Lurker > AxemRedRanger

He didn't include Resident Evil 4 because it wasn't in this poll:

https://www.gamefaqs.com/poll/5632-13-years-after-its-original-release-whats-your-all-time

And for the current poll he just used the same options as that one.
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http://board8.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page
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I'd rank the Noble Nine:
Link
Mario
Samus
Snake
Cloud
Mega Man
Crono
Sonic
Sephiroth

Nintendo's likely at its highest ebb now since people started souring on the Wii in late 2008 or so. We didn't see great stuff out of Link/Mario/Samus in 2013 (barring the Draven match) but after Breath of the Wild and the Switch were so successful and with Mario Odyssey and (much less importantly) Metroid Samus Returns upcoming, Nintendo's probably going to be tough to beat in the near-future.

Snake has probably dropped but "down to Sonic levels" is too much unless Sonic is boosting to the strongest he's ever been because of Mania/Forces - Snake got 55% on Sonic in 2006 and he seemed to get stronger pretty much every character battle after that. He's almost certainly fallen off a bit since looking like the #2 in 2013 but he's still probably the site's presumptive #4 at worst.

It's probably wishful thinking to have Cloud beating Link, Mario, or Snake in a fair fight at this point, unless the FFVII remake hype reaches fever pitch or the game releases to massive acclaim. It's even sort of tempting to go Mega Man > Cloud; FFVII has consistently gotten weaker and underperformed expectations every contest since the 2008 character battle. And it's not like Mega Man > Cloud would be at all a stretch given the 2013 results! Cloud's at least gotten into Smash 4 since then though and Mega Man's series remains dead so I'd only put it at "tempting upset."

I wouldn't expect major fireworks out of Crono despite what happened in 2015 but Crono being close to Sephiroth and Sonic was something I figured was true even before then so with that factored in I'd take him to beat those two too. I don't think Sonic Mania does much for Sonic since people on gamefaqs weren't huge on the old Sonic games but it's always nice to have something good and new going for you. Apparently some people are excited about Sonic Forces too? Sephiroth unlike Cloud doesn't have a Smash 4 appearance to prop him up and the gap between Sephiroth and Cloud seemed to get wider over time even while Cloud has still been weakening. Yeah I'll go Sonic > Sephiroth.
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Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines
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Lufia II
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GoldenEye 007's playrate is higher than I would have expected, since it's roughly on par with FFVII's playrate.

Even if you never had the game yourself, if one of your friends in that era had Goldeneye, and you ever played video games at their house, chances are pretty high the two of you played Goldeneye at some point.
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Final Fantasy VI
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Dragon Quest VII
Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance
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LapisLazuli posted...

AxemRedRanger posted...

Symphonia > Eternia > who cares > Dawn of the New World/Destiny(PS1)/Phantasia(both SNES & GBA)

Symphonia is one of my favorite JRPGs but I've been slow to catch up with the series since the early games and DotNW were underwhelming. Finally got through Eternia last month, which was at least a big improvement over Phantasia/Destiny. Currently replaying Symphonia and still love it.

I hope you guys are right about the later games improving on Symphonia. Plan to playing Legendia next though so it might be awhile before I get to the good ones!

There is no reason to play all of those other games. This isn't a linear franchise.

Do not play Legendia under any circumstance.

You must reach THE ABYSS.

Too late, already bought Legendia. Plus I figure I'd try it at some point and better now than after the games that many claim are even better than Symphonia.
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INCEPTlON posted...

ChaosTonyV4 posted...

Do they just have katana, or some sort of polearm?

With just swords they're screwed.

Just swords

Oh, so they're not real samurai then?

The elephant slaughters the 10 weeaboo LARPers sword-fetishists.
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Symphonia > Eternia > who cares > Dawn of the New World/Destiny(PS1)/Phantasia(both SNES & GBA)

Symphonia is one of my favorite JRPGs but I've been slow to catch up with the series since the early games and DotNW were underwhelming. Finally got through Eternia last month, which was at least a big improvement over Phantasia/Destiny. Currently replaying Symphonia and still love it.

