Ravages of Time
PostPosted:Wed Oct 11, 2006 8:20 pm
Has anyone ever picked up this manga? This is a manga that is drawn by a Hong Kong guy but serialized in Japan and is apparently the pride of China. Personally I think it is more like shameful piece of work roughly as bad as Death Note Part 2. It is billed as a manga for intellectuals, even though I find it to be more moronic than any your favorite pointless generic adventure manga.
The premise of the Ravages of Time is a battle of wits in the Three Kingdom period. Unlike other mangas based on the same material, fighting in Ravages of Time is strictly intellectual. You can think of it as a manga with 20 guys who are all smarter than Death Note's L all trying to outthink each other. We will ignore that even certified not-so-smart guys like Zhang Fei can deduct 20 layers of strategy because it's manga, it's allowed to change these things. The art and the story is actually quite good. So, what's the problem? Well, the common criticism to Death Note is that L and Kira's level of deduction reaches the level of prescience and it gets progressively worse. Indeed in part 2 you get stuff like N can watch a video tape and deduce who is Kira #3 out of thousands of Kira followers (obviously this is because Kira #3 is incredibly handsome and we know all important characters in DN has to be handsome). Except Ravages of Time makes all this look like child's play.
Here's a typical battle of wits in Ravages of Time.
A does something
B does something to counter A's ploy
A does something to counter B's ploy
repeat about 20 times
Finally, A says this is my counter to the counter to the counter to the Nth step and is surely to work.
B says unfortunately I have already figured out the counter to the counter to the counter of the Nth+1 step (or, if the intellectual difference is vast, something like N+500).
A is now defeated.
The last major battle has Chen Gong's 250th counter to nth moves being overpowered by Sima Yi's 610th counter to the nth moves. In the tradition of ever increasingly more powerful characters, right now it looks like calculating the counter to the 610th move is insufficient to defeat the new characters like Pang Tong. Zhuge Liang will most likely be able to calculate counter moves to the millions.
You're never told what anything between from the 1st to the nth plan other than that some guy way smarter than you has thought up of some steps between 2nd and nth-1 steps that got canceled out. You'll see the 1st plan usually (sometimes 2 or 3 if the author feels like it), and the last step of the plan, and they look like anything any moron could've come up with. But of course, the real genius is from the 2nd to nth-1 steps which you don't know about. Only the smartest readers can even fathom what intelligence is involved in these steps!
As much as I dislike Naruto and other popular fighting mangas, at least those the authors make some attempt to have the action going on reflect the state of the battle. Sure the good guys can get an extra 5 lifebars or powerups on demand, but at least you can tell when they're supposed to be losing or winning. Not so in Ravages of Time. Even 1 on 1 duels are a battle of strategy that has two characters yelling out strategies that represents their attacks. The latest one went something like
Zhang Liao: Right slash strategy!
Zhao Yun: Left retreat piercing strategy!
Zhang Liao: Right forward strategy!
repeat this until one character is mysteriously defeated due to the superior strategy of his opponent, despite what you see on the paper would give you zero clue as to who is actually winning.
I can't help but to think the new wave of 'intellectual' mangas I have heard people talk about, most notably Death Note and Ravages of Time, is more like the Emperor's New Cloth. I've never seen anything in manga that'd indicate the characters really possess superhuman deduction/logic/etc, which is sensible because to you have to have superhuman deduction/logic to write about a character that possess such abilities, while it is trivial to write about a character of arbitrary physical ability with no regard to your physical condition. The only way I can realistically describe a counter to the 500th power plan is if I can actually think of one, and I sure can't do that so I won't be able to write about one in detail either. I commonly hear excuses like 'it's manga the author can do whatever they want'. Yes but while it's easy to accept I can write a character about super human physical abilities, you actually need near superhuman intelligence to write about superhuman intelligence. I don't buy an average intelligence person, writing about stuff that sounds decidedly average intelligence, and then accept that characters are superhuman intelligent just because the author said so.
I'm fine with something like Kendaichi where clearly superhuman intelligence is obtained by cheating and working backwards, i.e. author spends a lot of time coming up with a scenario with exactly enough clues to deduce the result with perfect logic and knowledge, and then writes about a character that possess such knowledge and uncovers the truth. In fact that's more or less the basis of every detective manga. Adequate explanation, even if it is clearly obtained by cheating, is okay. But I can't stand things that ask you to believe that soandso can deduce the time of murder occured at 6pm because there were 3 pennies on the ground.
