Lurker > TsunamiXXVIII

Match 125: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild vs. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

BotW 18203
SSBU 8661

Okay now this is just getting silly. With 67.76% of the vote, Breath of the Wild put up the second-most dominant performance in a semifinal match. There have been four doublings in the semifinals or later of a contest, all in the semifinals: Link over Mega Man in Character Battle III, The Legend of Zelda over Metal Gear in the Series Contest, Ocarina of Time over Super Mario RPG in BGE III, and this match. (Zelda over Metal Gear is by far the #1, clearing 73%; the other two performances mentioned here were also in the 67.XX% range, but lower than BotW's 67.76%). Obviously there's a common thread there, but there's also something about this match that stands out--namely, the strength of the loser. The Series Contest was never going to have enough strong series to avoid having some lopsided semis--we knew right off the bat that it was Zelda vs. Final Fantasy, nothing else. Mega Man has never been one of the stronger Noble Niners--he has only three wins against the NN and none since 2005, all against Sonic and Snake (who, remember, was thought to be the weakest of the NN before 2006). And SMRPG, it turned out its strength had been hidden by unfortunate SFF situations in the first two BGE contests, but still, it was the beneficiary of a pair of divisions with little Nintendo/Square competition, which seemed almost intentional as Allen wanted at least one outsider in the Final Four. But a Smash game? The SFF-hammer was strong here, and it was pretty much a foregone conclusion that Breath of the Wild would romp in the finals. The only question remaining was how it would fare in the inevitable bonus match against Majora's Mask.

---

Also known as Cyberchao X.
Now let us all sing the praises of azuarc, Guru champion.

Wait, has it seriously been that long since I even bumped this?

---

Also known as Cyberchao X.
Now let us all sing the praises of azuarc, Guru champion.

Damnit I got so close to the end! And I've just been forgetting about it. I could easily finish this in one more sitting.

---

Also known as Cyberchao X.
Now let us all sing the praises of azuarc, Guru champion.

Been slipping again.

---

Also known as Cyberchao X.
Now let us all sing the praises of azuarc, Guru champion.

Very soon. Hopefully.

---

Also known as Cyberchao X.
Now let us all sing the praises of azuarc, Guru champion.

Match 121: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild vs. Mass Effect 2

BotW 17691
ME2 8199

It seemed that in the end, the concerns about Mass Effect 2's strength based on its early performances were warranted after all. I get that Dragon Quest XI was the game that allowed the series to finally break through here in the US, but given what we saw in the first GotD, we had to figure that the top games from 2010 and 2011 would be premium contenders. (Naturally, 2011's addition to the Zelda series failed to even make the bracket. LOL 2011 Board 8. Though in fairness, we had no way of knowing at the time that 2017 was going to be to Gen Z what 1998 was to Gen Y, not to mention we've always had the "boomer" mentality and never really gave a crap about Gen Z anyway.) Mass Effect 2 barely outperforming DQXI was, quite frankly, pitiful. You could make a case that ME2 was being punished for the franchise's later sins, and it probably was, but it just reinforced that in this contest, older wasn't better. If this was the direction that GameFAQs was heading, the scarcity of contests was suddenly no longer looking like a good thing; contests had the potential to become interesting again, even if they'd never return to the glory of their heyday.

Match 122: Super Smash Bros. Ultimate vs. Xenoblade Chronicles

SSBU 15437
XBC 10461

Smash Ultimate winning this match was never in doubt; about the only thing that would've even stood a chance would've been Odyssey the previous round. But how about Xenoblade breaking 40% here? Remember, in 2015, Xenoblade lost an extremely close match to Donkey Kong Country 2, which went out the next round and was only marginally more impressive against Fire Emblem: Awakening. The Gurus favored Three Houses over Xenoblade for exactly those reasons--Awakening was polarizing among the fandom while Three Houses received a far more uniformly positive reception, and the "far weaker" Awakening got 47.89% on something that Xenoblade was only able to get 49.76% on so that gap could easily be overcome.

And Fire Emblem turned out to be the popular pick for Turd of the Contest, and honestly Donkey Kong has a case for it as well, with its only game going out and getting beaten easily by Devil May Cry 5. I said it in the write-up of that match, but it bears repeating: Devil May Cry has never even been in a Best Game Ever, and in the first Game of the Decade, 2 and 4 missed entirely, 1 required vote-ins to make the field, and 3 picked up the series' only win...in a failure to double a game that was never released outside of Japan, in a round where it had massive pic advantage because the theme of "box art" meant it was facing "Mother 3" on a solid red background. And it's not like DMC5 went out in Round 2 and showed that it had revitalized the series; its loss was entirely the level of beatdown that would be expected, both from the strength of its opponent and from the weakness that its own series had shown in the past. Normally, this would be the perfect place for shouting FRAUD. It might still be; Division 4 wasn't exactly strong, seeing as how even we had a Fire Emblem game as our Guru favorite, the lolcasuals seemingly had an lolGTA game as their favorite (with fellow Rockstar game Red Dead Redemption the seeming #2), and the division final pit Xenoblade against a Vita remake of a game that hadn't exactly dominated past contests to begin with, including memorably losing by 7 votes in a meaningless battle for 3rd place and becoming easily the weakest game in Round 3 of the first GotD. And, yep, Division winner, that's about where past FRAUDs finished. So calling it now, "Xenoblade is a FRAUD"...

...wait, weren't we discussing a match where it broke 40% against Smash Ultimate? It's easy to forget that this discussion is going on not because it's in this match, but because it did well in this match. Except that actually changes nothing, because bandwagon effect (seriously, it sucks that P4G and XBC had to run into each other; they were the two biggest bandwagons of the contest) and because a lot of our earlier FRAUDs didn't even need to have big wins, just impressive losses. Remember Shadow getting roughly 45% on Mario in his debut, then going against a similarly overrated Tidus in Round 1 in his follow-up in the rare double-FRAUD? (Seriously why are Tidus's X-Stat numbers for 2002-03 so good? Oh right because the game was still brand new then.) Or Magus getting overrated to high hell for an overperformance against Link (in the sprite round, which quite frequently allows characters too new to have an 8-bit sprite to overperform on characters old enough to have one--and that might be the only time you ever hear anything related to Chrono Trigger referred to as "new")--and by the way, this directly relates to the previous example, because Magus only narrowly got past Ganondorf the previous round after Ganondorf had only narrowly beaten Tidus the round before that--in 2003, then outright assigned his 2003 value again in 2004 because lol CJayC SFF bracket, leading to the rare unanimous Board 8 selection going wrong in 2005. (Other examples of unanimous picks gone wrong: Mario in Round 2 in 2013, Link in Round 3 in 2013...that's probably it, although the reasons that there aren't more in 2013 are pretty hilarious in their own right.)

So, yeah, bandwagon, soft path, FRAUD. We're all good with that, right?

Match 123: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt vs. Persona 5

W3 15182
P5 11670

The biggest sign that Persona's finally made it big worldwide? This game is being billed simply as "Persona 5". Up until recently, literally everything in the greater Megami Tensei franchise had the "Shin Megami Tensei" title bolted onto it as a prefix regardless of what its original Japanese title was; even knowing full well it isn't actually an SMT game, I've been using that as one of the tags on the YouTube uploads of my blind playthrough of the first Megami Tensei. But here you have Persona 5, devoid of the SMT title and going for 43.46% on freaking Witcher 3. This was the first time all contest that Witcher 3 looked vulnerable, and it seems silly to say that about a game that was going to be the Guru underdog in the semifinals and an underdog in every other metric in the finals (or maybe it was a casual underdog in the semis too; I procrastinated too long after the contest and they've already taken down the standings for this one, even though you can still see them for older contests), but that's how dominant Witcher 3 had been. It was legitimately looking like it had a chance at the upset over BotW after two rounds. This quashed any faint prayer it m

Okay, seriously, what the crap, GameFAQs? I was able to finish up my write-ups for the 2018 contest mere days before this contest started, and a mere two months after this contest ends, they've already taken down the stats page?

---

Also known as Cyberchao X.
Now let us all sing the praises of azuarc, Guru champion.

I need to just get this over with. It's been months.

---

Also known as Cyberchao X.
Now let us all sing the praises of azuarc, Guru champion.

Apparently not

---

Also known as Cyberchao X.
Now let us all sing the praises of azuarc, Guru champion.

I dunno maybe tomorrow (or technically later today)?

---

Also known as Cyberchao X.
Now let us all sing the praises of azuarc, Guru champion.

Yeah, I feel like I've been forgetting about this so much that I'm afraid it'll have purged every time I look for it.

---

Also known as Cyberchao X.
Now let us all sing the praises of azuarc, Guru champion.

I've been doing a lot of things.

---

Also known as Cyberchao X.
Now let us all sing the praises of azuarc, Guru champion.

And up once more

---

Also known as Cyberchao X.
Now let us all sing the praises of azuarc, Guru champion.

You'd think that going as it went, this wouldn't have happened again.

---

Also known as Cyberchao X.
Now let us all sing the praises of azuarc, Guru champion.

bump

---

Also known as Cyberchao X.
Now let us all sing the praises of azuarc, Guru champion.

Match 119: Dark Souls vs. The Last of Us

Dark Souls 14919
Last of Us 10669

Time and again, we've seen that hype often trumps an actual release when it comes to strength on this site. We saw it in 2008, when Brawl disappointed so many Melee fans and led to all of the characters that had seemingly boosted in 2007 due to being in trailers falling back to earth, and we saw it in 2010 when Golden Sun pulled an upset in the first GotD on the release date of its disappointing sequel, Dark Dawn. (Though while I certainly had issues with the harsh difficulty spike after a certain spoilery event and the inability to return to areas earlier in the game to pick up anything you might have missed, my biggest gripe is that whereas Lost Age ended with a vague sequel hook that took seven years to deliver, Dark Dawn ended on a clear To Be Continued and we haven't gotten anything in over a decade.) Technically, we even saw it back in the very first Character Battle, given how poorly regarded Super Mario Sunshine is. So when the long-awaited The Last of Us 2 got a bunch of scenes and gameplay footage leaked not long before this match, it should've been fuel for a major upset, right?

Wrong, because what was leaked depicted the game to be absolutely execrable, with the internet exploding and the general consensus being outrage at the creators themselves, considering it to be contemptuous to their fans. Uh...yeah, you keep posting your clickbaity titles, guys. I say "depicted" because not long after this match, it was confirmed that what the hackers (yes, this was the work of hackers, not anyone affiliated with Naughty Dog) leaked was in fact fully outdated. That's not how gameplay will actually work in the finished version, and the scenes...well, what type of real gamer wants plot spoilers, anyway? That takes half the fun out of it! So in the end, it all added up to the fans getting massively trolled, and the general consensus was that this would've made this number unreliable, and that TLoU was destined to underperform here. Which, uh...kind of means this should've been a pretty close match? With these types of vote totals, it would only take a couple thousand votes swinging the other direction to outright flip this match, even less if those were registered voters. (Remember, swinging the votes means subtracting them from one side and adding them to the other. So the entire 4250-vote lead would in fact be turned by a mere 1063 registered users that voted for Dark Souls having instead voted for The Last of Us. Though given how low the total number of voters is, that actually is a large figure.)

Still, in a match that seemed prime for Dark Souls to overperform, it only got 58.30%. Oracle consensus: 56.64%. An overperformance, yes, but not a huge one. Seeing as how Dark Souls had fewer brackets taking it to the semifinals than either of its two potential quarterfinal opponents, this was definitely considered a discouraging result for Dark Souls fans...which made it an encouraging result for just about every Guru, even the eliminated ones, with the exceptions of Seginustemple, Xeybozn, and Agent_M, each of whom had a route to victory contingent on Dark Souls winning the next round. Xeybozn and Agent_M both needed Smash Ultimate to win it all, with Xeybozn specifically requiring Witcher 3 > Dark Souls in the semifinal while Agent_M would win it if Dark Souls either lost to Persona 5 in the seminal or made the finals and lost to Ultimate directly; while Seginustemple was the lone Guru to take Dark Souls to win it all--but had enough mistakes elsewhere that the most likely path for this, defeating Witcher 3 in the semifinal and Breath of the Wild in the final, would not be enough. If Dark Souls made the final and lost to anything other than Smash Ultimate, or if it won it all specifically by defeating Witcher 3 and Breath of the Wild, the Guru Champion would be a troll account that had entered both the Guru and their official bracket under the name COVlD-19. That's a lowercase L, mind you, not an uppercase i, but the intent is clear. Most people were calling this "the darkest timeline", and so the prospect of Dark Souls > Witcher 3 was not something we were looking forward to.

Match 120: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim vs. Pokmon HeartGold/SoulSilver

Skyrim 15311
HGSS 10284

And with this, all three of the remakes of older games were eliminated shy of the Elite Eight--but all three had only just been eliminated this round. Given this board's penchant for things that are old, is it any wonder that they all made the Sweet 16? (I mean, sure, a bunch of other games in the bracket had updated remakes, but their originals were also in this decade--like Mario Kart 8 (Ultra) and Xenoblade Chronicles--or was XBC a straight-up port? I don't even know.) But that said, all were worthy candidates. The original GSC pulled 45% on Melee before Melee started rallying to make it a 60-40 match; Persona 4 did better on Twilight Princess in 2015 than it did in its third-round exit to RE4 in 2010, and Resident Evil 2 straight-up won the GotY polls for 2019. Speaking of which, if you count these remakes as being ways of "cheating" and getting older games into this contest, then Pokmon GSC is the only game to have been in all five Games Contests. (It's one of 11 games that had been in all three BGEs and the first GotD; obviously there are far more that have been in all three BGEs.) Skyrim's performance here was solid, nearly breaking 60% and outperforming Dark Souls against what was presumed, in the wake of the disastrous TLoU2 leaks, to be a stronger game. But it was still a remake and therefore something that "didn't belong in this contest", and a handheld game to boot, so there would be doubters.

But let's be real here--saying GSC and HGSS are the same game is like saying that Ultimate is just Smash 4 with an expanded roster. Same goes for FRLG and ORAS to the games they're remakes of, though maybe not so much for any future remakes because honestly, the changes in each generation past the fourth have largely been minor rebalancing issues and weird gimmicks. I'm not saying I dislike the changes, though I'll admit I'm none too happy with LGPE and SwSh "GO-ifying" the series, but stuff like Triple Battles, Mega Evolutions, Z-Moves, and Gigantamax is not the same as Gen 2 splitting the Special stat into Special Attack and Special Defense and introducing held items, Gen 3 introducing Abilities, or Gen 4 making it so that each individual move was designated either Physical or Special instead of it being determined by the move's type. Those were all very big changes, and as long as they don't try to use a Dragon-type move on a Pokmon that used t

Match 117: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt vs. God of War

Witcher 3 17096
God of War 9418

Well this was a fairly predictable blowout. Over 50% of all brackets had The Witcher 3 here, with Gurus in particular calling it at nearly an 80% clip and almost two thirds of the Gurus that missed it having instead picked The Witcher 3's opponent from the previous round.

...Correction. Predictable result, yes; predictable blowout, maybe not so much. There's no exact data on the Second Chance brackets, which were something vaguely resembling the Oracle except you could only pick whole percentages and there was no option to pick a winner with 50% (which meant that a truly perfect score was impossible because such a pick would've been required to get the maximum 50 points from Xenoblade-P4G), but looking at the Oracle...Witcher 3 was the unanimous choice to win, but 51 out of 53 Gurus went under on the percentage, 44 of them by at least 5% and all of them by enough that the two that went over had the top two predictions. I guess it just seemed obvious to me because I was the highest pick and thusly the second-place finisher in that match. All in all, the Oracle Consensus was 6.30% lower than Witcher 3's actual score. Wait, hold on...

