TGQVS Retrospective
Kaiser: Oh, hello there. I guess we’re doing this now. Many other blogs are doing retrospectives of their work in 2024, so we thought it would be a good idea to look back and talk about the content of this blog. Not only 2024, but a bit of 2023 too, because we started it back then. Since this blog is owned by Strunton and I, we take turns in choosing what matchup will be covered at a time. Because of that, each blog post will be commented on by whoever had the most involvement in it. It’s funny that sometimes people refer to TGTQVS as “Strunton’s blog” or (more uncommonly) “Kaiser’s blog” when it was born because we wanted to have a space to cover our ideas as a duo. I guess it’s because we’re not as big as other DB fan blogs like Bang’s Blogs or G1^2, so people don’t know who “The Guys™” are supposed to be. The name of this blog doesn’t seem to make much sense, but it’s basically an inside joke between us about when we left the DBJ server (I don’t even remember why). Yet, we’re still active in the community, servers, and making blogs. The name just stuck and now it’s too late. Not that I mind, it’s a funny little title. Maybe one day we WILL be the guys that quit versus to do something else. Maybe it will happen to YOU too. While that doesn’t happen, let’s take some time to appreciate what we were able to achieve together these past 1 year and a third. Enjoy!
Character Analysis: Copen Kamizono
(Flip - Also used on this blog)
Strunton: All the images are dead. RIP. Anyway though, Gunvolt is a series I enjoy playing, so I figured “Hey. Why not make a blog about one of my favorite characters from the series?” Needless to say, I had a lot of fun going through the games again to make this blog. It also gave me a good excuse to finally play the Blaster Master Zero series as well (good series btw).
(Flip, he inverted the order, grr)
Kaiser: All the images are dead here too, lol, hence why I asked Flip for a new thumbnail. This was the first versus blog we did together, and it was certainly an interesting experience. Ideon had basically nothing for research outside of a bunch of calcs on Narutoforums, and Gunbuster had some too, in addition to decent enough coverage on VSBW. So, we had to basically do everything over for both to see if it all checked out. We organized this on a group chat, but fortunately there wasn’t much to research or discuss. I started on Ideon, but Serge finished it alongside Mau, and Strunt handled Gunbuster. I had to do all the calcs for Ideon, and recalc some stuff for Gunbuster, plus a single Diebuster feat that everyone should scale to. I remember that everyone was very much surprised by the result, since Ideon had quite the reputation in the niche of mecha VS circles. The idea that Ideon was universal, or that destroying it would nuke the universe instantly and kill everyone was a common misconception that a lot of people had… and that we found was complete nonsense. Not only that, but we also found some scaling avenues that could arguably make Gunbuster much stronger than initially thought. That added to a large advantage in skill and hax made Noriko and Kazumi the surprise winners of this fight. About the matchup itself, I like it quite a bit. Ideon’s only popular matchup at the time was Eva 01, and while I do get it, it never hit fully for me. Sure you have the common themes and the obvious legacy, but the contrast in Ideon VS Gunbuster elevates it for me. An alien machine that brings about the end of civilization against humanity’s last hope against the cosmic horrors in the form of a giant robot. It can go super high in scale as both robots are very capable of cosmic destruction with their arsenals, and the overall power clash is super cool as both series have similar space battles. There’s also the obvious rivalry/legacy aspect, as the director of Gunbuster, Hideaki Anno, is a huge fan of Yoshiyuki Tomino, the director of Ideon. This is made clearer with Evangelion’s overt Ideon homages, but Aim for the Top also has a lot of little nods to the Space Runaway. Gunbuster’s most popular idea currently is… Mazinkaiser for whatever reason. I really don’t get or vibe with it. Mazinkaiser is an ant next to Gunbuster and can’t go to space, so I don't know what's the appeal of the fight here. This blog certainly could use a remake, and I wouldn’t mind. Showing how cool this matchup is to more people would be interesting. Maybe the result can change upon recalcs? Who knows. Cool idea either way.
Flip: Gatecrashing a bit to talk on the thumbnail, I imagined Gunbuster was more popular and therefore should come first. I have no idea which one is tho, they are only talked about in specific circles. Noriko is a big deal to me cuz not only is she a really cool character but also inspired one of my all time favorite characters (that is soon to star on the show), Simon the Digger. Anyway, if you ever redo the blog she's first .
(Flip)
Strunton: Most people reading this probably know that Sonic is my favorite series of all time, so I definitely had a blast making this. I also felt like Tails was a character that didn’t get much representation in VS circles, so it was also fun to highlight gadgets and abilities Tails had that many people probably didn’t know about.
