Are Power Levels really a "Big Joke"

[Perfectionist-Cell]

I was watching some back to back Screwattack videos and while I was watching Goku vs Superman 2 they said power levels are no more than a big joke.


Are they really that bad?I thought power levels could be use determine someone's strength speed and durability.The only reason I thought they might have been a joke is because they way they were introduced.The names and earthlings hidden their true power so of course the villains would under estimate them.

This is just my opinion I thought they were an interesting part of the plot if we had official power levels after Frieza arc it could clear up some problems.

[dbgtFO]

They are a good indicator of characters' strength, but then the scouters become obsolete, because Goku and co. could just hide their power from it, making potential opponents overconfident and open to attacks like we saw with the Ginyu Force.
Toriyama has only ever said, he thought it was a good way to show characters' strengths and such, whether or not he intended is a joke is speculation.

[DBZGTKOSDH]

They are not. The battle powers have always been the main part of one's strength, up until Boo arc, Super, and GT. It is the scouters that are useless, because they are not fast enough to read the change of one's BP when he changes it quickly (like Goku & Trunks did), and the scouter users also have the habit to rely on the numbers they see too much, which is bad when their opponents hide even more power, so ki sensing is much better. Kanzenshuu just twisted the scouters being useless to the battle powers being useless for the ScrewAttack's Death Battle, for some reason.

[TheGreatness25]

lol They are a big joke. They are easily suppressed and overcome. Need to raise your power/ Take your clothes off! Need some more? Charge an attack. Need something even more? Here's a transformation. Here's another transformation.

LOGICALLY, they're a good indicator of one's power, but they don't serve any purpose. It's too easily altered. There's no clear indicator. And then they were ridden of.

[Gyt Kaliba]

Power levels, in terms of numbers, had a point only from the beginning of the Saiyan arc, through the end of the Freeza arc (unless you really want to throw in that '5' reading for Trunks into the mix). From anything before that and anything after, it was simply a matter of 'feeling' one's power in a more general way, and even there it's far from perfect. Characters are constantly hiding or revealing their true power at the whim of the plot.

So yeah, in the grand scheme of things, they're pretty un-important. They're just one other factor of the plot.

[Herms]

Their function in the plot is to show that people who rely on them too much miss the forest for the trees, which tends to be their undoing. See also Gero and his calculations, Babidi and his energy meter, and that punch machine they use at the tournament preliminaries.

(Seriously, can you imagine fans trying to "calculate" the punch machine score for every character in every story arc?)

[KonohaKillas]

They were more easy to follow earlier on and at a certain point the numbers became lost on me beginning after Freeza arc.

[Polyphase Avatron]

Even Toriyama realized they were a bad idea. That's one of the few things ScrewAttack got right.

[SaiyanZ]

Yes and no. The initial reading like Trunks's PL of 5 by that random Freeza soldier is a joke since it doesn't say anything about Trunks's true power, but something like Kaioken Goku showing a PL of 180k to Ginyu can be taken seriously since it shows Goku's true strength (Freeza in his 1st form telling Nail that he has a PL of 530k is also an example of this).

[Cipher]

As in the numerical Power Levels introduced in the Saiyan arc? For a brief portion of the series, they're used earnestly to help convey relative strengths to the reader. By the end of the Namek arc, though, it's clear that relying on them has badly hurt Freeza's forces and that the series doesn't stand by those kinds of numerical estimates in terms of who has more potential than whom.

So, yes, kiiiiiind of a "big joke."

[Xeztin]

In my opinion, they should have never went up to the thousand's right off the bat and beyond, I think it would have made a big difference if a human's average power level was 5, while Saiyan's were around 30-50 depending on how hard they train. and Super Saiyan multiplied it to a 100 or so. I think it get's ridiculous when it shot up to millions, I think the whole point of God Ki not being readable is because it shot up so high. It's like having a Super Saiyan 10, that's how crazy out of control it gets to me.

[FoolsGil]

The whole point of power levels was to show that they didn't matter at all. So yeah. they are.

[Neo-Makaiōshin]

Powerlevels are what determines how strong a character is and who is the stronger (albeit this =/= who wins between the fighters), they are not a big joke. However, what is a "Big Joke" is when it comes to the numbers, that´s what you could say being a joke, but powerlevels as a whole are not.

[dbzfan7]

They are a joke in the sense numbers are never to be taken seriously. They can change so easily that they're unreliable. So it's better to not have numbers at all. What's not a joke is strength which determines who has more power. Skill used to be somewhat of a factor, but now it's meaningless.

[Lord Beerus]

Once Future Trunks had been shown to have a power level of 5, and with that went on to slaughter all of Freeza's soldiers effortlessly, that was for me the moment when Toriyama practically told the readers of the manga, "See, battle powers are stupid. Now put away the calculator and enjoy the rest of my drawings."

[The Monkey King]

Well PLs were never stopped entirely in the manga.