Match #33 - The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt vs Assassin's Creed Odyssey
Consensus: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt 76.65%
Result: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt 84.07%

Match #81 - Mass Effect 3 vs The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
Consensus: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt 69.09%
Result: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt 78.40%

Match #105 - Super Mario Galaxy 2 vs The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
Consensus: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt 61.29%
Result: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt 60.60%

...Okay, so there was at least one match where Witcher 3 was fairly close to expectation, actually coming up a tad short. Ironically, it's the one where there were the most people picking it to lose outright. But that's still the third time in four rounds where The Witcher 3 vastly outperformed expectations. At this point, it was more or less taken for granted that the Guru Contest would be decided by Dark Souls vs. Skyrim; Witcher 3 making it to the finals and losing was more or less set in stone.

Match 118: Persona 5 vs. Portal 2

Persona 5 15239
Portal 2 11276

This, on the other hand, was predictable no matter how you sliced it. Almost as well predicted by Gurus as the previous match, with Oracle percentages bunched up right around the actual outcome (50 out of 53 Gurus were within 5%, most of them dramatically so), casual prediction percentage...29.22%? Ah, well, it's a Round 4 match, so a high prediction percentage would be odd. Even Skyrim and Witcher 3 barely cracked 50%...Huh. Nope, P5's prediction percentage last round was 63.69%, so this constitutes an upset for the casuals. See, I knew they'd screw this one up! And Portal 2's prediction percentage last round was 23.57%, coming off a 50.55% prediction percentage the round before, so...the true casual favorite in this match was Red Dead Redemption 2? It did have one of the highest R1 prediction percentages, and an R2 prediction percentage nearing 70 entering the match against Portal 2 and its prediction percentage barely above 50. ...Although it'd have to retain a fairly good percentage each round to still have the plurality; P5 and RDR2 had similar R2 prediction percentages but then P5 barely lost anything from R2 to R3. 73.69% to 63.69%. LOL Sonic Mania, almost no one had it (or Super Meat Boy, since it seems like Mania wasn't favored by much) beating Persona 5.

Incidentally, had Persona 5 made it all the way to the finals, we would've had our first two-time Guru champion...by tiebreaker over another past Guru champion. The last point of divergence between the brackets of Rivals Contest Guru winner SuperNiceDog and CBVIII Guru winner Dr Football was the Division 4 final, where Football had the Cookie pick of Three Houses (already eliminated one round earlier) and SND had Xenoblade. Once Xenoblade won, they were guaranteed to finish with identical scores, and would have beaten out everyone else if Persona 5 were to win two more matches. Dr Football appeared to still have the better tiebreaker, though, which is maybe ironic since SND's win came in a gimmicky contest so easy to predict that the Battle Challenge required an Oracle component hastily tacked onto its finale to break all the ties. (Relatively speaking, of course; even that year didn't have a single perfect Guru, though SND wasn't the only one with but a single wrong pick on a 1-point match.) They weren't even the only past champions still alive at this point--Skyrim defeating Witcher 3 in the semifinals (yes, Witcher 3 specifically; a win over P5 would've given it to someone else) would have given the win to Villains Contest winner yoblazer as long as the overall champion wasn't Smash Ultimate. Guru Contests, it seems, are much like the World Series of Poker Main Event--it's really hard to win it twice, but you tend to see the same names making deep runs. But on the other hand, it's still possible to fluke into a deep run, like when I was still alive with a mere 5 matches left in 2013. I'm still mad as hell that it wasn't two matches left--I already knew that my bracket was doomed by then because Vivi's nonsensical upset of Mario meant that a literal second Pokmon character had won Division 8, but come on, we'd seen Mega Man underperform 1v1 against Zero in 2004 and get LFFed into a loss against Weighted Companion Cube in 2008. The Guru stats even back this up; Charizard was heavily favored there. Huh, maybe that wasn't a fluke? My bracket was good enough to still be alive at that point if the cookie pick came through. How'd I manage to put together a bracket that strong, given my usual track record?

---

Also known as Cyberchao X.
Now let us all sing the praises of azuarc, Guru champion.

Oh, right, keep this up

---

Also known as Cyberchao X.
Now let us all sing the praises of azuarc, Guru champion.

Well,Ulti should be making the pages soon,if he hasn't already, so I'd better keep this well and bumped.

---

Also known as Cyberchao X.
Now let us all sing the praises of azuarc, Guru champion.

Bumping.

---

Also known as Cyberchao X.

Match 115: Super Smash Bros. Ultimate vs. Super Mario Odyssey

Ultimate 14975
Odyssey 11796

This was a very hyped match, and it only grew in hype when Odyssey outperformed Ultimate just about every step of the way leading up to the match. The common belief, however, was that the Nintendo hierarchy would assert itself when it mattered, and that's exactly what happened. Back in 2009, Brawl > Galaxy was considered an upset. We're smarter than that now. This was just a nice cozy 56-44 win that we could all put aside while we watched the fireworks going on in Division 4 at the same time.

Match 116: Persona 4 Golden vs. Xenoblade Chronicles

P4G 13334
XBC 13445

So where do we start?

In Round 2, Persona 4 Golden led Red Dead Redemption from wire to wire, but never managed to establish a terribly large lead; at 458, it was a new record for smallest max lead by a wire-to-wire winner, breaking the record set by Ike > Proto Man in 2013--which, it should be noted, was a 12-hour match. It then followed that up by taking a second space in that category's top 10 with a wire-to-wire win over GTA V with a maximum lead of 616.

But Xenoblade's no stranger to wire-to-wire dogfights, either. While it was broken three times during the Legends'/Losers' Bracket segment of the 2018 contest, Xenoblade's loss to DKC2 in 2015 was at one point the record holder for closest wire-to-wire 24 hour match, with the largest lead being 290 votes by Xenoblade. So there was definitely a good chance that we'd see something exciting, especially since there wouldn't be much bracket voting to get in the way; P4G's R3 prediction percentage was 14.01% and XBC's was 16.7%.

Xenoblade jumped out to the quick lead, going up by 100 in just half an hour and requiring less than two hours to push it above 200, but it took a while for it to increase much beyond that, falling into a pattern of ebbs and flows. By early morning, it had gotten into the mid 300s...er, the low-to-mid-300s...well, anyway, at the halfway point of the match, the lead was at 342, which would turn out to be its peak. That right there was good for a tie for #10 on the closest wire-to-wire matches list (1v1s only). And it looked like it was probably going to get that record for a wire-to-wire winner without any trouble, because P4G wasn't really doing much more than stalling things out; XBC's lead crested above 300 for an update at 10 minutes past noon, and it was 274 at 3 PM, five hours from the end of the match.

25 minutes later, it was down to 222, and it kept dropping. Xenoblade recovered somewhat, and had the lead at 232 with two hours to go...but one hour later, it was down to 99. The comeback was real; there was a pinned rally topic, and P4G was going to pull off another ridiculous win.

Except...it didn't happen that way. XBC won the next update, then lost a couple, then won three in a row. The last hour was just a giant stall, and it was Xenoblade with the big final update to push its lead back up over 100. The record was secure. But I can't help thinking that there was another record this match should've been chasing instead...

P4G 4484 4445 8929 13334
XBC 4585 4336 8921 13445

Are you kidding me?! Yeah, this match was fun and all, we were expecting a lit final hour based on the penultimate-hour comeback...but without the registered user bonus, this becomes a legitimate final-update F5-er. 8 votes. 8 measly votes, which would've been just one away from the 1v1 record. Even with the registered voter bonus (which flipped the match, mind you), it still squeaked into the overall top 25 with its final margin of 111, comfortably landing in the 1v1 Top 25 at #13. And that wasn't the only list where this match was #13 among 1v1s and #25 among all matches. Xenoblade' prediction percentage of 6.29% landed it at those exact same spots on the list of biggest surprises of all time.

Normally this would be the point where I'd say "6.29% is less than half of 16.7%, so this was an upset", but I don't think it's necessarily applicable here. It wouldn't surprise me in the least to find out that P4G's prediction percentage was below 5.27%, which would be the equivalent percentage of 14.01%. These games were both considered underdogs all the way back in Round 2, though XBC's prediction percentage was at least close to half of its R1 prediction percentage, and they were both considered underdogs again in Round 3. So, yeah, of course most people who picked Xenoblade to reach this match thought it would lose; most of them likely had it facing GTAV or RDR. I mean, I do expect that "top half winner" was a favorite over "bottom half winner" to take Division 4. Just looking at those prediction percentages, it wouldn't surprise me to think that Red Dead Redemption had the second-highest prediction percentage to win this match in spite of the game it's trailing being its would-be R3 opponent.

It's just a shame that this would likely be the only entry on the "most surprising results" list for the entire contest. XBC itself was done for next round, of course, leaving only the second semifinal as a match that would likely have that much debate--and even then, the fact that the apparent favorite to win it isn't the one that's going to get its prediction percentage depressed by a debatable quarterfinal match, even that should be able to get the requisite 10% prediction percentage to avoid the lists.

Oh, yeah, I guess that's a thing to note. With this match, the cutoff to make the 1v1-only list fell below 10%, with Auron's division title from 2018 (9.97% prediction percentage) falling to #25. Can't lol at the casuals on this one, though; only 9.86% of Gurus got this right. That percentage would've been even lower if P4G had won (which was my selection, for the record), though even if the Guru favorite had won, it'd only be 44.37%. And that favorite was...Fire Emblem: Three Houses. Which I guess is still a possibility for who the casuals' favorite was, but I'd still bet theirs was GTAV.

---

Also known as Cyberchao X.

Match 114: Mass Effect 2 vs. Resident Evil 2

ME2 13236
RE2 11992

Our second GotY vs. GotY match of the contest pitted the 2010 and 2019 winners against each other, and while normally you'd just say "OldFAQs" and pick the 2010 game without a second thought, the 2019 game was a remake of a 1998 game, and as we all know, when in doubt, pick the closest thing you can to 1998. That meme started in the Years Contest itself, but it probably held true for the most part in 2015 as well, aside from Undertale matches. It certainly explains away a lot of the strange "upsets", although back then we were just calling it "Year of the SNES". This match was briefly on the list of 25 closest wire-to-wire matches where the loser never led...for a few minutes, until I noticed that HGSS-Nier had been closer and hadn't been put up there yet. Which is better than the few hours I expected it to be there, since a match in progress at the time was looking like it could outright break the record! But we'll talk about that when we get there. Back to this match, where it was plainly evident that nostalgia is the route to success for these old companies. Capcom's learned that here; RE2Make was a huge hit and they've already followed it up with RE3Make here in 2020. I'd say that we can expect an RE4Make by 2022, but they literally just ported the original RE4 to Switch in 2019. Then again, the Switch is notably absent from the list of consoles that RE2Make and RE3Make are on, so I guess maybe Nintendo's still being looked at as the "little brother" the way it was in the "WiiS2/PS360" era. So yeah, RE4Make for the PS5 and Xbox Series X, coming to stores in 2022. Book it. Square seems to be learning that lesson as well with FF7R. Sega kind of is as well with Mania, but they're so far gone that nobody seems to even care. Nintendo, of course, keeps doing their own thing, but a lot of their recent output has been aimed at trying to recapture what people loved about their earlier games rather than continuing to innovate--just look at the two Zelda games in the bracket, or even FE:A. And Konami...doesn't really care, because their profile is so far diversified beyond just video games. Apparently they did try to produce a Metal Gear Solid movie back in the mid-00s, and it completely fell through by 2010...but there was a new version put into the works at Columbia Pictures (owned by Sony) as early as 2012, and as of the end of 2019, a draft of the film is complete. And it's got Hideo Kojima on board! Which brings me to the question, who the hell owns this franchise? Konami did put out Metal Gear Survive in 2018, after Kojima was no longer with them, but apparently they can still go around Konami for the film? Well, at any rate, I've long felt that with MGSV wrapping up the Big Boss arc, going as far as to end with the lead-up to the Outer Heaven mission, that Metal Gear Solid 6 should just outright be a remake of the original Metal Gear. Honestly that's something that Konami could do even without Kojima; it wouldn't be the first time (non-canon NES port, anyone?)

But of course, nostalgia couldn't measure up to Mass Effect 2, still an incredibly strong game and likely one that's only bolstered by the later entries in the series being disappointments. This was a 52-48 match pretty much the whole way through, which makes it especially ridiculous that it even came close to being on a "closest wire-to-wire matches" list. Maybe if I have some spare time I'll archive binge the poll updater and craft a wire-to-wire list that's based on percentage rather than raw totals; the lowered totals make the current lists drastically favor the most recent contests.

Doesn't make the possibility of a new record any less exciting, though!

---

Also known as Cyberchao X.

Match 111: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim vs. Mario Kart 8

Skyrim 16562
MK8 10635

Hey, remember back in Round 1 where someone suggested that voters would only view "Mario Kart 8" as being the Wii U game instead of including the Switch's "Mario Kart 8 Deluxe" and that as such, it might not even get past Uncharted 4? I really hope that one got archived in Zen's topic. I don't think it did. That's some quality wrongness right there. I mean, ignoring the fact that this site has always been pro-Nintendo and as such, a Wii U exclusive vs. a PS4 exclusive probably favors the former...voters aren't stupid. I guess maybe the fact that there were remakes in the bracket might have colored that person's judgment? I guess it's a fair point. There had long been arguments that "Mega Man" represented all iterations of Mega Man, not just Mega Man Classic, until X was finally allowed in as a separate entrant. I can even understand the logic that CJayC used for excluding X; it's a slippery slope, since technically most Links are different entities. Just at the time of the first Character Battle, you already had Zelda/Zelda II Link, ALttP/LA/Oracle Link, and OoT/MM Link, and by Character Battle II, they'd already been joined by WW/PH Link and Four Swords Link.

And Mario Kart is surprisingly strong here. We'd seen it before with Super Mario Kart going toe to toe with Super Metroid twice in 2009, and that was SFF. This performance feels kind of bad for Skyrim, but it honestly isn't really.

At 69.25%, Skyrim's R3 prediction percentage was second only to Breath of the Wild's...84.65%. Which means the percentage that picked against it was 30.75% to 15.35%, a little more than twice as many. Yikes! BotW was looking to be one of the most predictable winners ever.

Match 112: Pokmon HeartGold/SoulSilver vs. Nier: Automata

HGSS 14109
N:A 13091

Nier actually managed a slight win with the unregistered voters, but it wasn't enough to even come close as HG/SS managed to win by over 1000 votes. The most interesting thing about the match was that said lead didn't break 1000 until the literal final update. It entered that update with a lead of 999, though, which is fun. Certainly a lot more fun than 1018.

It really does amaze me that HGSS was able to get a 3-seed while the rest of the series was shut out of the bracket entirely. I''m not complaining about the first half, because HG/SS was amazing, but the Pokmon fanbase couldn't manage to get a 14-16 seed for the Gen 5 games? Were B/W and B2/W2 splitting nominations or something?

Gen 5 really did end up as the forgotten generation. I feel like this is at least in part because of Gen 6 being the first generation to have a unified worldwide release, which meant that outside of Japan, Gen 5 had a really short lifespan--2011 for Black and White, 2013 for X and Y. Wait a minute...

Pokmon Black/White release date outside Japan: March 4(EU)/6(NA)/10(AU), 2011
Pokmon X/Y release date: October 12, 2013

Span of 947-953 days.

