Lurker > KamikazePotato

I'm not even a hardcore Melee competitive player (was playing Smash 4 most recently). Brawl's competitive is bad. I'm not sure what kind of point you're trying to make when the entire fanbase agrees that Smash 4's was good (proving that they're fine with change as long as it's GOOD change) while Brawl's was bad.

Aside from tripping being dumb and modded out of the game in certain cases, you also had stuff like intentionally stalling forever using gliding, chaingrabs, staying too long in the air if you're certain characters, easily-replicateable glitches that render characters invulnerable, and...well, Meta Knight. There's more stuff I'm not remembering.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

I've stated my case on this, but CT looked flat-out stronger than OoT in pretty much every match. It did better on FF10 than OoT did on FF9. Maybe OoT hulks up in the final once it had a chance of losing, but it was legitimately looking a full step below in intrinsic strength.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

San Andreas outcry was a much smaller group of people that were a lot louder about their dissatisfaction. Nothing compared to Brawl/Melee. Or even Deus Ex/Rock Band.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Lopen posted...

but both games are able to be played at high levels and imo neither one is "more credible" than the other.

I think it's fine to prefer Brawl over Melee, but this is untrue. Brawl's competitive scene was a disaster from start to finish. They had a list of like 20 things you had to ban to make a match possible, and even aside from that, people just didn't like it. There's a reason the Melee scene even still exists. People were ready to move onto Brawl and they just...did not want to. Smash 4's competitive scene was going equal to Melee's before Ultimate supplanted it, which simply did not happen with Brawl.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Big grain of salt with this comparison, but Snake crushed Samus in the 2013 final, even before the big rallies for him started. Then there's the final bonus match of 46% against Link, by far the closest anyone's ever come who wasn't prime Cloud/Seph. I think in 2013 Snake was stronger, but in 2018 he's just...not. Samus might sap his strength a little, for whatever reason, but it's not turning around a 6.5% deficit. The Metal Gear series is dead and buried and everyone knows it. He'd lose to Mario and Cloud easily as well.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Might as well watch the anime of Re:Zero if he's going to get into it. I'm more of a manga guy but its an extremely good adaptation.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

charmander6000 posted...

Brawl > Melee was a good result because Melee fans would have never shut up over it if it won. Imagine Mario > Samus 2005, but worse.

Instead, they never shut up about it losing!

Not that the other side is any different. Anytime Brawl/Melee is mentioned, literally everyone in the topic posts which one they prefer. It's just one of those things.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

I play AR for the daily free rewards. And by free rewards I mean the grails you get on the 3rd day. The actual ranking is nice too but I'm not stressing over it.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

You don't need to get the items for Elizabeth to go on dates with her, and that's the real reward.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

I think Brawl has the potential to be one of the most non-transitive entrants in the history of contests. Put it against, say, a Square game? I think it performs very close to its original strength. Put it against a Nintendo game and it's going to start to falter. Put it against another Smash game and it will crumple like wet tissue paper. I have no doubt that Smash 4 would coast past Brawl even though Brawl would have no trouble breaking 55% on Mass Effect 1.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

I don't want to hear it from the guy who keeps saying Vivi/Mario was bad because it hurt Squall next round!
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

More recommendations

Fullmetal Alchemist
Angel Densetsu
One Punch Man
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Brawl/Melee was a good match but it was a bad result and it resulted in the worst possible final. Melee wins and I'm like 90% confident we get Melee vs. FFX.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Really not a fan of the Reversal Edge system in this game. Might be one of my least-favorite systems I've ever encountered in a fighting game.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Pretty confident in that, yeah.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Surprised you think so when it basically sealed's FFX fate

FFX wins the contest if Melee wins that
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Majora wasn't a plucky underdog to me. I just hated and hate Brawl. I'd rather have a good N64 game, stupid as that may be, win the contest over a bad game.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

I had Link>Snake in the 2008 finals and chickened out on it at the last second. Would have helped my bracket a lot if I just went with my fanboy instincts.

I get the feeling that people often lose sight of how incredible it is that Crono is legit.

