Lurker > TsunamiXXVIII

Jill
Waluigi
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"Someday I'll catch up, and then you'll all be surprised!"
BKSheikah has the power. He is the one.

Wow, Oklahoma State actually beat Texas. I've been on the "OK State might not even make a bowl game" train for weeks now, so it was a struggle to even keep the Longhorns in my top 25 even though I had them in my top 10 last week.

Of course, 3 of my top 5 were idle this week so no real change there. Texas A&M actually takes the worst tumble simply because this was their third loss and I'd previously been justifying ranking them far higher than any 2-loss team has any right to be this early in the year simply because said losses were to undefeated Clemson and Alabama, the former being a close game and the latter being a game against Alabama. Iowa somehow manages to rise 1 spot after losing, because seven of the ten teams I had ranked 16-25 lost (out of a possible nine since two of them were playing each other), so they were #19 and they lost close to #14, heck it, I'm not bringing in someone who wasn't even on my radar last week and putting them above Iowa. Obviously they'd have dropped further if others in their range hadn't lost as well, or had even had off-weeks.

Biggest riser is Utah. On what I thought was my finalized Top 25 for last week, I'd had the Utes at #25, but when looking at it to gauge my "poll inertia" for this week, I found that I'd somehow missed Oklahoma. Checking two weeks' ago's poll showed me where to slot them, and everyone else slid down, which meant sliding "out" for Utah. One blowout over a struggling team later, to wind up alone in front of the Pac-12 South clusterfuck, and they're #15. Meanwhile, the ACC has a little support for Clemson, and it's...Virginia and Syracuse? Believe it. And even the MWC, C-USA, and Sun Belt are getting in on the fun! Georgia Southern upset Appalachian State this week and has still not lost to anyone other than Clemson, while UAB...may be one for us Level 6'ers to watch. Since conference play began, they've averaged just 7 points allowed per game, including two shutouts; they also shut out a non-conference opponent to run their season total to 3. I'm hoping that the "natural lower limit of vegas lines" can get an over/under that's easy for them to get under.
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"Someday I'll catch up, and then you'll all be surprised!"
BKSheikah has the power. He is the one.

turbopuns2 posted...

TsunamiXXVIII posted...

Level 5: Kentucky (PK) @ Missouri

What a pick!

Thanks, I just came back here because I checked the scoreboard again after having previously seen it fairly late and having a SFII 2K4 reaction. "Wait, Kentucky WON?!"

And then going further into play-by-play and recap and realizing that they were literally still trailing when the clock hit zero and won it on an untimed down...I cannot believe I got that win. What a miracle.
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"Someday I'll catch up, and then you'll all be surprised!"
BKSheikah has the power. He is the one.

The Owner of FF9 posted...

So Garrus vs. Ramza was one for the records, right?

It's up there. The record books apparently weren't updated in 2015 though.

Also, damnit Shovel Knight! I just can't win with you. I figured that Shovel Knight could pull some upsets last contest because it would be against anti-vote magnets (and its second opponent wouldn't even have the benefit of bracket votes to curtail its anti-votes because said opponent's first opponent is the biggest piece of casualbait ever), and I got totally burned.
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"Someday I'll catch up, and then you'll all be surprised!"
BKSheikah has the power. He is the one.

The_Ctes posted...

If Waluigi can't get ahead now he's not winning without good rallies.

Well that was always the expectation. I don't think any of us thought Waluigi had enough legit strength to beat Aerith, but a combination of him having some natural strength just for being a Mario character and Square supposedly being weaker (which doesn't quite look true?) meant it wouldn't take much for Waluigi to pull the upset.

And that was always going to be a 3-point match, so if Waluigi beat Aerith, he'd make it to Round 3, which is usually the make-or-break round for rally targets (due to the bizarre format of CBIX, Draven's R2 is the proper comparison.)