I hope you guys are right about the later games improving on Symphonia. Plan to playing Legendia next though so it might be awhile before I get to the good ones!
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Chrono Trigger
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TWEWY
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Lots of Final Fantasies, for one! Kefka's the strongest FFVI character, Vivi's the strongest FFIX character, Auron's the strongest FFX character, Balthier's the strongest FFXII character, and while he definitely got surpassed with KH1's release Sephiroth MIGHT have been the strongest FFVII character before then. Rydia's looked good enough that you could probably argue FFIV, too.

Then even aside from games with customizable player avatars that nobody cares about there's also Portal, Mortal Kombat, Pokemon, BioShock, and BioShock Infinite. It looked to be the case for Tales of Symphonia at one point but that might have changed.

It's not common but it happens.
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Xenogears
Final Fantasy VIII
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Baten Kaitos
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Final Fantasy VII
Lunar: Silver Star Story
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Paper Mario
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Xenoblade Chronicles
Suikoden V
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If Goku has strength, it'd be because he taps into widely-shared nostalgic memories people have of the late 90's/early 00's when they'd get home from school and watch Dragon Ball Z on Toonami or their local station. (Well, U.S./Canada did; most other parts of the world got the series a bit sooner.) I'd say basically nothing happening currently with Dragon Ball or among its fanbase is going to matter at all to the general gamefaqs audience. Most of these people aren't anime fans. Thinking about it more I'm gonna backtrack and say DBZ Abridged probably didn't do much; if a pretty good portion of the site didn't already (passively) view the franchise positively before then, Goku has no shot at being strong.
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Undertale
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Persona 3
Chrono Cross
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AxemRedRanger posted...

FFXII
CC
BoF3
IOG isn't an rpg but I'll vote it anyways!

Obviously ffxii should have been ffx
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FFXII
CC
BoF3
IOG isn't an rpg but I'll vote it anyways!
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Final Fantasy VII
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Batman and Vader are probably the best choices for the gamefaqs demographics' non-gaming cultural touchstones and there have been some pretty popular Batman and Star Wars games too but the people on this site have gaming as their main hobby so I don't think most are gonna be deep enough into other stuff for non-game characters to beat Noble Niners. Could be pretty good midcarders, though.

Homer Simpson could maybe do something; he's iconic and his show is/was popular even here (https://www.gamefaqs.com/poll/2944-do-you-watch-the-simpsons) but something feels really wrong about an incompetent comedy protagonist being strong in a gamefaqs character battle. I don't watch the show though and was only ever briefly into it so I might be too remote from other people's taste here to accurately gauge him.

Not sure exactly what to think about Goku but I don't think the percentage of gamefaqs that remember Dragon Ball Z positively is going to be high enough for him to be really strong. Probably better now than before DBZ Abridged took off, though.

Bugs Bunny would be the Pac-Man of All-Fictional in pretty much every sense; well known and respected but too old, irrelevant, and not really beloved by anyone to do much. He also has never had a game that either the mainstream or gamefaqs niche even remotely cared about. I'd take Golden Sun Isaac over him without worrying about it and I view Isaac as the fodder line.

Mickey Mouse is pretty much Bugs Bunny plus Kingdom Hearts appearances. (Also some of his other games are/were considerably more relevant than Bugs' but KH dwarfs the rest of them so massively they might as well not exist) I don't think he comes even close to Sora, and Riku's decline is not encouraging for people other than Sora from that franchise doing much. Maybe he could beat some midcarders though. I never actually got far enough into KH to meet him there but I remember people thinking KH Mickey was cool.

James Bond had some relevance to mainstream gaming with Goldeneye even if that was forever ago and the game looked kinda bad in the 2015 contest but I'm not sure caring about the Goldeneye game necessarily means caring much about Bond. And while Bond films were and remain popular I definitely don't get the sense that they are childhood/adolescence-defining properties for the gamefaqs demographic the way that Star Wars or Batman are - not even the Goldeneye film. At the end of the day though, I guess Goldeneye's a big enough name that James Bond isn't likely fodder.

