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Katanagatari Discussion Thread

I finally get why this is so fun. Always felt like the series had some sort of haze as things were going off mostly the anime, so seeing Agnaa's findings as he gets into the source is mighty amusing.

Seriously, the source material in VNs and LNs is like a treasure trove.
 
Alright so I've just finished Katanagatari.

To Hl3's dismay, there's nothing about the perfected deviant blade having the abilities of all other deviant blades. Beyond that, there's nothing about Shichika becoming "perfected" at that point in the story - the entire art of Kyotoryu itself was the perfected deviant blade. There appears to be no buff to his stats, nor additional abilities.
  • Destroying Zetto the Leveler was possible by all Kyotoryu practitioners. Shichika merely failed it the first time since he had zero battle experience. That technique was actually developed by Kazune Yasuri and Shikizaki Kiki specifically to destroy Zetto the Leveler.
  • There was no indication of regeneration.
  • He didn't produce bladed winds or powerful shockwaves.
  • He could probably just see Zanto this time. The practitioner stated a speed that was far below the one Ginkaku had (saying that with bloodlust its speed was merely Supersonic, while Ginkaku when swinging with bloodlust hit lightspeed).
  • He did replicate Nanami's moves, but he was also told about them. The immortality/regen nullification would be in a similar vein of not necessarily only being possible at the 12th episode.
  • He didn't end up resisting durability negation.
It's getting somewhat late here, and there's a lot of work ahead of me, but I've finally read everything and can get to work on revising it all. A lot of things will be removed, and a lot of things will be added. Speaking overall, I expect Shichika to be mainly downgraded, while other characters are mainly upgraded. A lot of the stuff that was inferred about Shichika isn't present in the novels, while many other characters had a lot of elaboration to their abilities.

I'll try to keep y'all updated as I work through it all. Feel free to leave my any questions, or requests for parts of the novels that you'd like to read yourselves.

EDIT: Also, on top of those revisions, I'm expecting to add many more profiles! Up to 14 character profiles, and maybe some weapon profiles for the Deviant Blades. I'm even considering jumping the gun and adding some of those Kyotou Yasuri character profiles before revising the verse.
 
Some AP things:
  • Shichika's last Cheerio! Wasn't said to have done damage to the castle or surrounding area.
  • While there wasn't a shown feat around Shichika and Hakuhei's duel on Ganryu Island, there is a statement at the very end of the novels that it shrank to less than half its size as a result of their duel. I'm not sure if this can be given anything more than a "possibly far higher" as it was talking about the state it was in afterwards, rather than the effect of any single attack.
  • I'm a little bit unsure about Komori's 9-B feat. It is a wooden hut after all, and it was sent flying rather than fully fragmented. I'd like to get it calculated somehow.
 
I'll dig around for one and get back to you.
 
Not sure how viable it may be, I admit, but if it was done over a known timeframe, I remember there being calcs for "average level of destruction" to reach an end result in a certain amount of time.

Right now what comes to mind is Dargoo's stormliight archives' calc where he calcs AP off a hole dug by one of the characters.

Edit: Oh wait, here it is.
 
Blech, timeframe's completely unknown. Book four starts at an unknown time in April, and they still need to make preparations to head out to Ganryu Island. And the book ends at close to the end of April, with Shichika and Togame talking about the fight after landing back on the mainland, before they continue walking onwards, so they presumably didn't get back to the mainland at night, but that's about all we have.

Other descriptions of the fight only mention how one-sided against Shichika it was and how strong Hakuhei was. With Nanami and Hakuhei being seen by everyone as obviously far above the other deviant blade wielders, purely by strength alone.
 
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Ahh yeah, I just noticed how small it is.

But it looks like it'd still get around 9-B/9-A if done over the entire month of April (a fairly big lowball).
 
Every day I curse myself for not remembering the circumstance where the anime visuals were used for clarification on the AP of something unclear in the original source.
 
I mean we are allowed to do that, just not when the scene's like missing entirely from the novel, afaik.
 
Yes but the scene of the island battle and the halving of the island did happen, we just didn't get the visual so we can't judge it with the novel alone. Meanwhile the anime shows a glimpse of it and clarifies that the destruction was caused in a single attack.

However, it's likely a question to ask the community in the eventual CRT
 
I guess so.

Should I even bother calculating/posting the extremely low-balled 9-B to 8-C versions then?
 
4je5c2.jpg
 
Hell yeah.
 
There seemed to be a line where it said Kokken was the strongest in history up until that point, so her being above Zanki seems reasonable.

So Head, Mutsue, and Zanki are comparable, with Nanami and Kokken above that.
 
Reading the bit with Zanki, I can see him being way harder to deal with than Kokken, considering his main thing appears to be guilting his opponents into not fighting.
 
I mean, Kokken was said to be the strongest swordsman in history when she was introduced. She then got rekt by Nanami, disarmed by Meisai, compared as equal to Head (and by extension Right Arm) who are both ninjas, and Zanki.

The only swordsman who I'd expect to get counted there is Zanki, since Nanami wasn't really counted as the strongest swordsman in the main story despite being way stronger than Shichika, and Head/Right Arm are both ninjas. The stronger than Zanki implication is weird, but I honestly had chalked that down to just being hearsay.

