Capeworld Comics

First, thank you G1 for another W, I’ll put it with the rest. You guys actually thought they were going to make Geese 5 times the speed of light because one obscure KOF character “moved in time with her light based attacks.” How PREDICTABO of you.

When someone spazzes out at a rave and starts waving around glowsticks, do you think they’re moving faster than the speed of light?

What am I saying? Of course you do.

You guys make it too easy sometimes.

 

The Fighter Previews

 

Oh god. Whoever writes these needs to be fired or circulated out. Elon Musk jokes for Heihachi? Wiz going to mad scientist college? “Hey Wiz I heard you can buy respect next to that dollar pizza store you like.”

Ew. If this was the Apollo they’d be dragged off with a cane.

My complaint is the same complaint Death Battle has heard before from several people–we want less jokes, more character discussion. We’re watching for the characters, not the really, really cringey humor.

 

The Fight

 

I had a feeling I was going to like this one the moment the fight preview had Geese open his mouth and Engrish come out.

For the most part, I wasn’t disappointed. The fight was generally good. The VA for Heihachi was on point, the perfect old Karate master, and the VA for Geese would have been on point…if Swan had reigned in his love for catchphrases a bit more. It wasn’t as bad as Obi-Wan vs Kakashi where every single word out of Obi-Wan’s mouth was a prequel meme, but it got close. They even did an an entire bit based around PREDICTABO. I love that they fully committed to the Engrish bit, but they should have had him say more original lines. It felt really forced.

Also, the “that would violate anti-trust laws” doesn’t work as a joke when the Mishima Zaibatsu is already transparently a monopolistic trust straight out of a William Gibson novel. Whoever the writer is (Swan), they aren’t as clever as they think they are.

The fight did a good job communicating their takes on the characters. Geese has more flashy moves but Heihachi is just a brick that can tank them all. I’m off mixed feelings about the ending. On one hand, I do appreciate it being a double fake-out. You think Geese is going to take a classic fall into the lava but he does something at the end to make it more interesting than that. On the other hand, I wanted the fight to end with Geese being combo’ed into the volcano only for Heihachi to grab his arm and consider sparing him as a worthy opponent and potential asset for the Zaibatsu only for Geese to knock his hand away and accept defeat as he did with Terry. It would have been a unique ending to a fight that paid homage to both characters. But when Swan writes someone to lose, they lose hard. No one that dies in a Swan fight dies with dignity outside maybe Cable. He had Dracula go Deliverance on Ganon.

Still, it was a creative kill, and in some ways something Death Battle has never done before as a kill. I wouldn’t be surprised if it made it on a “best Death Battle kills” list…if not for one thing. There’s an animated closeup of Geese that’s really, really bad. Like Bush-era Newgrounds animation bad.

I feel bad for the animator, because he did a great job with the sprites he was given to work with. But then along comes Swan and goes “YOU KNOW THAT SCENE FROM BAREFOOT GEN? I FUCKING LOVE THAT SCENE FROM BAREFOOT GEN. GET IT DRAWN!”

It would have been so much better if they had left it out.

 

The Music

 

Kings of Iron was good in the sense that Heat Haze Shadow and Soy Sauce for Geese was good. It sounds great, but I think it samples just a bit too much, especially from Heat Haze Shadow. It’s less like Heat Haze Shadow meets Soy Sauce for Geese and more like Heat Haze Shadow with some of the percussive elements from Soy Sauce for Geese mixed it. The song favored one fighter way more than the other, and that’s the same problem I have with Ikari! and Teenage Mutant Ninja Power.

The best part was how the penultimate portion of the song took the beats from Soy Sauce for Geese and arranged them to sound like a Tekken combo. It’s too bad the fight didn’t capitalize on it by having Heihachi combo Geese into the volcano. A nice slow five hit combo would have been great, especially when it was set up with them becoming so tired that they leaned on each other.

 

The Research

 

First thing: “Takuma is fodder compared to Geese!”

Uh, no. I know they wanted Takuma to be to Geese what Jack bots are to Heihachi, but he’s not. Mr. Karate didn’t work for Geese (really Mr. Big, who in turn worked for Geese) because he respected Geese’s power like Billy Kane. He worked for the mob because the mob threatened to shoot his kids.

