DEATH BATTLE

Heresy.

Stick to the games and Sonic wins easily.

The only time they had Mario with "insane reaction time" was that electricity BS and him piloting the star.

Even if I didn't have issue with both of those examples I'd wager neither are feats Mario consistently demonstrates.

Sonic. Got robbed.

Edited by FOFD on May 12th 2022 at 5:30:47 AM

Umm, If you're referring to the Lightning Bolt Item from the Mario Kart series, that's more iffy because it basically just shrinks you, and that's about it. Sure it's a lightning bolt, but still.

Damn, talk about timing. I just saw the Mario vs Sonic rematch for the first time, like, 3 hours ago.

Honestly, arguing over what their feats and limits are is kinda destined to end in disaster because the characters themselves are incredibly inconsistent with what they're capable of throughout various entries in their games.

Sometimes Sonic's fast enough to restore time by just running. Sometimes he's not fast enough to save Tails from a trap. Sometimes Mario is strong enough to lift and punt a castle. Sometimes he can't even destroy a boulder without a hammer or power-up.

Edited by Awesomekid42 on May 12th 2022 at 5:55:24 AM

I just reread the prediction blog and my favorite part is that the deciding factor with then was basically the Vegeta vs Shadow argument. Mario shit stomps base Sonic but can he outlast Super Sonic?

That bit about Sonic fans is a little uncalled for, I would amend that maybe. I also respectfully think Sonic was robbed a little, Mario has some minor Toon Force on his side and a few visual gags like lifting and throwing an entire fortress that can be used to wreck VS debates, but I just don't see him having a workaround for Sonic casually outrunning a black hole. Piloting a star in a Mario Party minigame is an extremely questionable feat to take literally as proof of speed of light reflexes.

In retrospect, I was rooting for Mario the first time around, but I'm not much of a fan of the rematch. The animation also felt a little mean-spirited towards Sonic, he didn't get a very respectful showing there.

Edited by Elmo3000 on May 12th 2022 at 10:59:47 AM

Which iirc the Blog (if not Death Battle) addressed by noting that RPG items like Bottomless Gloves give Mario more of an edge on how long his invincibility lasts than Super Sonic gets on having to maintain Rings. And that's to say nothing of things like White Raccoon Mario having no real limit.

I wanna say the Blog also put Mario's top speed as higher than Sonic's due to things like "Black Hole Boogie" from the Mario Party series. Make of that what you will, but I like it just because it's hysterical.

Edited by NesClassic on May 12th 2022 at 6:00:58 AM

2Not a Mario Party Minigame, it's from Mario and Luigi Dream Team where Luigi throws Mario with an enlarged Star.

Taken speed into account, Even if Mario can't reliably catch Sonic, Sonic really has no real way to harm Mario in any fashion, given how you can't really dispute the strength and durability stats either. Given Mario's potential unlimited supplies of power ups, which includes Invulnerability power ups, Sonic was eventually going to lose.

I never really got Mario's 'potentially unlimited power-ups' thing. In New Super Mario Bros, you can access any of your three reserve power-ups any time you like, and in the Mario & Luigi RPGs, they have an inventory filled with standard RPG items, although to the best of my recollection, none of them give you outright invincibility (been a while since I played them though, I did Superstar Saga and Partners in Time, still need to start Bowser's Inside Story) and in regular Mario games, the Starman makes you invincible, so... if you mash all three of these systems together, you can theoretically composite a Mario who can carry around multiple invincibility power-ups and chain them nigh-endlessly. But even when taking characters at their best, it's a ridiculous stretch that doesn't remotely resemble any portrayal of Mario. It would be like saying that it was impossible to defeat Link because for all we know, he's carrying infinite bottles of fairies, or Red and Charizard are unbeatable too because maybe Red bumped into Missingno before the fight and is now permanently carrying (X = X + 1) Max Revives.

Edited by Elmo3000 on May 12th 2022 at 12:43:47 PM

The unlimited items thing comes from the Mario&Luigi game with equipment that allows unlimited item usage and in the platformers Mario already had the potential to carry a shit load of different power ups. So mix those two together and yeah that’s a lot of power ups.

