Commonplace Rare



""This is a place where having the ability to bake cakes is a mark of considerable status!""

- Yahtzee on Minecraft (as imps bow down to worship his avatar's superior cake-baking abilities.)

In video games, seemingly common items often take an excessive amount of effort or money to acquire. You may expect an item to be common based on real-life experience and even see them used all over the place in the game, but you can't pick one up until you've completed the proper Sidequest. Probably not until much later into the game.

This is frequently seen with capacity upgrades. Being able to hold more money and items is a big deal in a lot of games, so coming across a wallet or sack fifty floors deep into an ancient dungeon often makes the whole trip Worth It.

A form of Gameplay and Story Segregation. Often applies to parts in a Chain of Deals.

See also Unusable Enemy Equipment. Contrast Junk Rare.

"White Dragon: "Why do you humans value these things so much? Don't you know they're made from my sh-""
 * In many games in The Legend of Zelda series, glass bottles are extremely valuable to Link, he usually can only find about 4 of them each game and it requires searching the farthest, most remote places on Hyrule. Yet there's frequently a thriving milk industry, and potion sellers can't only be selling to people who have traveled past the Lost Woods to get the one glass bottle that Farmer Brown is only willing to give to someone who completes his mini-game.
 * Conversely, gems are commonplace and can be found lying around in grass.
 * Likewise, getting an "adult's wallet" that carries more Rupees seems to always require fantastic feats and gifts from supernatural creatures. This despite Link's apparent Hyperspace Arsenal/Bag of Holding inventory.
 * It's the same with larger quivers and bomb bags. Although in the case of the bomb bag, several games state that they're crafted by Gorons and made of odd or rare materials like dodongo stomachs and/or the woven fibers of bomb flowers.
 * While the only bow in the land is always locked in a dungeon, shops still sell arrows and enemies with bows still exist. There's even a market catering to people with bows, in the form of shooting mini-games. Though this one was partially justified in The Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess, where its heavily implied that the Hero's Bow is unique and magical.
 * In The Legend of Zelda Skyward Sword, a sidequest involves a ghost on the toilet asking for "any kind of paper". Despite there being a lot of books and paper pieces in the classroom, not to mention several rather pointless paper notices you can read on the wall, the only piece of paper you're allowed to give is the love letter a classmate asked you to give to a girl. And no, after the girls shoots the letter down you're not getting it back.
 * Speaking of Skyward Sword, the rarity of glass bottles (one NPC equates being allowed to keep one as adequate reward for saving his daughter's life) is actually justified this time around. Glass is made from sand, sand is crushed rocks, and the Floating Continent everybody lives on has an alarmingly finite amount of habitable land as it is. Breaking any up to smelt glass (which can easily fall from the island or shatter into uselessness) would have very permanent consequences.
 * The "larger wallet" phenomenon occurs again in The World Ends With You where the only way to construct the third wallet requires Orichalcum and Dark Matter. That's some wallet.
 * Not to mention that they're extremely rare if you waste the few you get as a part of the story. You can only obtain Dark Matter (or its trade material Shadow Matter) from some of the hardest enemies in the game.
 * In the Paranoia RPG, the ability to recolour equipment which is above one's security clearance (and therefore punishable by death to possess or be seen using) to a colour you are cleared for (and therefore make the gear usable) is very important. Not least because stabbing each other in the back is the whole point of the game, and a low-clearance RED laser, for instance, will be defeated by not-quite-so-low-clearance ORANGE body armour. Since players are usually RED level, this is more useful than one might initially think. This results in paint being one of the most restricted types of item in the game.
 * Other items requiring high security clearance include really powerful weapons like cone rifles and plasma generators, but also some things that are utterly mundane in real life, like chapstick and umbrellas.
 * In Puzzle Pirates, black clothing is very valuable, as black dye can only be obtained by pilfering kraken's blood, a rare resource, from strong merchant ships. Nope, you can't kill a kraken yourself, much less mix different colors of dye together.
 * This actually makes sense, considering that no matter what proportion you mix different colors dye together, you'll only ever get a really dark shade of brown, not black. The only way to get black dye... is by mixing a black pigment with a solvent.
 * An even worse example involving dyes is Guild Wars, where dye of ALL colors are only obtainable as entirely random world drops. There's a "dye merchant" but he only carries what other players have sold to him and his prices depend on supply and demand. Naturally, this means more popular dyes are much more expensive, and of course the most expensive here is also black. The best part is that dye doesn't actually do anything other than change the color of one of your pieces of armor. This is in no way surprising however, as top-quality gear is very easy to obtain, and the only things of any particular value for experienced players is gear that looks particularly nice.
