Lurker > TsunamiXXVIII

Match 96: KOS-MOS vs. Aqua

KOS-MOS 16438
Aqua 12209

Ulti's got the, erm, "stupidity" surrounding this match covered, so I'm going to avoid talking about ranting users and stick to the characters in the match. Here, have a quote from KOS-MOS's Contest History page.

What in the world happened to KOS-MOS? After two years in which KOS-MOS was a middle of the pack character, she went out against Luigi in a match that she had a decent chance to win and completely bombed.

After Xenosaga 2, no less. KOS-MOS's disappointment paired with Albedo turning out to be cannon fodder in Spring 2005 confirms what many already believe, which is that the popularity of Xenosaga is likely gone for good. Either that or Luigi boosted beyond belief.

That's from her 2005 contest run, one and done. Luigi would end up losing the very next round to Tifa, and normally a character putting up 66% in a match that was supposed to be debatable would lead to massive overestimations but Tifa's Round 1 performance literally saw her get a better percentage on Vyse than Cloud did in an earlier contest so Luigi was still the underdog. I bring this up because her two "middle of the pack" runs only granted her one win. She's since made it to Round 2 via the awfulness of the female bracket and via Blizzard SFF allowing her to easily come out in second place in a match with a clear winner and three characters of similar strength fighting for second place, but this is her first trip to Round 3. Even though her games proper are over a decade in the past, and she only maintains any relevance via a consistent string of guest appearances. (Play Super Robot Wars OG Saga: Endless Frontier.) This, however, probably is one of the reasons that this site gets ridiculed. There's a perception that we're stuck in the past and that characters/games are worthless until they can be viewed through nostalgia goggles. Sure enough, KOS-MOS finally breaks through to Round 3 only when placed in a fourpack with three characters from the 2010s.

Of course, it should be noted that this was only the second contest where that was possible, because nominations for Character Battle VIII were in December 2009. Compare this to the six contests in as many years that she was in after her game came out (yeah, she's still too young to have been in CBI).

What is the current policy on vote-ins, by the way? I know that at the time, Ulti said he was in favor of considering the 2010 vote-ins part of the contest because it kept alive CATS' streak of making every contest (which was undeniably broken here), but in this year's topic when he mentioned how wide a range of seeds Lara Croft has had, I brought up the stat about both she and Pac-Man falling in the vote-ins that year after being 1-seeds in 2002 and he said that no one cares about vote-ins. I bring it up because if they do count, KOS-MOS is on the list of characters to debut post-CBI that have been in every contest since their debut game came out.

KOS-MOS was actually one of three characters that made the vote-ins but not the main bracket in 2010 that reached Round 3 this year, along with Wario and Bayonetta. We were guaranteed at least one before Round 2 even started because of Bayonetta's 2nd-round opponent also qualifying. The rest of the vote-in field did fairly decently, too. I'll put them all together, even the ones I already mentioned.
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Also known as Cyberchao X.

Match 95: Ryu vs. Commander Shepard

Ryu 19063
Shepard 9581

Shepard avoided the doubling here. It's clear that s/he still hasn't run out of strength yet. Though this is definitely a huge step backwards from beating Aerith last time out.

I may expand upon this analysis later but this was mostly just something to hold the place. This isn't exactly a terribly interesting match.
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Also known as Cyberchao X.

Match 94: Amaterasu vs. Lara Croft

Amaterasu 15728
Lara 12915

Counterevidence to the "pink wave"? Yes if you think it's mainly fueled by horny incels, but if you think it's a sign of gamers' tastes changing, who want their characters to be relatable, this is no such thing. I think Lara's reboot has brought her in line with what Gen Z wants, or at least what Gen Y perceives as what Gen Z wants, but I don't know. Amaterasu, however, is busy being an actual goddess, saving the world with a paintbrush and being a single mother. I may not be very well in touch with the female half but I seem to remember these being feminist goals.

Actually to be honest I'm kind of weak at all direct interpersonal communication. I prefer to express myself through writing, hence the analyses and playthrough topics. I refuse to coopt the "incel" moniker even though it's technically true because I'm too paralyzed by fear. When I was young, it was merely fear of rejection, but I got over that. Unfortunately, we live in the Age of Me Too. I have no doubts that the majority of complaints levied under Me Too are real, but the whole idea of it has me so rattled that my best strategy right now is to just be as charming as possible and wait to find a girl aggressive enough to make the first move. See, that's the other advantage of writing things down; you can see how stupid you're being. I need to get out and mingle and not care what happens next.

I somehow turned what was supposed to be an inspiring ode to powerful women into my own complaining. I should not write these this late.
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Also known as Cyberchao X.

Match 93: Sephiroth vs. Captain Falcon

Sephiroth 18597
Falcon 10046

Falcon did 5.00% better here than he did against Cloud in 2010, but this was still not necessarily cause for concern for Sephiroth. After all, Falcon, being a Smash character first and foremost and one of the Original Twelve at that, had likely boosted. Furthermore, although this could be considered an even bigger cause for concern, the match wasn't actually as close as it seemed. Just barely over 50% of Falcon's raw votes came from registered users despite unregistered voters outnumbering registered voters by nearly a thousand. Like, close enough to 1000 that Seph's unregistered votes outnumbered his registered votes by over 1000 while Falcon's registered votes outnumbered his unregistered votes by less than 10. On raw votes, Seph had 65.54%; 63.64% with registered voters and 67.26% with unregistered. That could bode ill for him in the future, since the registered voter base, while smaller, is more important.
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Also known as Cyberchao X.

Match 91: Tifa Lockhart vs. Mewtwo

Tifa 16669
Mewtwo 12023

Just another piece on the growing mound of evidence that Tifa has always been the #3 FF7 character, except not really because Mewtwo was rallied in 2013. We all know that. Mewtwo wasn't going to be as strong this year.

...Okay, I admit it: I had Mewtwo here in my bracket. And next round. By the time this match actually came around, I'd realized I'd made a mistake and took Tifa in Oracle, albeit with a very low number that got me fairly low in the rankings for that match. That was largely because I was still rooting for Mewtwo, because my bracket needed Mewtwo. We saw very easily in 2010 that Mega Man X was stronger than Luigi; they had a common opponent only a round apart, and yes Luigi probably gets SFF'd harder by Link but they're both probably SFF matches. And Tifa outright had a previous win over Luigi. I would have taken either of them to beat Luigi in Round 4, no question--but Mewtwo, being a true Nintendo character, I expected would suffer from Nintendo hierarchy. I had Luigi > Mewtwo in Round 4 fully expecting that it would be wrong if Mewtwo lost in an earlier round.

Honestly, I identified this as one of the toughest divisions to predict. In Round 1, you've got Ocelot-Dedede. In Round 2, you've got Tifa-Mewtwo, and then in Round 3 you've got the winner of that vs. MMX (although I think I even gave MMX a slim chance of being upset by Dedede if he got past Ocelot--or was it the other way around? I don't remember; neither of those upsets seems likely now but I'm certain I didn't consider MMX an absolute guarantee, merely a heavy favorite.) And then in the division final, Luigi being a likely favorite against one of his three most likely opponents but a likely underdog against the other two. And that's without considering any other result on Luigi's half of the bracket; Tails/Nathan/Chief was a bit of a mess as well.

Match 92: Revolver Ocelot vs. Mega Man X

Ocelot 9062
X 19621

Ocelot's results have always been a tad uneven, as I mentioned last round. But this is unquestionably a good performance for X. The final percentage isn't that far ahead of the Oracle Consensus, but that's with the biggest outlier being an overestimation. There is one other significant outlier and it's on the opposite side, though. At any rate, X still looked like he would probably be slightly favored next round. There's some fun to be had with those numbers but I'll get to that then.
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Also known as Cyberchao X.

Match 88: Sub-Zero vs. Claire Redfield

Sub-Zero 19471
Claire 9915

Oh hey there's another match where we're still nearly unanimous (over 90%) and the casuals are split far enough that the favorite has less than 50% of brackets. This one's at least a little understandable because of the seedings; Joker was a 2-seed and a newcomer and Shulk was also the seeding favorite and didn't have Smash yet when he lost in Round 1 in 2013, so it would be easy enough for people to overestimate them. If anything, this shows where our biggest weakness to being embarrassed by the casuals lies--we usually don't have much faith in newcomers, so if one of them actually shows strength, they can easily ruin us.

Match 89: Luigi vs. Frog

Luigi 17681
Frog 11008

This was an entirely normal result, so probably the best thing to do is compare this to Bowser vs. Frog 2010. Bowser got a better percentage there, which is entirely in line with what most seasons would suggest. After all, fellow Mario character Yoshi has met both Luigi and Bowser in 1v1s and defeated the former while losing to the latter. The problem, of course, being that Luigi and Bowser met in a 4way and Luigi won. To that I say lol 4ways. It's that simple.

Match 90: Master Chief vs. Miles "Tails" Prower

Chief 12771
Tails 15923

I'm sure most of you have probably had at least one moment where you look at your bracket during the contest and say "I picked WHAT?!" Because it seems so obvious to you that you can't believe that you actually picked it wrong. I had that moment in Round 1. While 55% of Gurus were lamenting the loss of 3 points (yes, that's how many had Drake > Chief/Majima) and an additional 25% were lamenting the loss of 1, I was celebrating my insight for getting this right...only to discover that I'd picked Chief > Tails. Why had I done that? Chief hasn't been worth a damn thing for quite some time. The board knew it, as both Drake and Tails had over 50% retention rates for this match. Tails only barely, however, so I guess I wasn't the only one who thought Chief > Tails was possible.

The casuals also felt that Tails vs. Chief/Majima was more or less a toss-up. Only 16.29% picked Tails to win this match, but only 16.87% picked him to lose it, with the remaining 66.85% picking him to lose to Nathan. Yes, I know that adds up to 100.01%. We got to see raw bracket counts for correct picks as well as percentages, and I assure you that each of those numbers is correct and the extra 0.01% is the result of rounding errors.
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Also known as Cyberchao X.

Match 87: Auron vs. Vincent Valentine

Auron 16396
Vincent 12989

Bracketmakers were not fooled here; 37.61% may not sound high for a second-round match, but it's higher than three of the previous four winners. Besides, Vincent was a slight underdog in Round 1, and Auron himself had under 70% prediction percentage in Round 1. So let's look at the Gurus instead!

...Whoa.

Board 8 loves to hold on to the past. Once they're convinced that someone is strong, it takes a while for them to accept that they aren't. And in particular, there's this feeling that even if a Final Fantasy 7 character is naturally a little weaker than their opponent, they'll pull off the win anyway if that opponent is from a Final Fantasy game other than 7. And honestly, FF7 does have a damn good record against other FF games. Squall beat Aerith twice in 2007, and Auron beat Aerith in 2010, and Kefka beat Zack in 2013. But that's it for FF7 characters losing to characters from other FF games, and it's not just Cloud and Seph who keep the record afloat--Vincent beat Squall in 2005, and Tifa, Aerith, and even Zack all have wins against other FF characters. (Though admittedly Aerith's is pretty weak.) And when something doesn't fit Board 8's preconceived narrative, they like to come up with excuses for why the result isn't "legitimate". The single highest-profile Board 8 failing is Knuckles beating Magus when literally no one in Guru, Oracle, or Board Odds Project predicted it. It no longer qualifies as the "Most Embarrassing Result" because that's measured by the difference between the Gurus and the casuals and the casuals were surprised by that too, but it was a complete blindsiding and it came because Magus was fed to Crono in 2004 and rather than trying to figure out what the degree of SFF was, the adjusted X-Stats just gave him his 2003 number, which was entirely bogus. The reason I bring this up is because nearly everyone wanted to make excuses for Vincent's 2013 performance, namely that he'd been sabotaged by a picsmith. (They refused to use "rallies" as an excuse, even though that was a much better one, because admitting that Mewtwo was rallied meant they couldn't call him a FRAUD for not retaining his 2013 strength. And yes, that is a perfectly valid explanation for why Vincent finished in third; Phoenix's consistent overseeding alone should be evidence that his fanbase is dedicated, and as such he retained a greater portion of his natural strength in the presence of a rally than Vincent did.) But in spite of all the justifications available for Vincent, 95.625% of Gurus picked Auron! The Oracles even more so, at 98.5%, though that's understandable because Oracle picks are made far closer to the match itself and Vincent's struggles with Magus made Auron > Vincent even more obvious than it already was.