Mind you the shows argument when it came to the power ups was less Mario having unlimited power ups but rather Mario having more and better power ups on the average.

Edited by Pokesamus on May 12th 2022 at 4:55:03 AM

2I mean were not saying Mario is using them all at once, he has, and potentially always be limited to, only used them one at a time with a few exceptions (The Double Cherry for example and the Starman). The point is, Unlike the Link Infinite Fairies or that Pokemon example, Mario's "Bottomless Glove" equipment literally just makes his battle items inventory unlimited, We do have a legitimate reason into why Mario could be like that.

Besides the point of that argument is that Mario will always regularly have more items to use than Sonic because eventually Mario has usually been depicted at carrying them with him through his journeys, and because of it, he has a solid counter to Super and Hyper Sonic.

Touche, However, it still stands to reason Mario would still carry more than one of each item given that is possible for him to do so and has proven that he could as well. So we can agree on one thing, without the Bottomless Glove, he would still have the arsenal advantage. With it, it's Overkill.

Also, you can the same for Sonic's other items like his numerous shields that really won't do much other than save Sonic an extra hit, which is what usually what the other Mario suits will essentially be in this case. Even then, Mario doesn't have to beat Super/Hyper forms either, he just has to survive long enough til they burn out, which he can with Starman, A Rainbow Star, Invisible Cap and Metal Cap, all of which grants Invulnerability or Invisibility that makes it impossible for Super/Hyper Sonic to hurt Mario.

Edited by Mrbda241 on May 12th 2022 at 5:25:17 AM

That's not unreasonable, but it's worth remembering that the Bottomless Gloves in Mario & Luigi games are optional (and extremely expensive) equipment that is not mandatory to the story and will only be purchased by very few players. Giving Mario the Bottomless Gloves makes as much sense as saying "Hey, if you beat the Resident Evil 2 Remake on Hardcore difficulty and get an S-Rank, you unlock the infinite rocket launcher, so it's totally canon that Leon Kennedy carries around an infinite rocket launcher now."

Mario definitely has more power-ups on average, but better power-ups? I don't see how turning into a bee or a cat or a spring or a tanooki gives you a notable advantage against the straightforward power, speed and durability boost that Sonic gets as Super or Hyper Sonic.

Edited by Elmo3000 on May 12th 2022 at 1:11:30 PM

Ok now you’re just trying to split hairs for what should or shouldn’t be allowed in these fights

Like yeah they gave Mario his best equipment for the fight. They did the same for the likes of Sonic, Link, Megaman, Cloud, and Doomguy.

Edited by Pokesamus on May 12th 2022 at 5:31:15 AM

Genuinely not trying to split hairs, I just don't think that in a fair fight featuring Mario, it should be included that in one spin-off RPG, if the player grinds for currency for 6 hours, they can buy a magic pair of gloves that lets you use items infinitely, ergo it should be taken into account as part of his standard arsenal.

It would be one thing if I was saying "They shouldn't include the Fire Flower or the Cape or the Super Bell, because they're not canonically confirmed and it's possible to beat the game without them!" because they're all iconic and common and everyone used them when playing the games. It's another thing to take an intentionally broken RPG bonus item, take it out of context and combine it with power-ups that weren't even in the RPG, and then composite a scenario in which Mario can endlessly spam invincibility items to become permanently unkillable.

Now that you mentioned it, they did give Mario two potentially broken items that can essentially net him the win every time, which they clearly shown in Mario's arsenal page, the Retry Clock(Bowser's Inside Story DS Version) and the Earlier Time (Mario RPG), Both items restart the fight at the very beginning of it, with the Retry Clock kicking in when Mario is defeated. It could grant Mario knowledge of everything he learns from Sonic the first go around.

Actually, it's never insinuated that Sonic can just time travel because he runs fast, I just thought it was because of that Time Warp Sign. He hasn't done it ever since, nor is it implied he could to begin with. But point taken.

