Blog Retrospective

 Hi.

Sooooooo 2024 is coming to an end and as my final blog is released for this year I figured it’d be a good idea just to have some kind of reflection if you will on my content specifically. I don’t particularly have a fancy intro or anything, this is just gonna be a look back and all that. Hopefully you enjoy. 

Android 21 vs Jack-O

This was the first major project I’ve released and as of now the biggest blog in terms of views I have right now. I don’t think it’s surprising given DragonBall was involved.

And that was partially the reason I decided to “kick off” the year with this if you will. I don’t think it’s a surprise to say that DragonBall and Guilty Gear respectively have had a place in my life for the past 6 or 7ish years. DragonBall speaks for itself, but DBFZ was in particular the perfect hype game that brought together so many of my friends and helped me make some new ones in the process. We were kinda coming off of MVCI being well…bad, so having a big tag game that spiked a lot of adrenaline and excitement into our veins was perfect. Guilty Gear goes even further back than that, and while I can’t go into hyper specifics here for reasons beyond your understanding, I don’t think it’ll be surprising to know getting into the franchise was a major part of my high school and even college life when it came to the people who I would know even today.

And wouldn’t you know it, DBFZ and GG just so happened to have an actually really solid matchup that people were generally okay with! Combine that with Strive becoming more mainstream and the Jack-O challenge being a thing that would make her for better or for better, a notable character in people’s eyes, and I figured this would be a solid blog to start with. I had a solid idea as to where I would place GG at least since I had some notes on the series I had been taking for a while, so all I would need is some recalcs and that’d be handled well.

21 was a bit different tho. Because she doesn’t have an explicit “canon” version, I figured the best route would be to just cover her appearances in DBFZ, Xenoverse, and DBH. The problem would naturally come in with how far she’d scale in all three due to the nature of those games. Eventually I managed to make some kind of “compromise” with myself with throwing a fat “debatable” sign on the higher end XV and Heroes stuff, largely because 21 wasn’t really involved with the plots of those games and I didn’t wanna create some implication of just “anyone and everyone is Mechikabura tier.”

Naturally there are some weird quibbles and stuff being my first “real” big blog but the overall response was pretty positive and most people seemed to be okay with the winner. Even the cosmology stuff which I was kinda dreading seemed to go over pretty well. It did provide a halfway decent reference point for GG stuff which was nice, and I do hope to revisit the series at a later date with a different match since it’s a favorite of mine.

Kenjaku vs Medusa

Up until very recently THIS was the biggest blog I published view wise. I was kinda riding on the JJK hype train and figured getting a blog out would be a cool way to ride that kinda hype. Kenjaku was a major antagonist and I do still prefer him as a match for Medusa compared to Orochimaru even if I think that match also works. 

This was also my first real collab project and I was lucky enough to catch Rina on board before she became likely busier with other major blog projects and stuff. And “modding” I guess that’s also “important.” 

There were two sorta big things to come from this blog. The first was I tried shaking up the verdict with a “stats equalized” scenario, as me and Rina thought it was a legitimately interesting discussion to have since if stats were closer there were many ways both characters could actually take the victory. The biggest and funniest deciding factor was that damned Purple Clown that invoked the madness wavelength. It’s so specific but given how JJK battles tend to operate, it’s kinda fitting in that sense. 

The other big thing was the birth of that black hole calc…which I wanna say kickstarted a domino effect into JJK having bigger and crazier calcs that reach big numbers. I haven’t been fully paying attention but nowadays we have Sukuna punching rocks getting Small Country and stuff cause of Jacob’s Ladder and the infamous “perfect sphere” calculations thar began to spread around. I can’t say for sure how people feel about them nowadays but I remember people posting the Black Hole calc around a good number of times from this blog and I sometimes wonder if maybe that was a mistake.

It’s a good thing Shiggy is just gonna one shot Mahito on the show itself no matter what.

Cure Scarlet vs Phoenix Ikki

Welcome to one of the big hyperfixations that only a few people I know besides me care about super hard in this hobby. 

So yeah I like Pretty Cure a lot. It’s probably my favorite magical franchise overall and I felt it was a no brainer to give it a big blog. The only other one that existed was Sailor Mercury vs Cure Beauty, which I also worked on so go figure. 

Go Princess is a favorite of mine from the series and I felt out of the series I could pick that could explore the series in more depth, it was probably the best choice. The cast of that season had a lot of solo content and attacks only rivaled by weirdly enough some of the later seasons, received all of the big scaling, had enough feats within their own series, and had some of the cooler transformations within the series visually, which could be eye catching to some inevitable newbies.

