Ultimate shonen showdown! *

[the cat]

*actual game name pending

Hello, I go by The Cat here and at RPG.net. I am working on a game that can emulate battles in shonen anime. Even if my game does not work out, at least I can say that I tried to create something that emulates shonen games well.I am trying to focus on what makes dbz good and expand that logic to cover other subjects like Bleach.

How it works
Grades, bursts and abilities
Grades- Determine the relative strength of a character within the scope of a particular season.
Bursts- Bursts are the altered states our heroes often get into when they are in extreme trouble. They range from Extreme Rage, to boosted reflexes. They are triggered only one time during a game day and of course, a game day can be as long as the story needs it to be. Stronger characters often get more than one burst but all player characters and important NPCs start with one.
Abilities- The meat of the game is in abilities. They are the 'powers, techniques, etc/  that your characters can do. The GM will need to decide which abilities fit their setting but I will say that I am working on having powers that are not necessarily combat in nature. That way, a very charismatic character can still hold their own in a fight. As your character gets stronger, their abilities get stronger as well.
Power stat- the main stat that controls how much power a character has is called Spirit. This number is a total of 100% and will not get higher. Bursts and healing items can restore Spirit, but ultimately it will take time to restore.

How I am going to handle power creep.
One thing about my game is that I am trying to find a way to cover power creep. The idea I came up with works with the grade level concept I had. Grades are subjective only to the current season. Characters who move on from 1 season to the next loose their current grade level but are still considerably more powerful compared to past villains and NPC's. They only "lose" grade levels to scale back the power within the scope of the new campaign. Characters who do not advance with the campaign will be eventually written out of the story. Why do character's grade level change? With shonen anime, new enemies who are much more powerful than the last always arrive on the sceene. Instead of the numbers in the game getting larger, the characters are scaled back compared to each other.

[M. Burrell]

Strikes me you still have a potential power-creep problem:

When character's grades reset at the start of a season it sounds like they'll effectively be Grade 1 of Season II (as opposed to being Grade 13 of Season I, previously). This simply condenses the issue. Which may be what you want - but in the end you'll still have to deal with those silly high-end numbers, and always having to top yourself in the next session (which even Shonen authors suffer from). 

[trick]

Isn't that the same with any leveling system? For example: DnD and getting stuck at level 20 (until they came up with Epic classes with bassically god-like powers).