@monsterstomp: It's complicated. Don't think of it as gameplay vs cutscenes, think of it more as canon vs not canon. CJ taking down the Ballas HQ is without a question of doubt; canon. His ability to soak up bullets and then regenerate by running into a giant floating heart obviously can't be taken into consideration on a battle forum, but the fact remains that in canon he was skilled enough to basically take down the whole Ballas gang by himself, among other things. For a game like Grand Theft Auto, I would ask that we be a little bit loose with the gameplay feats, because it isn't a very cinematic game like, say, Metal Gear Solid. The feats of the characters are in the gameplay, so if you don't accept that, then we don't have a debate. I'm fine with admitting that, if we were to only take what is explicitly shown in cutscenes into consideration, CJ doesn't even stand a chance against someone like Bourne, but then it would be nice if you (and everyone else) looked at things a bit more... generally so to speak, just for the sake of debate, because I do think CJ makes a great match for Bourne.
I mean the guy is nothing but a hood rat really. He has very little training, yet his natural talent is unbelievable. When the game starts, Carl is just arriving back in Los Santos with nothing, and his old gang is in ruins. Crack dealers litter the streets and have turned almost everyone into junkies, and in the first act of the game it's up to Carl to almost singlehandedly clean things up. His gang has very little power and resources left, but Carl fixes this by stealing a verifiable arsenal of weaponry from the military throughout the course of various missions, giving his gang the opportunity to make a comeback. In a very short time, Carl was able to wage gang wars singlehandedly and steal back the majority of hood in Los Santos from the Ballas, and Sweet even makes mention of Carl practically turning the Grove back around all by himself. But then his friends betray him, his brother is shot and jailed, and CJ is only saved when a group of crooked cops want to use him for their dirty work. But even when he's reduced back to nothing, Carl plans to rise back to power and make money with various heists, and slowly he pulls himself back up until he's running several successful businesses and operating as an unstoppable hitman for the mafia and whoever else is asking. His skills are so immense that a Government agent named Mike Toreno ends up offering Carl a deal -- perform several impossible missions for my agency, and I will get your brother out of jail. And of course Carl succeeds in all of it, no one can stop him, not the army, not aliens, no one. Once his brother is finally released, they once again go back to the Grove, and once again Carl almost singlehandedly cleans up the hood and makes Grove Street the most powerful gang in the city by literally wiping out every rival gang, before storming their HQ, killing their leader who used to be his friend who betrayed him, killing the crooked cop voiced by Samuel L. Jackson who was the source of all his problems, then the game ends with Carl being a rich and successful business man.
Here's a list of CJ's feats, everything I mention is canon, it just doesn't happen in a cutscene. So we can't pull specific feats like "CJ landed 10 headshots on everyone in the room in quick succession before they could shoot him", but I think the fact that we KNOW he killed everyone in that room without getting shot gives us enough to go on. Anyway, here's a list off the top of my head of Carl's feats in driving, shooting, close quarters, and stealth.
Driving/Piloting-
- In the very first mission "Big Smoke", Carl is attacked by a car full of angry Ballas all shooting at him with automatic weapons, and he is able to outrace and evade them without getting shot on a bike (not a motorcycle, a bike).
- In the mission "Cesar Vialpando" Carl won a lowrider tournament against the Varrios Los Aztecas (Mexican gang and professional lowriders) despite never lowriding before (not in anyway combat related but it shows how talented he is in picking up challenging skills quickly).
- The various Catalina missions involve robbing a bank and a betting shop, among other things, and Carl is forced to escape more-or-less the entire police force of Whetstone.
- The mission "Farewell My Love" is a large street race, where Carl beats Cesar Vialpando (leader of the Varrios Los Aztecas and probably the second best driver in San Andreas), Wu Zi Mu (a blind Triad leader blessed with incredible luck that allows him to fight and drive using just his other senses) and Claude Speed (the protagonist of GTA3 with a plethora of feats in his own right) all at once among other canon fodder drivers.
- In "Back to School" Carl completes the Advanced Driving School, which involves him pulling off several death defying stunts and learning various advanced maneuvers (flips, rolls, wheelies, driving with popped tires) and the final lesson requires him to drive to one end of San Fierro and back in under two minutes without crashing.
- In "Monster" Carl is tasked with completing a time trial where he has to drive a monster truck up mountains and through rigorous terrain in a short time. Presumably Toreno did this to test his skills before giving him any real missions.
- In "Learning to Fly" Carl completes Flying School in record time and becomes an ace pilot of various aircrafts.