 * Ancient proto-MMO The Realm had similar dye issues for some of its early versions.
 * This is actually quite realistic in pre-industrial settings. Purple clothes were a status symbol in some places.
 * The same 'dye is inordinately expensive' paradigm holds true in Ragnarok Online, where the only way to obtain it is to get a Mad Scientist to create the base materials, then colour them with patently absurd numbers of herbs. Players, naturally, go through the whole rigmarole in order to obtain Nice Hats.
 * Throughout Final Fantasy and, subsequently, Kingdom Hearts, among the most epic of all equipment accessories is... a ribbon.
 * In Final Fantasy Tactics A2, ribbons are stated in one of the quests to be made from pieces harvested from a species of malboro that is specifically bred to make those ribbons... so the low amount of materials is understandable.
 * So that's why the Ribbon can prevent every status effect in the game and possibly prevent AIDS. It's made from it.
 * This is not your little sister's Purity Ribbon.
 * Real Life gaming example: Yu-Gi-Oh!, aside from the regular rarities, actually has two "Short Print" varieties of the Common rarity cards; they look, act, and essentially are exactly like regular Commons, but you'll be busting your butt and your wallet going through hundreds of packs just to get one.
 * Similarly, the creation of the Mythic Rare status in Magic: The Gathering was due to certain cards being powerful and already on a short print run, but were on the same rarity level as the other cards, so you'd expect them to appear normally. A mythic rare would appear roughly once every 6 packs and most cards of this rarity are cards that, in Limited Draft, would be either overpowering or hard to use (even more so than normal rares), so to justify their low occurrence. Planeswalkers are also always Mythics after the rarity's introduction.
 * A mid-level quest in Dragon Quest III requires the player to travel halfway around the world, loot an ancient pyramid, and rescue a shopkeeper's daughter so that said shopkeeper will bestow upon you some ground black pepper.
 * Considering that historically spices were occasionally worth more than gold by weight... it makes a certain amount of sense that someone with the resources of a king might trade something that isn't irreplaceable (a ship) for something that, in that part of the world, was practically one of a kind...
 * Not to mention that the world in the game is (deliberately) modeled after medieval-era Earth. The king of Portuga (Portugal) wants you to go all the way across Europe and most of Asia to get him something that has never been seen in his area before. Which is similar to how the spice trade of old worked.
 * A more bizarre example exists in Dragon Quest IX. Early on, you'll run across a sidequest to help make medicine out of the famous cure-all water of Angel Falls. The man who makes the medicine requires "fresh water" to make this medicine... which you won't be finding for several hours, five towns later. Turns out, by "fresh water", he means the alchemy ingredient you can find in predetermined spots on the world map. According to the item's description, the "fresh water" is "wondrous" and of "perfect purity", but when you're asked for "fresh water", you don't expect that to turn out to be a mid-level alchemical treasure, do you? (Special mention also goes to another alchemy ingredient found only on a few enemies, or in a single gathering area on an island... kitty litter.)
 * Dragon Quest VIII has a Commonplace Rare ship. You need a ship, so you need to find an ancient abandoned ship in the desert, then go through a monster-filled castle to find the library, then get a once in a lifetime wish and give someone a priceless ancient artifact owned by a king who owes you a favor, to put the ancient ship in the water. Why you can't just ask the king for a ship remains unexplained.
 * Lampshaded in Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete when you go to pick up a Dragon Diamond -


 * In Kingdom of Loathing, many kinds of fruits suitable for cooking and cocktailcrafting can be bought from NPCs for 70 meat, but others like cherries, limes, and jumbo olives can only be found as loot on monsters, so they go for roughly 1000 meat at player-run stores. Bananas are limited-edition fruits that sell for around 30,000 meat. However, this is nothing compared to beets, which were discontinued so long ago and dropped so infrequently that they can't be bought for less than 100,000,000 meat, despite being completely useless
 * Pickling supplies (dill, brine, vinegar, and cucumbers) are quite rare, as the area where they drop only appears for a single day at a time, completely randomly. The factory has only appeared 6 times since June 2004. Holiday monsters also create some common-rares; Thanksgiving foods (tofurkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce) can only be acquired once every 3 months, and each player only gets to collect a few of them.
 * The Tiny Plastic Sword is Exactly What It Says on the Tin. It's used to make top quality drinks with relatively little investment. They are sold at the mall for 30,000,000 meat.
