Lurker > Lightning Strikes

I want a new Series contest. I know others do.

If anything the last one was run too early. There weren't really 32 notable series. Now you could do a 64 entrant bracket that is more interesting than that 32 entrant bracket ever was. Also if Zelda is left out as the championship match we don't know who would win it, which is unique. Rallies aside the last contest without a clear frontrunner was GotD1.

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Blaaaaaaargh Advokaiser

Glad to see Series doing well also! Ive been a proponent of that one for a while.

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Blaaaaaaargh Advokaiser

P5 was rallying pretty hard against Witcher too right?

Id love to see a Rockstar fourpack next time, with GTAV, RDR, and RDR2. We almost got part of that!

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Blaaaaaaargh Advokaiser

What about Shovel Knight.

Seems like fairly obvious SFF against Odyssey, but I dont know how you would calculate that one.

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ZeldaTPLink posted...

Well I'm sure UK has considerable levels of xenophobia but I'm not sure if those are particularly higher than in other developed countries, to the point of influencing a contest result.

The UK does have considerable levels of intolerance, but it is also one of the most tolerant in the world. The two are absolutely compatible.

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Blaaaaaaargh Advokaiser

Aside from BotW vs. MM:

Cuphead vs. Shovel Knight (Indie showdown, SK got slammed by SFF so it'd be great to see how it stands up to the presumed strongest indie)
Skyrim vs. SSBU (Third place battle)
INSIDE vs. Return of the Obra Dinn (Bottom place battle)

These would be great.

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WesternMedia posted...

UK is also probably the developed nation with the most history and animosity against Asians in general.

WTF

...No? Not even remotely? What would even make somebody say that.

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Blaaaaaaargh Advokaiser

Pre-contest people were talking smack about Borderlands 2 as a fraud and the weakest GotY winner. It has in fact kept most of its 2015 strength, and not counting P4G has only fallen behind Xenoblade for 2012 games.

Instead those titles go to FFXV. It is behind Doom, Uncharted 4, and Stardew Valley, and Pokmon Sun/Moon arent even in the contest. It could now be as low as fifth for 2016. It better be glad MW2 exists to stop it from being the weakest GotY winner ever!

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Blaaaaaaargh Advokaiser

Congrats azuarc! Amazing bracket.

Also Im finishing in the top ten (eighth)! Super happy about that, my best result ever. :)

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Blaaaaaaargh Advokaiser

I dont think you can deny Undertale was in danger against Melee. Easy to see that one going the other way.

Link was cutting at too fast a rate for that downtime to do nothing, there was less than 700 votes in it at the end. Dravens rally seemed to come in waves rather than be responsive, otherwise Link would never have mounted sustained comebacks. It was looking tight for a while at the end there.

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Blaaaaaaargh Advokaiser

Mega Man also had a big 4chan rally IIRC.

It was basically everybodys rallying, Dave.

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Blaaaaaaargh Advokaiser

Not of the board no? To be honest its a blur

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Blaaaaaaargh Advokaiser

2013 was exceedingly wacky without Draven. Like I said earlier, its hard to pick because everybody was rallying and bandwagoning. So I stand by Vivi. Giant outside force wins with rally had happened before, Vivi beats Mario was different. And Vivi legitimately got stronger after. All Draven did was get us invaded.

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Blaaaaaaargh Advokaiser

Draven is a fraud.

No, not in the big rally go bye bye sense, though that too. I mean in the sense that Link straight up had him dead to rights, and only the site going down saved him. Undertale he aint. So even if I were to account for the contest-busting rallies, I still wouldnt pick him unlike L-Block and Undertale.

Long term, the only thing Draven actually achieved was making some of the board the board a lot worse regarding Undertale.

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Blaaaaaaargh Advokaiser

It had I believe the best ever run for a guru nom (X Vs. Zero), and it got a 1-seed, despite not being in the suggestions.

Rivalry Rumble could have been good if "Rivalry" had actually been defined. Link and Ganondorf aren't rivals, Cloud and Sephiroth aren't really either. Removing them, you get a much more interesting contest, as opposed to the mishmash of actual rivals with just "heroes and villains". I mean, Crono vs. Lavos? Really? I am also reminded that it is responsible for us seeing the word "Barthandelus" in a vote-in poll.

It did start to cement Phoenix as legit though, but that's much more in the next contest.

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Blaaaaaaargh Advokaiser

RBY, as a top flight Nintendo game, SFF'd both MM and GSC about equally. Done. I made my bracket on that assumption and it paid off. It makes sense.

But yeah there was a mean-spirited edge to the MM rally which was unfortunate. I do like to remember that it was ExTha (at least partially) behind it though, that's amusing.

