r/whowouldwin • u/Joseph_Stalin_ ​ • Dec 20 '17

Special [Death Battle]Sephiroth vs Vergil

Vergil Respect Thread by me

Sephiroth Respect Thread by /u/ShadowSphere

Round 1: Regular Versions

Round 2: Nelo Angelo vs Whatever Peak Sephiroth is.

As per rules of Death Battle, they're both going for the kill

https://youtu.be/8sdzSDKquiY

151 Upvotes

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55

u/x_Saturn Dec 20 '17

While I don't disagree with the outcome, I absolutely hate how they calculated Sephiroths strength. That was ridiculous, and made no sense.

19

u/Albionest ​ Dec 20 '17

Yeah it was a little odd that they felt the need to resort to stats. Surely it would've been enough to show that Sephiroth was capable of overpowering Zak instead of delving into their respective character screens, especially when they'd just presented a Zak strength feat around the same magnitude as Vergil's. But as you say, right result.

13

u/CobaltMonkey ​ Dec 21 '17

Not to mention the fact that "Fake Zack's" stat screen would be worthless anyway since it's rooted completely in Cloud's false memory. So, even if you were to try to spin it as the stats being a representation of the characters' actual demonstrated abilities, this would be at best the past Cloud's guess at how strong Zack and Seph were at the time.
Even if you decide to fully trust Cloud's word on this, the best you can really hope to use is Seph's ability to 2-shot a green dragon. But then again, if you were bringing stats into it, that green dragon is far, far weaker than, say, a random Shinra grunt you might fight later in the game.

5

u/CantStopTheHerc ​ Dec 21 '17

Surely it would've been enough to show that Sephiroth was capable of overpowering Zak instead of delving into their respective character screens

How do you figure? it might tell you Seph is some vague value stronger, but not how much. The stats say how much stronger one is than the other, and the door feat tells you what those stat numbers mean outside an abstract.

2

u/Albionest ​ Dec 21 '17

Right, but as other people have said those stats don't even really tell us that. And sure for DB's purposes 'this feat is above Vergil's feat, and Seph is at minimum slightly stronger than him' may not give you any specifics, but it's more applicable than relying on stat-scaling in a fake memory.

1

u/CantStopTheHerc ​ Dec 22 '17

It gives us how much stronger one is than the other, and the door says how strong the weaker of the two is. The rest is multiplication.

1

u/Captain-Turtle Dec 21 '17

Surely it would've been enough to show that Sephiroth was capable of overpowering Zak instead of delving into their respective character screens

Death Battle just likes showing the character's peak and make hard numbers to try and look like they have conclusive information

19

u/willyolio Dec 20 '17

there's almost no point in even discussing Screwattack's "calculations", they're 90% wild speculation, 70% shaky applicability, 50% inconsistent data sources, and 200% bullshit.

5

u/[deleted] Dec 20 '17

What are your grievances with how they calculated their strength? Could you elaborate?

45

u/manaworkin ​ Dec 20 '17

Gameplay mechanics like stats are usually bunk. Though that whole segment was a sort of playable cutscene with preset stats so I'd say it's in a bit of a gray area.

3

u/CantStopTheHerc ​ Dec 21 '17

That's why they used the door to provide context to those stats.

3

u/shadowsphere ​ Dec 21 '17

It's not really gray I'd say. The gameplay segment comes from Cloud's messed up memories of the event so those strength stats for Cloud are inaccurate to Zack's actual strength, not to mention it's from a completely different game and takes place during a scene that is inconsistent between the different interpretations.

34

u/x_Saturn Dec 20 '17

They swapped from cutscene to in game stats, and I'm not sure how they calculated the force required for Zach slashing through the door, since that feat is pretty low end for the FFVII universe. Sephiroth was cutting through far more than that in his fight with Genesis, with far less effort. They could have used that calculation. Switching from cutscene to gameplay never works out accurately.

If you scale any low level character to high level character, you can't scale by multipliers. In game stats are used to show growth, but cutscenes stop making sense if they should be 50x stronger than they were 20 levels ago. Either use cutscenes only, or in game stats only. Crossing them doesn't work

8

u/[deleted] Dec 20 '17

You know what’s funny? I was thinking the same thing but I didn’t know how to phrase it. I guess that why people on this sub like to separate gameplay from lore.

28

u/x_Saturn Dec 20 '17

When someone stars with level 1 stats in everything, and can beat basic level soldiers easily, and ends with 999 stats, they'd be universe busting by scaling. Which is why cutscenes are the best for accurate power, because it shows what the developers really think the characters powers are.

Just my 2c. I still think Sephiroth would win, but that ridiculous scaling made their argument weaker.

10

u/Klondeikbar Dec 20 '17

Don't most JRPG protagonists end up wildly overpowered by endgame? I imagine universe busting is a bit hyperbolic but I can't remember the last time I played a JRPG where my late game characters weren't casually smacking around dragons or dropping mountains on things where they started the game dying to giant rats and slimes.

10

u/x_Saturn Dec 20 '17

Yes, but not the magnitude they had to resort to for this battle. If you were really even just 100x stronger than you were vs those slimes, the weight of the sword you were swinging would be multiplied by 100. Let's say the average sword is 3 pounds. You are now capable of swinging a 300 pound sword like it's nothing.

That's not even going into the realm of the fact that RPG typically has people starting out with 80ish pound swords (Buster Sword) so after his stats went from 1 to 100 each, he could swing around 8,000 pounds of sword with the same ease he was swinging the 80 pound one at lvl 1. The logic doesn't work.

4

u/[deleted] Dec 21 '17

They used the shear strength for a piece of steel the size of the door. Which, while a handy way to get a very precise figure, is entirely wrong since there's a big difference between ripping apart a slab of metal with your bare hands and cutting it in half with a sword.

1

u/Director-D ​ Dec 21 '17

To be fair they possibly could not use that from the Genesis fight because that was done in a computer simulation. So maybe that is why they avoided using that fight in particular.

1

u/shadowsphere ​ Dec 21 '17

The things broken in their simulation should be nearly identical to the original. Monsters made by the simulations are also very real and pose a threat.

1

u/Director-D ​ Dec 21 '17

I understand that, but I was just trying to possibly explain a reason why it might not have been used

1

u/[deleted] Dec 21 '17

I'd assume that it's because game stats are an abstraction. Also i don't remember if this is the case with FF but a ton of games have diminishing returns.

3

u/[deleted] Dec 21 '17

Assumptions. Assumptions, everywhere.

1

u/RuinEX ​ Dec 21 '17

That is what I ask my everytime watching these Death Battles. Why even resort to make such ridiculous calculations? To somehow make it a "fact" if they want to give one character an edge in something? It would be a lot more believeable if they just left it out entirely, if they can't find actual stats on the character in question to back up what they want to do with the characters.