Lurker > AxemRedRanger

Felix is very playable but i remember the game not seeming to have much in the way of actual level design so much as spamming a particular levels enemies and features at you in a not particularly clever way until it ends and its time for the next.

Not sure how the SNES version compares but as a not-particularly-skilled player of puzzle games, I did think the last, like, 10 stages of NES Wario's Woods are kind of overwhelming in how little margin for error you have at each level's beginning combined with the speed and amount of colors you're working with by that point. I was only able to beat the final stretch by cheesing it hard: pausing the game doesn't blank out the playing field, giving you all the time you need to plan out what you're going to do in detail.

I thought M.C. Kids looked about right. The sheer ambition is enough to compensate for some of the jank and put it a bit above most of the mediocre/totally unambitious/janky-in-their-own-right Japanese sidescrollers (Strider, Clash at Demonhead, Totally Rad, Kid Klown, Wacky Races, Little Mermaid) but once actual quality stuff starts popping up, it's out of the running pretty quickly. I can see a reasonable argument for it over Tiny Toon Adventures and can see why some wouldn't like Little Nemo in particular (not sure M.C. Kids is the game you'd want to champion in response though), but M.C. Kids shouldn't be on par with Shadow of the Ninja, Journey to Silius, or Jackie Chan's Action Kung Fu.

I'll give it this: I do think it's better than Rygar.
Also Monster Party, which runs mostly off "what the hell is this thing?" and basically belongs in the mediocrity pile.

I dunno much about Robocop but Bomberman does indeed deserve to be fairly low. It's a dull, monotonous 50-level game whose one level design is kinda too big for your initial state but can't really challenge you later on. It got ranked around where Yo Noid, Yoshi, and Renegade are and I'd definitely rather play those over NES Bomberman but none are very impressive examples of their genres. Bomberman being far enough below Kid Klown that it'd basically be in another tier checks out for me.

(Street Fighter 2010 being below all those games is the real bad decision.)

I've beaten both. I even beat Kid Klown's poorly thought out hard mode.

Rockin Kats is a reasonably good game. Kid Klown is arguably decent-ish but if you asked whether you should play it, I'd probably tell you to skip it unless you're a die hard fan for 8-bit platformers.

On the other hand, I'd absolutely take Kid Klown over Dragon Warrior or Urban Champion and those are above both. So there's that!

I'd guess Rygar probably belongs in the top half of the NES library and that's about all the credit I'm willing to give it.

BG3 is now ahead by a larger percentage than yesterday's poll ended up at and it is continuing to rise, suggesting a majority of RE4 + SMBW voters chose it over TotK.

Fallout 3 (2010) and Skyrim (2015) had narrow wins over Metroid Prime, so theres that. Big WRPGs could maybe beat SMRPG (54% on Oblivion or something) and Pokemon GSC too.

I dont think they beat Twilight Princess or Wind Waker.

So what Im taking from this is if an absurd early vote game like Melee had only a doubling against Baldurs Gate 3 at the freeze, the latter could still plausibly win just by normal trends.

I wouldn't take it to be top 5, but based on GotD2, Persona 5 is also on the lower end of the tier of games we're discussing.
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/8037-quarterfinals-the-witcher-3-wild-hunt-vs-persona-5
https://pastebin.com/Pxt3zA8g

If this is all TotK is worth then that Ganondorf boost speculation from last year is basically dead.

Also, nice to see that Baldur's Gate 3 has inherited Baldur's Gate 2's ridiculously lopsided trends.
http://www.gamefaqscontests.com/drupal/node/22?matchnum=4115&num=2
http://www.gamefaqscontests.com/drupal/node/22?matchnum=6089&num=2

What was the hint?
I just knew he really liked Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn and there was no way they'd just dropped all the way off the top 125.

What were the three you hated and the one you were lukewarm on?

RE4 got a reasonably timely (if inferior) PS2 port. None of the rest of these did besides Symphonia but that port didnt release in the west.

Part three!

My understanding is that most modern-style isekai originates as amateur self-published web novels, particularly on this site:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sh%C5%8Dsetsuka_ni_Nar%C5%8D
The popular ones generally get picked up for publication and undergo some editing to become light novels, with manga and anime adaptations often following.