L-Block got a lucky draw that allowed him to reach R3, and then the novelty allowed him to start causing havoc. Undertale managed to luck out, too, avoiding any Squintendo until Round 3. (Actually, forget just Squintendo; Undertale didn't even have to face anything Japanese until round 3. Not to take anything away from Fallout 3 since it did make the GotD semis, but I do feel that if Undertale had run into any of its later opponents in R2, it would've been in trouble). Missingno may have knocked off a Noble Niner in R1, but Crono has always been Sephiroth's inferior. I feel like if Missingno had gotten past Seph, nothing would've stopped it. And so on. If you look at it harder, the "Round 3 factor" is even true when we didn't know that it was going to be an issue. For example, take a look back at the Guru stats and see where the eventual champion first became an underdog. Round 3. From a certain point of view, it wouldn't be an underdog again until the semis. See, in later rounds, you have to look at more than just raw percentage because a lot of those that don't have a given entrant had them losing earlier than that. Majora's Mask had a very high retention rate in Round 4, and it was above 50% in Round 5 as well. (Retention rate being picks to win over picks to win the previous round, rather than out of total brackets. I'll again go back to 2015 when the Gurus were divided enough on RBYG vs. SM64 in the Quarterfinals that Final Fantasy VII was considered the cookie cutter pick for that semifinal even though "not RBYG or SM64" had only one bracket more than "RBYG or SM64" (and yes, some of those other options were from that QF rather than FFVII's) and there were literally more brackets picking FFVII as the loser of that match than as the winner (it was something like 35% winner, 42% loser, 13% eliminated in a previous round)).
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"Someday I'll catch up, and then you'll all be surprised!"
BKSheikah has the power. He is the one.

D.Va
Fox
Captain Toad
Aerith
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"Someday I'll catch up, and then you'll all be surprised!"
BKSheikah has the power. He is the one.

Apollo
Gilgamesh
Mimikyu
Liquid Snake
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"Someday I'll catch up, and then you'll all be surprised!"
BKSheikah has the power. He is the one.

Jorji
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"Someday I'll catch up, and then you'll all be surprised!"
BKSheikah has the power. He is the one.

Raiden
Venom Snake
Bulbasaur
Roy
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"Someday I'll catch up, and then you'll all be surprised!"
BKSheikah has the power. He is the one.

transiences Analysis

I actually have Shovel Knight in my bracket. I just looked back at old matches and I'm not totally sure why.. that game did better against GTA than I was expecting but that's probably more GTA than anything.

Guests Analysis - Nameless2000

The game Shovel Knight was able to get 38% on GTA:SA in 2015, showing some amount of strength.

*weeps*

Literally picked that game to win twice due to being indie and up against things that had reputations for sucking.

Two matches. Because lol GTA and because Chrono Cross is hated on for not being a "proper" sequel to Chrono Trigger and wouldn't even have the benefit of bracket votes because the LOLCasuals always massively overrate WoW.

Well, at least I got the part about them overrating WoW right; CC did have a very low prediction percentage to even escape R1.
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"Someday I'll catch up, and then you'll all be surprised!"
BKSheikah has the power. He is the one.

garetha200 posted...

shovel knight.

Freaking Shovel Knight burned my Guru so hard last contest. I mean, not as badly as thinking that the generalized SNES strength meant that VI could upset VII, but thinking that Shovel Knight could actually take advantage of what seemed like a soft bracket placement to win 2 matches was pretty disgusting!
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"Someday I'll catch up, and then you'll all be surprised!"
BKSheikah has the power. He is the one.

Oxbridge posted...

My thoughts were something like: "Both of them are going to be weak but I've never heard of Aloy at all", so I went for D.Va and never thought about it again.

Mine was "I've heard of neither of them but I've at least heard of D.Va's game."
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"Someday I'll catch up, and then you'll all be surprised!"
BKSheikah has the power. He is the one.

Changes:

Fox McCloud with 58.77%
Captain Toad with 60%
Rosalina with 58.7%

No other changes at the moment, though I'll probably reevaluate Magus-Vincent and Joker-Claire after tomorrow's Fox-Jill and Aerith-Waluigi matches.
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"Someday I'll catch up, and then you'll all be surprised!"
BKSheikah has the power. He is the one.

garetha200 posted...

wait it's not even the overall 24 hour record I just realized

cause dkc vs xenoblade in 2015 was under 300 and that was 24 hours

so it's just the character battle record

Oh I guess the wiki page wasn't updated for 2015.

