Lurker > TsunamiXXVIII

Wait, I didn't even manage to finish out Round 4?

Match 120: Sephiroth vs. Ryu

Sephiroth 18769
Ryu 12376

Ryu fared better with registered voters than anonymous voters, so this match isn't even as close as it looks. Which isn't terribly close. Fighting game characters seemed somewhat stronger this year, but you'd never guess it from this match, where the allegedly struggling Sephiroth still managed to break 60% on Ryu, a character that famously always required a Noble Niner to take him down in early contests and always broke 40% in those losses. At this point, Sephiroth was probably only considered to have "weakened" because of the overall weakness of Division 8. Think of it like L-Block's 2007 run in reverse. Sephiroth's always going to draw a certain number of anti-votes, so he looks stronger against strong characters like Ryu here than he does against weak ones, just as L-Block's so-called "joke trends" meant it would draw a consistent percentage regardless of whether it was facing R1 fodder or Noble Niners.

Match 121: Link vs. Ganondorf

Link 22974
Ganondorf 5874

Normally I hate adjusted X-Stats, because there's no scientific way to determine the adjustments and then you end up with the "sharps" being unanimously wrong about Magus-Knuckles 2005 because Magus was just arbitrarily assigned his 2003 value (which was earned directly against a Link far weaker than 2004's) to account for the SFF Bracket of 2004. But then you get a near-quadrupling in Round 5 and it becomes impossible to defend the sanctity of raw X-Stats. Clearly Ganondorf's stronger than his raw numbers will suggest. But how much stronger? Who knows. About the only clear takeaway from this is that Zelda was able to withstand SFF from Link far better than Ganondorf did. Before this contest, it wasn't necessarily clear which one was stronger, though it seemed more likely even then to be Zelda. Now there's no doubt; Zelda came out looking like the new #3 character on the site.
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Yeah.
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Oh yeah, I nearly forgot about this.
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I like the thread.
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Luigi was the "safe" pick because him getting to the match was an easy call. I had Luigi in my bracket, but only because I thought he'd pull Nintendo SFF on Mewtwo. I was fully aware that if either X or Tifa stopped Mewtwo, Luigi wouldn't win.
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FBike1 posted...

This is going to fizzle out by the time CB11 actually happens...

If CB11 actually happens.

Sign me up.
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Match 119: Luigi vs. Tifa Lockhart

Luigi 15149
Tifa 15997

These two had met before in a match back in 2005, and it was somewhat close, but Tifa was never really in danger of losing. And here, with Tifa fresh off a rally-fueled victory...nothing really changed. This wasn't a blowout, which suggests that Luigi could've fared pretty well against MMX. Honestly, this wasn't really a surprising result, even if it does go against the "cookie" bracket--Luigi had barely over a third of the Guru brackets, with the rest being split between X, Tifa, and Mewtwo--X having the largest portion of those due to the Mewtwo-Tifa split. Which I guess means that the "true favorite" was X? This was a distinctly weird division due to the Mewtwo/Tifa/X kerfuffle making it impossible to declare who the favorite really was in that match.
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Match 117: Zelda vs. Aerith Gainsborough

Zelda 18235
Aerith 11088

Okay fine I guess I can't avoid this forever. Because honestly, at one point I was all ready to go back to this, then I saw what match was up next and was like "nah, I'm good". Because most of these division finals, even if they were never really in question, the loser still put up a good show. This was just a steady beating, and nobody was really that surprised by it, not after what Zelda did to Squall the previous round. For the casuals, it didn't even take that long--Zelda's prediction percentage was still above 25% and proportionally she lost more brackets this round than the last one (even by raw numbers, it's close) even though Aerith making it this far was considered fairly surprising. Though that's mostly from fear of rallies that never materialized; she was considered an underdog with the casuals all the way back in Round 1.

Match 118: Geralt vs. Auron

Geralt 13739
Auron 15582

LOLCasuals. 9.97% for Auron isn't necessarily funny in its own right since this was somewhat of a wide open division, but how we got to that point is. Over 30% of brackets had him losing in Round 1 to Lucina, and the first time that he actually lost more brackets than he retained was this round, even though the top half of Division 6 was extremely weak. I was willing to blame it on RallyFEAR but Pac-Man was actually the slight favorite against Sans in R1 and Geralt seems to have retained enough percentage to be considered the clear favorite every round. 1-seed fear? Whatever; this was a pleasantly close match. Here's hoping that Geralt really was a trial for a character battle that openly embraces having characters not originating from video games. It doesn't even have to be a fully open one; there can still be some sort of requirement for a gaming tie-in. You'd probably have to institute something like what Allen did to determine the field for BGE3, too, when considering the games involved, since most licensed video games are awful and serve little purpose other than to be licensed video games. None of that. I'm talking about characters from highly acclaimed games such as Goldeneye 007, the Kingdom Hearts series, the Arkham series.
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Indeed.
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I was among those with Bowser in my bracket and Kirby in my Oracle, because I am susceptible to Groupthink.
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Match 116: Bowser vs. Kirby

Bowser 15211
Kirby 13033

When a greater percentage of Gurus get a match correct than Oracles, you know we've screwed up somewhere along the line. Bowser has always been one of the strongest midcarders; by raw votes, his match with Snake in 2005 was still the closest 1v1 between a Noble Niner and a non-Noble Niner (though that would obviously change this year because of the horrible vote totals), closer than even Samus-Tifa 2006. He'd beaten Kirby before, during that same 2005 season. Now, Kirby had established quite a resume since then as well, so Bowser was only a slight favorite there--69 to 60, with 28 of the remaining 31 Gurus picking Charizard. But in the Oracle, which was made with the additional "knowledge" of the first three rounds? Kirby received 80% of Oracle predictions.

But it's a shame it even came to that. I love both of these characters, and if one of them had been in Division 3 or 6 instead, that'd be great. Preferably Division 3, if it's Kirby who was moved; for someone who hadn't faced any Noble Niners until 2008, Kirby sure has a lot of matches with Sonic. Why do I love them so much? For Bowser, it's mostly the more recent games. The RPGs were what allowed Bowser to really show his character--I was planning on spamming SMRPG and BIS quotes any time Bowser did anything good in his matches with Crono, but he never really did--but it's since carried over into the main games. A common criticism of video game leads is that their personalities are very generic, a necessary evil because they're supposed to represent the player. Think Mario, Link, Crono, and especially Red, who Game Freak has decided shall forever remain silent even when not the protagonist. The villains are not bound by this restriction, so they get all the good lines. Remember all the hype surrounding Magus in 2003? It's because Magus actually had a character, so he was thought to be much more popular within the fanbase than Crono. Kirby, on the other hand, appears at first to be one of those low-characterization leads, and in some ways he is, but it's more accurate to say that his characterization is a child-like simplicity. Kirby has faced all sorts of cosmic horrors, and he still maintains his cheerful demeanor, waving and dancing and constantly smiling (no matter how much American box art tries to hide this last fact). We could all learn a lot from Kirby.
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Maybe so, maybe not.
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Match 113: Ganondorf vs. Vivi

Ganondorf 16008
Vivi 14803

Vivi narrowly managed to take the unregistered vote, but registered voters easily carried Ganondorf to a win. This was especially satisfying as Ganondorf was the third-place finisher in Vivi's legendary upset of Mario in 2013, definitively declaring that RallyFAQs was truly dead.

