• This forum is strictly intended to be used by members of the VS Battles wiki. Please only register if you have an autoconfirmed account there, as otherwise your registration will be rejected. If you have already registered once, do not do so again, and contact Antvasima if you encounter any problems.

    For instructions regarding the exact procedure to sign up to this forum, please click here.
  • We need Patreon donations for this forum to have all of its running costs financially secured.

    Community members who help us out will receive badges that give them several different benefits, including the removal of all advertisements in this forum, but donations from non-members are also extremely appreciated.

    Please click here for further information, or here to directly visit our Patreon donations page.
  • Please click here for information about a large petition to help children in need.

Universal DMC: Final Conclusions

Status
Not open for further replies.

DarkGrath

The Asteraceae Knight
She/Her
VS Battles
Administrator
Human Resources
4,604
6,575
Alright, 4 threads in. This has to be one of the longest-running CRT's I've ever seen. Welp... time to shamelessly copy and paste all the points made so far.


Copied from the beginning of the last thread (https://vsbattles.com/vsbattles/2910304)


Established subjects

  • Argosax's feat's legitimacy.
Arius: Now, give me the Arcanas. With them, my power will be complete and I will become like the immortal, Argosax!... The world is already warped. Everything that belongs to the devils will eventually revert to its original form.

If you don't know what "original form" means, the beginning of DMC3 manga explains it.

The world was born of darkness. Unending darkness, a crucible of chaos...

DMC2 guide book also says this...

"She is certain that his (Dante's) skill is necessary to stop the evil (Argosax) and prevent the Demon World from consuming our dimension."

...and this, which prove that the Human World is, in fact, being consumed by the Demon World.

"The power of the demon world can warp the minds of men and stop the hands of time. In the time between seconds, reality is not what it seems. The dark forces can bend passages that once led to real destinations into circles of infinite confusion..."

"...The entire town has been warped by the approach of the demon world into a vicious infinite circle..."

Currently discussed topics

  • The legitimacy of Mundus's feat in Devil May Cry 1.
  • Scaling characters to Argosax's feat.
Those are the main ones, but you should feel free to bring other stuff up.

Mundus's feat
Shamelessly copy-pasted from Ogbunabali:

The only feat that is 3-A that's being discussed is the Mundus feat. And by process of elimination it's definitely creation.

  • It's not teleportation because this is teleportation, and even Munuds himself says that in the human world they are weaker, as well as the demon world not having a sky like that, means that it's not teleportation.
  • It's also not illusions because the fight can't physically happen in that space they were in, if you've played the game you would know what I mean here is a full fight you can watch it yourself if you haven't already, and not to mention the room they were in doesn't have a scratch on it when we see Dante in the aftermath, which again would be physically impossible if it was an illusion.
    • The sky rotating is also just a weird camera spin, not the area itself moving, which you can quite clearly see when Mundus flies up and the sky behind him isn't rotating at all.
    • There is also no "air burst" when he jumps, that's blatantly false. If someone sees an "air burst" there feel free to show me a scan of where, because I don't see anything.
    • As well as when he creates the dimension both him and Dante float in the air, unlike some people that have claimed they were standing feet flat which is just wrong.
Scaling from Argosax's feat
Follow Doctor Freeman proposed these 2 options:

  • Everyone who fought Argosax/is comparable to him should scale, from DMC2 Dante upwards. Sparda DT Dante fought Mundus with a 3-A feat & DMC2 Dante fought Argosax with a 3-A feat who is also equal to Mundus. Another thing worth pointing out is that Dante beats Void Mundus (who is stronger than the original one) in the DMC2 novel.
  • DMC2 Dante doesn't scale, since Argosax was defeated due to Plot-Induced Stupidity, since Dante hijacked the ritual. However, that is contradicted by Dante being Void Mundus in base. There's also no concrete proof that Argosax was not at his full power there.


Copied from Kepekley's post on the previous thread.

