Estimating the Plot Power levels of the Touhou cast

[metroid composite]

If there's one thing I've learned from watching plot power discussions on Board 8, it's that they actually can be reasonably objective.  While the average RPG character doesn't have much in the way of quantitative plot power, the average, say, Marvel character will usually have a database on how much they can lift, how much they can blow up using their mind, and so forth:



What I'm going to try to do in this topic is get a ballpark estimate for Touhou characters.  The unit of measurement I will be using is Kilograms.  Before anyone objects "but you can't account for speed with kilograms"--on the one hand, not really, but on the other hand strength to a large degree determines speed; to use more comic examples, the Hulk can leap 2 miles in a couple seconds.  Any of those "near lightspeed" characters like the Flash needs insane strength to accelerate from 0 to 1,000,000,000 km/h (easily enough force there to lift up a skyscraper).

So...anyway, on to actual Touhou stuff.  (Spoiler warning I guess)

OFFENCE

Let's start with the outlier from Highly Responsive to Prayers:

(B-route)
(A-route)

This is an explosion that looks like it could, say, blow up the moon pretty easily (about 10^22 kg).  That said, I really don't know what's going on in that scene.  These are two of the bad endings, and my best guess is that it's Reimu saying "what does this button do?" *kaboom* "Bad Ending #1: try to win without continuing so that you don't blow yourself up".  Furthermore, if Reimu could blow up a moon-sized object with relative ease, then the plot of Imperishable Night doesn't make a whole lot of sense (why don't they just blow up the fake moon?)  Moon-sized explosions and creating a fake moon are abilities that seem to be used only outside of combat, at any rate.

So...alright, Master Spark:



Juding by the picture...it's about 12x the height of Marissa (witch hat included).  She's probably like...4 feet tall, 5 feet with the hat.  That makes Spark about 60 feet in diameter (Actually I'll say 50 just because it's a round number).  In manga, Master Spark has been shown to blow through the walls of buildings.  I could definitely see it blowing through multiple walls, or multiple floors if it was aimed vertically.  Okay, so how big of a building could it incinerate?

Hmm...just because I have the numbers handy...the World Trade Center was 208 feet x 208 feet x 1362 feet and 5x10^8 kg.  This is too large in every dimension probably, but if we scaled this down by a factor of 4 in every dimension we'd get 52 x 52 x 340--within reasonable dimensions for Master Spark.  The weight of this smaller skyscraper would be (5x10^8)/4/4/4 kg = 8x10^6 kg.

DEFENCE

Well...canonically pretty much every character in the series has tanked a Master Spark and kept on fighting so that's 8x10^6 kg.  Granted, the characters are also small enough that they don't get hit by the entire energy blast of Master Spark.

Alright, so I looked to Perfect Cherry Blossom, Sakuya A against a character of not particularly special durability (Youmu).  SakA fires out 30 knife waves, roughly 5 times per second, so 150 knives per second.

Youmu has 4 spellcards and 4 openers, which take SakB approximately 20 seconds each to kill (time-slowing accounted for).  This means that Youmu tanks approximately 20,000 Knives moving at...based on in-game I'd estimate 150 km/h (100 mi/h).  The knives aren't generic, either--Sakuya tells us they're made of silver.  So...okay, 150 km/h silver knife, that's enough to kill, say, a 100 kg human.  So... 20,000 knives x 100 kg = 2x10^6 kg.  (Of course, this doesn't kill Youmu or anything; she comes back for another round in stage 6).  Surprisingly within the same order of magnitude as Master Spark.

For another example, Utsuho is pretty content chilling at the center of a nuclear reaction:

(She's in there somewhere).
Now, nuclear weapons vary greatly, but the standard nuclear bomb seems to create a blast of approximately 2x10^7 kg of TNT.  10^7 is a little higher than other numbers we've seen for durability, but on the other hand Utsuho is canonically very durable.




So...those are all the semi-functional examples I could think of at the moment.  A lot of the other stuff is just "whee, magic" which doesn't translate into a clear kg value or anything.  Still, it's surprising how all the ones drawn from in-game fights come out to a very similar order of magnitude.

[DjinnAndTonic]

I don't know anything at all about Touhou and I found that writeup fascinating. More please?

[Sierra]

While the average RPG character doesn't have much in the way of quantitative plot power, the average, say, Marvel character will usually have a database on how much they can lift, how much they can blow up using their mind, and so forth:

Too lazy to read through the Touhou stuff right now but the elderly comic nerd in me has to point out that even superhero power can vary widely according to the creative team writing the comic. Also, that is a totally awesome image.