Match 114: Zero vs. Pikachu

Zero 13387
Pikachu 17428

Division 2's final was a yawner, as while rallies may have been dead, PokFEAR was still alive and well. But it was still worth something to look at. Pikachu won this match with 56.56% of the vote. Way back in 2004, despite theoretically having SFF on his side, Mega Man was only able to beat Zero with 56.01%. Granted, Zero's fared worse against Mega in two later fourway matches, culminating in Mega Man beating Charizard with Zero as an anchor after having previously lost to Weighted Companion Cube, but 2013 especially showed that SFF is magnified in multiways because the fans will abandon the lesser of the two characters to support the one with the better shot of winning. Last-Place Factor, we call it.

Match 115: Pokmon Trainer Red vs. Alucard

Red 13041
Alucard 15195

The PLAN! Alucard may not have been the intuitive choice to win Division 3, and both the Guru and the casuals' prediction percentages show that, but he staked his claim as the favorite to win the division back in Round 2, when he was beating Yuna with the same percentage that Kefka was beating Bomberman. Was he the weakest division winner? Yeah, probably. But he took advantage of a weak division and showed that he's still got some strength, 16 years after he initially shocked the board with a deep run in CB1.
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Match 112: Ryu vs. KOS-MOS

Ryu 21099
KOS-MOS 11325

As is often the case with these bracket set-ups, Round 3 closed with a whimper. The later divisions in the bracket are often stacked with the lower-glamour entrants, though it's not a hard and fast rule. 2002 had some interesting matches in the last division, but a bit too high up to truly close out any rounds until we were getting double-elite matchups. 2005 had two good upsets ending its two contests' first rounds, and the 2006 Character Battle had a couple of nice ones, too. 2010, like 2002, largely only suffered in that the notable matches were in the top half of the final division. And...2013 actually had two great matches to close out rounds, which is impressive because it didn't have that many rounds. So maybe it just seems worse than it is because of how Games Contests usually have the designated non-Squintendo divisions near the bottom of the bracket. And yes, even in the division-by-era contests, the final division is the closest thing to the non-Squintendo division, because when we talk about those companies' mystique, we're talking about their classics, not their recent output. We refer to just about everything from the 8-bit era, and much of the 16-bit era, as "pseudo-Nintendo" for a reason.

On another note, this was the second match of Round 3 to be a rematch of a Round 1 match from 2004. KOS-MOS was more relevant in 2004 than she is now, so it's no surprise that match was closer than this one was.
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Match 111: Sephiroth vs. Amaterasu

Sephiroth 19901
Amaterasu 12525

I believe it was sometime during Round 4 that the "lineal Noble Nine" concept was introduced, and I bring it up again because at the time, people were still expecting the Noble Nine to largely hold serve and possibly restore the Lineal Nine to something closely resembling the actual Nine, with probably seven and as many as 8 of them in there--with the one guaranteed outlier, there in place of Sonic, being Amaterasu, courtesy of her Round 1 blowout of defending champion Draven combined with Sephiroth having managed not to lose his spot in 2013 despite finishing in third place in his eventual defeat--largely because said defeat came in the semifinals and as such, everyone else involved in the match had already gotten past an actual Noble Niner that still possessed a spot in the Lineal Nine at the time. (In Mewtwo's case, the aforementioned Sonic.) Of course, things didn't go that smoothly--Zelda ran over almost everyone, taking Snake's spot (which he was unable to win back); Tifa defended the spot she won from Mewtwo by defeating Sephiroth; and Mega Man won the rematch with Pikachu so it was his spot, not Pikachu's, that Crono took in Match 143. (Yeah, 2013 did a lot of weird things to the Lineal Nine--the lowest finisher is the one that loses their spot, so three characters outright earned their spots in second place finishes because they were the only ones entering the match without a slot and a fourth actually defended their slot with a second place finish because the third-place finisher also had one to give up to the winner.) When this was stated, someone said they were fine with the idea of it being Eight Noble Niners and Amaterasu. Slaying Draven certainly gained her a lot of good will here, but I feel like she's been a favorite here for awhile. The public perception of Board 8 is that we're a bunch of sticks-in-the-mud who hate anything upsetting our established order of expectations, but the truth is that we hate it just as much when things are too predictable, finding it boring. The nuance that the outsiders that invaded us in 2013 and 2015 didn't understand is that the upset has to make sense. Draven and Undertale putting up 201st-decade numbers in the 202nd decade and generally making a mockery of the elites didn't make sense; it was a clear aberration, and furthermore, because it eventually polarized things to "pro-X vs. anti-X" instead of "pro-X vs. pro-Y", it meant that entrants of vastly different natural strengths could get comparable numbers on the eventual champs, leading to the proven fodder Jak and a game whose ending was so ill-received that the creator's eventually released a "fixed" ending as DLC winding up near the top of the X-Stats. Amaterasu pulled "upsets" because we just vastly underestimated her. In her very first match, she was up against a proven midcarder, an unproven (Round 1 loss to Link in his only previous appearance) but recognizable character, and a potential target for a joke rally; as a new character without the benefit of joke appeal, people weren't expecting her to advance. She did, then advanced again when a more hyped newcomer flamed out massively. Actually, nothing she's done since then can reasonably qualify as an "upset" except maybe beating Shadow in 2010--she's made it to Round 2 in every contest, sure, but she's gotten favorable draws every time. We've learned to stop underestimating her.
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Huh, guess the purge time is longer than I thought.

Edit: Oh wait that's right there was another post.
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But Tifa was not done yet. From that peak of 89 at the 20:50 mark, she quickly picked up a double-digit update win to close out the hour, then fought through a wall of single-digit wins for both sides over the next 1:20 to leave X's lead at the 22:20 mark at 52. That was when she made her move, pulling three double-digit wins in the next four updates to pull it back to dead even, then adding another on the next update--only for X to win the following one by the exact same amount, pulling it back to dead even with just 1:10 left in the match, and taking the next one by double digits as well. Entering the final hour, X led by a mere 8 votes, and it only took one update for Tifa to turn her single-digit deficit into a double-digit lead. X would win the next two updates to reduce Tifa's lead to a single vote with 45 minutes left in the match, but Tifa won all nine of the remaining updates, many by double-digits, to win by 114--the first triple-digit lead by either side in over 10 hours. In some ways, it could be seen as an anticlimactic ending--this match barely even makes the Top 25 list for closest final margins, and only does so at all because we don't count battles for placement among non-advancing competitors in 3- and 4-ways.