Introductio
My main problems with the opposite side of this debate are the following issues:

  • 1. The complete dismissal of secondary evidence from non-game sources, the dismissal stemming from the fact that they're not as unquestionable as in-game evidence instead of them contradicting anything stated or shown in the game itself.
  • 2. The constant false equivalences with other franchises and with other events in the series that have absolutely nothing to do with the event on DMC2, unless you distort the very, very basic description and outcome of said event ("Argosax would conquer the Human World/Mundus would also do the same thing") in order to make it appear as if it's remarkably similar.
  • 3. The contradictions that come from the confusing structure of the arguments.
Up until this point, those three basic issues can be considered vague, so you may ask me to elaborate, and I am definitely glad to do so:

Explanatio
First things first, an online debate is, in principle, similar to a real-life debate, the only obvious difference being the subject being debated. In real life, in order to make conclusions about a fact, we apply what we call the scientific method - which is a set of observations based on experimenting with the available evidence. A scientist in real life may conduct numerous experiments to test the shape of the earth among other things. The important part about an experiment is that you need to already have a hypothesis/theory formulated about the outcome of your experiment in order for it to be scientific. For example, one could conduct an experiment to find out the Earth's shape and presuppose that the Earth has the shape of a rectangle - when the data actually supports the conclusion that the Earth has the shape of (roughly) a sphere instead, the previous conclusion is discarded in favor of the one with more evidence. This is called the concept of falsifiability/verifiability, something very important to a debate.

To exemplify when something is NOT verifiable, I will give a very famous example, from Carl Sagan himself. If I were to tell a skeptical person that there was a dragon in my house, and then I led them to my house and there was no dragon in there, they'd probably ask me where it was. If I told them that the dragon was invisible and that only I can see it, they'd probably ask me to locate the dragon and try to bump against it to prove it, or spray paint on the ground and have the dragon step on IT in order to make its footsteps visible, to which I would probably reply that the dragon floated in the air and that it was also intangible/immaterial. Basically, I'd keep giving a host of excuses for why the dragon's existence could not be verified, making its validity completely impossible to prove at all. This is an example of an unverifiable hypothesis. By default there is absolutely no reason to give it any second-thought whatsoever.

"Okay, why is this significant?" you might ask. Keep reading on to find out.

How it translates to a fictional setting
Having explained this, let's look at a videogame setting. When it comes to video-games, experimentation as we perform it in real life is completely impossible, with extremely rare exceptions, due to the fact that video-games follow a linear, pre-rendered path and storyline, which the player can not deviate from, and thus the only experiments that we can make in order to prove a point or a feat in a video-game is the evidence that 'we're allowed access to by the game's pre-programmed storyline. However, if there is not conclusive evidence to support a presupposed point of view, then making a conclusion is, by default, appealing to ignorance and fallacious at best.

So, what we can experiment with and prove in Argosax's case? Well, taking the game as its own enclosed story and universe, we can definitely state that, based on evidence, Argosax is performing a distortion that affects the series's setting in some way. Now, what about the scale of the feat? Let's analyze both of the hypothesis thrown around on this thread for the feat's scale

Worldwide Hypothesis
It has been proposed by some that Argosax's feat was happening on a merely planetary scale. The argument used to support this hypothesis, is that we, as the player, while traveling around, only observe the local effects of the distortion - namely, cities having been distorted out of shape and reorganized, the sky having become bloody red, with the atmosphere also being warped, and clouds swirling around unnaturally.

Right away, sharp-eyed readers who have paid attention to my previous sections may notice that this hypothesis would be taking advantage of the fact that we, as a character on a pre-programmed and nigh-unexaminable video game setting, are naturally simply unable to observe and note anything that happens outside of the main area. And this is the simple, major, untenable problem that completely troubles this hypothesis - it is inherently based on a distorted and flawed source of conclusive evidence for a feat as unorthodox as this - the player character's observations

While the hypothesis that the feat was only planetary is falsifiable - that is, it can be put to test based on available evidence -, the hypothesis can not falsify (debunk) any other hypothesis, because disproving universal scale based off of Dante or Lucia's personal, local observations in DMC2 is completely impossible by default, as they never witness anything that'd contradict universal scale for the feat, they only observe local results of the distortion.

This theory ends up suffering from a major and infamous fallacy in this wiki - the non-sequitur. That is, it draws its conclusions from evidence that does not actually support said conclusions. The whole theory can be resumed with the following basic statement:

  • "If the feat is planetary in scale, we would see cities being distorted by it, therefore the feat is planetary."
...Which can be easily identified as fallacious because it is not a necessary truth or conclusion of the evidence presented. To put it into cosmic perspective, this'd be similar to me seeing a meteor falling in the sky, noticing that is bright, and drawing the conclusion that every single bright thing one sees in the sky is automatically a meteor by default - an obviously fallacious and unwarranted conclusion from the evidence.

