DEATH BATTLE

Though we don't see how the fight ends between the Tiger God and Phoenix, the Defenders leave during it, so it's not much of an example of anything.

They are both still around, so neither were destroyed. Though that could just mean neither one of them can be destroyed.

On the subject of Death Battles that were more fitting as season finales, I’ll echo Naruto vs Ichigo. It’s easily the clearest example of a matchup that fits that descriptor to me, what with the legacy of the matchup and especially the thoroughness with which it explained its conclusion.

Honestly, I’m still surprised it wasn’t the season finale given how much the conclusion was giving me Classic Goku Vs Superman vibes. Like, I’m pretty sure the only people who consider it outright bad are the ones whose enjoyment of the episode rested entirely on the winner. Even without it being one of the episodes that come to mind when I think of my favourites, it’s still one I respect a lot.

It was just such a weird thing for them to bring up in the first place; they barely ever use anti-feats, so "X might appear strong, but here they are on a panel, struggling briefly in a fight, so... y'know, obviously they're not that strong, really," feels like... hmm, given how rarely they use these arguments, and how badly they tend to be received, often becoming running memes ("The point of impact of the rockets that exploded near Scout was never directly shown!" or "Beast didn't actually lift the whole tree off the ground!" or "Bowser... um, uh, SUPER-LAVA!!!") then it always feels more like they were running really low on good arguments that day, so they've resorted to citing things that even they don't really actually believe. And we know that they don't believe them. And they know that we know that they don't really believe them.

But they don't know that we know that they know that we know.

https://g1dbteamblogs.blogspot.com/2024/04/death-battle-predictions-spider-gwen-vs.html

Gwen vs. Sakura is out!

>Multicontinental level Sakura

Fuck it at this point, sure.

Chain Scaling is a hell of a drug

"Sakura should definitely scale to the likes of Alpha era Ryu, Zangief, and E. Honda, which can easily match Gwen’s ends in AP, with the Psycho Drive’s highest ends nearly perfectly matching the Gene Bomb’s 1.4 gigaton calc, at 1.1 gigatons. "

yeah, not particuarly surprising Even when giving benefit of the doubt to Gwen with the extra stuff, doing the same for SF still keeps the win. SF is a pretty strong Verse… shame for them that Tekken 8 happened and made it stronger with just the mainline stuff.

So... Sakura wins via chain-scaling to Haggar (solely on the basis that, well, Street Fighter and Final Fight have crossed over, and they're 'depicted as being roughly even') and one of Haggar's pile-driving feats measures in petatons of TNT - literally billions of times stronger than E Honda's meteor destroying feat - and so by scaling to this, Sakura is multi-continental and ten million times stronger than Spider-Gwen.

...

(Sigh) Oh, power-scaling. Never change. Except, y'know. Please do. Please.

The response from Powerscalers to your inquiry to get them to change:

Edited by Demongodofchaos2 on Apr 29th 2024 at 10:14:45 AM

At this point, I understand it’s all subjective, and I definitely see the logic and appreciate all the research that goes into it. With that said, this does strike me as a pretty major outlier, and it makes me personally wish that consistency for the character was more of a focus in analyzing them. Because once we get to Multicontinental Sakura, it no longer feels like we’re really discussing Sakura with how far removed it is from how she’s portrayed at any point.

I’d never tell them to STOP this, though. I’m not going to try and gatekeep what they clearly enjoy doing.

I do find it funny to say that about Sakura, when you can make the literal same exact case for Gwen. Neither is obviously supposed to be seen as anywhere close to these levels of power. The moment either even reach town busting levels of power, we've left the realm of believability far behind.

Just a note that the first part of the blog said, is that they effectively went full comp for both just to make things interesting. Usually, neither would get every single thing the blog gave them.

It's fine to disagree with them, just don't go to the blog and start insulting them over disagreements, nobody looks good doing that.

Edited by Thebrawlbro on Apr 29th 2024 at 10:28:41 AM

It wouldn't make it significantly less silly, but it's also the fact that... this is Sakura. I don't think Sakura is even in the top half of the strongest Street Fighter characters. It would be one thing if you were scaling Akuma to the biggest feat in the Street Fighter universe - they did this in his fight with Shao Kahn, since oddly enough, one of the greatest physical feats vis-a-vis Gigatons of TNT in the franchise comes from E Honda of all people - but this Haggar thing is billions of times stronger than that, and if everyone who can hold their own in a fight chain-scales to Haggar, then... yeah, every Street Fighter is now multi-continental. An indistinguishable blob of identically strong mid-tier characters.