During the final hours of this match, rallies were once again on everyone's minds. Some users, I don't remember who, decided to rally for Tifa on hentai sites, because why not? And since it ended up being such a close match, people blamed the rallies. Did they really make a difference? Maybe. There have always been rallies, though, and it's clear that there wasn't anything this contest on the scale of what Draven and Undertale did in 2013 and 2015. It livened up the contest a bit, and had people wondering what Zelda, Tifa, and Samus could do from here on out--but mostly Zelda and Samus, because Tifa's path was still largely set in stone. She beat Luigi long before hentai rallies were a thing, and she'd be facing Samus and then Sephiroth in the Legends bracket, two Noble Niners that she's already lost to multiple times. Her best chance at pulling some sort of crazy upset would be if Sephiroth managed to continue his historical dominance of Mario, but the consensus was that Mario would finally break through with a win against Seph. At any rate, while there had been some rallying involved, the unlikelihood of Tifa upsetting a Noble Niner this contest meant that the X Classic bandwagon would finally quiet.

It wouldn't last.
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Match 110: Tifa Lockhart vs. Mega Man X

Tifa 16269
X 16155

For the second time in four matches, the registered vote was separated by single digits, in favor of the loser of the overall match. That said, this was probably the most hyped pre-Legends match, and with good reason. Both of these characters had already shown potential Noble Nine breaker power--Tifa directly, when she finished second in the main bracket X-Stats in 2006 with a near-upset of Samus (even with the Noble Nine getting beaten outright by outsiders more frequently, this is still the only time they've failed to break 50.5% in a 1v1 win against an outsider) and Mega Man X a bit more indirectly, to the point that it probably wouldn't even be brought up if he weren't Mega Man X. Namely, that X's percentage against Link in 2010 compares favorably to the original's 2004 percentage. And as of this point, he'd yet to be threatened by anything that you wouldn't immediately say "this is not a spot where Mega Man Classic would have lost". 2008, he wins his R1 fourpack outright and then finishes second to Mario twice before losing out to the combined strength of Link and Mario. Yes, he also lost to Zack Fair in that match, but given how close Zack got to Mario it's clear that Black-Haired Cloud was the beneficiary of some massive STF in that match. Come 2010, it's Link directly who took X down. 2011, if you want to count that, it was Mario/Bowser who took out X/Zero. And then in 2013, it was peak strength Draven. And even in that contest, X doesn't look horrible--because there was never any chance of either of them taking down the rallied Draven, X's battle for second place with Ryu is probably fairly organic, and X won that with 57.21%. Ryu might not be quite the dependable barometer of near-elite strength that he used to be, but he's still a strong character and that's a quality win. Also, games may not equal characters, but when we were finally given a gimmick-free Games Contest, one that wasn't intentionally balanced over the eras, Mega Man Classic got shut out while X still got his debut game in--and it did pretty damn good, almost breaking 45% in a loss to the heavily favored Final Fantasy X.

But now for the match. This one was deadlocked at 320-320 at the freeze, though X would ride a big third update to a triple-digit lead by the half-hour mark (even though Tifa had already managed her first update win by then). His lead would eventually peak at 469 at the 4:05 mark. At the 7:00 mark, Tifa won her eighth consecutive update, the first time either one had even won 5 straight since X's 7 in a row from 0:20-0:55. Tifa took her first post-freeze lead at the 9:40 mark and X promptly stalled the next one, but that zero-change update was Tifa's only update non-win for a period of just over an hour, from 9:05 to 10:10, which for this match qualified as huge momentum. She reeled off a bunch more after X's update win there, but stalled out in the 110s for a bit before recovering to eventually push it out to 194 at the 12:15 mark. Then X fought back and cut 100 off that deficit in the next 1:40. 45 minutes later, he took off 30 votes in a single update to cut it to 43, only for Tifa to take back 25 the very next update. The next time he got within 50 was met by two straight double-digit wins for Tifa, and when he got it below 20 at the 18:20 mark he was again met with a 22-vote update win for Tifa. Finally, at the 19:15 mark he took an update by 21 to take an 8-vote lead, skipping right over whatever she might have in store for being pushed down to single-digits,and kept up the momentum to a 66-vote lead 45 minutes later, then fought off Tifa's return push to expand the lead by another 23 over the next hour.
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Something like that. As I said before, I wanted to do analysis in the past.
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Okay, can't do it just yet, but should be soon.
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Match 108: Auron vs. Sub-Zero

Auron 17609
Sub-Zero 13440

This wasn't a terribly interesting match to look at--the percentage stayed within .3% of 57-43 for the final 21 hours and 15 minutes, which is only mildly interesting in that the final percentage was very close to the edge of that range in favor of the loser--but it is an interesting one to interpret. Was Auron one of the weakest division winners this year, or were fighting game characters on the whole doing better than usual? Or maybe both? Division 6 was certainly one of the softest divisions, with the best established track record going to a character already known to be on the decline (Vincent) and the number two and probable number three being said #1's first two opponents (in reverse order; and yes, as many embarrassing losses as Magus has had, he racked up enough of a resume early that he might still be one of the more accomplished characters in this absolutely silly division). I feel like the fighting game characters were "up", though. The actual wins weren't necessarily there, because of rough draws (Scorpion got Pikachu in R1, and avoided embarrassment but still got beat pretty bad, and Chun-Li drew Ganondorf in R2 and did a very good job in a loss.) But outside of Guile's horrible loss to Kirby, they looked good. Now, part of that is that they weren't bogged down by lesser representatives--Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat are the strongest fighting game franchises (not counting Smash) and they were the only ones with reps, and mostly their strongest reps at that. But it's still interesting to think about.

Match 109: Luigi vs. Miles "Tails" Prower

Luigi 22581
Tails 9840

It's a well-known fact that Mario-Sonic is one of the few inter-NN matches that we've never seen in any format. But how many times have members of the two franchises met?

2003 R1: Shadow defeats Wario with 64.90% of the vote
2003 R2: Mario defeats Shadow with 55.10% of the vote
2006 R3: Sonic defeats Luigi with 60.19% of the vote
2007 R1: Yoshi puts up 56.03% directly on Knuckles, who still advances over Rikku and Vaan
2007 R2: Yoshi puts up 58.21% directly on Knuckles; both finish ahead of KOS-MOS and behind Mega Man, so Yoshi advances and Knuckles is eliminated
2008 R1: Mario puts up 65.95% directly on Knuckles, who is eliminated behind Zelda but takes 3rd place over Fei Fong Wong
2013 R3: Sonic puts up 59.43% directly on Bowser, but both lose out to Mewtwo
2018 R3: Luigi defeats Tails with 69.65% of the vote

Definitely favors Team Mario; Team Sonic's only wins came when they had the clearly higher-tier representative. (I guess technically Wario's a separate franchise now, but unlike Donkey Kong, who technically also originated as part of Mario's franchise, he hasn't really established himself as a true independent.) Even in cases where the franchises' own pecking orders would seem to at least slightly favor Team Sonic (which is to say, Yoshi-Knuckles), Team Mario handily won.