We don't have a list for the matches where we outpredicted the casuals by the greatest amount, but this one probably has to rank up there pretty high. 58.01% difference. Of course, it wouldn't surprise me if a lot of our greatest "triumphs" came in later rounds, because prediction percentages naturally wane there but a lot of times we're still nearly unanimous where Noble Niners are concerned.
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Also known as Cyberchao X.

...I think we would have to ignore Losers' Bracket and just treat this as an 8-round bracket. I know a lot of people are treating Losers as the "true" values for X-Stat purposes since those are the ones that actually knocked characters out of the contest. I feel that this is a view largely perpetuated by those who feel that the two rematches that had significant shifts in percentage produced more "legitimate" results than the originals, which is a belief that meshes with their preconceived notions. One of the matches I'm referring to is Mario-Samus, where Samus nearly pulled the upset the second time, and the other is a match with only one Noble Niner in it where said Noble Niner outright lost the first time, and only the first time. Really, the presence of a Loser's Bracket just muddies the waters, especially when it's set up like this with it being single elimination for four rounds and then double elimination. When listing the Most Surprising Results of All Time, Zelda's upset of Mario is listed as a Round 7 match. Because that's what it is. That's the percentage of people who thought that Zelda would win 7 matches. Contrast, say, the very next match, which is also on that list. That's the number of people who thought that Crono would either lose his first match and win the next three or win his first match, lose his second, and win his next two. And it gets murkier the further you go along. How many people who correctly picked Mario > Samus II did so because they actually had Mario losing in the Legends Semis (most likely to Snake), and how many did so because they mistakenly thought Sephiroth would continue his previous dominance of Mario and would still be alive in the Legends' Finals?

So I think you have to just treat the Legends matches as the only ones that matter for how deep a tournament run you've made. By that metric, making Round 3 in this tournament is essentially equivalent to making the field at all pre-2007. It's not exactly the same since there are only 40 characters alive at the end of Round 2, not 64 like there were then, but it's still six wins away from a title. It's either that or you just ignore the 8 legends and pretend that these first four rounds were just the first four rounds of a seven-round tournament, and then...what? Honestly, that whole "128 down to 8, then those 8 are part of the Sweet Sixteen" bit is throwing me. I guess 2005 and 2006 were no better, what with the fact that technically Mario and Samus won titles in those years, but Link is still the ultimate champion (no, Jay Solano doesn't count) and Samus in particular was eliminated from three days before the runner-up from the main bracket, who was also included because CJayC loved getting cutesy and the favorites on the Male and Female sides were Crono and Samus, and even though that would make the Battle Royale 3 parts Nintendo and 3 parts Square, it wouldn't be tough to imagine Link's presence allowing Crono to steal another win over Mario. We've never quite seen if that would be the case. We've seen Crono steal a win over Samus and Mario in a fourway with Link, and we've seen Crono miserably in last place with Cloud, Link, and Snake, but we never saw Link and another Nintendo character and Cloud and Crono.

All of this is irrelevant, though, because Bayonetta's Round 2 appearance in 2013 came at the expense of N and Wander. So clearly this is her best run. Also, you are just now realizing that Bayonetta has never lost in Round 1 (though she has failed to advance out of a vote-in poll. She's not the only character whose record is positively affected by losing in those polls; I mentioned Wario's .500 record but he's also among those who lost out in the vote-ins in 2010.

Pac-Man is also among those who failed to advance out of vote-ins in 2010.)
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Also known as Cyberchao X.

Match 86: Pac-Man vs. Bayonetta

Pac-Man 14082
Bayonetta 15299

But before Geralt cold get a proper bandwagon going, he'd have to deal with another potential bandwagon, and one with boobs, no less. You could argue that Bayonetta hadn't truly reached new heights despite having gone to Round 3 for the first time, because 2013 cut out two thirds of the remaining field each round rather than half, and if you measure simply by distance from the end of the contest, a Round 2 appearance in 2013 is at best equivalent to winning a division in 2018, possibly even equivalent to winning your first Legends Bracket match.

Yes, that's right, Link's 2018 record is the same as Draven's 2013 record. Link did it in 1v1s rather than 3ways so he beat fewer characters (not to mention he beat the same character twice), but even with a free pass to Round 5, he needed to win 5 matches to take home this crown, just like Draven did.

Of course, it's kind of impossible to come up with a good equivalence between either of those two years and any other year, because the 2013 field using powers of 3 instead of powers of 2 and the 2018 field having a losers' bracket (You know who else besides Link had 5 wins in 2018? Cloud! Also Pikachu, Bowser, and Tifa all had exactly five wins and Zelda had 7, but they were in the main bracket.) It's much easier with the earlier brackets. 2010 had 7 rounds, Villains had 5, and the other brackets all had 6. You could make an argument for counting 2007 and 2008 as though they had 7 rounds, since they also had 128 characters just like 2010 did.

Okay, granted, 2005 also had a Tournament of Champions, similar to this year's Legends Bracket. 2005 was essentially an 8-round contest in which 3 out of the 4 characters in Round 7 had direct byes there. It feels wrong to say that a Round 5 appearance in 2005 is only equivalent to a Round 3 appearance in 2004, though. It would be foolish. So then how, even if you ignore the loser's bracket, do you score this season? In 2005, we narrowed 64 down to 1, and then put that 1 in a 4-character bracket. This year, we only narrowed 128 down to 8, and then put those 8 in a 16-character bracket.
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Also known as Cyberchao X.

Match 84: Captain Toad vs. Aerith Gainsborough

Toad 12000
Aerith 17995

Look at those numbers. Captain Toad lands right on a multiple of 1,000, and Aerith comes up just five votes short of breaking 60%. Which actually does amount to a swing of just one registered user's vote making it 60% exactly (17997 to 11998).

The overall Oracle consensus was that Captain Toad exceeded expectations, but as you'd expect with it falling so close to a round number, the top picks were all extremely close. Five different people went for 60.00% exactly, and it would've had to fall right on it for them to get first place because 59.99% and 60.01% were also taken (which, yes, means that a score of 49.98 failed to be good for a top five. There's a 49.89 that's outside the top ten.)

Match 85: Geralt vs. Simon

Geralt 15334
Simon 14045

And now we're into Division 6, aka the Division of Blah. This division seemed almost custom-made to promote a bandwagon effect, because even in the absence of a true rally, a certain level of bandwagon effect tends to occur when a character is perceived to reach a round beyond what they "should" be capable of, and this division was guaranteed to allow multiple characters to reach rounds that they never had before. Obviously this was true at the highest level for most divisions since normally by Round 5, there's nothing but Noble Niners left, maybe one or two others (non-rally) if the bracket was suitably lopsided (quick, which Noble Niners did L-Block knock out in the 2007 semifinals? The answer is none of them because he'd already knocked one out in the quarterfinals and seven of the other eight had been on the opposite side of the bracket.) But Vincent Valentine was the only one in this group to make Round 4, and Ryu Hayabusa, Riku, Pac-Man, and Auron were the only other four to have made Round 3. (Also there were a couple of Round 1 matches in this division where neither character had any prior wins, although only one of the four characters in those two matches even had any prior appearances so that's a little misleading.) Oh, and Riku's only Round 3 appearance outside of Rivalry Rumble came in a year in which he didn't finish in first place in any match, getting second place in two straight rounds of fourways.

Geralt-Rosalina was the match where both were newcomers, and with Simon upsetting Ryu H, both of these characters had already reached new heights. The newcomer winning only cemented it, however. Ladies and gentlemen, start your bandwagons.
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Also known as Cyberchao X.

All in good time, swirl.

Match 81: Squall Leonhart vs. Garrus Vakarian

Squall 19202
Garrus 10792

As per usual, once you've started heading into the bottom half of a round, you generally get very few relevant matches. This won't actually be the case for this bracket, where some surprise results would come from low divisions, but...well, there were surprising results in low divisions in previous contests under Allen, too, but that was largely the result of the later divisions being worthless. Remember how Super Mario RPG made a contest semifinal? The game that I noted is extremely easy to screw over because it eats the ass end of SFF against Nintendo and Square? But Division 7, its division, had only one other game from each of those companies: Paper Mario for Nintendo and Chrono Cross for Square. And Division 8 had absolutely no Square and its only Nintendo games were from the Mother series. The prevailing theory was that Allen set it up that way because he wanted a company other than Square or Nintendo to be represented in the Final Four (Square was considered the favorite for Divisions 1 and 2, with Chrono Trigger and the 3 most popular Final Fantasy games, while Divisions 3 and 4 had RBY and the top three Mario games and Divisions 5 and 6 had the 3 biggest Zelda games). Well, there was one non-Nintendo, non-Square entry in the Final Four, but it was Undertale. Furthermore SMRPG was the only Square entry at all because Melee got in the way of the Square-fest in Divisions 1 and 2. Divisions 7 and 8 had most of the top non-Nintendo, non-Square entries, like the MGS games and RE4. Didn't matter.

Squall failing to double Garrus was another one of those warning signs that we all missed. There, I actually said something about this match.

Match 82: The Boss vs. Zelda

The Boss 8788
Zelda 21205

After this performance, it was hard not to think Zelda was the favorite against Squall, though the margin would still come as a shock. The Boss has been fortunate enough to almost always draw a winnable first match, allowing her to reliably reach the second round without ever really establishing herself as a true midcarder. But she's considered one due to her strong Round 1 record, so this beating was a statement win for Zelda.

Match 83: D.Va vs. Fox McCloud

D.Va 8543
Fox 21451

This was also a statement match, and that statement was "goodbye and good riddance, RallyFEAR!" Fox has always been one of the weaker members of the Original Twelve, coming in ahead of Jigglypuff, Ness, and probably Captain Falcon, but behind the other eight. Well, he wasn't always eighth, obviously; the only win he has more impressive than this one came at Pikachu's expense. That was back when Pokmon was anti-voted just on principle. It might be anti-voted again due to its perceived dominance, even though the only time Pokmon outright won a contest was as sidekick to Ocarina of Time in the Years contest. Fox breaking 70% in a Round 2 match is fairly astonishing.
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Also known as Cyberchao X.

Match 80: Isaac vs. Kirby

Isaac 8982
Kirby 21249

This is an SFF match, plain and simple. Golden Sun is a handheld-exclusive series, and while Kirby isn't quite handheld-exclusive, he is very handheld-dominant. His debut game, Kirby's Dream Land, was for the original Game Boy, as was Dream Land 2. Dream Land 3 was a Super NES game...released more than a full year after the debut of the N64. And then there's the little matter of the 2000s. Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards came out in June of 2000. Let's look at the ensuing decade--and keep in mind that Isaac's debut game wasn't out yet when this decade begins, while his most recent game was just a few months away from release when it ends.

August 2000: Kirby Tilt 'n' Tumble for the Game Boy Color. One of the first games to use motion controls.
December 2002: Kirby: Nightmare in Dream Land for the Game Boy Advance. Remake of his console debut, 1993's Kirby's Adventure for the NES. Like Dream Land 3 with the N64, that was well after the debut of the SNES.
October 2003: Kirby Air Ride for the GameCube. Racing game spin-off. Surprisingly fun given how simple the controls are.
October 2004: Kirby & the Amazing Mirror for the Game Boy Advance. I really need to go back and beat this game. I think this is the only game that I've ever gotten stuck in and my sister was able to beat.
June 2005: Kirby: Canvas Curse for the Nintendo DS. Like Tilt 'n' Tumble, this is about 50% tech demo. Kirby tends to be the go-to series for Nintendo to try out new gimmicks.
December 2006: Kirby: Squeak Squad for the Nintendo DS.
September 2008: Kirby: Super Star Ultra. An updated remake of Kirby's second console outing, 1996's Kirby Super Star. Super Star just narrowly manages, in all three regions, to be Kirby's first console outing to be on the most recent console at the time--none closer than North America, where it was released just nine days before the N64 came out.

