Yeah, Death Battle is still shit.
I will say in their defense that after another watch of Cell vs Metal Sonic that I do like the episode more than I liked it yesterday. I forsee that episode as being a reverse BowsEgg where I enjoy the episode the more I see it. Especially when the minor details in Cell vs Metal Sonic are great or at least excusable instead of being confusing, baffling or irritating as they were in BowsEgg and Cell didn't get disrespected as a character and needlessly downplayed in scaling like Eggman did.
Hell it says a decent bit about the episode that despite me liking Metal Sonic more my favorite moment of the fight actually belongs to Cell when he walked through that fire and said "Fool. You're dealing with the ultimate lifeform" as you could see his earlier forms in the flames.
Still after Bowser vs Eggman I don't trust them at all to not do weird stuff in Mario vs Sonic 3. If they do the same things as Bowser vs Eggman I would expect them to do the following. And also I'd expect everyone in the general audience to worship the episode like it's the greatest thing since sliced bread solely because the animation quality and music will be peak enough for people to not see anything wrong just like Bowser vs Eggman.
- Give Mario noticeably more hype than Sonic in their analysis for no apparent reason.
They went crazy for Bowser in his episode and I loved that in a vacuum but then for Eggman they were so weirdly tame instead of also hyping him up too. The most Eggman got from them was Boomstick saying "Okay he's kind of cool." like they were already bored of talking about him and then compared to Bowser they were so straight to the point when discussing his abilities. With Bowser when they talked about the Wonder Flower it was "It can mold reality like playdough" which is descriptive and interesting but with the Phantom Ruby it was "I don't know how illusions translate to creating clones or summoning a sun but sure" which is almost dismissive by comparison. Which is really strange because they could have saved that energy for the conclusion when explaining why Bowser wins, but no, they just seemed disinterested in Eggman when they could have at least given creative descriptions to his stuff like "The Time Eater can rupture spacetime itself at [insert speed feat]." or "With the Phantom Ruby the good doctor can impose his desired version of reality on a target." and so on. On the bright side they at least hit the emotional beats of his story but that's kind of it and that doesn't help much when they also hit the emotional beats in Bowser’s run down as well and hitting those beats is the bare minimum that should be expected of a character run down.
- Repetitive combat flow that also favors Mario every time.
In Bowser vs Eggman there were points where the interactions were good in isolation. For example as spiteful as it was Infinite vs King Boo was an interesting interaction of abilities. But at the end of the day the whole fight boiled down to "Team Eggman does something. Team Bowser counters it. Repeat until Eggman dies" so I'd expect much the same of Mario vs Sonic 3 where the whole battle is Mario countering Sonic's every move until he wins while Sonic never changes his approach and just escalates forms in the hope he can do something.
- Sonic's best attributes are absent from the animation, only get mentioned in his character run down and are hardly touched on in the conclusion.
In Bowser vs Eggman, Death Battle said alot that Eggman is intelligent but Eggman does absolutely nothing that stands out as cunning in the fight and the absolute best strategic decisions he makes like sending a decoy in his place initially are things that anyone with a brain would also do let alone a supergenius. Besides that his "plans" boil down to "Just hit Bowser harder with the next thing in my arsenal one at a time and hope it works." all while he did things that are actually straight up stupid due to bad writing. Like shouting at Sage to
fire it again while he is standing directly in the blast zone instead of attempting to call Sage to defend him (she can teleport to him and is the only one in perfect condition by that point in the animation, she even teleports on screen to reach the Death Egg to begin with) or attempt escape with his jetpack first, he's never established to have any comms device so he shouted at Sage when she was in
outer space and expected her to hear him for some reason, the Egg Fleet just sits in the sky like useless bricks the whole fight so while the meta reason they did that is just DB wanted them to make a cool entrance and look nice when Bowser blew them up in the context of the animation Eggman is just stupid enough to forget he has an enormous fleet sitting there and doing nothing and he also has absolutely no reaction to Fury Bowser overpowering the Death Egg Robot. He doesn't even call Sage or Metal Sonic or the Egg Fleet to help deal with him he just politely waits to get murdered that or he somehow never realized he was at a disadvantage and did nothing about it.
So expect for Mario vs Sonic for Sonic's speed and skill to be mentioned only for Mario to have no problem reacting to Sonic the whole animation while Sonic never does anything skillful at all but maybe brags about being more skilled while also doing nothing to show it.
- A post fight scene of Tails signing up to be Mario's sidekick after Sonic dies.
During Bowser vs Eggman both Orbot and Cubot were portrayed as loyal to Eggman, they participated in the fight directly and they were the only one's in Eggman's army who didn't run away when the Death Egg was about to be fired. Which could have been emotionally powerful (god I would have loved that in a vacuum) but then Death Battle walks it back 30 seconds later in a post-fight bit where Orbot and Cubot were eager to join the Koopa Troop right after Eggman's death like Death Battle couldn't make up their damm minds on how Orbot and Cubot should be portrayed and decided to contradict their own portrayal of them...
for joke please laugh. Also while Sage with the "plotting" speech bubble is implied to be upset about Eggman's death she doesn't visibly look the least bit bothered to be joining the group that killed her father so DB having Tails sign up to be Mario's sidekick after Sonic dies shouldn't be off limits to them
because funny . And also I just know that if Eggman won the episode that there is no universe where they would have pulled that crap with Bowser Junior but they did it with Orbot, Cubot and Sage because they had a shoehorned narrative to support. Speaking of.
- A shoehorned in pseudo narrative about how Mario is the "ideal hero" while Sonic is flawed that also somehow makes Mario win a whole category in the analysis. Perhaps a
STRATEGY category that I actually agree with Mario winning because of generally better power ups and more experience but they give it to Mario because they claim Sonic is cocky and arrogant so surely Mario is the better strategist by default, you know instead of making an actually interesting or respectful argument.
In Bowser vs Eggman this is obviously the Bowser is the better boss narrative that they went for. And yes I agree that Bowser is the better boss than Eggman and the less evil villain. But they bashed that in so excessively and exaggerated it so shamelessly (Eggman can't even work with himself while conveniently ignoring that Bowser and Paper Bowser literally had the same issue) that it annoys me. Especially when they claimed that team loyalty somehow is enough to win the
ARMY category by default even though Eggman's whole army is loyal by design, Infinite required special circumstances to betray him, Metal Sonic is currently such a die hard loyalist that he was planning to conquer the world just to hand it over to Eggman and Sage would literally die for Eggman while she just so happens to control his whole army. But sure Death Battle the Koopa Troop wins on team loyalty. And it's also wild that they didn't even argue anything interesting with it like maybe the Koopa Troop could recharge the Pure Hearts or resist the Sonic Colours mind the control canon because of their devotion but no instead it was just "loyal army gg" because casuals would be emotionally gaslit into eating it up.
- Saying the fight is close while portraying it as a stomp even though Mario vs Sonic is a legitimately close debate that can go either way without downplaying either of them into the dirt.
I think it's self explanatory how Bowser vs Eggman did this so I won't elaborate. I will just say that there were practically infinite ways they could portray the fight as interesting but still in favor of Bowser but they went for none of them because they only wanted the appeal of a close match up with the certainty of a stomp, likely because I'd be asking too much of their "masterpiece" episode to have an interesting conclusion that actually makes me see the fight in a different light.
There's more but that mostly covers it, I don't want to write an essay lol even if blasting Bowser vs Eggman is a cathartic pass time because of how much I regret ever being excited for that episode.
