It's definitely impressive what smaller powers will try to build to rival larger nations naval superiority. The Bismark was built as one of the first surface boats to try to break British naval dominance of the Atlantic. Though the war broke out faster than Nazi naval planners had anticipated and with the expense of building battleships during war footing they had to shift resources to a U-Boat strategy.
Speaking of impressive and mean ships, the Bismark is definitely dwarfed by super battleships out of the Pacific. The Yamato was a mean ship designed from the offset to engage multiple American battleships simultaneously. It is the biggest battleship every built at over 60k tons. It dwarfed almost every surface naval vessel right up until the first nuclear carriers decades later.
The ship had massive 18.1 inch designed to defeat the thickest battleship armour of the time. Though it came at a time when the Japanese already demonstrated naval air superiority and didn't play any significant role in WWII
I am always amazed at how much more advanced segments of axis power technology at the time. Japanese had wicked ship building and far superior fighter designs at the onset of the war. Germans had built ballistic missiles, jet fighters and excellent U-boats whose designs had to be reverse engineered and copied for decades to come.