This hypothesis right here would only be valid if there was absolutely nothing else to judge the feat off of. With the introduction of any, literally any piece of evidence contradicting it, it immediately falls apart as a conclusive theory for the feat, just like my "star" example above, especially because the only thing that supports this is local visual picking (as opposed to any of the scans singling down the "Earth" or the "Planet" as being affected).

Universal Hypothesis
This was the initially proposed hypothesis for the feat, since when it was first mentioned. Namely, that Argosax's feat is of a universal scale, being a literal fusion of the entirety of the two universes. The main arguments used to support such a thing are the facts that the official Devil May Cry 2 guidebook outright states that Argosax's appearance would result in the Demon World consuming our dimension, and a statement made by Arius, a guy who has researched Argosax and the tales of the Demon World for the larger portion of his life who is also the main villain of the game, who states that the seal on Argosax was weakening, and as a result, the world was already being warped and everything that belonged to the demons would end up reverting back to its original form:

The first one is relatively straightforward, while the second one might be relatively vague to some without further explanation.

To be straightforward, what Arius is talking about by "everything that belongs to the devils will revert to its original form" is explained in the first few pages of the prologue of the Devil May Cry 3 manga, where it is revealed that, at the dawn of creation, the Human World and the Demon World were once joined on the same dimensional plane/universe ("the original form"), with the Human World having been actually born from the Demon World itself, until the original universe was forcibly split in two, with the smaller half becoming the Human World, our universe, and the larger half becoming the Demon World, the universe of the demons:

  • The world was born from darkness. Unending darkness. A crucible of chaos. But even to that primordial existence there came a ray of light. The universe was eventually split in two. The darkness became the realm of demons... and the light became the domain of mortals.
So, with both of those scans in mind, we can definitely state here that there exists conclusive evidence for Argosax's feat being considered universal in scale, as opposed to the formerly pondered hypothesis of a mere worldwide scale. Not only that, but we can visibly see that the universal hypothesis's evidence has proven to be falsifiable, as well as able to falsify the formerly debated point that the feat was merely planetary in scale, which is something that, as proven beforehand, the planetary hypothesis failed to accomplish, by utilizing lack of conclusive evidence in order to make a conclusion in and out of itself.

So, what is the most logical option here, having pondered the issues side-by-side? One of those arguments actually provides conclusive, falsifiable evidence, while the other side visibly lacks the capability to falsify the universal argument, while being fallacious and untenable itself. Therefore, it's just reasonable and logical to decide that the feat is 3-A, as that is the only option with any leg to stand on here.

Rebuttals
Having made my own judgement and conclusion, I of course have to acknowledge that a few arguments have been put forth against the scans that establish the feat to be 3-A. Here I will analyze those arguments myself to see if they do hold up to scrutinity.

  • Argument 1: The scan referring to the Demon World consuming the dimension can simply refer to the Earth being conquered by the demons and assimilated, instead of actually being consumed in the literal sense, as shown with Mundus."
Reply: A complete, very much flawless response to the above claim already exists, as can be seen in the post of ParadoxIndifferent, and it deconstructs this particular claim much better than I ever could, though I myself have my own points that will be shown below.

First things first, this argument, put forth by Matthew, is made while simultaneously acknowledging the fact that Argosax was indeed going to warp and distort the world in some form. This interpretation is therefore completely untenable and self-contradictory when you consider that those who believe in it do acknowledge Argosax's distortion and consumption as a physical fact, even if they believe it to be on a lower scale. Very basic usage of Occam's Razor would already dictate that if every single other reference to Argosax distorting and merging the "world", be it universal or not, does indeed refer to Argosax literally causing the world to be consumed by the Demon World, then another reference that specifies that our entire dimension would be consumed, as opposed to merely Earth, would also be logically expected to have the exact same context and meaning as all the others coming before it, instead of a magically new, never-explained "conquering" definition that is never, ever alluded to in the entire campaign of the game, and is based off of a pure false equivalence with Mundus that has nothing to do with what Argosax did. So it already fails at a basic technical level by violating Occam's Razor in this situation, and also contradicting itself to boot.