[Chisa]

What Cid said has a relevant example, and you yourself used it.  MS has had an awful lot of forms.  There's the fighter version, which is just a bit larger than Marisa.  Then there's the boss and PC versions that Mari uses in the main series, which are quite a bit bigger.  Of course, if you're sprite scaling, PC Marisa gets a nice advantage.  Then there's ye olde YukaSpark.  And of course, different artists have their own portrayals.

As regards Utsuho, there's a couple things I'd like to bring up.  The first is a simple matter of units.  Namely, you seem to be using kg of destroyed shit as your main unit.  This is notably not equal to kg of TNT.  One kg of TNT can certainly destroy a lot more than one kg of material.
The second is just my personal PoV on Utsuho's power.  As stated by various characters, it's the power of a sun god.  And with it, she can create and control the fusion reaction.  So, when it comes to sitting in the middle of nuclear fire, I regard it as more of a case of "Immune - Nuke" than straight up tanking it.  I'd compare it to something like Iceman freezing himself, but I know that analogy sucks and I can't think of a better one.

Note: if this is ninja'd 30 times, I can't see it cuz I'm on a shitty phone.

[TranceHime]

If you are going to consider Yuka's Double Spark and Mima's Twilight Spark into the equation, you're going to have to remember that Marisa's Master Spark is derived from Yuka's DS and Mima's TS, in the sense that her NDL is taken from Patchouli's NDL. Marisa is a copy-cat, and I think it's safe to assume that Marisa's variations of other characters' skills are imperfect, which probably means that the original NDL is much stronger (refer to EoSD), Yuka's Double Spark could perhaps be taken literally to be about twice as strong as MS (refer to Mystic Square, Touhou Soccer) and such.

...

... I'm losing my train of thought. Dear lord Touhou power level discussion.

[Anthony Edward Stark]

Well, an A-bomb isn't fusion, but this is the same entertainment media that gave us guns that don't work in outer space, so I don't nitpick.

[Niu]

.....WHAT MONSTER BROUGHT THIS HERE!!!!!
I've had enough of those over at 2ch!!!
Fire to this topic if people starting making 12 paragraphs long power level tenpus 2ch style.

Oh of course, the reality overwriting girl's fans well most certainly invade this topic like they always do, simply because the game developer hyped her once. Yeah, death to all Touhou power level topics.

Anyway, means no offense to anyone, just I have gotten really frustrated with this sort of topics.

[DjinnAndTonic]

I don't know, discussing power level rankings is kind of the core idea behind the DL on at least one level.

Even though I don't know anything about Touhou, it's really interesting reading this kind of well-thought-out ponderance on power levels.

I don't expect there to be any kind of consensus, but just reading the logic behind how people come to their conclusions is fascinating.

And comparing a DL discussion to a 2ch discussion hardly seems fair...

-Djinn

[Anthony Edward Stark]

Yeah, but this discussion is like "Who would win in a fight: New Sun!Gambit or the Incredible Hulk?" It's so over the top it's a Stallone movie about arm-wrestling and truckers.

[DjinnAndTonic]

I don't know what New Sun!Gambit is, but do you really think "Who would win: Ghaleon or Myria?" is that much more of a cerebral discussion than a fight between two comic book characters?

[Niu]

PLOT power, if you pay attention to the topic.
And those of a sane mind would know how fucked up Tohou plot powers are, some of those are Type Moon level headache.

[superaielman]

Said Niu, with an AI1 avatar.

[Anthony Edward Stark]

I don't know what New Sun!Gambit is, but do you really think "Who would win: Ghaleon or Myria?" is that much more of a cerebral discussion than a fight between two comic book characters?

Okay, let me explain:

New Sun!Gambit is him at the time he briefly got his full template of abilities and became an all-powerful time-travelling godlike being who had control over all forms of energy. The fact it was an entirely self-contained thing always lead me to believe it was a "So you see how stupid this is when you do it with Jean Grey now, right?" on the part of the author, who periodically did in-jokes like that throughout the run.

And then you have the Incredible Hulk, who recent had a whole storyline devoted to him beating up the rest of the Marvel Universe combined, and shrugs off most forms of nuclear weaponry as moderate annoyances.

So, like I said, this is in that territory of "wow the scope of this discussion is ridiculous."