(Mau)
Strunton: This is the first magic girl match on this blog and I’m sure it won’t be the last (hint, hint). This was definitely an interesting match to tackle. Pretty Cure has almost no representation in the VS community and a lot of Sailor Moon arguments on average are heavily rooted in hearsay. I don’t think many Sailor Moon matches I’ve seen take the anime into account so it was interesting to see what that had to offer as well. I remember the first thing we wanted to do when planning this match was to ignore multipliers all together. Not only are there just too many to keep track of, but we felt like multipliers can be argued as subjective and we didn’t want this fight to be a stomp for Beauty. If we took the multipliers at face value, then she would’ve been millions of times stronger than Mercury and that’s no fun. The victor may have stayed the same but I did find the match more interesting to research without taking multipliers into account because that essentially made their stats even. I think the biggest surprise was learning that Beauty could break out of Mercury’s Hyperspatial Sphere. I had completely forgotten about the Pretty Cures breaking out of Joker’s Sloth Balls.
It was also a huge relief that Black Shulk, Joshiki, and Vivi were able to assist with Mercury and Beauty’s research, especially on Beauty’s side. Pretty Cure is about to hit 1000 episodes. No way was I researching that by myself. Lol.
Kaiser: This was the first time Mau did art for us. The thumbnail you're seeing right now is a redraw of his first piece for our blogs. He has come a long way and I'm happy we could help him exercise his skills.
Kamille Bidan VS Hikaru Ichijyo
(Marilon)
Kaiser: The first blog of 2024, and it’s another mecha blog chosen by yours truly. Admittedly, this one is a MESS. It is pretty impressive we got it done, however. A single person researching most of UC Gundam is kinda nuts, but Serge pulled through. I researched Macross, and other members took care of straggler shows and OVAs. I did EVERY SINGLE CALC in this blog. It was kinda painful. Not all of them hold up, I think the numbers would look quite different nowadays. With that said, we kinda saw the result coming a mile away, but it was nice putting some numbers and getting a general gist of the stats in both franchises. Absurdly consistent relativistic Gundam is based. The matchup is pretty excellent. In my opinion it’s the best Gundam matchup by a lot, and I know it's Flip’s favorite too. Great connections, perfect aesthetic and vibe, the one and true rivalry for the Gundam franchise. It does everything you’d want for an 80s mecha matchup that pays homage to the most iconic series of the real robot subgenre.
I’d love to remake this one too, as I think I could have done a better job in multiple areas, including expanding on the verdict.
Side note, mentioning that this is Flip's and I’s favorite Gundam matchup wasn't random, since it was because of this blog that I met him. He came to my DMs asking about what renders I used to make my thumbnail and was generally happy that someone else liked mecha anime in the community and was making blogs dedicated to the genre. It took some time for him to realize we were both Brazilian, it was kinda funny.
(T0m)
Strunton: Me choosing to do a blog about psychopathic girls? Surely people that know me well aren’t surprised about that. Rena VS Yuno is a match I really like and have looked into repeatedly for years now, so of course it was going to get a blog eventually. Needless to say, I had a lot of fun making this with Ed, T0m, and Ishi. On average, fights that are more “grounded” tend to interest me more than figuring out how many universes someone can destroy. I think the biggest surprise when researching this match was learning everything Rena’s Role Cards are capable of. I wasn’t surprised to see that they had typical RPG haxes like healing or paralysis, but I was surprised to learn that one of them could seal away powers, which uh… pretty much the perfect counter to Yuno’s god powers, which have been sealed before by Murumuru. It didn’t help Yuno that Rena was just as strong and consistently faster. Either way, this fight was fairly close. It’s probably the closest blog we’ve made so far.
(Kaiser)
Kaiser: This blog was a big deal for us for several reasons. It was when we decided to create our server, and the first time Flip did our graphic design stuff. This was also the first “mainstream” mecha matchup that we covered, and it brought some more attention to the blog as a result. It was super easy to research this, as both series have been prematurely cancelled and have only 46 episodes in total. With that said, we weren’t ready for the result. At all. Megas XLR had quite a reputation in versus forum debates back then. “They instantly win everything because toonforce”, “they have a plot button”, “they can do anything”, etc. It also had a VSBW page that ranked them at multi-continental and FTL. Pretty impressive if compared to the only calcs we found for Sym-Bionic Titan on NarutoForums and VSBW, which capped at Island and Massively Hypersonic. With further research and evaluation, we found that Megas’ calculations were extremely inflated and relied on incorrect assumptions, and that Titan had some hidden busted feats. For every planetary threat that Megas encountered, there was always some context that stopped from scaling to it. For every MFTL+ travel feat, everything pointed at reactions not scaling to their flight speed at all. Meanwhile, Titan was much faster in both reactions and flight, and had a random (and extremely blatant) energy mass conversion feat that granted them large country to continental levels of power, placing them much above the best we found for Megas, which was large island. At the end of our research, Sym-Bionic Titan simply had everything it needed to win. Much better stats by any metric and much better combat skill and teamwork. Not gonna lie, it positively surprised me, as I grew a much bigger appreciation for the show upon a rewatch. This is one of the few times where the “serious” character of the matchup just beats the wackier one, and it’s kinda funny it happened with something with a reputation of being unbeatable as big as Megas’. I’m very fond of the work we put on this blog, and certainly would put it as one of the highlights of TGTQVS in 2024.