It works like this: Ryo (the Art of Fighting guy Dan Hibiki parodied) kick Geese’s ass in Art of Fighting 2. During the KOF ’97 ending where Takuma blew a killsat beam away from King, Ryo and Robert look at him doing it and are shocked, which implies that when Ryo beat Takuma in Art of Fighting, Takuma was holding back, which is likely since Ryo is his son and Takuma was ashamed of being Mr. Karate.

Mr. Karate would smoke Geese like a ham. Just because you work for someone doesn’t mean you’re weaker than them. I’m pretty sure Dana White isn’t going to step into the octagon anytime soon.

Someone didn’t do their job and their name is next to the research credit. Someone looked at a wiki, saw that Mr. Karate indirectly worked for Geese, and thought he was like Billy Kane.

Next, some credit where credit is due. I do like how they didn’t make either KOF or Tekken’s killsats light speed. Color me shocked that they actually looked at how fast the beams travel on screen to figure out how fast the beams travel. Did someone find Strunt’s pills? If they keep this up, maybe we can move away from this era where all that glitters is light speed.

I was also shocked that they didn’t bring Akuma into the equation with his juicy island sinking feats. I thought for sure they would since Akuma’s existence is pretty important to Tekken 7 and the numerous times they’ve mentioned JLA/Avengers shows that in some cases crossovers are not off the table.

Heihachi won with just Tekken feats. I think we just had a tiny Ben vs Hal moment here given how KOF is often wanked as top-tier in terms of fighting game power levels and now Heihachi, who is below Jin and Kazuya and Akuma, just beat Geese and by extension Verse and the top of the KOF power pyramid.

So it officially goes Street Fighter>Tekken>KOF. Ouch for KOF.

Okay. Now for what predictably disappointed me.

Heihachi’s big feat was Jack’s Iron Giant parody ending from Tekken Tag Tournament 2, which is a joke ending from an explicitly non-canon game. So that’s some bullshit. Geese’ big feat was Verse creating a storm, which is gooseshit.

They did that stupid thing they do where they take how much energy it would take to create something and extrapolate it into how much energy a character can attack with. You know the film Dragonslayer? The film’s dragon vs the rancor from ROTJ was the first battle I ever did for this site. In that film, the wizard warms up for his fight with the dragon by summoning comets and creating storms that involved moving so many clouds so fast Strunt would have seizures trying to calc the gigatons of energy involved.

The best thing the does against the dragon is a lightning bolt.

Now why am I bringing this up? I’m bringing it up because it demonstrates my point that the energy that would, under real world physics, be required to perform ability A (summon a storm) does not necessarily translate

When comparing characters, look at what they actually do, not what you think they should do because X, Y, and Z.

Verse made a storm, okay. Does he ever direct this storm to murder anyone or does it just stick in the background while you fight him? Does he ever take the energy from this storm and use it to fire a kamehameha?

If its just a storm, its just a storm.

It’s bad that Geese and Heihachi got awful scaling calcs, but its really only a symptom of the underlying rot within Death Battle–it isn’t Death Battle anymore, its Setting Battle. The fight was billed as Heihachi vs Geese and instead we got Jack bots vs Verse. And that’s a shame, because the characters are cool and have done cool stuff. The closest they come to actually analyzing the fighters is in their fighting styles and experience, but even then they say its secondary compared to their scaled stats.

It’s a shame. Geese and Heihachi have cool feats all their own they could have talked about, and if you directly compare them the winner is obvious. On some level, they’re even aware of it. At the end, Boomstick says that it wasn’t close “because one throws people off cliffs, and one gets thrown by people off cliffs,” only for Wiz to to go “No! It was close! Look at these scaling numbers!” Death Battle came dangerously close to admitting a fact I pointed out in my prediction–Geese died (or at the very least was incapacitated) by falling off a building while Heihachi took a blast that sent him flying for miles and survived.

They could have made that comparison and saved Jack vs Verse for Jack vs Verse.