DEATH BATTLE

That's Rukia's bankai, though Toshiro's does something similar and can freeze anything — even energy — with the added benefit that anything he freezes is negated.

edited 25th Mar '18 5:25:18 AM by Arawn999

Then again, the flames of Makai might just No-Sell that shit.

There's no real way of knowing to be honest.

End game Bleach got ridiculous

Late reveal bankais didn't have to be scaled for more than one fight so they ended up making bankais from earlier look like chump change

Not as much as Late game Naruto, though.

Yeah but never forget that Kaguya Otsutsuki mother of all chakra was defeated because of male supermodels.

And Madara Uchiha master of all things ninja-related and practically god's gift to hand-to-hand combat was defeated by a technique taught to school children, a technique so basic most advanced ninja don't even bother.

Chump change in Naruto ended up saving the global economy and then some.

edited 25th Mar '18 10:26:07 AM by Soble

Wait, what technique defeated Madara?

Substitution. The thing that lets you replace yourself with a log. Hashirama beat him with it before the start of the series.

Madara also once got kicked in half by a guy using a technique foreshadowed right from the second arc of the series (Eighth Gate Of Death).

For all the shtick Naruto gets about Bloodline techniques Id argue it's the shonen where what you're born with matters the least.

Ignoring the factors leading to it being necessary and reason for the unfortunate outcome?

If you're talking about "it kills you" then yeah, it does but I was only using the Eighth Gate as an example since it's something you can get with nothing but Taijutsu.

But still in terms of "no bloodline techniques" there's three Hokage who are all exceptionally dangerous (Tobirama, Hiruzen and Minato) none of whom had bloodline traits (unless you count Tobirama's high chakra base). All three of these are some of the strongest characters in the verse just from really hard to learn but really good jutsu.

Now that's not to say that there isn't a tier that you can't challenge without hax in the Narutoverse - there's the six paths tier which you need either a Rinnegan, a nine or tentails or something of equal caliber to handle. But anything below that is basically free country no matter what you're born with - which is miles different to the vast majority of stuff in this genre.

edited 26th Mar '18 8:19:15 AM by Sigilbreaker26

I get what you're saiyan.

It was more among the lines of Guy needing to use a suicide technique just challenge someone like that and only avoided the death part, remaining crippled after, due to another bloodline(technically).

Basically if most or possibly all of the big fish are powerful due to the connection of a certain lineage, directly or indirectly, then saying the little fish have their own pond wouldn't make it better.

It's hardly a little pond - I mean, look at Kabuto. With a Jutsu that anyone could learn he managed to make himself one of the most dangerous players to not individuals but entire countries. Had he not been an absolutely terrible general he could have stomped the rest of the world.

I mean, I'm not denying that at the very tippy top of the pyramid, you need some hax to be a player. But look at the vast majority of other shonen and you can see the difference. The only one which I think is truly free of it is One Piece.

edited 26th Mar '18 8:52:30 AM by Sigilbreaker26

Was he the guy that ate Orichimaru?

Well, one of three people who did.

But he's the one who looked like he did.

Wait, Sasuke, Kabuto, who was the third?

Itachi, or at least Itachi's Susano'o.

What the shit, Naruto

I completely forgot how bonkers that series was. And all this talk reminds me that Itachi force fed Naruto a crow.

Speaking of which, the Sharingan and Byakugan are also two of the bloodline powers that make whoever possesses them superior to those who don't.

edited 26th Mar '18 10:00:20 AM by Arawn999

First of all, the Byakugan barely even registers in power terms. While it's got some really handy utility abilities and no ninja would turn it down, you need good hand-to-hand abilities to use it properly. With, say, Neji, yeah it's really dangerous but Neji is a genius who was able to reverse engineer the main branch's hiden techniques. Hinata also had the Byakugan and does not rank highly among the Konaha 12, she's about mid level. The Byakugan is not especially more dangerous than a really good hiden technique.

Secondly, yes, the Sharingan is really good but the majority of sharingan users we see in the series are already really dangerous ninja without it - Sasuke was considered the class genius before he even unlocked his, Kakashi was already a rare talent before he scored his off of Obito, Itachi is shilled to high heaven by basically everyone who mentions his name, and Madara is just 1 in a million fucking insane. Only Obito went from chump to champ basically just on the strength of his sharingan.

It is totally possible to lose with a sharingan - heck, Sasuke loses a fight to Rock Lee, the latter not even bothering to take off his wieghts, because his sharingan simply couldn't keep up at all. It wasn't even close it was an outright curb stomp. It does not automatically make you better than someone without access to either of those two eye abilities.

edited 26th Mar '18 10:33:35 AM by Sigilbreaker26

Sasuke and Obito were the less dangerous by comparison to the other since theirs weren't fully develop. Once they hit a certain point it's basically a game changer capable of screwing over genuinely better combatants.

See, now the problem with Obito is that for some reason he never suffers any ill effects from his MS power like he should and it's that that makes him really dangerous. Likewise, the really broken ability for sharingan are MS abilities which will blind you if you don't get a transplant

@ATLA: its easy to forget that benders in Avatar are nearly all far less powerful than most characters with similar powers in other media - due to the more down to earth and “everyday” tone the powers in that series tends to have. There are exceptions, but they’re few.

It’s like how the emphasis on practicality results in wizards in Harry Potter being less versatile and powerful than wizards in basically everything else.

Granted, part of that is because most of the characters we follow in Harry Potter are children learning magic. The few glimpses we see of fully trained adults fighting with magic are fairly impressive.

IIRC, the only characters to do impressive stuff that really goes beyond the scope of what we see the kids do are Dumbledore and Voldemort. This is true even in the movies, which go farther into spectacle than the books, and is even true for the one movie we have that doesn't include Harry at all.

In the books themselves, we see quite a few adult wizards do things in the series, and few of them show much more ability beyond that Harry is capable of by the end of the series - and by the last book, we had multiple instances to take examples from that don't involve the children.

And that seems to be because the average wizard in the Harry Potter universe is designed to be practical over flashy: there's a sense of Rowling intentionally making magic a bit more mundane with each new book, as Harry grows to find the world around him less fanciful and more flawed than he (and the audience) imagined it would be. Culminating in the most powerful spell, the one that all the villains depend on, being basically no more remarkable than a magic bullet.

In the Harry Potter verse, typically what being a "strong wizard" means is that when you and another wizard do the same spell, your spell wins out (or being able to use the Unforgivables easier, in the Death Eaters' case), sometimes with some additional physical damage (as with Bellatrix' death). With additional skill, you learn how to put a bit more oomph into your Disarming spells, but for most wizards in the Harry Potter series doing magic means the same basic set of abilities with the same very clear restrictions, with more complicated or powerful stuff generally taking multiple wizards, ancient artifacts or spells set in place by guys who died long ago, or the work of a prodigy.

edited 26th Mar '18 8:08:03 PM by KnownUnknown