Edited by Mrbda241 on May 12th 2022 at 6:33:57 AM

True, but in Sonic CD, Sonic can run fast enough to travel through time without the use of any item or power-up, so he could also restart the fight with prior knowledge if he wanted to.

Honestly, Mario is a very awkward character to put in a VS Debate, because gameplay-wise he can only ever carry one power-up at a time with maybe one in reserve, but if you give him one of each, suddenly he's carrying five hundred power-ups that vary from useless to complete invincibility. And if you combine his RPG arsenal with his platformer arsenal - which I still maintain you should not - he becomes straight-up FUBAR.

Amusingly, Composite Link actually does get a cheat along those lines- Chateau Romani from Majora's Mask grants him an infinite Magic Meter, and Naryu's Love and the Wind Waker version of Magic Armor both grant invincibility as long as he has Magic to spare.

...it's just Cloud still eclipses Link in stats and can innately accomplish similar bullshit from just stuff he gets in VII proper. The joys of VS debates involving video game equipment, ah?

Quick question, how do you guys feel about time-displaced combatants. Specifically, combatants that are taken from a certain part of a story but not the entirety of it. For example, Anakin Skywalker but without any of his feats as Darth Vader. He is a commonly requested opponent for Terra, but most fans stick to his pre-Vader appearance from the prequels. Also, DBX had Kid Goku fight against Gon so I was wondering if that could qualify for Death Battle as well.

I feel like, as long as they are set to keep it that way, where the limit is to where their feats and accomplishment go, Maybe.

But then there is the situation where the phrase "True Potential" comes in. Like sometimes, a character from their past might be capable of what they could in the future at that moment. We don't know if it's training or experience, but still.

Well, I've overall not been a fan of their research methods that DB is doing currently, I feel like they went from mostly reasonable to highest most generous possible interpretation no matter how little sense it makes from any perspective.

But ignoring that, I actually caught up on a bunch of fights. Popeye vs Saitama was god damn amazing. Holy shit. It might hands down be my favorite DB episode ever. I had maybe a few quibbles on the analysis portion, but nothing that would have really changed the result. But the fight animation, that was great. I loved the multiple style switches. From traditional animation, to pixel animation, back to traditional briefly, before swapping into CGI, and then ending on traditional again.

Thor vs Vegeta's fight was good too. I care less for the Vegeta can destroy the universe 20k times over but Thor could do it 200k times over. Not because I doubt their math, but because like come on really?

Scarlet Witch vs Zatana also had a good animation, though I do kind of get the complaints about it being the Zatana show. The universe busting stuff weirdly worked better in this one, probably because both were grabbed from like actual major universal events, instead of calculated extrapolations from scaling.

Korra vs Storm was... kind of a mess. Like the math clearly shows Storm being a billion times better then Korra at like everything. And then Storm is somehow on the backfoot of the entire animation. ...But yeah I definitely agree with the sentiment that this just shouldn't have been done.

Mikasa vs Blake, gonna be honest it had been so long since this one had been the topic that when I finally watched it I actually thought Mikasa was going to win when she cut off Blake's hand. And I was very surprised at that because I'm like 'there's no way Mikasa can win this' and turns out I was right, the arm chop was just a very effective fake out. At least on me.

Given next season's gonna mark ten seasons so far, what would you like to see there?

I'd love to see things from S1 return, like "Fight!" at the start or more obscure combatants.

"FIGHT!"

Also Jocelyn > Ringmaster > Buddy > anything to do with Boomstick's dad > Deadpool.

I was thinking, a while back one of the semi-popular Team Fortress 2 requests was Sarge from Red V Blue VS The Soldier, because of their similar personalities, but Sarge's more advanced armour and weaponry and the general superhuman-ness of those characters would make it a blowout. Can anyone think of any other Team Fortress 2 match-ups that would work?

The tempting pick is Overwatch characters but they tend to have huge advantages in terms of technology and firepower. One of the most disappointing things about Tracer VS Scout - other than... well, everything - was that it was arguably the most likely match-up TF2 had a chance of winning.

The Spy vs The Chameleon from Marvel.

If nothing else the fight animation for that would be interesting because it would need crowds for the two to get lost in