[Niu]

Said Niu, with an AI1 avatar.

Exactly, if people realize that SRW originals are silly and should not be taken seriously, then the same should apply to Touhou.

[Cmdr_King]

Well of course SRW Originals are silly.  SRW, by my understanding, does a stunningly credible job of translating the plot power within various series into relative gameplay power in SRW.  Consequently, their original villains must be a discernably greater threat than any villains drawn from the included series, and thusly must be on a higher power tier.  So they're pretty much obligated to be able to destroy planets with a flick of their wrist, if not be outright cosmic horrors (a la AI1.)

[Ranmilia]

So this is kinda interesting.  I'll go by "Single most powerful demonstrated event or attack" here.

Remilia Scarlet

Choice of two events here - the infamous Scarlet Mist incident, wherein she introduced enough heavy mist into Gensokyo's atmosphere to significantly lower the entire region's light levels and somewhat alter its temperature, or influencing a sizable, dangerous comet to fall towards her own house (so that Flandre could use her power to blow it up for fun).  I'll go with the mist here, because the comet will be useful for pegging Flan anyhow, and the mist event is trivial to produce figures for.

It so happens that there are real life events that inject enough particle material into the atmosphere to block sunlight and even lower temperatures in an area - they're called volcanic eruptions.  Wikipedia has a very handy table on the subject to eyeball things with.  Reading the descriptions suggests that Remilia's mist would be around the level of a VEI 5 Plinian event, similar in scope to the ejecta of the eruption of Mt. Saint Helens.  So... call it equal to about 1 cubic km of volcanic material. 

Converting this to kg is a bit trickier.  Let's call it equal to pure silica in mass, why not.  It's convenient, probably a little more dense than your standard volcanic material, but danmaku-stuff (which the mist is composed of, more or less, given her final spellcard) has been shown to have significant (bruising, clothes tearing) mass anyhow.  So that'll give us what...  2.3296 grams per cubic centimeter?  That maths out to...

2.3*10^12 kg to blanket Gensokyo in scarlet mist.

Not bad at all, compared to Marisa's puny sparks.

[Niu]

NO CK, that is not my point. The point is, the power has gotten so out of boundary that smply is not reosnable anymore.

Fine, I'll juts list out what Reimu can do in Touhou.

Musoutensei- Invincibility cheese Avalon style, if not worse
TIME KOMPRESSION- Can freely compress and expand time and allow different time span overlap with one another. Ulty is extremely envious.
Fate Manipulation- In a limited sense, alters the events in near future.
Destruction- Grasp whatever being's weakness into her hand allowing her to detsroy the target immediately. Think of Shiki's death eye, now add that with range ignoring properties can can work on entities that contains no concept of death.
Instant Death- Kills physical life form just with her thought. So far, only those two immortal lunar rabits are immune from this power (because they are not physically dependant life form).
Boundary control- Can erase boundary, or whatever that maintins the differnce between things. Death can't be told apart from life, existence can not be told apart from none eixstnce, 2 diemnsion can't be told apart from 3 diemnsion. The laws of relaity just falls apart and allows her to create her own imaginary relm.
Density- Can control desnity of ... whatever from typical phsyical matter to chi energy, she can create micro blackhole anywhere she wants.
Wave control- Controls anything that has a wave frequency, light, sound, human emotion, what have you.
Eternity- Cease change, nothign can ove on nor digress, all beigns are locied into their current state of being.
Shuu- Time manipulation power that is completly devoid of logic. She can manipulate unsensible time, allowing her to select and obtain multiple histories (or parallel universe) as she feel.

Now, do I really have to go on? There are still 7 other more characters who are about as broken as her. Do you really believe any snesible discussion can coem of of THAT???

[Xeroma]

Niu, this isn't 2chan. I doubt things will become so serious >_>; Chill.

[Ranmilia]

Clearly this is the most serious topic on the boards because it uses MATH and SCIENCE.  None can compare.

Shinki

Final boss of Touhou 5, goddess of Makai.  If she is to be believed (and there's no real reason to doubt her), Shinki created the entire world of Makai.  That sounds pretty impressive until you realize Makai isn't really all that big; dialogue and gameplay indicate that the entire "world" is just a reasonably sized demiplane containing a single large (but not overly large) metropolis and some undeveloped rocky wasteland around it.

So... call it a sphere 100km in diameter or so?  Even that sounds generous, but we'll give her the benefit of the doubt here, this is already going to come out much larger than other numbers. 

