Another year, another set of blogs I did. A lot happened this year for me personally, as I managed to get a job working at Universal Studios, as well as moving out of my parents house into an apartment of my own. And for this, I ended up transitioning from a solo blog to one where I was working with a team, which did lead to things slowing down a bit, but I do think it was for the best to make sure I’d still be able to cover other matches. In any case, I put out 10 blogs since the last one of these I made, so I thought I’d go over them.
(Technically I released this last year but I ended up releasing the last retrospective before it because I did not think I was going to finish it that year so I’m just talking about it now and you can’t stop me)
This is a match I actually came up with on my own during high school when I was just watching the show. I had recently been playing the South Park games and Saints Row IV, and I thought it sounded neat to put them against each other. When I got older, I kinda fell off it a bit due to not following up my interest in the series and the whole “how do you actually have them fight” thing, but I always had the idea of doing it. Then I got SR3 free on the Epic Games store, along with starting a binge of South Park the show after seeing a lets play on the games, and that got me interested in covering it in blog form, since blogs can let you cover matches free of the confines of animation potential. Then as I got more proper into each series I fell in love with the match again, and I figured the animation style clash wasn’t as unworkable as I thought, so now it’s one of my most wanted again. Funny how things work.
In any case, researching this was a huge undertaking. These two have a lot of stuff to talk about, and while there are definitely parts I ended up not covering, I feel like everything important got some kind of discussion. The angle of this turning into an army fight wasn’t what I had in mind originally, but I found both characters have good arguments for those being standard and it would let me cover even more shit, so I thought “what the hell sure”. I was a bit scared about how that might make the fight more unbalanced considering the content gaps of the franchises, and while that does kinda show in how the ally descriptions for the Saints are a lot less detailed than what the South Park boys got, I’m glad the Boss still had enough bullshit to put up a good debate regardless.
This is also the first case of one of my blogs having calcs that are mostly my work. While I’m no stranger to calculating stuff, a lot of the sources I usually go to for this were not very helpful, with the Saints Row section of VS Wiki being a particular hellscape of stuff just being said with no links. So I learned a lot of the methods myself and that was nice, since it helped give both series some better buffs. And it did let me do the stupidest buff I’ve ever done for a series in Mr Slave’s infinite ass shove, which is simultaneously the stupidest and most fitting buff you could do for South Park. I also like how I was able to be the first to actually discuss some of the more infamous South Park feats besides just Cartman’s scream.
I’m also glad that this blog had done pretty well considering I kind of shadow dropped the match on the world with it. These are characters I don’t hear talked about much in VS, and this is a match that before I released the blog was just confined to me going “hey wouldn’t this be neat” for a few years. So I’m glad that I managed to get some people on board with the idea, and if this somehow ends up becoming an episode of some VS show, that’d be great.
After Boss vs New Kid, I figured that I might do a more recognised match next. But when I was starting to go through Negan vs Vaas, I found Far Cry was potentially about to release a comic crossing over a bunch of its villains which would be useful given Vaas has a singular scaling chain otherwise, so I quickly looked for a replacement. TF2 is a series I wanted to cover for a while given how contentious its scaling is, and the last comic had recently been released, so I thought it would make sense to take it as a chance to cover the second most relevant character original to those. And I recently figured out a match for him in a series that has very little VS coverage, so this became the next blog. Definitely failed on the front of following up with a match people would recognize, but oh well.
Covering TF2 stats was definitely a bit of an undertaking, though it wasn’t anything too difficult given most of the big talking points have been discussed to death. I’m glad that covering Gray gave me the chance to cover some stuff that hasn't been discussed as deeply, such as Australium and of course the robots. I was especially glad that some of the specific details that you really can only talk about in a Gray match were things that actually impacted the verdict, like him having to rely on his money to power his robots. Despite the recent discussion on the series, I do generally stand by where I put TF2 in stats here, since I don’t really buy the debunks for Rela stuff and I think the Grodbot weapons are debatable. The one thing I definitely don’t buy anymore is the Mersamsus storm thing, which even at the time I wasn’t totally sold on it and it only really got included since it was generally accepted and was in line with the other city level stuff. I am glad that the blog didn’t end up drawing much drama from the guys who push high stats of TF2, though I’d imagine that’s mainly because Gray was against a guy who would still stat stomp him even with the bullshit higher ends.
