Recently, I saw two videos, one by Reality Punch Studios* and one by Gigguk, that deals with the escalation problem in Shounen Anime and how to prevent power scales from rising too high. And, because I love talking about power scaling, I would like to discuss that a bit.
When it comes to escalation in anime, the show responsible for how shounen is now is Dragon Ball, with its constantly rising power levels and characters that fall to the wayside because they can't keep up. Now, while Super has removed the power scaling, ignoring the fact that it doesn't make any sense within the existing canon for power scaling to be removed and have it work, the fact remains that DBZ is so much older than Super that its impact has been felt across anime long before Super got the chance to do anything about it and, now that it is, it seems too little too late.
That said, even anime of the time were not immune to resetting power levels and lowering the power scale. One of the oldest and recently most popular examples is with JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, specifically Part 4: Diamond is Unbreakable. Now, it's worth noting that prior to Part 4, the power scales were constantly rising. This is understandable for the first two parts, since Phantom Blood was introducing power systems, and Battle Tendency was refining those systems, and of course it helps that Joseph was one of the strongest protagonists of shounen at the time, character-wise. However, then we get to Part 3 and that's where problems start occurring.
So, at the end of Battle Tendency, all of the Vampires and creatures related to the Stone Mask were destroyed and dealt with and because Hamon, the power ability at the time, is really only effective against non-living creatures or, as Kars displays, in extremely high amounts, Araki was kind of backed into a wall and he only had two options: either introduce a new power system and bullshit some way that it can happen while not being known about prior to Part 3, or he can contrive a reason for Vampires to return.
Long time fans of JoJo probably know where I'm going with this, he chose the former and came up with Stands. Now, Stands are a lot more powerful than Hamon for a few reasons due to the way they work. First off, is their energy sources: Hamon is a concentrated use of Life Energy and all living creatures have a limited amount of that, it can't grow, it can only be preserved. Stands are the manifestation of your Determination, the more unwilling you are to give up, the stronger your stand will ultimately be. And, because Determination can be refined over time, there's no upper limit on how powerful Stands can get.
The second reason is because Stands are much more personalized than Hamon. While Hamon can be used to harden things like Soap Bubbles or a Scarf, Hamon is much more customizable in relation to what you translate it through far more than Hamon's inherent abilities. Stands, on the other hand, have powers that are unique to each person, and even in the rival battle of Jotaro Kujo vs. Dio Brando, where their Stands are almost identical, there's still a distinguishing feature that separates them. Kakyoin's has the ability to generate and fire emeralds, Polneraff's has the ability to stab at the speed of light, Abdul's can generate fire, and Joseph's can rip information out of whatever it binds.
The problem with Part 3 in terms of power scaling was actually due to its structure: this was a new power system that Araki wanted to show off so this dictated that the structure be sort of Stand User of the Week, which ultimately means that by the end of Stardust Crusaders, we've seen a vast array of different ways Stands can be manifested and it also raised the power ceiling significantly.
This is why Part 3 and Part 4 are thought of as "Super Hero Arc" and "Regular People with special talents Arc" respectively. All of the fighters from Stardust Crusaders are insanely powerful so when Araki went to reset the scale for Part 4, he had to work with a different cast, something that wouldn't be too hard or alienating since the series set that precedent from Battle Tendency onward. This is the reason that Jotaro is sidelined for most of Part 4, since he could destroy anyone he wanted, and it's also the reason that Jotaro is the strongest of all of the Protagonists from Parts 1-6.
This is an issue that relates to two unique but similar issues in games but can also happen in Anime: Power Creep, which is where escalation causes power levels to rise so heavily that other abilities or characters are useless, JoJo is a good example of this, and Spectacle Creep, which is a phenomenon where you've shown the audience so much in terms of awesome and cool that you feel like you have to keep one upping yourself if you're going to maintain your audience. DBZ is an example of both of these problems in an anime and that's why they're both summed up as "The Escalation Problem."
An example of an Anime-related game that has suffered from severe power creep is Yu-Gi-Oh! or, most specifically, Duel Monsters. Even factoring out the current Meta of Ice Barrier Lockdown and Zoodiac, Duel Monsters has fallen into a weird place where cards from older generations are useless because of how the game has progressed. Dark Magician, Blue Eyes, and Red Eyes are achetypes that are still being supported because they have to be but older, less iconic cards are harder to use in the current meta. Try using only classic cards against a modern deck and you'll see the problem.
That said, it wouldn't be quite right if I didn't tackle the two solutions presented in those videos so I want to address both before I get to what I think should be done about it: first is the act of setting the power ceiling right out of the gate and the second is to make a power system that is deep enough that every victory and defeat can be contextualized with the knowledge you currently have, which makes no victory feel cheap.