The premise of the Ravages of Time is a battle of wits in the Three Kingdom period. Unlike other mangas based on the same material, fighting in Ravages of Time is strictly intellectual. You can think of it as a manga with 20 guys who are all smarter than Death Note's L all trying to outthink each other. We will ignore that even certified not-so-smart guys like Zhang Fei can deduct 20 layers of strategy because it's manga, it's allowed to change these things. The art and the story is actually quite good. So, what's the problem? Well, the common criticism to Death Note is that L and Kira's level of deduction reaches the level of prescience and it gets progressively worse. Indeed in part 2 you get stuff like N can watch a video tape and deduce who is Kira #3 out of thousands of Kira followers (obviously this is because Kira #3 is incredibly handsome and we know all important characters in DN has to be handsome). Except Ravages of Time makes all this look like child's play.
Here's a typical battle of wits in Ravages of Time.
A does something
B does something to counter A's ploy
A does something to counter B's ploy
repeat about 20 times
Finally, A says this is my counter to the counter to the counter to the Nth step and is surely to work.
B says unfortunately I have already figured out the counter to the counter to the counter of the Nth+1 step (or, if the intellectual difference is vast, something like N+500).
A is now defeated.
The last major battle has Chen Gong's 250th counter to nth moves being overpowered by Sima Yi's 610th counter to the nth moves. In the tradition of ever increasingly more powerful characters, right now it looks like calculating the counter to the 610th move is insufficient to defeat the new characters like Pang Tong. Zhuge Liang will most likely be able to calculate counter moves to the millions.
You're never told what anything between from the 1st to the nth plan other than that some guy way smarter than you has thought up of some steps between 2nd and nth-1 steps that got canceled out. You'll see the 1st plan usually (sometimes 2 or 3 if the author feels like it), and the last step of the plan, and they look like anything any moron could've come up with. But of course, the real genius is from the 2nd to nth-1 steps which you don't know about. Only the smartest readers can even fathom what intelligence is involved in these steps!
As much as I dislike Naruto and other popular fighting mangas, at least those the authors make some attempt to have the action going on reflect the state of the battle. Sure the good guys can get an extra 5 lifebars or powerups on demand, but at least you can tell when they're supposed to be losing or winning. Not so in Ravages of Time. Even 1 on 1 duels are a battle of strategy that has two characters yelling out strategies that represents their attacks. The latest one went something like
Zhang Liao: Right slash strategy!
Zhao Yun: Left retreat piercing strategy!
Zhang Liao: Right forward strategy!
repeat this until one character is mysteriously defeated due to the superior strategy of his opponent, despite what you see on the paper would give you zero clue as to who is actually winning.
I can't help but to think the new wave of 'intellectual' mangas I have heard people talk about, most notably Death Note and Ravages of Time, is more like the Emperor's New Cloth. I've never seen anything in manga that'd indicate the characters really possess superhuman deduction/logic/etc, which is sensible because to you have to have superhuman deduction/logic to write about a character that possess such abilities, while it is trivial to write about a character of arbitrary physical ability with no regard to your physical condition. The only way I can realistically describe a counter to the 500th power plan is if I can actually think of one, and I sure can't do that so I won't be able to write about one in detail either. I commonly hear excuses like 'it's manga the author can do whatever they want'. Yes but while it's easy to accept I can write a character about super human physical abilities, you actually need near superhuman intelligence to write about superhuman intelligence. I don't buy an average intelligence person, writing about stuff that sounds decidedly average intelligence, and then accept that characters are superhuman intelligent just because the author said so.
I'm fine with something like Kendaichi where clearly superhuman intelligence is obtained by cheating and working backwards, i.e. author spends a lot of time coming up with a scenario with exactly enough clues to deduce the result with perfect logic and knowledge, and then writes about a character that possess such knowledge and uncovers the truth. In fact that's more or less the basis of every detective manga. Adequate explanation, even if it is clearly obtained by cheating, is okay. But I can't stand things that ask you to believe that soandso can deduce the time of murder occured at 6pm because there were 3 pennies on the ground.