 * For reference on what these prices are to people who don't know the relative value of money in Kingdom of Loathing, the Mr. Accessory item (Which players recieve for each $10 they donate), sells for ~8,000,000 as of this edit (The price fluctuates depending on what goodies you can exchange them for). That's right, tiny plastic swords are worth a little bit more than $40, and beets are worth over $120.
 * There is also Hell Ramen, a food whose joke is that Ramen is so cheap, you gain money by eating it. Except it is very good food, so it goes for a few thousand meat in the mall.
 * Used wrapping paper (which can only be used to make gifts with nothing in them) costs 80 million meat—that is, $80–100 of real-life money, or many months of meat farming. It was only available from gifts in a Crimbo giveaway back in 2003 (more common gifts from later on don't produce the paper item when opened), only a few were generated because there weren't many players at the time, and most of them have been lost over the years due to account deletion.
 * Any dedicated NetHacker will tell you that two of most useful items in the game are: a magic marker and a can of grease. Both are disgustingly uncommon.
 * Another inexplicably uncommon item: shirts. T-shirts and Hawaiian shirts have no armor value in and of themselves, but can be enchanted to give a valuable extra few points of protection. If you can find one. Wishing or polymorphing may be necessary.
 * Unless you play as a tourist, in which case you'll be wearing one at the start of the game.
 * When you think about it, you'll realize that wands of nothing are too. Really, what are they? Plain sticks?
 * In Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World, there's a quest where the heroes must venture into dangerous woods, making their way past monsters and solving puzzles... to find a sprig of Rosemary.
 * In RuneScape, party hats are some of the rarest, most expensive items. What is a Party Hat? A crown made of colored paper. There are also discontinued holiday healing items that are rather valuable, such as pumpkins, easter eggs, and the most valuable item in the game - Christmas crackers. Half-full wine jugs are also ludicrously expensive (originally, you drank half of a jug of wine at a time, but they later changed it so your character chugged the whole thing).
 * Not to mention the Quest "One small favor", Which will take at least four hours of dedicated running around the map doing errands for a huge number of people for an incredibly unique item: A keyring. A small band of steel, bars of which most players have sitting in their banks, which even the universes greatest blacksmiths cannot replicate.
 * In World of Warcraft, after leveling your character up to level 45 or higher, you and a group of 4 other like-minded adventurers (you'll die if you try to do it alone) can go on a dangeous quest deep inside Zul'Farrak to obtain the electric scale of a giant hydra named after Godzilla. To simply summon this hydra, at least one of your group must go to another continent, then battle his way through hordes of troll cultists to obtain a sacred mallet, then battle his way through even MORE hordes of trolls to bless this mallet at a very special altar. AND all those trolls used to be elite, that is extremely powerful for their level (thankfully, they changed that in a later patch). Your ultimate reward? A carrot on a stick. In the game it actually was rare and highly sought-after for a while because it was one of very few ways to make a mount go faster, but the mundaneness of the item itself made the whole quest chain absurd. The absurdity was only compounded by the item being usable with any mount, include carnivores.
 * This makes this item a subversion, since a carrot on a stick that can motivate a meat-loving tiger to move faster is obviously magical.
 * There also exist a lot of items you can buy from vendors that are incredibly expensive while serving no actual purpose whatsoever. Unless you happen to need, say, a wedding ring for roleplaying.
 * Some kinds of pets are incredibly rare to acquire. Rats, for example. Some others can only be bought from vendors of one faction, so they will be fairly expensive for players of the other faction wanting to buy them over the neutral auction house.
 * While on the topic of Warcraft, the orc campaign in The Frozen Throne, has you go on a sidequest to retrieve a powerful artifact, as part of a shaman's dying wish. You get to keep the artifact, and are also rewarded with a unique item: The shaman's weapon which is like the one every single shaman owns. Its only power is to give your attacks a lightning damage bonus, which makes it no different from an ordinary lightning orb.
 * EarthBound, since it takes place in an Urban Fantasy instead of medieval times, is full of them. Made more obvious by the fact that the currency is dollars, leading to a $3480 frying pan and a $98 cup of noodles. The rumor that this happened because the currency was changed from yen to dollars is false; it's still dollars in the Japanese version.
 * In Assassin's Creed 2, enemies use the same weapons that you can buy for large amounts of money from a shop. Pretty generic example, except- you can pick up the weapons. But you can't keep them of course, if you try to switch weapons, it just drops the thing.
