Board Thread:News and Announcements/@comment-6533159-20150930152159/@comment-9464517-20151003131242

As for Ryu VS Strider, that fight could have gone both ways. Screwattack claimed that Strider was stronger, faster and had better weaponry than Ryu, but that is untrue.

First off, Ryu is definitely stronger, having deflected sword blows from beings tens or hundreds of times stronger than him. I'd argue that he's more durable too. He once survived a mountain-engulfing explosion (he was at the epicentre), though the mountain also sustained virtually no damage, which makes me wonder how forceful the explosion actually was. Nevertheless, he's been crushed, burned, windswept (by razor-sharp gale-force winds), poisoned, and had his insides attacked with a chainsaw, and has still been able to walk away from it all. However, durability is a negligible factor in this battle, given the insane respective strengths of each fighter's weapons.

Strider definitely takes the cake in terms of weaponry, however. Ryu only has three weapons that Strider would not be able to instantly destroy, to my knowledge - the True Dragon sword, the Eclipse Scythe (which is too slow and unwieldy to really compete with the insanely agile and athletic Strider), and Ryu's very own plasma sword (which would still put him at a massive disadvantage since it doesn't have any of the abilities that Strider's sword has - e.g. charging capabilities, massive quantities of homing plasma waves and extensions). If Ryu entered the fight with any weapon other than those three, he would be sliced and diced instantaneously, and indeed of those three, only with the True Dragon sword would Ryu be able to feasibly keep up with Strider. Interestingly, both the True Dragon sword and Strider's sword have canonically been stated to be able to "cut through anything", so it's interesting to imagine what would happen if the blades ever clashed.

In any case, Ryu's sword has the advantage of being able to deflect plasma (making Strider's barrage of projectiles completely worthless) while Strider's sword has other advantages (such as the aforementioned beam-charging and extensions that give it increased power and a lot more range). Neither of the weapons is necessarily superior to the other.

The speed was one of the more controversial aspects of the fight, with Wiz and Boomstick's "43% faster than Ryu" statistic being scoffed at by a lot of people, most notably Death Battle enthusiast Tsubori, a senior admin on the Fanon Wiki. He and I had a heated debate about this factor. My understanding of weapon physics is very poor, to say the least, but I seem to recall his points being that Wiz and Boomstick did not take the "muzzle velocity" into account, and that Strider running back and forth to dodge the anti-aircraft bullets that supposedly gave credence to the 43% argument would have only confused the sensors and led to them firing at random. I have two counterpoints for that. Firstly, this is futuristic technology that we are talking about, so modern limitations can and should be more-or-less taken out of the picture (especially when the shadow-tag hardware in question was designed by a government with limitless funds, resources and extremely powerful technology, with the specific intention to kill Striders), and secondly, if the shadow-tag guns do fire at random, that makes the bullets even harder to dodge, since they are in an enclosed space and there would be thousands or high-speed bullets firing at him from all angles in unpredictable patterns, yet he still avoided every single one of them. While Wiz and Boomstick did neglect to mention Ryu's feat of dodging surface-to-air missiles himself in Ninja Gaiden 3, it isn't in the same league as Strider's feat. The surface-to-air missiles were designed to hit jets flying in mid-air, not a 5'10 human being falling directly towards them, allowing them to be confused enough for Ryu to maneouvre around them. So while that feat alone definitely shows that Ryu has superhuman speed, he doesn't seem to be quite fast enough to take out Strider.

As for Strider's gadgets and Ryu's magic, well, both can pretty much dodge whatever the opponent has to throw at them, despite Ryu's magical prowess. I may talk about that in greater detail at a later date but I'm getting bored of writing now and I still want to talk about the time-stop.

Yes, that's right. There is one thing that would give Ryu an insta-victory in this battle - the time-stop. It's a pick-up ability that only ever appeared in the very first Ninja Gaiden game that allows Ryu to freeze time completely for a few seconds. Whether or not he gets to use it is certainly debatable, and requires the allowance of pick-up items to be utilised in the battle, as well as affirmative answers to the questions, "Should Ryu been granted an ability he hasn't had in more than 20 years?" and "Would he even have enough time away from fighting Strider to pick the item up in the first place?". Given all the scientific calculations that one has to take into account when working out the result of this battle, perhaps one would even need to figure out how the time-stop would even work!

However, if Ryu does get the time-stop, there's virtually no question that he would win. Strider would be completely powerless, and Ryu would cut him to pieces long before the timer ran out, short as it may be anyway.

It seems ridiculous after all of that to suggest that the battle could well hinge on a single, often overlooked ability from the first Ninja Gaiden game, but what can I say? It arguably does. Your choice on who the victor is might very well depend entirely on whether you give Ryu the time-stop or not. That being said, even without it, the fight could still go either way. Both are immensely capable fighters, and a fight between them would be one for the ages.

In any case, despite Wiz and Boomstick's crappy reasoning, the Death Battle itself was awesome.