Pokmon Red/Blue release dates:
NA: 9/28/98
AU: 10/23/98
EU: 10/5/99

Pokmon Gold/Silver release dates:
JP: 11/21/99
AU: 10/13/00
NA: 10/15/00
EU: 4/6/01

The Japanese release date for Gold/Silver is irrelevant, but I included it because lol at R/B being out in Europe for less than two months when G/S came out in Japan. But dang! Gen 1's lifespan outside of Japan is even shorter than Gen 5's. 748 days in NA, and a mere 549 in Europe. Wait, wait, there's more.

Pokmon Ruby/Sapphire:
NA: 3/19/03
AU: 4/3/03
EU: 7/25/03

885 days in NA, the longest of the three, and 840 in Europe. Gen II's shorter, too, though it at least gets a pass because in North America and Australia, it was the most recent generation for three "Holiday Seasons", whereas 1 and 5 both only held that status for two. Though I guess that does explain one thing--Generation IV was the longest generation in every region, even Japan. Wait, scratch that...Gen IV was only the longest Generation in Japan. Everywhere else, Gen III beats it out. Which means the real surprise isn't that there aren't any Gen 5 games in this bracket, it's that ORAS didn't get in as well.

Match 113: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild vs. Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age

TLoZ:BotW 17702
DQXI:EoaEA 7508

Return of the colons! So the 2018 contest had a hiatus after Round 4 to set up the Second Chance Brackets, perfectly timed to allow for Thanksgiving break. This contest had a hiatus after Round 3 for no particularly good reason. It killed momentum, and it shows in those vote totals; barely over 25000 votes after, um...wait, that's actually higher than the Division 6 and 7 semfinals were? Huh, I guess it just looks bad because Division 8's semis scored so highly. Well, it was also a rather precipitous drop-off from BotW's R3 match against Final Fantasy XV, and that benefited DQXI immensely. One round after putting up 80.25% on FFXV, BotW was held to just 70.22% against DQXI. A Dragon Quest game outperforming a Final Fantasy game by that much? It's very strange, and I have to stop and try to figure out how it happened.

The obvious answer, of course, is anti-votes. The Legend of Zelda dominates every contest unless a rallied entrant stops it, and even Draven was barely able to pull it off. The deeper into the contest you get, the more it'll get anti-voted for being too strong. But Final Fantasy is about the only series that can't benefit from this phenomenon, because the only times Zelda has lost without a rally being involved--2003's character battle, 2004's Games Contest, and technically the Villain contest but Sephiroth was expected to win that one, to the tune of the highest prediction percentage for a champion ever--it was to Final Fantasy, or more specifically Final Fantasy VII. Combine that with FFVII being the game that put GameFAQs on the map, courtesy of the late Kao Megura, and for the longest time there was a perception that "Final Fantasy Always Wins", even though in reality it's only managed a few sparse wins over The Legend of Zelda. (It might also help that we do Character Battles far more frequently than Games Contests and each numbered Final Fantasy game is a separate continuity while the Legend of Zelda has the same few characters in every game, even if technically the Link and Zelda are usually different individuals with the same name each time, so Final Fantasy characters dominate(d) the brackets even though they rarely win out in the end. Wait, hold on, let me do some math...yeah, Final Fantasy VII alone has put more characters into Character Battles than the entire Legend

Self-reminder to add in 2004 Link vs. Yoshi to the list in the BotW write-up when I archive it.

Match 105: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt vs. Super Mario Galaxy 2

Witcher 3 16312
SMG2 10606

Well, what do you know. "It's Freaking Mario" still has some juice after all. After the godstomping that Witcher 3 put up in Round 2, it looked like it was a near lock to make the Finals, but it's clear that Mass Effect 3 was just horribly overrated. Which, granted, was inevitable given that it was Undertale's R1 opponent, but...okay, let's just try to figure this out. Let's assume that Octopath > Undertale wasn't anti-votes due to what Undertale did in 2015, and it's just that weak. I think I kind of like that better, not because I want it to be weak, but because I'd like to think that it'd be treated more like L-Block than Draven. I know I for one am far madder about Draven in 2013 than Undertale in 2015. Undertale's cool; the whole deconstruction of "random encounters are there to level grind on" is pretty awesome. But if you consider Undertale just that weak, it's certainly possible that Mass Effect 3 slaughtering it before the rallies came really wasn't that impressive, especially when you consider that Undertale's natural strength probably would've been even lower in 2015 because of how new it was. Yes, games tend to get weaker as they age, but Undertale's an indie game, which means it relies on word of mouth to get noticed and build a fanbase. For a lot of us, the 2015 contest was our first exposure to Undertale.

Anyway, this was the match that killed my Guru bracket, because hype backlash. I absolutely loathe SMG2, but it seemed to be fairly well-regarded here, at least in comparison with SMG1 and SMS. So it not being as hated as I'd like it to be tricked my brain into thinking it was really well-loved. Also, this is OldFAQs, so a Wii game seemed like a safe bet, the way an N64 game won the first GotD.

Match 106: Fallout: New Vegas vs. God of War

F:NV 12043
GoW 14879

Wait, was this an actual Round 3 match that happened? I honestly barely remember this, and the idea of one of these games making Round 4 on GameFAQs seems strange to me. Still, I'm not really surprised that God of War won, because it's entirely in line with the apparent shift in the site's tastes.

Match 107: Persona 5 vs. Sonic Mania

Persona 5 17040
Sonic Mania 8059

Ah, now this is more like the Sonic we know and love. Horribly outmatched against anything with an ounce of strength. Mania is a return to the series' roots and was actually quite well-received by the fanbase that stuck with the series, but the damage has already been done; I'm pretty sure Sonic is an anti-vote magnet now. Which is not to take anything away from the legitimacy of Persona 5's wins; anti-votes alone don't cause doublings unless you were fairly close to able to do that anyway. But yeah, it's hard to have much faith in Sonic for anything anymore. Even the casuals knew it; Persona 5's 63.69% prediction percentage was fourth among the sixteen winners in Round 3. Its 95.07% prediction percentage with Gurus was, uh...tied for fifth. With Skyrim.

I'm happy about this. I haven't played Persona 5, because I so rarely buy new games these days (and have enough of a backlog that I won't run out of new stuff to play any time soon), but I love the Shin Megami Tensei series as a whole and the Persona sub-series sounds like it'd be even further up my alley.

Match 108: Portal 2 vs. Red Dead Redemption 2

Portal 2 13422
RDR 2 11677

If you ever wonder why the leaderboard always seems to be dominated by Gurus, here's why. Portal 2 wasn't the overwhelming groupthink favorite that a lot of games were (fully half the matches in R3 had the favorite holding over 90% of Guru Brackets), but it was still the clear favorite, with 50% on the dot. Remember, that's as the culmination of an eightpack; 50% is still a pretty good figure. With the casuals, on the other hand, this was an upset. Just 23.57% of brackets got this right, coming off a 50.55% R2 prediction percentage, and the fact that the former figure is less than half the latter is generally the most telling sign that it's an upset. The next factor is to consider what the opponent's prediction percentage was, to see if the true "favorite" had in fact lost earlier. No dice; RDR2 had a 69.82% prediction percentage in R2 (then again, look at the fourpack it was in). That really doesn't leave much room at all for anything else to have been the favorite. So, score one for the Gurus (but not for me because I had KH3 in my bracket and RDR2 in the Oracle. Seriously, where is Portal 2 getting all this strength from all of a sudden?)

Match 109: Dark Souls vs. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

Dark Souls 15439
MGSV 8954

Dark Souls's prediction percentage of 56.17% feels awfully low here, considering this is a rematch of a match it won fairly comfortably in 2015 and MGSV was the favorite to make it this far. Still, I suppose it can't be helped; it was only at 72.23% to win in R2, and MGSV was lower than that.

Still, the Oracle predictions are very telling as to what our expectations of these games' trajectories have been. In 2015, Dark Souls beat Metal Gear Solid V with 55.4% of the vote in a match where Oracles were fairly split on who'd even win, favoring Dark Souls a mere 45-42. In 2020, the lowest prediction anyone made for Dark Souls was 57.24%, and that person avoided last place because three people picked Dark Souls to break 70%. It's clear that Dark Souls was where it was at. But who would win the Dark Souls-Skyrim and Dark Souls/Skyrim-Witcher 3 matches? Only time would tell (oh, and I guess there was probably still some support for The Last of Us > Dark Souls, but it was waning quickly.)

Match 110: Batman: Arkham City vs. The Last of Us

B:AC 10919
TLoU 13475

Obligatory "Allen allow licensed characters into CBXI."

After Arkham City seemingly laid an egg against XBC2 in Round 1, it would've been tough to figure it being able to perform this well here, but then it went out and got a better percentage on BioShock: Infinite than it did on XBC2 and everyone realized that XBC is just kind of legit. The Last of Us had a fairly easy path to this point, so this was not even a lock, but for the most part B8 had this pretty well pegged; the Oracle scores were fairly tightly packed together and they were all pretty good. I guess maybe TLoU never really gained traction on GameFAQs? From what I hear it's a masterpiece. Then again, the whole "video games as art" thing never really took off here. That's

I don't even remember when the hiatus is over...

---

Also known as Cyberchao X.

Match 103: Grand Theft Auto V vs. Persona 4 Golden

GTAV 13414
P4G 14000

If we needed any more proof that "Reddit" is not a single unified entity, this was it. While rally topics for the other match on this day, and just about every other day, were calling us "weebs" for advancing P4G over GTAV, the Persona fanbase was trying to "buttdevastate" us by advancing it. And looking at the numbers...the Persona fanbase had it right! While Golden didn't reprise its feat of having more unregistered voters than registered, it was again really close between the two, while GTAV had a lot more support among registered voters than unregistered and actually took the registered voting block by 129 votes--not nearly enough to overcome the massive advantage P4G enjoyed with the unregistered voters. Just over 14% of brackets got this right, the second straight round in which more than half the brackets that had advanced it this far had picked against it. If this trend kept up, a P4G win in Round 4 would probably be among the least predicted matches of all time.

Oh, and if you're looking for a long blow-by-blow of this match, don't bother. Persona 4 Golden's lead was 386 by quarter past 10--just a few votes shy of the max lead in RE2-Bloodborne, at the time of day that match was having its freeze. GTAV would spike a huge update win not long after that--in fact, it was the largest swing of any update, including those early ones that are typically larger due to the higher vote totals--but P4G controlled this match from start to finish. While it didn't challenge the record that it had set the previous round (max lead of 458), it again made the top ten of that list, with its maximum lead at 616. Two consecutive wins in which it never trailed, and the largest lead it had in either match was 616. But would it be able to clutch out another win?

Also, this was considered an upset with Board 8 as well, no matter how you slice it. 52.11% picked GTAV to win this match to just 32.39% for P4G (although it should be noted that if you take it as "winner of Match 77" vs. "winner of Match 78", this was considered a debated match, 54.23% for the former; GTAV was just a far easier pick to reach this point), and the Oracles favored GTAV 30-21.

Match 104: Xenoblade Chronicles vs. Fire Emblem: Three Houses

XBC 16374
FE3H 11082

At 16.7%, the prediction percentage on this match wasn't much better than the previous one, but surprisingly enough for a 1 in 6, it's harder to conclusively call this an upset. Yes, it was less than half its prediction percentage last round, and yes, FE3H had a better R2 prediction percentage to begin with. Xenoblade was barely picked to advance to this round by half the voters that picked it in Round 1 at all, so it had a pretty low percentage going in here. Unlike the last match, however, everyone on Board 8 knew going in that their brackets were screwed--Three Heroes had 73.24% of Guru brackets, a far better percentage than GTA V had, but those same 51 Oracles that had ruled 30-21 in favor of GTA V were 45-6 in favor of Xenoblade in this match. The "Nintendo domination" was just a myth. And yes, I know Xenoblade is considered pseudo-Nintendo in its own right. Doesn't matter. Fire Emblem is seemingly Nintendo's biggest rising star right now, but this match showed just how steep a climb it has to make.

It should of course be noted that Persona 4 finished ahead of XBC in 2015 straight-up. If you use GTA V's strength as a barometer, the results are even more stark. GTA V outright breaks 60% on Awakening in 2015, and the general consensus after this match was that contrary to our expectations, Three Houses wasn't any stronger than Awakening. If that's the case, Golden's got this in the bag. I'd be a lot happier about this if my bracket wasn't already shot from mistakes elsewhere, because that's one surprise run that I actually called correctly!

---

Also known as Cyberchao X.

Match 100: Resident Evil 2 vs. Bloodborne

RE2 13421
Bloodborne 13333

What the...

It wouldn't be a contest without at least one completely batshit match--the more controversial, the better. In this contest, matches had been starting at 8 PM Eastern, 5 PM Pacific. When 8 PM rolled around to close out the previous day and put a merciful end to Breath of the Wild's beating of Final Fantasy XV, we got...nothing. Nothing at all. The match didn't start. And didn't start. And didn't start. Finally, a little bit over two hours past the scheduled start time, Allen and crew noticed the issue and fixed it. At 10:11 PM, Bloodborne jumped out to a 10-0 lead, but by the freeze, RE2 had bled the percentage quite a bit, and it would take the lead on the second update. It would stumble a few times during the first hour, but closed out the delayed hour one with a massive win, over half of what its lead already was, to wind up at 152 votes ahead after an hour. It would get that lead to 231 in just another 20 minutes, and by half past midnight, it was up by over 300 and continuing to be the one that would spike a big update every so often. Its lead would peak at 390 at 2:25 AM, but it was still 372 at 4:10, at which point the roof began to fall in. Over the next hour, Bloodborne cut double digits on ten of the twelve updates, with one of the remaining two also being a single-digit cut and the last being only a single-digit win for RE2. The following hour wasn't any better, and it ended with the match being tied at 8 hours in. The momentum would continue, as it took Bloodborne just 40 minutes to build a 179-vote lead of its own, but then support tailed off; that was as high as that lead went. RE2 retook the lead at 5 minutes to 11, by a single vote, then pushed the lead to 21 on the next update, but Bloodborne forced a stop after that, then took most of it back and was back in the lead by 11:20. This didn't last long, with RE2 retaking the lead at 11:30, then seeing the second tie of the match on the 11:50 update.

RE2 didn't allow Bloodborne to turn that tie into a lead change, however, winning the next update and pushing its lead out to 55 at 12:25 PM. Bloodborne would halve that lead over the next 45 minutes, but RE2 laughed it off and spiked a 25-vote win at 1:25 to push its lead back to 60. They'd trade some big swings after that, but it was never enough to get Bloodborne into the lead. Until it was; at 5 after 5, with just under 3 hours left in the match (because, yes, Allen had already told us that the delayed start wouldn't affect the end time), Bloodborne retook the lead, by just 4 votes. The next update would be another stall before RE2 retook the lead. This lead would last an hour; at 6:15 PM, the percentages sat at 50-50, but the votes showed a 2-vote lead for Bloodborne. Half an hour passed, and the lead was up to 30; another half hour, and it was down to just 3. The next update went decidedly in Bloodborne's favor, however, expanding the lead to 24, and it would tack on two more on the next one before RE2 turned it around, winning the next two updates by 16 and...10. With just 25 minutes left in the match it was once again tied. But there was no let up from Resident Evil 2; it won all five of those remaining updates, four of them by double digits, to win by 88 votes. Outside rallies? Well, yes, probably, but the other reason why the shortened match time was such an issue was that for the first time this contest, and just the fourth time since we started having the registered user bonus, the loser of the raw votes won. Bloodborne had a 568-vote advantage with unregistered users but a 325-vote disadvantage with the registered, and while the math still doesn't come out right (28 RE2 votes and 34 Bloodborne votes were not properly doubled, which again tells me that the "registered votes" column is being done automatically and that Allen is manually adjusting to make sure only accounts that were created in the proper time frame get the benefit of doubled votes), it's enough to flip the match. And no, raw votes weren't higher from unregistered voters than registered, either. If there were rallies, the rallied voters were, at the very least, GameFAQs members.

