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The greater the Force power, the more it seems to eclipse the personal development and integrity of the character in some ways. I believe characters in SW should be interesting despite not being particularly powerful or in spite of it. Han Solo, Chewie, Leia, Wedge and Lando were interesting characters who (at the time in Leia's case) did not particularly kick ass or obviously display Force powers. Those who did in the OT were very mild and the emphasis was on the story, not the special effects.
Fast-forward to the PT era, and most of the visual media is chock-full of needless CGI, overdone fights (Yoda's fighting in AotC is in hindsight atrociously done) and non-Force using characters are pretty non-existent. Padme? She is stupid. Jar-Jar? No. Uh... who else exists in the PT that isn't a Force user of note? Like no one. Even Grievous is a footnote in the Clone Wars history, overshadowed by the likes of minor Force deities Opress, Maul, and Ventress.
One other thing that makes the video game characters tougher to compare to non- there's more tiers.
You can have "A stomps B stomps C stomps D stomps E, but E's still supposed to be really powerful," chains, while in other stuff, by the time you're four stomp tiers from the top, you're pretty low down and well out of the big badass zone. It's like the 'roughly equal' band is smaller in TOR or such.
The statements of power aren't the problem. Character fights are feats, and by feats there's just a different number of tiers / it takes larger/smaller amounts of skill to stomp in different eras.
Another big problem is limited exposure; it's a lot easier for some people to say X is better because X has more fights under his or her belt, or is visibly faster (due to media differences).
But then sometimes statements of power are one-sided too. For example, "Anakin is the strongest Force user ever" is accepted at face value by a lot of people in this community, but Anakin hasn't displayed Force powers on the scale of say, DE Sidious, DE Luke, Exar Kun or Revan. His stalemate against Obi-Wan is all the more confusing as well.
However, with similar statements such as "darkest power in the universe", "the most powerful of the most powerful", are dismissed out of hand due to either bias or lack of media exposure. Or in some cases just because people don't like the character.
His stalemate against Obi-wan is something I don't find confusing- in movie and CGI clone wars, he's one tier down, and his style and familiarity gives him rock-paper-scissors like advantage against Anakin.
On the flip side, in the video games, you can have a massive Jedi killer like Sion, be solidly outmatched by the Exile, who's in turn well outmatch by Nyrss, who's outmatched by Revan, who's outmatched by Vitiate.
TOR's 5 tiers represent a range of power that in TCW and prequel trilogy would represent in 2-3 tiers.
I don't think you quite understand though. Anakin's raw Force potential is supposed to be off of the charts, exceeding Yoda's by Qui-Gon's own determination. Within the movie-only canon, he peerless. His defeat of Dooku is typically chalked up to superior swordplay and strength due to his Force power, even though Dooku routinely manhandles Obi-Wan in the Force.
So why then is Obi-Wan able to hold his own in a direct Force push? There's no canon precedent for this making sense, given that Anakin's outperformed Obi-Wan in this area many times.
It's not the issue of fewer tiers; it's of tiers being so muddled on all sides it makes a clear, linear power chain pretty much impossible.
Because you don't need to be exactly equal to someone in an area to defend against it. There's multiple cases of this happening, Obi-wan defended against Dooku's lightning on occasion too. I'd say Obi-wan has focused his force skills more on defense and, if he can sufficiently anticipate an attack, hold off a stronger one.
That's rather my point- in some SW stuff, someone can be stronger but still not overwhelm the weaker one a good deal of the time. In other stuff, the same strength difference is more overwhelming.
The idea of Obi-Wan being more defensive in general makes sense, but he was instantly overpowered by Dooku and struggled but ultimately stalemated Anakin. Again, this raises a concern about how this can be, unless Anakin had you know, leaked his Force strength out when he was stabbing Jedi earlier.
The best approach is to draw from feats and accolades.
Anakin isn't the strongest Force user ever; only potentially. That a character is the recipient of numerous accolades and doesn't have the feats to match isn't really sufficient grounds to dismiss the accolade. Revan is a prime example of that: besides one or two impressive feats in the book, he's really done nothing special on-screen or in-text despite being one of the most openly fapped characters. Doesn't mean he's a weak feeb either.
Don't forget about the numerous times Palpatine's been called "the most powerful Sith Lord in history."
Registered: Jun 2016
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It all depends in your viewpoint:
If you take all the hype at face value and highball it, then I'd say he's in the gap between Ventress and Dooku. If you lowball it, he's somewhat below Ventress.
You can also ignore the hype altogether, and focus in his sole on-screen feat. If you highball it, he's unchained Vaylin-level. If you lowball it, he might as well be featless.
If you ignore the feat because it happened during gameplay, he is featless, and the only thing going for him is logical deductions based on his title as the strongest of his time. So he's about your average Dark Lord of the Sith-level.