Pinnacle Battle
PostPosted:Wed Oct 05, 2011 5:15 am
That's the name of a major arc in One Piece, but a pretty common concept in the action oriented manga. You got all the guys who are normally too cool or legendary to participate in combat all gather for some epic showdown against all the bad guys of the world. Aside from the fact that the main character still will inexplicably get more powerful as time progresses, you should expect this battle to establish the limitation of what is possible in that world.
Let's start with the one manga that gets it right: Naruto. Now you might say that's impossible because Don hates Naruto, but this is the one aspect Naruto does really well. Sure you can say Naruto is just making up new legendary nijitsus or eyepowers or whatever on the fly. But that's fine as long as they all sound and appear to be totally awesome. Even with the rampant power inflation in Naruto, the encounter between the 3rd Hokage and Orochimaru still seems like it'd be expected for two of the most powerful users in the world (this can be thought of the first such battle in Naruto). In the current mega brawl arc, there's even a good sense of balance as the nobodies get matched up with nobodies, so you don't have random nobodies beating Akatsuki-class guys. I guess the only minor flaw is that nobody on the good guy's side ever dies, but that's a consistent in theme in just about any action-oriented manga. The funny thing is that Naruto is generally viewed in as inferior to One Piece or HXH depending on which faction you belong to (Naruto has a ton of fans, but tends to lose the popular vote to OP and the elitist vote to HXH) but this is one area it is way better than any of its popular competitors. Sure the fight literally drags on forever but you're never wondering who are these losers that call themselves the most powerful entities in the world.
Next let's talk about One Piece, which has an arc named exactly that: Pinnacle Battle. The problem with OP is that the whole fight looks like 5 random guys using 3 chapter long cooldowns. You'd see one guy jump out and do a move and it apparently takes him 3 weeks before he shows up again while he's recovering. The fighting aspect might be better named Pinnacle Cooldowns. There was never any sense of flow because once you see one powerful guy, don't expect to see him again for another 3 weeks. Another major problem is that at no point does it seem believeable that Whitebeard's group had a chance to overcome the Marines let alone all the other guys they're fighting through. Even with Luffy's hero bailout, you can't seriously expect anyone to believe there was a reasonable way this is going to end well. Now, I don't mean reasonable as in the outcome. Anyone can tell that the good guys will win in Naruto, for example, but the bad guys actually seem to have adequate force for a victory. The Pinnacle Battle is supposed to be some kind of ultimate showdown, not a few guys running to their doom against certain death. I guess part of the point of this arc in OP is that Luffy's power is totally insignificant compared to the most powerful beings in his world, but honestly the only person who doesn't know that is Luffy himself.
Then there is HXH, where failed because it is not possible for the fighting to get any better except it didn't end there. The Ant arc features 5 of the top 5 most powerful entites in HXH, possibly top 6 (it's not clear if Netero is indeed the most powerful normal human being in HXH). To put things in DBZ terms, human aura power level varies from 20K-100K and this appears to be a hardcap that cannot be overcome by training, and then you suddenly got multiple guys with power level of 1 million showing up in this arc. At a conservative guess, the battles in this arc involve people who are at least 10 times stronger than human limitation and that's probably for the guys on the lower end of the top 5. Meryem might be a hundred times or more powerful than any human character can reach, and is flat out undefeatable by combat. Meryem even does the usual "omni powerful guy give enemy great handicap', and problem is, unlike most villians, he still wins every single time even while giving some totally unreasonable handicaps to his opponent. Also, for an arc that spans 8 or so volumes, the top 5 only fought against another top 5 twice (if you count Netero), and only one of those fight was meaningful (nobody was ever going to beat Meryem). I suspect Togashi figures he has an infinte capacity to come up with cool characters, so he doesn't care how he totally wasted his top 5 fighters in one arc while getting only one meaningful fight. But unless you go to the Bleach "Everyone can become stronger than Aizen after training hard for an year", he's not getting his top 5 fighters back. OP has the same problem with Ace and Whitebeard. Manga have a limited number of 'totally awesome character' that they can work with. That doesn't mean you have to recycle them forever, but you really should think about whether you've got your value out of your star character before sending him to his doom. Maybe Naruto gets too much mileage out of its character, but here I think it's better to be too safe than too daring.