Good catch.
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"Someday I'll catch up, and then you'll all be surprised!"
BKSheikah has the power. He is the one.

igordebraga posted...

This is more of a rant, but you have my vote!

Unbridled9 posted...

Joel lost because... You know? I honestly sat down at this computer and tried to come up with a good pun that wasn't 'We Like Ike' or 'Ike fights for his friends' but I honestly couldn't. Joel's 'GOTY' character was so flat and uninteresting I could barely remember him in comparison to a B-list (at the time) JRPG protagonist who is basically 'Fantasy Luke Skywalker who might be gay'. That's how bad the writing for these supposed 'Game of the Year' games really is. It's like the Oscars in which they'll ignore all the actually good movies for some obscure movie that was middling at best or about gay cowboys eating pudding or something.

Yeah, the absurdity is worth voting for.
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"Someday I'll catch up, and then you'll all be surprised!"
BKSheikah has the power. He is the one.

ZeldaTPLink posted...

Pirateking2000 posted...

Estelle Bright lost to Isaac
Estelle wasn't as Bright as the Golden Sun.

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"Someday I'll catch up, and then you'll all be surprised!"
BKSheikah has the power. He is the one.

KamikazePotato posted...

That match scares me. It's such a perfect opportunity for a Nintendo character to overperform like crazy. Aeris is a character defined by exactly one thing which has lost a lot of its shock value over time, and Waluigi is currently in some weird meme-induced upswing. I'd like Aeris' chance better against say, Wario.

Is he in an upswing? I remember Waluigi being a meme earlier this decade but I thought it had cooled off. I figured he'd still overperform because of memes, but I never entertained the idea of an upset.
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"Someday I'll catch up, and then you'll all be surprised!"
BKSheikah has the power. He is the one.

Ramza
Metal Sonic
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"Someday I'll catch up, and then you'll all be surprised!"
BKSheikah has the power. He is the one.

Back-to-back updates for Ramza, barely. Can he actually pull this off?

No, not the actual win. I feel like Garrus has that. I'm talking about the wire-to-wire 24-hour records. The closest 1v1, 24-hour wire-to-wire match is Frog vs. Master Chief in 2004, largest lead by either side being 460 votes. The overall record for a 24-hour match is 403, Tales of Symphonia vs. God of War in 2009.

...As I wrote this, Garrus got the next update by enough to set his lead to a new high. 387. I don't think Ramza will be able to keep it close enough to break either record.
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"Someday I'll catch up, and then you'll all be surprised!"
BKSheikah has the power. He is the one.

haloiscoolisbak posted...

What's the closest final margin for a match. Has overtime ever been needed?

Officially, 3 votes, Liquid over Alucard in 2007. However, that was between first and second in a 4way so both characters advanced anyway. For an actual advancement, 7 votes, Frog over Master Chief in '04.

The seven votes has also been equaled twice in situations in which neither entrant advanced. Street Fighter IV took third place over Persona 4 by 7 votes in a 2009 Games Contest match, and Kratos Aurion beat Boko by 7 votes for second place in a 2013 match.
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"Someday I'll catch up, and then you'll all be surprised!"
BKSheikah has the power. He is the one.

MAX on D.Va.
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"Someday I'll catch up, and then you'll all be surprised!"
BKSheikah has the power. He is the one.

No, I feel like Nintendo still has the advantage here. I'd probably take Bowser over Squall.

But Squall's right up there.
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"Someday I'll catch up, and then you'll all be surprised!"
BKSheikah has the power. He is the one.

It's funny. When I went to vote in that stupid match, I didn't think I cared enough about it.

But now I realize that I really do, for all the wrong reasons. I honestly don't care one bit about Garrus, but the idea of Ramza having a win while Cecil Harvey Never Wins absolutely infuriates me.

And it's not even Ramza's fault. I've never owned a Sony system, so I've never played the original FFT...or even FFTA, which I heard isn't nearly as good as the original but is still miles ahead of A2. Which I have played. Rationally, I know I don't have any good reason to want Ramza to lose... but I want him to lose.
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"Someday I'll catch up, and then you'll all be surprised!"
BKSheikah has the power. He is the one.

