DEATH BATTLE

I cant say I'm the biggest fan of how the VS community often uses powerscaling, but at this point I am honestly just as tired of reading the same complaints about it every single time the topic comes up.

Edited by uncertanSearcher on Apr 30th 2024 at 12:06:47 PM

Yeah I do regret the 'collective IQ of a fish' comment. I don't know how to edit blogspot comments.

It is legitimately hard to phrase criticism like that in a way that sounds polite when it pertains to something like "In my opinion, you are unfortunately incorrect, and stating that it is justified to scale one character to another under the reasoning that they are 'comparable', when one of them has a direct strength feat which is demonstrably superior by an unequivocal factor of one quadrillion... does not adequately reach my personal standards of proof, which up until this moment were being met by your explanations, and as such this has lowered the satisfaction I was previously feeling from encountering your work. In fact, I was rather shocked by this revelation, because I do not believe that this is merely a slight inaccuracy in your work, but rather a quite large departure from the well-reasoned and logical motives that I have come to associate with you. Anyway, I hope this comment finds you well, and have a wonderful day."

So anyway, Ego VS Mogo, headbutting contest or nah?

... Ooh, perfect ending for that fight, the winner is enjoying their victory in solitude, and then they hear a rumble and turn around, only to see Galactus grumbling and rubbing his empty stomach. He spots them and they go "Oh noooo!" and very slowly... gravitate away.

Actually, the fight can get a lot more intense than that! Mogo's got every ability a Green Lantern could have, and Ego has both giant tentacles to counter, plus humanoid "anti-bodies" that could potentially attack Mogo's surface. Oh, and Psionic powers. Ego is apparently super-busted.

The idea of having two planets fight is a fun one, and would be interesting to see what kind of choreography they have for that. I don’t know how mobile they are, but sticking in one place and just throwing attacks at one another could be a fun change of pace in a way.

I always thought a sniper battle would be fun in a similar way, with the right characters. Only small changes in position so as to not expose themselves too much, taking pot shots at the other as they peek out or inch closer.

Yeah, basically.

Scaling rules are dumb. In this case, it runs on the idea that "if you're able to hurt a character, that means you're stronger/faster/whatever than anything the character has ever withstood. If you're able to take a hit from a character, that means you're stronger/more-invulnerable/whatever than anything they've ever done," which is a completely ridiculous assumption but is effectively the backbone of how scaling - including the scaling Death Battle does - works.

But that said, on the other hand a lot of the counter to this I'm seeing here is "we don't specifically see Sakura do anything, so we have to assume she can do nothing" even if the face of genuine inference, which is equally ridiculous imo.

At the end of the day, we definitely know enough that the claim that Sakura is one of the weaker members of the SF cast is very obviously false, no matter what.

Edited by KnownUnknown on Apr 30th 2024 at 4:08:15 AM

"The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to make sense." - Tom Clancy, paraphrasing Mark Twain.

Am happy to drop the discussion but this bit right here is a very drastic mischaracterization of the point.

"But that said, on the other hand a lot of the counter to this I'm seeing here is "we don't specifically see Sakura do anything, so we have to assume she can do nothing" even if the face of genuine inference, which is equally ridiculous imo."

Nobody is saying "We don't see Sakura do anything, so we have to assume she can do "nothing"." What people are saying is that we don't see Sakura doing anything, therefore it is not applicable to scale her to a feat which is (deep breath) one quadrillion times greater than anything that she has ever actually directly done. I know power-scaling arguments have come up before, but I really cannot stress enough; I have never seen people argue that a street-tier character should feasibly chain-scale to a feat which is 1,000,000,000,000,000 times stronger than anything that they have directly done. Usually, questionable chain-scaling tops out at like, a multiplier of a thousand, or ten thousand tops. This is a quadrillion. One million billions.

"I don't think she scales to the guy a quadrillion times stronger than her," is very clearly different from "I think that we should assume that she can do nothing."