I'll add to this - while not quite as incredible as how strong Crono is, Snake being so strong on this site is extremely weird. He doesn't fit the MO of other popular characters on this site at all. Realistic-looking human from an M-rated series about stealth, guns, and politics - MGS being weird as hell and having a Japanese bent to it helps a lot, but still. Every other character in the Top 20 is from Nintendo or a JRPG. Then there's Snake. And he's not just popular - he's significantly more popular than his contemporaries. Solid Snake vs. Sam Fisher (back when both were in their prime) is like a 60-40 in Snake's favor on any other site. Here it's 85-15. Who's the next-strongest character from an M-rated series after Snake? Geralt?
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Snake was the strongest he's ever been in 2013 (46% on Link looks even more impressive after this year). What could have been.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Got some time to play her. Simply put, she's busted and I don't know what they were thinking. Very fun though!
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Squall has fallen almost as much as Vincent (sorry, Leon). Sephiroth has fallen further than either.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

P3 Tower is one of my favorites in the series. Hermit, Sun, Empress, and Devil are also some good ones.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Pre-Bacondorf
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/2903-division-5-round-2-luigi-mudkip-ganondorf-vergil

Post-Bacondorf
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/2915-division-5-final-ganondorf-luigi-master-chief-yuna

Mega Man
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/3804-mushroom-division-round-2-mega-man-vs-zack-fair

Mega Man with a sprite round advantage
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/3831-mushroom-division-round-3-mega-man-vs-ryu-hayabusa

There's a reason stats get adjusted.

Also there was a guy who came to Board 8 and literally asked if he was supposed to be voting for Ganondorf or Ganon, so.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

P3 Moon has got to be the worst in the entire series.

Anagram posted...

"With Fuuka providing support, I can return to the frontline"

Who's ready for some Marin Karin?
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

CT/SSBM is one of the worst matches ever.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Peace___Frog posted...

For all the hate Morgana gets because of his irritating plot distraction, his voice acting is leagues better than fuuka's.

ThE eNeMy
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

The general term people use is Pity Breaker / Pity Broken.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Yukari is a jerk.

Fuuka's reaction to the gun makes more sense when you contextualize it within Japan's culture that is significantly less used to guns than America is.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Berserk
Berserk
Berserk

TheArkOfTurus posted...

If you like Monster, I'd definitely recommend checking out 20th Century Boys and Pluto, both by the same author.

This too
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Poll results so far look...exactly the same!
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Squall, in a sense, lucked out. He dropped about as much as Vincent, but he was still handed two easy matches against weak opponents, and if he had to be exposed by someone this year, being exposed by the contest star is a good way to save face.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Each Persona game has better Social Links than the last one. Kenji's is a pretty bad one too, which is unfortunate because it's probably the first one you do.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Holding out for laguz.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Don't need to apologize! Making x-stats is hard and I'm going to be right about everything.

Sonic is projected to get 37% on Samus through Snake. There's not much that can be done about that. I even projected Sonic through his Zelda result, which makes him look a little better, and he still ended up low.

Some other stuff I did:

1. Division 2 and 3 needed no adjustments and were really easy to make because there weren't many SFF matches in the matches the division winners had in the Legends bracket.

2. Ganondorf/Mega Man is a fraud result. The pic disadvantage was nuts. It makes Vivi, Leon Kennedy, Tidus, and Dante all look extremely bad. For that Division, I ended up doing Yuna's and Bowser's divisions first (two of the easiest to do outside of Phoenix Wright/Kirby), then did two comparisons: one where I set Tidus equal to Yuna and one where I set Ganondorf equal to Bowser. Think I took the middle ground of those but both comparisons ended up with very similar stats.

3. Kirby messed up his whole side of the division. I'm not buying that Ness 60-40s Ike, so I set Ike's relation to Ness equal to his relation to Ness via 2010 and called it a day. For Kirby I went back and checked some results, found some stuff that indicated he was about even to Bowser indirectly (his match against Terra being the biggest indicator), then set him slightly under Bowser and called it a day.

Division 5-8 were a mess. I don't remember everything I did to make the stats for those. It involved a lot of cross-comparisons and trying numbers until stuff 'lined up'. As close as possible, anyway. Some random things I remember:

4. Knocked Geralt down a peg because otherwise his half of the division looked too strong. Arbitrary but necessary. Used Ryu Hayabusa as a comparison to Sub-Zero to help do so.

5. Tifa's number (and subsequently, her division) was placed by comparisons between Luigi/Bowser and Mewtwo/Charizard. Setting those ones (around) equal to each other ended up with elegant stats, and lined up with prior results, so I rolled with it. Samus was then projected through Tifa's projection against Link through Tifa's result against Luigi/Mewtwo through their comparison with Bowser/Charizard - my head hurts.

6. Sephiroth's matches against Amaterasu and Mario were prioritized over his results against Captain Falcon and Ryu. That put him on the lower end of his x-stat 'potential', but he lost to Tifa straight-up so...yeah. I ignored the Tifa match and using the Ammy and Mario matches, he still ends up losing something like 51-49 in the final stats so he probably ended up where he should be anyway. Mario was projected through Sephiroth...and Cloud...I think. I looked at a LOT of different stuff to try and figure out a good number. Sephiroth caused issues. Only division that caused more issues was...