AxemRedRanger posted...

I don't understand why so few people took Tails there.

I'd take Tails > Pac-Man pretty easily and Chief should be even worse now; Halo got like 22% on FFVII last games contest.

That...is a good question. I had to look up who Tails' 4pack was, since I didn't think I had him winning it, and when I looked at the unmarked bracket rather than my own I figured I must've overestimated Nathan for some strange reason.

Lolnope, it's Chief > Tails for Round 2. Which is a pure "characters =/= games" mistake, because Chief is a clear example of a character that's worth nothing despite his games being at least moderately strong.

On the subject of games =/= characters, I want to address something that's been relevant recently. I've already decided that if by some miracle I win the Guru I'll just use that to assure that this changes since I'm assuming that with how infrequently we've gotten contests, the Guru winner this time will be picking a game for GotD, but I want to address this (and start rallying early!) anyway.

All that talk about Ike's strength being almost entirely from Smash? It doesn't seem founded. Fire Emblem has had at least one representative in every Games Contest. And all three of the games in the series that have made a contest, one of which was one of Ike's, have actually won a match. This board seems to have a mental block about Nintendo's second-tier franchises actually having strength of their own instead of being reliant on Smash for their strength. Except I bring this up to point out that one of the vaunted Smash 12...does seem to derive his strength entirely from Smash, if his franchise's record in Games Contests is any indication.

Is it 0-6 over the four contests? 0-4? Try 0-1. And this from a franchise whose main character has been in every Character Battle and has frequently done quite well for himself. I am talking, of course, about Kirby.

Why is there such a disconnect between the characters and the games? We can't even necessarily tell how strong a Kirby game might be, because the only time one's made it in was in the fourway contest and Super Star ran headlong into SM64 (and probably wouldn't have beaten SotN in a 1v1 anyway, though it hopefully would've looked a bit better than it did).

In summary, nominate Kirby's Return to Dream Land for GotD in 2020.
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"Someday I'll catch up, and then you'll all be surprised!"
BKSheikah has the power. He is the one.

Well crap.

I didn't really care about either character in Garrus-Ramza so I actually let the pic factor decide it for me and went against my bracket.

I figured it was harmless because Garrus was going to roll Ramza anyway!
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"Someday I'll catch up, and then you'll all be surprised!"
BKSheikah has the power. He is the one.

Squall
Garrus
Metal Sonic
Zelda
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"Someday I'll catch up, and then you'll all be surprised!"
BKSheikah has the power. He is the one.

ZenOfThunder posted...

TsunamiXXVIII posted...

Love Zen's write-up. But Leon's not wrong that Metal Sonic is, in most games he appears in, just a boss fight. The only one that really shows him as a distinct character is Heroes, a game that most Sonic fans didn't like very much. Well, unless a lot of other people make the same mistake Leon did and think that the S3&K boss is Metal Sonic too, since despite a lack of actual text or speech in that game that Mecha Sonic actually showed some personality!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHOZGlMQfsk#t=6s
P E R S O N A L I T Y

Sonic Forces? Never even heard of it.
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"Someday I'll catch up, and then you'll all be surprised!"
BKSheikah has the power. He is the one.

Joel
Estelle
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"Someday I'll catch up, and then you'll all be surprised!"
BKSheikah has the power. He is the one.

Love Zen's write-up. But Leon's not wrong that Metal Sonic is, in most games he appears in, just a boss fight. The only one that really shows him as a distinct character is Heroes, a game that most Sonic fans didn't like very much. Well, unless a lot of other people make the same mistake Leon did and think that the S3&K boss is Metal Sonic too, since despite a lack of actual text or speech in that game that Mecha Sonic actually showed some personality!
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"Someday I'll catch up, and then you'll all be surprised!"
BKSheikah has the power. He is the one.

Lopen posted...

Ha, yeah, I just saw that.

Still though I think Lloyd is decently stronger than Isaac. Just feel like Tales has shown better strength over the years. Not by a lot or anything mind you-- Lloyd is high end fodder or just above the line at best.