You yourself said the strongest we should kit Sakura to was breaking down a door and that's it like two pages ago. You've also been trying to undercut anyone who tries to point out that Sakura is explicitly shown to be a match for Zangief.

There's a difference between being against overly exaggerating a character's strength and, in compensation, overly underselling a character's strength, and frankly you've been doing both, so that's what I'm responding to.

Edited by KnownUnknown on Apr 30th 2024 at 5:08:29 AM

"The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to make sense." - Tom Clancy, paraphrasing Mark Twain.

I never actually remotely stated that Sakura's maximum strength full stop should be considered 'breaking down a door'; I've actually said several times that power-scaling, within reason, is a perfectly valid method of determining the strength of a character who doesn't have a lot of direct feats. Merely uppercutting Zangief into the air, who as mentioned before weighs around 400 lbs, is enough to conclude that Sakura is outright superhuman. You can definitely scale Sakura within reason to be hundred or thousands of times stronger than just 'breaking down a door'. There's just an incredibly significant difference between that, and... you know. Quadrillions.

I'm also confused by "We definitely know enough that the claim that Sakura is one of the weaker members of the SF cast is very obviously false, no matter what." Sakura is undoubtedly weaker than Ryu, Ken, Akuma, M. Bison. Chun-Li, Cammy, Juri, Seth, Sagat, JP... like, I don't think anyone would say that she's 'one of the weaker members' of the cast full stop - there are so many character who appear in one/two games and never again - but the point is that she's very clearly not in the Top 10. So scaling her to the greatest physical feat ever performed in the franchise is... questionable.

One, the M. Bison feat that was brought up on the Reddit still applies, so no, not the greatest physical feat.

Two, when said greatest physical feat is performed by someone who is on par with someone we know Sakura is on par with too, I don't see the issue?

We do this with Marvel and DC street tiers too, and scale everyone to one or two feats. Or with Jo Jo's. Or with Mega Man.

It's just that with fighting games, due to their nature, most of the casts are gonna be physically around the same level, with a few characters being higher then the rest. So naturally, most of their stats are gonna be similar. Is it kinda boring? Yeah, it is. But I feel also with what you said on the reddit that you don't get what makes FG characters and matchups different in Vs from each other.

Y'know, the stuff besides stats?

I feel a lot of people when they say characters are just "amalgamations of stats from other characters" seem to forget that stats aren't even the only part of vs. debates. Arsenal, abilities, skill, experience, smarts, etc, these all exist too. Hell, a big point we brought up in the Sakura verdict was that her arsenal/abilities are much better then Gwen's and that she's so much more skilled that any fisticuffs interactions even ignoring stats would go in her favor.

But then again, us talking about that stuff would require you to have read the blog besides the stats, which considering you got a basic part of one of the scaling chain arguments for Gwen wrong, I genuinely don't know if you even read the damn thing before bitching about it and saying we don't care about Sakura as a character - even though we do, actually - and just wanna make her a stat block.

Shocker: we do this because we like the characters involved. Otherwise, if we didn't, do you think one of us would've written an entire fucking script about this fight?

Stats aren't everything in these blogs, and I'm tired of people saying they are, and that we don't care about characters because of their stats being based off us scaling them to other characters, when again, that's not even close to everything about the match. It's frankly really disrespectful to say that, and makes all the effort we put in feel wasted when people say we don't give a shit about the characters because their stats are based off scaling, especially scaling that's at least in my opinion, completely fine.

Hey, could you stop accusing me of not reading the blog? I got mixed up with the symbiote speed stuff, but now it's just being rude.

"Two, when said greatest physical feat is performed by someone who is on par with someone we know Sakura is on par with too, I don't see the issue?"

If Sakura is on par with Haggar, then why is his greatest physical feat one quadrillion times stronger than hers? 'On par' and 'greatest feat is one quadrillion times stronger' do not describe the same relationship. It doesn't take Phoenix Wright to spot the contradiction in this testimony.