Match 101: Super Smash Bros. Ultimate vs. Marvel's Spiderman

SSBU 16611
Spidey 9504

After the madness of RE2-Bloodborne, Division 3's pair of obvious outcomes were somewhat of a breather. Both of these matches had over 50% prediction rates, and the fact that they were as low as they were was, quite frankly, pure anti-favoritism at work; just six Gurus out of 142 picked wither one of these games to lose, and none picked both. There was a case to be made that Odyssey had once again outperformed Ultimate, but Shovel Knight, mainstream as it may be, is still an indie game, and Spider-Man is, well, easily one of the three most mainstream superheroes out there. Yes, the recent proliferation of superhero movies and TV shows has brought a number of other heroes into the limelight, but let's be honest, Spidey still probably only trails Batman and Superman for recognizability. Also, as a PS4 exclusive, it's a good candidate for antivoting the Nintendo dominance--and at this point, Nintendo still was perceived as absolutely dominating this bracket, even when it was really just a handful of games (these two plus BotW) and the other Nintendo games still in it largely had soft paths thus far. So it's tough to say which game had the better outing.

This was absolutely a good showing by Spider-Man, though. Allow characters originating from other media into CBXI, Allen!

Match 102: Shovel Knight vs. Super Mario Odyssey

Shovel Knight 7104
Odyssey 19021

After the madness of RE2-Bloodborne, Division 3's pair of obvious outcomes were somewhat of a breather. Both of these matches had over 50% prediction rates, and the fact that they were as low as they were was, quite frankly, pure anti-favoritism at work; just six Gurus out of 142 picked wither one of these games to lose, and none picked both. There was a case to be made that Odyssey had once again outperformed Ultimate, but Shovel Knight, mainstream as it may be, is still an indie game, and Spider-Man is, well, easily one of the three most mainstream superheroes out there.

And make no mistake: Shovel Knight is mainstream. ZenOfThunder has been keeping a topic screencapping various posts, be they on this board, our associated Discord, or on Reddit (or anywhere else people might talk about the contest, but there haven't been that many of those), and Shovel Knight was a name that came up in replies to rally topics involving completely different games. It's got a hell of a lot of respect.

All in all, though, it was tough to tell which game would have the advantage next round, which was really the

Match 97: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild vs. Final Fantasy XV

BotW 22397
FFXV 5511

Here, have a list.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/988-north-division-semifinals-mario-vs-donkey-kong
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/2449-hyrule-division-final-the-legend-of-zelda-vs-metroid
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/8011-division-1-semifinal-zelda-breath-of-the-wild-vs-final

There you go. That's your full list of 1v1 contest matches in which a character, series, or game got quadrupled in Round 3 or later. Once in Character Battle 1, once in the Series Contest, and now here. The first two were both Nintendo vs. Nintendo, though, so this stands out even more starkly as a sign of just how far Final Fantasy has fallen. What an absolute embarrassment. Yes, Breath of the Wild was well-received even by Zelda game standards, but how can the juggernaut that Final Fantasy once was have been reduced to this?

Match 98: Monster Hunter: World vs. Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of a New Age

MH:W 13043
DQXI 14866

It didn't look like it'd be getting any more palatable for Breath of the Wild's detractors in Round 4, either. This very site, despite being generally quite knowledgeable about video games, frequently mistakes Monster Hunter for a WRPG, which should tell you just how obscure it is since it's actually created by one of the "Big Five" (you know, the five companies with a Noble Niner to their credit), namely Capcom. Dragon Quest was always well behind Final Fantasy in popularity here in the United States, but it's still a well-known and well-respected franchise. Only getting 53.27% on Monster Hunter: World is, quite frankly, absolutely pitiful. It's not like vote totals had dropped, either, though it'd be easy to be apathetic about this day. Seems strange to think that Nintendo's more dominant than they've ever been, but at least on this site, that seems to be the case. The rest of the Japanese contingent, or at least its old guard, are just struggling to stay relevant.

...wait, what?!

68 Dragon Quest XI 5580 64.99%
98 Dragon Quest XI 2120 24.69%

This was the stealth "ha-ha casuals" moment. I almost didn't even bother checking prediction percentage because DQXI's path had seemed so set in stone. Over 40% of brackets had MH:W/Sekiro/BD:FF/Ni No Kuni beating DQXI? And MH:W was above 50% in prediction percentage in Round 2, so that's clearly largely on it. I'd honestly have been less surprised by that low prediction percentage if its R2 prediction percentage had been lower, because Walking Dead seemed like a casualbait pick, but that's as clear as day: more people picked DQXI to lose in R3 than to lose in R1 and R2 combined. Gurus, meanwhile, had an 81.69% prediction percentage on this match. It's good to know we can still embarrass the casuals once in a while, and it helps make this result make more sense; Monster Hunter: World was most likely the favorite. DQXI's R3 prediction percentage was just 38% of its R2 percentage, so flip that around to 62%, multiply by MH:W's R2 prediction percentage, and you get a rough estimate of 33.16%. There's no better way unless Allen were to actually release the pick data for all matches rather than just the percentage correct, so that's all I can do. Project.

Match 99: Mass Effect 2 vs. Horizon Zero Dawn

ME2 14749
HZD 12010

And suddenly, Fortnite's blowout loss looks decent. Last round, I said that based on the 2015 X-Stats, HZD beat Borderlands 2 convincingly enough that it theoretically had a chance against ME2, but I figured I was just illustrating how far Borderlands 2 had fallen (and yes, ME2-BL2 is a "legitimate" comparison because they were both in SMRPG's quarter, which means they can be compared to each other without having to account for Melee's rallying, Undertale's rallying, or OoT SFF-stomping ALttP). I didn't think Horizon Zero Dawn would actually put up this good a fight! This was, of course, good news for Skyrim, because we weren't questioning the idea that BL2 would have fallen and as such, ME2's poor percentage suggests that it, too, has fallen, which would then suggest that Witcher 3's blowout of ME3 isn't as impressive as it first looked. On the other hand, "as impressive as it first looked" would've put Witcher 3 potentially on BotW's level, at least until it broke 80% on a main line Final Fantasy in round 3. So this was far from a done deal.

...Goddamnit Allen you've got some explaining to do. As per usual, since I'm not familiar with a lot of these games, I looked up HZD to see how it managed to do so well. Sure enough, it was not the genre I expected it to be based on its name. It is, in fact, yet another of these ARPG's that are lighting up the bracket, and not a military game like it sounds like it ought to be. Which was fine, until I noticed that that's the game that...wait...never mind, that was an Overwatch character that HZD's main character lost to in R1 in 2018, not a Fortnite character. I thought Allen was getting cutesy again, like when he had Ninja Gaiden take on Halo in the first GotD after Ryu H's upset of Chief the previous winter. But I got my casualbait games confused.

---

Also known as Cyberchao X.

Match 93: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim vs. Journey

Skyrim 19725
Journey 6581

While a near-tripling in Round 2 sounds promising on paper, this was if anything a worrying performance for Skyrim backers. That it would win its division was of course still not remotely in question. And its 88.32% prediction percentage in this match was second only to BotW in Round 2. But The Witcher 3 managed to comfortably get the tripling over a presumably stronger opponent, and one round sooner for Skyrim's potential opponents, Dark Souls also got a tripling, albeit against what one would presume to be an even weaker game than Journey. It didn't quite seem like time to worry about it possibly getting upset by Dark Souls just yet, but it was absolutely looking like Witcher 3 might be the new favorite to reach the finals out of the bottom half of the bracket.

Match 94: Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn vs. Mario Kart 8

FFXIV 10424
MK8 15873

"Freaking Mario" strikes again, in an...upset? No, probably not. 41.16% looks like an awfully low percentage until you look back and remember that Mario Kart 8 was only a 56.02% bracket favorite in Round 1 against Uncharted 4. More likely, FFXIV was a decided underdog, but the debate as to who it would be facing made it so that the favorite could merely take a plurality. It still seems strange, though, that a Mario Kart game would be in R3. It shouldn't, though; Super Mario Kart went pretty much dead even with Super Metroid twice in the 2009 contest, their second match being decided by 56 votes back in the days where 56 votes meant it was probably undecided going into the final update. I don't even know what to say about this. Was it a good performance for FFXIV? A bad one? I feel like it's a good performance for FFXIV. MMOs have never been terribly popular here (probably; the only major one to get any attention is WoW and that's lolBlizzard) and Square seems to be struggling to gain the voters' love.

Match 95: Pokmon HeartGold/SoulSilver vs. Rayman Legends

HGSS 18929
Rayman Legends 7373

Since this was an utterly predictable outcome, I'm going to instead use this space to talk about something interesting about all four matches today (also, this was the final day of four matches at once, which should be noted). There were still more registered than unregistered voters today, yet in all four matches, the loser got more raw votes from the unregistered voters than from the registered. Were we finally being noticed and "anti-voted"? It was hard to say; as Zen's screencapping topic would show, Reddit no longer seemed to have a hold on what would make us angry.

Also I needed to mention that registered voters were still the majority on this day because I completely failed to notice that three days earlier, they weren't. Witcher 3-Mass Effect 3 was the only one of the four matches that day where both games got more than 50% of their raw votes from unregistered voters, while SMG2 was the only one of the four winners to get over 50% of their raw votes from the registered voters. Hopefully I'll remember to move this fact out of this write-up and into one of the write-ups for that day when it comes time to archive these on the wiki.

Match 96: Divinity: Original Sin II vs. Nier: Automata

Divinity 8222
Automata 18075

There were some doubts as to whether Divinity was actually decent or if it was just lucky to draw the hated Hearthstone in Round 1. This performance makes it look like...well, like it wasn't overinflated, at any rate. Yes, it did get a fairly lucky draw, but it got a better percentage than Rayman did against Automata's next opponent, and Rayman at least has name recognition. Then again, Pokmon probably has much better name recognition than Nier, so it all balances out.

And no, the next round won't count as a Nintendo vs. Square match. Nier, and Drakengard before it, are published by Square Enix, but they aren't really made by them; they're made by a company called Platinum Games. Actually, the series seems to have gone through a bunch of developers; the first three games were made by Cavia, Drakengard 3 was made by Access Games, and Nier: Automata was made by the aforementioned Platinum.

Does Breath of the Wild vs. Dragon Quest XI count as Nintendo vs. Square even though it's part of a franchise that began with Enix well before the merger? I feel like technically it does since it's a post-merger game.

---

Also known as Cyberchao X.

Match 88: Animal Crossing: New Leaf vs. Red Dead Redemption 2

AC:NL 11095
RDR2 15080

So, uh...Animal Crossing is legit, huh?

This was a kind of underwhelming performance by what I presume, based on the prediction percentages for the first two rounds, is the casuals' favorite in Round 3. I mean, maybe it isn't, since the trio of New Leaf, Street Fighter V, and Dying Light really shouldn't have been able to stop it, while Portal 2 had to deal with Tomb Raider in round 1 and Kingdom Hearts III in Round 2. But we're dealing with almost 70% vs. barely over 50%. Unless Portal 2's R3 prediction percentage is over 75% of its R2 prediction percentage, one would have to figure that RDR2 would have the plurality even if Portal 2/Tomb Raider/KH3/Disco Elysium has the overall majority over RDR2/ACNL/SFV/DL.

I'll admit, I screwed this one up in Oracle but not in Guru. I had RDR2 > SFV in Guru, but I was impressed enough by New Leaf's win over SFV that I backed it in Oracle. Apparently SFV is just that bad. See, I told you that always picking against Capcom was a good idea!

Match 89: Dark Souls vs. Rocket League

Dark Souls 18921
Rocket League 5544

Let's just go back to laughing at the guy who said he was going to rally for Rocket League last round. This was a huge fall-off from the previous day's vote totals, and IIRC one of the main Tumblrs that started the whole Undertale fiasco in 2015 was a self-professed Dark Souls fan first and foremost. Why she decided to rally for Undertale instead of Dark Souls is beyond me, but whatever. Point is, Dark Souls is going to be filthy in this contest if it needs to be.

Match 90: Yakuza 0 vs. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

Yakuza 0 10462
MGSV 14011

Man Metal Gear has fallen hard. This is a very strong performance by Yakuza 0, showing that it's a game far stronger than its characters, who were nothing short of atrocious in 2018. This would set up a rematch of a somewhat debated 2015 match, except the only debate this time would be just how much more lopsided it would be (the 2015 match wasn't terribly lopsided at all--Dark Souls only won with 55.4%. I'd be surprised if it doesn't exceed that by a full 10%.)

Match 91: Batman: Arkham City vs. BioShock Infinite

B:AC 14637
BSI 9832

Well, my Arkham City > The Last of Us upset loves this result...but my Three Houses > Xenoblade Chronicles not-upset is scared shitless! (No, I still don't know why I picked Arkham City > Last of Us, and it's a moot point because I wouldn't have picked Dark Souls over the Last of Us, either, so I'd have lost the R4 points either way.) Arkham City did better against BioShock Infinite than against Xenoblade 2. Is Xenoblade 2 any good? I might have to check it out. The first one seemed like it was promising from a story aspect but I just couldn't get past the janky battle system. Give me a traditional turn-based RPG any day, but failing that, if you're going to give me an ARPG, give me a goddamn attack button!

So, yeah, turns out BioShock isn't that strong any more. 2013 certainly provided some hints with Big Daddy losing to Lloyd Irving and the Infinite characters not being worth much of anything, but the series' decline was hidden by both games in the bracket (the original and Infinite) being in the SMRPG quarter. BioShock had a close loss to Division 8 champ MGS3, while Infinite had a decent match with Fallout: New Vegas, which in turn broke 41% on RE4. Arkham City is, apparently, still fairly decent, and I expect it to give a good match next round.

Match 92: Diablo III vs. The Last of Us

Diablo III 8989
The Last of Us 15488

The Last of Us winning this match was never in question; faulty as the 2015 X-Stats may be, they suggest it to be slightly stronger than Diablo II. Now, Diablo III was not a terribly well-received game at all, so I'd expect the strength gap between Diablo II and Diablo III to be tremendous. We're only a few matches removed from a "III" losing to a game that its "II" beats handily in those X-Stats. I'm going to drag them out again:

The Last of Us (2015g) VS Diablo 2 (2015g)

The Last of Us has a strength of 27.36.
Diablo 2 has a strength of 27.23.

The Last of Us wins with 50.24% of the vote!
A win of 289 with 60,875 total votes cast.

Portal 2 (2015g) VS Kingdom Hearts 2 (2015g)

Portal 2 has a strength of 23.30.
Kingdom Hearts 2 has a strength of 34.22.

Kingdom Hearts 2 wins with 65.96% of the vote!
A win of 19,426 with 60,875 total votes cast.

Diablo III is worth 36.72% on a game that Diablo II is worth 49.76% on, but KH III is worth 37.64% on a game that KH II is worth 65.96% on. ...How? This isn't even about KH3 losing that match anymore, though I am still baffled by that; the idea of KH3 being worth less on KH2 than Diablo 3 is on Diablo 2 (pre-SFF adjustments) is alien in its own right. I'm sure there will be a lengthy diatribe on this PCA anyway since I think this is the last Blizzard game to leave the contest, and I have to say...Bobby Kotick could walk down Fifth Avenue and shoot someone and not lose any supporters. That's really all I can liken it to; Blizzard has its consumers by the balls.

The "Disney just buys Squeenix" idea I proposed last round is looking better and better all the time. Someone has to save them from themselves, and the idea of Square's properties being part of the Disney/Marvel/Star Wars stable is oddly appealing. Though given what happened when they tried to have Kingdom Hearts characters as walkarounds at the theme parks, they might need to work out a few kinks.

