So here we’ve got this Naruto who’s actually got some brains, and a Jiraiya who actually bothers teaching him, and he’s spent the whole time skip doing massive amounts of clone training. Obviously that means he’s going to stomp all over the bad guys and win with ease, right?
Um, not exactly.
One of the interesting things I've noticed in the course of writing Indomitable is that the power level of the Shippuden universe is actually way, way, waaay higher than you might think from watching a typical episode. Part of this is because the major characters are mostly ninja who prefer to operate discretely and conceal their powers as much as possible. But a lot of it's just lazy writing, like the way Naruto's power level varies wildly depending on who he's fighting. I swear that guy has to start every story arc as a genin and work his way back up all over again.
Now, there are good reasons why writers usually try to limit the power level of their characters, but in Shippuden the resulting story flow is pretty weird: fist fight, knife fight, trickery, fist fight, knife fight, explosions!, NUCLEAR DEVASTATION!, back to knife fights. Um, yeah, right. I think I'll stick with just having the characters actually use all their abilities in my stories.
But if I’m going to do that Naruto really has his work cut out for him. Consider a few of the things we’ve already seen in the Anime episodes:
- Deidera can apparently make an unlimited supply of animated explosives, and his biggest bombs seem to have a yield of several kilotons. At the same time, he’s sneaky enough to walk up to a pair of alert ANBU and pat them on the shoulder before they spot him. Clearly this guy can blow up Konoha any time he feels like it.
- In four-tail form Kyuubi!Naruto threw several attacks that, again, were obviously producing kiloton-range explosions. Orochimaru was more intrigued than concerned, despite the fact that he had to rez himself a few times. As near as I can tell the only reason he pulled out of that fight was that he doesn’t like fighting battles he isn’t guaranteed to win.
- Orochimaru can apparently resurrect himself, repeatedly, in the middle of a fight. Yeah, think about what that means if you actually take it seriously.
- Kakuzu and Hidan are the wimpy Akatsuki members. One of them can kill anyone if he tastes their blood, while the other is just an immortal super-ninja with all five elements, massive chakra and a huge repertoire of jutsu. What would they do if they weren’t being stupidly overconfident?
In the end, making Naruto a kage-level ninja at the start of the Shippuden timeline really just puts him on the same level as his opponents. His clone tricks make him nearly impossible to kill, but there are lots of ways he could lose a battle against opponents like these. Especially if they start taking him seriously.
Not that he isn’t going to kick ass and take names in the end, because that is kind of the point. But it isn’t going to be a cakewalk…
Good post. I joke with my friends that a lot of these episodes are obviously cutting out the scenes where someone is beating Naruto over the head with a crowbar, thereby leaving him too concussed to fight effectively in the actual battles.
ReplyDeleteNow a good example of a real ninja battle would be the Kakashi/Zabuza fight in chapter 5 of Akraa's Koudoukou: Fool's Gold (on fanfiction.net), a fic where a training accident winds up giving Naruto the enhanced vision needed to see what is really going on during Jounin battles.
Personally, I always assumed the depowering was deliberate because of the need for a series to progress in terms of power over time. If Naruto (And thereby his opponents) had a straight power progression at the rate we see at times in the show, by the time Shippuden reached the fight with Pein Naruto would be reaching Dragon Ball Z levels of collateral damage.
ReplyDeleteAnd that doesn't even cover the most important fact that so often gets skipped over!
ReplyDeleteA ninja's greatest weapon is Deception.
Historically. . .ninja masqueraded as *gardeners*, and other such things that the upper-class would ignore as a matter of course. They'd intentionally come up and distribute rumors of supernatural abilities to cover that up!
Well, in Konoha at least they don't rely entirely on the sensing ability of your average ANBU to detect intruders- they've got some sort of invisible-to-normal-ninja spherical detection field that starts at the walls and projects into the sky.
ReplyDeleteWhich is not to say Deidara couldn't simply deploy one of his larger bombs from just above the field, since he can, after all, fly himself. He's a one-man Enola Gay; all he needs is Jiraiya's Transparent Escape techique or an equivalent and he's a one-man B-2.
While Orochimaru IS fighting at a very high level against KN4 Naruto, its important to note that he's simultaneously talking smack about how Naruto still has some work to do to catch up to Sasuke, and that was since proven to be a blatant lie. It seems likely that Orochimaru was downplaying KN4's abilities, but the fact is that Naruto was only going to get stronger, and had every reason to kill Orochimaru. He had no reason to leave Naruto alive, and every reason to want him dead. If Orochimaru was capable of winning that fight, he wouldn't have run away.
I'd also point out that from Sasuke's fight with Itachi we learn that Oral Rebirth - the 'rez jutsu' - is apparently just some kind of extremely chakra-intensive Kawarimi variant, but since it's never made clear whether that actually precludes the healing of unforeseen, already-taken damage, it's pretty much a moot point. Other than the fact that it's named 'Oral Rebirth', which goes to show Orochimaru is even more of a creepy weirdo than he at first appears.
To me, the power variations make sense. High level techniques are dangerous, hard to prepare, and use a lot of chakra. Naruto could use the rasengan from the start on everybody, but it's not instant, it requires being close to the enemy, and the fancier forms like the rasenshuriken even more so and exhausting as well. So it always makes sense to throw a kunai at somebody and see what happens. If that solves the problem, no reason to use anything else.
ReplyDeleteOrochimaru in my view was losing badly. All the managed was to punch the 4-tails Naruto in the face, which didn't do anything useful and got him ripped in half. The Kusanagi did nothing, and he didn't seem to have anything that could harm Naruto.
He doesn't resurrect himself, he regenerates his body, and for that he needs to be alive enough to pull it off. His unique body means he can pull it off even when cut in half, but if Naruto managed to vaporize, burn or cut him in enough tiny pieces, he'd be dead for good. Plus all that stuff uses lots of charka, and the Kyuubi has a whole lot more of it.