(Strunton)
Strunton: Originally I wanted to do Metal Sonic VS Cell but felt that choosing Bass would’ve been the better option. Had I known that Metal VS Cell would’ve blown up the way it did, I would’ve stuck with doing Cell lol. Regardless though, despite a few hiccups here and there, I did enjoy making this blog. I remember the biggest debate being whether or not Metal’s Overlord or super form scaled to most of the feats that mattered. At the time, that was a hotly debated topic but I think most of the community in general has come around and accepted Metal Sonic being on par with Super Sonic. That’s not to say that Bass didn’t have his arguments. Depending on what you accept, you could argue that Bass blitzes and dura negs. More times than not though, we believed Metal had the better wincons. Part of me is kind of glad we did the match back then because if we did it now, there probably wouldn’t have been much discussion, especially considering the main Bass sider back then now thinks Metal wins.
(Kaiser)
Kaiser: Ok, this blog is great. It was super fun to work on, and it probably was one of the first rematch blogs that sparked interest in everyone wanting to do one now (correct me if I’m wrong, I’m kinda talking out of my ass here). The original Death Battle episode for this matchup has a cool fight, but the analysis is so faulty that it begs the question of who would win with modern research. To the surprise of almost no one, Ryu absolutely steamrolled. Researching this was relatively easy but… kind of unorthodox. You’d think one would only have to research Ninja Gaiden and Strider, but it goes deeper than that. DoA, Koei Tecmo crossovers, Street Fighter stuff… we had to look over a lot of arguments for both. Thankfully, most were easily accessible. The only problem we had was finding a specific archive for a Warriors Orochi Japanese Website that may have indicated that the series is directly canon to Ninja Gaiden. If that sounds weird to you, give the blog a read, seriously. We were mostly expecting Ryu to be cosmic, but we weren’t expecting Strider to come off that short in comparison. Some calculations on DeviantArt put some feats at Multi-Continental to Moon level, and some Discord ones reached even Large Planet. As we found, it was no good. No real scaling chain, perspective issues, incorrect assumptions, you name it. By the end of the blog, Strider was multi-city block. At best. With very generous assumptions. His speed had a good low end, and a high end that massively blitzed Ryu’s finite ends, but as we found out, Ryu’s high end was MUCH crazier. You see, when you read a random lore fragment in Ninja Gaiden 2 you usually don’t expect multiple universal statements and a potential immeasurable feat. Not that Ryu even needed that. He had several feats that put him massively above Strider in AP, and Hiryu’s only durability negation option was found out to be fake. Yeah… A funny side effect of this matchup being a gigantic stomp is that it opened the way for more Ryu Hayabusa ideas. Dante and Simon Belmont in particular came up a lot, and I really like them, with Simon being my current favorite matchup for Hayabusa. On a tangent, we found some bizarre stuff on the Ninja Gaiden wiki. Like, someone edited it to have infinite higher dimensional scaling for whatever reason. Give it a read, it's nuts. Some people questioned the high ends, to which I responded with a follow-up blog, but eh, not necessary for this matchup.
Side note, this was the first time I worked on a blog with door-kun, and she became a frequent collaborator and very dear friend of mine since.
(Flip)
Kaiser: This was a simple defense and expansion of the high end (universal and immeasurable) cosmic Ninja Gaiden stat arguments that the blog proposed. Honestly, I think I did a good job. It’s never being accepted by the majority and I still had to deal with very annoying “debunks” of the feats, but eh, what can I do? Ryu absolutely didn’t need these arguments to stomp Strider, and they make other matchups more fun to talk about (Dante, Simon Belmont). At the end of the day, it's a somewhat vague feat that’s up to interpretation. I’m objectively right, though, Ryu beats Dante.