Second, as I passingly mentioned above, the false equivalence with Mundus is...indeed a massive false equivalence - I can simply not highlight this enough. Remember when I previously mentioned how the supporters of the "planetary" point of view tried to make Mundus and Argosax's situations appear similar to each other by describing both of them together in a bald, extremely basic summary, to make them appear more similar than they actually are (not saying that this is done intentionally or dishonestly)? Well, now to elaborate on that. We currently accept Mundus creating a portal and sending his armies through said portal in order to conquer the Earth - correct. Now imagine Argosax, physically shattering the barrier between both worlds, distorting and forcibly merging both together in some way into a bizarre nightmare realm- which is what is established in the game. Really, sounds extremely similar to Mundus - or not. At all. This comparison could literally not be anymore unwarranted or more of a false equivalence when you actually look at what is happening in both events separately, instead of blending both together because the characters performing the feats are both Demon Kings and God-Tiers of the erse.

Third, the entire comparison does not even have grammatical support to begin with, since the passage is not telling us that they would consume the world, which is what would be required for the interpretation of "conquering the Earth" to be valid. It specifically singles out our entire dimension being consumed. Considering that the demon invasion promoted by Mundus would be entirely focused on conquering the Earth, instead of conquering the whole universe or anything similar, there is absolutely no basis for interpreting the statement as anything other than than what it is ("our universe will be consumed by another universe"), and the statement quickly becomes extremely weird and inefficient if we assumed it was actually meant to convey a mere planetary invasion poetically.

No on all accounts for this one.

  • Argument 2: The Devil May Cry guidebooks are not unquestionable sources, being third-party and not written by the developers, only licensed by Capcom."
Reply: Indeed, guidebooks are not completely unquestionable sources, but that'd only matter if there were a contradiction at play here. If the statement does not contradict anything in the game (unless you count lack of evidence as evidence of absence), then there is absolutely no reason to dismiss it. This right here is just violating all our policies on guidebooks and handwaving evidence, given that we have a long history of utilizing guidebooks, especially if they're created with input from the developer team, and have discussed the issue in too many threads to count at this point. Short of attempting to change our standards just because of this issue, this argument holds no validity, both from a logical pointview and from a point of view with basis on our standards.

In addition, the claim that the guidebooks have no developer backing is completely false, considering all the Bradygames guides ''are'' run through with the developer team itself instead of just being licensed by the producer (the evidence for this being the credits to the scriptwriters for the content in the introduction), so attempting to paint the guidebook as fully third-party is rather faulty. The DMC guides are most definitely the very best next source after a statement or feat coming straight out of the games themselves, being second only to official interviews or streams with the developers.

Conclusion
Amidst the above discussion of the High 6-A or 5-B suggestions, which have exactly zero conclusive/admissible evidence to back them up, aside from being unfalsifiable and unscientific if you want to use real debating as a comparative stick, interpreting the confirmations at face-value and taking all evidence into account to form the whole picture ends up still being the best and more reasonable manner of looking at those feats, as my analysis above indicates, as opposed to simply taking one completely inconclusive aspect of the feat and trying to use that one observation to form a conclusion, while simultaneously ignoring the reasonable body of evidence against it.

Needless to say - my final conclusion is that Argosax's feat being 3-A is much more reasonable.
 
As with the previous thread, I stick with my decision to agree to legitimize 3-A DMC once more as per Kep's suggestions.

>Longest-running CRT

Bill Cipher wanna talk with ya son.
 
Yeah. With the exception of people who have considered themselves neutral thus far, going off of members active on the thread the vote is now synonymous, with 20+ people agreeing with it and many of those people being considered the knowledgable members of the verse. This is nearly as definitive as it can get.

Also, I've never kept up with Bill Cipher threads. I know, treasonous. XD
 
So! I created this thread purely so that the other one wouldn't accidentally reach the 500 post limit, but is there really anything more that needs to be discussed? The only thing I can think of that hasn't been concluded at this point is who will implement these changes. I'm obviously not qualified, and I'm not sure who the best staff member would be. Is Kepekley qualified to edit pages?
 
We wanted to wait until Matt has responded just to be 100% sure, we confirmed its a 3A feat but Matt said it was an outlier and that got thoroughly discussed.
 
