Saotome Ranma (Ranma 1/2) VS Senator Armstrong (Metal Gear Rising)

[master of read]

Sounds...crappy.

Pity - I really loved MGS, waaaaay back on my Playstation.

from what my friend said of working with kojima, she had a blast. said that kojima speaks in a rather unique style, so much so they called it "kojima speak". but those last few months working on ground zeroes and the phantom pain were horrible. the mess between kojima bled over into the other departments. they were looking funds. due dates were pushed back and forward all the time. even kojima was looking haggard from the drama.

sigh. i honestly think there was a good story in 5 but we'll probably never see it.

[Nik Hasta]

The thing about going Kenshiro, is that I'm not sure what that means. Does it mean he's hitting him at blazing speeds all over his chest? Or hitting him 500x in one specific point in a way that (somehow) multiplies the force? Because the latter is what Ranma does.

Again, on a day when Ryouga is literally laughing off shots that smash him into a cliff face with enough force that a large chunk of said cliff face collapses on him (not just rolls over him, it FALLS on him, and leaves him completely unharmed and giggling when he pops out of the vast pile of rubble like an insane jack-in-the-box), Ranma takes him flat out with something like three or four multi-punch strikes (I'm not calling it the amiguriken, that's an anime thing; the kachuu tenshin amiguriken wasn't a technique in the manga, it was a speed training method).

That's a huge jump, from 'I completely can't hurt him (also cliff face)' to 'yeah, three or four attacks and he's done.'

Basically, the question becomes 'can Ranma wear down the nanomachines like Raiden did?' If so, he likely wins. If not, he loses.

Thanks for the additional feats. I vaguely remembered the iceberg thing but thought that was Ryoga rather than Ranma. Like I says, it's been like... a good fifteen years since I last read Ranma in any real capacity. That's somewhat in the ballpark of Raiden's raw strength.

Here's the catch though. Raiden's high frequency blade cuts through foot thick metal armour, huge chunks of concrete, people, advanced combat cyborgs, mecha etc. like cheese. When faced with Armstrong, his blade does no real damage to Armstrong's nanomachine armour, Armstrong catches his blade and snaps it with one hand.

Sam's blade is apparently just a better sword (after all it is red) and Raiden is able to make Armstrong kind of feel his attacks more. There's actually in-game dialogue where Armstrong is like "Huh, I actually felt that one," an suchlike. However, it takes protracted fight with Raiden attacking him dozens and dozens of times with the blade (even targetting him in the face) plus judo throwing him into exploding wreckage that dumps literal tons of rocks on him which Armstrong just busts out being pissed off more than really hurt by it, for the effects to actually be felt. It's not until the end of the fight that Raiden is able to damage the nanomachines enough that they can't keep up with the damage rate any more and the ending sequence happens as I described earlier in the thread. And even then, with the nanomachines pushed to their limits, Raiden still had to blade-time carve his way through through the nanoshell over Armstrong's heart to make it vulnerable enough for him to get the kill. Armstrong was weakened but his defences were still quite active.

Now Ranma, is using primarily blunt force. While he'll able to hit more often, since his basic speed is higher than Raiden's (outside of his blade-time moments), I don't think him punching is going to impact the nanoshell in the same way as Sam's mega dangerous blade.

I'm all for the Foie Gras strategy, having looked up that extremely weird fight scene, but I am dubious on how well that will work with a shirt on someone who can just blast out shockwaves of fire which would just burn up whatever Ranma is throwing at him.

Does Ranma have defence bypassing stuff? I'd have thought that with a martial arts silliness as broad as Ranma 1/2 it would have come up.

[master of read]

[Sharpandpointies]

Thanks for the additional feats. I vaguely remembered the iceberg thing but thought that was Ryoga rather than Ranma. Like I says, it's been like... a good fifteen years since I last read Ranma in any real capacity. That's somewhat in the ballpark of Raiden's raw strength.

Here's the catch though. Raiden's high frequency blade cuts through foot thick metal armour, huge chunks of concrete, people, advanced combat cyborgs, mecha etc. like cheese. When faced with Armstrong, his blade does no real damage to Armstrong's nanomachine armour, Armstrong catches his blade and snaps it with one hand.

Sam's blade is apparently just a better sword (after all it is red) and Raiden is able to make Armstrong kind of feel his attacks more. There's actually in-game dialogue where Armstrong is like "Huh, I actually felt that one," an suchlike. However, it takes protracted fight with Raiden attacking him dozens and dozens of times with the blade (even targetting him in the face) plus judo throwing him into exploding wreckage that dumps literal tons of rocks on him which Armstrong just busts out being pissed off more than really hurt by it, for the effects to actually be felt. It's not until the end of the fight that Raiden is able to damage the nanomachines enough that they can't keep up with the damage rate any more and the ending sequence happens as I described earlier in the thread. And even then, with the nanomachines pushed to their limits, Raiden still had to blade-time carve his way through through the nanoshell over Armstrong's heart to make it vulnerable enough for him to get the kill. Armstrong was weakened but his defences were still quite active.