This seems like the kind of thing that the word 'outlier' was designed for.

You say that as if this is some unique case for SF, when almost every big universe ends up with scaling chains. Heck, for a long time, the best speed feat for Street Level DC characters came from some C-lister named Adam strange that barely anyone knew.

The thing is scsling chains were never some incontrovertible debate tool to begin.

DC Comics

• the Flashes and Superman family are relative to each other because they regularly interact and fight the same baddies

Ok I can buy that. I can find a comic of Superman punching someone so hard they feel it across universes

• Sakura scales to this guy who scales to all these other guys so if you look at her critically she could shatter a continent

Like... like what.

Edited by FOFD on Apr 29th 2024 at 10:49:23 AM

Don't know what else to tell you other then both series explicitly take place in the same world, Final Fight characters have appeared in SF on many occasions, and Sakura has been clearly shown on many occasions to be on the same level as these characters.

If you don't like it, fine, that's fair. But the scaling by itself is very clear cut.

It's not like they decided to scale Street Fighter to Darkstalkers based on that one non-canon comic where Chun-Li beat Morrigan. That would be problematic scaling.

Edited by Thebrawlbro on Apr 29th 2024 at 10:54:22 AM

I'm definitely not saying that this is exclusive to Street Fighter. If I knew what that Adam Strange feat was then I would probably find it equally dumb. This just feels a lot more... blatantly silly than other power-scaling instances.

Sakura's greatest direct feat is literally door/tree level, but there's another character who has a feat in the Petatons. Has she ever fought them? No. Has she beaten someone who has beaten them? Uh... no. This character with the Petaton feat, do they have any other feats which are even one billionth as impressive as the Petaton feat? No.

I didn't like Akuma VS Shao Kahn, but the prediction blog's version of Sakura is somehow millions of times stronger than Death Battle's version of Akuma, and that's just clearly not right.

"Sakura has been clearly shown on many occasions to be on the same level as these characters." I-I really, fundamentally do not think that you can argue that someone has been shown to be 'on the same level' as a character who has a feat which is literally billions of times stronger than anything they have ever done.

Edited by Elmo3000 on Apr 29th 2024 at 4:08:17 PM

The most obvious scaling Sakura has is Karin, as Karin is her rival, which would mean she would scale to everything Karin did in SFV, which - since that game's storyline put Karin in the spotlight, is quite a lot of asskicking.

In general, it looks like the issue is that Sakura is running against the vs adage of "the most powerful thing we see a character do must be the limit of their power," since Street Fighter doesn't work that way. Street Fighter doesn't really give a crap about scaling, and treats pretty much all of its cast with very few exceptions as essentially one big blob of general strength level that can all reasonably beat each other in a fight if the fight turns their way.

Most major fighting games do this, notably - MK, KOF, etc (frankly, it's the way a story like that in a genre like with a wide cast should be handled) - which is presumably why pretty much every fighting game Death Battle has pulled solely from the very small pool of characters in each game that can, explicitly, be considered among the stronger of that game's cast.

I know the Haggar pile-drive Feat wouldn't have really mattered with the other stuff cited like having matched Zangeif and E.Hona, but Multi-Continental Sakura still looks a bit odd upon first showcase even if it was used when accounting for Higher-End Scaling like whenever Peter has in turn fought and defeated Basic-ish Iron Man suits.

Though that's generally par for the course when a character's objectively best Feats are literally from how well they fought other characters i.e Power Scaling. Personally the best parts of these Versus Blogs I like to read about are the Tertiary factors as those are usually things that are glossed over in a typical Death Battle episode for most cases.

Edited by Candid-Jury on Apr 29th 2024 at 11:17:00 AM

Elmo DB literally scaled Akuma to the exact same Haggar feat we used in the blog. It's stronger now cuz the calc.got updated, but still.

Be at least honest with your critique. It's really fucking annoying to drop a blog I helped work on and get all this.

(I wrote the sections in Sakura's verdicts on stats, tertiaries, and the summary.)

Edited by ultimate_life_form on Apr 29th 2024 at 8:21:48 AM

"Death Battle scaled Akuma to this feat, so why shouldn't we scale Sakura?"