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Blaaaaaaargh Advokaiser

Once Missingno. struggled with Yoshi it was clear that the jig was up. And then it didn't have enough time to build a reasonable bandwagon before slamming into Sephiroth. In the end, with several deep runs by Crono and Chrono Trigger's propensity for shenanigans back then, it's far from certain if Missingno. would have even won the full 24 hours.

shane15 posted...

Dunno why Allen doesn't get a few veterans off here to help with the bracket seeding. That would probably mean them forfeiting the right to enter a prize bracket though.

He let us in on the bracket making process in 2009. It turned out... bad. We could make topics on this board suggesting replacements, and almost every single one of them was bad. It just turned into board 8ers removing games from debatable matches to put their favourite into a blowout and/or SFF beatdown. The worst has to be Super Smash Bros. (which we've still never seen) getting pulled out of a winnable match for Soul Calibur, but Golden Sun getting its contest debut (and a match it could have gone for an LFF shocker in) removed so pre-popularity Fire Emblem could get destroyed by Melee was pretty awful as well. The only decent one was Mortal Kombat II replacing Super Street Fighter II Turbo... but only because SFII was already in haha.

With how good the seeding was this time, he's better without us.

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Blaaaaaaargh Advokaiser

Even though it was only one match, special mention needs to go to GoW/San Andreas/Oblivion/Tales of Symphonia, the match of death:

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/3470-division-7-round-1-god-of-war-gtasa-tos-oblivion

The very best of the fourway format in a lot of ways. Fourways were great, two ranked winners made it a lot of fun to predict. The threeways by comparison were pretty bad.

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Blaaaaaaargh Advokaiser

Series, easily. Its time, enough has changed.

Overall I would like to see:

Series-CB11-BGE4-Other side contest-Game of the 90s

in that order.

No interest in a true all-fictional character battle, nothing interesting about Link crushing hordes of anime fodder with almost no links to video games. Instead I would rather the current guidelines get loosened to allow characters who have a clearly distinct or notable gaming iteration, like PS4 Spider-Man. Nobody wants to see Iron Man getting in because he was in some trash licensed games ten years ago. And with Geralt and Dracula it would really just be a continuation of the current rules.

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_SecretSquirrel posted...

Honestly, I think Pokemon was a big benefactor of the 2005 Nintendo shift, but we couldn't have known since Pokemon failed to get a representative in the character battle that year.

I had meant to talk about this for the 2005 writeup actually, so this is a good point. I asked people for reasons as to why the 2005 Nintendo boost happened because it always eluded me, and I got some great answers so thanks to everybody who responded. Perhaps the most interesting was the notion that it wasn't a Nintendo boost, but a Mario boost. I went and looked at the stats and this was more or less borne out, as the extended Mario crew all boosted very significantly while other Nintendo characters stayed more or less the same. There was one exception to this - Kirby. And the 2005 contest was right after the launch of Canvas Curse, which isn't worth much now but at the time was not only seen as a top tier Kirby game but was also the game that made the DS. What else helped the early DS? Super Mario 64 DS, a game which actually sold on a par with the original. Thus it seems reasonably clear that the 2005 boost was a DS boost, as it benefited DS characters. Once the DS got bigger and Wii hype became a thing, the rest of Nintendo's characters were able to get in on the boost.

Now, we would really be able to say this for sure if more than 4-5 Nintendo franchises had been represented in 2005!

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_SecretSquirrel posted...

Personally, I think it goes back to as soon as the Series contest. Pokemon absolutely wrecking Star Ocean's shit, and then going even with Metroid when it would have gotten SFFed to hell and back in 2004 was a harbinger of things to come.

Agreed. 2006 was no outlier, we just thought it was at the time then picked Pikachu to come second to Tidus. But no, the result was legit, Pokemon was back. The DPP hype and release were huge, and it maintained that.

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Blaaaaaaargh Advokaiser

I just cant see picking against Kirby. I mean Snakes performance was pretty as expected beyond the final, and I remain unconvinced that if Vincent had been there it would have happened. If I had to rank them I would say Kirby>Pikachu>Snake. Crono is 128th lol.

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Blaaaaaaargh Advokaiser

As lightning_guy

BotW 65
Witcher 3 54
BotW 60

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I never thought Witcher 3 was going to SFF Skyrim super hard. Went with 54 in my second chance bracket. The thing is Skyrim is also on the top tier of WRPGs right up there with Witcher 3. So that FF can certainly still exist.

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Undertale is behind BotW>SSBU, SSBU>SMO, and SMO>SK. It obviously gained a ton of strength.

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To be fair Undertale is behind three layers of SFF.

Also I am on the Second Chamce leaderboard, nice. Though with a different name because I was dum when they brought in the account name system back in the day. Whoops.

