Altered Nova said:
Wow, yeah okay that was a bad memory on my part. For some reason I was convinced that Naruto had use Wind Release Rasengan on Kakuzu, since he didn't throw it. I forgot that Naruto never actually used Wind Release Rasengan in battle, so we don't actually know exactly how much damage it would do. Which is kind of weird, you'd think that Naruto would try it at least once before inventing a new and improved version of it.
Also he invented it pretty damn fast, didn't he just master Wind Release Rasengan as Shikimaru, Ino and Chouji were setting out to hunt down Kakuzu and Hidan? And yet he'd already invented Rasenshuriken by the time he'd followed them to provide backup. Holy shit, I thought Sasuke was supposed to be the genius?
Depends on exactly how he went from the WR:R to the WR:RS. The way I figured it works, the regular Rasengan's not "big enough" for the amount of wind chakra that Naruto was putting into it, and the wind blades inside the sphere were a little too tightly packed. Naruto's sitting there with the WR: Rasengan in his hand, thinking "This is pretty good, but it could be stronger. Maybe if I made it bigger..." I mean, the Rasenshuriken is basically a Big Ball Wind Rasengan, isn't it? I think the Odama Rasengan and the core of the Rasenshuriken are about the same size. And becuase the wind chakra was less pressed together the blades extend to the sides?
Yeah that probably makes more sense. I guess I just liked the the user guiding the rockets after a fleeing opponent like Yamcha's Spirit Ball technique in DBZ.
Chakra's always struck me as being more... impersonal than Ki attacks. I don't think that a dbz character has ever been hurt by their own Ki blast. Well, Frieza and his own kienzan, but it wasn't so much the energy of the attack that hurt him, but the incredible sharp edge.
Err, it's like low low-density earth chakra with a special bouncy crystal structure... yeah okay that's stupid. I just really loved the idea of throwing a bouncing super death ball in a small room and watching it make Swiss cheese outta someone. Throwing a giant mega-dense Earth Rasengan like a fast ball with the built in Light-Weight Rock technique and watching it crush/drill some poor bastard and digging a 15 foot wide tunnel through that mountain behind him is way better.
Well, if Kumo's Dodai ever learns the Rasengan, or Naruto turns out to have his form of Lava Release, bouncy death is more than possible! And your desciption of the Rasen-Rocks-Fall-Everyone-Dies sounds pretty awesome.
Good point. This is another reminder that elemental chakra in the Narutoverse is actually a man-made artificial replica of the real element and doesn't perfectly duplicate all of the same behaviors and properties. Lightning chakra isn't electromagnetic energy, it's chakra imperfectly mimicking the electric half of electromagnetic energy. There are going to be times when it doesn't behave how you might expect.
That makes it harder to come up with a good Lighting Release Rasengan that isn't just a chidori/rasengan fusion. And having it somehow make you faster feels like a copout. Hmmm... didn't the databook say that Lightning Release are good at being diffused over a large area? Perhaps Lighting Release Rasengan can use that. When the jutsu destabilizes without contacting a target, instead of throwing the released chakra blades everywhere mostly harmlessly the user can direct them all towards the target. This lets you turn a compact blender killing sphere into a large number of electrified chakra blades that cover a large area and are much harder to dodge. It does much less damage that way but it can paralyze the target with electricity, making it easier to land a proper rasengan death blow on them.
Between Sasuke, Kakashi, the Raikages, and Darui, I can't help but feel that Kishimoto's exhausted the options for lightning techniques.
I don't really like it but I can't explain why. Maybe I'm just too squeamish for that mental image. But I can't think of anything better so I guess it'll have to do!
Well, knight504 brought up the link between the Rasenshuriken and the reaction people with a wind affinity get from the special chakra paper.
Wind cuts the paper, so the Rasenshuriken is the ultimate cutting technique with an expansion trick. A fuma shuriken is also quite an aerodynamic shape, so I bet the Rasenshuriken is the slowest to lose momentum over longer distances.
Fire burns the paper, so the "Rasenroketto" is the ultimate burning technique, with the energy released from the attack causing an exothermic explosion, and although fire doesn't have a secondary property like lightning's piercing/vibration, the jutsu can be "programmed" with a flight path through shape manipulation.
Water, perhaps the most versatile of the five elements, capable of being manipulated into a variety of shapes, dampens the paper, so the Rasen-super-soaker (Rasenbubble?) is the ultimate drenching technique, with the Water chakra in the technique entering the victim's body through available opening like any open wounds, the mouth, the ears, and even the pores, just as water seeps into the cracks of rocks and metals. It can be manipulated into a variety of shapes, but in zero-gravity, water takes the shape of a sphere, so I'm thinking that the further the technique travels from the user, the more it starts to return to the sphere shape of the Rasengan. It might actually "wobble" a little bit while moving as well.
Earth... causes the paper to turn into dirt and crumble away, which actually sort of supports my earlier petrification idea, but honestly the paper crumbling sounds like the reaction that a dust affinity should cause, so screw it, we're going with the Rasen-Mass Effect idea!
As knight504 mentioned, Lightning wrinkles the paper. I don't know whether that's an effect of the vibrations, or what. At high voltages paper stops being an insulator, and a voltage high enough to make that happen but not high enough to make the paper catch fire might make the paper wrinkle in some way, I don't know. Lightning's secondary property is vibrations creating additional piercing power, so the Raiton: Rasen-Tesla looks like ball lightning, has enough piercing power that Hashirama's Quintuple Rashomon technique is about the only thing capable of blocking it, and destroys the nervous system of whoever it hits. That said, it's my impression that, on average, long-range lightning jutsu aren't actually as fast as long-range wind techniques. so the Rasentesla should actually be slower than the Rasenshuriken.