DEATH BATTLE

Terrible creatures come from beneath the water…

The Gill-man VS Bruce

Underwater sea monster VS giant fucking shark. I think it’ll be a fun time for all.

Let's just hope Gill-Man can be quick enough to dodge the shark and engage in CQC.

Although if we take the games into account, even that ewill be difficult.

And yes, these are real.

"If Sakura is on par with Haggar, then why is his greatest physical feat one quadrillion times stronger than hers?"

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

This justification simply does not work when we are talking about a power difference of quadrillions. Like, Sakura has never flipped a car into the air, but Dan Hibiki actually has (it was a gag, he shoryuken'd it, then it fell on him, and therefore in the case of Dan VS The Car, it was judged that The Car was actually victorious,) and therefore even though flipping a car several feet into the air is probably stronger than any of Sakura's direct feats, it is undoubtedly reasonable and uncontroversial to scale her to this; she's definitely stronger than Dan, after all. You could easily make the case that she is building tier despite never destroying a building, or even possibly city-block tier. But you're skipping straight to "Sakura can lift the entire continent of Africa and she could still just walk around, like 'Hey Ryu, throw another continent on there! I can take it!'"

When outliers exist and we are all familiar with them then I don't understand how a power discrepancy of one quadrillion between characters does not set off 'outlier' alarm bells.

I kind of want to suggest Bruce the Shark VS Gooper Blooper, just to pay off the joke of it being a Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus.

My only remaining forum-appropriate dog in this race is that scaling Sakura to that craziness is wild and I don't grasp the thinking there.

(2)

I love how Smoky vs Scruff was "one's a dog and the other... well he's a freaking bear."

In this case, one's a mutant and one's... a giant goddamned shark.

I might suggest King Shark vs the shark from Maneater.

Edited by FOFD on May 1st 2024 at 9:21:15 AM

Don’t know how strong the Maneater Shark gets, but I’m sure King Shark can get pretty crazy if you do a deep dive into him.

But the idea of seeing Jaws (well, Bruce, but everyone calls him Jaws) chomping their way through a sea monster man is funny. Could be fun to do it as a fight around a boat too, like both of them are going after the same boat and come into blows with one another. Could have a fun scene where the Gill-man successfully kidnaps one of the women on board, only for Jaws to snatch her right up and eat her, leading to the Gill-man being PISSED.

That's not really relevant to the point that rating her lower than half the cast is incorrect, as is aggressively lowballing how strong she is. As you keep attempting to push that, it being incorrect continues to bear repeating.

Just because she's not explicitly quadrillions strong doesn't mean the character is on the weaker side of characters in the game - especially when we have explicit indication that she isn't.

Edited by KnownUnknown on May 1st 2024 at 6:48:52 AM

Is that the thing that you're objecting to? I'm not ranking her lower than half the cast, I'm ranking her lower than most of the main cast, I- alright, how many Street Fighter characters are there?

According to Wikipedia, there are 121 playable characters in the Street Fighter series. Despite being a fan-favourite and also being extremely cool and nice, Sakura has never exactly been close to being the main character of the series; she doesn't land the killing blow on any final boss, she doesn't have a huge impact on the story of any game. I have no problem putting her in at least the Top 20 characters, ranked both by strength and by relevance, but when she's scaled to the most powerful physical feat that has ever been performed in the entire extended franchise, then... no, there's no basis for that at all. Obviously the 20th strongest character in the series doesn't scale to its strongest feat.

I had no idea that this entire thing was just because you thought that I thought that Sakura was 'weaker than half the cast of Street Fighter'. Half the cast of Street Fighter are only in a single game and have literally zero feats, of course she's stronger than most of those guys. You can't complain that I'm aggressively low-balling her when I've explicitly said that despite a lack of feats, you could easily scale her to building-tier or even charitably something like city-block tier.

Edited by Elmo3000 on May 1st 2024 at 2:58:54 PM

I want to see Stardust the Super Wizard fight someone.

Stardust the Super Wizard VS Sterdust, wrestling alter-ego of Stephanie Sterling.

Sterdust has a phenomenal feat of waiting until the referee wasn't looking, picking up a chair and slamming it on the ground, and then falling down clutching their face, which confused the referee into thinking that they had been illegally attacked, which got their opponent disqualified. What can Stardust do against that, hmm?

That’d be fun. I’m sure there’s a good, comically powerful character out there known for giving out Cruel and Unusual Deaths.

And that's still incorrect. As has been pointed out to you many times at this point, we don't have enough information regarding where most of the characters stand next to one another to make a strong distinction like that, but Sakura being able to match Zangief puts a wrench in that idea outright because the last few games have depicted Zangief as one of the stronger members of the cast.