Because Akuma and Sakura are different characters? One of them is widely-regarded as the single strongest character in the entire franchise, and the other is... not even in the Top 20?

For the record, I'm not totally on board with scaling Akuma to this Petaton feat either - I wouldn't even give this feat to Haggar (even though he did it,) because it's millions of times stronger than his next best showing - because the entire thing seems like a gigantic outlier, but at the very least, scaling the strongest character in the series to the biggest feat is... well, it's not as silly as chain-scaling the entire roster to it. Except for Dan. We all agree that Dan wouldn't scale to it.

Sorry to be a downer on your efforts on the blog, it was overall very good, very well-written and I enjoyed reading most of it, it's just that one sticking point of 'Every mid Street Fighter character now scales to the strongest feat ever performed in the franchise,' that really turns me off.

Edited by Elmo3000 on Apr 29th 2024 at 4:33:54 PM

x 4 Or, you know, there's Gameplay and Story Segregation. The characters are balanced in terms of gameplay because they all have to be viable, but lore-wise Akuma and Gōken are supposed to be among the strongest in the series.

Or the Soul series. Any character can beat any other character in gameplay and they all have story modes where they defeat Nightmare, Inferno, and/or Elysium and go on to claim or destroy Soul Edge... but all those story-mode endings are non-canon, and lore-wise Nightmare is more often than not fighting with only a percentile of his full power and even then the only characters who stand a chance against him are those who are themselves Malfested and/or have weapons tailor-made to destroy Soul Edge—like Soul Calibur and the forged-by-the-gods Omega Sword.

Would the raging demon work on Ganondorf, I’d say a strong “Maybe” because they brought up the fact that Ganon has never dealt with Soul targeting attacks before and it likely would be a somewhat decent loophole too. Problem is, it’s his only win con since it’s likely his only method around the Holy Weapon weakness, and that’s out of generosity

Reading Gwen's calcs, I found an error.

The speed calc for Knull and his symbiote dragons says it only took them two weeks to go from Klyntar to Earth, but if you look at the King in Black timeline it was actually either three months (according to #9) or one month (according to #10). The timeline did a goof since they happened concurrently in the comics.

Edited by Arawn999 on Apr 29th 2024 at 9:29:04 AM

If I recall correctly, Lofty had found a source that corroborated the two week end from another comic? That calc's been done for months prior to this, I don't remember exactly where it's from though, but I assure you the two week end didn't come from no where.

The citation given here says the two weeks is taken from the timeline given at the end of King in Black #1—which has numerous flaws... as do the handbook entries, some of which seem to paraphrase the Marvel Database wiki.

But if we take it at face value, Knull's escape from Klyntar happened either three months (end of Absolute Carnage) or one month (Web of Venom: Wraith) before the events of King in Black (the timeline messes this up since the events of Web of Venom: Wraith happen concurrently with the events of the ending of Absolute Carnage in the comics).

According to the timeline, the event that happened two weeks before was Venom telling the Avengers about Knull, getting attacked by Virus, and getting sent to Earth-1051.

See for yourself:

That said, Knull didn't go straight to Earth. He took the time to slaughter and reanimate at least three Celestials, destroyed every planet he came across on the way, and attacked the Kree/Skrull Empire ship sent to investigate the planets he was destroying. He certainly didn't seem to be in any rush, and considering he and his symbiote dragons were capable of out-speeding the Silver Surfer when Norrin Radd was trying to nope the f#@k out of there... I wouldn't take the Klyntar to Earth trip as being indicative of his top speed.

Plus, I'd really like to know where the handbook got that Klyntar was in the Milky Way Galaxy and only 60,000 light years from Earth from. I don't recall seeing that in any of the comics, just that Klyntar is found in an uncharted region of space and IIRC Knull and his symbiote dragons carved a swath through the Kree/Skrull Empire (which spans the Andromeda Galaxy and the Large Magellanic Cloud), and the Spartoi Empire (which is in the Large Magellanic Cloud) and the Shi'ar Empire (which has its own galaxy) on their way to Earth.

So at the very least you have symbiote dragons travelling those distances in the same amount of time that it takes Knull to travel from Klyntar to Earth, or less.

Edited by Arawn999 on Apr 30th 2024 at 9:08:48 AM