 * You actually can keep them if you've been disarmed, usually by an enemy with a two-handed weapon. Said two-handed weapons do fall into this trope though.
 * This is justified, as they are too big to carry while free-running.
 * You will also find that to carry more throwing knives or phials of medicine/poison you will need to buy pouches. These can cost 6,000 florins, more that it costs to buy finely crafted weapons or armor, and can even outprice the extensive repair and refurbishment performed on the buildings around your villa.
 * Appears with most of the mid-to-high tier items in Animal Crossing. Items of the highest rarity level can be reliably earned at the game's special events. But the items just below that level can't be found at special events and only appear as very rare common items. As a result it is far, far easier to, say, earn the king and queen of the chess set than it is to earn the rook or bishop.
 * There is only one Fetch Quest in Left 4 Dead 2 - and that's to get a gun shop owner a six-pack of cola. (Oddly enough, the corner store where the cola is located has only the cola in it - all the shelves are bare.)
 * This is also the goal of the "Hard Rain" campaign - fight your way through zombie hordes, a sugar mill full of witches and a hurricane to get gas for the boat. Justified in that the closest gas station had already been emptied by people fleeing by car.
 * In Pokémon Gold and Silver, a road is blocked by a 'tree' (actually a Pokémon), so nobody can pass there. You have to defeat the (difficult) Gym Leader in order to acquire an item that will allow you to remove said tree: a squirt bottle. (The Pokemon is actually Rock-type, making it weak to water).
 * Introduced in the same game: Charcoal. While this game allows you to buy an endless number of them, future games (and even the remakes) don't and give you a single piece of Charcoal per game.
 * Fishing Rods, which are only available by finding expert fishermen in small houses along routes.
 * In Pokémon Red and Blue, a bicycle costs 1 million pokedollars (you can only have up to 999,999), but at some point in the game, you can get a free bike voucher that allows you to get the bike.
 * Lands of Lore 2: The silverleaf is supposed to grow in the Dracoid Cemetery. Except that it doesn't. Instead, you have to find glass orbs, charge them at three different machines (One of which is located in a completely different and HUGE level, the Dracoid Ruins) to open the various crypts. (The orbs can be charged with white, blue or yellow sparks to open crypts with corresponding doors. If you you don't have the right kind of orbs, you may have to go all the way back to the right machine.) In one of those crypts you will find the ghost of a dracoid priest who wants you to cremate his body for him and bring him the ashes. And where might his body be? In the farthest corner of the Ruins. So after this incredible endeavor, he opens the door into the dracoid king's crypt for you. (This is back at the Cemetery, mind you.) What does his ghost want? To destroy what's left of the Ruins of course! So he gives you his bones in an urn that you have to take to a statue somewhere in the ruins, which will come to life and fight an ice worm, causing the ruins to flood. So you have to get the hell out of there, end up back in the jungle, head back toward the Cemetery... and then the king will make the silverleaves grow. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!!!!!! And to top it off, whole piles of silverleaves turn up later at the Ruloi Citadel.
 * At one point in Beyond Divinity a dying prisoner asks for a drink of water. You have to go back almost to the start to get the only bottle of water on the level. This takes you through a guard station, mess hall and kitchen area but none of the dozens of cups and bottles contain any water or can be filled from the numerous barrels and sinks.
 * Secret of Evermore has the alchemy system. Oh, sure it makes some sense to have trouble gathering things like Oil, or Wax, but...water? It's not even like it has to be purified water, you can literally scoop it from a river in the middle of a swamp. But only in certain spots that are sniffed out by your dog.
 * In the world of Adventurers!!, apples are pretty expensive.
 * In Far Cry 2, one mission requires you to go to a diamond mine to steal some dynamite, which you're told you'll need to destroy a water pump. The only practical way of getting the dynamite is killing all of the mercenaries guarding the mine, and there are at least a dozen of them, meaning that this little fetch task inevitably turns into a full blown firefight. This all seems very pointless, since you have RPGs, hand grenades, improvised explosive devices and M79 grenade launchers available at this point, and any one of those should have had no trouble with the fragile-looking pump. No explanation for why the arms dealers you know can't hook you up either.
 * In Star Ocean 2, you have to go into a dangerous cave filled with monsters as a test of strength - the proof of your journey being to bring back a rare and undiscovered herb. It turns out to be clary sage, a fairly common, hardy and widely-distributed medicinal plant. Still, everyone reacts as if it was incredibly rare.
 * On the other hand, you're explicitly not on Earth in this scene—you're on the planet Expel, where Clary Sage very well might be a rarity.