In particular, in response to this:

As for this:

I don't know why. I've been very explicit about what specifically about your arguments I've been objecting to for the last two pages, and repeatedly so at that.

Again, disagreeing with Sakura being highballed, and turning around and lowballing the character in response, are two different things, and just because highballing the character is inaccurate doesn't mean lowballing the character is any less inaccurate.

Edited by KnownUnknown on May 1st 2024 at 7:27:34 AM

The rest of the main cast have actual, legitimate direct feats that Sakura doesn't have, and Haggar-outlier-scaling doesn't change this because if Sakura scales to this then they all must do as well. So best case-scenario, Sakura is joint-strongest with like seventeen other members of the main cast. Which would also make them all the joint-weakest too. I should have said 'main cast' instead of 'cast' but otherwise I totally stand by that statement 100%. And when my main point of contention was the 'quadrillions' thing then it just seems like an odd thing in specific to object to.

I've said 'city block tier' multiple times so these repeated claims of lowballing without ever explaining where you think Sakura scales to is kind of rude. Like, if I'm lowballing her by a factor of one thousand, that would mean that the quadrillions-feat was a highball by a factor of one trillion, in which case it's just really odd that you're specifically disagreeing with just me.

Edited by Elmo3000 on May 1st 2024 at 3:32:06 PM

And as stated, the lack of feats is not, in itself, evidence of weakness.

Again, matching one of the stronger members of the cast would infer that the character has power matching one of the stronger members of the cast. That's pretty much it on that front.

I mean, I've been saying for the last five pages or so that that's basically how Street Fighter works.

There's outlier characters who have very high power in comparison to everyone else (IE - Akuma, Gouken, Oro, and Ryu as of SFV), and there's outlier characters who have very low power in comparison to everyone else (IE - Dan, and maybe Sean), and everyone else is in this nebulous cloud of mostly being able to match one another.

Edited by KnownUnknown on May 1st 2024 at 7:34:02 AM

"And as stated, the lack of feats is not, in itself, evidence of weakness."

Okay, I'm saying, "There is no evidence that she scales to quadrillions of times her best direct feat," and you are saying "Ah, but there is no evidence that she does not scale to quadrillions of times her best direct feat!" and no disrespect but one of these positions is significantly more defensible. "There is no evidence to disprove it, so it must be fair to assume that it is true!" is just fundamentally... not a good line of reasoning.

We clearly fundamentally disagree on the merits of power-scaling, can we drop this and go back to Stardust the Magic Dragon or whatever?

Edited by Elmo3000 on May 1st 2024 at 3:38:25 PM

At no point in this entire conversation have I ever said anything whatsoever about her scaling to a quadrillions feat, so I don't know where you're getting that from.

I quoted the things you stated that I disagreed with for a reason.

I do feel like Sakura is a good character to use for Death Battle, and as such getting an accurate read of how strong she is important. For that reason, it's important that her read is not only not too high, but also not too low. And I'd hate for us to never be able to bring up Sakura again just because acknowledging who she is or isn't explicitly weaker than is a hot button for some reason.

Edited by KnownUnknown on May 1st 2024 at 7:42:22 AM

... Then why did you only speak up to disagree with me?

If you don't agree with the quadrillions thing, but you didn't feel the need to vocally say so, but when I allegedly mis-scale Sakura by an irrefutably smaller degree, you feel the need to repeatedly reply calling me incorrect and accusing me of lowballing her, even after I clarify my position and am incredibly charitable to her, then... I mean, it feels like you're going out of your way to disagree with me, specifically.

I would appreciate very much if we could stop and talk about something else.

... because you said something I disagreed with? And then you countered me, so I countered that, and back and forth as a conversation. Yadda yadda.

I'll admit to being a bit confused. This whole thread is all about debates about how strong characters are. People disagree with each other here all the time over all sorts of minutiae. Nobody's doing it for personal reasons, or at least we try to ensure that doesn't happen.

I... did vocally say so? It's like the first thing I ever said in the conversation. Heck, I said it twice.

Edited by KnownUnknown on May 1st 2024 at 7:55:35 AM

To be a bit fair Sakura does have two Direct Feats that can get to like Small-Building level and therein above quite a good margin of the non-reoccurring characters. Clashing Hadoukens with Ken which resulted in a large explosion that's noticeably a tad bit larger than the nearby houses.

In Dan's ending Street Fighter IV, Sakura along with Ryu easily extinguished a burst of flames flooding a rather large hallway. Feat beginning at about the 4:30 minute mark https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1D6VZb24tU&t=277s

Side note, Dan being able to have outpaced the flames for what should be at least quite some time until Blanka bumped into him can get around Speeds of 100 m/s (223.694 mph) as deflagration can occur that fast by people in the Death Battle community dedicated enough to learn about the differences of flammable gases.

Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god!

Dan Conner

VS

Hank Hill

• tough family sitcom dads, one from live-action and one from an animated series
• both with outdated views that brush up against their family's more laidback attitude
• both strong, opinionated family men embodying the stereotypical American in different ways
• both with a son they were worried about "not growing up right" and said son later growing up the most well adjusted out of the whole family
• completely flies off the handle when family gets abused or hurt

Edited by FOFD on May 1st 2024 at 11:17:45 AM

"I... did vocally say so? It's like the first thing I ever said in the conversation. Heck, I said it twice."

I just went back to check and no, I really don't see you doing that. You said that Sakura's most obvious scaling is Karin, but never actually expressed any disagreement on the quadrillions thing. Unless I've missed something. Which is... very possible.

Sorry if I'm taking it too personally, I've been on edge for a few days and it's just when someone says "We shouldn't highball Sakura or lowball Sakura," and then go on to argue against a perceived lowball but have little to nothing to say about a repeatedly-referenced highball (by a factor that is significantly larger than the lowball,) then, yeah, it can feel to the recipient kind of like "... Oh. I guess this guy just specifically doesn't like me in particular, then." Which I am 100% sure was not your intention.

Those feats are really cool and helpful, and also undoubtedly valid. It's also crazy to think about that whole 'Dan Hibiki shoryukens a car into the air' thing, because even though it's a gag that ends badly for him, it means that he is strong enough to launch a car into the air, and durable enough to survive it landing on top of him with no serious injuries whatsoever. That's... wow.

It's not a match that has fans clamouring for a redo, but how do people think it would go if Dan Hibiki fought Hercule Satan again?

Edited by Elmo3000 on May 1st 2024 at 4:12:43 PM

Hank Hill is absolutely a case of a character that shouldn’t be on a VS battle show, but I really want to see him on one.

Brandon Yates recently did a commission for Hank Hill VS Bob Belcher.

The prediction blog also did Bob Belcher VS The Condiment King a while back. I was glad that Bob won, but a little doubtful over 'lightspeed reaction-time Bob Belcher' via scaling to Louise, who reaches lightspeed via... being a child who plays laser tag.

x3

Dan is absolutely no pushover based on that car feet and a lot of other stuff he's done in the comics and games. He's clearly superhuman. However, I don't think he has anything that matches Hercule's getting smashed into a mountain by Perfect Cell. In terms of durability, Hercule just seems way too crazy.

I think seeing Dan again against someone else would be fun.

I occasionally hear Dan VS Glass Joe, though I feel that’s too lopsided in the other direction. Joe doesn’t exactly got a ton going for him, though not nothing. He did beat Nick Bruiser, the Super Punch-Out!! champion… In an accident. It’s also hard to tell how impressive this should be since earlier Punch-Out titles didn’t really have many feats to go off of.

More generally impressive, he improves enough after his first lost in Wii (and a helmet for losing 100 times) enough that he can provide at least a moderate challenge to a Little Mac that just became champion after beating Mr. Sandman. Mind you, Mac’s best feat of defeating Sandman, who was now angry and strong enough to demolish a building with his fists, doesn’t happen until after this point, so arguable of Joe should be anywhere near that. But still, even being a contender was a nice boost for this guy.

Pretty sure Dan takes it anyway you slice it though. It’d be funny to see Dan just beating on him though, until Joe somehow gets that head protection and becomes a lot more competent. Even if he eventually loses.

One of my dream match-ups for ages has been Dan Hibiki VS Glass Joe. Because they're both total jokes, who have surprisingly become fan-favourites due to their never-give-up attitude in the face of waning talent, and they have surprisingly great durability feats. Glass Joe survived a hit from Mr Sandman, he can take punches from Little Mac (admittedly Mac is 100% not the kind of guy who would hit Joe with everything he had if it risked seriously injuring him,) and when you fight him in Title Defence Mode in Punch-Out Wii, he surprises you by totally kicking your ass.

Also, according to a joke in Nintendo Power, his one win in his 1-99 career was against Nick Bruiser, the final boss of Super Punch-Out, which occurred in a freak accident. And when Mike Tyson - the real Mike Tyson - played Punch-Out on 'Hey I'm Jimmy Fallon and this is my talk show,' he lost to Glass Joe due to just completely misunderstanding the game. Which means that technically, Glass Joe has beaten Nick Bruiser and Mike Tyson. Sort of.

EDIT: I have been sniped in the best way possible.

Edited by Elmo3000 on May 2nd 2024 at 3:51:32 PM