So, let's start with the first because I feel like that's easier to criticize. The act of setting the power ceiling is akin to making it clear just how powerful you can get before your power will inevitably cap. Usually, this is done by showing us what the strongest character in the series is capable of at their maximum so you know, no matter what, this is how powerful any character can get. The example used in Gigguk's video was All-Might versus Nomu in Season 1 of My Hero Academia, however, this can be easily applied to Toguro from YuYu Hakusho, Netero from Hunter X Hunter, and to a lesser extent Yamamoto and Aizen from Bleach. However, there's a problem with this solution and, if you've been paying attention to my examples, you can probably see where I'm going with this: just because you introduce a character who is the power cap now doesn't mean a retcon won't eventually happen to allow the introduction of a stronger character.
This hasn't happened in My Hero Academia which is why I'm cutting it out of this but as for the others, Toguro was stated throughout the Dark Tournament Arc to be the highest class of demon and the strongest character in the show but then, in the very next arc, Koenma tells us that Toguro was a B Class, the strongest B class, almost breaching into A class but that doesn't change the fact that Toguro is 2 full categories below the villain of that arc, Sensui. Now, to Togashi's credit, that probably isn't his fault since he wanted to end YuYu Hakusho at the Dark Tournament and wasn't expecting to create Chapter Black in the first place. However, what he can be faulted for more easily is the fact that Netero was stated to be the strongest Hunter in the world as well as the strongest Nen User and he still lost to Meruem, quite easily in fact as it took a contagious radioactive poison to kill him and not the fight itself. Even Yamamoto and Aizen were trumped by the Quincies in the last arc and even the Zero Squad, really.
The problem with this solution is that, even if you introduce the strongest character in the series at the time and show their maximum, that doesn't mean a stronger character won't be introduced later. Even Kenichi The Mightiest Disciple, which had Hayato Furinji the invincible Superman since the beginning, he still has a rival that has the ability to kill him by the manga's end.
I can't say this solution isn't a great starting point because it is and as long as you can stick to your guns on it it has the potential to work out. The problem is that the solution itself is temporary and unless you end your manga right as the strongest character is overcome by the protagonist, power creep has the potential to ruin this by making way for bad retcons.
The other solution I feel is a bit more solid but also harder to execute. The second solution is to give your power system enough depth that any victory and defeat makes sense within the context of that power system. Hunter X Hunter is the prime example of how this can be done well since every victory and defeat makes sense when you put it into context. Kurapika vs. Uvogin is one that's brought up a lot because Kurapika uses risk-reward cheat codes to get to that level but you also have Gon vs. Genthru which incorporates Gon's current skill level with pre-planning and Greed Island's mechanics in order to pull a surprise win, Gon vs. Neferpitou which has Gon assuming the power he needs to kill it at the cost of all his nen and body, the former which has yet to be resolved and the latter which could only be resolved by an omnipotent wish granter. There are other more complex fights, like Menthuthuyoupi vs Knuckle, Shoot, Morel, and Meleoron, which was very long and had a large amount of preplanning on it but ultimately backfired when Youpi figured out their weakness, which made it quite engaging but also somewhat hard to follow at points, as I only fully understand the fight after having watched the full series twice. Then there's Hisoka vs. Kastro, which shows us how mind games and strategy are just as important to your skillset as the skills themselves.
The problem with this solution is that it's very hard to execute. First, for this to work, the author creating the series needs to have a complete understanding of the power system before they even start writing the show and have an idea of how far its potential can go. This is hard enough as is, as Yoshihiro Togashi didn't get it right until his second series and, even then, it required a lot of time with games and prior refinements from YuYu Hakusho in order to get it as good as it was. And, even then, things can get a bit hard to manage when other systems work in tandem with it. Now, the best example of this working is Greed Island, as the card game works quite well with the Nen powers we've seen so far. However, an example of a system that works poorly in this regard is Phagogenesis.
If you haven't read Hunter X Hunter you probably don't know what this is as it seems to be a made up term so I'll explain. Phagogenesis is the trait of a certain species for it to absorb the genes of whatever creatures it eats so it can then evolve by passing those genes on to their offspring, accelerating the rate of evolution by many millions of times depending on what gets eaten.
This is a trait found in the Chimera Ants, where the Chimera Ant Queen is already large enough that eating fish is not enough to help her heal but then she starts eating bigger animals and even some humans and then, her offspring gain the human's ability to strategize with the traits of the other animals making them quite powerful. Then the queen starts eating Nen Users and the four Chimera Ants that absorb that power, the Royal Guard Neferpitou, Shaiapouf, and Menthuthuyoupi, and the King Meruem, are born with the ability to use Nen but it is amplified by the amount of Nen they ate and the physiologies of the animals that comprised them.