Speaking of which, covering Advance Wars was also pretty fun. It’s a series that I’ve not seen much discussion for, so it was neat to actually give the verse more solid stats, even if the funny meteor continues to be the big scaling point. I was originally thinking the stat discussion would be a bit closer since I didn’t figure out the bigger map size measurement until later, and that quickly buffed the big feats to well above where TF2 can get. I feel the conclusion is still fairly good, and covers all the relevant details well enough. Though in hindsight, I do think it wouldn’t have hurt things to expand it to the other commanders of both series (ie: the TFC mercs and the other Black Hole COs). Considering how doubtful it is for the TFC Mercs or anyone else from Advance Wars to get a blog, it would have been neat to establish more solidly what they bring to the table, especially since they really wouldn’t change things that much besides just making Sturm win harder. Though in my defense, I was just coming off Boss vs New Kid and I didn’t want to turn things into another big discussion.
Stanford Pines vs Reagan Ridley
This blog I originally was going to do as part of my original batch of episodes, with the preview images here being ones I made well in advance. I even originally made a solo blog for Stanford way back when I was still making these on google docs, though I think I accidentally deleted it at some point. Then there was the blog that covered this match first, and I ended up cancelling the idea because I was still relatively new and didn’t feel comfortable stepping on their toes. So instead I was planning to cover Gravity Falls with Dipper vs Dib. If you remember my last retrospective, I did mention quickly shuffling Rorschach vs V as a last minute replacement because I found out a match I was doing was going to be covered by someone else? Yeah, that was going to be Dipper vs Dib, but then I learned someone was gonna make it, and so I had to quickly cancel it as well. Then Dipper vs Dib actually got released, which showed quite a few bits of scaling I wanted to cover my thoughts on. And after I looked through the Book of Bill, I thought there were enough new details that it was worth covering this match myself.
This is the first time I’ve covered a match that another blog did previously, and that definitely felt a bit weird, even if most people were less familiar with this preexisting one. I did make an effort to stick mainly to my own research and only went back to it when I was mostly done to make sure I didn’t miss any topics it brought up. The big arguments for Reagan winning were mainly based on her having a massive stat edge, which didn’t actually line up with scrutiny. The big strength feat was Brett’s storm, which used the generic value for making a storm, but after looking into things I realized it was not nearly as impressive when actually getting assigned numbers, on top of being questionably applicable. And her speed edge was negated by FTL Gravity Falls being more supported. I’ve also heard that the higher feat for her is inflated, but at the time speed calcs felt like magic to me so I had no idea on that.
Anyways, going over these two was fairly easy. As mentioned I already did a lot of the research for Stanford myself, it was just a matter of getting new links and adding some new topics. Some of this was just obligatory discussion since Gravity Falls is a fairly talked about series, including finally recalcing the Gideon explosion feat. Though I was glad to get proper discussion on feats like the coloring book explosion and scaling to Bill in speed, as both were arguments I’ve seen without much discussion on them in the blogs. Reagan was also pretty easy to go over, as she has a much shorter show and also has a fairly in depth VS Wiki page, so I only had to add a couple clips myself.
The big issue with this blog is that I don’t think it accurately shows that town level Inside Job is not really that good in my opinion. The storm feat isn’t really valid as a storm creation feat as I went over, and the moon worm scaling is vague to the point I basically had to make up all the details of it. I mainly included them just for the sake of the argument, since even with them I think Stanford has a better argument for winning since he’s not drastically far behind in stats and has plenty of good arguments even under equal stats. I also wanted to just give numbers to the moon worms since I’ve heard them brought up as a feat a lot, and I do not expect Inside Job to get another blog considering this is the one big match I’ve seen for the series. But hey, maybe if somehow the series miraculously gets revived, someone else might take another stab at them.