People who really love Harry Potter are probably going to swing younger than optimal for this site's user base and I have the impression that the majority of them are female. None of the Harry Potter games matter at all. In addition, the popularity of his franchise aside, something about Harry himself as a character doesn't pass the smell test with me - people who like Harry Potter a lot seem to love the cast in general and think Harry's a pretty good protagonist and all but Harry himself has like zero hype. Real skeptical about him being worth much but I'd still probably put his floor above Bugs Bunny's ceiling.
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Star Fox 64
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Final Fantasy VII
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StifledSilence posted...

barreldragon88 posted...

Advance Wars is an RPG? O_o

It's a turn based tactical RPG. Units don't level up but I'm pretty sure the CO ranks up.

Only Advance Wars Dual Strike gives you the ability to upgrade the COs. Even then I wouldn't count it; it's a turn-based tactics game but I think it's kind of clearly not an RPG. The other games including the first one have no argument for being RPGs at all, though.
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spooky96 posted...

Pre 2010ish GTA wasn't complete trash. The only thing which is even less liked/more hated is Call of Duty.

Halo, CoD and GTA are probably the least liked franchises on GFaqs of all the mainstream stuff.

Don't forget Assassin's Creed, the crown jewel of which got 23% on FFVI.

And Metroid Prime got LFFed by Paper Mario. GTA's weaker now and Prime is stronger but take Paper Mario out and it doesn't lose that match.
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Star Fox 64
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Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
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1. Chrono Trigger
2. Super Mario RPG
3. Final Fantasy VI
4. Tales of Symphonia
5. Barkley Shut up and Jam: Gaiden
6. Final Fantasy Tactics
7. Final Fantasy VII
8. Persona 4
9. Persona 3
10. Final Fantasy X
11. Xenogears
12. Fire Emblem
13. Suikoden II
14. Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door
15. Baten Kaitos
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Are there still people willing to claim the opposite though, even after the 2015 contest? I don't recall seeing any.
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So I think the consensus around 2013 was that Snake was our second-strongest traditional character. 46% on Link is way better than Mario's ever looked and after the Mario/Vivi/Ganondorf debacle it was hard to give much credit to Mario magically pulling out in a win there.

Would people still go the same way now?
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This is still a dumb idea because nobody actually cares about the individual robot masters. It's always Metal Blade that's emphasized as awesome, never Metal Man. And Mega Man 2 isn't exactly of overwhelming strength in the first place.

Still in though! I want the opportunity to be proven right on this.
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Freeman with 57%.

Master Chief might be around fodder-line weak at this point but I figure he's polarizing enough to avoid being outright destroyed. I also don't have a ton of confidence in Freeman. HL2 did relatively poorly in 2015, his good result on Leon in 2013 doesn't mean as much to me given how RE4 likewise performed poorly in 2015 and while Leon had some very plausible excuses for why he performed dreadfully against Cloud and Squirtle part of it might also have just been him being weaker, and I just don't think HL is a good match for gamefaqs' old, console-nostalgic rump userbase.
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This poll is terrible, you screwed up the final option. Did you mean Secret of E.V.O.?
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It's probably a Persona 5 character.

Kazama Kiryu would be fodder and would easily lose to Laharl. He failed to make a 243-character bracket in 2013 without really having a decent excuse and none of his games have ever been worth anything here. Yakuza 0 is no exception:

https://www.gamefaqs.com/poll/6730-five-months-in-to-2017-whats-your-pick-for-game-of-the-year

I'm skeptical about Aloy but eh, her game is popular enough to at least make seeing her in a match worthwhile.
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Shame we didn't get Barkley/Jordan!

...Huh. Come to think of it, if we redid Rivalry Rumble nowadays, Hitler might well win.
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1. Star Fox 64.
2. Final Fantasy VII
3. Mega Man X4
4. Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
5. Alundra
6. Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back
7. Mega Man 8
8. Wild Arms (this one seems reasonably prominent and you missed it!)
9. Bomberman 64
10. Kirby's Dream Land 3
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No Sepholmarv, no buy.
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For most of Chrono Cross's dialogue by non-plot-relevant playable characters, they made some kind of tool that automatically applies all of the respective characters' accents, speech impediments, and other idiosyncrasies to the same base dialogue resulting in a very, um, memorable script. Whereas I heard the Japanese version mostly just gave each character a unique suffix and called it a day. So in that sense the English version is probably the superior product and thanks to the tool it probably didn't kill their translation/localization team too badly.