The only question was picking a match, and I was kind of in a pickle there, since obviously there wasn’t a truck load of Precure matchups as is, much less for the Go! Cast specifically. I then sat down and rewatched Cure Scarlet’s Phoenix Blaze attack and then it suddenly hit me.

Phoenix Blaze?

Phoenix Ikki?

Saint Seiya doesn’t have a notable blog yet?

Greenlight and profit.

Obviously there is actual thematics to the match but beyond that I figured I’d also kill two birds with one stone here by covering another not super huge series in this hobby with Saint Seiya. Unlike Precure though, the Beerus Hades debacle back in 2020 did put eyes on Saint Seiya within this community. It also helps that it’s kind of a battle boarding darling that has some kind of reputation on its hands for being super powerful and having the crusty ass translations.

“Mario translations ain’t got nothing on me”

Out of all the blogs I would say this is easily the one I’m the most unsure about verdict wise. Because Saint Seiya stat opinions are mostly limited to battle boarding areas, I didn’t want to just laser focus on targeting every single major battle board stat push, and mostly wanted to highlight what I would see in the Discord community spaces, while still being an accessible guide to some of the series mechanics and powers. Pretty Cure also had a bunch of crazy multiplier nonsense that I didn’t wanna laser focus on too much at the risk of turning the blog into Thor vs Vegeta’s verdict. Even before I made my choice I was pretty back and forth and asked for some second hand opinions from some close friends who ultimately helped push me to select Scarlet as the victor. I definitely can see myself switching up on this the most, and maybe if I did this at some unknown later date I’d be more inclined to dig through the crazier interpretations of both.

Still I do think the blog turned out very well overall and I’m glad for two series that aren’t super huge in the VS sphere, it performed decently well view wise. As of now it sits at around 600 views, which is pretty neat and closer to the top half of my current output this year. 

The biggest gain here tho was I managed to have Ani help make the scaling images, and I can’t express enough how much of a help he’s been this year. The dude is really talented in the field of graphic design and I’m glad he’s been able to lend a hand on these projects as much as he can, especially when it came to the next project:

Gilgamesh vs Estark 

This was a big one for sure. Given these two were recurring bosses in multiple games, it functionally meant having some notes for god knows how many Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest titles. The latter was especially a giant obstacle because Dragon Quest isn’t huge in this hobby, and Estark isn’t exactly a well known iconic face to everyone so I would need some help when it came to his side of things.

Luckily, that’s where Zenni came in. He’s a really really big Dragon Quest fan and basically knew exactly where to go for basically all of Estark’s major content. He even managed to record some footage which was really helpful given how much would be needed for a series that isn’t exactly brimming with just random Estark gifs to find. 

What followed was honestly a really fun development cycle that involved just gushing and having fun with the weird shit that these two have gotten into. There were moments that we just took time to talk about the weird weapons and absurd powers they’ve gotten between games. We were able to get the blog done in a shockingly efficient manner, in large part due to having a bunch of notes from the both series already on the back burner. We wanted to avoid just making it a giant “let’s scale every single FF and DQ game ever” because neither character shows up in every game and it could just end up losing the plot juuuuust a lil bit.

While Estark did ultimately win I will say I am happy Gil stood more of a chance than we thought. It helped because we decided to use equipment from Brave Exvius. He earned some really nutty weapons like the True Zantetsuken, which would be useful given the average JRPG boss experience is something like:

Beyond just the fun of covering both series, I’d say the biggest dub of this blog was the art. Ani cooked super hard here with the many requests we gave him for this blog to spice things up. I think as of now this is my most visually fun blog due to the various ways we spiced up some of the usual categories and points such as the “Combats set” or “Arsenal and Abilities” section. I was very happy to see him go hard with these images, and if you are reading this Ani please know you can in fact cook.

Annie vs Linne

This blog was mostly meant to be a breather. Skullgirls and UNIB hadn’t gotten anything of note and it wouldn’t take super long so I decided to talk to good ol Homie (or Radioactivecaffine as he claims to be called) to help out with the SG side since he was a massive fanboy of the game.

And while I would say “yeah research was pretty simple” that’d only be half true. 

As it turns out the secret to getting any competent information out of either series was through diving through random ass long forgotten live streams that were nigh near lost to time. The key to what would be the most notable Skullgirls feat was based on a random Twitch stream. It was fucking crazy.

Beyond that though it was a simple blog with a simple goal. It was fun.

Donovan vs Zangetsu

This one was also kinda simple. I wanted to have a Halloween related blog but everyone wants to research Castlevania all of a sudden so I decided to use Castlevania but indie instead. It was a cool enough blog I got to collaborate with Ani on and it was fun to have another look into DS after a while. Beyond that I don’t have too much to say on this one. 

