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Okay, I feel like this is a discussion that should've been done a long time ago, but we need to discuss and put some really solid facts about Baki. I thought about making this into a CRT, but this isn't really a CRT, just stablishing some rules for a future CRT.
Baki has went through a cycle of revisions that, in retrospective, have been mostly the same cycle of upgrades, downgrades and some circular reasoning, and I don't exhempt myself from this, I should've been not only more cautious but more participative about things. First and foremost, I think that I need to apologize to @LordGinSama as I feel I've been unfair to him a few times, particularly on the Yujiro downgrade to 8-A, particularly after re-reading Baki. While I still think that 7-C/maaaybe 7-B Yujiro has some basis, now I recognize that it isn't nearly as solid as I thought it before. And the reason is the same for many revisions in Baki: Cherrypicking information, for the good and for the bad of whoever made said revision.
So, we need to talk about a few issues in Baki, which are way more important than scaling. We can do all the scaling we want, but only after we solve a few problems. And by solve, I don't mean a majority arguing for something, the minority standing down because they are the least-heard voice, the decision being pushed as official, and a few months or weeks later, after nobody cares about it anymore, the minority turn up again and bring back Baki to how it was before. I will try to be as honest as possible and cover as much bases as I can before arguing for anything, for both things that I personally approve and for those that I don't, because I feel like honesty and cautious adhering to the canon of Baki; not theory (even if well-supported), but first and foremost the facts.
Why I say that? Because:
Am I saying that we should always consider the characters untrustorthy? No. Far from it, many of them give valuable input, and they are correct many times as well. It is just that you should never, by a rule, use a character's statement for a basis on any argument. Which ties to my second point.
Now, I will be the first to say that there is often a kernel of truth on whatever they say, and often they have a good reason to believe so, but they often (quite realisticaly in fact) exaggerate the prowess of any given thing. Some examples to illustrate my point:
So, this is a concept that seems very simple to me, because I honestly analyse that kind of thing from a different perspective from a VS-centric POV, but I get why it is a problem to the VS community as a hard, specific rating is preferred in place of a plastic definition.
What I am going by this is that Baki simply isn't a consistent series. I know, shocking, most of fiction isn't, but Baki isn't in a very particular way that divides the base in basically two camps: People who take the highest shown feats that are not contradicted, with lower showings being either justified as narrative and plot devices, or sheer contradictions, and people who believe more on the lower, consistent ratings, with the higher ones being just Itagakismoking crack not really realizing that the feats he is putting on the page are entirely different from the stuff characters usually do, with the odd one out that selects solely the absolute lowest showings and absolute highest showings and deride everyone else for it, but I digress.
What we need to do is to recognize that both kinds of rationales have their valid justifications, and that there is no way to cut it: Both kinds of feat happen, and we need to deal them.
This isn't about characters with Tier 7 feats doing mostly Tier 9 to 8 feats on their day-to-day life. That isn't a problem. Doing higher feats do not forbid you from doing lower ones, particularly if you have enough control over your own power to control the amount of damage you do to the environment. This is about Baki characters that on any given page may have different standards for power. A few examples to illustrate my point:
I'll tackle the Yujiro/Nuke comparison later as I am bit busy at the moment, but this is a good start.
Baki has went through a cycle of revisions that, in retrospective, have been mostly the same cycle of upgrades, downgrades and some circular reasoning, and I don't exhempt myself from this, I should've been not only more cautious but more participative about things. First and foremost, I think that I need to apologize to @LordGinSama as I feel I've been unfair to him a few times, particularly on the Yujiro downgrade to 8-A, particularly after re-reading Baki. While I still think that 7-C/maaaybe 7-B Yujiro has some basis, now I recognize that it isn't nearly as solid as I thought it before. And the reason is the same for many revisions in Baki: Cherrypicking information, for the good and for the bad of whoever made said revision.
So, we need to talk about a few issues in Baki, which are way more important than scaling. We can do all the scaling we want, but only after we solve a few problems. And by solve, I don't mean a majority arguing for something, the minority standing down because they are the least-heard voice, the decision being pushed as official, and a few months or weeks later, after nobody cares about it anymore, the minority turn up again and bring back Baki to how it was before. I will try to be as honest as possible and cover as much bases as I can before arguing for anything, for both things that I personally approve and for those that I don't, because I feel like honesty and cautious adhering to the canon of Baki; not theory (even if well-supported), but first and foremost the facts.