Given this, whether it's through inexperience, incompetence, or pandering to the audience, any common creative issues with isekai can probably only be laid at the feet of the authors themselves, who have the core of their stories already worked out well before any corporations can begin adapating them to more profitable mediums.

In that case:
Captain Falcon's only 1-on-1 losses are to Crono, Cloud, and Sephiroth.

Missingno.s only 1-on-1 loss is to Sephiroth!

Genesis LFF from Sub-Zero could help explain both that match (particularly the margin of victory - Sonic losing to Auron is sorta sensible, Sonic getting 46% on Auron is kind of eyebrow-raising) as well as why Squall almost beat Sonic in 2007 despite Sora being there to drag him down and then still narrowly failed to beat Sonic after Sora and Sub-Zero were removed!

Detroit DJ had a project back in late 2013/early 2014 where he got 2000+ gamefaqs users to list their top 5 favorite games and compiled the results. Twilight Princess might have been the most drastic underperformer on the entire list, only getting 25 votes and being tied for 97th place.

So yeah, totally correct on hardcore fans not being there for it.

Given that back in 2010 we saw signs of Cloud clearly struggling (Captain Falcon breaking 30% on him when at one point even Bowser couldn't do that, Samus hanging even with him until the TDZ and ending up in the high 40s and beating him in the U.S.) while Squall and Auron still seemed basically fine and Vincent in retrospect looking like he had probably already started his big drop, a theoretically Cloud-that's-not-in-Smash might have dropped about as hard as even Vincent did. I guess that maybe kinda matches up with what we saw out of Cloud in 2013 though.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/7357-division-8-final-sephiroth-vs-ryu
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/7348-division-8-semifinal-sephiroth-vs-amaterasu

Should we be talking about Ryu vs L-block or Amaterasu over them both!?

sent

Related question: Where did Ganondorf rank in 2018?

Characters I'd have taken over Dorf after that contest/before TotK:
-Noble Nine
-Zelda
-Pikachu
-Tifa
-Mega Man X
-Luigi
-Bowser
-Yoshi

Asking Bacondorf to have been worth like a full 5% downgrade against Mega Man to put Dorf on par with Bowser/Yoshi's 45% on Pikachu/Crono sounds...possible but a little sketchy.

So I'd go with 17th, maybe roughly on par or better than, like, Alucard, Zero, and Kirby (who possibly suffered slight FF). Vivi got 48% on Dorf so he'd probably be 21st or so.

I'd say 7th is more likely. Snake was like 6th-ish last time and almost beat Zelda so Dorf would probably need to have gotten at least as strong as that to have a claim on top 5. Which is possible but also asking a lot.

Ganondorf > Mega Man would still be a pretty huge jump, overturning a 60-40 loss, albeit one with Bacondorf involved.

Liquid probably hasn't maintained his strength, people just don't care enough to even nominate him anymore.

I'd guess the percentage of this site who have actually played Duke Nukem 3D or its ports is fairly low.

Kenri posted...

Winner of that faces Sonic 3 & Knuckles

Only if Sonic 3 & Knuckles beats Charles Barkley and Michael Jordan first.

Magus looked only marginally weaker than Sub-Zero in 2018 (52-48 with Vincent, Vincent outperformed Sub-Zero on Auron)
Sub-Zero is overall probably one of our most stable guys of reasonable strength and is one of the relatively few other opponents Sandbag has faced.
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/3290-division-8-round-2-sonic-sandbag-auron-sub-zero
Didn't go well for the bag. Sandbag probably would have done worse 1-on-1 and does worse in 2023 regardless of format due to the general fading of joke characters. And given the trends of the past 15 years Chrono Trigger seems unlikely to majorly decline if nothing happens that would cause votals to shoot back up.
It also seems pretty obvious and intuitive to me (your mileage may vary) that "the ****ing Glove" would be a step up over Sandbag at least in a contest environment where jokes don't run rampant and:
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/7248-division-2-round-1-noctis-vs-master-hand
If you agree with me that Master Hand > Sandbag but want to argue Sandbag > Magus, you start running up awfully close to Magus ~ Noctis and that's just not happening.

