Alright everyone, over the last week I've been watching the entirety of the PAD Anime for the sake of gathering up new bits of information to use, because this has been long overdue. (It's...It's not a great anime, 89 episodes and I'm not sure how much of it I enjoyed.)
I kept a note file on my PC for everything of interest, with episodes numbers for when they occur. I only remembered to get a few screenshots but I have the episodes marked down so they shouldn't be hard to get, so lets jump into everything important:
1. General bit of information, comes up in multiple episodes, but we can confirm that 'Combos' are not Game Mechanics. They are frequently used in-universe and translate to power boosts mid-battle, which means
Damage Boost should probably be a verse standard ability.
2. Another general bit: Orbs/Drops, spirits, souls, ghosts, and energy are normally invisible to the naked eye, but being a monster or being in-tune with them (for example, being a Dragon Caller) makes all of these visible to you. Some sort of
Enhanced Senses should probably be standard too since almost every major character has the ability to see normally invisible things.
3. Episode 65 gives us an answer for our question about characters like Sonia where there are multiple versions of her that have always been 'unique' without explanation. It's as simple as we thought it was, they're all different Sonias, they all have the same name, they all have similar appearances, but they aren't the same person. In Sonia's case, the other elemental Sonias are her siblings.
4. This anime LOVES to talk about how everything is a 'threat to the planet' or 'the planet will be destroyed', you can practically make a drinking game about this one. Since we're already having issues with planet destruction as a statement alone, I won't bring it back up unless one of the times where it's mentioned has interesting context.
5. Episode 47 -
Myr makes a brief appearance to use her time powers for our main hero. As soon as she's released from her egg a pocket dimension appears that she seems to be in control of and when she returns to her egg this dimension vanishes. Her dimension is a section of floating space with (you probably guessed where this is going) countless stars in the sky in the background. This is kinda a common feat on the wiki at
4-A, and not the last time we see it in-universe either. Myr ranks at a whopping 10 Stars though (If I'm not mistaken, the current highest rating a monster/character can get), so she's extraordinarily powerful compared to a lot of the cast, this probably wouldn't scale to many characters...
6. Episode 49 - This might scale to a LOT more characters though. TLDR of the situation in this episode, our hero gets an artifact called the 'Three Moon Compass'. This artifact is used to locate the city of Stella, to meet the tribe of star people, who are guardians of the star fragments. Lotta' references to stars, right?
Well, the compass takes our heroes to a space with a starry sky again (the link here doesn't seem strong that the compass made a dimension though, so that's not important). The compass then shoots a beam of energy into the starry sky and several new stars suddenly come to life...before those stars shoot beams of energy back at the hero which guides him to Stella...Why this needed to be so complicated, I don't know, maybe star people are dramatic?
The important detail is that half of the compass was created using the Legendary Dragon Idia, and I mean that literally as in the dragon became one half of this artifact while Awoken Zeus (more casually) created the other half. So I think it's a fairly reasonable connection that we can attribute half of the compass' power to Idia.
...Coincidentally, Idia's one of the 5 Star Legendary Dragons, just like Vritra, our current problem child when it comes to scaling. I think this might be a more solid feat to scale those tiers to. I attempted a blog to count how many stars are made in that scene and come to a number for what rating it should have, came to the conclusions of
High 4-C here
7. Episode 67 - Ra kinda gets huffy with our main hero in an argument, leaves the conversation dramatically, and then suddenly the sky is brightly lit in the mid-day when it was previously only dawn. I can only guess that's Ra's way of a 'take that'? Don't have a calc for what it would take to do that yet, but it's of some interest.
8. Episode 77 - The main rival gets a new transformation and in describing it he makes the claim that this type of transformation, Dragonoids 'reverting' into true dragons, allowed him to 'obtained the power of this planet' and that the star fragment he had was enough to 'restructure the world as he sees fit'. He follows that up by admitting his plan is to destroy the planet and make a new one to get a fresh start. (There's some irony in that threat, we'll get back to that).
9. Episode 84 - Dafnes, the Ancient of Dark, is revealed to have her own pocket dimension inside of her that she can trap people in. Getting a look at it we get both ground and sky, but interestingly compared to Myr's we see no stars, sun, or moon. Possibly means she isn't as powerful or the dimension she can make is smaller?
10. Episode 88 and Episode 89 - Series finale and it's a doozy of information to work with. We're introduced to the Terra Dragon, who has been mentioned through the series as the planet's creator. The Terra Dragon isn't happy about seeing the inhabitants of the planet abusing natural resources and constantly going to war, and decides to destroy the planet.
To meet with the Terra Dragon to fight/reason with it, our heroes go to a place called Ymir which, you probably guessed it, is a lot of space with starry background.
The Terra Dragon's first form is what looks like a sun/star, complete with sunspots and flares coming off of its surface. The second form is a jellyfish that's supposed to represent 'life', the third form is a massive cocoon, and its final forms are large white (forgive the lack of a better word) godly beings. However none of these forms are apparently 'true', because the Terra Dragon is described as being
'The entire space, everything you can see' . So...
4-A again?
We also learn that the current planet for our heroes is the Terra Dragon's 4th attempt at making a planet with lifeforms, the previous 3 attempts being failures in its eyes that it destroyed. The moons of the these planets are what was left of the previous planets after destruction being reused for the next attempt. And Terra Dragon is only really doing this because it wants to make a world that's 'perfect'. Considering that context, these are probably casual feats.
The Terra Dragon is also called an 'All Knowing Creator'. Not sure we can take that title literally though. It asks our heroes questions as if it's genuinely confused about why they're resisting it starting over.
Now with everything that makes Terra Dragon powerful out of the way, how did our heroes stack up? ...Not well. They hit the cocoon form enough to get its attention, one character breaks one of its forcefields, and the characters survive being hit a few times by it...but it's a no contest fight. Terra Dragon utterly curb stomps everyone involved and takes little to no damage. It's only 'defeated' by our heroes pleading with it for a second chance.
Conclusion: I think the Anime has given us enough evidence for Tier 4 PAD
There's frequent 'threats to the planet' from all sorts of sources, with at least one character outright claiming they can destroy and recreate the entire planet. A 5-Star Legendary Dragon, who should be on par with Vritra AKA "World Annihilator", powered an artifact that made multiple stars in the sky. And while our characters got curb stomped by Terra Dragon, they didn't die and hit it enough to be noticed by it, so we can probably assume Terra Dragon held back and they were at least strong enough to handle such a being barely trying. Depending on the response to the Calc, I think we can more safely put our 5-Star cast in either 4-C or High 4-C, and scale characters comparable and superior to them accordingly
As for Terra Dragon and Myr, Terra Dragon has an avatar/form where they ARE a star, and they're all of the space of this starry sky we're given, which seems solidly 4-A. Myr should probably be comparable, since she's the very top of the known rating scale in-universe and has her own dimension that came and went with her. Plus Terra Dragon is one of the rare monsters that, at least currently, has NO rating, but I think this information makes it safe to assume it's comparable if not superior to Myr.
And thank god I marked down the episodes all these things happen, because it will make going back to get screenshots for proof so much easier.
So...Thoughts?
