Basic Trope: An item or solution to a problem which lacks anything flashy or otherwise interesting about it, but makes up for it in heavy practicality.
- Straight: Alice's Pistol is plain and takes multiple rounds to kill one enemy, but is easy and quick to reload, fully-automatic, has a high ammo capacity, and a decent fire rate.
- Exaggerated:
- Alice's Pistol is cheap as dirt and ugly as ever, but is effective at defending her from a large group of enemies in a small room and can get her through missions much, much faster than her BFG and with less cost, too.
- Cheese Strategy
- Downplayed:
- Alice's pistol is effective and efficient, but it can't handle everything, leading to her sometimes needing to rely on her more powerful weapons.
- Alice's Pistol is the best choice for most of the game, but for several sections she will need to temporarily upgrade to a more powerful but less efficient weapon.
- Justified: It's the same kind of pistol that police forces use.
- Inverted:
- Awesome, but Impractical
- Boring and Impractical — Bob's Assault Rifle is not only plain and takes multiple rounds to kill one enemy, but takes an hour trying to reload, has an absurdly low ammo capacity, an abysmal fire rate, and it has to be manually charged with each shot, making it worse than semi-automatic.
- Subverted: The Pistol is the best weapon of choice at first, but is almost useless after the first few stages.
- Double Subverted: The Pistol has upgrades that can make it almost as powerful as the weapons found in the later stages.
- Parodied: Alice's Pistol is a bonafide Hand Cannon (even though it looks like a poorly-maintained, hand-made firearm that barely passes for a pistol) and can destroy entire buildings with lesser costs than even a tank's main cannon.
- Zig-Zagged: Alice upgrades the Pistol for better firing rate, but that comes at a cost of capacity, so she then swaps out the bullets for energy balls, but the battery packs needed to create the bursts take hours to charge with little capacity, so she then swaps them out for better batteries with bigger capacities, but they are too heavy and take much longer too charge. And said repair costed literally a ton of gold.
- Averted: Anything awesome is practical and anything boring is impractical.
- Lampshaded: "Why is it that all of the boring stuff works the best?"
- Invoked: "Why use some big, flashy nonsense when you can use something ultimately uninteresting but wildly effective?"
- Exploited: Enemies underestimate Alice because her pistol looks boring.
- Defied: Alice's superiors don't allow her to use the pistol because they think she is lame for using it.
- Discussed: "If you have a Pistol, good on you for choosing function over form."
- Conversed: "So, this show is trying to be realistic and show the advantages with a simple pistol."
- Implied:
- The Wall of Weapons in Alice's house has an array of amazing firepower, but it's easy to notice that several pistols have been maintained the most out of the whole lot.
- We see plenty of weapons going from drawing board to prototype to full production, but several uninteresting designs are shown leaving the production the most.
- The production logs show that the Pistol experienced mass adoption only 10 minutes after hitting the market.
- Deconstructed: Since Alice relies solely on her Pistol, she doesn't get experience with the harder to use but more powerful weapons, resulting in her being unprepared when she is forced to use a weapon other than her Pistol.
- Reconstructed: But Alice still makes a lot of progress with her basic weapons, and proves to be a more effective regular agent than the ones whom rely on the less practical but more powerful ones, whom are saved for missions that Alice can't take on.
- Played for Laughs: The Pistol is so efficient, Alice manages to defeat an entire army all by herself
- Played for Drama: Alice's weapons and tactics are so boring that Alice eventually becomes a boring person herself as well.
Boring, but Practical doesn't always mean bad.