(Kaiser)
Strunton: This was definitely an interesting match. Initially, I believed that Alita was going to win with medium to high difficulty, and…well, you can still argue that maybe she does, but the power of bad translations really made this one of the more difficult matches to determine. You see, the scans that are often used to argue island level Alita turned out to be a mistranslation. Once more, we also learned that Alita’s FTL speeds only applied to her cyberspace body, not her physical one. Ultimately, we determined that the victor probably came down to whether or not you scaled Alita to Tunpo’s black hole, which…(shrug). That’s up to you to decide. Ultimately, I am glad that the match was way closer than we thought it would be initially. Alita is the superior waifu though and Kaiser knows it.
Kaiser: Covering NieR was cool, Replicant is my favorite game of all time and I love Automata to death. It was also the first time I fully read Alita, it was cool. Gotta say though, First Order wasn’t as good as the original manga. That one has impeccable Sega Genesis energy, it’s great. Don’t feel as confident on the result of this one currently. Maybe a second look is warranted when this matchup inevitably becomes an official Death BAttle episode episode. I was happy to give 2B a fighting chance at all, as many people just assumed Alita stomped because they read “solar system” in her VSBW profile.
Character Analysis: Haruko Haruhara
(Flip)
Strunton: As you’ve probably noticed by now, while Kaiser is making a blog that I don’t have much involvement with, I’m usually using that time to make a character blog on the side. Also, fun fact, but this is actually a remake of a character blog I made with Ultra years ago. Because of the release of FLCL Grunge and Shoegaze, I felt like the blog could use a revamp. I also really like FLCL and the series is like 18 eps, so it was easy to get through it. Unfortunately, this meant that I would have to watch FLCL Grunge, but sometimes sacrifices have to be made. Lol.
(Kaiser)
Kaiser: The big one. The biggest one. What can I say? I love this idea a lot. It’s one of my favorite matchups of all time and it was a great joy to make a blog on it. Research had some hurdles, and it was the longest we ever took to put something out, but it all went well in the end. Mau was researching all of Getter Robo for a few months before we started this one, so that was a huge help. My idea initially was to only use the classic base versions of the robots, but we ended up going with composites. Basically all Getters against all Mazingers, within a certain limitation of pilots. I was convinced to take a different approach by analyzing specific versions against each other, and then finish by seeing who would win between Mazinger ZERO and Getter Emperor. Rather than Frankensteining them, we’d isolate each model and put them against the opponent’s equivalent. It was a good decision, as it allowed for a pretty different type of Verdict that I hadn’t seen in blogs before. Mazinger Z had very little coverage in versus, just a few calcs and pretty barebones composite VSBW profiles. Getter Robo had no calcs, and old deleted VS wiki profiles too. A few VSBW derivative profiles here and there, nothing really indicative of deep research. So it meant we actually had to look through everything, especially Getter. Thankfully, Getter research was done thanks to Mau, and Toei Mazinger had decent respect threads to start. Naturally, we still looked over Toei Mazinger, researched his manga, Mazinkaiser, and finally ZERO. I had to do 99% of the calculations on this blog too, but they weren't too bad. The best feats each version had were relatively easy to calculate. And of course, the strongest versions barely needed calcs at all outside of some speed ones. I was happy with putting some numbers on specific versions of them, though, it was fun to discover what they scaled to. I wasn't expecting Toei Mazinger to hit multi-continental at all, and planet Shin Getter was cool. ZERO, however, was the highlight. I wasn't expecting him to be so cracked. I was a bit disappointed to find out Emperor stood little chance as ZERO took every advantage by a large margin, especially considering his God form, but it was cool regardless. My favorite part of working on this was writing out the Legacy sections. Since this matchup has an absurd amount of legacy and historical significance behind it, I decided to elaborate on why it's such a big deal. And of course, explain why Mazinger and Getter are so important. This ended up being one of the most well received parts of the blog, and certainly made me more confident about letting myself loose a bit more when talking about the passion I have for matchups and characters. Talking about what inspired both characters and what they ended up influencing was fun, and I’m glad people enjoyed learning about them. Maybe I got them to remember these old robots from the 70s every time they think about their favorite Megazord, or about how Evangelion is their favorite anime. This took a lot of time to get made, but it paid off. Outside of regular blog problems, I was going through some heavy stuff in my personal life that demotivated me from working on versus for a while. Thankfully, we could still deliver a finished, if a little rough, product. When it came out, I was very surprised at the overwhelming praise Mazingetter got in the community. People were talking about how it was easily one of the best blogs of the year alongside SlenDako and KanEren. It was certainly a risky passion project, as Mazinger Z and Getter Robo aren't exactly that notorious or popular among people of this community, but this convinced me I can put my ideas out there to good reception if enough dedication and love are put into making them come true. Who knows, maybe we'll get more mecha matchups in the future with similar treatment. There are other characters with titanic legacies that could use coverage, and I have some favorite matchups for some of them.