And that's it. Kirby did manage another console outing before Isaac's most recent game came out (in November 2010), October 2010's Kirby's Epic Yarn for the Wii, but that's outside the 10-year window from, we'll call it starting from July 2000 since Crystal Shards came out in June of that year. 10 years, seven releases, and only one of them for a home console rather than a handheld. And that one was a single-button racing game rather than the platformers that he's known for. Yes, this conveniently ignores that HAL Laboratory in general and Kirby creator Masahiro Sakurai in particular are also responsible for Super Smash Bros., and that the focus on the three Kirby characters in the game has led some people to consider Brawl's Subspace Emissary "basically a Kirby game with a lot of guest stars", and thus if you include the two Smash games from that time frame, Kirby had some very prominent releases in that decade. Kirby's a handheld star in my mind, just like Pokmon.
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Also known as Cyberchao X.

Match 79: Phoenix Wright vs. Ike

Phoenix 15320
Ike 14913

This was our first match to be flipped by the registered user bonus. The raw votes are even closer, with Ike winning by just 28 votes, but Phoenix is Board 8's favorite character, so it came as no surprise that he'd be the first character to outright steal a win because of the registered bonus. It's entirely in character, too. Phoenix always does his best work when the odds are stacked against him, and occasionally he's unable to pull out victory on his own power, but someone else comes along to bail him out at the last minute. 1-2 is obviously the most prominent example, but there are other times, too, like 1-4 when Larry Butz comes busting in and Phoenix finally gets a chance to cross-examine a witness that Manfred von Karma hasn't tampered with in advance.

I still need to play Spirit of Justice. I hear Phoenix is back to being the main protagonist in that one after being demoted to side character in the fourth game and being part of an ensemble in the fifth. Still, those games did give us other Ace Attorney leads. If they're any good in Spirit of Justice as well, maybe we should consider them for future experiments with other characters. The Godot thing didn't work out too well, and Edgey's been struggling for years now without a win. Couldn't be any worse than that, right? Well, okay, maybe it could because Apollo's debut game was roundly panned (I kind of liked it). He'll suffer for that. Athena might do okay just because females are doing better.

Actually, forget those two. I also heard that Ema Skye is reprising her role from AJ:AA as the main detective, and she's had other appearances in the series before that. If we want to see if two X chromosomes really is an asset in these contests, we'll make her the next AA character to get a shot.

But even without the registered voter bonus doing him in, Ike would have barely squeaked past Phoenix. Given the way Ike regularly dominates the Voting Gauntlets in Fire Emblem Heroes, that really doesn't speak very well for the strength of Fire Emblem as a whole. Or rather...it doesn't speak well for the characters' strength. It's been fairly rare in recent entries for there to truly be a lone main character. Ike kind of was in Path of Radiance, but even there he was the first lead to not be royalty in a game that still had plenty of royalty. Beyond that, you really have to go all the way back to Roy. It's quite possible that Fire Emblem will forever suffer from ensemble cast syndrome. The series has done okay for itself in Games contests, though not spectacularly.
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Also known as Cyberchao X.

Match 77: 2B vs. Ness

2B 16239
Ness 13991

Ness was the straight-up Guru favorite here, and that's even before taking into account that considerably more people took Shadow to win this match than took 2B to lose last round to Cayde-6. So yeah, this came as kind of a surprise.

I didn't even realize until this contest was well underway that Nier is a Square Enix franchise. I'm not sure if that knowledge would've given me more faith in 2B, or less. Probably less, because everything post-merger tends to be completely trash in these contests.

The casuals didn't exactly jump all over us on this one, either. Given that 2B's Round 1 prediction percentage was only 81% or something, the 46.42% this round means she was probably technically the favorite, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if Ness + Shadow had more brackets than 2B + Cayde-6.

Match 78: Charizard vs. Bowser

Charizard 13136
Bowser 17096

Do not let anyone talk you into believing that this loss made Charizard look bad. This was barely half a percent away from the Oracle consensus. Bowser has always been one of the strongest midcarders, and 43.45% is a good percentage to get on him. I think. ...Actually, the list of characters to do better than that is surprisingly long. Kirby has, more than once. Ryu didn't, but then he turned around and beat Bowser twice in fourways. Leon Kennedy outperformed him. So did Yoshi, but only barely. Honestly the fact that Leon's number is better than Yoshi's...oh, wait, I think RE4 was still fresh when that match happened. So Leon was a lot stronger than he is now.

Charizard may not have had the perfect timing that he had in his first match against Bowser, but he's had plenty of reasons to remain strong over the years. He's made two more Smash appearances since 2010 and gotten two Mega Evolutions. Both Mega Evolutions got showcased in the anime, under the ownership of recurring characters, and prior to that, but still post-2010, Ash's Charizard returned to his party for a while. And then the 20th movie, which was basically an alternate continuity retelling of the entire first season distilled into one movie, again had Charizard as Ash's ace. This is a strong performance, and yes, it was somewhat redeeming after he disappointed in Round 1. Of course, it would be a few more rounds before his "disappointing" 2013 campaign was massively vindicated thanks to the efforts of his anime teammate Pikachu as well as his second-round opponent from that contest.
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Also known as Cyberchao X.

Match 74: Crash Bandicoot vs Big Boss

Crash 14601
Big Boss 16381

The opponent here seems oddly appropriate, because that's exactly what Big Boss did here. He crashed and burned. This was an absolutely awful performance. Look at Crash's history.

2002: Gets horribly overseeded, allowing him to face fodder in Round 1. (Although he still got lucky because there was a far stronger character on the same seed line as his opponent.) Fails to break 20% in his Round 2 match
2003: 38% in Round 1 against KOS-MOS. This might be a high point.
2004: Allows Master Chief to break 70% on him.
2007: Returns from a hiatus; loses to Magus, Phoenix Wright, and Bomberman. At this point, Phoenix's only previous contest appearance was the loss that ended Gordon Freeman Never Wins.
2008: Doubles up Raz from Psychonauts, but still falls well short of advancing over Nightmare (Samus Aran was the obvious first place finisher).
2010: 38.21% against Ryu Hayabusa. Remember, Crash couldn't even break 30% against Master Chief.
2013: Finally gets another win, beating Wheatley and Tommy Vercetti, but finishes in third place in Round 2 behind Elizabeth from BioShock Infinite. All you need to know about her is that she was a 3-seed, which meant low expectations thanks to that being one of the gimmicked seed lines.

So is Crash just stronger now? I know there was some sort of compilation release or something, but that shouldn't do that much for a character. It is a mystery.

Match 75: Alucard vs. Yuna

Alucard 18472
Yuna 12512

With Big Boss struggling with Crash, the instinctive thought was "wait, is Kefka the favorite in the division now?" That was what felt right, but it was easy to see that it wasn't true, because Alucard was putting up nearly identical numbers against a clearly stronger opponent. I suppose a case could've been made for Red to be the favorite; I didn't think that way because I didn't feel like narrowly beating Sora was all that strong a performance. It is, because Sora only feels weak because he never lives up to his seed lines.

I'm sure there's some analysis that conclusively shows that yes, Alucard was the favorite now.

Match 76: Kefka vs. Bomberman

Kefka 18537
Bomberman 12451

It's tough to say that a character has the most decisive win of the day and still looks bad, but Bomberman's just not that strong a character. We last saw him losing to Ezio and Tails, and that didn't seem awful at the time but Ezio looked awful this year. It probably wasn't awful, though. And he did beat Crash in 2007.

Still, Bomberman was a 26-seed in 2013. How did he even make the bracket?
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Also known as Cyberchao X.

Match 71: Yoshi vs. Velvet Crowe

Yoshi 21148
Velvet 8796

Yoshi is never going to be an elite, but he's never going to be weak, either. Just look at 2010, when he had the misfortune of running into a rally entry after it had already taken out a Noble Niner. Normally, once that happens, there's no hope for anything stopping it. Now, that happened to be the one rally entry that was stopped after it had done some damage, but nevertheless, Yoshi managed to stand up to Missingno like a champ, and it got him something like #9 in the raw X-stats.

Unfortunately for him, not even those numbers would give him a chance next round, because Pikachu was #6 in the raw X-Stats that year.

Match 72: Pikachu vs. Kratos

Pikachu 18987
Kratos 10957

Why does this match feel so familiar?

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/3809-heart-division-round-2-charizard-vs-kratos

Ah, that's why. Same seedings and everything. It's kind of depressing to see how far our vote totals have fallen since then, and even more depressing when you remember that the current vote totals are inflated by the registered bonus...but it should not be overlooked that, admittedly only thanks to the registered bonus, Pikachu has a greater margin of victory than Charizard did. And Kratos has had a recent game, so that may actually be meaningful.

This was the second time in as many rounds that Pikachu's percentage was lower than that of his next opponent, and the second time that hardly anyone expected that to mean anything because Pikachu clearly had a stronger opponent.

Match 73: Sora vs. Pokmon Trainer Red

Sora 15212
Red 15772

This was another match where the registered and unregistered voters went in different directions, but Red would've still narrowly won without the registered vote bonus. Very narrowly.

Sora 10508
Red 10566

Yeah that's narrow. Still, this wasn't exactly a wide margin, either.

Sora was the Guru favorite to win this division, which seems wrong to me. Though there weren't really any proven winners in the group. Nearly half the division had been to Round 3 of a contest at least once prior to this year.

...Huh. Sora's record is better than I thought it was. He's never been to Round 4, but this is the earliest he's exited since 2003, his first year in the contest. It's been Round 3 exits ever since--and for once, I don't have to say "not including Rivalry Rumble" because he and Riku made it to Round 3 in that as well. Nearly upset Squall/Seifer, too; it's the closest Sora's ever come to Squall (though they've never met in a true 1v1, Sora having advanced in second place behind Squall in Round 2 of both fourway contests to allow for four total matches in those two years.) If Bacon ever decides to do another gimmick contest like that one, Sora might actually win in a couples contest; I'm almost certain that Rinoa would hold Squall back even more than Seifer and Kairi actually reached Round 2 in the Female bracket, and not by beating some other fodder that only made the bracket because of the gender segregation. She beat Claire Redfield, who regularly makes the bracket when it's not gender-balanced and made it to Round 2 this year.

Red has quietly amassed a rather impressive resume himself. He's never lost in Round 1 and it usually takes nothing short of a Noble Niner or the equivalent thereof (yes, I'm still sticking with the X Mega Man theory) to finally take him out. Of course, quietly is the only way Red knows how to do anything :)
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Also known as Cyberchao X.

Match 69: Zero vs. Knuckles the Echidna

Zero 16811
Knuckles 13128

Both entrants in this match are red anti-hero rivals to blue heroes from the mid-90s, which is honestly a more interesting bit of trivia than anything in this match.

Well, that's not quite true.

Zero (2010c) has a strength of 31.71 against Base Link.
Knuckles (2010c) has a strength of 27.79 against Base Link.

Zero wins with 56.18% of the vote!

I usually don't trust adjusted X-Stats as far as I can throw them (and seeing as how they're an abstract concept, I can't throw them at all), but that's only 0.03% away from the actual result and Knuckles literally faced Sonic in 2010. And then Sonic got blown out by Link, making the entire division look pitiful in the raw X-Stats when in fact it was full of reliable midcarders such as Ganondorf, Mewtwo, Vivi, Kirby, and Knuckles himself, in addition to others such as Donkey Kong (who is not reliable, but made Round 3 this year), Altair (who as I noted in my write-up of Ezio's loss has never lost in Round 1, and this is the first time since his debut that he missed the field entirely), and Rikku (who frequently misses the field but always performs well when she makes it).

And yes, I feel like we can call Knuckles a "reliable midcarder" even though he's never made it to Round 3. He's been in 9 out of the 10 contests (only missing 2006 because half the field was reserved for females), and he's only lost in Round 1 once, and that was when he had to deal with Mario and Zelda in a 4-way. He's almost certainly the strongest character to never make Round 3. Early on, CJayC was entirely to blame (stupid gimmicky bracketmaking), but as time has gone on, it really just does feel like he's been unlucky. Far weaker entrants have made it to Round 3 due to soft placements, including one from the same series as Knuckles. (At least I'm assuming Knuckles > Tails. That might actually be a match worth seeing, though!)

Match 70: Master Hand vs. Wario

Master Hand 11686
Wario 18257

And you needn't look any further than this match to see that a decent record doesn't necessarily mean you're strong. This was Wario's first run to Round 3, but his only Round 1 loss was to Shadow the Hedgehog (who immediately had to face Mario after that. No points for guessing which admin that was under), which means he's officially .500. Except not really because two of his contests were 2007 and 2008 and both times he advanced in second place in Round 1 and got 4th place in Round 2, meaning he went 2-4 against individual characters but is credited with a 1-1. His 2013 performance is, I suppose, a "proper" .500, getting last place in Round 2. But the only win he has that's kind of impressive is coming in second place in a match in which he was the only character not to appear on the N64, going up against Fox, Captain Falcon, and Banjo. Banjo is weak, but beating Captain Falcon is pretty good.