Schnee One said:
We wanted to wait until Matt has responded just to be 100% sure, we confirmed its a 3A feat but Matt said it was an outlier and that got thoroughly discussed.
Matt has responded, he admitted that he really didn't care about the thread any more and did not provide any new arguments. I think it's safe to say there aren't any more rebuttals.
 
Again though, so we don't go too far off track, I have to ask again. Who would be both qualified and willing to implement the changes?
 
Implementing the changes is the easy part, especially since all of the profiles are unlocked except Dante. First we need to actually conclude this.
 
Ogbunabali said:
Implementing the changes is the easy part, especially since all of the profiles are unlocked except Dante. First we need to actually conclude this.
Ah, gotcha. Who will be able to unlock Dante's profile?
 
Also, how exactly do we definitively "conclude" the CRT? If it's not concluded already, then it probably should be.
 
DarkGrath said:
Also, how exactly do we definitively "conclude" the CRT? If it's not concluded already, then it probably should be.
Usually in a new staffs thread for the staffs vote on the topic with a similar Opinion Statements as above, as a last case scenerio.
 
Ah, gotcha. Surely this is not a last case scenario though, right? I think everything that's been discussed so far is pretty conclusive, unless there are any more unaddressed rebuttals. Is there someone to ask to have Dante's profile unlocked so we can do the changes?
 
DarkGrath said:
Ah, gotcha. Surely this is not a last case scenario though, right? I think everything that's been discussed so far is pretty conclusive, unless there are any more unaddressed rebuttals. Is there someone to ask to have Dante's profile unlocked so we can do the changes?
The thread's Opinion Statements need to be widely accepted first then profiles can be unlocked
 
I see. Thank you for your help so far, I hope I'm not being a bother with the questions. How widely accepted do they need to be before profiles can be unlocked? It's difficult to put an exact number on the amount of people who have voted in support of this thread, however given that the last time it was counted it was around 18-19 and several people have since also voted in support, it would have to be at least 20+, of which I'm pretty sure the last thread had around 10 people very actively supporting it. There are currently no opposing members; the last person to directly oppose the CRT was Matthew and he has since relented. Currently, with the exception of a few neutral people, the thread has synonymously agreed on the revision with around 20+ people and about 5 of the people on the DMC "Knowledgable Members" page. Surely that is enough of a consensus? Or are there more factors that need to be accounted for?
 
Twellas said:
So, with Matt out of the picture, as Charlie Kelly so eloquently put it, what do now?
Well, that's kind of what I'm asking. It's quite clear at this point that this CRT should be implemented, but with how large-scale the CRT is I'm not sure how you're supposed to go about it.
 
Spinosaurus75DinosaurFan said:
What was the argument against it being an outlier again?
Too many things. For starters, the rebuttal states that the feat is an outlier based on the fact that the other feats in the verse are within the tier 8/7/6 range. What it fails to mention is that these are almost entirely based off of fodder feats, as the God Tiers of the verse have not previously had any good feats. Even saying that a God Tier feat is an outlier because of High Tier feats is extremely dubious; saying that a God Tier should only be comparable to the fodder of the verse when we explictly see that this is clearly not the case is literally one of the weakest outlier arguments physically possible.
 
Anyway, the outlier argument has been disproven till kingdom come repeatedly. Let's not dawdle on it. Again, the discussion on the Argosax feat has been ridiculously thoroughly debated and there is no opposition. How do we get Dante's profile unlocked so that we can implement it?
 
Spinosaurus75DinosaurFan said:
So basically the God tiers have no feats aside form Mundus' and Argosax's?
Correct. Techincally, Mundus' feat is still debatable when it comes to scale. 3-A is the most likely, but there is also the 4-A suggestion, and in the end it's not the main reason for the upgrade. The upgrade is based off of Argosax's 3-A feat, since there are no other reliable God Tier feats in the franchise.
 
Do we have any conclusive answers as to how to get this CRT implemented?
 
@Spinosaurus -- Which isn't to say there are any contradictions. The lore takes inordinate care to ensure that scaling is consistent across the board via direct statements and/or power-draining properties and such.