Costumed Moogles might be fun, though, assuming that any of the younger fans would even know what a Moogle was.

Edit: Upon reading responses to my previous reviews, I have discovered that, yes, KH3 really was that big a disappointment. Upon doing some research of my own, I discovered that, no worries, "the kiddies" would know what Moogles were. They were in KH3. Part of the problem was that they were the only Final Fantasy characters in KH3, though the inevitable rerelease only a year later is said to have more. Good lord Square Enix really needs to be saved from themselves.

Doesn't change what I said about Blizzard, though. If Square fans were half as blindly loyal as Blizzard fans, KH3 beats Portal 2 easily and actually might be a sexy upset pick against Persona 5. Square releases a game and then makes you pay full price for what amounts to the same game with DLC, and their fans are rightfully pissed. They've been doing this over and over, too, with Kingdom Hear

Match 84: Nioh vs. God of War

Nioh 7151
God of War 20845

Without even meaning to, I ended up bringing up a topic of discussion with my Guest Analysis of this match for the Crew: Can Japanese and Western games SFF each other? I honestly don't see why they shouldn't, but apparently people think that they don't overlap that much. I mean, this isn't exactly the best match for it since Nioh's an ARPG and God of War is a straight-up hack-and-slash AAG, but I feel like unless you're loyal to a specific company, you wouldn't be any less likely to be a fan of other games from the same genre just because they were developed on the other side of the Pacific. In a weird way, even those same people realized it in other genres, when they figured that a Mario game would be harder for "the indies" to rally against. A lot of those indies are Western in origin, you know! But for some reason, platformers are apparently the only thing that's allowed to SFF across the ocean.

(Though I have to admit I haven't played that many WRPGs, if any. I've had this copy of Skyrim sitting around for years since I got it second-hand for practically nothing and I've never actually installed it because I wanted to stream my blind playthrough and there have been other things higher on my streaming priority list. I need to play it! Maybe when this contest is over, since Skyrim's obviously going to go really far.)

Match 85: Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 5 vs. Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag

P5 18600
AC4 7575

Well, Persona's definitely in the mainstream now. 73.69% of brackets got this right, and ACIV was the favorite in its R1 match. I guess Assassin's Creed just isn't that well respected any more? I seem to remember that the other Assassin's Creed game in this bracket got slaughtered and everyone knew that it would. Who was that against, again? ...Oh, of course. The Witcher 3. Really looking more and more like a contender for the title with every passing match!

Match 86: Sonic Mania vs. Super Meat Boy

Sonic Mania 16972
Super Meat Boy 9202

So apparently Sonic's worth something again? This was a great showing, and a lot of people saw it coming; while the prediction percentage was under 50%, it's close enough to be a clear plurality. It seems like a lot of the disappointments of the past decade figured it out at the end. Ah, well, at least the Guru Nomination made it to Round 2.

Match 87: Portal 2 vs. Kingdom Hearts III

Portal 2 16322
Kingdom Hearts III 9850

Nothing to talk about here; over half the brackets got this right and the match wasn't even close. RPGFAQs strikes again...

...wait, Portal 2 was the winner? Not Kingdom Hearts III? And people expected this? Fuck, man, I didn't even remotely consider this one, and their respective Round 1 results did nothing to sway me one way or the other. I guess KH3 did have the worse result, even with the slightly better percentage, because its opponent was a lot less recognizable than Portal 2's, but come on. Portal 2 got upset in Round 1 in 2015 (which I called correctly) and Wheatley lost to Crash Bandicoot in Round 1 in 2013 (not so much so). 2015 X-Stats say Portal 2 gets 35.96% on KH1 and 34.04% on KH2. And that makes perfect sense because they're fucking Square Enix RPGs; hell, I think KH1 might technically be pre-merger Squaresoft. Yes, the endless spinoffs dragged the series down, but this is a numbered game. Kingdom Hearts III. This wasn't supposed to be a contest. It just...I keep wanting to say "I didn't even consider this upset possibility", because I can't wrap my head around the fact that Kingdom Hearts III was the upset pick! I honestly wouldn't have been surprised to see Persona 5 > Kingdom Hearts III as our "haw haw casuals" moment, because Persona still doesn't have the name recognition that Kingdom Hearts does. I'm pretty sure "the casuals" don't actually exist anymore, but still. Portal 2 was proven crap, and yet it's pretty much dead even with RDR1 in the 2015 X-Stats so we knew that RDR2 would be even less of a challenge, except actually we didn't know that at all because the idea of Portal 2 not weakening considerably since 2015 was also laughable.

You know what, Portal 2 was in Division 3, aka "the Undertale Division". Yes, it lost to Sonic 2 and Sonic 2 lost to Pokmon, but the exact X-Stat numbers on that would still be fishy because we were already prepping Pokmon to be our savior again, just like in 2013 with Mewtwo. Maybe Portal 1 can give us something "cleaner"? ...Goddamnit Portal 1 was fed to Melee in the first round. We had nothing. Nothing remotely reliable, aside from the characters bombing, and as we all know, Characters =/= Games. And we...oh. Forget "prepping to be our savior". RBYG-StH2 was the same day as UT-SMW! And Undertale's own rallies favor Pokmon there. We really had nothing. Except...

Portal (2015g) VS Kingdom Hearts 2 (2015g)

Portal has a strength of 24.72.
Kingdom Hearts 2 has a strength of 34.22.

Kingdom Hearts 2 wins with 63.88% of the vote!
A win of 16,900 with 60,875 total votes cast.

That one barely moves at all when switched to raw X-Stats; I suspect the fact that it moves at all is just due to rounding errors. Because Melee was perceived to have rallied in Round 2 against Pokmon GSC, and then in every round from Round 4 against Chrono Trigger until its defeat against Undertale. The two matches where it had not been perceived to have rallied were Round 1 against Portal...and Round 3 against Kingdom Hearts II. It's a clean comparison, even if it was through an entrant that had rallied.

Which begs the question: Why? Was Kingdom Hearts III that poorly received? There is no good reason for Portal 2 to have gotten stronger, since there are no other games in the series. Yet somehow, everyone just kind of knew that Portal 2 would win. Against probably the biggest Square RPG of the decade. What site am I even on anymore?

---

Also known as Cyberchao X.

Match 79: Xenoblade Chronicles vs. Overwatch

XBC 20023
OW 7287

This is entirely in line with expectations for Overwatch. I guess the casuals got fooled by it? Or I dunno, maybe not. 38.68% got this right, compared to 38.98% who had XBC reaching this round and losing, but XBC's first-round prediction percentage was about 5 points better than Overwatch's. I feel like Overwatch probably was the favorite, but its low R1 prediction percentage was either people overrating Death Stranding or just there being a high enough percentage of people who finally realize that casualbait games tend to get slaughtered here.

I think the upshot of this is that Kojima needs to bite the bullet and just make movies instead of trying to make these cutscene-heavy video games.

Match 80: Ori and the Blind Forest vs. Fire Emblem: Three Houses

OatBF 10312
FE3H 16994

We all believed prior to this match that FE3H was probably the favorite in Round 3, and after this, not so much so. Holy crap what a disappointment. Or maybe Ori's just that good. I'd be willing to believe that Ori's actually kind of strong. But I still think XBC has the advantage next round, much as I hate it.

Match 81: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt vs. Mass Effect 3

The Witcher 3 21948
Mass Effect 3 6047

Holy shit what just happened

Any semblance of faith that anyone might have still had in the 2015 X-Stats meaning anything at all was obliterated here. Yes, we all knew there was no good way to figure out a proper X-Stat value for ME3 since it faced Undertale in Round 1, but the one they eventually came up with had it still beating ME2. Now, ME2 was in Division 8 and Witcher 3 in Division 7, so their relative X-Stat values should be fairly accurate--that's the SMRPG quarter, so the only SFF match that can gum things up was MGS-MGS3 in the Division 8 finals.

The adjusted X-Stats say that the Witcher 3 only wins that matchup with 53.59%. The raw X-Stats say that Mass Effect 2 wins it with 50.56%. Yes, we all know that ME3 > ME2 was comical to begin with, but this is an absolute brutalization. A lot of people said this was a huge SFF match. It probably was, but we've had SFF matches be close before. This is a beatdown, and taken at face value would arguably make Witcher 3 the favorite to win the whole damn contest. Something very strange was happening here.

Some people were even saying that ME3 was getting caught in Undertale's backlash, either being punished for not stopping the menace before it could be started or for riding Undertale's wake to an undeserved #2 in the raw X-Stats. This was of course ridiculous, and yet, Witcher 3 was only 13th in R1 prediction percentage yet 3rd in R2 percentage, behind only BotW and Skyrim. It's clear the voters had no respect for ME3 at all.

Match 82: Stardew Valley vs. Super Mario Galaxy 2

Stardew 10055
Galaxy 2 17947

"Freaking Mario" may be strong, but his games aren't, at least not since SM64. Still...what is that prediction percentage? Galaxy 2 had over 95% prediction percentage in Round 1, yet it barely cracked 60% here. 35% of people thought that either Stardew Valley or Destiny would stop it? I mean, good for them; shows that maybe they have some taste after all. My bracket's pretty much busted since I was counting on this overrated piece of crap going deep because Nintendo Always Wins. It's pretty much toast next round against Witcher 3, which I continue to underestimate for some reason. Oh, right, maybe because the "common wisdom" is that licensed games are garbage?

Yeah that's right I'm going to pull the licensed game card again. We need an all-media character battle desperately. Or even a limited one. We already force people to put game of origin in their nominations, right? So just make them do first game. Though I suspect that due to the "licensed crap" aspect, most of the beloved Kingdom Hearts Disney characters had other games first.

Match 83: Fallout: New Vegas vs. Dark Souls III

FNV 15107
DS3 12888

The prediction percentage suggests that this was a toss-up in voters' minds. Only 48.31% got this right, down from 91.38% who had New Vegas reaching Round 2. Dark Souls III also had a R1 prediction percentage above 85%, so it's not the other entry's fault.

The match failed to live up to their expectations, settling into a groove where the last 18.5 hours had the percentage between 53.69% and 54.19%, finishing at 53.96%. A good percentage by the loser, but never in doubt.

---

Also known as Cyberchao X.

Match 77: Grand Theft Auto V vs. Cuphead

GTAV 16450
Cuphead 10849

GTA V continues to be casualbait, trailing only BotW and Witcher 3 in R2 prediction percentage. Cuphead's classic Disney aesthetic continues to perform well here, and while it never stood a chance of winning, this was a solid showing, more or less. It couldn't quite break 60%, though.

Match 78: Persona 4 Golden vs. Red Dead Redemption

P4G 13879
RDR 13428

Upset alert! Upset alert! Just 31.05% of brackets got this right, compared with 88.36% who picked P4G to win in Round 1. RDR's Round 1 prediction percentage was sixth-highest...and its sequel's was eighth-highest, so yeah, clearly getting a lot of respect from the voters. But do you really want to pick an action-adventure game over an RPG on RPGFAQs?

...Apparently, yes. This match broke a trend that had stood throughout the entire first round and into the second: Unregistered voters made up the majority of Persona 4 Golden's raw votes! Red Dead Redemption won over registered voters 4737-4620, but Persona 4 Golden smashed it with a 4664-3985 advantage with the unregistered voters. It made for a 562-vote win in raw votes, but just 451 on the scoreboard...wait, those numbers don't add up.

4620 4664 9284 13879
4737 3985 8722 13428

Okay, the third column is indeed the sum of the first two columns...but with the first column, the registered voters, counting double, shouldn't it be 13904-13459? Makes me wonder if the "registered voters" column is in fact counting all registered voters, and Allen has to manually adjust it to make sure that only accounts that were created before the start of the contest are getting their votes counted double. Well, fixing it would only make things even closer, so it's no big difference. You see...Persona 4 Golden was still extending its lead almost right up until the end. Its maximum lead was 458 votes with just 10 minutes left in the match. That's two fewer than our long-time record, the legendary Frog vs. Liquid Snake match from 2004. But no big deal, right? That record's been broken like 15 times now. In this contest alone, three other matches had smaller max leads.

Except Octopath led during its match. So did Hollow Knight. And Celeste. And Mega Man in both of his losses in 2018, and Mario in his loss to Cloud in the same contest, and all of the others, even the ones whose matches only lasted 12 hours. Red Dead Redemption? Didn't. Never even came close. Usually, the updater at least captures a single-digit lead because it takes its first snapshot only a few seconds in, but P4G was already up 22-10 by the time it could. It was up by 74 at the freeze and hit triple digits by the 15-minute mark. The lead entered the 200s by the end of the second hour. This was, in fact, never in doubt. It just happened to stay close. Heck, the lead didn't even hit 400 until only about 2 hours remained in the match. Could've really made a record that would be tough to break if P4G hadn't surged right at the end. This is a match that looks a lot better on paper than it actually is.

---

Also known as Cyberchao X.

Match 75: Octopath Traveler vs. Shovel Knight

Octopath 13696
Shovel 13895

If you thought the end of Round 1 and beginning of Round 2 were exciting...you ain't seen nothing yet.

It didn't look like it would start out that way. Octopath managed to take a lead 15 minutes in after trailing at the freeze, but Shovel Knight easily flipped it on the next update and got the lead into triple digits a mere 20 minutes after that. By the two-hour mark, the lead was over 200, and Shovel Knight followed the 35 vote gain that it made to end that hour with a 38 vote gain to start hour three. OT made some nice cuts as we reached 10:30, but again SK easily countered, tacking on 31 and 46 votes in consecutive updates. Every time Octopath looked like it wanted to cut, Shovel Knight countered.

At midnight, four hours in, Shovel Knight led by 340 votes. It would gain one vote on the next update, then spend the rest of the hour futilely trying to increase its lead. But then the next hour hit and bam! +20, +24, new max lead at 1:15 AM. Shortly after 2 AM, SK's lead peaked at 365, but then at 2:15, Octopath made a sizeable cut and followed it up with another one two updates later. SK recovered, forcing Octopath to wait until nearly 3:30 to get within 300, but from there, the comeback was slow but inevitable. Then, suddenly, it wasn't so slow. Octopath got within 200 at 10 minutes to 6, then within 100 at 7:05, and a 25-vote cut at 7:20 left Shovel Knight's lead at a mere 45 votes. From there, however, it went into a stall; an hour and a half later, Shovel Knight's lead was at 43, having not dipped below 35 nor risen above 56 during that time. Shovel Knight won the next update to increase its lead to 61 at 5 minutes to 9, only to be met with an Octopath run. 61 became 46, then 24, then 9, then 3, then 3 again, then 1...and with its lead down to a single vote, Shovel Knight finally won another update, then two more, then a net positive over the next two, and then another one. At 9:55 AM, Shovel Knight had restored its lead to 46 votes.

At 10 AM? Deadlock. At 10:05? Octopath Traveler leads by 50.

Wait, seriously? Did we have an honest to God rally going on? Because that is an insane swing for this deep into a match. Octopath slowed down after that, netting only +17 over the next half hour before picking it up again to gain its first triple-digit lead at 10:50. It hovered for a bit, got up to 151 at 11:40, let SK spend about half an hour gaining back about 30 votes, then quickly smacked it down in only 10 minutes. At 12:45 PM, Octopath led by 193 and seemed primed to win easily. Shovel Knight took a chunk back, but it could never keep much of its gains; at 2:15, Octopath still led by 171.