Again, respectfully disagree. Isaac has had the misfortune of running into Noble Niners in Round 1 twice and Pokmon (which given that all of his games are for handhelds is especially damaging!) two other times. Felix getting 47% on Chief in 2004 and the game performing well in GotD (in all three rounds!) also help its case.
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"Someday I'll catch up, and then you'll all be surprised!"
BKSheikah has the power. He is the one.

Lopen posted...

Almost certainly overestimated Trails. Golden Sun has never been worth much here.

No, I'm almost certain that in my case, it was underestimating Golden Sun. I used matches like this:

http://board8.wikia.com/wiki/(7)Valkyria_Chronicles_vs_(10)Disgaea:_Hour_of_Darkness_2010

And this:

http://board8.wikia.com/wiki/(7)Skies_of_Arcadia_vs_(10)Baldur%27s_Gate_II:_Shadows_of_Amn_2010

And there are other examples too, but despite being Games Contest matches those probably fit the best. Niche RPGs on both sides, but the first option is also the one with more female in the pic. Seedings even matched this one.

The thing is, you're actually completely wrong about Golden Sun never being worth much here. Isaac's W-L record isn't so great because he's frequently been fed to elites early... he's lost to Pokmon twice, which is totally understandable because he's a GBA character and Pokmon is Nintendo's flagship handheld franchise, and he lost to Noble Niners twice. Really, the only thing that's especially ugly is losing to post-2007 L-Block. And other Golden Sun characters? Felix's lone appearance saw him get over 47% on Master Chief at a time when that still meant something. The game itself? Easily surpassed a Round 1 doubling in GotD and went on to upset San Andreas in Round 2 before avoiding a doubling at the hands of FFX in Round 3.

...Yeah, I feel like I massively underestimated Golden Sun.
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"Someday I'll catch up, and then you'll all be surprised!"
BKSheikah has the power. He is the one.

Yeah, regardless of whether there's a blanket deboost for FF, Vincent definitely looks weaker. Also I'm still not sure if he was ever the #3 FFVII character. I would argue that not even his 2007 victory over Crono--which, I remind you, came in a poll with two other characters largely associated with the SNES (probably; you could argue that Samus's strength is based more on Smash than on her own games but Super Metroid is still the strongest game in her series)--is as impressive as what Tifa was able to do in a 1v1, which is to say, break 49.5% on Samus. You've also got a bunch of direct comparisons involving SFF matches, but I don't even necessarily take stock in those (I'm honestly not even remotely surprised that Sephiroth SFFs Vincent harder than Tifa, because Vincent is an edgy guy in dark clothing just like Sephiroth and Tifa is a hot chick.)
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"Someday I'll catch up, and then you'll all be surprised!"
BKSheikah has the power. He is the one.

LeonhartFour posted...

so no one has the exact same set of division winners as me?

awesome I like my chances better that way

Same here... doesn't look like anyone has even 7 of 8 agreeing with me unless another unique one does. Granted, most of that is because apparently my Big Boss pick was even stupider than I thought...

So, thoughts on the cookie:

Damnit we were so close! Bayonetta-Riku remained the R1 match with the least consensus, ironically followed in 2nd place with the match that determines the winner's second-round opponent, Sans vs. Pac-Man. That's the absolute perfect setup for an "impossible cookie", but in the end, Bayonetta's 81-78 majority over Riku did translate to a 59-55 plurality over him to reach Round 3 (Sans with 35 picks, Pac-Man with 10).

On the "bright side", and I say that because people often assume that plurality = favorite, we managed to avoid a "false favorite" in Round 2 with Ness narrowly edging out 2B, 71-70, all 18 remaining brackets belonging to Ness's R1 opponent. For a good example of why plurality =/= favorite, let's look at the first semifinal of the 2015 Games Contest.