Master Hand is also .500 all time, having lost in Round 2 in both of his contest appearances.
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Also known as Cyberchao X.

Match 68: Donkey Kong vs. Leon Kennedy

DK 15859
Leon 12629

Wonderful. Now this is exactly what the grumpy old folks of Board 8 are looking for! This was an upset, plain and simple, and there was nothing fishy about it. It wasn't some newcomer doing unexpected things; it was an established veteran beating another established veteran when we all expected otherwise.

Just 5.625% of Gurus picked Donkey Kong to win this match, though to be fair, only 32.5% even picked him to beat Tidus. Yes, we get nice round percentages for this, because the total number of Gurus was 160, a number with 2 and 5 as its only prime factors. Since we work in base 10, these are the only prime numbers that will result in a terminating decimal. I suppose when you look at it that way, the Gurus were giving DK a better chance against Leon than they were giving Tidus, as despite having over twice as many picks to reach Round 2 he had not even 1.5 times as many picks to reach Round 3 (Leon was a unanimous choice to reach Round 2, so I don't even need to go deeper to know that this is solely based on the potential matchup with Leon). So this was definitely an lolGurus moment.

"But wait!" you say. "The casuals were held under 50% on this one, too!" Yes, they were, and it's certainly possible that Leon was the favorite there, too, but it's quite unlikely.

DK's Round 1 prediction percentage: 66.99%
Leon's Round 1 prediction percentage: 72.69%

DK's Round 2 prediction percentage: 38.06%

This means roughly 56.82% of brackets that took DK to Round 2 continued to take him to Round 3. Not a heavy favorite, but a favorite nonetheless. If you assume little to no correlation between DK > Tidus pickers and Leon > Dragonborn pickers, you'd expect only about 48.7% of brackets to even have both of those correct. If you further assume that the 56.82% ratio is also applicable specifically to DK-Leon pickers, you're left with just over 21% of brackets specifically picking Leon > DK. Leaving Leon in need of over 18% of brackets to have Leon > Tidus, when as per our previous numbers, DK being a bit over a 2-1 favorite over Tidus means that under 24.5% of brackets even have Leon-Tidus.

Now this does make a lot of assumptions. If there is in fact a surprisingly strong correlation, it's quite possible that an inordinate amount of DK picks were actually DK > Dragonborn, and that both Leon > Tidus and Leon > DK were more common picks than Tidus > Leon and DK > Leon. After all, it is at least mathematically possible that fewer than 40% of brackets had the correct matchup (in the event that no brackets got both matches wrong.) But chances are, DK was the slight favorite here. Given that Vivi had been the casuals' underdog in each of his first two matches with DK (conclusively confirmable because they were both Round 1 matches), fans of low prediction percentages were eagerly awaiting Round 3.

(Final numbers note: Just 8.96% of Oracle pickers sided with DK here, so it's not like we saw this coming by match time and adjusted accordingly. This was an upset through and through.)
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Also known as Cyberchao X.

Match 65: Dante vs. Lightning

Dante 18682
Lightning 9787

I said it in Round 1 and I'll say it again: Final Fantasy fans are a lot like Pokmon fans, always whining about how awful the most recent entry is and how much better things used to be. Older characters do better on this board in general anyway, but if you're from one of those franchises, the best thing that can happen is for a new game in your series to come out, because it establishes your age. 34.38% on Dante is surprisingly respectable given how awful opinions of FFXIII were, and I suspect the existence of FFXV is a large part of it.

Final Fantasy is a lot like these contests. The NES and SNES (well, Famicom and Super Famicom; the US equivalents didn't get all of them) managed three main series games each, and so did the PS1. Not counting the MMORPGs, we've had just four of them since. Meanwhile, we've all turned into crochety old men reminiscing about the good old days when we had contests every year and the upsets were genuinely surprising rather than the result of off-site rallies, except even then they were the result of off-site rallies. Look again at the previous write-up and the linked Frog-Axel match. Everyone suspected that Frog's comeback was less than legitimate, but it was a CT character beating a KH character so we all rejoiced rather than being upset.

Match 66: Chun-Li vs. Ganondorf

Chun-Li 11699
Ganondorf 16773

As usual, the board overreacted to this, suggesting that Dante could challenge Ganondorf. Probably because our inherent biases suggest that "Final Fantasy protagonist" should be a more impressive win than "fighting game character". Except Street Fighter (and I guess Mortal Kombat, though we've never tried anyone other than Scorpion and Sub-Zero from that franchise) have never been fodder like other fighting game franchises. You might even be able to add Soul Calibur to that list; Nightmare has managed to do okay in his appearances and Yoshimitsu (who is sort of a shared character between Tekken and Soul Calibur) got a win in 2013. And Lightning still suffers from being a post-merger Square Enix character.

Chun-Li put up another solid performance. She's never faced a Noble Niner, but all four of her losses are to solid midcarders from Noble Nine franchises--Zelda, Mario, and Final Fantasy.

Match 67: Vivi vs. Aya Brea

Vivi 21489
Aya 6993

This was a predictable blowout. Regardless of who won, it would set up a rematch of at least one previous Square vs. Nintendo match, and based on those past results, it was easy to joke that Square had fixed the match. Aya making this contest was honestly kind of surprising; she was a 26-seed in 2013 and hasn't had any releases since then to make her relevant. Of course, she's hardly the only bottom-third seed from that contest to make it to this one. The full list:

19-seeds:
Jill Valentine

20-seeds:
Aerith Gainsborough
Ridley

21-seeds:
Ryu Hayabusa
Simon Belmont
Chun-Li
Cecil Harvey

23-seeds:
Vincent Valentine

24-seeds:
Peach
Pac-Man
Claire Redfield

26-seeds:
Aya Brea
Bomberman

8 for 13 at making Round 2, with one of them making it all the way to Round 4. Though we were guaranteed at least one 21-seed from last contest would make Round 2 due to two of them facing each other in Round 1. My only explanation for this was that people saw the expanded field and figured that it would be easy to rally whatever ridiculous obscure character they loved into the field, so contest regulars got even fewer nominations than usual.

One of the other seeding gimmicks that year was that the 3-seeds would all be highly touted newcomers who would no doubt fail miserably. Only 4 of those 9 even made this contest and they all lost in Round 1.
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Also known as Cyberchao X.

Match 64: Aqua vs. Quiet

Aqua 18432
Quiet 10320

As so frequently happens in these contests, the last match of Round 1 was extremely dull. Well not really because we always had four matches going on at once and Shepard-K. Rool was interesting, but you know what I mean.

Aqua was a Guru nom, and she failed to double a side character from the least successful MGS game. Quiet didn't even get to use her sex appeal in her pic, either. Kingdom Hearts just flat-out sucked this contest.

Okay, yes, Aqua would be fodder even if Kingdom Hearts was still strong. Though it should be noted that there's only one KH character to make even one contest that's never won a match, and he still looked damn good in one of his losses.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/2865-division-1-round-1-axel-frog-samus-kerrigan

No really, what is this? Axel almost beat Frog? And he's the only KH character without a win?

Ansem only appeared in the Villains Contest, but managed to draw beloved loser CATS. Kairi only made the female bracket, but beat Claire Redfield, which is actually possibly a decent win.

But this contest suggests that Kingdom Hearts does not hold strength on its own merit any more. Maybe what it needs to get its mojo back is for its other set of non-original characters to be allowed in!

...Actually, given that different incarnations of the same characters are allowed into these things, do you think if we tried nominating him as "King Mickey"--that is to say, specifically the Kingdom Hearts incarnation--we'd be able to get Mickey Mouse in? Though as per the Captain Toad debate, that would probably end up limiting his strength.

In any case, if we do get an open character battle, Disney characters has better get Kingdom Hearts pics. Tetsuya Nomura and his zippers would definitely help Donald and Goofy. Well, they probably would. Maybe. I don't know.

I'd comment about Quiet being the only character to debut in MGSV to make the field, but I'm pretty sure no one that debuted in MGS4 has been in a character battle. Then again, no one of much consequence debuted in that game. The main villain was Ocelot, who's been around since MGS1, and Solid Snake was the main protagonist for the first time since MGS1. (Well, okay, he was still the protagonist of MGS2 even though he was only the player character for a short time, but that's a minor detail.) We got a character from Revengeance into the 2013 contest, though. Of course, I suspect the MGSV character we all really wanted was denied for being a huge spoiler. Criticize Allen all you want, but he has never allowed anything like what happened in 2005's villains contest, where a major (albeit telegraphed) plot twist for Tales of Symphonia was ruined. The character is fought four times in that game, and the first three battles all have him going by one name and looking a certain way, but CJayC decided to credit him by the name and appearance from the final battle.

And with that, Round 1 is complete.
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Also known as Cyberchao X.

Match 62: Commander Shepard vs. King K. Rool

Shepard 14726
K. Rool 14019

Remember what I said two matches ago about another gender-equal bracket? Yeah, forget that I even mentioned it. Thanks to characters so customizable that they don't even have a canon gender, we can never have that particular gimmick ever again.

K. Rool is another Nintendo villain that failed to make the Villains Contest. Granted there were only 32 slots, but we had representatives from Grand Theft Auto in there. I mean, technically doesn't that series have a villain protagonist/hero antagonist?

Nintendo was boosting all over the place, though, and Mass Effect is a decaying franchise, so this was a decent upset pick. K. Rool led for nearly 7.5 hours, too, before ultimately fading away.

Match 63: Ellie vs. KOS-MOS

Ellie 13094
KOS-MOS 15654

To be honest, I didn't even realize KOS-MOS had been in a Xenoblade game. I figured she was less relevant than this. Like most people, I ignored TheStupidRaptor. Apparently there are people out there who refuse to believe that Xenoblade is part of the same franchise as Xenosaga and Xenogears? Although it's apparently the video game equivalent of a series that has just enough of a fanbase to get picked up by a new network whenever it gets canceled. Xenogears vs. Xenoblade would literally be considered a Square vs. Nintendo match, but neither Xenogears-Xenosaga nor Xenosaga-Xenoblade (which has actually happened) would be. (Namco published Saga; Nintendo published Blade. Both were developed by third-party developer Monolith Soft, whom you might also know from the Baten Kaitos series, which was founded by the creator of Xenogears after he left what was then Squaresoft, where he worked when he created Xenogears.)

Anyway, it was fairly obvious, though disappointing, that an unrealistically proportioned character from an early 2000s Japanese RPG would beat out a realistically proportioned character from an early 2010s American Survival Horror Game. Not that I'm a fan of survival horror, because I'm not, but everything I've heard about The Last of Us is absolutely amazing. I want Ellie to succeed. Maybe in CBXI, once she has TLoU2 behind her. Though that game's supposed to be coming out this year so she'll probably have to hope for a TLoU3 to be relevant. And really, once you're on the third game, isn't the title "The Last of Us" kind of misleading?

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

Ah, right then, carry on. Also, while it's way too late now, how did we not get Kalas into even one Character Battle back when Baten Kaitos first came out? We've gotten all sorts of other obscure JRPG leads into these things. I tried to rally for one this year, but was handicapped by the fact that the lead in question suffers from Vaan Syndrome but most of the better characters to nominate are spoiler risks. Though honestly most of the reason I continually pimp Stella Glow on this board is just to get music from it into VGMC, because that soundtrack is amazing.
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Also known as Cyberchao X.

Match 60: Lara Croft vs. Metal Man

Lara 19706
Metal Man 9319

Oh, hey, speaking of "Random (insert game here) Character #3.14159", have a Robot Master from Mega Man 2. I briefly entertained the idea that an attempt at a Draven rally might actually let Metal Man pull this upset, because the types of trolls that would be attracted to this would pick the most anti-establishment choices possible and Lara Croft isn't strong enough to weather that storm. Turns out, Lara's either not as weak as I thought, or nominating random Mega Man characters that don't recur across the entire series was just that stupid an idea. I prefer to think it's the latter.