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Janus5k posted...

toss a coin to your Witcher

O valley of plenty


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Eep

Well I hope Witcher wins because it would out me on the leaderboard and top ten in the guru and those would be firsts for me. Heres to a good match.

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Blaaaaaaargh Advokaiser

Skyrim has the brackets for the record.

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Xenoblade is essentially Shadow of the Colossus if it beat MGS3. Thats why people are big on it, not just fans. However its gotta be BotW like I said. The difference is GotD1 didnt have a BotW. MM looked normal then rallied twice. BotW tore this whole thing apart.

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Im glad the people who like them like them. :)

However

UshiromiyaEva posted...

FFXIII has a good cast except for Hope, especially compared to the entries surrounding it.

No way, XIV has a great cast! Yshtola and Alphinaud are easily among the better FF characters.

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Blaaaaaaargh Advokaiser

Well as Ive spoken about before the pin alone was worth at the absolute minimum an extra 100-120 votes - in reality likely more as Xenoblade is a stronger game than P4Gs previous opponents.

To put it a different way, the last two hours of P4G vs. Xenoblade got 1.5x as many votes as the last two hours of GTAV vs. P4G despite the overall votes being lower due to recovering from the gap. Thats the pin in action.

Secondly P4G had many random updates where after losing ground its votes would spike upwards with these huge cuts then fall back down. There was a 40 vote cut out of nowhere, that doesnt just happen. Xenoblade by contrast only made large single update gains when Europe woke up which were not nearly that big (this was also expected, as its Europe and Xenoblade) and the very last update (could be the P4G effort collapsing). Those P4G cuts were just too big, while Xenoblades gains were typically small and consistent.

There is one element of all this that doesnt get enough credit though: Xenoblade tanked a pinned rally thread, with only a couple of small counter rallies. Shovel Knight needed the developer to tweet about it, Resident Evil 2 needed the front page thread (not pinned) removed. Xenoblade took a major rally head on and won. Thats really impressive.

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Blaaaaaaargh Advokaiser

As said in the episode, that was definitely sll P4G. Not just bandwagon but also the massive rally attempts - the pin in the last 90 minutes alone gave it half a percent at least.

I just dont see how you downplay XC after yesterday. But IIRC it was a bit less than that no? I thought Dark Souls was the biggest.

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Vaan sucks and is one of the worst examples of executive meddling in games. However he is more a non-entity than unlikeable to me.

He is nothing compared to the cast of FFXIII.

In most JRPGs of that era there was always the one character that was significantly less popular than the rest and regarded as a bit annoying. The Cait Siths, Genises, and Vaans. There was always the token really unlikeable character you might say. In FFXIII that is the majority of the main cast. The only two to escape are Fang, a total non-entity, and Sazh, who was... borderline problematic to say the least. Hope, Snow, Vannile, and Lightning are TERRIBLE. Every single decision these characters take seems designed to make them as unlikeable as possible, all their supposed likeable traits fall flat, and Snow and Lightning are just the most cynical attempts at appealing to American and Japanese audiences respectively imaginable. You could just say Lightning as she really sucks, but as it is the story of the whole group I think they all qualify.

Anyway, FFXIII has bad characters.

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Blaaaaaaargh Advokaiser

I have a feeling FFXVI wont come out until VII Remake is fully done. To be honest with all the good other FF stuff happening and launch numbered games being consistently underwhelming for almost 20 years, Im good without XVI.

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Blaaaaaaargh Advokaiser

I might go for Crono in 2002 if only because I suspect we will see Marios year soon!

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shane15 posted...

Persona 4 is MVP of this contest no question. it only lost because NIntendofaqs decided it suddenly liked Xenoblade again.

1. Again? This is obviously a result of the franchises popularity exploding with time, 2, and DE hype.
2. If that rally hadnt been pinned Xenoblade would have beaten P4G with anonymous voters. You can tell from the excess votes in the final 90 minutes of the match compared to P4Gs last two matches. Without rallies at all, good chance it does better than with registered users.

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Blaaaaaaargh Advokaiser

Nah I consider Xenoblade the star and thus obviously greatly appreciate P4G for bringing the excitement and dread, as well as killing my bracket. But BotW is the first time a new game has looked like this contests began.

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Shout-out to Samus for convincing us all she was going to beat Mario.

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Link in 2004 is even more impressive when you consider that that was still in Nintendos dark age. Not just for this site, but in general the Nintendo name has never meant less than back then (though 2013-2015 gives it a run).

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Small SFF is hard to detect however. The best test may actually have been CT vs. FFX and Melee if Melee hadnt rallied. But Melee did rally so who knows.

There is an argument that Link actually did SFF Crono in 2004. Mainly revolving around Mario. But I dont want to derail this topic lol since it was a minor point and I even said may to hedge my bets haha.