#16 could sense power levels but never stated them numerically. Also it was shown in the Buu saga that due to wearing a scouter for so long, even after gaining the ability to sense ki Vegeta still measured PLs numerically in his head

Chapter: 461 (DBZ 267), P4.6, P5.4-6
Goku: “It’s a ki…! A huge ki has appeared…! Majin Boo has finally come out…”
Vegeta: “Fuffuffuh…Majin Boo, huh?...Here I was wondering what kind of amazing guy he would be, and he’s got this kind of battle power number?...I thought so…Kakarot, you and I have now become too strong…By a wide margin! By his nature, Kaioshin is supposed to be someone tremendous, but have you ever once thought that he was incredible? Quite the opposite, it's Kaioshin who’s been bewildered…Majin Boo is fearsome from Kaioshin’s perspective, but from ours he’s not so much…”

Also didn't Toriyama just say he made PLs simply as an easy way for the reader and himself to understand how powerful characters were in relation to one another.

So they weren't really, I think Toriyama couldn't be bothered to make more numbers.

[Herms]

Powerlevels are what determines how strong a character is and who is the stronger (albeit this =/= who wins between the fighters), they are not a big joke. However, what is a "Big Joke" is when it comes to the numbers, that´s what you could say being a joke, but powerlevels as a whole are not.

This is a distinction that often gets overlooked whenever this discussion pops up. Yes, some DB characters are stronger than other DB characters. Heck, practically every character is insanely powerful in comparison to some other character, but pathetically weak when compared to still another. These big gaps in power often drive the plot. There's no denying that.

However, the various systems throughout the series for quantifying power through numbers or calculations or whatnot are all consistently shown to ultimately be a waste of time. This is not a subtle point. First, it's pretty much always the bad guys trying to put things into numbers: the Saiyans, Freeza and co., Gero, Babidi. Bulma fooling around with that scouter is the main exception (the tournament punch machine is more neutral, but still once again portrayed as silly). Not only are power-measuring devices mainly a tool of the bad guys, but we even repeatedly get scenes where smarter bad guys have to explain to the dumb bad guys that it's a big mistake to rely too much on these numbers. All in all, the sort of character in the series most likely to toss around statements like "my power level is X and yours is Y, you can't win!" is someone both stupid and evil. It's not a flattering portrait.

So is Vegeta stronger than Goku in the Saiyan arc? Yes, of course. Does pegging Goku as about 8,000 and Vegeta as 18,000 tell you anything meaningful at the end of the day? Not really. Does the series put forth consistent rules for how these numbers are supposed to work, or what they mean in concrete terms? Not even remotely. In my experience when anyone uses the word "power level", 9 times out of 10 they mean the specific numbers that pop up on scouters, so in that sense I think it's safe to say that power levels don't mean much. I think lumping all strength-related things under the general category of "power levels" is just confusing the issue.

[Speedster]

If I were to come up with a “formula” that makes some sense of “battle power levels” I would say something like this: “each time you double your battle power level you increase your actual strength by 20x”. That not only explains why 1.25x difference in power level is large but also explains why the power levels jumped to much higher values during DBZ. That is because for low number ranges there is more space for doublings than there is in higher number ranges. From 5 (human level) to 1280 (Radditz level) is 7 doublings i.e. 20^7x (about a billion times) difference but from 1280 (Radditz level) to 5120 (~Nappa level) it is only 2 doublings (20^2=400x) difference.

At the end of the day however this is just us trying to put logic on something that was created without ANY logic or rules. Toriyama never thought with any formula when he started assigning power levels and even if he somehow initially did he certainly never adhered to it throughout the series– certainly not between the start of the Saiyan arc and the end of the Freeza arc. He never tried to be consistent with any of his numbers in general. Glaring example taking Goku 6 months (arguably 4 if you exclude sleeping) to travel the 1 million km snakeway (and from that only about half as he flew above a large chunk of that spiral) while Tao throwing a pillar could make a round trip of 2*2300km=5600km in 30mins (and kill Goku in the process too!) meaning that Tao with his pillar would travel snakeway in about 1.5-2 days! Or Goku as a kid jumping higher than 2000m height in the 21st TB while at Kaio’s planet as an adult at 27x gravity (10x the planet plus his clothes) he could barely jump 5m – if you brought kid Goku there he would jump over 80m. Anyway.

[Blade]

Are power levels a big joke to Akira Toriyama?

Well, to script Freeza in RoF to claim an exact estimation of his post-training power as '1.3 Million', I can't help but feel that he's making a very public joke at the expense of those who fret about that sort of thing.

But that's just my inkling - perhaps I'm giving him a tad more credit than he's due!

[BlazingFiddlesticks]

You pick your signatures wisely, Blade.

To power-gaugers credit, no opinion on the usefulness of these numbers changes that their introduction was a Pandora's Box of potential quantification, and I think there is some fun to be had in tackling the series like something of a puzzle using the one methodical approach we are given toward how the otherwise incalculable, nebulous, ever-increasing-stockpile-of-infinite-health called ki works. That speculation just so happens to be doomed to fall flat every time because Toriyama rarely writes his story to comfortably fit that logic, and that as Herms said, numbers do not tell us anything new.