And then the comeback was on. Highlighted by a +21 at 2:25 and a +27 at 3:20, Shovel Knight got the deficit down to 36 before Octopath started putting up any resistance. And resist it did; it took until 5:55 for Shovel Knight to regain the lead, a +17 giving it an immediate double-digit advantage. Which Octopath wiped out in two updates to take a 1-vote lead at 6:05. Shovel Knight was back in front at the next update, but only by 6 votes, and the next update only grew it to 8...then back to 6...then 6 again...

And at 6:30 PM, Octopath spiked another of its huge updates. +36, lead of 30. They traded update wins for the next 20 minutes, with a net of +8 for Octopath.

And then, suddenly, it was Shovel Knight that had the huge rally power. A 38-vote deficit became a 1-vote lead, then 37, then 50, 76, 99, 137... Shovel Knight won 13 of the final 14 updates to end up winning by 199, the largest lead by either side since 5:50 AM. A title previously held by its penultimate-update lead of 194, one vote more than the largest Octopath's lead ever got. Shovel Knight started out looking like it would win easily, then spent much of the second half of the match trailing, and in the end, still won by a fairly comfortable final margin. The registered voter bonus carried much of that; Shovel Knight's raw vote lead was just 57 votes, courtesy of a 136-voter advantage with registered users offsetting a 79-voter deficit with unregistered.

The favorite in this match? Obviously it was Undertale. At 18.86%, Shovel Knight > Octopath Traveler had the lowest prediction percentage of the tournament so far...taking the mantle from Octopath Traveler > Undertale, at 21.58%. Undertale was the Guru favorite, too, and as for the Oracle...well, it seems that the Oracles were convinced that Octopath's win was a result of Undertale anti-votes, not its own strength. Very few people predicted a match this close, and most of the ones who did were Octopath pickers trying to mitigate the damage if they were wrong. I ended up with a top 5 for this match going over by nearly 3% on SK's percentage. So let's give a hand for everyone involved here. It's clear by the wild swings, at least relative to our vote intake, that this was a match where both sides were rallying, and it brings into question another outcome. It was, of course, noticed that Undertale had been trying to rally yet again, though it was far weaker than what it put up in 2015, and the common belief was that it just wasn't getting it done and couldn't get past the antivotes. But now, perhaps, one has to wonder if we weren't giving Undertale too much of the credit for the increased traffic. Maybe it just got outrallied?

Shovel Knight's run would be coming to an end the next round, of course, faced with Super Mario Odyssey. But it should be noted that outside of 64, 3D Mario has had a long and storied history of looking like utter trash in Games Contests. Whether it's Galaxy losing to CoD4 twice in 2009 or Sunshine and NSMBWii getting upset by Halo 3 and Marvel vs. Capcom 2 in 2010 or the Galaxy games losing to Super Metroid and Mass Effect in 2015, Mario just hasn't been worth much as a platformer franchise this century. Maybe he continues to stay so strong in character battles because this is RPGFAQs; the Paper Mario games have done just fine in contests, after all. (Of course this isn't actually the reason, but the point still stands; PM64 and TTYD are the only Mario games from either of the past two decades to do well in any contests.) It wouldn't surprise me one bit if Shovel Knight made Odyssey look bad heading into its match with Ultimate.

Match 76: Devil May Cry 5 vs. Super Mario Odyssey

DMC5 7917
SMO 19681

I may have spoken too soon. Holy hell, DK, what's wrong with you?! This is an ass-whooping entirely commensurate with what you'd expect a Mario game to be doing to a Devil May Cry game. For comparison's sake, the weaker of the two DMC games in the last GotD would be projected to break 41% on Galaxy, the strongest Mario game in that bracket. Super Ma

Match 71: Resident Evil 2 vs. DOOM

Resident Evil 2 15984
DOOM 11780

Huh, maybe DOOM's blowout of INSIDE wasn't just INSIDE being piss-weak? Not to say that it isn't, but apparently DOOM has some real strength. Or RE2 isn't as strong as it seems. Still, 57.57% is not a great score for Resident Evil 2; according to the 2009 X-Stats, RE2 should get 66.28%.

That may or may not have been an excuse to put "according to the 2009 X-Stats" into a write-up about a contest that only covers games released between 2010 and 2019. I was planning on using the 2004 X-Stats, but apparently RE2 didn't make that contest. I guess first entry syndrome won out there; I always thought RE2 was better regarded than RE1, but RE1's the only one that made it in '04. Granted, '04's nomination process was awful and resulted in a bunch of games from obscure systems getting in.

Also, unlike RE2, the "DOOM" in this contest is not a straight-up remake of the first game in the series. It's a brand new game, and was actually called "Doom 4" when it was first announced. So that makes the stat especially meaningless...except this is OldFAQs, where "pick the year closest to 1998" is a valid strategy. Resident Evil 2, the original one, is a 1998 video game. Wouldn't you expect it to get even higher on 2016's "Doom 4" than 1993's "Doom"?

Also, holy crap that is legitimately 21 years between original and remake. That's long enough to be "excusable". It's really been that long since the fifth generation, huh? And yet we're still technically considered to be in the eighth generation, even though we all know that since the Wii U is an eighth generation console, the Switch kind of has to be a ninth generation console by default. It'll probably be reclassified as a 9th gen console once the PS5 and XBSX come out later this year.

The Switch has officially succeeded the 3DS, also an eighth-generation system, as well as the Wii U. Even more evidence that the 9th generation is already well underway.

Match 72: Fire Emblem: Awakening vs. Bloodborne

FE:A 11688
Bloodborne 16076

Oh, hey, something that the lol X-Stats wouldn't have predicted! Two write-ups ago, I said that Borderlands 2 was presumed to be a stronger opponent than either RE2 or Bloodborne faced, then looked up the X-Stats for Borderlands 2-FE:A and found that according to 2015, that wasn't the case. Only problem is, the 2015 X-Stats not only have FE:A ahead of Bloodborne, but they also have Borderlands 2 ahead of Bloodborne! Narrowly, of course; something like winning with 50.21%. Apparently FE:A's a lot weaker than it was in 2015, which kind of makes sense because the backlash against FE:A from the hardcore series fans only got worse when the next game was everything wrong with Awakening turned up to 11. It's funny; Awakening was meant to be a big series of shoutouts to the entire series thus far, and then Fates ended up just being one long ode to Awakening, except it was far worse than Awakening ever was because the mechanics that made sense in Awakening were just kind of bolted onto Fates for the sake of keeping them. About the most encouraging thing about the series is that Echoes was still fairly loyal to Gaiden, because Genealogy is next up to get a remake and even though that's the game that Awakening was referencing with the child mechanic, it could get really ugly if they try to make it too much like Awakening/Fates.

Oh, right, Bloodborne. There's absolutely no good way to determine the strength of any of these games; it seems that the Undertale Effect was a lot harder to untangle than we thought. Still, Bloodborne put up a better percentage on FE:A than RE2 did on Doom. If we take that underperformance as a sign that contrary to popular belief, the RE2 remake isn't as strong as the original, well, RE2 isn't even projected to break 56% on Bloodborne by the 2015 X-Stats. The turnaround it made on FE:A, it's by enough that it should be able to get past RE2 as well. Remind me again where all these games actually were in 2015's bracket?

Okay, RE2 was on the opposite side from the rest of them, so its numbers are filtered through two Undertale matches including the final. And Bloodborne is stuck behind a bunch of SFF matches--it was in the division that had a ALTTP-MM final for the right to lose to OoT the next round. Yeah, these numbers are useless.

Match 73: Super Smash Bros. Ultimate vs. The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds

SSBU 17671
ALBW 9912

Pretty standard SFF match here. ALBW did well to avoid the doubling. It was pointed out that SSBU has more Links in it than ALBW has, so yeah, not even the LAW was going to help it here. It was a shame that two GotY winners had to face each other so early in the contest, but at least the 2013 winner could take solace in the fact that the 2012 and 2014 winners were out of the contest, too. In fact, the 2014 winner had never been in it to begin with. That was the year that Smash 4 came out, and being a Smash game is basically an instant win button in GotY oh hey Melee what are you doing there.

Most of the individual consoles' polls in 2001 only got their winner into the final poll, but for some reason the top three finishers in the PS2 poll all made the final poll, and finished 1-2-4. Melee lost to freaking GTA3. Weren't we supposed to be NintendoFAQs, not SonyFAQs? And yet Brawl, 4, and Ultimate all won their years. 4 did it so convincingly that they stopped at just the one final poll!

Match 74: Marvel's Spider-Man vs. Minecraft

Spider-Man 15903
Minecraft 11681

So about that assertion that Minecraft is weak...ah, wait, we don't have any gauge on Spider-Man. Let's try that again.

So about that assertion that licensed games are weak... 57.65% may not seem terribly impressive for this tournament, but it is a round 2 match, and more importantly...Minecraft's not weak. Back in 2015, it got 43.28% on Halo. Not a Halo sequel; the original Halo. Yes, Halo is known for being a disappointment in contests, but it is still a big-name franchise and this is the first game in the series we're talking about. And Spider-Man did better against Minecraft than Halo did.

Yeah, this was a match in which both games looked good. Minecraft was able to easily cruise past the percentage predicted for it by the Oracles, but Spider-Man still gets to say it beat a game harder than Halo did. Win-win! Except for the casuals; it's pretty clear by the prediction percentage that they thought Minecraft would win this outright.

---

Also known as Cyberchao X.

Match 67: Monster Hunter: World vs. Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice

MHW 14644
SSDT 11599

The "Soulsborne" boost evidently doesn't extend to Sekiro, because this match was expected to be close and it wasn't close. Remember, this is the same series whose only previous outing involved being upset by Suikoden II. (Yeah, I know, not the same game.) More importantly, this is Capcom, whose last win in a debatable match was probably Mega Man > Charizard in 2013. (Oh, right, the DMC5-DKCTF match in round 1. There was that.) The idea of MH:W actually being strong seems ludicrous, but here it was, reaching R3 and still being the favorite to do so. Well, at least it'd be facing something strong next round.

Match 68: Bastion vs. Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age

Bastion 7370
DQXI 18869

Still nothing to see here. DQ11's path was pretty much set in stone from the start: Win three matches, then get beat pretty hard by BotW. Nothing seemed to indicate that this won't still be the case.

Match 69: Mass Effect 2 vs. Fallout 4

ME2 18568
FO4 9197

Well obviously Mass Effect 2's going to win; a weaker Mass Effect game than 2 did better against Undertale than a stronger Fallout game than 4.

But seriously, this was a good showing for Mass Effect 2, the type of performance it needs if it wants to stand a chance at breaking 40% against Breath of the Wild in Round 5. (It probably won't do it, but it looks like it can avoid the doubling.)

Round 4 opponent? No, there's no cause for concern there, don't be silly.

Match 70: Borderlands 2 vs. Horizon Zero Dawn

Borderlands 2 12471
Horizon Zero Dawn 15292

When HZD scored a massive blowout of Fortnite, we all just chalked it up to Fortnite being antivoted to kingdom come. After this win, on the other hand, it looks legit. The Gurus were fairly split on this one, though they ultimately favored Borderlands 2; by the time Oracle came around, however, they were leaning towards HZD, likely as a result of BL2's Round 1 performance. With the casuals? Your guess is as good as mine who the favorite was. Technically speaking, more brackets picked HZD to win in this round than to lose in it, but the group that picked HZD to lose last round had the heavy plurality, 43.13% to 28.65% to 28.22%. Which means the favorite was probably Borderlands 2, which had an 80.77% prediction percentage in Round 1, but it's quite likely that "Horizon Zero Dawn-Fortnite winner" was favored over Borderlands 2 and certainly at least a chance that Fortnite could even be the favorite despite not being the favorite last round if enough of its R1 pickers were expecting it to be RallyFEAR and picked it to go deep. At any rate, this was a solid win for Horizon Zero Dawn. Its goal right now? Try to put up a better percentage on ME2 than its Round 4 opponent will. Prior to this round, I'd have called that impossible, but it just put up over 55% on presumably a stronger opponent than either of them faced, and neither of them broke 58%.

Borderlands 2 (2015g) VS Fire Emblem: Awakening (2015g)

Borderlands 2 has a strength of 21.33.
Fire Emblem: Awakening has a strength of 22.89.

Fire Emblem: Awakening wins with 53.41% of the vote!
A win of 4,149 with 60,875 total votes cast.

...Oh. Never mind then.

---

Also known as Cyberchao X.

Been letting this slip

---

Also known as Cyberchao X.

Match 63: Divinity: Original Sin II vs. Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft

D:OS2 16804
Hearthstone 7471

Hearthstone was easily the weakest game in the X-Stats in 2015, certainly unadjusted and probably adjusted too. (The unadjusted X-Stats are mostly worthless because Undertale scored its largest blowout in the final against OoT. I feel like that definitely says something about Undertale, given that Link very nearly managed to stop Draven anyway, but I'm not sure what. But they can still be useful for comparing games that were on the same sides of the bracket.) Divinity was therefore expected to win easily, and it did just that. Some people were a bit surprised at how easily it did so, however, given its weak showing in the only other poll it had been in, but we all know that non-contest PotD results, even from GotY, are often suspect when used to predict contest matches. Nevertheless, this was the match where it was theorized that 2017 had actually been a stealth monster of a year and that there had been a number of games, Divinity: Original Sin II among them, that had flown under the radar because their only prior appearance in a poll was a poor showing in that year's GotY. People started talking about how 2017 would've done in the Years Contest. The thing is, it probably still wouldn't have done that well. There was a running joke about "just pick the closest year to 1998", except it wasn't a joke at all; if you actually made your bracket that way and picked correctly on all the "coin flips", you'd have a grand total of two wrong picks, though one of them would have been on a semifinal match so you'd still be far from perfect.

Match 64: Nier: Automata vs. Bayonetta 2

Nier: Automata 16604
Bayonetta 2 7668

Both of these games were clearly going to be far weaker than their TJF-packing protagonists, although there was reason to think Automata might not be as weak as the original Nier presumably would be. I say presumably because we've never seen it in a Games Contest! It's actually recent enough that it would've been in this GotD, not the last one, and normally the instinct is that the first game in the series is always the strongest but Automata was far more successful commercially so it probably is stronger. Nier the character was weak in his only outing in the Character Battle but he was being SFFed by Riku. Then again, that kind of says everything, doesn't it? In fact, if you tried to use past results without understanding what they actually mean, there's a direct route you could've taken to getting this match horribly wrong: Riku beat Nier in 2013; Bayonetta beat Riku in 2017; sequels are always weaker than the originals; therefore there's no way that a Nier game could beat a Bayonetta game.

The only question left is just how much weaker than the multi-platform original the Wii U-exclusive Bayonetta 2 is. Because this is GameFAQs, where Link Always Wins, and yet Nier: Automata won more convincingly here than 2013 Game of the Year The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds did against the first Bayonetta. Even if being a handheld game is always a negative here unless you're Pokmon, I find it hard to believe that Nier: Automata would challenge ALBW. (Granted, it wasn't that much more convincingly, so the two Bayonetta games would have to be pretty close in strength for Nier: Automata to actually win.) Either that, or the "2017 factor" is stronger than we thought.

Match 65: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild vs. Halo: Reach

BotW 22268
HaloR 3972

Breath of the Wild set a new contest high for votes received in a match, which is honestly kind of amazing given how lopsided so many Round 1 matches were. Then again, one of the truisms of the board is "there's rallying in every close match". This does indeed appear to be the first day to have over 26000 total votes, so there probably was some rallying going on, and since voters have to vote in all four matches (even though the totals never come out quite equal, because there is some way around that if you know what you're doing), it meant that Breath of the Wild got to pile on Halo: Reach even more. No one was complaining.