But this is an SFF matchup, make no mistake. That's why there haven't really been any close matches in that series. Mario-Shadow is still a huge anomaly that may never truly be explained, but this was predictable. The blowout being as bad as it was, though? Maybe not so much. The Oracle consensus had this at roughly a 65-35 match, and only four Oracles out of 57 overshot the actual percentage.
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That, and I've just been kind of busy lately.
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Go
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Match 106: Fox McCloud vs. Aerith Gainsborough

Fox 14684
Aerith 16362

In my mind, this is a good performance for Fox. Aerith's always been a fairly strong midcarder, and Fox, for the longest time, wasn't. Mostly he just preyed on weaker characters, often using SFF to do so. But there is the sincere possibility that FFVII has just weakened. Tifa managed to stay strong because of the rallies or whatever, and Cloud managed to stay strong because he's in Smash. But Sephiroth definitely looked weaker, too, and of course so did Vincent. Maybe Aerith lost a step as well, even if this is her deepest run ever? Sounds weird but I guess it's possible.

Match 107: Geralt vs. Bayonetta

Geralt 15799
Bayonetta 15251

Legitimately close match here. Registered voters actually favored Bayonetta, by a scant 9 votes. This match does feel more appropriate to the second round than the third; these characters are too "new" to be worth anything, or so it seems. In reality, maybe not so much. Geralt, of course, has been around for a long time. Even if you only count from his video game debut, that's probably longer than you realize, because it wasn't until The Witcher 3 that he really made a name for himself. And Bayonetta's coming up on a decade, too. The first game came out in October 2009; if she makes waves in GotD, it'll have to be with the second game. It still feels like she's a newcomer, though, because of how infrequent Contests have been; she made the vote-ins in CBVIII but was so new that she couldn't even make the main field, and then in CBIX she caught an incredibly weak first-round 3-pack and then ran into a Noble Niner in Round 2. That Round 1 match was so stupid; "pick the oldest character/game" is usually a good rule of thumb for fodder matches as long as they aren't too old (which usually means 8-bit era), so when the oldest character is the consensus last place finisher in a multiway, well, you'd expect that to be something ancient, not a character whose piss-weakness also comes from being too recent.
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Yeah, I had Zelda winning the division, too, but going two and out because mine was one of the RallyFEAR brackets that had Sonic losing right away, so no break from the NN in Losers' 1 for Zelda.
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It's cool, I understand. I guess I should be glad that I refrained from mentioning you a second time, which I very nearly did because you were also that solitary Oracle that actually predicted Zelda breaking 60%. Congrats on being at least somewhat less blindsided than the rest of us.
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See, now you're misinterpreting what I'm saying. I never said that it doesn't exist for the first one, nor did I say that later ones are what "made them noticed". It's really no different from any other case where characters get stronger and stronger the more games they have. That's why the majority of the Noble Nine are lead characters from long-running franchises. I suppose my only mistake was wording it as though this was specifically a characteristic of Smash.

It isn't. Any high-profile release will boost a character, and more releases means more boosts, in theory. The famed "Kingdom Hearts boost" of 2003 is the exact same thing. However, as I noted back in the Mewtwo-GLaDOS write-up, there's the risk of overdoing it and weakening your brand by churning out rehashes of the same game over and over again. Assassin's Creed is a good example of a franchise that fell into this trap, and it shows in the franchise's results in these contests. Altair's failure to make the bracket at all and Ezio's first-round blowout loss to Zelda marked the first time for either one of them that they missed the second round since their games were released, but not one of the leads from later games has even made a contest. That is Smash's true strength--even its weakest entries are still considered strong games.

Also, it speaks to another trend that I've spoken of--the nostalgia bias. For Pokmon, the general rule is that the two most recent generations get shit all over and anything older is looked upon fondly, though there is a minority that will never see anything from the GBA era or later as being good. For Final Fantasy, it's a little tougher to tell, in part because the release schedule has slowed down so much that even XII is over a decade old--hell, even XIII is getting pretty close to a decade old and that's the second most recent non-MMO. So you're right, I did word things poorly. It would be more accurate to say that each new Smash game increases the value of having been in previous ones. Again, if you doubt the veracity of this, just compare 2002 Pikachu, 2008 Pikachu, and 2018 Pikachu. The first one was a chump, the second a dangerous midcarder who slayed the threatening joke character, and the third a Noble Nine breaker. That's because being one of the Original 151 and the Original 12 didn't mean much when GSC and Melee were the most recent games in those series, but it meant something when DPP and Brawl were and it means a hell of a lot when it's USUM and Ultimate.

Edit: Also, I see your edit. I feel it doesn't really flow without some of the parts you took out, but I reworded that section to avoid directly referencing you and instead put "if you're reading these write-ups in order", which is true enough and I frequently refer back to my own earlier write-ups so the fact that I'm referring to something in your analysis rather than my own is irrelevant.

I also corrected my write-up because LMS was right; Zelda missed '04 after debuting in '03. I had honestly forgotten that she'd been in '03 until I looked it up, but I must've glossed over the absence of '04; I think it's because normally characters that debuted in '02 or '03 have their first text block on their history page after the '04 contest and another one after each contest from '05 on, but Zelda's first one is after '05.
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Also known as Cyberchao X.

See, being new to Smash is only good for a small boost. But here's the secret. Each time you appear in a Smash game? The boost gets bigger. Remember, Metroid Prime wasn't even out when Character Battle I happened. Super Metroid is certainly an all-time classic, but being one of the Original Twelve (and the Original Eight, at that), surely gave her the added strength to be a Noble Niner right from the start. (Though maybe people put too much weight on the lack of a Metroid game since SM at the time of CBI; it's only a year older than Chrono Trigger and actually had a PAL release on its initial system to boot.) Kirby, of course, gets most of his strength from Smash even now. Same goes for Captain Falcon. And of course, Fox. He had a pretty decent contest this year even though he hasn't had a game anyone really cared about since 1997. (Star Fox Zero got panned for being too much of a retread of 64, but given how poorly received every game since then has been with the exception of the literal SF64 remake on the 3DS, why shouldn't they try to stick with what people liked?)

And it most certainly has trickled down to Melee's cast of newcomers, or at least, some of them. Conventional wisdom coming into this year was that no one really cares about Peach; she's just an apathy vote magnet. Which...okay that would actually be a pretty decent explanation for why she gave Alucard a better match than either of his next two opponents; this contest's format made "apathy vote magnet" a surprisingly strong thing to be. And of course, Mewtwo is still the second-most consistently strong Pokmon...actually let's face it, Mewtwo should probably be ahead of Charizard in the adjusted X-Stats, because Division 7 is in a horrendous place in the raw X-Stats. Guess which one made it into Smash first. Don't get me wrong, a lot of Smashers would be strong anyway. But Zelda has been there since Melee, and more importantly, there was a kind of big Legend of Zelda game out recently. You know, the series with her name in the title? She was, as usual, only a supporting character despite being the title character, but she still had a pretty decent presence, not to mention one of her best designs yet, which, again, was used for her appearance in Smash Ultimate.

