Who wins? I tried watching the battle but got bored.
Superman.
I'm amazed at how overestimated superman is. He's susceptible to magic and I'm certain a strong enough telepath. Hell, i don't remember him having telekinesis. He should be long dead.
Well, to be fair I think there's a lot of evidence to support their "chi isn't magic" argument. But yeah...some of the other things they had going on didn't seem right to me. I'm disappointed with the results. To be fair, this fight has always been a question of which source material one chooses to look at. Superman's abilities are notoriously inconsistent depending on which writers were involved. Here are my main complaints:
1) They used source material for superman that I'm personally not familiar with, and that contradicts source material for him that I am. Obviously I can't expect them to tailor their estimates based on me personally, but it was very strange watching them make claims about superman based on material I hadn't seen that pretty blatantly contradicts material that I have seen.
2) They got some things strangely wrong about Goku. Biggest one: it was completely bizarre to the point of ludicrousness to suggest that Goku, of all people, would be surprised and confused at the notion of someone using pressure points on him. Another example: claiming that he couldn't breath in space. So far as I can tell that's based on a single comment by Freiza during the Namek saga of Dragonball Z. The problem is that it's demonstrated wrong on a number of occasions. Vegeta and Nappa are both shown casually hanging out in space during the series, Goku's father and various other Saiyan have been shown flying through and fighting in space...it's obvious that space is not a significant hinderance to members of his species. Maybe Goku himself is never explicitly shown to do this himself...but it it's pretty clear he can, and in fact even after Freiza said he couldn't, Goku was obviously not hindered when the planet blew up and actually did leave him in space. He just disappeared for a while and then showed up again. Obviously the vacuum of space didn't kill him, and once he realized it he just flew away. But then they also gave him powers that I'm not sure how they justified: for example the had him draw power directly from the sun for the spirit bomb even though I'm not aware of the spirit bomb ever having been used to draw power from anything other than living creatures. They had him use IT to teleport ahead to where Superman was going rather than where he was, even though IT explicitly required an energy source to lock onto for targetting. So some of the things they got wrong hurt him, some helped, some made little difference...but they did make a lot of mistakes.
3) While they drew on material from GT (which is the third of three Dragonball series) they appear to have used about the middle of the second series as the measuring point for Goku's power. The Snake Way and "40 tons" events happened about halfway through Z. That's relatively ancient out of the Dragonball timeline. But they apparently chose it, disregarding a lot of other material because it was one of the few instances of
numbers being given in Dragonball apart from power levels and the kaioken. Whereas for Superman they also used a set of "numbers" given at one point...from, once again...some specific source that I'm not familiar with and appears to contradict his generally demonstrable feats in material I have seen. Basically...it seems like they were comparing an obscure outlier of Superman to a very old mid-second-series Goku.
4) They appear to have completely glossed over fight speed mechanics. Seems like they just arbitrarily allowed the two to fight on equal terms. Superman is routinely seen taking punches from much slower fighters than Goku, whereas FTL combat is a regular and recurring theme in Dragonball. Even as early as original Dragonball, world tournament fights were shown to occur more quickly than the audience was capable of observing them, and throughout the various series it was common for some fighters to be unable to even see the attacks of other fighters because of speed.
5) While they were really trying to get the personalities right...and did some things well...some things they got just wrong. For example, I have a difficult time imagining Goku blowing up the Metropolis building with no regard for the people inside. I similarly have a difficult time imagining superman destroying the planet earth just to beat Goku. But they both did these things. It was out of character. They really should have stopped the fight and moved to somewhere where there wouldn't be civilian casualties.
6) It sort of felt like they were trying to "touch on everything quickly once" rather than actually have the two of them legitimately fight. They made mistakes for both characters here. For example, squeezing in the nyoi-bo and kinto-un, even though those were childhood toys that Goku pretty much stopped using s teenager because he'd outpaced their usefulness. And they had superman complaining about the "magic" of the nyoi-bo, but even I would say that no...it was pretty silly to suggest it would have had any special effect on him. Again...it was something that Goku mostly stopped bothering with by the end of original Dragonball, let alone Z or GT. It was essentially a stick that could elongate itself. Yes...maybe that's magic...but so what? Goku wouldn't have bothered with it and it shouldn't have had any effect on Superman anyway. But they were doing stuff like this just so they could say that they included everything.
7) They ran out of time. With Goku dead and the earth destroyed...the obvious next thing to happen would be for Superman to reverse time to undo the destruction of earth, and for Goku to teleport out from the afterlife and continue the fight. But they just let it end there instead. Granted, the video was already over 30 minutes long by that point, but neither of the fighters would have stopped at the point they decided to end the fight.
EDIT:
Oh, this is interesting: can't confirm, but according to some other post-analysis being done by others, apparently the some of the feats Death Battle used to based superman's strength were from sources in which Superman had spent years in the sun accumulating energy, which is why they were so much above and beyond what he's usually capable of. Whereas in the fight video he spent at most 5-10 minutes in the sun. So...huge discrepancy.
EDIT:
Nappa not Radditz
Author
Topic: Deathbattle! Superman vs Goku (Read 14710 times)