I mentioned before that I wasn’t a huge fan of how I handled Scott Pilgrim in hindsight, leading to me wanting to reexamine the series now that I have more skill in actually discussing VS stuff. While initially I thought about doing an update for Scott vs Travis, I decided that it would be a bit more fruitful to try and cover a new match. Ramona immediately seemed like a good choice, as not only does she tend to get a little overshadowed when it comes to potential DB matches due to already being on the show, her being the star of Takes Off meant it would be fitting for a match with her to be the one to mainly discuss how it adds things to Scott Pilgrim scaling.
And yeah, relooking into Scott Pilgrim was pretty fun. Not to toot my own horn or anything, but I feel this more than any other of my blogs shows pretty clearly how far I’ve come, as I was able to look through a lot of arguments for the Scott Pilgrim series in a new light, especially a couple that I was a bit bad at discussing before. I especially am proud of the discussion on Seconds, as I feel this was an argument that I failed to properly break down before and I’ve seen treated as legit by people without much question due to what I feel was misinformation from it being a more obscure work, so I was glad to finally put an end to that. And this has been a stance on stats I’ve seen most people agree with, though with the new game coming out next year I know there’s going to inevitably lead to another mass reexamination soon enough.
Ramona’s opponent being Wyldstyle was a bit more of an odd pick. Going in, I knew immediately that Ramona would be the best character relook at the series while covering, but I wasn’t sure on who exactly for her to fight. After looking through her spread, I settled on Wyldstyle more out of a want to talk about Lego Movie stats, not as much for the match itself. I was initially worried that it would turn into a blog more discussing Scott Pilgrim stuff, but I’m glad there was still a lot of stuff to go over for the Lego Movie, and I do feel everything there will likely stay as it stands for the future considering the Movie continuity seems to be done and over.
Disney Twist Villain Battle Royale
While Chibi vs Olimar took a decent amount of time to work on, I ended up thinking of what to do for my April Fools’ blog. I cycled through a couple ideas, but I ended up landing on this after doing some preliminary research and finding there’s a lot more stuff to go over than most would expect. I actually got so hyper fixated on the idea that I managed to write up everything about a week after I decided to cover it, which was also about a month in advance. So that was neat.
As someone who generally is a bit more positive to these films than the rest of the internet tends to be, it was neat to revisit them and go through a lot of the side media that I know plenty people would never know about. Like I had heard about the Frozen Heart novel and did enjoy reading it, but I was surprised to find out about the Big Hero 6 manga which I think is pretty good. And while it was a pretty clear cut win, I'm glad Hans had enough to talk about to make the conclusion at least a little complicated.
Then there was Bellweather. Even going in I was kinda aware she'd end up becoming the Volnutt of the match but it was still kinda surprising and funny that the talking animal was from the more grounded world than the two humans. For the record I did make an effort to look into Zootopia extended media to see if there was something hiding somewhere, but sadly the police procedural series was not hiding a secret cosmology buster. I do want to cover a match actually for Zootopia at some point, as Nick & Judy seem like they’d be fun to discuss, but I do not have any idea of matches that would be fair and fitting.
This was a blog that I initially picked for the uniqueness factor, as the idea of covering two characters who are very small and therefore lacked a lot of high scaling seemed pretty interesting. Olimar was surprisingly pretty simple to go over since Pikmin has had a lot of coverage, though I still had to go over some parts myself. Particularly the online manga, which I legitimately had never heard anyone talk about until I did some digging. And working on this did get me addicted to Pikmin Bloom, so that was neat.
Chibi-Robo, though, had kinda flown under the radar before I went into it, so this was the first series in a while where I had to basically do a full series breakdown. And I'm glad I did, since not only are the games pretty charming, but I think there's a lot of stuff people weren't that aware of going in. It was also a pretty funny blog to work, not only due to there being plenty of normally impressive feats that got neutered due to their sizes, but this having a few of my favorite BTV joke images. The only thing I'm not sure about in hindsight is that I feel like the conclusion could have gone a bit more in depth, but it's not like I'm ignoring anything significant, so I'd say it's a good blog in hindsight.