Match 66: Final Fantasy XV vs. Hollow Knight

Final Fantasy XV 13229
Hollow Knight 13008

We'd nearly gone all of Round 1 without a single barnburner, and on day 1 of Round 2, it looked like the floodgates had opened after the final day of Round 1 broke the dam. Which I think is a mixed metaphor, maybe. They're both related to a lot of water all over the place. Final Fantasy XV won the board vote, which is hardly a very Final Fantasy thing to do, but it took only 15 minutes for Hollow Knight to take a lead. It held onto that for an hour and 15 minutes before FFXV took the lead for one update, and then the next update was a straight-up tie. Hollow Knight did swing out in front on the update after the tie, but FFXV was right back in the lead the following update. 15 minutes later, back to Hollow Knight; another 15 minutes, back to FFXV. At this point, we were 2 hours and 15 minutes into the match and had had six lead changes. And...we wouldn't get a seventh, though it was far from smooth sailing for FFXV. It briefly got its lead above 200 at 10 minutes to 1 AM, and a mere 45 minutes later, it was down to 118. 2 hours after that, it again got past the 200 mark, and again Hollow Knight immediately started cutting.

And FFXV started fighting back; at one point, HK shaved off more than 50 votes in just 10 minutes and it took only 15 more minutes for FFXV to get its lead back to higher than it had been before those 10 minutes. At 5:05 AM, FFXV's lead breached the 200 mark again, at 215 and this time it stuck. Really stuck; for the entire hour after that, the lead never dropped below 213 nor exceeded 225. It crested at 232 at 6:20, then Hollow Knight managed to briefly get the lead under 200 at 7:30. As was the match's trend, this meant it was time for FFXV to gain momentum; by 7:45, it had a new largest lead, 238, though this was merely the beginning; by the time Hollow Knight next took an update, it was to reduce the lead from 298, and FFXV breached the 300 mark not long thereafter. Another prolonged stall began until FFXV spiked a win of 23 at 9:40 to push the new high to 340, only for HK to spike a 27 ten minutes later. FFXV went on a push at 11 AM, winning an update by 32, and at 11:35 AM, its lead stood at 400 votes exactly. And that's where it peaked; HK started slowly battling back, but far too slowly; it wasn't until 6:30 PM, just 90 minuted from the end of the match, that the lead dipped below 300 again. HK would continue to make a late push to make the match look closer than it really was, but the mat

Match 61: Pokmon HeartGold/SoulSilver vs. A Night in the Woods

HGSS 19898
Night 4379

Long before the contest was even announced, I theorized that due to the apparent "two generations" rule, where two generations have to pass before people can start getting nostalgic for a Pokmon game, that Black/White could be a beast in the Game of the Decade because it'd have the benefit of three generations having passed. Then Allen decided to allow remakes into the contest, possibly fueled by RE2Make winning GotY 2019 (wait, what?!), and even Gen V, which I'm pretty sure is remembered fondly because its metagame was very much still evolving when the Gen VI games came out (blame this on Gen VI being when Game Freak shifted to worldwide releases; Gen V didn't just feel shorter than previous generations; it was shorter), was completely missing from the bracket, let alone the newer games, but Gen IV got a representative with a 3-seed. Because as we all know, being essentially from the previous decade is a winning strategy for Game of the Decade. Just ask "Ocarina of Time 2". (I'm joking, of course; Majora's Mask proved it was legit in 2015.) Though of course, no GameFAQser would ever forget that HGSS was released in 2010 and not 2009. You could say its release date is...burned into their minds.

https://tenor.com/view/horatio-csi-miami-yeah-meme-gif-16346536

Other than that, there's not much to say about this match. No entrant in Round 1 received more raw votes from unregistered voters than registered, but Night in the Woods came closest. There were 1501 more registered voters than unregistered, and of these 1501 votes beyond the unregistered output, a grand total of 2 went to Night in the Woods. GameFAQs loves its Pokmon.

Match 62: Celeste vs. Rayman Legends

Celeste 12027
Rayman Legends 12244

FINALLY! FINALLY! FINALLY!

Yes, it really needs that many finally's. A lot of trends were broken in this match, saving Round 1 from being complete and utter monotony.

Celeste jumped out of the gate on fire; the earliest update on our vote tracker had it receiving 16 of the first 18 votes. Of course, there are a bunch of registered users who make a contest of getting the first vote, so it's probably fewer votes than that. It was a bit wobbly after that until Celeste spiked back-to-back update wins of 52 and 56 near the end of the first hour. From there, though neither side could put together more than 5 straight update wins (and Celeste had managed that feat before it hit the two big ones, all of which amounted to a smaller lead than either of those two updates alone), Celeste slowly built up a lead, peaking at 333 at 1:10 AM, about five hours in.

At 3:30 AM, however, it was Rayman Legends that broke that trend, winning its sixth consecutive update and pushing the deficit under 200. Celeste promptly won the next update, but then Rayman rattled off a string of seven, then a string of five shortly thereafter. By 5:10, the lead had dwindled all the way to 65 votes--but then Celeste reversed the trend. At 6:20, Celeste was coming off its sixth straight update win and had climbed back to 123 votes ahead (hey, we're still talking about this contest's crappy vote totals; large swings in updates late in matches just don't happen, except sometimes in the big blowouts where the leader can still put up decent net positives). The next update was a stall...and then Rayman started chipping away again. At 7:15, however, chipping was no longer enough; Rayman spiked a 29-vote swing to cut its deficit to 66. At 8:20, Rayman took its first lead of the match.

It was short-lived. Celeste retook the lead a mere 10 minutes later as part of winning 6 of the next 7 updates after falling behind.

At 9:35, the poll read 50%-50%, with Celeste clinging to a 1-vote lead. And again at 9:45, after it responded to Rayman's +9 with a +9 of its own, constituting two more lead changes. It then got a bunch more little wins to pad its lead all the way up to...18. At 10:25, however, Rayman spiked another +22, flipping a double-digit deficit into a double-digit lead. And again Celeste fought back, bringing it to a dead tie at 11:00 AM and winning the next update by 11. So of course Rayman Legends wins the next update by 12. Lead changes 6 and 7 in rapid succession.

And that was all the lead changes we had, though it took until the final four hours or so for Rayman to really start breaking away. In the end, it was a 217-vote margin and a percentage of 50.45%-49.55%. The Gurus were really tripped up by this, with a correct percentage of 27.46%, but at 37.67% the casuals weren't much better. And in addition to this being our first match that was honestly intriguing for quite some time, it marked the first match where the registered and unregistered voters disagreed. Celeste polled at 50.37% with registered voters and 47.51% with unregistered voters. Oh, hey, that means the unregistered voters actually flipped a match! Bravo for them, I guess. It's a 1-point match anyway as neither of these games stood a chance against HGSS.

I honestly thought this was the first appearance by anything Rayman in any of the contests. Courtesy of the wiki, however, I learned that Rayman the character has in fact been in two contests, though one of them was the bloated 2013 contest and his seeding was below the line where he'd have made a 128-character bracket (yes, even when you account for the 8-seeds being taken up by Board 8 rallies without regard to where they ought to have been seeded.) He didn't make it to Round 2 in either, though he at least managed to beat out Commander Video in 2013. Honestly I'm not surprised; even among forgotten platformer stars, Rayman feels irrelevant. What an amazing match though! I normally try to do the entirety of a day's matches at the same time, but my hands are already getting sore (admittedly, I'd already spent quite a bit of time on the computer today before writing these) so I'd probably end up half-assing the next two matches' write-ups if I tried to do them now. Let that be a testament to how good, and how necessary, this match was! We were just one day away from the highlight of Round 1 being a troll claiming he was going to start a rally before a match even started and votals for the day in question being down from the previous two while the game in question actually trailed after an hour but still won. Most matches could be called right at the freeze; only a couple of others even had any lead changes at all but that had been the only one where it took over an hour for the winner to take the lead for good. A match that stayed inside of 51-49 for the final

Match 57: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim vs. Subnautica

Skyrim 20647
Subnautica 3933

84.00%. A nice round number, the type of match that perfect Oracle predictions are made of. And I threw one away! Among the many games that this board plays to liven up the contest even more is the "Spread Betting" topic. Allegedly the spreads are set by the Oracle picks, but having just been told by the Analysis Crew (and having done my own research and agreeing) that Subnautica would be a contender for weakest game in the bracket, I figured that Skyrim covering the spread was the smart pick, then checked my Oracle prediction to make sure that it was high enough to cover the spread.

The Oracle consensus, even after me raising my prediction from 84% even to 86.67%, was only 84.77%. The average of the lowest and highest predictions was roughly 85.5%. Where the hell did they get -72 from?!

So, yeah, Subnautica's weak, but getting 16% on Skyrim easily takes it out of contention for weakest game in the bracket. Far weaker games than Skyrim got higher percentages in R1.

Match 58: Fate/Grand Order vs. Journey

FGO 8307
Journey 16271

Journey was piss-weak in 2015, so I figured the Fate name had enough clout to pull this one off. Then the Crew reminded me that even the people who play gacha games hate them, possibly even more so, because they make their money by making all the good stuff really hard to get. My Oracle still turned out pretty bad, though, because I still didn't have enough faith in Journey to not be awful too! And the apathy votes should've still leaned towards FGO because, again, recognizable name. It could very well fare better with people who haven't heard of it and don't know it's a gacha game than those who have!

Also, in a contest full of blowouts, Journey failed to double a gacha game. On GameFAQs, which hates mobile games and other "casualbait" (even though FGO is less casualbait and more otakubait.)

Match 59: Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn vs. Crypt of the NecroDancer

FFXIV 17583
Necrodancer 6997

This was one of those matches that I barely even considered debatable when making my bracket and it turned out it wasn't debatable, but in the other direction. I mean, let's look at the facts here: this site has never been big on MMOs, as evidenced by the way WoW constantly gets embarrassed, frequently losing as the favorite and failing to win convincingly even when it does win. Again: only entrant, game or character, to win with less than 60% with over 90% bracket support. And this site hates most of Square's recent output, so even if this were a regular Final Fantasy and not an MMO, it wouldn't be that strong, though it'd still be strong enough to win. And most importantly, Nintendo has been famously reticent to allow anyone else access to their IPs, ever since the Philips CD-i debacle. Even though Cadence of Hyrule isn't the game in this poll, its mere existence is a vote of confidence from people whose opinions matter a lot to GameFAQs.

Turns out, FFXIV is actually really well respected now. That "A Realm Reborn" in the title isn't merely a fancy subtitle; it's to differentiate it from the original release of FFXIV, which was such a disaster that Square basically scrapped the whole thing and then went meta with the rerelease, setting it in a post-apocalyptic world that's basically the same cataclysm that they dropped on the original release's world when they killed it off. People love it, especially because it finally gave WoW some much-needed competition.

So after being informed that I'd horribly misjudged two matches in the same day again, I went into the Oracle topic, came up with what I thought was a good percentage for FFXIV > FGO, then went back before posting because I'd already forgotten what the other game that I'd wrongly had losing was...and realized, oops, FFXIV was facing Crypt of the NecroDancer! So I had to redo it, and it was killing me because I still believed that if the opponents were reversed, I'd only have to change one outcome; that Crypt of the NecroDancer could still win.

After this? I no longer think Crypt of the NecroDancer could beat Journey. Unless FFXIV is just that beastly, getting only 28.47% is just not a good performance, and I really overestimated the psychological effect of "Nintendo let these guys make a game with one of their most valuable IPs".

The actual Cadence of Hyrule probably would've been stronger. Too bad it's a 2019 game or else we could find out in ten years.

Match 60: Uncharted 4: A Thief's End vs. Mario Kart 8

UC4 10114
MK8 14467

This match was debated for all sorts of silly reasons, most of them stemming as to whether voters would see it strictly as "Mario Kart 8", the Wii U game, or if they'd see it as both Mario Kart 8 and its update Switch version, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. Because of course, voters will anti-vote anything associated with the Wii U. </s> Uncharted has never been that strong here; Nathan Drake managed a single first-round win in 2013 against Pac-Man and Steve from Minecraft, but is better known for coming in 4th place in his debut despite having CATS in his fourpack and then later becoming the first 2-seed to lose in round 1 in a format with 16-character divisions (though we'd had 8-1 upsets in the 8x8 era, so...) As for the games themselves...er, the game itself, Uncharted 2, went two rounds in GotD, beating The Legend of Dragoon and Street Fighter IV, before losing to Halo, then beat out The Walking Dead in round 1 in 2015 before losing to Sonic the Hedgehog 2. Neither Uncharted nor Uncharted 3 have ever been in a contest. No, Uncharted wasn't even in the vote-ins for the first GotD. (Uncharted 3 would've been in this one, not that one.) Honestly, this feels like a really bad result for MK8. I honestly wasn't that concerned about having blown two matches in the same day because unlike the Bravely Default/Ni No Kuni disaster, at least my wrong calls would both be R2 losers anyway, but after seeing MK8 held under 59% by UC4 while FFXIV was putting up over 71% on NecroDancer, I'm not so sure anymore! Obviously MK8 had the stronger opponent, but was it by enough to account for that big a difference?

Though it should be noted that at 55.86% correct, this was the most debated match of Round 1 with the casuals, narrowly edging out Nioh's upset of Binding of Isaac: Rebirth which 56.01% of brackets had incorrect.

---

Also known as Cyberchao X.

Match 53: Batman: Arkham City vs. Xenoblade Chronicles 2

Batman 13688
XBC2 11445

Remember everything I said about action games being the in thing now, and non-video game origins not being a detriment? Yeah, this match basically decided to throw that all out. 93% of Gurus got this right, and 71.32% of casuals, which means that it was by and large not a debatable match--yet look at how close it was! This was an absolute embarrassment, barring the possibility that XBC2 was almost as strong as the first--based on 2015 X-Stats, Arkham City is worth 52.86% on XBC, yet it could only get 54.46% on the sequel. And in the next round, it was set to take on a game that finished ahead of XBC in the 2015 X-Stats.

Match 54: BioShock Infinite vs. Terraria

BSI 17005
Terraria 8123

If there was any good news for Arkham City, the presumptive favorite in Round 2, it was that its opponent, BioShock Infinite, was also disappointing in Round 1. Terraria is a sandbox game similar to Minecraft, hardly the type of game that GameFAQs goes crazy for. Yet here it was pulling down 32.33% against BioShock Infinite. Admittedly, Infinite hasn't had nearly the success in these contests, be it in games contests or Character Battles, that BioShock or BioShock 2 have had. But it's still an established franchise, which means it should be worth more than this.

Match 55: Diablo III vs. Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward

Diablo III 17340
VLR 7788

This feels like it was actually a pretty good performance for Diablo III. No, VLR isn't strong, but Diablo III was absolutely excoriated by the fandom when it first came out. Though I guess nowadays, how good a game you are when you first come out is completely irrelevant because everything's so wired that they can just patch things? And D3 is apparently a better game than it used to be. We'd see that again soon.

Still, Diablo II beats RE2 outright in the 2015 X-Stats, 56-44. If we peg Diablo III at even half Diablo II's strength, VLR's projected to get 26.73% on RE2, which is higher than what VLR is actually pegged to get on RE2 via 2015 X-Stats. Even adjusting for the expectation that this RE2 remake is actually stronger than the original, which flies in the face of everything this site has stood for for the past two decades...there's still no X-Stat voodoo I could come up with to suggest that VLR is weaker than DR2.

Also, did people forget that 999 came out in 2010? It seems really weird that VLR made the bracket and 999 didn't.

