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A big problem with a lot of animes regarding the whole invincible protagonist thing is the fact that many, if not most, tend to drag on for a long while after the protagonist unlocks a certain special awesome powerup that's been hyped up like crazy when that point is honestly when the story should end: the protagonist is at their peak, they finally became the strongest, there's nowhere else for their character to go. It's over. Time to move on to something else, or at the very least someone else. Naruto, Dragon Ball, and Inuyasha are I feel especially bad offenders. Now, to their credit, each of these shows did make marked attempts to mitigate the protagonist power creep issue, but unfortunately none of them really solved it because it ended up leading to other problems:
- Dragon Ball went for the serial escalation route by trying to make sure that each new threat was conveniently more powerful than the last, but because it also wanted the stakes to be as high as possible it also made the mistake of hyping up each new antagonist as "the strongest ever", which eventually becomes hard to buy because when the new one pops up you already know they're going to be rendered obsolete by whoever the next one is.
- Inuyasha meanwhile tried to go for the "clever antagonist" route by making it so that the only reason the heroes couldn't skewer the villain into tiny pieces was because the villain was just too smart, but unfortunately this was handled extremely poorly because most of the time the villain's tactics weren't properly foreshadowed and he didn't exactly display much more intelligence than any other character onscreen, and this resulted in the villain coming off as less of a strategic mastermind and more like that one snotty kid in the playground whose overpowered OC always conveniently has a counter for whatever the other kids' OCs throw at them.
- Naruto went for a similar route to Dragon Ball, but it suffers from this issue slightly less if only because it did at least eventually reach a conclusion. That said, I did hear that Naruto was so powerful by the end that the sequel series apparently had to resort to nerfing him severely so that he didn't just steamroll whatever new threat popped up. I haven't actually watched Boruto, though, so if anyone reading this actually has feel free to correct me or clarify.
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