 * If you want to go the extra mile, however, you can go further into the cave and find the Dill Whip. This doesn't bring you any reward whatsoever, but at least you get told that your characters have found a legitimately undiscovered plant.
 * In Minecraft, like in the Adventurers! example above, apples are incredibly rare. Rarer than diamonds. So are leather saddles (which you can't craft from leather found commonplace).
 * Apples are so rare that, without hacking or using mods to get apples, the only legit way to get an Apple was to kill Notch if playing with him on a server. It wasn't until the 1.8 patch that added strongholds with chests that have a chance of carrying an Apple or more. A pre-release of the next patch for version 1.0 has apples fall out of trees when you cut them down or destroy the leaves, but it won't drop it that often.
 * Clay is also rather rare; it's found on coastal areas. Make a boat and get to searchin'!
 * A later update made clay and apples much more common.
 * As a matter of fact, Clay is a strange example of this, as it's rarer than diamonds, but easier to find. There's a decent amount grouped near water, but only near water. Diamond is just really really deep and spread out.
 * Watermelon seeds, Cocoa beans, and Vinyl records are only found in treasure chests deep underground, making them among the rarest items in the game.
 * Cookies. Made from cocoa beans, themselves extremely rare. To the point that they've become a sort of trophy.
 * As mentioned in the Yahtzee quote, making a cake is a highly elaborate process: you must build a furnace and a stone or better pickaxe, find nine iron ore, smelt them into nine iron ingots, make three buckets, milk cows, grow or find wheat, gather sugar cane and make it into sugar, and find an egg laid by a chicken, then put them all together. That said, once you get to the point that you can produce one cake, it becomes fairly easy to make more.
 * Chrono Trigger has jerky, which appears twice in the game. The first time it is used is as a minor plot advancement point. The second time it is part of a Chain of Deals for getting some optional equipment in one of the zany sidequests. About 2 minutes into the game you can find the shopkeeper selling it, for 9900 gold. A trifling when you will need it (much later in the game), but at the beginning it seems insanely overpriced.
 * Bizarrely, you can also resell the Jerky for 10,000 gold to the person you're supposed to give it to. However, to advance the plot, you have to give them the Jerky for free.
 * Backpacks, of all things, are some of the rarest, most expensive goods in Dragon Age's Ferelden.
 * In Ultima VII Part Two: Serpent Isle, one of the common reagents you use for spellcasting is mandrake, and indeed it can be found and bought in plenty of places. Later in the game, an NPC gives you the task to obtain mandrake. For some reason, only mandrake from one specific location qualifies, all the other mandrake doesn't work; and you can't get to that spot yet (semi-justified in that he wants fresh mandrake, and the stuff you can buy is presumably dried: it doesn't make a difference a spell reagent, though).
 * Going back further in the series, in Ultima IV mandrake and nightshade cannot be bought, and can only be harvested in one place each in the entire world, during one particular lunar phase.
 * In the Playfish game Restaurant City, ingredients are ranked on a scale of one to five stars, with five being the most expensive. However, the stars were handed out based on how many recipes use them, with the result that sugar and eggs are five stars, while saffron only has two.
 * In Scarface the World Is Yours it's entirely possible to have lackeys wielding weapons the player is not yet allowed to buy. Don't fret. They can give them to the boss by placing them in the trunks of special cars (think mobile armory). Doesn't quite work with the boat-mounted machine guns that Tony can later buy to wield himself. Also, it doesn't quite matter how much cash Tony has. Being able to purchase entirely legal items (such as a vending machine or a park bench) depends on how much his enemies respect him.
 * In Maniac Mansion and its sequel, Day of the Tentacle, nothing physically prevents you from leaving the Edison Mansion, which causes some Fridge Logic when considering the ludicrous lengths you have to go through to get commonplace objects such as an envelope and stamps (in the first game) or a bottle of vinegar (in the second). Possibly justified in that both games are set at night, and the mansion is in the middle of nowhere, possibly hours away from the nearest shop.
 * Guns in Resonance of Fate are like this. One can only wonder where all the hordes of bandits in the Random Encounters get their guns from, when only two handguns are for sale in the entire game, both at exorbitant prices. And yes, that means two individual guns, not two types of guns. Naturally, the hordes of bandits never drop their weapons when they die either.