Also, if that bit about the Smash Boost becoming stronger with each successive appearance is true? It really explains a lot of characters getting these massive boosts. And sure enough, they did exactly that. Cloud recovered from his signs of weakness in 2013, and Bowser hasn't looked this good since he gave Snake a scare in 2005.

You figured it out yet?

That's right. This was the first Character Battle since for WiiU/3DS came out. And since they made a point of bringing back everyone from Melee, Brawl, and WiiU/3DS (the original roster has been present in every game anyway), even ill-advised decisions like Pichu, it's a 100% guarantee that any character in Wii U/3DS had their Smash counter incremented by 2 since the most recent contest. So, yeah, there were bound to be some absolutely ridiculous power boosts. Long live NintendoFAQs.
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Also known as Cyberchao X.

And yes, it took a conscious effort to write "couldn't" and "can't" rather than "didn't" and "shouldn't". Or "won't". Because that's the way most of the old guard thinks. The Noble Nine, and their peak games (okay mostly just OoT, CT, FFVII, and to a lesser extent ALttP/SMW/SMB3), are put on a pedestal. They've finally accepted that they're not all going to stay invincible forever, but the idea that something else could be as strong as they once were...

...well, it wasn't always that way. CBII was, in many ways, a very weird contest, because a bunch of side characters from games whose main characters were in CBI debuted and people expected these side characters to be stronger than their leads for some reason. Maybe because leads tend to be bland. People figured that if Crono could come as close as he did to Mario, then Magus should be able to outright win the contest--but on the other hand, Mario has no real personality at all so surely Luigi will be even stronger than Mario. As awful as CBIII was for all of the SFF matches, it was, one supposes, at least useful for derailing that kind of misguided thinking. But on the flip side, it might just have been what led to this kind of misguided thinking, that the Noble Nine have some sort of untouchable aura that no other character will ever be able to attain.

Well, okay, there's that, and there's also the fact that new characters tend to do poorly, and the inherent advantage of having existed for a long time means that anything that could be on that level would have shown that capability by now. That is an entirely more logical reason for thinking that no other character would ever be able to dominate non-fodder the way the Noble Nine do, or once did. Forgive me, I've been railing against the unwillingness to see members of the Noble Nine weakening for so long that I overlooked that the converse, that nothing else will ever rise up to that level, actually had a logical basis. That said, there was something overlooked, and if you scroll back up to the point where I mentioned the games that are treated with the same reverence as the Noble Nine, you'll probably figure out what it is.

No, that wasn't an accidental omission.

This contest, Smash Ultimate was certainly considered a factor as to why Nintendo--and certain non-Nintendo characters--had boosted, but far too often, Smash is overlooked. I suspect that this is because of one of the exact same things that I consider to be among the three reasons that Melee isn't looked at in the same light as those other games. Namely, Brawl. The threefold reason that Melee isn't given the reverence it deserves are the loss to Brawl in GotD, rallying to turn what was already an assured 55-45 win into a 60-40 win in BGE3, and rallying again to defeat Chrono Trigger in BGE3. That last one, I assume, brings this into grudge territory, because this board loves Chrono Trigger almost as much as it loves Phoenix Wright. (I promise, when I decide to go back and play Chrono Trigger, I'll make a playthrough topic. It's something I intend to do because the reasons that I vaguely remember hating it the first time I played it were things that I actually enjoyed when I encountered them in FFVI, so I'm fairly certain that I'd actually like the game if I tried it again.) But back to why Brawl is relevant. In 2007, a bunch of characters made their Character Battle debuts based on being announced for Brawl, and even more debuted in 2008 for getting into Brawl. And the newcomers were largely underwhelming in the contests, which led to everyone believing that Smash wasn't really as big a boost as it seemed. It is. They were just looking at things the wrong way.
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Oh, wow, someone else bumped it.

Match 105: Squall Leonhart vs. Zelda

Squall 11385
Zelda 19656

Well. This is certainly a thing that happened. And it was terrifying. Squall has been in every contest, and he's consistently been one of the top midcarders, though it took until CBII for this to really be noticed due to some horrendous seeding in 2002 that saw Squall fed to a Noble Niner in Round 1, and a Noble Niner that was actually seeded properly (which not all of them were).

How bad? More than once this contest, Ulti pointed out that 15-2 upsets had been all but unheard of until this contest. Now imagine (2)Crash Bandicoot vs (15)Squall Leonhart. That is a match that could have happened in 2002. It didn't; Crash was given an opponent who actually belonged on the 15-seed line (if we're being generous) and Squall was fed to Snake. But it could have.

Now, Zelda hasn't been there for every contest, because for some reason it took until CBII for any Nintendo franchise to have multiple representatives in the contest unless you consider Mario and Donkey Kong to technically be the same franchise due to their shared origins. But she's been in every contest since then, and it's usually taken a Noble Niner to defeat her (though she did come in second in a fourway to Vincent in a "clean" match, one round before Link showed up and absolutely annihilated her). All things considered, this result might've been far more expected if not for a handful of votes.

Stop and think about it for a moment.

Yeah, that's right. Zelda lost to Charizard by all of 15 votes in 2013. And it was widely expected that Charizard would be able to take advantage of Zero's demonstrated ability to not get SFFed into oblivion by Mega Man (see: Weighted Companion Cube, 2008) to win Division 9. Charizard was considered a disappointment in part for failing to do this, by the only slightly less narrow margin of 23 votes, but also for nearly getting "upset" the round before by Zelda. Now, remember also that Pokmon had a representative in almost every match near the end of that contest. Divisions 2, 5, 6, and 8 had all been won by Pokmon entrants, which meant all three Contest Semifinals would also contain one. There was serious Pokfatigue. Is it unreasonable to think that, had Zelda managed to muster up those 16 extra votes needed to beat Charizard, she could've done what he couldn't and beaten Mega Man? And then of course she easily outpaces Red in the contest semis to get to the 4th place match and, just as Mega did, has no trouble handling the LFF-afflicted Mewtwo and Pikachu to win that match.

But back to the match at hand. Nintendo had clearly boosted, and Zelda especially seemed strong, so most Oracles, at least, saw this coming, selecting Zelda at a bit over a 5 to 1 ratio. (Gurus, not so much. 93-65 in favor of Squall.) But the magnitude? Not even close. Zelda won with 63.32%, 3.31% above the highest-scoring Oracle prediction...which was itself 2.75% above the #2 Oracle prediction. This was just a gobsmacking.

And of course, everyone was quick to dump on Squall, because taking this at face value would mean Zelda was at Noble Nine level, and that just couldn't make sense. After all, it's called "Noble Nine level" for a reason, and that's because they're the only nine that can ever reach it naturally. L-Block and Draven got there with rally power, sure, but when a Noble Niner loses a legitimate match? Only happens because of the Noble Niner's decline. Not because the other character has strengthened to their level. That just can't happen.
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True, but it's still hilarious.
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Also known as Cyberchao X.