Let's start with the one manga that gets it right: Naruto. Now you might say that's impossible because Don hates Naruto, but this is the one aspect Naruto does really well. Sure you can say Naruto is just making up new legendary nijitsus or eyepowers or whatever on the fly. But that's fine as long as they all sound and appear to be totally awesome. Even with the rampant power inflation in Naruto, the encounter between the 3rd Hokage and Orochimaru still seems like it'd be expected for two of the most powerful users in the world (this can be thought of the first such battle in Naruto). In the current mega brawl arc, there's even a good sense of balance as the nobodies get matched up with nobodies, so you don't have random nobodies beating Akatsuki-class guys. I guess the only minor flaw is that nobody on the good guy's side ever dies, but that's a consistent in theme in just about any action-oriented manga. The funny thing is that Naruto is generally viewed in as inferior to One Piece or HXH depending on which faction you belong to (Naruto has a ton of fans, but tends to lose the popular vote to OP and the elitist vote to HXH) but this is one area it is way better than any of its popular competitors. Sure the fight literally drags on forever but you're never wondering who are these losers that call themselves the most powerful entities in the world.
Next let's talk about One Piece, which has an arc named exactly that: Pinnacle Battle. The problem with OP is that the whole fight looks like 5 random guys using 3 chapter long cooldowns. You'd see one guy jump out and do a move and it apparently takes him 3 weeks before he shows up again while he's recovering. The fighting aspect might be better named Pinnacle Cooldowns. There was never any sense of flow because once you see one powerful guy, don't expect to see him again for another 3 weeks. Another major problem is that at no point does it seem believeable that Whitebeard's group had a chance to overcome the Marines let alone all the other guys they're fighting through. Even with Luffy's hero bailout, you can't seriously expect anyone to believe there was a reasonable way this is going to end well. Now, I don't mean reasonable as in the outcome. Anyone can tell that the good guys will win in Naruto, for example, but the bad guys actually seem to have adequate force for a victory. The Pinnacle Battle is supposed to be some kind of ultimate showdown, not a few guys running to their doom against certain death. I guess part of the point of this arc in OP is that Luffy's power is totally insignificant compared to the most powerful beings in his world, but honestly the only person who doesn't know that is Luffy himself.
Then there is HXH, where failed because it is not possible for the fighting to get any better except it didn't end there. The Ant arc features 5 of the top 5 most powerful entites in HXH, possibly top 6 (it's not clear if Netero is indeed the most powerful normal human being in HXH). To put things in DBZ terms, human aura power level varies from 20K-100K and this appears to be a hardcap that cannot be overcome by training, and then you suddenly got multiple guys with power level of 1 million showing up in this arc. At a conservative guess, the battles in this arc involve people who are at least 10 times stronger than human limitation and that's probably for the guys on the lower end of the top 5. Meryem might be a hundred times or more powerful than any human character can reach, and is flat out undefeatable by combat. Meryem even does the usual "omni powerful guy give enemy great handicap', and problem is, unlike most villians, he still wins every single time even while giving some totally unreasonable handicaps to his opponent. Also, for an arc that spans 8 or so volumes, the top 5 only fought against another top 5 twice (if you count Netero), and only one of those fight was meaningful (nobody was ever going to beat Meryem). I suspect Togashi figures he has an infinte capacity to come up with cool characters, so he doesn't care how he totally wasted his top 5 fighters in one arc while getting only one meaningful fight. But unless you go to the Bleach "Everyone can become stronger than Aizen after training hard for an year", he's not getting his top 5 fighters back. OP has the same problem with Ace and Whitebeard. Manga have a limited number of 'totally awesome character' that they can work with. That doesn't mean you have to recycle them forever, but you really should think about whether you've got your value out of your star character before sending him to his doom. Maybe Naruto gets too much mileage out of its character, but here I think it's better to be too safe than too daring.