Shooting-
- In the mission "Just Business" Carl's friend Big Smoke was meeting with the Russian Mafia to make a deal, only for it to be revealed that the Russians were planning to assassinate him and had the whole building filled with heavily armed hitmen. Carl and Smoke were able to fight their way through the Atrium by killing every Russian who got in their way, then while making their escape via motorcycle, Carl hung off the back with a gun and was able to take out every pursuing vehicle and clear out every roadblock in their path.
- In the mission "Robbing Uncle Sam" Carl and Ryder broke into a National Guard base with limited equipment, and fought all the soldiers long enough to steal their stockpile of weapons.
- In the mission "Reuniting The Families", Carl's brother Sweet meets with another faction of the Grove Street Family in order to negotiate reuniting, but the meeting is busted by the S.W.A.T. team who raid the hotel and kill almost everyone in a matter of seconds. Carl grabs a shotgun and bursts into the hotel, fighting his way through an army of heavily armed S.W.A.T. agents until he finally finds his brother, and together the two get back outside and escape in a getaway car, with Carl hanging out the roof and using an AK to carve themselves a path and gun down any pursuer until eventually the S.W.A.T. team loses them.
- In the mission "The Green Sabre", Sweet and the rest of Grove plan a largescale ambush on the Ballas home turf in order to take back Los Santos, but right before the battle commences CJ finds out that the whole thing was a set-up, and Grove Street are the ones getting ambushed. He races to the scene to find his brother shot and most of Grove dead, and in an angry frenzy, he challenges every Balla there by proclaiming he's going to take them all down, before doing exactly that until eventually the police show up and arrest him.
- The various Catalina missions involve robbing a bank and a betting shop, among other things, and Carl and Catalina more or less take on the entire police force of Whetstone.
- In the mission "Air Raid" Carl wields a gatling gun with his bare hands and uses it to accurately take down a whole battalion of tiny remote-controlled airplanes threatening to destroy Zero's transmitter towers.
- In the mission "Interdiction" Carl uses an RPG to shoot down a whole fleet of agency helicopters in order to protect the one helicopter under Toreno's command.
- In the mission "Black Project", after sneaking into Area 69, Carl rampages through the military base and kills every soldier who gets in his way, successfully stealing the government's biggest project -- a 60 million dollar jetpack -- with nobody being able to stop him.
- Towards the end of the game, when Grove Street has zero influence in Los Santos, Carl manages to singlehandedly wipe out the majority of every rival gang and reinstate Grove as the strongest family.
Close quarters-
- As soon as the game begins Carl is already a professional criminal with years of experience on the streets of Los Santos and Liberty City, two of the most dangerous cities in the country (with Liberty taking the edge). He has no training, but he's a talented street fighter and fully capable of casually killing two Ballas who got in his way during the mission "Tagging Up Turf" with just his bare hands, and in the mission "Cleaning The Hood" he raided a crack den and killed everyone inside with a baseball bat (he had help from Ryder but that guy can spend the whole mission fighting one guy).
- In the mission "Catalyst" Carl was strong enough to throw military weapon crates dozens of feet into the back of Ryder's truck, despite the fact that they must have weighed dozens or even hundreds of pounds.
- After training in the gym and reaching maximum muscle, Carl is able to bench-press 320 pounds effortlessly.
- Across San Andreas are three gyms, each led by one master. If Carl challenges them and defeats them using his current fighting style, they will train him in their techniques. By the end of the game Carl has mastered boxing, taekwondo, and his most powerful style, kick-boxing.
- In the mission "Stowaway", Carl infiltrates an agency plane and is forced to fight his way through half a dozen government agents who may-or-may-not-have-been-aliens in order to plant a bomb.
Stealth-
- In the mission "Madd Dogg's Rhymes", CJ, armed with a knife, broke into superstar-rapper Madd Dogg's heavily guarded mansion, and made his way through while assassinating every bodyguard one-by-one until he found the rapper's precious rhymes book, which he stole and then escaped with, without ever raising a peep.
- In the mission "The Da Nang Thang" Carl survives a helicopter crash into the ocean, but loses all of his gear except for his knife, whereas his enemies all have machine guns. He sneaks aboard a heavily guarded Triad freighter ship, and assassinates everyone on board and even frees some imprisoned refugees.
- In "Black Project" Carl infiltrates Area 69, a black military site that's not even on the map where secret research is conducted.
- In the mission "Vertical Bird" Carl sneaks aboard a military aircraft carrier and manages to steal a fighter jet right from under their noses.
Again, the only problem is that there are no cutscenes, so we just have to take everything at face value. But even then, I'm pretty sure CJ has the edge on Bourne.
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