Top picks:
1. Final Fantasy VII, 34.52%
2. Pokmon RBYG, 31.98%
3. Super Mario 64, 17.77%
4. Super Smash Bros. Melee, 5.08%
5. Chrono Trigger, 2.54%
6. Super Mario World, 2.03%
7. Final Fantasy VI, 1.52%
8. Final Fantasy X, 1.02%
8. Super Mario Bros. 3, 1.02%
8. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, 1.02%

Honestly, I didn't have to go all the way to the top 10 to make this point. I really only had to go as far as #6, because that's the point at which the set of all entrants that would've come out of the second quarterfinal surpassed 50%. Final Fantasy VII had the plurality at 34.52%, but Pokmon RBYG and SM64, who would've met a round earlier if Undertale hadn't gotten in the way, combined for roughly 49.75% of brackets just between the two of them. All totaled, it actually was fairly close; "Winner of second quarterfinal" had 53.81% of brackets and "Winner of first quarterfinal" had 46.19%. But the "favorite" was declared to be FFVII because it had far more consensus on making it that far (73.10%, to RBYG's 46.19% and SM64's 34.52%). Put another way, both RBYG and SM64 had over half of the brackets that picked them to reach the semifinals pick them to reach the finals. FFVII did not.
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"Someday I'll catch up, and then you'll all be surprised!"
BKSheikah has the power. He is the one.

Team Rocket Elite posted...

Is this what you mean? (Number in brackets is number of rounds predicted)

Average score per match up to Round 20
13 - TsunamiXXVIII - 44.21 (16)

Aw man, seriously? I'd be an actual contender if I hadn't missed the start? It figures.

If anyone's still looking for a team I'm game.

Edit: And I posted this before even noticing that I got two more top 5's yesterday, albeit one of them coming well behind the winner.
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"Someday I'll catch up, and then you'll all be surprised!"
BKSheikah has the power. He is the one.

If my bank is nonzero after today:

HALF on Metal Sonic/Zelda parlay

Else:
MAX on Metal Sonic/Zelda parlay.
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"Someday I'll catch up, and then you'll all be surprised!"
BKSheikah has the power. He is the one.

LeonhartFour posted...

I mean I know I've been big on Mewtwo is a fraud and didn't say much about Charizard being a fraud but I thought CBIX made that obvious to everyone

guess not!

That's not true. This is the first I've heard you say anything about Mewtwo being a fraud and you have not shut up about Charizard being a fraud.

And honestly, I'm not convinced that Mewtwo is a "fraud", because the only reliable results we have on Mewtwo aren't terribly impressive in the first place! 2007 and 2010 he was one and done, albeit to strong Nintendo characters. 2008, he lost to the freaking WCC the moment he was in a situation where the SFF wasn't in his favor; no one is calling his win over Squall and Sora in R3 legitimate. And in 2013, he was likewise given an easy path, then caught a rally because we were convinced he'd be an easier target to rally against Draven, and managed to officially finish in 5th place because he was again on the plus side of SFF in the 4th place match (somehow... yeah, Mewtwo > Pikachu really doesn't seem like it should be a thing.)

The only remotely impressive win Mewtwo has that wasn't the result of a Noble Niner delivering SFF or Draven's direct presence in the match is the win over Sonic and Bowser, and that's tainted by DravenFEAR as well. I don't even count exposing Vincent as a fraud as being "impressive" anymore, because the seeding really should've told us as much.
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"Someday I'll catch up, and then you'll all be surprised!"
BKSheikah has the power. He is the one.

Yeah, Bowser has always been strong here.
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"Someday I'll catch up, and then you'll all be surprised!"
BKSheikah has the power. He is the one.

Ngamer64 posted...

Crono winning it all? Heck I'd settle for Magus winning one match!

Nintendo RPG characters could very well be on the upswing, I agree, but if so watch out for Bowser!

I've got Magus winning one match!
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"Someday I'll catch up, and then you'll all be surprised!"
BKSheikah has the power. He is the one.

Underleveled posted...

Kirby is arguably a top 12 character.

I definitely overestimated Guile though.

I wouldn't quite say top 12, but definitely Top 25 material.
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"Someday I'll catch up, and then you'll all be surprised!"
BKSheikah has the power. He is the one.

Wow, in this early and already I like things other people have posted.

Underleveled posted...

B > 3, thus 2B > 6.

GavsEvans123 posted...