Volume of sphere = 5236 km^3

Call that at a density of rooooughly 1.3 g/cm^3 for normal soil and air at sea level.  The ground stuff will be more dense, the air above will be less so, and there's no hard data on how far the plane extends in any direction anyhow.

6.8*10^15 kg for ex nihilo creation of a modest demiplane.


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Patchouli Knowledge

Hooray, it's everyone's favorite asthmatic witch!  Yeah, I'm doing the easy-to-figure-out-via-Google folks first.  Patchouli's biggest achievement on record is duplicating an Apollo spacecraft's flight to the moon. 

... okay, technically it was a joint project with the Sumiyoshi gods and Reimu helping out with propulsion, but Patchy did construct the rocket and create the grimoire instructing the gods, so it counts. 

Maybe. 

We're being generous here.

Anyhow, quick and dirty Google reveals m*5.984*10^7 = energy to get from Earth to Moon in joules, and 2.75*10^6 kg as the mass of a Saturn V.  We'll go ahead and chop that down to 1*10^6 kg, since Patchy's rocket is, yknow, made out of wood and doesn't carry physical fuel.  (It should probably still be much less than that... but we're being generous here.) 

So 5.984*10^13 joules.

It took the rocket 12 days to reach the moon, that's about 1*10^5 seconds.  Call the distance from Earth to the moon at an average of, oh, 3.8*10^8 meters.

kg = joules/(m^2/s^2)
kg =  5.984*10^13 / 2.6*10^-4

2.3*10^17 kg harnessed to propel the Sumiyoshi Rocket.

"Wait a minute," you say, "that's ridiculous.  You can't give Patchy credit for any of that!  The gods did all the work!  And you're just throwing conversions around on whims!"

Eh.  Okay.  Sure.  We can throw that out, if you like.

In normal battle, Patchouli produces solar flares at the peak of her ability.

Solar flares release around 1*10^25 joules of energy, which Patchy focuses into a 3 second span....  okay, that's the largest flare on record, so scale it down a few powers of ten, but you get the picture.  Looks like that Sumiyoshi figure might not be so outrageous after all!  Guess she wasn't kidding about having the strongest magic, when she's healthy enough to cast it.

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Utsuho Reiuzi

Continuing with the solar theme, good ol' Okuu here has the power of nuclear fusion and so forth.  In her final spellcard, Subterranean Sun, she makes... a sun.  Underground.  It appears to be main sequence-like and is said to be as hot as the Earth's sun, lasts for 140 seconds, and appears to be, oh, 5-10 meters in diameter judging by the size of Okuu's sprite when she starts it up. 

But I'm tired, so I'll leave calculations from this point and getting the result into kilograms somehow open to anyone who wants to play with it.  Till tomorrow!

[SageAcrin]

Niu, seriously, lighten up, this isn't a serious discussion to start with. In fact, it's meant to be judging the plot power of represented-in-some-way-in-game(instead of ridiculous interpretation of plot power), as near as I can tell, which is sizably more entertaining than the leading brand of plot power argument.

(If it gets serious, that could be bad. Serious buisiness Touhou plot power arguments could lead to yelling, you never know with these things. They can get scary. Like if you tell someone Batman can't beat Superman.)

One could argue that non-serious discussions don't belong on Discussion but that's silly. Of course they do. For one thing this forum gets few enough topics as it is. >_>

[Halbarad]

MC: I do not have the calculations here, but I know that Marisa's power is usually based off the card Magicannon "Final Spark", which is said to be capable of leveling a mountain. I know 4chan's /tg/ board has done energy equivalence (and conversion to the D&D system, this being the traditional games board >_>) for the spell, but I don't have the numbers handy.

[Sierra]

WTF SAGE BATMAN CAN TOTALLY BEAT SUPERMAN HE HAD KRYPTONITE GLOVES MADE JUST IN CASE LOLOLOL

[Cmdr_King]

I thought Superman vs Goku was the traditional fangasm argument of hate, myself.  Also highlights the problems inherent in power level discussions, since Batman v Superman can and has happened canonically (more than once.  I believe Batman's won most of them)

[AAA]

The only time Superman won was in the Red Son alternate continuity, and even then Batman wasn't Bruce Wayne.

Also, the strongest Touhou character is the little girl that's more than she seems with giant eyes that does weird shit for no reason. Yeah, that one.

[Taishyr]

Yeah, Cirno is the strongest, isn't she, Trips.