Now Ranma, is using primarily blunt force. While he'll able to hit more often, since his basic speed is higher than Raiden's (outside of his blade-time moments), I don't think him punching is going to impact the nanoshell in the same way as Sam's mega dangerous blade.

I'm all for the Foie Gras strategy, having looked up that extremely weird fight scene, but I am dubious on how well that will work with a shirt on someone who can just blast out shockwaves of fire which would just burn up whatever Ranma is throwing at him.

Does Ranma have defence bypassing stuff? I'd have thought that with a martial arts silliness as broad as Ranma 1/2 it would have come up.

Okay, if Ranma could go Nekko-ken, he'd have much better than blunt-force, but it's not something he can access here unless someone comes in and attaches a cat to his face or somesuch, and even then he loses all of his tactical ability. So that's out. Vacuum blades...I don't think Ranma can just spam those (actually, I'm not sure Ranma ever really mastered the Vacuum Blades).

His defense-bypass-stuff is the aforementioned 'hit Ryouga 500x in the same place in an instant' (I'm not kidding about the 500x...it's noted in-text that he's hitting Ryouga 'hundreds' of times in the same place - I think the number 450 gets bandied around at one point - so quickly that to the watchers, who are some pretty high-level fighters, it all looks like a single punch...even Ryouga, who is plenty fast, doesn't catch on until after the second or third time). With that, he goes from someone who is doing scratch-zero damage to a Ryouga who finds a cliff-face collapsing on him to be an amusingly light shower, to someone who puts him down in three, four attacks, no more (that part is the killer - it's not just 'he could then hurt him', it's 'he started wrecking Ryouga').

The issue with the Fois Gras thing is that it's happening so quickly that Armstrong won't be able to intercept anything. He won't even know stuff is going into his mouth until he starts choking. ^_^ However, there's a limit to how much material Ranma has to work with, here. I guess the arena has sand? But...*wiggles hand*

Anyway, we're into the area where I'm personally figuring there are better odds that Ranma tires before he gets through the armor. I'm not 100% sold either way, but it's looking to favour Armstrong by dint of Ranma tiring out.

[Sharpandpointies]

Got it. And yeah, not quite the same thing.

When Ranma does it - in-manga - it's a single punch with a bit of a 'drrrrt' to it. That's all, for a few hundred punches that hit exactly the same place.

[BitVyper]

Vacuum blades...I don't think Ranma can just spam those (actually, I'm not sure Ranma ever really mastered the Vacuum Blades).

Not explicitly. Based on dialogue, it's super likely he can pull off yamasenken stuff, but it's never shown, and he'd probably have to do some training to actually be good at it. He was surprised that Kumon Ryuu hadn't learned the Umisenken from their fight, and he only needed to see one move from the Umisenken to be able to train it, but he still took a little bit of practice. It'd be of limited usefulness compared to the Umisenken anyway, since Ranma's not a killer, and the Hiryu Shoten Ha generally serves his fighting style much better in terms of ranged stuff.

[Nik Hasta]

Looking at the arguments, I'm leaning Ranma... like 7/10?

He's got a deep enough bag of tricks that I think he could do it more often than not, with the caveats that Armstrong takes a few where he AoEs Ranma or tires him out.

[The Drunkard Kid]

Give Ranma the Gekkaja that he used in his fight against Saffron, and he probably easily wins, considering it casually sliced through the aforementioned water tap that he and Ryouga could only do scratch damage on, even when Ranma was being propelled by a technique that was designed to clear out cave-ins in one shot, could freeze a guy who was basically a living fireball capable of melting stone from with his aura from several meters away/vaporizing multiple mountaintops in one blast, and allows him to put more oomph into his Hiryu Shoten Ha.

As for Ranma's strength, Ryouga and Mousse both considered Saffron to have a glass jaw for being momentarily stunned from being hit in the face with a person-sized boulder being hurled by a tornado that was going so fast that it altered the flow of a river underneath the battleground they were fighting on, claiming that Ranma hit them that hard all the time.

With regards to esoterics, off the top of my head, Ranma thinks he knows a pressure point that can instantly KO someone (he never got a chance to try it out, though), can turn invisible, can convert ambient heat into massive tornadoes or energy blasts, knows a trick to throw a punching opponent ludicrously high by flicking their wrist with a small object (he used a fan the one time he did it, and it's not something he normally eqips, but he does have a habit of pulling small items out of nowhere and could just as easily use Armstrong's glasses or shoes, though this move could only really be used to just annoy Armstrong, or set him up for a different attack), and can throw entire meals/banquets/random objects into the mouth of a comparably super fast opponent (or entire crowd) too fast for anyone to actually see him move (this is the aforementioned Parley du Foie Gras).

