Doctor. wrote:Nickolaidas wrote:Doctor. wrote:
Namek's power inflation, at the very least, was measurable. We knew exactly how strong everyone was, how strong everyone got with training/power-ups/transformations, how they compared to each-other and so on. The ToP couldn't be any more arbitrary if it tried.
But it was still bullshit, imo.
The zenkai makes no sense at all. Basically, all that Saiyan arc Vegeta had to do was nearly get killed three times within two days and BAM! His power is increased from 18.000 to like, a gazillion.
Let me state this once more.
Vegeta went from 18.000 to be able of fighting 4th stage Frieza (relatively effectively).
In a few days.
Makes you wonder how the hell the saiyan people hadn't reached Beerus' power level just by fighting amongst themselves to near-death within a few weeks. Heck, they even KNEW the ability of the zenkai and how it works. But no, that's not jumping the shark bullshit at all! It's the 'now SSB Goku is a match for Jiren, now he's not!' that pisses the fans.
It's bad writing to have a character suddenly have a power increase of like 100000000000% within a few days (because plot), while all his life he had a steady, slow increase. It's not like Vegeta was living in a lab - he was fighting all his life. So all his life he managed a PL of 18.000 and then, a few days later he has like, what, 20 million?
Or how about Dr.Gero, who is the VERY DEFINITION of lazy writing? An inventor living in a backwater planet (when compared to the other starfaring races like Saiyans and Frieza's race who have evolved to the point of space travel, lazer rifles and healing regeneration machines), is able to build robots who are hundreds of times stronger than the creature who LITERALLY ruled the universe?! What kind of tech did he use? What resources did he have? How was he able to build something like that when the Earth clearly isn't evolved or sophisticated enough to make such tech? This is the equivalent of an Earthen kid living in his garage, and building a robot which is 20 times stronger than Superman.
Nobody's saying it wasn't stupid. I'm saying it's better because it was measurable and we had reasons for characters to get stronger. SSB Goku could barely touch Jiren in #110 and now he can trade blows with him just fine; and don't get me started in how strong his base is supposed to be or how characters like Gohan and #17 are supposed to compare to him due to all the conflicting portrayals episode to episode. Character strength in the ToP, much like the rest of Super, is completely arbitrary. Namek followed rules. It followed them loosely, but it still followed them.
I get what you're saying. But hear me out on this.
BOTH Super and Z follow rules. They're just different rules.
For example, I understand (though I do not accept) that Z's rule for Zenkai was:
"A Zenkai increases the strength of a Saiyan by X amount."
Where X is whatever number Toriyama pulled out of his ass, whenever the situation demanded it. It's a half-arbitrary rule which came in handy for the man, and I understand it, though it was a rule that caused many training sessions of Goku to become meaningless and obsolete (Goku trained for weeks while Vegeta simply told Krillin to half-kill him).
Consider this rule for Super:
"Jiren is stronger than a non-UI Saiyan."
That's the rule. It doesn't specify how much stronger. It doesn't specify in what capacity Jiren is stronger against X form of Vegeta. All you need to accept as a rule is that Vegeta (no matter what form - barring UI) cannot beat Jiren. Anything else can be explained in headcanon (if you are willing), by simply telling yourself that Jiren is simply observing the saiyans to see what their limits are.
For example, since Vegeta states that Jiren was stronger and faster when fighting Goku, this could imply that Jiren is putting a much weaker effort in fighting Vegeta than (UI) Goku because he simply thinks Vegeta isn't worth it.