Oh, but I seem to be getting off track. Sort of. Point is, Phoenix wasn't as strong as he seemed to be. Also, this is a pseudo-SFF match. Kirby gets the majority of his strength from Smash, of course, but he's still one of Nintendo's bigger stars to be primarily associated with their portables rather than their consoles, trailing only Pokmon. Different genres, too...if you're being generous, you could say that Kirby is the biggest platforming star on the Game Boy/DS. Yes, bigger stars have had platformers on those systems, but most of the better Mario games available for a portable system are merely ports of games that started on a console. (6 Golden Coins is pretty good, and I guess 3D Land isn't bad.)

But because Kirby was absolutely wrecking Phoenix here, in fact marginally improving on the number that Bowser put up on a weaker Phoenix in 2008 (in Round 1; we won't even count Round 2 because Bowser was being SFFed by Luigi), suddenly everyone was declaring Kirby the favorite in Round 4. Like, seriously. Bowser is a slight favorite over Kirby in the Guru, based on pre-contest expectations, but in the Oracle, based on what we've seen so far, Kirby is the overwhelming pick.

Now let's continue laughing at a psychopathic AI.
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Also known as Cyberchao X.

Match 103: 2B vs. Bowser

2B 12620
Bowser 17562

I stated back in Round 1 that Bowser was in a very similar position this year to the one he was in in 2010--a 4-seed, in the division with the weakest 1-seed. The difference was that at least then, said 1-seed was a proven midcarder, and merely had the title of "weakest 1-seed" because the Noble Nine were still in the main bracket and the Heart Division was the only one that lacked one. Of course, while Bowser did knock off the 1-seed then, he had the poor timing to run into Charizard on the release date for a main-series Pokmon game.

https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/board8/images/5/56/Cb8-116.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20100318230229

It's easy to forget that that was only a division final and not an Elite Eight match, until you remember that the Noble Nine were still in the main bracket.

This? Was not a worthy use of Bowser's time. When you're a 1-seed and the 12-seed gets a better percentage against the 4-seed than you do...yeah. 2B did well to get a bracket placement that allowed her to reach the third round, but Ness barely qualifies as a midcarder. 2B is not a threat to make a deep run, and it wouldn't surprise me if we didn't see much more of her at all. However, she did show some strength here, and this would actually have an impact on things to come.

Match 104: Phoenix Wright vs. Kirby

Phoenix 9566
Kirby 20621

And that "impact on things to come"? Right here. While Bowser was merely cruising to an Ulti-style blowout against 2B, a character with no track record (and thus, not expected to be worth much), Kirby was cruising to an actual blowout against Phoenix, who was generally believed to have finally risen to midcarder status after his shocking upset of Vincent Valentine in 2013 (admittedly only for second place in a match that had been decided almost 24 hours before it began, and remember that the matches were only twelve hours long). And Phoenix had put up what seemed to be a decent win in Round 2, albeit only with the help of the registered user bonus. Then again, Ike lost to a horse in 2013. A horse from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, mind you, but still an actual horse.

Only here's the thing: Phoenix struggling with Ike ABSOLUTELY SHITS ALL OVER the idea that Mewtwo was a FRAUD. Phoenix got a better percentage on 2013 rallybait Mewtwo than Ike got on GLaDOS in the Epona match, the same GLaDOS that FRAUDtwo annihilated in Round 1. If you really think Mewtwo is a FRAUD, then GLaDOS is the Turd of the Contest, because that is truly ridiculous. Check this inequality.

Phoenix's percentage against Mewtwo in 2013 > GLaDOS's percentage against Mewtwo in 2018 > Ike's percentage against GLaDOS in 2013.

Now remember that 2013 Mewtwo is a rally-fueled monster and 2018 Mewtwo isn't. There's no combination of Phoenix dropping and Ike boosting that doesn't still make that embarrassing for GLaDOS. Of course, as I suggested in an earlier write-up, Phoenix's win over Vincent is kind of an illusion, precisely because Mewtwo was being rallied as a potential insurance policy if Link failed to stop Draven. Board 8 loves Phoenix. Always has. And they're not alone. Phoenix Wright fans are a loyal bunch; I feel like the rally probably hurt Vincent a lot more than it hurt Phoenix.
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Also known as Cyberchao X.

Again, bump.
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Also known as Cyberchao X.

Except that much was already obvious.
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The stats say otherwise. Even in the raw X-stats, Mewtwo still rates well above the fodder line, even though Division 7 is literally stuck behind an SFF loss at all four rounds of Legends.
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Also known as Cyberchao X.

Going to bump this too, even though it's less important to keep bumped because I've been putting these on the wiki as I go.
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Also known as Cyberchao X.

Don't worry about the deleted post; I just posted in the wrong topic.
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Also known as Cyberchao X.

Match 102: Alucard vs. Kefka

Alucard 17943
Kefka 12242

This match goes beyond simply "lolKefka". This is like a "lolKefkaception". Pre-contest, Kefka was a definitive favorite here, getting over 50% of Gurus. The second most popular pick to win this match among Gurus was literally Kefka's first-round opponent, L-Block. Yet it was precisely because of this that, come match time, we all knew that Kefka was the underdog. "Kefka/L-Block winner" was a 154-6 pick over "Kiryu/Bomberman winner", while Alucard was only an 87-67 favorite over Yuna (remaining 6 brackets taking Alucard's Round 1 opponent, Peach.) But Alucard was every bit as dominant as Kefka against what appeared to be a stronger foe!

And yet, Kefka still embarrassed himself here, barely outdoing Yuna's number against Alucard. In fact, Kefka and Yuna are only two spots apart in the raw X-Stats. Kefka's #33, and Yuna's #35. And therein lies the biggest joke of all. That one spot between them belongs to none other than Terra Branford! And while the raw X-Stats are a bit wonky due to the number of SFF matches in the late rounds, Division 3 is probably the truest numbers you'll get, and Division 4 the second-truest as it's only stuck behind Cloud > Crono, which is marginal at best. Division 1 is stuck behind Link > Ganondorf, Division 2 behind Link > Pikachu, and Divisions 5-8 behind Link > Zelda. So it becomes kind of hard to argue that there's some sort of SFF result leading to Terra being right behind Kefka--if anything, you could actually make a case for Terra > Kefka indirectly, as Terra's number is not only behind Cloud > Crono but also Bowser > Charizard, which is probably a stronger SFF result.

And even with the evidence that Alucard was stronger, nearly 37% of Oracles still backed Kefka here. Because it just makes more sense.

The casuals, on the other hand, seemed to tentatively have this one from the start. Vaguely. Over 25% of them picked this, down from just under 49% having him reach this round. That was largely on the first round, however--Yuna was a far heavier favorite to reach round 2, but Alucard still managed to get that respectable R2 prediction percentage. It's highly unlikely, especially given Kefka's R2 prediction percentage being worse than Alucard's, that any other character had a higher percentage. Which kind of says what we'd all been thinking--Division 3 was thought to be wide open. Or at least, the bottom half was.
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Also known as Cyberchao X.