You talk about how important abilities and tertiary factors are, but your power-scaled version of the Street Fighter cast includes of army of 50 mid-tier characters who all scale to exactly 10.4 Petatons of TNT and 3,600 times lightspeed. All of them. We're talking 50+ different characters, all exactly as strong and as fast as each other. That's your prerogative, you're free to do that, but you can understand why people might think that this is a really dull way to look at a vibrant cast of unique characters. You can see why they would disagree. And you can understand why it's not a personal insult, but a valid and reasonable criticism, to call that approach 'lazy', when you are using three feats to measure the capabilities of 50 characters. That is quite lazy.

All the talk about the experience and the unique skills and 'stats aren't everything' is utterly meaningless when you could swap out Sakura with any one of those fifty other functionally identical characters, and the result would be the same. Why wouldn't it? Apparently they are all ten million times stronger than Spider-Gwen and 3,600 times lightspeed.

I'm very happy to just drop this if you want to stop talking about it.

You know, vehicle battles are brought up occasionally, but I wonder if there’s any good fight ideas involving flying vehicles. That aren’t mechs. I suppose there is X-Wing VS Arwing, which I hear thrown around a bit, though I’m curious as to what others could include.

Same for battles using water-based vehicles, so things like boats or submarines. I suppose it can be hard at times to find vehicles where you wouldn’t rather use their pilot/captain personally rather than their vehicle, unless they’re mecha.

Building on that, I kinda wanna see a tank battle. Gimme something like the Baneblade vs. the Megatank.

Jeezes these out of control arguments of how boring and lazy Power Scaling can get are exactly why most Dragon Ball matchups hardly interest me outside of the animation potential.

Since they all share the exact same power kits and their Best Feats are literally just how well they fought other characters, aka the very definition of Power Scaling.

So once the roughly estimated Stat-blocks are placed, there’s really not much else to talk about debatewise. Powers/Abilities or Skill? Most of Dragon Ball’s large catalogue of named Ki attacks generally vary very little that can tangibly distinguish them outside of differing color.

And again because of that lack of real variety means there isn’t really much to talk about for Tertiary factors fighting anyone else who isn’t another similarly hard hitting flying brick.

I guess there’s technically Whis and Beerus’ tutelage of Goku and Vegeta respectively but that too gets predictably boring pretty fast reiterating how they’ve been around for at least thousands to millions of years.

Like generally I'm just: Oh. A killed B. Now the horrendous outcome is that C is gonna happen because B wasn't there to stop it.

"I just need one of you to come here to give your life to the sun god. It will be for the monkey city's glory."

Powerscaling in stories works with at least definitive signs.

Like, Beerus has and is currently always shown to be Goku and Vegeta's Superior and likely even more, so what ever they can output, Beerus is likely to be that at minimum.

This does create a funny thing in-universe where Beerus will always get more powerful, not because he shows anything more powerful, but because he’s always vaguely above Goku.

I’ve described it as sitting on top of a power ceiling that just keeps rising, until eventually they decide Goku will surpass him. It’s common for long-term villains in series, really. Even if entirely inferred (we know Blackbeard and Akainu will be on par/stronger than Luffy because narratively they’re final boss types, of course they would be, unless they shoot for a purposeful aversion where Luffy kicks their asses upon meeting them)

Yeah, I don't know how I would scale Beerus, because... there's no evidence at all that Goku has surpassed him, but there's also no evidence that Goku hasn't surpassed him by now. I don't know how likely that is, but presumably since time has passed since that big universe shockwave feat, Goku's maximum strength is like, a few billion times stronger than it was when they last fought. Beerus was holding back, sure, but was he holding back by a factor of billions?