1. Characters are wrong
First fact that we need to tackle: In Baki, characters are frequently wrong about what they believe. I don't think any of them consciously lie in the series, but many are either overconfident, misinformed or were just wrong in their guesses. Sometimes they were correct in the past, are not anymore, but still believe that things are as in the past. This is an important thing to recognize, because I see too many arguments that depend heavily on the statements of characters, such as saying that "I am stronger than X", or that he is "powerful like an army", or whatever. We should not do that. Our main arguments should be based around a combination of factors, of which hard evidence should be first and foremost; character statements are a distant second.Why I say that? Because:
- Gaia was described, many times, as being a better tactician than Yujiro, and at the time of his introduction, that he was as dangerous as Yujiro. That is wrong. He may be a better tactician or at least more willing to fight tactically than Yujiro, but for all his build-up as being as dangerous as Yujiro, he was easily wrecked by Yujiro, as shown before Baki and Yujiro's first fight with each other.
- Oliva was built up as an equal or at least close to Yujiro in some way or another. Yujiro clearly respected him in some measure, they seemed to stand in similar ground during the Vietnam War, Strydum believed that Baki, after beating Oliva in raw strength, was the biggest threat to Yujiro. That is wrong. Not only did Yujiro immediately shoot down Strydum for daring to compare him to Oliva, but he actively one-shot Oliva later on while holding himself back and using padded gloves. Yujiro also performed far better against people that Oliva couldn't deal with, such as Musashi and Sukune. Worse; this is something that Baki and Strydum himself had foreshadowed since the BEGINNING of Baki the Grappler: Yujiro grows continuously stronger, quite fast actually, by the day, and that the Yujiro that anyone had fought in the past is an entirely different beast from what he is on the present.
- Doppo, Gouki and many others believed that Ali Jr. would beat Baki after having given him the incentive to do so. They were wrong, Baki easily beat Ali Jr. up.
- A lot of people say that Yujiro wouldn't use a character's techniques, as he feels that is disrespectful to them. Yujiro did say that during his fight with Kaku, but he is either lying or, what I find more likely, trolling. In fact, I honestly don't know how people read that and missed how, just a few chapters ago, Yujiro incentived Baki to copy an opponent's techniques and use them against themselves just to "piss them off", and how, on the VERY BEGINNING of Grappler Baki, he said the same to Baki. Heck, the entire Baki V.S. Jack fight showed both Baki and Jack using the techniques of other contestants to fight. What does happen is that Yujiro uses the techniques that he copied, but he usually prefers to resort to his own brand of pure violence and skill, only using them as a mere option among many of taking a specific technique or to just, as he so eloquently says, piss his enemies off.
Am I saying that we should always consider the characters untrustorthy? No. Far from it, many of them give valuable input, and they are correct many times as well. It is just that you should never, by a rule, use a character's statement for a basis on any argument. Which ties to my second point.
2. Exaggerations
Baki characters exaggerate - a lot.Now, I will be the first to say that there is often a kernel of truth on whatever they say, and often they have a good reason to believe so, but they often (quite realisticaly in fact) exaggerate the prowess of any given thing. Some examples to illustrate my point:
- Doppo said, after Kasumi's introduction in Grappler Baki, that bullets and arrows wouldn't be able to do anything to him. No matter if you take that as a durability or speed feat, that isn't entirely true: As for durability, we have explicit evidence from characters who are stronger than he is in raw strength/durability, such as Hanayama, that were clearly perforated by bullets and affected by it. (Hanayama V.S. Spec 2) As a speed feat, not only was the Mach punch at the time, which was just a bit above the speed of sound in speed, treated as utterly undodgeable (in fact, in the profiles I've seen that people say of characters dodging the Mach punch, but I've never seen that before) and, heck, in general, characters in early NGB, who are considerably stronger than in Maximum Tournament, struggle to dodge bullets. However, there is a kernel of truth: Kasumi, due to a combination of sheer speed, durability and willpower, could likely tank a few bullets and arrows and reach whoever was trying to shoot him. That is consistent.
- Baki states that Shinogi wasn't doing any damage to him, and that to really damage him, he needed to hit his vital points. That is an exaggeration; Baki was being bruised quite seriously by Shinogi's blows on his body, it is just that his sheer will, pain tolerance and stamina would allow him to keep being struck like that for a very long time with no problems at all. So, there's the kernel of truth: He probably wouldn't be KOed by him while he attacked the body, but he was clearly being bruised by Shinogi's blows.