 * From Team Fortress 2 we got the (in)famous hats, which are the most demanded and valuable items in the whole game despite not having practical use besides looking cool. How rare are they? With the current item-drop system, there's a minuscule change (1 in 128, possibly even lower) that you might get one after 15 mins. to 2 hrs of play, but most of time you'll get a random weapon. However, there's a weekly cap for dropped items, (roughly 7 - 12 per week) after which you'll not get new items until next week. You can also use the crafting system in order to get one, but it takes from 54 (to craft a random one) to 75 weapons (to get a class-specific one) in order to do so, which translates into several months worth of game-play.
 * While a lot of specific hats are rarer than others and cost a hell of a lot more metal than it is to craft them, special mention goes to the Ear Buds. These are a pair of Apple iPod Ear Buds that are barely visible on your character. Their price is equal to several dozen expensive hats (keeping in mind the above, where several months of playing may land you just one hat).
 * Tactical shooter 7.62mm High Calibre, there are several guns that are extremely hard to find, and several guns that are extremely easy to find, based on both how far you are in the game's plot, and who you're buying from. On the other hand, ammunition can be absolutely impossible to find. At the beginning of the game, 9x19mm Parabellum bullets, one of the most universal rounds used today, cannot be found anywhere. Later in the game, you might be struggling to find enough ammo for your common 5.56mm assault rifles, while tripping over Gyrojet rounds and 5.7mm pistol clips.
 * To give an idea of how ridiculous this is: the 5.7x28mm round is used by only two weapons in the entire world (the Five-seveN pistol and the P90 PDW) and aside from all models of the Gyrojet being rare collector's items, so is the ammunition (selling for over $100 a round). The 5.56mm, on the other hand, is the standard rifle round used by NATO as well as all South American governments except Guyana and Venezuela (the game is set in a fictional country on the east coast of South America).
 * This is fixed in the universally used mod Hard Life. Instead of bizarre ammo shortages, common ammo types (9mm, 45 ACP, 7.62 Tokarev, 5.56, 7.62x39, 7.62x51, and 30-06) are easy to find, but which ones you'll find depends on what region you are in (the communist rebel and bandit controlled jungles in the south have plenty of Soviet ammo while others have more NATO calibers). The quality of ammo you use is also more important.
 * In the X-Universe games, microchips are everywhere—weapons, ships, components of all kinds. And yet, good luck finding some in the universe—there's so much demand, and the production process involves such a convoluted chain of supply, that most chip factories are permanently empty—the few chips they produce are instantly snatched up by NPC traders. And if you do manage to be faster than the traders, expect to pay ludicrous prices for them.
 * Oh, and
 * In the online game Neopets, the rarest items initially were... food. The only place food was generated was at the food stores every five minutes. Unfortunately, they ran out in 15 seconds or so. You could feed your pets at the soup kitchen if you were poor enough, which led to lots of people in Perpetual Poverty just so they wouldn't have to spend all their money on an apple.
 * In one of the vending machines in BioShock (series), a Cream-filled cake is around $90 despite it being found on the floor anywhere. This was done to show how without any capital control the companies could charge what ever price they want.
 * Said machine is in a theater hallway, doubling it as a Take That against real life concession stands' exorbitant markups.
 * Suikoden's Chain of Deals is this as well, as the item you're ultimately after is soap. Which Sarah finds on her own while you're looking for it.
 * Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin has one Guide Dang It example - the longsword. A simple weapon, probably obsolete at the time you pick it up. What takes this from oddity to hear-tearingly frustrating is that while these were as common as you'd expect in other Metroidvania games, there's only one here, it's necessary for a sidequest (and with only 5 available at a time, you want to complete these), you won't know this until some time later, and there's nothing stopping you from selling it.
 * Money is surprisingly rare in The Binding of Isaac. Playing a slot machine until it explodes will sometimes give you a dollar, and there's no other way to get one. However, the most expensive items are in the realm of 15 cents, so if you do get that dollar, it'll probably last the entire game.
 * Granted, The Perils of Akumos takes place on a space station, but you still go to odd lengths to find a used coffee cup.
 * It's not quite this trope, but in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, without mods there is no way for you to do fletching of arrows (despite at least one NPC being explicitly a fletcher). You can purchase arrows from various shops, and naturally enemies who carry bows will have arrows on them... but using smithing skills you can make Daedric armor but not a stinking iron-tipped arrow? (Fortunately a very nice mod takes care of this.)
 * In Two Worlds Two you, like most RPG protagonists, slaughter animals by the hundreds and loot their body parts for alchemy but the "meat" item remains rare as none of the wild boars, ostrichs and other animals which are perfectly edible will ever have it on their corpse.