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Id argue theres never been a true test! Especially since we are not talking about big SFF like todays match, but the tiny percentages that can decide close matches. In the end it doesnt matter though, because even if it was there Vincent still needed to be legit to take advantage.

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Blaaaaaaargh Advokaiser

I see that, and as weve talked about before I staked it all on Vincent in 2008, only for the CT clutch to screw me. Buuut Samus was in that poll so its a but unclear.

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Good question, I'll just do the contests I was actively on the board (though I have seen at least one match for every contest since 2003). I won't account for contest-crushing rallies which makes 2013 hard. I'll do it in terms of the runs and results that impressed (and excited) me the most.

Series - A small contest so not much to say, but Fire Emblem squashed a debated match then highly overperformed against Metal Gear. Zelda also deserves props for establishing itself as the dominant series once and for all despite FF still being the favourite.

CBV - Samus. A lot of people would very understandably say Snake, but Samus not only looked godly (running pretty much only on Wii hype and possibly female star cred) but defeated perhaps the biggest incident of pic sabotage in contest history then easily establish herself as the #4 character despite Snake looking great beforehand.

CBVI - Vincent. He may have had to depend on Link, but he did "break" the Noble Nine for the first time (though I am of the school of thought that it didn't truly break until 2018) and lived up to his hype where so many theoretical N9 threats failed.

CBVII - Kirby. Most people had him losing early and he goes and outlasts Sonic. He also beat Dante in the legendary showdown. One of my all time best pics too so a personal favourite of mine.

BGE2 - This is going to sound absurd, but Ocarina of Time. It crushing every challenge that came its way despite numerous instances of LFF then effectively reversing its last result against FFVII in the one-on-one was really impressive. If I'm not allowed (for lack of a better term) to do that then it might actually be Tales of Symphonia, only 12% of the board thought it would get out of the match of death but it did. Oblivion from the same match looked great too.

CBVIII - Charizard. The thing about this one is you can actually ignore all the rallying and bandwagoning and this is still a great, great run. Most thought he would be toast against Kratos in round 2, when Kratos was still in his prime (with the possible exception of right now). Instead he wins the division outright, beating three big dogs in Kratos, L Block and Bowser. The performance against Mario was just a bonus.

GotD1 - Shadow of the Colossus. This is pretty canonically accepted.

Rivalry Rumble - X Vs. Zero. Great guru pick, making it in unexpectedly, getting a 1 seed, then going on a tear. And unlike some other entrants it was actually a rivalry!

CBIX - In a sea of rallies and bandwagons, Vivi stood out as the one who actually kept a lot of his bandwagoned strength later. It seemed like the character legitimately became more popular as a result of this which is not a very common thing to happen. Also Link essentially straight up beat one of the biggest rallies we've ever seen and needed two hours of downtime to lose, he deserves props.

BGE3 - Despite what happened to it, Chrono Trigger did look godly (and I'm a relative CT-sceptic in that I don't think it would have beaten OoT) and was the harbinger of the great SNES wave, so that.

Years - 1998, moving on.

CBX - Zelda. IMO the first proper (or "traditional" if you would rather) N9 break, and no fewer than three! For me her defining result will be how she just pasted Squall though, when Squall was the easy favourite to win.

GotD2 - Breath of the Wild has established itself as an all time great in record time - we are in the semifinals and it has yet to go below a doubling. Despite this I want to give props to the entire top flight of games for proving that GameFAQs actually does like recent games, they look really strong (until BotW or Witcher 3 SFF them anyway). Also Xenoblade gave us the most exciting and unexpected run and went from people thinking it was around the lower-middle to perhaps top 30 all time.

That was a lot of fun!

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Blaaaaaaargh Advokaiser

That Sega poll shows what the inclusion a none of these option can do - the Dreamcast and Mega Drive clearly benefitted from apathy voting last time and have plumetted while the less popular systems stayed the same.

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Blaaaaaaargh Advokaiser

Haha when I was making that post I thought Did they make Dark Samus playable? Nahhhhh... whoops.

Though yeah Banjo is the only one that is wholly western, being both made and owned in the west.

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Blaaaaaaargh Advokaiser

Banjo is a western Smash character btw. Technically Diddy and K. Rool too.

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Blaaaaaaargh Advokaiser

lol

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Also Sword and Shield are garbo (contest wise, havent played em), no doubt about that. X&Y might be the strongest post-GSC games...? Hard to tell but I do not buy the 2015 stat as legit.

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Blaaaaaaargh Advokaiser

That X&Y result would make it the third strongest game that year beating GTAV lol.

Now obviously it is unlikely that X&Y could beat GTAV or go even with The Last of Us and ALBW. But it might beat everything else.

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