Match 101: Pokmon Trainer Red vs. Big Boss

Red 15748
Big Boss 14431

Add another one to the pile of results that disprove the popular notion that Pokmon had a bad contest outside of Pikachu. Honestly, other than Charizard's close call against Terra this was a phenomenal contest for Team Pokmon, in large part because they weren't spread so thin like they were last time. I mean, yeah, it's kind of disappointing that a character that literally beat Cloud last contest didn't get to return, but the quartet we got was really all we needed. And Charizard's poor outing in 2013 would soon be vindicated. Maybe. Honestly it's tough to tell because Charizard's downfall involved a character that had previously resisted SFF from his series' lead like a champ suddenly failing to do so. And Zelda clearly boosted a lot, so it's kind of misleading to say that that "disappointing" narrow victory looks a lot better now, but it does look a lot better now, especially with Donkey Kong also suddenly looking good.

So for the second straight contest, Red is in Round 4. Dude's been in three contests, one of which only had five rounds, and he's been to Round 4 twice. Oh, yeah, I guess he was also in Rivalry Rumble, whereupon he and Blue literally took home the bronze medal. So from another perspective, he's been in four contests and has two semifinals appearances. Remember when Butler went to back-to-back title games while they were still a member of the Horizon League? Yeah, that's kind of what Red is.

As for Big Boss, this was a respectable exit for him. It's clear that the series is on the decline here, due in large part to the series being completely dead, but it's still got some strength. Honestly, they don't really need to create a "new" game, just to make sure that the Konami/Kojima breakup doesn't cause the characters to fall into a legal gray area where no one can use them. Metal Gear Solid V literally ended with the prelude to the original Metal Gear. They officially wrapped up Big Boss's story and brought it back to the start of Solid Snake's. The obvious solution would be for Metal Gear Solid 6 to literally be an expanded remake of Metal Gear 1, the way the 11th, 15th, and 12th Fire Emblem games are remakes of the first three games. Except much better, because you're taking a game from the 1980s and giving it the full 3D console makeover.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/AZComics/comic509.png

Yeah, the TX-55 definitely needs some upgrades. Hopefully Kojima Productions can get the rights to Kojima's creations; the only game listed for them since they ceased to be a subsidiary of Konami appears to be a brand new IP. (Also still unreleased with release date TBD.)
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Also known as Cyberchao X.

Hm. Yeah, I suppose Seph was the only one with a 50%+ prediction percentage in Round 4. Pikachu was second in that category, though.
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Also known as Cyberchao X.

Match 99: Zero vs. Wario

Zero 17867
Wario 11789

Round 3 is where the last of the weaklings are usually weeded out. Occasionally an entire eightpack is weak enough that something not normally capable of making a deep run gets there (think Scorpion in 2002), but even in the era-divided games contests, there were rarely undeserving entrants in the fourth round.

Fourpacks, however, are a small enough entity that they can be comprised of nothing but weak characters. Wario in Round 3 is definitely a weird result in a vacuum that wasn't weird at all given the competition he'd face. What's weird is that his second-round opponent wasn't even the weakest character in this division to make the second round!

It's been commented that it seemed like as compensation for making him the only Noble Niner not in Legends, they gave Sephiroth an easy division. Personally, I think this was an even easier one for Pikachu. Other "potential Noble Nine breakers" didn't have divisions nearly this easy. Vivi and Vincent both beat Noble Niners in the past, but were given highly challenging paths that they failed to handle. (Well, okay, Vincent wasn't in a terribly strong division, in that whoever came out of his fourpack would almost certainly win the division barring RallyFEAR.) Kirby and Bowser had largely easy paths to Round 4, but then had to face each other. And so on.

Match 100: Yoshi vs. Pikachu

Yoshi 13405
Pikachu 16249

See what I mean? This was probably Pikachu's biggest challenge, and it's a same-company match. All-Nintendo matches rarely produce unexpected results. One would further down the line, but that's beside the point.

That said, this qualifies as a strong performance for Pikachu based on most recent X-stats. Not the raw 2013 X-stats, but Yoshi faced Link in 2013 and Nintendo characters facing Link will always have poor raw X-stats.
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But let's take the comparisons to 2007 a bit further, because there's still a point to be made. That match I linked to above was a round two match. This was one of the Round 1 matches that fed into it: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/2886-division-6-round-1-leon-ridley-spyro-vivi. Now, aside from the bit where a character with no contest wins outside of Rivalry Rumble where a Noble Niner was carrying him manages to comfortably spank a character that has one (albeit only one which came in the watered-down 2013 field) for third place, the key thing to note here is that even without Tidus LFFing him, Vivi lost to Leon. As such, unlike in 2010 where the casuals had no excuse for Vivi having only a 39.95% prediction percentage (not even a full 5% better than the initial match in 2004!), they can actually be excused for dropping nearly two-thirds of Vivi's R2 prediction percentage here (65.96% of brackets had him making it to this match but only 22.96% had him winning it). He was, by all rights, the underdog in this match pre-contest, except the favorite ended up eliminated a round earlier.

...Maybe. DK was the favorite with the casuals in Round 1, though not with the Gurus, and his Round 2 prediction percentage, while under 50%, was more than half his Round 1 prediction percentage--and more than half of Leon's Round 1 prediction percentage. Which means that DK might have had the plurality of brackets in the Tidus/DK/Leon/Dragonborn fourpack. Which would mean that there's...maybe less excuse? Heck, once you consider the fact that Vivi had a 65.96% prediction percentage in R2 and DK only had a 38.06%, but the percentages fell in such a way to make it look like that was a plurality...it's possible, if unlikely, that the casuals were so split on DK's fourpack that Vivi's 22.96% is actually the plurality. Unlikely, because that still leaves 77.04% to mostly be split among DK's fourpack (the other three members of Vivi's fourpack will probably take a little bit, but not much). If we give about 3% to the other three members of Vivi's fourpack, DK's fourpack would be averaging about 18.5% apiece. Given that Dragonborn barely had twice that to get out of Round 1...yeah, I doubt Vivi was even the technical favorite here. Though it does bring up another intriguing possibility, that DK was the favorite in his fourpack but Leon was the technical favorite in the eightpack due to being perceived as having a greater chance at getting past Vivi. It would only serve to underscore the fact that transitivity is not a thing in these contests. Hell, just look at Bowser/Yoshi/Luigi.
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Also known as Cyberchao X.

Match 97: Dante vs. Ganondorf

Dante 12926
Ganondorf 16720

An utterly predictable result. Dante's surprisingly strong for a non-Nintendo, non-RPG character, but there's a limit to how powerful you can be if that's the case unless you're Solid Snake. (Technically also Mega Man and Sonic from among the Noble Nine, but they're still pre-PS1 platformer characters so they might as well fall under the "Nintendo" umbrella). About the only thing he has in his favor is that he is not, in fact, a western character, a fact which I frequently forget because his character design screams "American developer". Nope, he's actually Capcom, although these days, that might be even more of a liability than being non-Japanese.