This was a match I was excited to do for a while. Oersted vs Garland was always the popular Live A Live match, but this had been the second most popular idea for the game for a while. And while Earthbound had gotten plenty of coverage thanks to blogs on Ness and the villains. Mother 3 was an overall pretty underdiscussed series since scaling from it was more of a footnote to the characters who had been covered. Add that to the fact the cosmic ends for both series were not applicable to these two, and that meant this gave me the chance to actually focus on the lower tier feats.
This was a pretty fun blog to go over, and it’s probably the most even blog I’ve done in a while since they’re shockingly close in stats. It’s also the first time in a while that either series had gotten new feats to bring up, especially with potential buffs for both that I’d be excited to see covered if someone else were to take a stab at scaling them. I think this was a good capper for my original blogs, and at the time I was excited to hopefully move into a new era.
Then the next blog took 3 months.
…yeah this was definitely a rough transition. And I didn’t really expect it to be, since Invincible and Marvel are both very commonly talked about series. But I will say in hindsight I was not very good at figuring out how to run blogs at first. I’m kind of a passive person generally, and at the time I was in the middle of moving into a new apartment, so I do think a lot of it was more just a victim of circumstance. But even then, since the blog does not feel like one that needed to take several months to make, and I’m willing to say that was more my fault for not properly guiding things. Something I’m still trying to adapt to.
In regards to the blog itself, yeah it’s alright. Both aren’t characters who have a whole lot to go over, but I do think it’s a pretty in depth look. Especially since I believe it’s a first in terms of covering a lower tier for Invincible and trying to pull a soft composite for a Marvel character. I was surprised the debate ended up being close and even a straight up dead heat in terms of votes, where I saved my vote until I posted it as the tiebreaker.I would personally still say Angstrom wins just because “hitting Spot once” seems like a more solid wincon, but I can see the case for Spot winning well enough that I get why a lot of people lean to him. I surprisingly don’t have a whole lot to say, it’s just an alright blog that took too long.
(Yes I know this technically came out before Angstrom vs Spot but if I put this spot before I couldn’t make that joke during the transition, shush.)
A weirder blog I made was this. As mentioned in it, I am kind of the cohost of a show Zab makes, and he was planning to make an episode featuring his main OC to help celebrate an anniversary. So I pitched doing this as a side thing as a way to try and research him in full. It was interesting to go through a lot of this content, and it was a bit nostalgic to go through a lot of Lawls and get a bunch of feats together from them. This kinda went under the radar since it is far from my usual wheelhouse, but I did it for me.
So that leaves us with this. I mentioned in my last retrospective that Yakuza has become a series I was previously burnt out on in no small part due to scaling for the series getting very polarizing, and I knew it getting covered again by me would be a big deal. So when I ended up getting reinterested in the series due to skipping to Y7, I knew I had to go for broke with the blog and make it as definitive s lolk at the series as i could. A match on Kiryu of course offered the best way to do that, as due to being the main series lead a lot of the big arguments would have to get discussed if I were to talk about him. And of his matches I felt Snake would be the most interesting, as the two series have a lot of overlap in terms of scale and Metal Gear had also gotten a wide amount of arguments I felt I didn't really go over during Liquid vs Zeke
I actually started going through a lot of stuff before I fully opened the blog up to people on my own, which was mainly on the Yakuza side, since after reacquainting myself with the big scaling arguments I had a lot I wanted to say on them. When it was opened it up I git a smaller team, who were mainly focused on the Metal Gear side of things and brought up a lot of stuff I wasn't even aware of. It pretty quickly became clear it would be giving both series the Ryu vs Kenshiro treatment and debunking a lot of stuff, so we were bet our coming in how it might be relieved.
It was a pleasant surprise to me that I haven't seen much pushback that wasn't polite disagreement, though that could just be because I've not been willing to go to places like the ODBD. Ive even seen a few cases if people being actively convinced by my debunks, which was very gratifying. And I can say the final product is probably the blog that I'm the most proud of, at least recently. Both of these series are ones I always enjoy looking into, with Kiryu being one of my favorite characters ever, and I'm glad I was able to do them justice. The only thing I don't like is that Blogger being uncooperative led to some formatting issues I have no idea how to fix, but beyond that I'm glad the last blog of the year from me was a great one.