Side note, Minniez was the MVP of the Mazinger ZERO research. They basically had almost everything ready, we just had to calc and revise some stuff. Super cool to work with them. Tony was also of great help, making a lot of gifs and clips for us. It was great to find more people that shared so many interests with me. It was also the first time I commissioned art for a matchup. We had some commissioned drawings before (for both Metal Sonic VS Bass and Ryu VS Strider), but it was from Flip's own initiative. We’ll probably do it again in the future. Speaking of art, Mau did a LOT of art for this blog. It was crazy. You can tell he's very passionate about this matchup.
Alexander Anderson VS Nicholas D. Wolfwood
(T0m)
Strunton: Long ago, in a world called DeviantArt, I researched and wrote Vash vs Alucard. Since then, I always wondered how their priest themed rivals would fare against each other. I figured it would be way closer than Vash vs Alucard was, and indeed it was. Anderson having the edge in strength was probably the biggest surprise for most people working on the blog. After all, Hellsing is kind of infamous for losing a lot in Vs and Wolfwood is from Trigun, a series full of planet busters. Personally, I can’t say that I was surprised that Wolfwood still won despite lacking the physical strength advantage. Trigun in general is a faster series than Hellsing, and Wolfwood’s weapons have consistently harmed characters that have way better durability feats than Anderson. I’m pretty sure that’s because these Trigun characters aren’t bulletproof but neither is Anderson.
I think the funniest counter is that it is 100% in character for Wolfwood to aim for the heart even if he didn’t know that doing so would neg Anderson’s regeneration. As a whole, I had a lot of fun with this one. Hopefully I can do another blog on Trigun that would touch on the more powerful beings of the series. I am interested in an Alucard blog but I don’t know what matches he has that would be interesting at this point. Makima? Who knows.
Kaiser: I hate Hellsing feats. Also this blog got delayed a lot, it was originally supposed to come out on Halloween, but could only drop in December. The final product was rad, though. It was cool looking into Hellsing and giving the series a proper modern analysis with working calc links. Still, Alucard’s blood ocean feat is the most annoying calculation I’ve ever had to deal with. And it wouldn’t even change the result of anything. I want to do other Hellsing and Trigun ideas in the future. Since Wolfwood doesn’t fully scale to Vash or have the same abilities of a Plant, Vash wasn’t fully looked into and given a detailed analysis outside of the feats Wolfwood scaled to. Maybe he could use a blog. Maybe we could do it. I wonder against who :^)
In Production: Mewtwo VS Shadow the Hedgehog
(Flip)
Strunton: Assuming that we stay on schedule, this blog should be dropping some time this month. I will say that so far, the debate hasn’t been as hectic as I thought it would’ve been. Both sides have been pretty chill and there’s a lot of interesting arguments for both. I will also say that we found things for both characters that I never knew about. Hopefully, people will enjoy the end product regardless of who wins.
Kaiser: Since this matchup blew up because of the Death Battle rematch poll thingy, we figured we could give it the “definitive” treatment here. Since 2024 was the Year of Shadow, it’s the best time to cover his most popular and likely matchup. The last blog that covered a huge Pokémon VS Sonic fight got really heated reactions, but we don’t feel discouraged from that given we know how the fanbases are. But hey, it’s gonna come out as good as it gets.
In Production: ??? Battle Royale
Strunton: This blog has been in production for about 5 months now and it’s been an extremely fun one. For this match, we are including everything, and I do mean “everything.” Cartoons, games, comics, the Nicktoon crossover games, you name it. As far as progress as goes, Jimmy and Timmy are nearly complete. All that’s really left is researching Spongebob and Danny, which shouldn’t take long given that these characters already have extensive research, unlike Jimmy and Timmy, and I’ve researched Danny plenty of times by name. Give us about 2 or 3 more months and this blog should be finished. No matter what this blog argues though, never forget who the strongest Nickelodeon character truly is.
Conclusion and what’s to come in 2025
Kaiser: I think we had a good run so far. The quality of the blogs only got higher as we got more collaborators, and I’m more confident in my blog making skills. I hope 2025 sees our quality increase even further. For this year, I’m thinking of going more… personal with my choices. As Mazingetter paid off so well, I think I can afford to cover matchups and characters that mean a lot to me, and explain why they matter more often. Expect a banger 2025 trailer with many revealed characters to drop with Mewtwo VS Shadow. Until then, happy holidays and have a-
Flip: It’s 2025 already, dude.
Kaiser: WHY DOES EVERYTHING WE DO GET DELA-
I'm so excited!
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