevere is really notable, and then, mostly because of her unique gimmick of having access to both Light magic and Anima magic at the same time.
- Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon has the Elysian Whip item in the game's online shop. When used on a female unit in the Pegasus Knight class, it promotes them and causes their Dracoknight promotion to be replaced with Falcoknight, its promotion from other games in the series. The trouble is, Falcoknight is worse than Dracoknight; it trades off Strength and Defense (both highly useful stats its users very much want) for Resistance (situational and easy to increase), and trades off axes as a secondary weapon (best base damage and a Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors advantage against half the enemy roster) with swords (worst base damage and disadvantage against that same half). The only thing Falcoknight has going for it is a slightly higher Speed cap, which only comes into play against a handful of enemies on the highest difficulties of the endgame; even then, said Speed cap matches the Paladin, which does everything the Falcoknight does bar flight without any special trouble. New Mystery of the Emblem buffed the class to make it more of an actual tradeoff, but also made the Whips available in the main game, making them no longer a bonus.
- Fire Emblem: Awakening continues the trend with its six Spotpass characters, available as free DLC and recruited in six special downloaded chapters. Unlike previous examples, most of them range from decent but underleveled to surprisingly powerful, and two even have completely unique skills that no one else naturally has access to. However, they're only able to be recruited right before the final chapter, and some of their recruitment chapters are harder than the final chapter itself. Worse still, their support pool is extremely limited, as all six of them can only support the Avatar; in a game where two units achieving an S-Support can make them obscenely powerful when paired up, this is a harsh drawback. While the existence of other DLC chapters prevents them from becoming truly useless like previous examples in the series, the final one, Apotheosis, basically requires an army consisting of nothing but S-ranked units paired together with maximum stats and the absolute best skills available, meaning at most exactly one of them will get a chance to participate. They're not as bad as previous examples, but are still generally underwhelming all the same.
- Fire Emblem: Three Houses featured the recurring shopkeeper Anna as part of the game's paid DLC season pass. While Anna does get her own paralogue, she doesn't have any support conversations, not even with the player character. This is a sharp contrast to the game's other DLC characters, who all have multiple supports. In particular, Jeritza was released at the same time as a free update for all players, and he has multiple supports and paired endings.
- Super Robot Wars 30: The DLC intro missions serve as a rare non-postgame example. They were added in for free in order to give players a taste of the new units and convince undecided players to buy the DLC. One issue though is that the units get most of their more powerful weapons removed, making them fare far worse against the enemies they're put up against compared to your current crew. This would make them less appealing to those without the DLC. The other issue is that you are required to do these missions to access the recruitment missions for the involved DLC characters - including, nonsensically, the OG characters that don't even show up in the mission - and there's no indication of that in-game. Add the facts that these missions in particular have little significance to the story and give extremely bad rewards (you often "beat" the missions by timing out rather than destroying all enemies), and you're left with an extra "feature" that fails as a DLC advertisement and is just a hassle to play for anyone who already has the DLC.
Wide-Open Sandbox
- Grand Theft Auto V: The video editor included with the PC version has a lot of irritating problems, like only being able to go roughly fifty feet away from your character, recording ending the instant your character dies, the "smooth" camera option causing the camera to lag behind the set keyframes, poor video output quality, and other arbitrary limits that make it just plain annoying to use.
- ''Jaws Unleashed: The Tin Can reward for finding all 24 Tin Cans, is movie clips from the first Jaws movie. Which is a pointless feature, considering that the game came out in 2006, years after the original movie which was released in 1975 which means that you could just buy the movie and watch that instead.
- Spider-Man 2 (Activision): Upon completing the game, you can unlock a movie viewer that can let you watch FMVs at a specific location in New York. Said FMVs are just the company logos and the ending credits.
Misc.
- Dark Tales: Two of them.are present in The Fall of the House of Usher.
- The First-Person Snapshooter activity from Masque is brought back. However, whereas in Masque it serves a useful function (forming an interactive map enabling fast travel), it's almost completely pointless in Usher; it does nothing except create a photo album in the player character's personal study. Many players complained about this in the forums.
- Many players also complained about the rat which hangs out on the inventory bar. It serves no useful purpose, you can't turn it off, and all it does is perform vaguely distracting actions like eating and falling off the bar. Notably, this is the only game where either the rat or the pointless photography appear, indicating that the devs took the criticism to heart.
- Duck Life: The Adobe Flash version of the second game had a Level Editor which is glitchy and broken to the point of being unuseable. The fourth game has an unlockable arcade cabinet that allows you to replay the training minigames, but it causes the game to freeze and if you try to play the game again, it's permanently soft-locked.