Lapis Lazuli vs Flame Princess

This fight was fun to think about. Initially this would’ve been the final blog of the year, but things changed and I ended up having to move this up a bit, which worked well since I finished up content for Lapis. I asked Js and Cal to help me out with Flame Princess, and we managed to cook up something that was decent in between AT and SU stat talk, while also highlighting the unique properties of the matchup.

Out the gate going into the fight I knew no matter who was going to win, I wanted the verdict to actually go in depth into how their powers would or wouldn’t counter each other. Truth be told, if either Lapis won because of the obvious water weakness, or if Flame Princess won because she just stat stomped, I prooooobably wouldn’t have continued going forward with the blog. Thankfully while we did agree FP ultimately did have better stats, we managed to actually look through both series to determine if she could actually win without just relying on being a stat brick. It led to a verdict I was pretty proud to write as I felt I wanted to get across above all else that Phobe wasn’t just relying on the most boring answer of “She’s way stronger and faster so she wins lol.” 

I also got to talk about some stuff for both SU and AT that weren’t addressed in those G1 blogs a while back, which did help spice things up a bit and not just feel like a copy pasta of those blogs. I have no idea if that Ice King speed calc will be taken 100% at face value with no issues but who knows I don’t know the ramifications of this blog in the wider sphere. Hopefully it’s more positive than negative lol.

This was also the first blog at least so far that seemed to drag any attention of the mods when I posted it but maybe they’ve read the others without mentioning it IDK. The only other example was recently when Lousy said he’d read Scarlet vs Ikki. I hope if he did he found it informative and I can start corrupting people into the Precure socie-

Wait this is about Lapis and FP. Uhhhhhh I hope it happens as an actual episode or something.

BlackWaryGreymon vs Jeane Alter

Some of you might think this is outside of my comfort zone and to some extent you wouldn’t be lying. I have played and watched media from both Fate and Digimon but I wouldn’t call myself a hardcore fan per se. That being said, I did make Ky Saber waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay back and I felt it’d be appropriate to try and do Fate again, and another Digimon blog was always nice. I didn’t want to go with the furthest trenches of cosmology, so I decided to pick two characters that are comparatively much more simple.

Sadly though, production of the blog was kinda hectic. Due to a lot of personal factors with the people I assembled to help make the project, it ended up getting delayed internally and for a while I wasn’t sure if we’d even be able to put it out before the end of the year. I didn’t want to fully rush them or demand anything that was unreasonable, but I didn’t want to sit on this for a long time and it just never gets done. It led to some of the usual flair I added to blogs being missing in some aspects, which I do somewhat regret. I would’ve loved to given both some crazy background visuals or really push far how much I can spice up some of the editing bits. 

I will say when I did start adding in more deadlines and being more aggressive on the completion rate the team did not waste any time and locked in. 8bitUtopia, Makoto, Mikahael, and Dragonmasteryz all made sure to complete and help out as much as possible and made sure to not mess around when that due date was approaching. They even managed to get in some of their first scaling images near the end to help out!  It felt like once the ball was moving they were beginning to have more fun, though that’s just an observation on my end.

The most fascinating element was the debate, since it felt like one side would end up washing depending on how far stats went. What we got was a scenario where BWG would either kill Jalter before Fafnir, or Fafnir goes full Mahoraga and carries Jalter to victory. A big thing everyone was happy about when working on the blog was simplicity of the characters. Neither Jalter or BWG were scaling to the highest levels of their cosmologies, and their powers are fairly simple and straight forward. This led to a much more engaging discussion overtime, which eventually lead to having two separate verdicts for the first time!

This admittedly led to a more shitposty esque verdict, but for what it's worth this wasn't entirely just chosen for the sake of the laughs. Most of us had agreed Fafnir was the main win con but we werne't confident enough on whether or not the Edmond Dantes speed feat would scale properly. Thankfully, reception so far has been pretty good and people don't seem to be particularly upset at the choice since, at the end of the day it's a VS blog not a news report. I'm curious if one day I'll do a match where it's a legit tie or justc inconclusive. 

The Future?

Yeah of course I’m doing more. And what’s gonna be the start of 2025?

I HOPE if nothing else this not only feels like a strong look into both series, but also convinces enough people that the match would be worth doing even with Godoka looming over Moon like a fucking eclipse. It’s a match I’ve really liked for a long time and I hope that I’m able to give it some layer of justice.

That’s all I got. Merry Christmas and soon to be Happy New Year to you all!