Reading the bit with Zanki, I can see him being way harder to deal with than Kokken, considering his main thing appears to be guilting his opponents into not fighting.


Maybe we read the fight wrong, but Zanki driving Mutsue away didn't feel like guilt, but more like intimidation to me. With Mutsue taking such a wide path around Zanki despite Zanki saying he'd stand in the same spot.
 
I doubt that, because Zanki outright stated that he had no intention of harming Mutsue beyond simply deflecting their strikes, something Mutsue believed. My best guess is that Mutsue wanted to avoid any possibility of encountering Zanki again at all, because it would cause another huge delay.
 
Sure yeah that's what I was trying to say. Not so much "guilting the opponents into not fighting" since that sounds like they'd feel bad for Zanki. When I think it's more like they don't want to fight Zanki because Zanki can just stall indefinitely.
 
What I meant by guilting the opponent is the whole "you're trying to kill a pacifistic 90 y/o man who literally has no intention of actually hurting you regardless of what you do" thing. While it's unlikely that alone did much to Mutsue, that combined with the fact they can't get through Zanki easily was probably an extremely strange feeling.
 
If we're okay with Mutsue downscaling somewhat from Kokken Sabi, and we say that Mutsue was far weaker when Shichika killed him, AND we say that Right Arm = Houou, then the keys will go something like:

10-A/9-C/9-B | 9-A+/8-B | 7-C, possibly High 6-C

Start Of Series | Book 4 Onward | End Of Series

If we don't have Mutsue (and Head/Right Arm) scaling to Kokken Sabi, then start of series Shichika scaling to Mutsue's other feats seems much less outlandish. And we could use his concrete 9-B feats to do:

9-B | 9-A+/8-B

Start Of Series | Book 4 Onward

Speed-wise everyone's Supersonic+, except for Ginkaku's attack speed with Zantou Gari, and Pengin's max attack speed with Juukyuu (both reach SoL).

Note 1: Not sure whether first key will be 10-A, 9-C, or 9-B, Shichika would have died to Komori's attack if he didn't block his vital organs perfectly and minimize the area he got hit, he only actually got hit by 4 shuriken/kunai when the blast that blew off the hut's wall was 45 shuriken/kunai, and that feat may not even be 9-B in the first place, certainly doesn't look like it from the anime visuals.

9-C seems likely but a lot of the prospective feats I was looking for are gone for that, I might need to go on another calcing spree. 10-A is worst case if nothing better's found.

Note 2: Not sure whether second key will be 9-A+ or 8-B, our choice will be based on canon concerns about the anime. As 8-B came from anime visuals at a time where nothing along those lines was described in the novels, at the end of the novels there was a vague statement about half of the island disappearing (which is where the 9-A+ lowball comes from). We'll have to choose between one of these.
 
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So Earl weighed in and thinks that Mutsue should downscale from Kokken's feats while still being in the same tier, with the loss against Zanki and the win against Head coming down to them having different battle tactics with different effectiveness against 6 Mutsues.

But he also thinks that the Houou = Right Arm stuff is too much of a stretch to scale/put on profiles beyond a note.

So Kyotou Yasuri characters will all get 7-C, possibly High 6-C while the top main series characters will just scale to 9-A+/8-B.
 
I'm a bit iffy on Kokken since I got the impression that in an actual heated one-on-"one", Kokken would've destroyed Mutsue, and her power was treated as something phenomenal, which would be odd to do if there's three (8?) other people that are comparable.

I mean, Right Arm never had much combat anyway, and he probably got stronger by the time of the series itself so either way works for me. Once I read the main series I'll have more input there but we can always discuss that later.
 
I'm working on Kokken Sabi's profile and I'm wondering if there's some way that her feats could still scale to some of the main Katanagatari profiles.

There's a statement that she's considered the equal of the Shogunate's eleven personal guards combined. Could we downscale them individually from her, then scale those personal guards to the ones we see in episode 12, then scale those ones to Shichika/Emonzaemon/etc.?
 
That sounds promising. In the anime there was a line that somewhat implied that Mutsue was stronger than each one individually. Not sure about the LN though.
 
Also in case it was still a question, the thread where the anime visuals were used as clarification for AP calc'ing was about the Nasuverse, using the anime visuals to calculate certain Noble Phantasms based on cloud dispersion and beam size and such
 
Where was that line in the anime? I could try seeing if there's something like it in the novels.

I'm generally fine with using anime visuals to clarify calcs, there's many other verses I'm familiar with that do that. It's just that with the Hakuhei Sabi one the feat doesn't take place there during the novels and isn't described similarly enough to the anime, imo. But we can save that for the thread.
 
Also, here's a link to an updated version of Vertical's LN translations. Stuff like making TL notes clickable, and changing dubious localizations. If you or anyone else in the thread wants to check through the LNs yourselves. Only the first 9 episodes were included in this, so I'll try finding the last 3.
 
Oh sorry, looks like my friend's link expired. I've re-uploaded it myself here.

I had a look through the LN and I found a statement that Emonzaemon wouldn't be able to take on the Shogunate's Eleven Guardians (together) himself, and a statement that they weren't even remotely weak but that Shichika was too strong for them. Were those the statements you were thinking of?
 
Hmm, I didn't note that down. If you could give me the timestamp that'd help me a lot with tracking it down.
 
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