Board Thread:Episode Discussions/@comment-1251315-20150219132354/@comment-10982690-20150219163725

NeedleJizo wrote: Once again, I want to state my complete and utter disbelief that people this smart and powerful are JUST Genin.

On the previous Chunin exams we had Gaara and Naruto, both Jinchuriki and insanely powerful. Then there were Lee and Neji, both ridiculously powerful taijutsu users, Sasuke, who Kakashi himself says at their very first training exercise had a chakra level higher than a regular genin, Zaku, who could generate impossibly destructive air waves from his hands, and Temari, who could level a whole forest with a single jutsu. Sakura was also smart enough to answer ridiculously hard questions without cheating and Shikamaru was a strategy genius. Guy's dad was a genin all his life, and still he could open all 8 gates. Naruto and Sasuke are, technically, genin.

The thing is, we don't know the past of the participants. We don't know their age, and how many times they've flunked the exam, which seems to be a very easy thing to do, as the tests are specifically designed to narrow down the amount of people. It's been 2.5 years since the last exam, for all we know they spent all that time preparing for this.

Plus, are they really that powerful? All we've seen so far is a couple genjutsu (which don't feel so different from what the Rain ninja used on part 1), a person using a bow, one using puppet arms, and Yome's dojutsu, which has no true offensive use. The only thing I'm calling total BS in is Shira taking all of Neji's 64 palms and just shrugging them off. Other than that, I don't think they're so OP