Board Thread:Versus Debates/@comment-26005711-20150512133037/@comment-26518343-20150801181814

Whitequeen666 wrote: Honestly, I just feel like there's a disconnect with Hiruzen. I believe that originally, at the beginning of the entire Naruto series, Minato and Hiruzen were supposed to be considered the most powerful hokage. Clearly, a lot was retconned in terms of their strength level while Hashirama and Tobirama were given an upgrade in terms of power. Then there's the fact that we haven't seen either Tobirama nor Hiruzen's potential. We don't know what jutsu Hiruen knows or doesn't know, but we know that he was famed to know all the jutsu in konoha. The question is whether that was retconned as well. On Tobirama's part, we know that he is considered the best water style user in the world, but yet we never saw any of his water style jutsu in the war. He's also known to be just slightly weaker than Hashirama and Madara, but we don't know why he's that powerful because we haven't seen all of his skills. His chakra reserves are also huge and his control is good enough to perform jutsu by making seals with one hand. So in the end, we have no clue what either one can or cannot do. Therefore, in my opinion, there's no real facts or ways to tell who would have won. Pre-retcon, Hiruzen would have won. Now, there's no way to tell at all because we have seen so little of them after the retcon.

By the end of the series, Tobirama was being portrayed as a guy who should have easily survived the hopelessly outnumbered odds in the battle in which he was killed. He shouldn't have even had a scratch on him after that encounter the way his legend was boosted.

By the end, Hashirama was purported to be a guy strong enough to have killed Kakuzu with one arm tied behind his back instead of having an epic battle in which Kakuzu survived.

Meanwhile Hiruzen devolved into some scrub who was lucky to be Hokage and could be have been iced in one shot by the likes of Kabuto, Danzo or Jiraiya.