X's presence in contests has conclusively proven that "Mega Man" refers only to the classic incarnation. Why have we not tried to put other Mega Men into contests? I mean, heck, if you go back far enough Mega Man Legends has seen representation in these contests.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/2511-aeon-division-round-1-yuna-vs-roll

...Oh, right. Literally every other member of the Noble Nine had a female member of their franchise seeded higher than this. Marle was a 7-seed. Amy Rose was a 6. Amy Rose! And Roll was only an 8-seed, and probably only got that because people wanted to get every Noble Niner's best female co-star into the contest.

(Just quietly ignore the fact that with Brawl not out yet, no one on the female half of the bracket had actually been in the same game as Solid Snake as of that time. The Boss is easily the strongest female Metal Gear Solid character, and MGS3 was the most recent release in the franchise at the time. This was a far superior option to putting Meryl or Sniper Wolf or someone into the contest.)

If we ever have another half-male, half-female bracket, it should be mixed up rather than split, so that every Round 1 match is male vs. female. Do it evenly, though, so that stronger female characters are against weaker male characters and vice versa. Zelda probably gets a 1-seed and gets to school some 16-seeded male.

Link probably gets to feast on Hat Kid in Round 1, which will confuse people who still don't realize Hat Kid's a girl.

Match 61: Ryu vs. Lloyd Irving

Ryu 19671
Lloyd 9073

Oh hey, Tales doing Tales things again. I am pleased that Tales didn't get to fodder up this contest too much. I am also pleased that Ryu got a chance to do Ryu things. He was consistently one of the strongest non-Noble Niners in the earliest days of the contests, though he hasn't quite been the same since his loss to Bowser in 2005.

After the Lineal Noble Nine had first been proposed, I made a thought experiment as to what if the then-arbitrary cutoff for the elite tier had been placed at something other than 9 (which ultimately ended up being the perfect number, but that's with hindsight; the Noble Nine had been crowned long before 2006 proved that Nine was the correct number, no more and no less). Ryu ended up taking back his own spot twice, once when he avenged his 2005 loss to Bowser in round 1 in 2007 and once when he advanced in second place behind Auron in Round 2 in 2007, only for Cloud to SFF Auron the next round and allow Ryu to advance in second place again. Someone else commented that this was a very Ryu thing to do.

There is one Noble Niner who owns a spot in the Lineal Nine that they previously owned, but it's not their original spot. After losing his original spot to Vincent in 2007, Crono took Sonic's former spot by defeating L-Block in 2008. After losing that spot to Missingno in 2010, the spot changed hands three times in as many rounds in 2013, ultimately landing with Mega Man (who still hadn't recovered from losing to WCC in 2008), who Crono beat this year (though not before taking Mega Man's original spot from Bowser only to give it to Cloud.)
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Also known as Cyberchao X.

Ulti's write-up mentions that Draven's vote total of 3439 is the lowest we've ever seen in a 1v1 contest. Vote totals may have been down, but that number is actually inflated thanks to the registered voter bonus; his raw total is only 2287. Is that the lowest ever?

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/5153-character-battle-ix-division-2-round-1-lucina-vs-dracula-vs-caim
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/5157-character-battle-ix-division-2-round-1-chester-vs-mewtwo-vs-zero-999
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/5184-character-battle-ix-division-5-round-1-dancin-vs-zidane-vs-ridley
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/5209-character-battle-ix-division-8-round-1-squall-vs-rayman-vs-video

It is not! Damn, was 2013 filled with awful fodder. And that's just the ones that fell short of Draven's raw total; far more fell short of his adjusted total, including at least one character that might actually be worth something (though not above the fodder line) when not eating hero > villain SFF.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/5196-character-battle-ix-division-6-round-1-fox-vs-blue-vs-wolf

I am a huge Star Fox fan and this makes me sad. Wolf wasn't the only one to get screwed over in this fashion in 2013, but the third character in Leon Kennedy-Albert Wesker was weak enough that Wesker managed to get second place anyway. Wolf, on the other hand, potentially screws Fox out of a victory. It's tough to say for certain but Blue didn't make it to 50% and it's unlikely that Wolf was eating much of Fox's Smash support. That 7.75% is probably about 90% SF64 fans, and if you give even 75% of that 90% to Fox, you get...well, okay, you still get Fox only at 49.32%. So Fox really does need almost all of Wolf's votes to pull off this win.

Wolf's only appearance other than this was in Rivalry Rumble, where he and Fox got to beat up on one of the contest's many "non-rivalries" in Round 1 (Fox would probably be an underdog against Yuna 1v1 at the time, though not now, but Wolf easily outclasses Seymour and the rivalry was stronger) before being unfortunately fed to Ryu and Ken. I can't even advocate for giving him a chance to actually prove his strength, though, because the Star Fox series is completely irrelevant now and he'd just be "Random Smash Character #37.25964".

Although I think Ulti either completely forgot about 2017's Years Contest or intentionally left it out because it undercut the point he was trying to make, because sub-3439 wasn't all that rare and even sub-2287 was somewhat common.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/6686-best-year-in-gaming-wildcard-round-day-1-1979-vs-2009
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/6689-best-year-in-gaming-wildcard-round-day-2-1978-vs-2005
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/6690-best-year-in-gaming-round-1-day-1-1995-vs-1986
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/6692-best-year-in-gaming-round-1-day-2-2001-vs-2014
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/6697-best-year-in-gaming-round-1-day-4-1996-vs-1989
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/6698-best-year-in-gaming-round-1-day-5-1991-vs-1988
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/6702-best-year-in-gaming-round-1-day-7-1998-vs-1993

There were only 35 matches in that contest, so this is fully 20% of them. Allen really achieved his goal of a rally-proof contest with that one, didn't he? I'd ask for a moratorium on gimmick contests, but we have so few contests as it is and I'd still prefer gimmick contests over no contests.
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Also known as Cyberchao X.

Match 59: Amaterasu vs. Draven

Amaterasu 25584
Draven 3439

Remember what I said about poor first-place Oracles? Yeah, nobody had Amaterasu winning this handily. This is somewhere between a septupling and an octupling; the highest anyone predicted was merely between a quadrupling and a quintupling. Arti took first place with a prediction of 82.28% and only three other Oracles had Ammy breaking 80%. I was one of them, which honestly surprises me because I usually have a mental block about predicting huge blowouts. This place was AntiBlowoutFAQs for a while in the early 2010s, and I had some horrendous Oracle predictions on the biggest blowouts of 2015 because I refused to go much higher than the low eighties even on obvious blowouts like Ocarina of Time vs. Hearthstone. I mean, granted, "low eighties" is exactly what I did pick here--82% even--but it worked because Oracle consensus was in the low seventies. Interestingly enough, exactly as many Oracles picked Ammy to fail to break 60% as picked her to break 80%, but three of the four that had her under 60% had Draven winning outright.

Also, I feel it should be mentioned again that in 2013, Draven was legitimately the Guru favorite in his Round 1 match. 64.08% picked him to beat Jak and Chie, though only 2.04% picked him to beat Ryu and Mega Man X the following round. That's how weak his opening draw was. I talked about this during the Aloy-D. Va match. Allen does this every time, and he'll continue to do it. I'd give a hypothetical, but given how infrequent contests are, there is a 0.00% chance that anything already released would have the rally potential. Unless it's something Pokmon-related, because that's always a possibility. We had Mudkip and Bidoof in 2007 and Missingno in 2010.

I could totally get behind a Mimikyu rally. Of course, given how infrequent contests are, by the time CBXI rolls around we'll probably be rallying behind a Gen IX Pokmon.

There was also something that went around the board for a bit in later rounds called the "Lineal Noble Nine." Basically, it was a hypothetical scenario where beating a member of the Noble Nine would make a character a member of the Noble Nine, but rather than expanding, the defeated member would lose their status. It doesn't take into account past results, so it's not like that "defeating one is defeating all of them" argument. At the start of the Legends Bracket, it looked as though there could be as many as eight original Noble Niners in the Lineal Noble Nine, and Amaterasu was the one non-original Noble Niner whose spot in the Lineal Noble Nine was safe. As it turned out, there were only five original Noble Niners thanks to some weird upsets--up from the four that were there entering the Legends Bracket. The idea of it consisting of eight actual Noble Niners and Amaterasu was well received. She's beloved here. Combine that fact with how hated Draven is for hijacking the 2013 Contest, and it added up to a huge blowout. I hinted at this in my L-Block write-up, but it seems highly likely that whenever Character Battle XI comes around, it will likely mark the first time that a former contest champion misses the field entirely. I can't imagine that he'll get any nominations from the regulars, and since we only get a contest every other year and 2020 is reserved for a Game of the Decade contest, we probably won't see CBXI until 2022, at which point Draven's run will be nine years old and few trolls would feel the need to try nominating him again.
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Also known as Cyberchao X.

Match 56: Mega Man X vs. Isabelle

X 24693
Isabelle 5923

There's only so much that a Smash appearance can do for you, though. Animal Crossing is part of the long list of franchises that Nintendo initially thought would be unpopular outside of Japan, then decided (or were told) otherwise. It's far from the most successful franchise of that class, however; if I'm not mistaken, Pokmon qualifies as something Nintendo was initially unsure about bringing to other markets, and of course we all know the story of how Fire Emblem only made it to the western world because the localization team for Super Smash Bros. Melee defied orders to remove Roy and Marth from the game. We still can't get a conclusive read on whether Mega Man X or Mega Man Classic is stronger. Up until this year, I thought it was X, but Classic looked good this year. It seems silly to be talking about that in a match where X broke 80%, but there aren't exactly a lot of other opportunities to do so. I guess maybe I could've saved that for Round 2 though.

Match 57: Sephiroth vs. Wesker

Sephiroth 20400
Wesker 8625

This should've been an early warning that Sephiroth was off his game this year. Yes, he broke 70%, but the popular line was that Resident Evil had vastly declined.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/2009-ruin-division-round-2-kefka-vs-wesker
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/7294-division-8-round-1-sephiroth-vs-wesker

Keep in mind that not only should Wesker be weaker now than he was when he faced Kefka, but Kefka should've been weaker when he faced Wesker than he is now. Yes, that was the first time Kefka had gotten his final boss sprite in a match pic, so it was probably a stronger Kefka than what we'd seen up to that point in contest history, but Kefka is definitely a character who seems to have boosted over time rather than declined. So unless a lot of our assumptions are incorrect, a stronger Wesker did worse against a weaker Kefka than this Wesker did against Sephiroth. Is anyone taking the Kefka > Sephiroth upset? ...Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if some people took that upset simply because Kefka has a reputation for strange results and beating his FF7 counterpart is about as strange as it gets. I don't think I would, even though I picked FF6 to upset FF7 in 2015.

Match 58: Richter Belmont vs. Captain Falcon

Richter 11496
Falcon 17531

AKA the point where the concept of "Smash Boost" eradicated all ability to think rationally. People were calling for the potential upset here because of Richter's appearance in a trailer, noting that he'd managed a higher seed than Simon despite merely being his Echo Fighter. Also there was something about a Castlevania series on Netflix. Based on Alucard's performance, and maybe even the Belmonts', the idea that the series caused a boost might have been valid. But "Smash Boost" doesn't help when you're up against a fellow Smasher, and it certainly doesn't help when you're up against someone who's been in more Smash Bros. games than you. As I stated just three write-ups ago, Captain Falcon is a midcarder entirely based off of being one of the original twelve. Quick, name the only contest other than Rivalry Rumble (where the nature of the contest forced Captain Falcon to bring someone else along) to feature a representative of the F-Zero franchise other than Captain Falcon himself?

It's Game of the Decade. F-Zero GX was a 12-seed, losing in Round 1 to Dragon Age: Origins. This result was extremely obvious and all the talk of an upset was silly. Nice showing by Richter, though.
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Also known as Cyberchao X.

