DEATH BATTLE

The G1 Blog for Toph VS Terra is out! With a fresh analysis, does Toph have what it takes to score a second win, or does Terra take a win for... whoever's team she's on?

Worth noting that this is specifically the Terra from the 2003 cartoon, for the sake of fairness.
(also, yes, toph actually can sense any airborne terra firma. they back this up with instances of it happening.)

Final tally: 1-13, for a decisive Terra victory. It's not lopsided on paper, since Toph's far and away the more experienced geokinetic here with a lot more nuance and control over her abilities. Combined with Seismic Sense, she has the tools to make it a closer fight than it should be. That said... Terra does still statstomp Toph, and pretty easily to boot since she either directly performed her best feats or scales directly to characters she beat; Toph's highballs all involve shakier daisy-chain scaling. And while Toph's metalbending is an edge Terra can't compete with, Terra still beats it out with control over lava, golem creation, and having generic energy blasts in her toolkit. Odds are likely she'd end the fight before Toph could properly adapt and overcome her, and the fact that Toph's defenses rely on sensing the earth is a problem when Terra is so much stronger and faster.

Next time: Kratos VS Asura!

And at some indeterminate point in the future whenever the person writing it feels it's ready to release: Arceus will be fighting... Aslan from The Chronicles of Narnia!?

I can't believe that meme of 10 billion Lions vs. All Pokemon is technically going to be boiled down to "The Strongest Lion Vs. the Strongest Pokemon"

Considering that the Arceus we're familiar with is just a fragment of the real thing, my hopes are not high for Lion Jesus (unless he's utterly cracked, but then again so is Arceus).

Love Asura's Wrath but am honestly not looking forward to their Kratos VS Asura blog, Kratos has recently become the most unbearable wank-magnet in VS battle circles, with things like "He fought with Thor, and when Thor fought the World Serpent then their fight shook Yggdrasil, the world tree, which makes them both low-tier hyperversal at the very minimum, and furthermore in the novelization of the original trilogy then Typhon is stated to have created multiple universe that are infinite in scope, and Cronos beat Typhon and Zeus beat Cronos and Kratos beat Zeus, so if anything, low-tier hyperversal is a conservative estimate of his true-" and all of this is from a game series where Kratos has no direct feats greater than maybe island-tier and sometimes he still needs to button-mash to open a door.

It's like, a key difference in the settings is that Chakravartin, the final boss of Asura's Wrath, is a God in the religious sense of the word; he has existed since the dawn of time and created the universe and everything inside it. Gods in the God of War series were born into worlds that already existed, and are more akin to just... really, really, really powerful magic guys.

Also it just bugs me in advance that all of Asura's feats are going to be 'cool shit that Asura has actually literally done', and all of Kratos' feats are going to be 'has fought Hades, who did X, and Baldur, who did X, and Odin, who did X-' and so on and so forth.

I mean for Toph vs Terra, at least it’s not a total shit show over the Avatar character. Also, I think Toph is somewhat aware of lavabending because there was this panel where she could sense someone with lavabending powers before adding it to her school.

About Arceus vs. Aslan, Narnia magic is a lot like Tolkien magic in that it's very vaguely defined. I feel like while it isn't clear what Aslan's strongest feat is when it comes to combat, Arceus is comparatively much easier to grasp.

Verdict makes sense, and I’m glad they went with specifically the cartoon version, since while I’m sure comics Terra is an interesting character… She just isn’t the version most people really know and are attached to. Very similar to how, while I understand the choice, they chose to put Twilight against Composite Raven. Especially when one of their big similarities seemed to be voice actor.

As for Kratos VS Asura, yeah Kratos is definitely one of those characters where they look like they’re really insane on paper and then in motion just… Isn’t really? But that has to do with the lore being way bigger than what’s actively shown in any God of War game, and is especially noticeable compared to Asura who lives up to everything both in lore AND in action. “Consistent” Kratos VS Asura is a literal no-brainer for Asura, but the fact that they’re doing this at all likely means they’re using higher tier Kratos, and I’m not qualified to comment on that.

Prior to 2018 I was plenty sure Kratos straight up lost the fight with Asura.

Hearing anyone go "low hyperversal" assessing a character based on Greek myth aggravates me so.