I don't think this would be close in 2023 unless you think a weird rally could get going. Magus > Sandbag with 60+%

We would see Rydia again in 2013:

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/5171-character-battle-ix-division-4-round-1-alucard-vs-falcon-vs

CATS could certainly win a match against someone sufficiently weak 1-on-1 and maybe 2008 Drake is in that category. But even disregarding Drake entirely, that 2008 match doesn't look quite right compared to 1-on-1 strength. Yoshi barely doubled CATS, and while some of that's Yoshi's fault for being bad that year, it probably makes CATS look too strong 1-on-1 to be believable.

Captain Falcon is weird in terms of "hierarchy" because he was clearly fodder in 2006 (26% on Crono), got stuck behind Fox SFF in 2007, and then emerged in 2008 as a legitimate midcarder and has stayed there since. Seems to me a lot of the boost was from that one clip from the F-Zero anime and general youtube Falcon Punch memes.

Not many sidekicks/secondary dudes are worth more than around 40% on the main character, and I don't think Diddy's quite a Zero that can improve much on that. Modern Donkey Kong is stronger than Captain Falcon but is not worth 60% on him. (he might wreck him directly though given what he did to Falco in 2013). So I don't think a reasonable estimate on Diddy is gonna put him above Captain Falcon.

Thats a surprisingly respectable performance for a last place Nintendo joke-ish character facing down both a stronger real Nintendo character and a stronger Nintendo-aligned full-blown inanimate object joke character.

I've only read the Visual Novel version but Higurashi Rei (the main story part of it anyways; one of the side stories included was kinda bad), while not strictly necessary, felt like a solid, comparatively short +1 cap to the main 8 parts. It was written by Ryukishi shortly after Matsuribayashi and before Umineko so it'd be more fitting to count it with old Higurashi rather than the stuff that happened later.

The idea of a Rurouni Kenshin anime remake always seemed to me more like an obligation a studio feel necessary to make at this point in order to eventually get around to properly adapting the final arc rather than something people were actually excited about potentially happening. Skip the filler and the original anime was already cool as is; maybe the remake would be neat if the animation was up to modern high quality standards but it sounds like it's not? So yeah, a pretty muted response sounds appropriate!

WarThaNemesis2 posted... Pokemon over Final Fantasy isn't a given, but everything not-FF7 may as well not exist for the impact it has on the strength of the FF series. We've seen this before.

And given how Cloud has fallen off a cliff in recent years while Pokemon has skyrocketed...let's say there are reasons to doubt FF is a given.

What recent years? FF's big declines happened a decade ago now! It's hard to sift through all of 2013's nonsense but the FFVII cast overall probably looked better in 2018 than in 2013 and that was before the FFVII remake came out, while Pikachu was about equal with Crono both contests and in 2018 we confirmed Charizard and Mewtwo were frauds or have dropped and Squirtle and Missingno. didn't even show up. (I guess Red looked reasonably good though.)

I would not take it for granted that Pokemon is #4 or better. The conversation and general mood among that fanbase around newer games, the franchise in general, and its developer has soured horribly since Sword and Shield came out and the average gamefaqser still doesn't care deeply about anything besides the first two games. I'd give Smash a shot at the upset.

Pokemon's certainly not beating Final Fantasy. Everything not-RBY/GSC (or a remake of them) would lose to even FFIV, and might all lose to FFV or FFXII too. Back in the late 2010's when people were at least reasonably content around the direction of the franchise and the vibes from Pokemon Go weren't yet a distant ephemera, I could see reasons to consider the upset despite that, but nowadays? nope.

FFXV got itself into the gaming conversation fairly well but that conversation went poorly for the game!

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/8011-division-1-semifinal-zelda-breath-of-the-wild-vs-final
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/8027-division-1-final-zelda-breath-of-the-wild-vs-dragon-quest-xi

Maybe we'd go from Big Daddy LFFing Gordon from beating Scorpion for first to Gordon LFFing Big Daddy from getting second over Balthier!