I remember in the run-up to Hulk VS Broly asking "Is Broly as strong/stronger than Beerus?" and someone told me "Pfft, no, obviously not, like nowhere near close. I mean, he's strong, sure, but nowhere near Beerus-strong." And then Hulk VS Broly came out and Broly was judged to be approximately 3,600 times universe-tier, while Beerus was about 12 times universe-tier (admittedly while holding back to an unspecified degree.)

Given that Beerus’ current role is “person Goku is aspiring to be stronger than” to some extent, it’d be kind of weird if he had already surpassed him and the narrative just never referenced it. So I think it’s a fairly safe assumption to say he STILL is stronger than him, until the narrative directly acknowledges he isn’t, especially with DB’s more linear strength power system.

It would be insanely funny if they finally clashed again and Goku just one shots him, though.

No there's plenty of statements in the story that Goku still hasn't surpassed Beerus. The only ones indicated to be on his level are Broly (Goku directly states he thinks Broly is as strong as Beerus) and Frieza (magazine statments say that Black Freiza has reached the level of the Gods of Destruction.)

Edited by Pokesamus on May 1st 2024 at 3:03:22 AM

Power Creep amirite?

Even then Goku never saw Beerus at his max. So with only his word to go off of we don't really know where Broly really stacks up to Beerus.

Likewise Black Frieza may be on the level of Destroyers now, but both the anime and especially the manga makes a point that the Destroyers are also not equal to each other. Beerus is implicitly on the higher end of Destroyers, and we don't know where Black Frieza stacks up to any of them.

So yeah Beerus is just in a nebulous "stronger than you" spot right now.

#IceBearForPresident

Oh, ok, thanks for the info.

Hmm, it's weird to consider after Goku VS Superman 3, where Goku is at his absolute strongest, that there are still so many Dragon Ball characters who fold him like a wet paper towel. Also the fact that Black Frieza is apparently on the same level as Beerus/Broly really emphasizes how hideously ginormous his stat advantage was against the version of Megatron that they used.

Edited by Elmo3000 on May 1st 2024 at 11:19:52 AM

TBH most of Dragon Ball's higher tier characters right now are kind of in a weird question mark when it comes to exact power. Black Frieza one-shots UI Goku and UE Vegeta, but that's also them after being exhausted from going back and forth with Gas. Beast Gohan confronted Goku, Vegeta and Broly all at once, but that was just a sparring match, so I doubt any of them were using their full power. And who knows what Piccolo will do once he taps into his Orange form again?

I always liked the explanation that the reason as to why Beerus hasn't been surpassed yet is because when Goku and Vegeta aren't training on his planet Beerus is training his ass off to keep ahead of them.

The only of those characters we can definitely say have a strength advantage over Sakura are Ryu, Akuma and Bison. Maybe Sagat, if we go by the same rival rule as with Karin and presume that Sagat is at the same level as Ryu, which is a big ask given that the thing that definitively gives Ryu a level above everyone else is the crazy shounen-style power up he got in V.

Everyone else is a guess. Far from "undoubtedly."

Because writers do not write stories with the purpose of establishing feats (or at least, rarely ever do so), even fighting game writers.

To use Dragonball as an example, since we're also talking about that, up until pretty recently in Super, Android 17 and 18 had never showcased any feat that matched most of the other characters: they're not "big expressions of power" characters, don't blow up planets, don't even use attacks that seem

I've seen people before claim that, because of that, they must not even be capable of doing stuff like - say - blowing up a planet. But there's no reason to assume that, since they're stronger than Freeza.

Now, granted, that's Dragonball. Dragonball is extremely rigid in regards to how power level and strength works and how it relates to what you can do. But the point is that the absence of huge feats isn't necessarily evidence of a lack of strength at all - there are other factors.

Edited by KnownUnknown on May 1st 2024 at 5:25:56 AM

"The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to make sense." - Tom Clancy, paraphrasing Mark Twain.

Yeah, Sakura May not seem that strong, but she learned how to do Ryu's training at a rate far faster then he ever could despite being in high school when she first shows up.

Watch Symphogear