Honestly, even if he can't hurt him at all, I wouldn't really be surprised if Ranma can keep dodging and annoying Armstrong enough until he falls asleep. Is there any indication that Armstrong doesn't get tired any longer?

[BitVyper]

Yeah that's the flipside to the exhaustion argument. Plus being able to turn invisible and the fact that he can, by and large, turn AoE attacks against him to his own advantage, means Ranma can probably get a short rest if he desperately needs one. Which is honestly unlikely.

[Kuro]

Ranma thinks swimming across the Sea of Japan is a minor inconvenience in order to save Akane. And that was in the beginning of the series.

He is not running out of energy before Armstrong.

[Sharpandpointies]

I forgot about the invisibility...arrgh. That's another game-changer.

[Fallman]

One thing, well two things, well... More like one and a half things that I haven't seen mentioned.

When Jetstream Sam fought Armstrong, he managed to keep track of the hardening process and and attacked the arm that wasn't hardened when the effect went to the other arm. Armstrong did just harden the stump and reattached his arm afterwards, but being down a limb is still down a limb. Jetstream's DLC took place some time before the main game, so I'm not sure if that weakness remained by the time he fought Raiden, but it's something to consider.

The half a thing is that Armstrong started both of his fights by draining energy from the stuff around him. Now, he should be starting with a full charge, but his internals can't generate the energy to turn into Colossus on their own. An endurance fight is probably really bad for him.

Mind you, he also gives off a pretty decent amount of heat, and I don't recall anything that would help him against a tornado, so he's probably going to get blasted out of the arena in short order.

Oh, while Armstrong is ridiculously durable, he doesn't actually hit all that hard, comparatively speaking. He's stronger than Raiden, but not much stronger than Raiden. I don't think that he'd be able to drop Ranma with just a lucky shot, and he's only getting lucky shots at best.

[BitVyper]

To be honest, outside of the sheer chaos that is Nerima, I don't think there ARE lucky shots against Ranma. This is a guy who can stand at the epicentre of an industrial-sized explosion and flawlessly catch every single piece of shrapnel flying his way. He dodges point blank counterattacks from other speedsters while tied up and hanging from a ceiling. Almost any time he actually takes a hit, there's considerable extenuating circumstances, or it's just not really a fight that's happening. Herb was basically Ranma-as-a-DBZ-character, and once his attacks were actually visible, that was the end of him hitting Ranma with anything. Kumon Ryuu tried to give him the Full Touhou and couldn't land anything. One of the more impressive things about Genma is that he can consistently give Ranma hell until quite late in the series.

But yeah, if there's any amount of speed targeting that can overcome Armstrong's hardening, you can count on Ranma to both figure it out, and take full advantage of it.

[The Drunkard Kid]

Talking about invisibility, it should be noted that that mode involved Ranma suppressing his battle aura to the point where it can't be detected, even at point blank range.

Now the reason that I mentioned that, is because it's been shown that he can boost his strength by charging up his battle aura (such as when his weaker girl form charged up and then one-shot a large boulder that was so durable that every tool used against it shattered/snapped after doing negligible damage).

And the reason that I brought *that* up, is because, while invisible and suppressing his battle aura, Ranma collected up most of the debris from a shattered, completely solid, 2-3 story tall, stone or metal Buddha (the art isn't clear, but I'd guess that it was probably stone) that was littering the battlefield, ran around at superspeed with it strapped to his back while he loosened up the dirt all around said battlefield while dodging Kumon Ryuu's random attacks and stripping multiple superhuman martial artists to their boxers in passing, and at some point had managed to compress all the stolen material so much that it caused a supercharged version of the vacuum blade that originally shattered the statue in question (and only did superficial damage to Ranna when it hit him) to apparently get stopped so thoroughly that the vacuum force ended up pulling the loosened battlefield up into a small hill that buried Kumon to the neck.

[BitVyper]

I'm ASSUMING the Buddha was stone, as I'm pretty sure it would have been hollow if it were metal? Either way, its head alone was taller than Ranma, so yeah probably closer to three stories, which... the head was relatively squarish, so if it was "just" seven feet tall and made of granite, that's like around 51 tons on its own, I believe? Image reference for the head: https://imgur.com/a/WvN5Cdz

Notably, as a point for Ranma's durability, the vacuum blades that sliced easily through that statue gave him relatively minor cuts when he was taken by surprise and hit full on with them.