- A lot of times, characters say that they didn't take any damage from an attack... while bleeding profusely from the nose. From the top of my head, I remember Kaku saying that to Yujiro, or at least Retsu saying that of Kaku, after Yujiro landed an axe kick on him. That is an exaggeration, with a kernel of truth: Kaku bled from his nose. That is absolutely real damage. But it is true that it would be far, far worse and it is not even a significant injury for a Baki character at that level of fighting.
- Oliva says that his muscles are impenetrable even by bullets, and that even bullets can't take him down. That is an exaggeration with a kernel of truth: Just watch Oliva's introduction. He was shot at point blank with a shotgun. He was clearly wounded by that, and the bullets dug into his muscles. It's just that they didn't go deep; but they did penetrate him. The exaggeration is saying that bullets can't affect him. The kernel of truth is that it really isn't an inconvenience for him, neither can the bullets pierce him deeply, nor is it hard for him to recover from that.
3. Power Consistency
This is a big one, so buckle up.So, this is a concept that seems very simple to me, because I honestly analyse that kind of thing from a different perspective from a VS-centric POV, but I get why it is a problem to the VS community as a hard, specific rating is preferred in place of a plastic definition.
What I am going by this is that Baki simply isn't a consistent series. I know, shocking, most of fiction isn't, but Baki isn't in a very particular way that divides the base in basically two camps: People who take the highest shown feats that are not contradicted, with lower showings being either justified as narrative and plot devices, or sheer contradictions, and people who believe more on the lower, consistent ratings, with the higher ones being just Itagaki
What we need to do is to recognize that both kinds of rationales have their valid justifications, and that there is no way to cut it: Both kinds of feat happen, and we need to deal them.
This isn't about characters with Tier 7 feats doing mostly Tier 9 to 8 feats on their day-to-day life. That isn't a problem. Doing higher feats do not forbid you from doing lower ones, particularly if you have enough control over your own power to control the amount of damage you do to the environment. This is about Baki characters that on any given page may have different standards for power. A few examples to illustrate my point:
- Arizona State Prison arc is FULL of this. The same Baki that was dodging bullets from rifles from multiple points at a distance and believed that he could probably dodge a few bullets in point blank range, and who fought Oliva at speeds too fast for anyone watching the scene to even see anything, was treated as doing a punch in 0,1 seconds (Chapter 70, Baki: Son of Ogre) as utterly impressive (that is slower than real life punches of people like Muhammad Ali) and capable of blitzing Oliva, and that Yujiro, Guevara or Oliva moving at more than 50 mph being astonishing. Oliva was going around, breaking down multiple walls, and from even Grappler Baki alone we had characters capable of taking out tanks and armiws by themselves (Gaia and the other super soldiers), but only three men in the USA were considered to be more dangerous than a machine gun: Yujiro, Oliva and Guevara (Chapter 26, Baki: Son of Ogre). Someone like Kaku could be justified as being considered a secret or simply not deemed dangerous enough, but someone like Gaia was absolutely known by the US.
- Raitai is also full of this. The same Yujiro that caused a localized earthquake with a punch in the Raitai arena is the same that, with a full force kick, could only drive the glasses of Kaku into a wall. The same Kaku that was described as too weak to lift even chopsticks could hammer a nail through the hands of three men with a single palm chop.
- Maximum Tournament: Yujiro was knocked out by a team of armed men firing at him with tranquilizer darts, and slowed down by people throwing a net with weights at him. Without even trying to scale him to later arcs, let's remember that, on that very same arc, Yujiro tore apart a few dozen centimeters thick steel reinforced door. Darts shouldn't be able to break the skin of someone like him.
- Heck, even the Convicts Arc. Yanagi's Vacuum Palm could break a glass that was described as being utterly bulletproof and capable of tanking even a missle from a rocket launcher, and Baki could take it to his face and just be KOed by the oxygen deprivation. I... don't think I need to explain how that defies all other times in the manga that bullets can wound even people like Pickle (!) but he can tank an attack that obliterates bulletproof glass. Heck, Spec shoots through his own cheeks with a gun just to prove a point.
I'll tackle the Yujiro/Nuke comparison later as I am bit busy at the moment, but this is a good start.
for the next crt