Vincent should still win by a decent margin. 2018 Vincent vs. Fox probably would have been close, Fox vs. Falco is obviously not close, and with how terrible Vincent had already looked in 2013 relative to his peak (Disregard the silly round 2 stuff and he still failed to break 60% on KOS-MOS) it's not clear he even dropped in the 5 years from 2013 to 2018 so it shouldn't be a given he's notably worse in 2023 either and without that I don't think there's much reason to think Falco and Vincent are on the same tier.

Falco probably beats GlaDOS but I wouldn't be hugely shocked if he somehow blew it.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/5155-character-battle-ix-division-2-round-1-phoenix-vs-marth-vs

From 30% on Samus to 31% on Phoenix Wright.
I'd question less whether Crash wins a rematch and more whether he could potentially push for a tripling.

LeonhartFour posted...

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/3251-division-2-round-1-lloyd-mudkip-tom-nook-mega-man-x

I wonder how Mudkip (and Bidoof) would do now.

Bidoof is probably fairly unimpressive fodder, and outside of 4chan rallies it likely wasn't even very good back in the day. Mudkip we have seen in polls since:

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/5292-which-pokemon-water-type-starter-is-your-all-time-favorite
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/7781-which-pokemon-water-type-starter-is-your-all-time-favorite

I wouldn't expect it to get too far from the fodder-line in either direction. We've seen what happens to other meme characters when the joke gets old but being a well-liked (for post-RBY) starter might give it some base of strength though it's been a long time since it was relevant.

I think the reason why Lucario was such a relative bust is clear in retrospect: it's basically a nonentity in the actual main games of its generation. It's not a starter, it's not a legendary, it's not on the box, and in order to obtain it you have to raise its pre-evolved form from an egg that you don't get until fairly late in the game and it has one of those dreadful friendship evolutions. Lucario had some prominence in the anime and non-game franchise at the time, hence it getting into Smash, but non-diehard teen/adult consumers of Pokemon had largely fallen off most of that as the fad aspect of Pokemon faded in the early 2000s.

And Altair vs. Lucario is one thing, because yeah, I can totally see having no confidence in Altair. But does Lucario beat Isaac again in a rematch? I wouldn't take it. The broader franchise hype might not have lived up to expectations for Lucario in 2008 but it was probably doing something. I don't get the sense Lucario was ever particularly a favorite in Smash, whose cast is now much larger, and with its presence in relevant games outside of Smash feeling so minor at this point, I wouldn't expect Lucario to hold up to its 2008 performance either.

I don't think the likes of Captain Falcon or Waluigi or whatever would necessarily be an unfair match for showing Geno's strength. The potential issue with Bowser and Ness in particular is that they're specifically Nintendo-affiliated SNES RPG characters that outrank him on the totem pole, with Bowser in particular being a cruel choice.

sounds like prime bait for that one person to lecture us about the casual revolution of 2008

I think that Shadow performance looks a little better in retrospect. If even Sonic couldn't quite get 30% on Link due to SFF then Shadow managing to do just above 20% sounds sorta acceptable, and probably suggests he woulda beat Zidane 1-on-1. (nowadays though I'd just kind of expect another narrow Shadow failure against a somewhat stronger Zidane)

Leonhart4 posted...

This is the 2004 rematch lawl (and what a patriotic poll number to boot)

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/1367-tournament-final-cloud-strife-vs-sephiroth

I do wonder if there was some Cloud beating Link backlash

Didnt Sephiroth start that poll with the lead before falling behind after a bit? If so, it would strongly suggest there was, or that something funky was going on at least.

Sephiroths x-stat value that year is probably around accurate on accident though, because based on their 2004 match there probably should have been notably more SFF in Cloud/Sephiroth even back then - it likely got hidden by the 2003 anti-Cloud backlash votes.

Crono ~ Pikachu ~ Mega Man > Bowser ~ Yoshi with 55% seemed relatively sensible to me.

IIRC, while it wasn't a Snake sprite or anything, Snake looked underwhelming in the Samus/Snake match picture. Might have just been the mobile version that looked funky, it's been awhile.

https://www.pricecharting.com/