Anyway, my favorite example here is the Axe drop in stage 11 of Castleveania 1. In order to have a reasonable chance of defeating the stage 12 boss, you need to get the holy water from stage 10 and not lose it before the boss. You can only have one subweapon at a time, so picking up the axe makes you lose the holy water.

I was just watching a speedrun of Ghouls 'n Ghosts (looks like the Sega Genesis version) in which the player was unlucky enough to never get a dagger drop (with dagger supposedly being the best weapon for a speedrun).

I also seem to be trying to think of a game in which a mandatory key item had to be obtained as a random drop, but I can't remember what game that was.

Only thing I can think of atm is heart drops in Castlevania. They are pretty useless after you fill up.

I once went chasing after the Rainbow Flan quest in FFIV DS.

I was younger then.

But they're not as bad as unwanted subweapon drops; they're worse than useless because they replace whichever subweapon you had, and which you presumably did want.

Yes, having to get that drop to progress a sidequest is, indeed, rather obnoxious. (I actually forgot about that particular drop, even if I remembered other rare drops from that game.)

I play a lot of Dead by Daylight and getting a chest to drop a broken key is terrible.

It doesn't help that FFIV DS hates the player in the first place. Augments needing to be equipped in a certain order or you won't get other augments? Pithy bonuses for risking your life over map completion?

About 98% of everything I get in WoW.
I don't think it hates the player. The game got mad easy for me around the time I went to the moon.

I heard NWN has bad RNG loot.



EDIT: Actually, it has bad RNG loot.

1) Random drops unrelated to the killed creatures. I can imagine an orc carrying a shield or a wolf having swallowed a ring. A bear having swallowed an intact glass vial is a bit more difficult, but okay whatever. An swarm of bees dropping iron greaves is where I draw the line.

2) The french random naming of diablo 2's item made a lot of drops sound completely ridiculous. Maybe the original version did that to some extent, but the translation make it sound particularly off. It used to annoy me a bit, but nowadays it makes me want to replay it just for that.

I don't know if you'd call it random, but the stupid ring at the very beginning of Oblivion. It appears on the other side of the map the second you get out of the sewers and immediately begins to slide into the ocean, so it's almost a timing thing. I've heard you can still get it after it goes onto the water but the only people I know that have done that literally spent hours searching and ended up finding it out of pure luck.

Sometimes, upon opening treasure chests in HOMM2, you'll randomly get a cursed artifact. Some might argue that the Fizbin of Misfortune is the worst of the bunch, but I personally dislike the Tax Lien even more.

For me it was the Club of damned Laconium in Phantasy Star Online 1. As a person who mainly played hunters and rangers this was just absolutely useless. Every time I saw a rare drop (when playing solo usually) it ended up being this disappointment instead.

Someone go get StingingVelvet!

I found the worst one! :P

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWVKMMxCgY4

That's a good thread!

I have something, but I am not sure that it fits the topic entirely. At least there is the word "drop" involved.
Pretty weak, I know...
In Dying Light, there has been those "content drops", some kind of free dlc released by the devs at an unpredictable rate, of unknown content and ranging from "good" to "bwarghf". They planned to release ten of them and I was expecting great things from the last one.
It ended up being a new appearance for my character (it's a first person game),a paint job for my car, a new skin for crossbows and shotguns and a new machete.
I know it seems like it's a lot, but in a previous one, they added a new location with a new challenge so in comparison, it's a bit disappointing. I think it's that one they should have released last.
But I am not really complaining. It was free after all.

Hum...
Now that I wrote all that, I am convinced that it doesn't fit the topic but I can't just erase what took me so much time.
I apologize to the two people who will read this useless paragraph.

Even though I finished the game three times already, I absolutely never heard of that ring.
It was so good to believe that I knew everything about the game...
How is it called? Where is it? And more importantly, why?!

Awww my favorite game. *heart emoji*

Morrowind was full of useless drops. With Bethesda's later games it depends on playstyle I guess, but I remember lots of stuff in Morrowind and Oblivion that was just completely useless for every character type.