Match 55: King Dedede vs. Revolver Ocelot

Dedede 15157
Ocelot 15457

This set a new Character Battle record for closest wire-to-wire 24-hour match, though still trailing DKC2 > Xenoblade in 2015 for the overall 24-hour record. The largest lead by either side was 328. The final margin of 300 is also #25 on the list of closest 1v1 matches, though unlike the previous stat, that's based on where things stood at the end of the contest rather than at the time that it happened. At the time it would've been #19. Dedede took the early lead and managed to get it out over 200 for a little while about 5 hours in, but Ocelot took the lead during the 10th hour and never relinquished it. This, like most results, was seen as a sign of Metal Gear declining, but honestly, Ocelot has always been like this. He debuted in the Villains Contest and couldn't even break 55% on Nemesis, but the very next round he got almost as much against Dr. Wily. Made his "regular" contest debut that summer and lost to Pac-Man. Ruined a bunch of Gurus in 2007 by beating Jill Valentine in what probably amounted to a neutral field re: the other two characters in the match (Cloud and Midgar Zolom), then ruined them again the following year by losing to Jill despite MGS4 being released in the interim. And then in 2010 he has a match very similar to this one, against Red, coming out on the losing end in what might've been one of the last gasps for "wait till the kiddies wake up" (12-hour match, midnight EST start, Ocelot led early but lost it at the end). This would seem to be a weaker character than he'd been going even with last, but it's long been my belief that each successive appearance in a Smash game strengthens a character. Captain Falcon was one of the original twelve and has become a decent midcarder despite hailing from a franchise that almost no one has played, and it seems likely that Kirby also gets more of his strength from being one of the original 12 than from his own games. Well, Dedede's now on his third appearance in Smash, dating back to Brawl. There's a chance he's not really that weak after all. It's tough to say since he didn't make the bracket in 2013 and wasn't in the Villains Contest in 2005 (not that he's really a villain in most of his appearances, but I'm sure he was eligible anyway), leaving him with only a single previous appearance shortly after Brawl came out in which he had to contend with another Brawl newcomer and two midcarders who were independent of Smash and of each other. At any rate, I think he deserves further consideration.

The Smash roster is so big as of Ultimate that an entire 64-character contest could be held without a single non-Smash character. That's a little frightening.
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Also known as Cyberchao X.

Match 53: Tifa Lockhart vs. Geno

Tifa 22399
Geno 8205

Geno is another one of those characters that has become a bracket mainstay despite never winning a match. He's now 0-6 after this loss, and none of them have been terribly close. There are many reasons for this. He's a side character from a fairly niche RPG, one that wasn't released in PAL regions until much, much later (via Virtual Console). Furthermore, its initial release was fairly late in its console's lifespan, a Super NES game from 1996, albeit still a good few months before the N64 came out. Unlike its Japanese counterpart, the Super Famicom, which was still getting new games in 1999, the SNES died out pretty quickly once the N64 arrived, with no games coming out beyond 1997. (Though the N64 did even worse, managing to essentially die out before the GameCube actually launched, resulting in roughly 85% of Nintendo's US releases in 2001 being for its handhelds.) And worst of all, he's extremely easy to SFF, being the product of a collaboration between Nintendo and Square, which means that either company's presence in a poll is bad for him. I don't think he's incapable of winning a match, because that last factor could easily work in his favor if he ever drew one of those overseeded nobodies we see so often, but it's an exercise in futility trying to make it happen.

Match 54: GLaDOS vs. Mewtwo

GLaDOS 11484
Mewtwo 19123

Even before the contest started, people were calling for Mewtwo to be exposed as a FRAUD, which was perfectly natural because he'd overperformed last time. The thing is, there was nothing "fraudulent" about Mewtwo's strength. As I stated during my write-up of Vincent's match, Mewtwo was our rally target because Pokmon was something we could rally around to try to stop Draven, and Mewtwo was the only one with a bracket placement favorable to doing so, as the others would SFF each other out before they could see Draven. 2013 wasn't Mewtwo's first deep run, however, so it was easy for a casual who merely looked at past results without actually comprehending them to think that Mewtwo was an absolute beast. (Mewtwo's first deep run, in 2008, was the result of extremely fortuitous bracket placement, advancing two rounds on natural strength and then taking advantage of triple Square SFF to advance out of a third-round fourpack in which he was probably the weakest character naturally.) This match, however, would not give the board what they wanted, as Mewtwo handily destroyed a character that had reached the Top 27 in 2013 and finished in second place in her Round 3 defeat. Of course, it wasn't truly surprising as GLaDOS was expected to decline--Games may not equal characters, but Portal falling from Top 16 in GotD to 14-seed fodder for Melee in BGE3, along with Portal 2 failing to reach the second round in BGE3 as a 5-seed, suggested that the series was already on the decline then. It's nothing to be ashamed of; it's not easy for a franchise to walk the line between oversaturation and irrelevance. By opting not to turn into a franchise zombie, Portal instead risked fading into the ether.

The Oracle Consensus for this match was less than 0.60% off, and the two worst scores were comprised of one overestimation and one underestimation. That's a sign that we knew what we were doing here.
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Also known as Cyberchao X.

Match 49: Luigi vs. Miles Edgeworth

Luigi 22397
Edgeworth 6514

As I said before in the Godot write-up, Ace Attorney characters not named Phoenix Wright have been horribly weak and we really should spare ourselves the pain of watching them get blown out like this and not nominate them. This blowout tells us nothing about anything.

Match 50: Frog vs. Monokuma

Frog 22084
Monokuma 6829

Neither does this, and I really don't want to talk about it. I've never played a Danganronpa game, though I've had the first two games spoiled for me so they're not candidates for my blind VN playthrough topic. Maybe the third one could be, though. It's not terribly high up on the list.

Though giving Chrono Trigger a second chance is on the list of potential playthrough topics, because I hated its gameplay originally, but realized that the battle system isn't that different from FFVI's, which I played later and absolutely loved. So I truly believe that if I tried CT again, I wouldn't hate it as much as I did the first time.

Match 51: Master Chief vs. Goro Majima

Chief 19954
Majima 8963

Chief may not be worth much these days but he's still worth much more than a secondary character from a recent game that isn't an RPG. Still, this isn't a huge blowout which meant that I already knew I'd screwed up in my bracket having him win a second match.

Match 52: Nathan Drake vs. Miles "Tails" Prower

Drake 12514
Tails 16405

Remind me again why so many people thought Drake had any strength? Because he actually made it to Round 2 in 2013, the one year that 2/3 of entrants in each match were eliminated instead of 1/2? Yeah, that must be it. He narrowly beat out Pac-Man, and suddenly he's a midcarder?

These two had a common opponent in The Boss, and both lost, but Tails did so in down-to-the-wire fashion. Should've been obvious that Tails was the favorite, but because Tails always runs into strong opponents early, he gets underestimated. Not to mention he often gets hit with SFF.

45.68% against Alucard in 2002. 42.6% against Dante in 2004. Face it, Tails has never been fodder. A jobber, sure; for the longest time his job was to give up-and-comers a moderately strong but still winnable match to show that they were worth something. But the only loss that is in itself hard to excuse is the loss to Ezio in 2013, and that just proves that Assassin's Creed had the potential to be a force to be reckoned with in Character Battles if Ubisoft hadn't started spitting them out at such a high rate that they lost any semblance of quality control (and also if we'd had enough contests for them to make more of a mark before this happened). Tails is a low-end midcarder, and apparently, he always has been.
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Also known as Cyberchao X.

Match 47: Shulk vs. Sub-Zero

Shulk 11517
Sub-Zero 19251

Xenoblade Chronicles was originally meant to be Japan-only, but the rest of the world made a stink and the developers caved. It was hugely acclaimed and beloved, and...as a result, it was hard to get a copy at all. From what I can tell it really was interesting, but the battle mechanics were so awful that I eventually gave up on it. Even with the character you're directly controlling, your basic attacks are automatic, so it boils down to "dart in, hope that you actually get an attack off, dart away to avoid enemy attacks. Then somehow manage to build up your special meter because the bosses aren't actually vulnerable to anything other than the specials that are really hard to pull off." Xenoblade is the one entry in the Xeno series that has yet to do anything in contests, with Xenogears having once managed to beat a Pokmon game in a Games Contest (seriously, huh?) and KOS-MOS being something resembling a reliable midcarder. The game itself was a 3-seed in 2015 and got upset by Donkey Kong Country 2, which was by no means the only reason that I was the only one to get all eight Round 1 matches in Division 6 correct (three of them had Guru prediction percentages inside of 60-40, with the slight favorites only going 2-1), but was definitely the biggest deterrent.

Sub-Zero has a history of pulling seeding upsets, so this was a pretty easy pick. The casuals weren't terribly fooled, either, with Subby coming just shy of a 2-1 advantage in brackets.

Match 48: Ren "Joker" Amamiya vs. Claire Redfield

Joker 14278
Claire 16480

This was our second accreditation controversy, and the one that actually meant something. The name "Ren Amamiya" comes from the anime, not the game itself; like Yu Narukami when Persona 4 first came out and all of the SMT protagonists before him, the P5 protagonist was not initially given a "canon name". (Yu's canon name was eventually established by spinoffs.) As such, failing to credit him as Joker--especially in combination with an unmasked match pic--was tantamount to sabotage. I picked Joker in my bracket, but had Claire in my Oracle when it was initially believed that the single-word accreditation in the match would be "Ren". Turns out, I shouldn't have wavered on that when Allen changed it to what it should have been all along. So was this a case of old > new, or merely DAF? (Oh, come on, you know full well you're not looking at what she's got going on in the front. The picsmiths certainly weren't in 2013.)

https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/board8/images/f/f4/5204.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20170323064512

At any rate, this represents Claire's first contest win, which is all kinds of hilarious because the 2002 X-Stats say she could have reached Round 3 if she hadn't been horribly screwed by bracket placement. She finished 13th, breaking 30%, in the Raw X-Stats, following a fairly close (at least by 2002 standards) loss to Tidus of all people. Then she disappeared until the Female Bracket in 2006, where she lost to Kairi. And after that she didn't return until that 2013 match that I linked the match pic from, where she literally has to deal with booty SFF.

Joker was later announced as a DLC character for Smash Ultimate, making everyone wonder if he'd have won the match had that happened earlier. He might have, but I feel like Claire could've still gotten by.
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Also known as Cyberchao X.

Match 45: Auron vs. Lucina

Auron 20132
Lucina 10630

On the subject of Creators' Pets, meet Lucina. She's basically a Final Fantasy lead--wangsty and androgynous. Except unlike those guys, she's actually female, though she pretends to be male (specifically, an earlier androgynous Fire Emblem lead) for the first half of her game because reasons. And because she's "What if Marth were actually a girl instead of merely looking like one", the Japanese part of the fanbase loves her and the rest...well, I guess they kind of like her too? Fire Emblem Heroes tends to reflect the wishes of the whole fanbase, unlike earlier entries where DLC was based on the results of popularity polls that were solely based on the Japanese fanbase because the games weren't even out elsewhere yet, and she hasn't received a new alt in quite some time so I guess maybe her popularity really is waning.

But yeah Lucina is an awful character and this is a good result.

Match 46: Magus vs. Vincent Valentine

Magus 14802
Vincent 15968

Remember what I said about forever-overrated FRAUDS? Board 8 still hasn't gotten over the fact that a match between two newcomers that was supposed to be debatable (although most people did eventually choose correctly) ended up being a 79-21 blowout, and that Vincent went on to upset Squall. Also there was something about a 4way match that reversed an existing 1v1 loss for Vincent? Bah, it's a fourway; it's not important. Besides, he was the lone PSX character against three characters that shared the SNES, one of which was Link.

People blamed Vincent's loss to Phoenix in 2013 solely on the pic sabotage, and while I agree that Vincent should still be naturally stronger than Phoenix, a bigger issue there was that people just didn't care enough about Vincent. Board 8 loves its Phoenix Wright, so we weren't going to abandon him to hop on the Mewtwo bandwagon. And let's not beat around the bush: everything that happened from the moment Draven took X and Ryu to the woodshed was centered around trying to stop him at all costs. We identified Pokmon as the one thing that might be able to muster up a strong enough counterrally should Link fail to stop the threat with his natural strength, and since the other Pokmon were too far away in the bracket and would SFF each other out before the finals, that meant Mewtwo was our rally target.

2010, however, showed exactly where Vincent really sits on the FF7 totem pole. Both he and Tifa faced Sephiroth, and one of them did a lot better than the other.

But here, he was up against Magus, another character that crushed it in his contest debut and has never lived up to the hype. It was only fitting that the two had to battle it out, and the fact that it was so close should tell you exactly how strong Vincent isn't. Vincent won with 51.89%, which is still comfortable enough, but every Oracle that picked this match to finish under 52-48 picked Magus to win it. With good reason considering that he was the underdog, but still, not one person who believed in Vincent to win it at all thought it would be this close.
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Also known as Cyberchao X.