...But then consider the tool resulted in stuff like that kid who added -cha to the end of some word in like every single sentence and the mermaid who use umlauts in all of her vowels and it's like "nope nope nope."
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This moll's a mole!
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and we might get to see undertale lose another GOTY poll this year!
or whenever it gets released on PS4/VITA.
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Depends on whether you mean strongest now or strongest at the time of the poll.
Now would be Melee.
At the time of the poll would be MGS4.
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It probably wasn't just ninja theorycrafting, there was an actual poll supporting it, albeit an old one:

https://www.gamefaqs.com/poll/847-who-is-your-favorite-final-fantasy-vi-character

Charmander's rankings look broadly agreeable. I'd move Gau down two spaces - old poll or not I feel like he shouldn't have gotten under 2% if he was worth anything and my intuition would kind of place him with the bottom 4 as characters I don't think people care much about. Feel like Gogo > Umaro is likely just based on all the WHO IS GOGO questions and theories people made giving some reason to remember him/her/it. Not sure what to think on Edgar/Shadow/Sabin.

I never played it but didn't Setzer appear in KHII?

(Gogo is Adlai Stevenson, never forget!)
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Jigglypuff got annihilated by MMX despite having vastly more reason to have strength than nidoran. Being a Pokemon, even one from RBY, is not good enough if people don't care about you.
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Unless we count Jay Solano then yeah Cid Highwind is probably the right answer. Darth Revan and Strider also did pretty well. If you count Rivalry Rumble, we actually did get to see Jecht again.

M. Bison did well enough in villains I guess?

In 2013 (or thereabouts) I remember someone asked Allen about Strider Hiryuu and Allen okayed him for future contests. And while Strider technically appeared in a manga first, the Strider franchise had been conceived as a multimedia project between Capcom and the manga author.
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I've acquired some Steam games in bundles that I don't care about enough to ever even try but most probably aren't terrible.

There's a few stinkers that were included in compilation games. Street Fighter I probably "wins" there among those I've put any serious time into.

Tamagotchi on Game Boy was acceptable when I was a kid but is pretty bad now. Conker's Pocket Tales was fairly bad overall, too, and even without Mako Islands in there to totally ruin the game it'd still probably be the worst Action-Adventure game I've played. I bought Chicken Run on GBC for some strange reason back in the day and barely played it but I recall not liking it. I did put some time into Sim Earth on SNES, didn't understand a lot of it, but am pretty sure the game's not good no matter for much of it you grasp - music is good though.

My sister bought a few games I now have possession of that I don't really care about. Pokemon Channel is probably the worst of those; it's barely a game and I don't recall it being a good non-game either.
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https://www.gamefaqs.com/poll/4594-best-of-2011-game-of-the-year
https://www.gamefaqs.com/poll/6730-five-months-in-to-2017-whats-your-pick-for-game-of-the-year

Skyward Sword vs. Persona 5, who ya got?
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https://www.gamefaqs.com/poll/266-which-zelda-title-is-your-favorite

You don't even have to go quite that far back to get very "looks bad for OoT" results; CT/LttP were projected to get 45% on it in 2004.

Just like with FFVII vs. FFVI/CT, the further this site retreats back into its core old-school Nintendo and Square voting base, the worse Ocarina of Time will probably do against Link to the Past.
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Back in early 2014, DDJ got ~2101 users from around the site to vote for their 5 favorite games (in no particular order) and tallied the results.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/13V_sjThl_WvS6CzQ4cRAUMVcpIwuYy4MC6m9Uz8b6Zk/edit#gid=1647357978

Ocarina of Time: 214/2101 = 10.19%
FFVII: 182/2101 = 8.66%
Pokemon RBY (including the 3 votes for FR/LG): 66/2101 = 3.14%

And that's people who had those games in their top 5, not #1.

Maybe his respondents had more diverse tastes than the site at large but it would have to be to a pretty vast extent in order to get RBY+FFVII+OoT even close to being 40% of people's #1 game.
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congrats BKSheikah.

Assuming a standard-ish character battle, any idea who you want for the guru nomination?
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