This is what caused the Escalation problem to occur in the Chimera Ant arc. Animals that were stronger because of their higher bases combined with Nen made them quite overpowered and Meruem more so than others because his Nen ability is to absorb the Nen of whatever he eats, which also gave him Youpi and Pouf's Nen abilities when they resuscitate him. Granted, the power scale has been reset, for now, but the fact is that Nen is a system that works very well on its own but is hard to balance when it combines with other systems.
Of course, this wouldn't be as much of an issue if every Nen user were able to use other systems at any point. The fact that the Chimera Ants were using Nen in tandem with Phagogenesis while the other main characters didn't have similarly powerful add-ons they could use made the Chimera Ants needlessly overpowered. And, with the voyage to the Dark Continent Arc, it's only a matter of time before more systems are introduced that the world had yet to encounter.
So, what's my solution? That's probably the reason you've read this far is, if I don't think these solutions are perfect, what is a perfect solution? To be honest, there isn't one. Now, before anyone jumps on me, I'm not saying that this problem isn't fixable, just that no single solution by itself is going to deal with it.
Now, if we assume you have the proper pre-planning ability to make a system that can contextualize everything that happens in a way that's not bullshit, that's a great place to start. If you combine it with the showing of what the strongest character can do out of the gate then, by combining them, explain slowly over time how they're able to do the things they do, that's most of the problem right there. Now, it not only means that you have a cap, for now but it also means that, even if someone shows up who breaks that cap, your existing knowledge of the system can make sense of that. However, combining these two only solve half the problem.
The other half of the problem, which isn't resolved by these two videos is run-time. My use of examples from YuYu Hakusho and Bleach mean that the respective manga ran on for too long to maintain the power levels. As I already discussed, in YuYu Hakusho, the Dark Tournament was supposed to be the last arc so Toguro was created to be the strongest character and the one Yusuke had to overcome, if it had ended there, that would not be an issue, the problem is that it didn't.
Bleach has a similar issue. Although the scale got quite high by the time of Ichigo's battle with Aizen, if it had ended there, it wouldn't have been too much of issue but, again, that's not where it ended. To Bleach's credit, the way Ichigo vs. Aizen ended did seem definitive initially and the way it ended also meant the scale was reset so the Fullbringer Arc didn't have as much of a problem. However, the final Quincy arc drove everything so out of whack that Bleach never truly recovered.
The problem here is that these manga are, in general, going on too long. If a manga is designed to run for a long time, there's not as much of an issue so long as the run-time doesn't exceed the planned endpoint. However, once it does, it can be hard to keep things from going off the rails.
Of course, if things do go off the rails, there's still a possibility of recovery. Resetting the scale is something that is commonly presented to solve the issue but there are ways you can do it that are better than others. The first is to take away the powers that the character has at the start of a new arc, think the Metroid Prime games and you get the idea. If the powers are taken away and the protagonist starts from square one, they have to go back to basics and develop their abilities again. The problem, though, is that if you stick with the same cast of characters and most of them still have their abilities, they will continue to get stronger which means the escalation can still happen.
A much better solution is to swap out the cast entirely. This is usually done with time skips but if you focus the story on a new set of characters, they can start at different points and the story can feel fresher. JoJo Part 4 is an example of this done well but another example which is much younger and still too early to see how it'll pay off is Boruto, the sequel to Naruto Shippuden and following the offspring of the characters many people grew up with in Naruto. Boruto has a few things going for it due to the shift in cast so I want to illustrate them right now: first, the shift in cast but same world means that the anime can do things now that were done before but do them better. Boruto's growth over the series has been implied since the very first episode and will probably follow a similar structure to Naruto so it's an opportunity for Kishimoto to fix his mistakes, or at least acknowledge them. The second reason is that, since the cast is new and still children, there's a lot of room to see how they'll grow and get better without having to contrive excuses for the characters to go through the same stuff over again.
Finally, by aging the previous cast, it's possible that they lost a lot of their old abilities due to age which means that, when they're defeated and ultimately die, it'll make sense because the power ceiling had not been broken.
That said, Boruto is still relatively new so there's still a lot of room for things to go wrong, like I said about My Hero Academia in a previous review. There's a lot of potential but a lot that can go wrong in executing that potential.
That's all for now. Have a wonderful day.
*I previously listed this as Tales of Nerdia, which is false. It was an error on my part due to my memory and choice not to double check the name.
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