Poorly Utilized Game Mechanics?

[Moonface]

Earlier today I saw news that a remaster of the PS2/Xbox game The Thing could be happening, and comments on the story discussed and reminded me of a mechanic the games had that was really cool but didn't really get utilized very well. 

So this game has a squad mechanic where members may be infected or refuse to follow you due to a lack of trust, and blood tests can be used to show whether someone is infected or not. The problem is that blood tests will always be negative unless scripted to do otherwise, and squad members can test negative but then transform into a Thing if the trigger for it to happen is stepped over in the next second. It's a shame because the idea itself is really fitting for what The Thing is about, but it falls apart once you realize that it means nothing until the game wants it to mean something.

[Maniakkid25]

Very early in the game (so early that it's actually part of the demo of the game), Legend of Dragoon has a boss with an "out of range" mechanic. See, it can climb into a hole in the wall of the battle scene, and raise itself up above the field and, importantly, out of your melee character's range. It's a really cool mechanic, so of course the game never uses it again in any way shape or form. So, you know, that sucks.

[Moonface]

Very early in the game (so early that it's actually part of the demo of the game), Legend of Dragoon has a boss with an "out of range" mechanic. See, it can climb into a hole in the wall of the battle scene, and raise itself up above the field and, importantly, out of your melee character's range. It's a really cool mechanic, so of course the game never uses it again in any way shape or form. So, you know, that sucks.

Reminds me of some of the boss fights in the Metal Gear Solid games that use mechanics just for those fights exclusively. Although for those fights I don't think anything in them would work well if they were applied to other parts of the same game. 

Having played it again today after a while, Elden Ring has a really egregious case of not using a mechanic well. The whole game is focused around Great Runes that you get from bosses who are key to the story and progression, yet using them is horrible. They require activating with a limited resource, and remain active until you die. Most of them don't really give you much to make it worth using them outside of boss fights, but even then they're still pretty useless and using them in a boss fight just means you're likely to die a few times and bleed through the limited resource that activates them. Malenia for example gives a Great Rune that lets you regain health from damaging enemies after taking a hit, but by the time you beat her in the game you're so strong that you don't really need a rune like that so it's pointless to use it. 

To me the whole mechanic is just flawed and should have been handled completely differently. As they are they're just not remotely viable to use and may as well just be ignored.

[Kyng]

I thought the mouse movement gestures in some of the later Harry Potter games were an example of this.

To produce a particular spell, you had to move your mouse in a specific way. And this was fine for consoles, but... on a PC, it just felt very clunky and out of place. To be honest, the PC version of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix just felt like a lazy console port that was irksome to play on a PC... I gave up on the series altogether after that game.

[Moonface]

I thought the mouse movement gestures in some of the later Harry Potter games were an example of this.

To produce a particular spell, you had to move your mouse in a specific way. And this was fine for consoles, but... on a PC, it just felt very clunky and out of place. To be honest, the PC version of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix just felt like a lazy console port that was irksome to play on a PC... I gave up on the series altogether after that game.

I would have actually expected this to be better on PC because of how more fluid mouse movement is compared to analog sticks, like how FPS games are generally better on mouse/keyboard than controller.