Match 43: Sans vs. Pac-Man

Sans 8571
Pac-Man 21380

Pac-Man blowing out anyone like this is astounding, because Pac-Man is the King of the Apathy Vote. I figured that Sans, being a good character from a popular game, would beat him on natural strength. And from what I heard, Bayonetta was likely to be a major anti-vote magnet, so Sans would probably beat her even worse. And, uh, it wouldn't exactly take the bandwagon forming for him to beat Rosalina even worse than that, because as far as I can tell no one actually likes Rosalina and she only got my pick for Round 3 because this half-division was so bad. Sans ended up being the Ultimate Loser of this division, and I still only regret picking him to catch a bandwagon past Auron and Sonic (twice), not having him to Round 4. This division was largely unproven recent characters, proven fodder, and a couple of former low midcarders that were rightly expected to have fallen.

Oh, and Pac-Man. Pac-Man was there too. Also, this qualifies as a Guru upset, if only barely; Sans had an 83-77 advantage in Guru brackets.

Ironically, if I had incorrectly picked the next match, my bracket is probably better off for it in the long run. I'd lose the one point for Bayonetta > Riku, but pick up points for Auron > Riku (actually Auron > Geralt) and Sonic > Auron.

But back to what this meant for the near future. If Pac-Man was getting this type of percentage on Sans, well, suddenly Chloe Price's lock on the absolute bottom of the unadjusted X-Stats was no lock at all. Amaterasu has always been a consistent midcarder, and Draven is far more hated here than Sans/Undertale. It was clear that he was gonna have a bad time, and all that remained was to see just how hard he'd get dunked on.

Match 44: Bayonetta vs. Riku

Bayonetta 19289
Riku 10665

The Gurus were split even tighter on this match than the last one, Bayonetta ultimately winding up with the 82-78 advantage. At one point during the inputting of Guru brackets, Bayonetta was the favorite to reach Round 3 despite being an underdog against Riku. (The COOKIE did indeed end up with an impossible bracket, but only because of the double elimination format; Mario was a 78-67 favorite over Snake in the Legends semis, and with Mario-Snake so split it's no surprise that Cloud was the most common pick to win the Losers semi, but Snake was ultimately the most common pick to win the Losers final.) The Oracle Challenge broke 45-29 in Bayonetta's favor, with the Bayonetta pickers largely having a lower average percentage than the Riku pickers, resulting in a consensus of Bayonetta 50.49%. The highest pick was a flat 60-40, which was a full 2% contrast of the next highest picks.

64.40%. That's what Bayonetta got. Holy crap this was a blowout. Casuals got one over on us here; sure we ultimately wound up favoring the right character but they broke 70% in prediction percentage and a 45.60 is an awful score for a first-place Oracle prediction. Not the worst, obviously, since we've had matches where we were unanimously wrong (Magus-Knuckles 2005, for example), but not good.
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Also known as Cyberchao X.

swirIdude posted...

TsunamiXXVIII posted...

Why would Shovel Knight the character be any stronger?

Because Games =/= Characters!

I said "stronger", not "different in strength". Suppose I should've asked "why wouldn't Shovel Knight the character be even weaker?"

TsunamiXXVIII posted...

Also, how is Waluigi still a meme in 2018?

Did you miss that there was a Smash Bros. game this year?

Not at all, but I fail to see the relevance.

...Oh right that was how it got started, wasn't it?
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Also known as Cyberchao X.

Match 41: Geralt vs. Rosalina

Geralt 16779
Rosalina 13170

Okay, okay, I've learned my lesson already. I needed to be talked out of taking Binding of Isaac: Rebirth to upset Witcher 3 in Round 1 of 2015, and I underestimated it again here. It's an understandable mental block, though: Recent game, WRPG, this shouldn't be strong, right? Even though in both cases, the opponent wasn't exactly old either.

Geralt may not have entered the mainstream until The Witcher 3 in 2015, nor made his video game debut at all until 2004, but he actually made his overall debut just a few months after Link. Much was made of the fact that other characters that debuted in non-video game media were not allowed into the bracket, but Geralt was a 1-seed. Was this a trial run, or did Allen just rationalize it that a lot of gamers might not even realize that Geralt originated in a short story and then a series of novels, while everyone knows that Spider-Man originated in a comic book?

And make no mistake, I fully expected Rosalina to be weak. I get the feeling that a lot of people feel that she's been forced into too many of the spinoffs and was better as a single-game character. But she's still a Mario character, and with this division, that could have been enough for multiple wins.

Match 42: Ryu Hayabusa vs. Simon Belmont

Ryu 14743
Simon 15210

Oh hey a close match! This was the match where people really started talking about the Smash boost, even though Ryu Hayabusa had no real reason to hold on to any of his past strength.

Still, it's no surprise that this tripped up a number of people. Ryu Hayabusa is remembered for the two-day clash with Jill in 2004 and the upset of Master Chief in 2010. He had a reputation for being clutch. Simon Belmont... first managed to finish ahead of someone in a contest match when he came in second place in 2013, behind Gordon Freeman and ahead of Hades. In 2007, he finished comfortably in 4th place behind Sam Fisher, a character whose only win was against GFNW-era Gordon. But that doesn't even do justice to how awful Simon was in 2007, because the second-place character in that match was Raiden. Yes, pre-MGS4 Raiden isn't exactly strong, but how is Sam Fisher not horribly weak in the same poll as the protagonist of a Metal Gear Solid game? I first arrived to the board in 2009, so my first Character Battle was 2010, and I picked Simon to beat a newcomer because old characters > new characters. That was the match that Ezio won in order to get to that 2010 Round 2 match with Zelda.

Unlike then, I was in good company here, at least on the board. Nearly three quarters of Gurus got this wrong. The casuals got this right, though only at a 57.94% rate, so it's pretty clear that our knowledge of the past was what ruined us here.

And this was a close match. Most Oracles called it to be close, but not this close, so I got a pretty good position in Oracle despite having the wrong winner because I was one of only two Ryu H pickers to go under 51%. Oracle actually had a worse prediction percentage than Guru, 13 for and 61 against. Except...it wasn't ever really in doubt. Simon got off to a triple-digit lead in 10 minutes, 200+ an hour later, 300+ by the end of the second hour, and 500 less than an hour after crossing 300. To be specific, Simon's lead at 10:25 PM--just 2 hours 25 minutes in--was identical to his final margin of victory of 467, and a grand total of one update in between those saw Ryu Hayabusa get even a few votes closer than that.

Maybe Hayabusa would've been better off with another 48-hour match.

Oh, right, and this was another one where the registered and unregistered voters favored different characters, but the result remained the same. The registered voters were the ones that favored Simon.
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Also known as Cyberchao X.

Match 39: Shovel Knight vs. Captain Toad

Shovel Knight 13672
Captain Toad 15154

This was the first of two matches with a controversy over how a character was credited, and frankly, it was a stupid one. Yes, Captain Toad is not the same as a generic Toad, but it probably doesn't make a huge difference and definitely not with a bracket placement this obvious. A character from a major Nintendo franchise, even a D-lister like (Captain) Toad, isn't losing to an indie character from the current decade like Shovel Knight, and at the same time, there's no way he'd be able to challenge a medium-high midcarder like Aerith, nor could he win an SFF match against Waluigi (debatable at natural strength, but for Waluigi to get there he'd have to have the theorized rally strength.) So this was a nontroversy.

Oh, did I say "obvious path"? The casuals obviously thought otherwise. At 30.55%, this was the largest bracketbuster of the first round. The Gurus didn't exactly kill it, splitting 103-57 in favor of the Captain, but really, that still means that a greater percentage of casuals got this wrong than Gurus got this right. Usually that only happens when the Gurus' prediction percentage is really low.

Of course, maybe this really wasn't super obvious. The Guru Consensus came out fairly close to the actual result, but the individual picks ranged from Captain Toad 63.85% to Shovel Knight 64%. And I was among those that fairly heavily overrated Captain Toad.

This was the match I was referring to in the Dante-Cuphead analysis, and I'll admit, part of why I wasn't sold on Shovel Knight is precisely because I took a flier on the game in 2015. I figured that betting against GTA and WoW is never a bad idea and Chrono Cross is often hated for being a poor excuse for a sequel to Chrono Trigger. I was right to think that GTA:SA and WoW would embarrass themselves, but the former still managed to get past Shovel Knight. I had sole possession of the lead in Guru prior to SA > SK, too, after being I think the only Guru to perfectly call Division 6. It wouldn't have lasted because I had some weird late-round upsets, but it still stands out in my memory.

Also, Shovel Knight the game lost to a GTA game in 2015. Why would Shovel Knight the character be any stronger?

Match 40: Waluigi vs. Aerith Gainsborough

Waluigi 12271
Aerith 16553

Non-leads in Final Fantasy games often struggle to get decent seeds, but when they make the field, they do well. This year, some of the ancillary characters actually got good seeds, but Aerith wasn't among them. (Actually now that I think of it, Tifa had a decent seed in 2013 as well.) She's never had a great seed except for maybe in the split bracket in 2006, but she's 5-1 in Round 1 and the one loss came against Auron. There's this strange dichotomy with Final Fantasy: most of the leads tend to get anti-voted because of the perception that the series is this dominant force, but the real reason that the series is a dominant force is because side characters that struggle to get the nominations to make the field pull these huge seeding upsets. Aerith, Vincent, and Rikku all had seeds in the 20s in 2013 and they all made Round 2, and in Aerith's case, very nearly Round 3. Though I can't help but wonder if Link-Draven would've been as close with Aerith as the third character instead of Shepard.

Also, how is Waluigi still a meme in 2018? He's been a meme for what seems like forever.
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Also known as Cyberchao X.

Match 37: Aloy vs. D. Va

Aloy 13563
D. Va 15256

Outside rally? What outside rally? This was the second match in which the registered voters and the anonymous voters went in opposite directions, but it was the registered voters who favored the so-called rally threat. The raw votes still favored D. Va, though, as there were more total anonymous voters and, amazingly enough, D. Va's registered votes and Aloy's anonymous votes were identical, at 5205.

Or was this a case of one rally being swallowed up by another? D. Va wasn't the only rally threat in action today. Still, even with two rallybait characters in action, the raw votes fell short of 20,000. That wasn't true when Monika's match came around.

Still, this represented Allen's annual friendliness to rallies. Well, not annual because we don't have annual contests, but you know what I mean. L-Block only needed to overcome Laharl to reach Round 2 in 2007; Draven was threatening to lose to Jak namesake of one of the worst fourpacks ever; and Undertale got to start out against a game with an ending so hated that the company released a new ending. Rallies require momentum, and there's always at least one that gets the opportunity. (2007 had more than one. I'll lament this more later.) And here, a feared rally entrant was given an easy first match. Too easy, though; Draven and Undertale weren't strong enough to even beat their opponents without the rallies, and the board's reaction to those huge turnarounds assured that the rallies would be even stronger in future rounds. The only good comparison is L-Block, who got by on natural strength in Round 1 and benefited from LFF in Round 2. Once you've reached Round 3 when you're not considered "strong", even if you beat weak competition to get there, you start to build a bandwagon. We'd see that later in this contest.

Match 38: Jill Valentine vs. Fox McCloud

Jill 13234
Fox 15594

Next.

Okay I'm joking. But honestly, there's not much to say about this match. Two low midcarders went at it, they had a fairly close match, but not close enough to be exciting, and the winner was the one affiliated with Nintendo. The casuals were fairly split on this match, but still favored the right character (55.78% got this correct), as expected; the Gurus heavily favored the correct entrant (just under 7/8 of Gurus got this right), as expected. About the most interesting thing about this match was that the Oracles expected Fox to win more decisively. Maybe Jill outperforming expectations was part of why even in Oracle, DK's win over Leon came as a surprise. It suggested that RE hadn't fallen as far as we'd expected it to, when in reality, it had and Jill merely overperformed because this contest had by far the strongest TJF boost of any contest. That's probably going to be a running theme in this analysis, because it was the defining trend.
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Also known as Cyberchao X.

Part 6 lines:

Outback Bowl: Iowa +7 vs. Mississippi State
Citrus Bowl: Kentucky +6.5 vs. Penn State
Fiesta Bowl: LSU -7 vs. Central Florida
Rose Bowl: Washington +6.5 vs. Ohio State
Sugar Bowl: Texas +12.5 vs. Georgia
FCS National Championship Game: Eastern Washington +14 vs. North Dakota State
CFP National Championship Game: Clemson +6 vs. Alabama

I sometimes wonder how long it will be until NDSU moves up to FBS. They're 7-3 all-time against the FBS, 6-0 since 2010. FBS teams don't want to play them any more.
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Also known as Cyberchao X.