How much of that is him being actually scaled to stuff the gods he fought are actually confirmed to have done in universe, rather then just people pulling stuff from the mythologies and just insisting that it has to apply to all versions of that diety in media?

It's not so much that as it is... hmm. In God of War II, Kratos meets Atlas, who in keeping with the mythology, is holding up the World Pillar, which supposedly supports the weight of the entire planet. The problem is, this feat is literally millions of times greater than anything else shown in the original God of War trilogy, by Kratos, Ares, Cronos, Zeus; anyone. And even without going the 'If Mario is so strong, how come he gets killed by a goomba?' route and asking why Kratos still struggles with QTEs for opening doors if he can apparently lift the entire weight of the world, the disparity between what we are told Kratos scales to and what we have actually seen Kratos do is insane to the point where it's really unreasonable to just assume that he's holding back; especially considering what Kratos was like in the original trilogy.

Weirdly enough, God of War kind of reminds me of Scott Pilgrim, and how that's a relatively grounded franchise, and then there's one line about someone punching a hole in the moon, so through the magic of power-scaling, every major character in that series is now island/city-block tier.

A little correction, in actual Greek mythology does Atlas not hold up the world but rather the sky and with it the entire cosmos. So this would actually be a solid argument for the God of War verse scaling far below the original myths.

• God of War scaling says Kratos beat up a guy who held up the world
• In actual myth said guy held up the cosmos, not the world
• Therefore God of War should actually scale lower?

Sounds solid to me.

He's basically saying the GOW Gods got the Adaptational Wimp treatment, if I'm correct.

Pretty much. Mind you, my only real exposure to the Greek era of GOW is watchong a cutscene compilation a few years ago and some Youtube videos quickfire pointing out inacuracies to the myths in them.

So I cant speek with much authority on them, but I dont remember anything in them that goes beyond planetary at the absolute most.

Edited by uncertanSearcher on Mar 20th 2023 at 12:21:25 PM

What I'm getting at though is are we deriving some sort of distinction between

• Atlas held up the world
• Atlas held up the sky and the cosmos

Because last I checked the Greeks considered "the world" and "the cosmos" to be basically the same thing.

In GOW Chains of Olympus the reason Atlas had to hold up the world was due to a plan that would destroy all of existence, including the afterlife Kratos' daughter was in. Implying that Atlas holding up the world was him holding up what the Greeks also considered to be all of existence = aka the cosmos?

Edited by FOFD on Mar 20th 2023 at 8:06:05 AM

The Greeks specifically depicted Atlas as standing on the earth, or rather on top of a mountain on earth and holding up the sky, aka the celestial sphere, from there.

That actually came up in Heracles's Death Battle analysis since he temporarely took Atlas's spot during one of his tasks and lead to them concluding that his strength is literary infinite, since there are sources of the ancient Greeks calling the cosmos infinitely large.

The idea that Atlas carries the globe comes from people misiterpreting statues of him holding the celestial sphere as him holding the earth instead and GOW is one of the works that went with that misinterpretation.

Edited by uncertanSearcher on Mar 20th 2023 at 1:36:56 PM

Let's face it, if you've seen the fights Asura has dealt with compared to Kratos', you realize how out of depth Kratos is even with the most generous of scaling.

Speaking of Mythology, I think the next one would be Zeus vs. Odin.

I mean Zeus can’t die so perma-incapacitation will have to do for Odin.

Btw, for the Toph vs Terra blog, the one vote Toph got was solely out of pity, which I find funny.

What I'm hearing is that comic books continue to be so OP as to make any Versus debate that isn't Marvel vs. DC futile.

Still depends on the exact match up they’re going over, though in this case I th8nk it’s also driven by the fact that I’ve literally never heard anyone bring up comic Terra, while a lot of people like her cartoon incarnation.

Comics Terra mostly comes up in the context of "Wow that Deathstroke and Terra stuff was pretty fucked up, wasn't it?"

Big Jack Horner vs. Wapol (One Piece).

Jack's an ordinary guy, Mary Poppins' handbag and arsenal of magical objects aside Wouldn't Wapol's Devil Fruit powers grant him a distinct advantage?

Well, “ordinary guy” only means so much in a fantastical world, and he still does have those magical items.

That said I can’t really comment much on the match up itself.