Since no reasonable objections (or any, really) have been raised, we might as well go ahead and get ideas of scale, though objectors can chime in if they have anything concrete. Anyway, as for the ratings, I guess most iterations of Dante scale. I'm wondering if we should consider Arkham (and DMC3 Dante & Vergil by proxy) comparable enough to scale, though it might be wise to just scale the Temen-Ni-Gu guardians to Echidna and whoever since the whole point of the guardians was that they were more potent than would-be intruders, which probably includes those guys we see in DMC4. Therefore, DMC3 Dante/Vergil > Guardians > Echidna/DMC4 bosses.

Early-game DMC1 Dante could go either way, though one could argue that getting the complete Sword of Sparda gave him a permanent power boost afterward. Kinda like how his near-death experience getting stabbed by Rebellion in DMC3 awakened more potential. Not sure if it's concrete, but this interpretation might help things make even more sense if there's no contradictions.

Nero/Savior... I'm not fully aware of what goes down in DMC5 (pls send me money), but as for DMC4, you could go with Echidna stats (he stomped that fight) and bring up that Dante was holding back and bring up that the Savior wasn't as complete as it was intended to be. Or you could go the other way by interpreting the same evidence differently, as well as bringing that dubious novel adaptation (which hints Nero > Dante) into the matter. I gather that Urizen fellow got a massive boost from getting Nero's Devil Bringer; not sure if that's relevant.
 
Thank you for going into detail, Follow Doctor Freeman. My posts have been a bit wobbly and short, so I haven't explained my points very well.
 
Ogbunabali said:
This doesn't scale to anyone besides the God Tiers.
Correct. I don't believe there are any non-God Tier characters who scale here, and the only God Tier who isn't scaled is The Saviour (I think he's considered a God TIer? Might want clarification).
 
Attention all DMC gamers: Follow Doctor Freeman is in great danger and he needs your help to join Dante, Nero, and V in defeating Urizen, but to do this he needs a PS4 Pro/ALienware gaming computer and a copy of DMC5: Special Edition (with those $8000+ coats). To help him, all he needs is your credit card number, the three digits on the back, and the expiration month and year. But, you gotta be quick, so Freeman and pals can save the world from demonkind!

just send me the money

Erm, anyway, Sparda is obviously god tier. Argosax/Mundus/Void Mundus are beaten by Dante. I take it Vergil and Nero and Urizen are comparable in DMC5.

Arkham is too unreliable to scale to Sparda (hence my line about the Temen-Ni-Gru guardians earlier). Too many questions about the Savior's incomplete ascention, as well, whom Dante had cause to not obliterate if he was indeed that huge gap stronger (and he was still blocking punches and whatnot). Lucia never fought Argosax, only the uncertainly boosted Arius (who still has a feat splitting a road deeply). I might be failing to remember something from the anime or whatever, but I don't think Trish or Lady have cause to scale. Oh, and Sid/Abigail could go either way.

By the way, about that DMC2 eclipse thing you guys were talking about, did you find a cause yet? Would be interesting if that was Arius.
 
Currently, the characters Arkham, the Saviour, Arius, and Sid Abigail are not considered to be scaleable to these feats.
 
There's almost nothing to say now, God Tiers scale to Argosax, the end

The Savior possibly scales, but it's too vague

Sid and Anime Dante still on 7-A, Lady and Trish tried to hurt Sid but they were massive fodders to him

The Eclipse was done by Arius and his ritual

I'll talk to Dark to make the changes, I'll apply the Relativistic Combat/Reaction speed aswell
 
Follow Doctor Freeman said:
Attention all DMC gamers: Follow Doctor Freeman is in great danger and he needs your help to join Dante, Nero, and V in defeating Urizen, but to do this he needs a PS4 Pro/ALienware gaming computer and a copy of DMC5: Special Edition (with those $8000+ coats). To help him, all he needs is your credit card number, the three digits on the back, and the expiration month and year. But, you gotta be quick, so Freeman and pals can save the world from demonkind!
...jesus lmao

Someone pay Voiceoverpete to say this please?
 
Dante Demon Killah said:
There's almost nothing to say now, God Tiers scale to Argosax, the end

The Savior possibly scales, but it's too vague

Sid and Anime Dante still on 7-A, Lady and Trish tried to hurt Sid but they were massive fodders to him

The Eclipse was done by Arius and his ritual

I'll talk to Dark to make the changes, I'll apply the Relativistic Combat/Reaction speed aswell
Was the calc accepted?
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top