Yeah. Assassin's Creed came out in November 2007, so 2008 was the first contest that Altair was eligible for. And he made Round 3 in that contest and Round 2 in 2010 and 2013.
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Also known as Cyberchao X.

Match 35: Metal Sonic vs. The Boss

Metal Sonic 12480
The Boss 16221

Zen's Metal Sonic rally was a rousing success, but he got a rough draw. The worst possible draw? No, there were stronger 12-seeds. The 12 line was actually really solid, with Charizard, Chun-Li, and Pac-man also on that line. Or is The Boss simply very lucky with her draws? This might actually be the strongest opponent she's beaten to advance in a match (either him or Nathan Drake in 2010, but I don't think Drake was ever really that strong), which is not to say that Metal Sonic is the strongest opponent she's ever beaten. Ironically, the only time she beat someone stronger was also the only time she didn't make it to Round 2! In 2008, she narrowly beat out Tails for third place in Round 1, with the top two spots going to Vincent Valentine and Zelda. Every other contest she's been in, she's made Round 2, but never Round 3. Normally an 80% success rate in Round 1 would suggest a sure midcarder, but it's not a sure thing in this case.

Match 36: Zelda vs. Ezio Auditore da Firenze

Zelda 21673
Ezio 7081

http://board8.wikia.com/wiki/(10)Zelda_vs_(2)Ezio_Auditore_da_Firenze_2010

Above a 60-40, but not a doubling. This is a tripling. Wouldn't quite be a tripling without the registered user bonus since she won the registered vote more handily than the anonymous vote, but pretty close.

Assassin's Creed had some contest strength when the series first began, but it quickly got fatigued by the constant releases. This is the first Round 1 loss by any representative of the series in a Character Battle, as well as the first time since his game came out that Altair missed the field entirely.

Let me repeat that: This is the first time since Assassin's Creed came out that Altair was absent from the second round and the first time since ACII came out that Ezio was. Okay, yes, that's partly a function of how few character battles there have been in the past decade, but that is an astounding stat for a Western franchise.

This should've been an immediate sign of how ridiculous Zelda would be this year, but it was easy to just figure that Ezio had drastically weakened. He probably did, based on his seed (he was a 2 in each of his first two contests). But maybe not as much as it initially appeared, now that we know how strong Zelda is.
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Also known as Cyberchao X.

Huh. I did not realize he was in Dissidia.
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Also known as Cyberchao X.

Part 5:

Orange Bowl: Alabama -14
Military Bowl: Cincinnati -6
Sun Bowl: Pitt +4.5
Redbox Bowl: Oregon -2.5
Liberty Bowl: Oklahoma State +9
Holiday Bowl: Northwestern +7
Gator Bowl: Texas A&M -7

Here's hoping we get some good games; I'm pretty sure I have Mizzou and Utah outright.
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Also known as Cyberchao X.

Part 5 lines:

Orange Bowl: Oklahoma +14 vs. Alabama
Military Bowl: Virginia Tech +6 vs. Cincinnati
Sun Bowl: Pittsburgh +4.5 vs. Stanford
Redbox Bowl: Michigan State +2.5 vs. Oregon
Liberty Bowl: Missouri -9 vs. Oklahoma State
Holiday Bowl: Northwestern +7 vs. Utah
Gator Bowl: North Carolina State +7 vs. Texas A&M

...Huh. There seem to only be six bowl games in January, including the Championship, not 7. I suppose that what I should've done was not included the Celebration Bowl and done 8x5 instead of 6x7. Since I didn't, however, it appears that the FCS Championship Game will be part of Part 6 as well.
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Also known as Cyberchao X.

Match 34: Garrus Vakarian vs. Ramza Beoulve

Garrus 14527
Ramza 14128

Our first match in which the users and the anonymous voters disagreed. In this case, the registered voters favored Ramza, but Garrus won the anonymous voters handily enough to overcome the registered user bonus. Also, it was an exciting match for quite some time. Garrus led at the freeze, Ramza took his first lead on the second update, Garrus had it again after the third by one vote, and then Ramza took the lead on the fourth update and started building. Or trying to; Garrus had the lead for four updates in the second hour as well and only three were consecutive. Ramza would eventually max out his lead at 256 at 1:10 AM before Garrus began cutting, but Ramza would not give up his lead easily. Here are the updates from the 5-6 AM hour.

Ramza leads by 18
Ramza leads by 23
Ramza leads by 6
Garrus leads by 3
Tie
Garrus leads by 7
Ramza leads by 3
Tie
Ramza leads by 3
Ramza leads by 3
Ramza leads by 9
Ramza leads by 10
Ramza leads by 13

Garrus would retake the lead at 6:55 AM, and after Ramza took it right back on the next update, Garrus took the lead for good at 7:05. It took only 4.5 hours for him to build that lead above 300, and it never dropped below 300 over the remaining 8 hours and 25 minutes, but also never grew higher than 419 (a little over an hour from the end of the match). It just sort of went into stasis again. I suppose it was kind of even for most of the match, which meant that Garrus going from trailing at 7 AM to up by 301 at 11:35 was enough to put the match away.

Ramza has never won a match either, but he's not from a main series game like Cecil so we expect less of him. He barely beat out Laharl for third place in that Hogger match. Why do we keep nominating this guy? Also he has roughly the same hairstyle as Guybrush, who also has never won a match. Though in this year's match pic he just plain looked like a girl instead of a guy with a girl's hairstyle. Apparently FFT got some new port that gave him better pictures?
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Also known as Cyberchao X.

Match 31: Estelle Bright vs. Isaac

Estelle 10170
Isaac 18576

This was a 7-10 match featuring a new character from a niche RPG against a returning character from an RPG. You could make comparisons with certain 8-9 matches (although Neku wasn't making his debut when he lost to Laharl) and you would've gotten this right, or you could compare it to some past 7-10 matches in which DAT TOP OPTION was the one bringing the TJF and gotten this totally wrong. Admittedly, the matches in question were from Games Contests, but I still felt like those matches were a valid comparison.

Except Golden Sun's not niche. It was damn near a release game (I think it was released a few months in) for the Game Boy Advance, which came at the height of Nintendo's dominance over the handheld market. The series hasn't necessarily aged well, in part because it took seven years to get a third game and what we got was largely disappointing on multiple accounts, chief among them the gameplay but also that it explicitly ends on a sequel hook (Lost Age definitely ends with some loose threads, but it would've still been a decent place to end the story. Dark Dawn ends with "hey, remember that thing that seemed like it was going to be driving the plot for the first, uh, maybe at most a sixth of the game? You forgot? Don't worry, so did the characters, because it didn't come up at all once the main villains were introduced, but it's still a threat.")

Golden Sun and its characters have really never performed poorly. Isaac doesn't have that many wins largely because he always draws either Noble Niners or high Nintendo midcarders, but he hasn't done poorly, and of course we have Golden Sun > San Andreas and Felix getting 47% on Master Chief when Chief was still a midcarder.

Camelot, please get off your asses and make a fourth game, and make it more like the first two.

Match 32: Kirby vs. Guile

Kirby 21439
Guile 7341

It's hard to believe, given how beastly he is now, that it took until 2008 for Kirby to even face a Noble Niner. He wasn't losing to nobodies, but he was always knocked out by a fellow midcarder. Overall I feel like fighting game characters performed better than usual this year but it wasn't on display in this match. Maybe Guile's just weak.

Match 33: Squall vs. Hat Kid

Squall 21773
Hat Kid 6920

It's easy to look at this blowout and wonder how Squall managed to get so thoroughly embarrassed two rounds from now, but the answer is that he has a really weak opponent here. The enduring memory I have of Hat Kid's time in this contest is how frequently she was mistaken for a boy and someone had to correct someone else. That sounds like the epitome of obscurity to me.
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Also known as Cyberchao X.

Paratroopa1 posted...

Purdue +3.5
West Virginia +1.5
Washington State -3
Michigan -6
South Carolina -5
Arizona Bowl: Arkansas State -1.5
Notre Dame +12.5

I probably would have taken Auburn -2.5 but I don't like them -3.5

Cougs

Florida sucks

I had to look up Arkansas State AND Nevada's resumes and they both told me nothing. why is this game happening amongst all the other good ones

I have no idea why Clemson is favored by that many points

Because Arizona Bowl. It's always been on the 29th. It's even worse than usual this year because they're sticking all the playoff games on the Saturday before New Year's instead of making them New Year's Day games like they should be.
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Also known as Cyberchao X.

Purdue +3.5
Syracuse -1.5
Wazzu -3
Michigan -6
South Carolina -5
Nevada +1.5
Notre Dame +12.5
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Also known as Cyberchao X.

I suppose that makes sense. I probably get more advice from the message boards than the actual FAQs, at least for newer games. This place is a remnant of an older era.

I kind of liken it to how way back in the day, I got my fanfiction fix from individual fan websites that I found through Anipike--Classic Anipike, not the revamped version (though based on my timeframe, even the revamped version is probably older than 15 years old.) Then I discovered fanfiction.net, and I've been there ever since. Now that site is considered a remnant of a bygone time, with most younger people preferring An Archive of Our Own.

Heh. Originally when I made this account, it was supposed to be XVIII, but then I forgot the password and I think I made it with an outdated email address so I couldn't recover it, so I decided 28 was a good number, too. Parallels what happened on FF.net, where I stubbornly tried to hold on to AOL after my dad switched us to MSN (lul on both accounts, I know) and ended up creating my first account on an email address I was about to lose. Ended up having to add the X (which is not the Roman numeral for 10; it's just an X and my headcanon for the character was a full-fledged robot as opposed to the cyborg original), and since that was my first proliferation, that's what I ended up choosing as my username when I wanted to unify my online identity. Except that didn't happen until fairly recently, and by then I'd built up so much Karma on this account that I kept it as my main despite it not matching my identity elsewhere on the Internet.

...See, told you that it was also influenced by my love of SA2 back in the early 2000s. I've had that name on FF.net since 2003.
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Also known as Cyberchao X.

Yeah, but this one wasn't much better. The registered user bonus makes the totals look higher than they really are; if you look at the raw totals, this contest struggled to reach 20K early on as well.
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Wait, I really left BKSheikah in my sig all the way until Advokaiser dethroned him as reigning Guru champion? I need to come here more often.

Part 4 lines:

Music City Bowl: Auburn -3.5 vs. Purdue
Camping World Bowl: Syracuse -1.5 vs. West Virginia
Alamo Bowl: Iowa State +3 vs. Washington State
Peach Bowl: Florida +6 vs. Michigan
Belk Bowl: South Carolina -5 vs. Virginia
Arizona Bowl: Arkansas State -1.5 vs. Nevada
Cotton Bowl: Notre Dame +12.5 vs. Clemson
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Wait, I really left BKSheikah in my sig all the way until Advokaiser dethroned him as reigning Guru champion? I need to come here more often.

jcgamer107 posted...

There's my friends and I's seat at the Quick Lane Bowl (picture taken during Georgia Tech's one touchdown). Wore my Western Michigan jersey to rep PJ Fleck's (current Minnesota coach) old school. Seems like a really good dude and coach.

Yeah it was bizarre to me that GA Tech was favored - I had a lotta points on Minnesota in my confidence point contest. Not too exciting of a game, certainly not compared to the nine-interception Cheez-It Bowl, featuring a truly remarkable *double-pass* interception:

https://twitter.com/Deadspin/status/1078167394894393344

EDIT - I just saw that the bowl that was rained out was sponsored by a water cleanup service lmao

Wow. That's almost as ironic as a lawn mower company sponsoring a bowl played on artificial turf.
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Wait, I really left BKSheikah in my sig all the way until Advokaiser dethroned him as reigning Guru champion? I need to come here more often.

jcgamer107 posted...

Hmmm...apparently the First Responder Bowl was cancelled due to weather, with no plans to reschedule? Do we still need to get 4 right in that group?

Sadly, yes. The game is treated as a push.
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Wait, I really left BKSheikah in my sig all the way until Advokaiser dethroned him as reigning Guru champion? I need to come here more often.