Though I didn't just make my own blogs. I helped with a couple other blogs during this year as well, and since this a bit shorter and I’ve seen some people also include that in these, I may as well talk about my experience with them too.
Dr Manhattan vs Nixonverse (Saul)
Me being on this blog might be a bit surprising if you know me, given I tend to steer away from fights that get way too cosmic, especially ones involving comics. But a side effect of me going over Watchmen for Rorschach vs V was giving me a lot more appreciation for Dr Manhattan as a character. So I was down to discuss him in this, and I helped with a lot of the Watchmen related research here. It was a surprisingly smooth turnaround, though I was definitely more in the background with this, focusing more on abilities and bit feats with the big points of research being handled by others. I was also the one who wrote up most of the points for not using Doomsday Clock, and I’m glad that part was received well considering how some people get pretty upset about not including stuff when it’s technically canon. I also helped with some of the visuals on Manhattan’s side, and I think it all worked out to a blog that did this weirdass match justice.
Adam Smasher vs Frank Horrigan (Saul)
Then, of course, there was this. I’ve mentioned in the past that I am a big Fallout fan, but I also don’t really like talking about it with VS because there’s a lot of bullshit. So I was somewhat hesitant to join it, but considering how few Fallout matches there are, I thought I could toss my hat in the ring with this. It initially was alright, as I was able to get through a lot of the Fallout tabletop game books, which let me quickly note a lot of stuff no one had mentioned. It also gave me a chance to really break down the issues with nuke scaling in a way that felt concise, and I do think it’s a good indication of my main issue with the idea. Everything seemed to be progressing just fine.
Then things stalled out. For several months. I will be transparent and say I was one of the people who didn’t do things, but that was around when I was really trying to focus on getting a job and it kind of fell to the wayside. But things definitely took far longer than it needed to, and I get why it ended up becoming so dreaded for people who worked on it. In hindsight I also probably would disagree with voting for Adam, but that's mainly because I didn't actually read the Frank verdict until it was posted because of stuff in the background I'm not disclosing.
Ultron Sigma vs Dark Kahn (Round 1 Fights)
Speaking of blogs which had some delays, there’s this. Originally I got invited onto the blog because I had it reserved and R1 wanted to do it, so I let him do it. In hindsight, I definitely didn’t really need to be on it, as this was more a blog I picked up for the uniqueness rather than there being any actual investment in the match itself. So I decided to be the main guy that researched Injustice, which gave me first hand experience on all of that universe’s story beats and now I fully understand why most comic fans hate this. A lot of the Injustice related details outside of the final verdict were written by me, and I was actually able to somewhat buff the series to the point of it not just being planet level from a non-standard form. I even did a significant amount of the new calcs for the series, and was the one who brought in He-Man stuff after realizing there was a good argument for it being canon to Injustice.
After that, though, I kinda stayed in the background while the rest of it progressed. And that led to me seeing firsthand a lot of the bullshit that comes from Mortal Kombat scaling which I was more passively aware of beforehand. I would have commented a bit more on it at this point, but after I did what I was supposed to I really didn’t feel equipped to jump into trying to scale any of the other series involved. That also kinda meant for a while I wasn’t doing much besides just seeing the arguing over whether or not higher tier MK made sense, which kinda quickly killed what little investment I had. I voted for Ultron Sigma and I would still agree with him winning, as from my understanding you need to be a lot more lenient with Dark Kahn for him to win.
Closing Thoughts
So yeah. Not as long as last time since I’m not playing catch up for an entire extra half a year or going through twice the content, but I hope this was still interesting. Gadget vs Darkwing should be out sometime by the end of the month hopefully, which will give a better look at the next matches we’ll be going through this year. I hope I can keep up the momentum, and hope everyone had a good holiday. All that said, have a good day.