7. Zelda's! I didn't use anything Zelda did after Snake. I looked at her results within her division, where she was much more 'normal', and found that her results against Ramza, Aeris, Fox, and to a lesser extent Jill Valentine, were pretty consistent (and those characters themselves were internally consistent as well). I decided to use those - her indirect 39% or whatever against Link is simply stronger than the results she put up before. So she ends up lower than Mario and Cloud in the stats but if you put Zelda against them Round 1, I don't think she competes. Snake was adjusted through Zelda's results in this division. As for what Zelda's (and by association, Snake's) final indirect non-bandwagon result against Link projected by...I don't really remember. It involved a lot of cross-referencing. Aside from Ramza/Aeris/Fox/Jill, I think Lloyd Irving got in on the action too?

8. Sonic and Auron made their divisions look bad. I used Sonic's result against Zelda instead of Snake, which bumped him up (and put his division more in line with what it should be), but Sonic himself still looks bad. Shrug.

And other stuff. X-stats.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Zelda was adjusted via her projected results against Aeris, Ramza, and Fox. I ignored the Link match and pretty much everything she had after Snake because she got way stronger after that match.

Sonic's division wasn't adjusted lower than normal. Sonic and Auron just did consistently bad. Sub-Zero (who was one of the constants I used) didn't end up too far away from where he usually is, so I think it turned out okay.

The other ones took a lot more adjusting than I have time to talk about. It wasn't as simple as 'Mario through Cloud' because a lot of the Legends matches were this gaping pit of bandwagons, revenge votes, SFF, and non-transitive results.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Majora winning GotD is stupid on principle, but I still preferred it to Brawl winning.

Should've been FFX.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Got this recently, been having a ton of fun with it. All the single player content is great.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Tai is the ultimate freakout of all time. andymancan was less of a freakout and more of a stark betrayal - even back in the day, who rallies for Link on a B8-only poll?

I honestly don't remember anything about the jp outside of fat jokes.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

The thing I remember most about Samus/Tifa is, for some reason, the absolute meltdown Vlado had when Tifa lost the lead and never got it back

People REALLY cared about their pet characters back in the day
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Ryu did well in all his matches up until that point, and in a way that very closely lined up his previous contest results. Maybe I should have left it unadjusted, but I'm not taking Chun-Li over him anytime soon, which is what happens if I take the Sephiroth match at face value.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Sephiroth in 2013 is weaker than 2010, and Sephiroth in 2018 is weaker than 2018. It's actually impressive that Cloud managed to turn things around a little when you consider what happened to 'badass' FF characters like Vincent, Sephiroth, Squall, and even Auron.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

transience posted...

that's Sephiroth for ya. biggest contest enigma in history.

Fun fact about this - the Sephiroth/Ryu match this year is so out of line with how everything else matched up that it basically had to be discarded. Unless Mario gets 68% on Ryu these days. It's the only match in the entire contest where I had to do something like that.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Tifa has always been about this strong. People just sort of...forgot? She hasn't been in any big debatable matches in a while.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

For what it's worth, the current version of the 2018 x-stats (which is probably the final version), where I mostly ignored the Tifa/Sephiroth match, does have Tifa ranking a little higher than him.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Yeah, Persona 3 has a significantly different tone from Persona 5 (and 4, which also has a different tone from 3 or 5). Persona 5 is a constant high-stakes rage against the machine sort of plot. Persona 3 is slow, melancholic, and introspective. Lots of plot developments eventually do start happening but it never loses that subdued atmosphere. It's why a lot of people still rank it as their favorite Persona game even though mechanically it's far outclassed by now.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Rivalry Rumble got 'saved' by the Trainers. 100% of the surprising results in that contest came from them.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

I think Mario vs. Sonic is a doubling at this point, and I thought that even before Sonic looked really bad this year. That rivalry is so one-sided at this point that it's hard to imagine anyone but the Sonic faithful voting for him over Mario, and that number dwindles every year. The novelty of that match would wear off after 15 minutes,
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Sonic wasn't very consistent by that point (he lost to Auron and Kirby in the same year) and FF7 is rally bait. I remember the sentiment at the time was that Vivi was screwed if it was close because It's Freaking Mario and it just...didn't happen. I don't think the result is anywhere near as impactful if it had been any other N9er outside of Link - Sonic, Cloud, Sephiroth, Crono, Snake, Mega Man, and Samus had all had results where they embarrassed themselves far more recently than Mario, who looked like a champ since 2005. Mario may not have even been #2/#3/whatever for very long, but weird stuff like that just didn't happen to him.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Fraud is the most overused term of 2018 outside of Hentai Rallies, but it's somehow still fun anyway.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

This topic is as interesting to me as the P5 one. Watching someone go backwards in the series is fun.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.