After gaining the Flying-type from evolution, Charizard's weakness to Terra became an immunity.
Gordon Freeman's performance was thrown off by him being mad at Cecil for stealing his gimmick.

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"Someday I'll catch up, and then you'll all be surprised!"
BKSheikah has the power. He is the one.

Just noticed that with the brackets that have been currently input, it is impossible to have a bracket with zero "risks". Riku holds a narrow 62-61 lead over Bayonetta in their round 1 match, but Bayonetta has 46 gurus taking her to win in round 2 to Riku's 43 (Sans has 30).

I hope this holds up when all brackets are input (It was actually 62-60 when I first started writing this but another bracket was input). I've been waiting for a time where a match is so close that someone who's the underdog in one round actually gets the plurality in the next round because a greater percentage of the brackets that did take them that round had them advancing again.
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"Someday I'll catch up, and then you'll all be surprised!"
BKSheikah has the power. He is the one.

Phoenix
Ike
Estelle
Kirby
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"Someday I'll catch up, and then you'll all be surprised!"
BKSheikah has the power. He is the one.

Ranticoot posted...

I took Sephiroth over Mario

Somehow I don't feel totally awful about this

I considered that one based on their history, but backed off it.

Bowser > Crono, Pikachu > Mega Man, and Sans > Sonic
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"Someday I'll catch up, and then you'll all be surprised!"
BKSheikah has the power. He is the one.

Shadow
Terra
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"Someday I'll catch up, and then you'll all be surprised!"
BKSheikah has the power. He is the one.

Leonhart4 posted...

Maybe. I think Cammy could be an outlier, too, though. Anyone else other than them outside of the original SF2 cast would be trash though.

Agreed, if only because being a hot chick still gives you a leg up over not being a hot chick.

That's actually why I took the Estelle > Isaac upset in my bracket; I figured that Isaac was in that "niche RPG" ghetto where being DAT TOP OPTION and A GRILL would be enough for Estelle to win. I'm happy that the board consensus is that Isaac is stronger than that!
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"Someday I'll catch up, and then you'll all be surprised!"
BKSheikah has the power. He is the one.

Keltiq posted...

yeah, isaac is only popular because his game was the only jrpg on the gba for like a year so everybody tricked themselves into thinking it was good

That's...maybe not wrong? The game in which Isaac is the main protagonist is, in fact, somewhere between 33% and 40% of a good JRPG. Then we had to wait a couple of years to get the remaining 60-67% of the game, where Isaac and his crew are absent for 3/4 of the game before returning late.

That's not a joke; they basically took one solid game and split it up into two pieces.

Then there was a sequel that starred the children of Isaac's party. It was... honestly I didn't think it was that great at the time, but there was a subtle genius to it. Spoilers ahead.

While the biggest problem I had with Dark Dawn was that there were too many points of no return, something the first two games pretty much completely lacked unless you count the fact that once the two parties meet up in the second game, you lose your chance to transfer clear data from the first game if you failed to do so at the start of the file, another problem I had with it was that the level curve felt totally wonky. You get to a point that I estimate is maybe 2/3 of the way through the game at most, and suddenly every random encounter within a fairly large portion of the map is basically a miniboss. You find yourself dreading having to sail back into the Grave Eclipse. But looking back at it, that's the brilliance of it. You're hopelessly out of your league, and trying to come up with some way to deal with the impending apocalypse. The huge difficulty spike delivers the proper sense of foreboding.

Of course, the other major problem I had with the game is that the final boss and postgame bonus bosses, including the one that was the absolute bane of anyone who played Lost Age, were almost trivial, because once you get to the "99.9% mark", as it were--a cutscene that's such a short walk away from the final boss that you might not get stopped for a random battle at all on the way, and certainly not more than once if you're not intentionally dawdling--the area gets flooded with enemies that are total pushovers and give you ridiculously large amounts of experience and a guaranteed Water of Life drop. You can just farm that last stretch of the game for 15-30 minutes and you'll easily be overleveled for just about anything.
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"Someday I'll catch up, and then you'll all be surprised!"
BKSheikah has the power. He is the one.