But this is still a good performance against a Triforce Wielder, even if he is (ironically given that his is the Triforce of Power) the weakest of the three. I say this because even before Zelda boosted to near-Link levels this year, there was probably a wider gulf between the #3 and #4 characters from that series than between #1 and #2. Then again, it's not like Legend of Zelda has had that many characters participate. Midna was at least somewhat of a regular after Twilight Princess came out, getting into four straight contests, but other than that we've had Tingle a few times and Epona and Groose making the giant 2013 field. Of those, only Midna and Epona have managed to make Round 2, and none have made Round 3.

But that's kind of to be expected, because The Legend of Zelda has about as much cast carryover between games as Final Fantasy, except Final Fantasy has a full party of characters each game rather than a lone hero and the LoZ protagonists, while technically different characters, have the same name and similar appearances so they end up as a lone entrant in these contests. So you've got these three characters who appear in nearly every game (even if two out of three of them are technically the Identical Descendants/Ancestors of their counterparts from other games rather than truly the same person/beast every time) and a bunch of other characters who are lucky if they manage to appear twice. Why wouldn't there be a huge gulf between that trio and everyone else?

Match 98: Vivi vs. Donkey Kong

Vivi 16301
DK 13347

https://board8.wikia.com/wiki/Vivi_vs_Donkey_Kong

I thought it was worth making during the contest, so I did. Through the first two rounds, we were wondering how much Donkey Kong had truly boosted. Unless Vivi also boosted, the answer is "probably not by as much as we thought". This was Donkey Kong's best outing against Vivi, but it still wasn't anywhere near what his first two rounds would suggest.

Also, https://board8.wikia.com/wiki/Pikachu_vs_Tidus_vs_Leon_Kennedy_vs_Vivi_Ornitier_2007.

That's all three of DK's opponents this year in the same match. At the time this match happened, it looked like there was a chance that if DK won this match, he could make it all four members of that match. After all, given DK's past history, if he made it past Vivi, it would signify a legitimate boost, to the point that he probably would stand a chance against Ganondorf. Then DK-Pikachu would most likely occur in Losers' 1, or possibly Losers' 2 if they both managed to upset Mega Man but the idea of a DK > MM upset seemed fairly inconceivable so it would really come down to whether or not Pikachu could beat Mega Man.

But of course DK couldn't get past Vivi, so this mostly just served to show how far Leon had fallen. Did you actually follow the link to that 2007 match? Leon came out in first place, with 33.31%. Hard to imagine him even getting that percentage in a 1v1 against Pikachu nowadays.
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Also known as Cyberchao X.

Finally, it must be noted that this particular result is not an upset. Yes, the prediction percentage is only 23.29% which is too low to even possibly make her the favorite this early in the contest, but that's residual upset effect. KOS-MOS's Round 1 prediction percentage was only 41.48%, which means that 56.16% of brackets that had her in this match had her winning. Not a great percentage, and well within the range where it's possible that brackets that had this particular match-up favored Aqua slightly since she herself fell a little short of 2/3 prediction in Round 1, but it's definitely a decent amount, and while I don't believe that "bracket votes" make a huge difference, it can't be denied that Ellie outperformed Aqua against KOS-MOS and that this effect was even more pronounced among registered voters, which might suggest that the plurality of casuals had Ellie winning this match. (And yes, "voting your bracket" when you've already lost your pick for a match does often mean voting for the one that broke it, especially given those prediction percentages. Pre-match, it would be entirely likely that an Ellie bracket would see that Aqua was a bigger favorite than Ellie in their Round 1 matches and assume that more brackets would be busted by KOS-MOS > Aqua than by Aqua > KOS-MOS--which isn't necessarily false, because even if Ellie > Aqua is the most common pick, if the second-most common is Aqua > Ellie rather than KOS-MOS > Aqua, Aqua could have the second-most brackets anyway.)
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Round 4:

Aerith Gainsborough (Made 2010 bracket as a 14-seed)

Round 3:

Wario (Missed 2010 bracket)
Bayonetta (Missed 2010 bracket)
Sub-Zero (Made 2010 bracket as a 13-seed and reached Round 3)
Tails (Made 2010 bracket as a 15-seed)
Mega Man X (Made 2010 bracket as a 13-seed and reached Round 3)
KOS-MOS (Missed 2010 bracket)

Round 2:

Lightning (Made 2010 bracket as a 16-seed)
Chun-Li (Missed 2010 bracket)
The Boss (Made 2010 bracket as a 15-seed and reached Round 2)
Simon Belmont (Made 2010 bracket as a 15-seed)
Pac-Man* (Missed 2010 bracket)
Frog (Made 2010 bracket as a 13-seed)
Lara Croft (Missed 2010 bracket)

Round 1:

Spyro the Dragon* (Missed 2010 bracket)
Scorpion (Missed 2010 bracket; apparent final cut)
Ridley (Made 2010 bracket as a 16-seed)
Peach (Made 2010 bracket as a 15-seed)
Godot (Missed 2010 bracket)

*Lost to another name on this list.

So that's 19 characters in this bracket who were in the 2010 vote-ins--9 who missed the bracket entirely--and those 19 characters went 14-5 in Round 1, with a perfect 19-0 impossible because two were facing each other--the nine that missed entirely going 6-3, with, again, a perfect 9-0 being impossible because two of them were facing each other.

Now you might also notice that two of the three listed as being 13-seeds made it all the way to Round 3 in 2010. That's no accident. Frog had the misfortune to run into Bowser in Round 1 in 2010, but the other three 13-seeds that came out of the vote-ins all went to Round 3, and 14-seeds also went 2-0 in Round 2. The four 13-seeds that were direct entrants into the bracket, plus the full set of eight 11- and 12-seeds? 1-19 in Round 1. That one actually was a 13-seed, oddly enough--Ken Masters' tight win over Albert Wesker. But the point is, the 13-15 seed lines were generally stronger than the 11-12 lines that year (not the 10's; they had some absolute monsters. In fact both of those 14-seeds that made it to Round 3 lost to 10-seeds). The reasoning was obvious: a lot of good characters have trouble with nominations due to having to fight other members of their own series, but those characters easily rise to the top in vote-ins. The other low seed lines can often be filled with all sorts of weird fodder that got a rally.

In fact, here's my newest stupid idea: for the next contest, have the entire field decided by a series of vote-ins. If you want to speed them along, break out the old 12-hour format for those; you can whittle down 280 characters to 128 in only two weeks that way. Obviously, make sure to use an actual S-curve when grouping the characters for vote-ins, so the #1 nomination-getter would be in a poll with #56, #57, #112, #113, #168, #169, #224, #225, and #280, etc. (It doesn't have to be 280; I just threw that out there so that the vote-ins would cull more characters than it kept and we'd have a multiple of 70 so it could be an exact number of weeks.) The top characters would still get their high seeds, most likely, but the characters who are forever plagued by that little clause where nominating too many characters from the same game/series will get your ballot thrown out can finally get the seeds they deserve. (Due to being a series with a new set of characters in each numbered game, Final Fantasy suffers from this a lot, especially secondary females like Aerith and Rikku.) Yes, the vote-ins will likely become tedious, but it should produce an extremely strong field. Now that I think about it, that's not a stupid idea at all!
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Also known as Cyberchao X.