- Full Tilt! Pinball: On the Space Cadet table, the three blue lights near the top of the table are meant to show how many balls are in play during multiball. Since the version of the game included with older Windows versions does not have multiball, the lights serve no purpose during gameplay; they only light up during Attract Mode. This was fixed in the full Full Tilt! release which includes multiball.
- Ghost Squad (2004): Adjusting the difficulty level for an individual mission to Level 8 and above is actually detrimental to your score, in part because enemies take more hits to die now, which ensures that the player earns less Quick Shots and Medals because of the increased difficulty.
- The Nintendo GameCube can output supported games in 480p. The caveat? Due to the way the signal is processed, you need a proprietary component cable to actually get 480p video. Said cables were produced in very small quantities, were bought by a very small number of GameCube owners, and were very quickly discontinued. For a while, the cables were very expensive (topping off at $300 on eBay), though cheaper third-party cables have eventually entered the market. However, even if you do have the component cables, it occupies a special "Digital A/V Out" port on the console, which was removed in a 2004 console revision due to the low sales of the component cable. You're better off getting the first model of the Wii, which can not only play GameCube games in 480p but is overall cheaper, with the component cables not being as rare and expensive.
- PlayStation 2: Any games that required the i.LINK port for LAN play is this, as the port was removed on later revisions of the PS2. So if you had a game that required i.LINK for LAN play and not the Network Adapter and planned on linking more consoles together for multiplayer, you were out of luck.
- StarCraft: Mass Recall: The "Enslavers Redux" campaign integration was this in 7.0 and 7.1, as the campaign was riddled with bugs stemming from it being hastily ported to SCMR Mod 7.0, that resulted in it being an unplayable mess. 7.2 largely fixes the bugs, though it still remains unpolished.
- Tchia: After beating the story, you unlock the ability to spawn the mythical Xetiwa bird and possess it. However, it's pathetically slow, way slower than normal birds, and as such is pretty much useless.
- Twisted Metal: The hidden characters of Black except for Yellow Jacket are missing introduction movies and character bios; all of them are missing mid-game cutscenes to follow the boss fight against Minion; and the FMVs they do have are very cheap-looking compared to those of the normal drivers.
- The Boss Characters in 4 don't have specific ending FMVs either, it's the generic one also used when playing with a custom car.
- The WarioWare series has a few:
- In WarioWare: Twisted!, unlocking every microgame and clearing each of them will unlock the final souvenir; what is it, you may ask? WarioWare: Twisted. Selecting it restarts the game with a modified intro. Doing all that work for a glorified restart button.
- WarioWare: Touched! has one special souvenir that can only be unlocked if Twisted! is in Slot 2 of the Nintendo DS (Original or Lite) when launching Touched!, which is a music video for the Mona Pizza song. The biggest problem is that despite several DS games being able to make use of Game Boy Advance games' save files or even special cartridge features (e.g. for Boktai), the Mona Pizza video has no twist features, no rumble, nothing unique. The procedure also locks out DSi and 3DS systems because they don't have a GBA slot, and the procedure on the iQue DS system requires WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgame$! instead of Twisted!, removing all doubt that there are no special features in the music video.
Non-Game Related
- BIONICLE: The Exo-Toa set was heavily advertised for its ability to act as Powered Armor for Toa figures, bringing the Aliens homage of the year full circle. This doesn't really do anything play value-wise, since the Toa can't really do anything but sit there, but is still pretty cool... except for the fact that two of the Toa (Onua and Pohatu) have alternate body construction styles (Onua's head attaches to his chest, giving him a "hunchback", Pohatu's entire body is flipped upside down), which makes it impossible to put them in the Exo-Toa without doing some minor-to-heavy reconstructive work.
- Depeche Mode's remastered CD/DVD-A sets had a good selection of B-Sides... but moved all that material to the DVD, for no apparent reason but to preserve the albums as intended. That means if you want to hear them you always have to play the DVDs, which of course, cannot be played or copied like normal CDs can. You wonder why they didn't just give the B-Sides a bonus CD to themselves. Luckily you can get them elsewhere thanks to the band's extensive singles collection, and many were on earlier CDs of the albums, but still.
- Night of the Demons 3: The Scream Factory Blu-Ray has the director's cut workprint to watch as a special feature. Unfortunately half of the dialogue scenes are muted due to music copyright issues.
- The Limited Special Collector's Ultimate Edition of Jean-Michel Jarre's Oxygène Trilogy is supposed to include clear vinyl LPs of all three albums, but many sellers short-change audiophiles by leaving out the vinyl of the middle installment, which is especially shameful as the standalone vinyl pressing of Oxygene 7-13 is quite scarce and expensive.
- Lampshaded in Welcome To YouTube when he gleefully mentions YouTube has a 3D feature, only to abruptly change the topic and never mention it again:
Did you know YouTube has a 3D feature? Me neither!