Match 56: The Last of Us vs. Crusader Kings II

TLoU 20566
CKII 4560

No meaningful conclusions could be drawn from this match, because Crusader Kings II was always going to be weak. But still, is it really stronger than Hotline Miami? Because it got a better percentage on TLoU than Hotline Miami got on Dark Souls, and the 2015 X-Stats say that TLoU should be stronger than Dark Souls. (Technically speaking, they say that The Last of Us should actually get a higher percentage on Dark Souls in the division final than on Arkham City in the division semis, but Arkham City was in the top half of Division 1 which means its X-Stat number is horribly distorted by the collective delusion that a. Chrono Trigger would've won in the absence of rallies and b. that matters. Because it doesn't matter. Rallies have always been a part of the contest. Many of our greatest contest matches were great because both sides were rallying. And I guess they were fine with that because even if they shifted the outcome, they probably didn't shift the percentage that drastically. But when one side manages to tap into a source of votes that the other can't match, suddenly we have to correct for what "should be" instead of what is. And once a rally has knocked someone off, there's no longer any need to account for logic in projecting what "should have" happened. I'll say it again: Yes, Chrono Trigger was indirectly stronger than Final Fantasy VII in 2015. You can see it in the actual percentages they got against Melee and you can see it in the percentages that Allen was kind enough to provide for "registered voters only" for all of both Melee's and Undertale's matches. Wouldn't have mattered. Final Fantasy VII won't lose to a fellow Square game. There was a pair of PotD's shortly before the contest, one for "What is your favorite Final Fantasy game" and one between the top two vote-getters of that poll for "which of these two do you like more". Both times, FFVII lost to FFVI, and then FFVII still narrowly broke 60% when they faced each other in the Division 2 Finals.

Also, let's take a look at those "registered user only" numbers, and pretend they're the actual numbers. Note that this isn't the same as subjecting the 2015 contest to 2018/2020 rules because we don't know what the registered/unregistered splits are and either way, 2-1 isn't the same as 1-0. Looking at Melee's percentages against Undertale and Chrono Trigger, Undertale would be projected to get 22.33% on Chrono Trigger.

Undertale vs. Mass Effect 3 - 29.49% 70.51%
Fallout 3 vs. Undertale - 75.67% 24.33%
Undertale vs. Super Mario World - 19.28% 80.72%
Pokemon Red/Blue vs. Undertale - 76.30% 23.70%
Undertale vs. Super Mario 64 - 26.21% 73.79%
Smash Bros. Melee vs. Undertale - 69.59% 30.41%
Undertale vs. Zelda: Ocarina of Time - 33.44% 66.56%

Yes, Super Mario World, the game that started hemorrhaging percentage to Animal Crossing: New Leaf when Undertale started rallying against ME3, is projected to beat Chrono Trigger by this metric. It's probably misleading because it's only looking at "logged in", not the age of the account--while it's possible that Undertale legitimately picked up a bandwagon here on GameFAQs, it's far more likely that Undertale's percentage rises each round after the SMW match because more of the people rallied from off-site had accounts, possibly because they wanted to taunt the "butthurt" people (though I'm pretty sure that BracketEntry was a false flag operation by someone from Undertale's camp).

So, yeah, that happened then, and Allen conceded to give longtime GameFAQs users (well, anyone who had an account at any point before the contest began and still remembered how to log into it) a greater say, and it...flipped a grand total of three matches last contest, probably only one of which actually made B8 happy, and through pretty much all of Round 1 there hasn't been a single match whose outcome would've changed no matter how the votes were counted because registered and unregistered voters, while their percentages have varied, have always chosen the same g

Match 49: Dark Souls vs. Hotline Miami

Dark Souls 20080
Hotline Miami 4117

Dark Souls became the fourth game this contest to break 20000 votes, though it was the first of those to give up at least 4000. We knew Dark Souls was going to be strong, so if anything, this is a good performance by Hotline Miami. Nothing to worry about, though; the next match was going to produce a weak opponent for it no matter what happened.

Match 50: Rocket League vs. Dragon Ball FighterZ

Rocket League 12498
FighterZ 11694

This match had more total lead changes than the entire contest to date, including the first one to occur outside the opening hour. Rocket League led at the freeze, but FighterZ spiked a big update at the 15 minute mark to go up by 5. Rocket League retook the lead on the next update, but FighterZ was right back in the lead on the next update and was still ahead an hour into the match. It was the last time all match that it led, but still, progress! A match was actually won by the entrant that trailed after an hour! Okay yeah, "vehicular soccer" game vs. licensed fighting game was the definition of a fodder match, but you have to take the little victories. And this was the tightest Guru spread of the first round, 73-69 in favor of Rocket League, so we knew this could be a tough one to call.

But all of this was overshadowed by a hilariously inept troll. About 40 minutes before the start of the match, a topic was posted stating that "Rocket League must win; I'll alert the Discord with 200,000 followers". And the opening post had a picture to prove the follower count, along with the statement "Someone has to stop BotW". He was, of course, laughed at, and when told it wouldn't work, he said "probably not but someone has to try, we don't need a Wii U game winning the whole contest". When it was pointed out that Breath of the Wild is a Switch game, he instead started defending himself against non-existent accusations that he doesn't even play Rocket League with more pictures showing his accomplishments, or someone's accomplishments at any rate since the username in the pics didn't remotely match the one he was using here. When told that it was fine for him to dislike BotW without taking it personally, he responded that he does like BotW, but as you can see he does play Rocket League.

By the way, this was the second straight day that votes declined. Nice rally, bro.

Match 51: Yakuza 0 vs. The Witness

Yakuza 0 18727
The Witness 5470

Two Yakuza 0 characters made the 2018 contest, one of them getting a good seed. Neither put up any sort of resistance against characters who were either proven fodder or frequently anti-voted. And yet, we all knew that Yakuza 0 would win this easily, because of the quality of its opponent.

Though based on what we've seen this contest, action games are actually quite strong here, even if their characters rarely are. Or, wait, no, that's the opposite of the way things used to be! Guys like Dante and Kratos always far outperformed their games. Something's shifted.

Match 52: Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain vs. Dead Cells

MGSV 17542
Dead Cells 6651

While the days of SFF matches out the wazoo seems to finally be behind us, Allen can't help but get cute with the bracketmaking sometimes. Dead Cells going up against a Metal Gear game is funny enough, but we're also looking at a probable 2015 rematch in Round 3. It wasn't even a particularly close match in 2015, though it was one with what seemed like a fairly even split in prediction percentage.

MGSV was expected to have suffered from backlash. It feels like nearly every established franchise has been facing backlash towards its most recent games. No wonder indies are doing so well; any franchise not owned by Nintendo is essentially getting punished for how good earlier games in the series were, or are perceived to have been. We're in the midst of maximum hype about a Final Fantasy VII remake, and seeing the ads, it certainly does look beautiful. Modern graphics with, presumably, the original story. But I can't help but wonder, if it weren't a remake, would it be nearly so beloved? I haven't gotten that far into FFVII yet, but so far I'm less than impressed, and pretty new graphics won't fix that.

Though I was happy that the game took mercy on me after I failed the stealth sequence in Shinra Tower too many times. Funny, I thought that the problem with modern games was that they held your hand too much? It wouldn't surprise me at all if some gamers held that mercy against the remake, if it's still there.

---

Also known as Cyberchao X.

Match 45: Portal 2 vs. Tomb Raider

Portal 2 15978
Tomb Raider 8493

There was a lot of doubt as to whether Portal 2 would be terribly strong. The series seemed to be something that came and went--the first game did well in the first GotD because it was still fresh in everyone's minds, but it had a short shelf life. And this result...seems to suggest that the concern was warranted. Tomb Raider hasn't been worth a damn here in ages, if it ever was; Lara was at least worth a little bit in the early Character Battles but then again she was one of the pioneers of TJF in video game character design.

Of course, people had concerns about its next opponent as well so who knows what would happen next.

Match 46: Kingdom Hearts III vs. Disco Elysium

KHIII 16654
Disco 7816

The good news is that Kingdom Hearts III got the doubling. The bad news is, it only barely got 68% against a PC-exclusive (with ports to other consoles planned for 2020, but still, currently a PC exclusive) indie game that is nominally an RPG, but contains no combat and instead progresses through skill checks and dialogue trees. Which kind of sounds more like a visual novel to me! So, VN/RPG hybrid, that's fine I guess, but it doesn't sound like the type of thing that should have the strength to get almost 32% on a big name Square Enix series. They can't do anything right these days, can they? Of course, Kingdom Hearts isn't just Square Enix, and its other parent company is known for being one of the most well-oiled machines in the world. Maybe it'd be better for us all if they just bought up the video game/manga giant (yes, Square does more than just video games).

Apparently the title "Disco Elysium" was chosen for multiple meanings, including "disco" being Latin for "I learn". I am certainly learning as a result of this project.

Match 47: Animal Crossing: New Leaf vs. Street Fighter V

AC:NL 16274
SFV 8194

Animal Crossing has been nothing short of terrible in past polls. Or has it? Tom Nook did manage to get not-last place finishes in R1 matches in multiways, both in 2007 and 2013, with the latter being against someone who actually has...a not-last-place finish in 2008. But that was against someone with genuine contest wins, and in bizarre rSFF fashion, no less! Nook and his rival Crazy Redd also nearly avoided a doubling against Amaterasu and Orochi in Rivalry Rumble. The original Animal Crossing (or at least, the first one to be released outside of Japan) also managed to put up 41.45% on World of Warcraft, one of the few times that an entrant selected to win by over 90% of brackets failed to double its opponent and the only one to fail to even break 60%. But its most interesting poll was this very game appearing in the 2015 contest, where it proceeded to look especially like trash in a Nintendo SFF battle with Super Mario World. SMW got the lead to 1000 in only 15 minutes, to 2000 in another 20, and over 3000 by the end of the first hour, an 85-15 type of beatdown. And remember, 2015 didn't have great votals either, so those numbers are a lot bigger than they would be in our prime. So what made the poll so interesting? Well, like this contest, there were four matches per day. Which means that all of your potential opponents for the next two rounds are also active whenever you are.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/6152

"Oh."

SMW had already been slowly bleeding percentage throughout the match; it's only natural when you've got such a big lead and the vote totals are so low, because even a few votes for your opponent can cut your percentage (in fact, hour 14 ended with SMW winning an update 14-4, which is a percentage cut). But once Undertale started rallying, the percentage bleed sped up considerably, and New Leaf even started occasionally winning updates outright. In the end, an entrant that was under 14% near the end of the first hour and at 15.86% when Mass Effect 3's lead over Undertale peaked over two-thirds of the way through the match wound up at 26.73% when it was all said and done. It was a clear sign that if anything was stopping Undertale, it certainly wouldn't be Super Mario World.

Flash forward to 2020. We've all grown a bit older, and many of us have kids. I fully suspect that's as much a reason why Nintendo always does so well here; we've moved past the "M-Rated video games so cool!" phase and want E-rated stuff we can share with our families. And then the pandemic struck, and we're all stuck in our homes, and what should release but a new Animal Crossing game for the Switch! And the thing about Animal Crossing games is, they're not terribly different from one another. If you love one, you probably love them all. The weakening of fighting games made this round a mere formality, not to mention Street Fighter V was hated even by Street Fighter fans. (I wish I'd known that; I figured this was a no-brainer based on Animal Crossing's past results.) The following round, however, would be far more interesting.

Match 48: Red Dead Redemption 2 vs. Dying Light

RDR2 19917
Dying Light 4551

Since this was an obvious blowout (over 94% prediction percentage), it's fun facts time! The first Red Dead Redemption was originally considered a sequel, later redubbed "spiritual successor", to a game called Red Dead Revolver, but when Redemption proved far more popular, they renamed that as part of the series instead of just being the "Red Dead" series. Red Dead Revolver was itself considered a spiritual successor to an NES game called "Gun Smoke". Correction: an arcade game that was ported to the NES. If you're wondering how a Rockstar Games production could date back to the 80s, the original Gun Smoke was a Capcom game, but Red Dead Revolver kind of just sat in development hell for years until Rockstar took it off Capcom's hands.

But things with pedigrees going back to the 80s tend to be very strong here, and even if most of the voters didn't know it, RDR qualifies.

---

Also known as Cyberchao X.

Match 41: Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 5 vs. Heavy Rain

Persona 5 19455
Heavy Rain 5395

So of course, as I so frequently do, I immediately followed up my colossal blunder with an outright win. Only went over by 0.02%, and unlike some of my previous wins where I just had the high/low pick on a match we all messed up, there was some tight competition. In fact, the Oracle consensus was only 0.08% off from what actually happened--the top scores were the ones closest to the median!

Also, despite having literally filled out a bracket, it was at the very least when I was making Oracle predictions and possibly even on the match day itself when I went "wait, how is Heavy Rain in this contest? Didn't that game come out in like 2008 or something?" Nope, but I understand my confusion. Exact years for things in the past often elude me, so I probably remembered seeing ads for it on TV in my college dorm room and figured "yeah, that's late 2000s"; it actually came out in February of 2010 for the Playstation 3. It was then ported to the PS4 in 2016...and to Windows in 2019. So, yeah, recent rerelease, makes sense that it somehow managed to squeak out a bid. Got crushed, of course, because Persona is mainstream now even if SMT as a whole still isn't.

Match 42: Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag vs. Sid Meier's Civilization V

AC IV 14026
Civ V 10824

We were just two days removed from seeing Assassin's Creed Odyssey get quintupled by Witcher 3, and the original Assassin's Creed had needed the vote-ins just to make the first GotD while Assassin's Creed II was the series' lone representative in 2015 and it was a 16-seed. All indications were that the series was toast. And yet, we still believed in it here, for the simple reason that Civilization has always been absolute garbage here. Civ V itself had appeared in 2015 and got doubled by Dark Souls in round 1; Civ IV made it into the first GotD and lost a close match with Persona 3 where it was actually favored roughly 57-43 by both Gurus and casuals; the series as a whole managed to just narrowly clear 10% in the opening match of the 2006 series contest against The Legend of Zelda; and in the series' lone failure to come in dead last in a contest poll, the first game in the series beat out Castlevania III for third place by almost 1000 votes while still coming nearly 28000 votes shy of second place Street Fighter II (which was itself nearly 10000 votes out of first). The Persona 3-Civ IV match might've been sticking in Gurus heads, because honestly, neither 47.65% on P3 nor 33.3% on Dark Souls feel like awful results. But the fact that it lost as a favorite, even though with hindsight it doesn't feel like it should have been a favorite, leaves you with a "won't get fooled again" mentality. This is exactly why Kefka's been burning us over and over with his nonsensical newfound strength. But with AC also declining, this was far from consensus; over 25% of Gurus had Civ V, and about 28% of Oracle predictions were for it. The casuals were similarly conflicted but clearly leaning in the correct direction; 63.47% of brackets had this right, which feels about right for a match that had a clear favorite but was somewhat debatable.

Match 43: Sonic Mania vs. Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of DANA

Sonic Mania 15592
Ys VIII 9258

Sonic's woes have been talked about at length for many contests, so a blowout win felt unlikely even though Mania was the return to the series' roots that the fans had long been clamoring for and Ys has always been a fairly niche RPG series. Then again, it's still an RPG series, and a Japanese one at that, so, you know, Flowchart.

Or maybe not. In fact, out of 57 Oracle predictions, a grand total of one predicted Sonic Mania to win with a percentage lower than it actually did, though it did so by a wide enough margin to not even get a top 5 out of it. Was it Sonic antivotes or just RPGFAQs up to its usual shenanigans? We'd hopefully find out next round, since its next opponent would be an indie game regardless of who won the next match!

Match 44: Super Meat Boy vs. Slay the Spire

Super Meat Boy 17138
Slay the Spire 7713

Super Meat Boy was the Guru nomination, which it rode to a 4-seed. Meat Boy had been in the contest before, once solo and once in *sigh* Rivalry Rumble. The 2013 solo outing is nothing to speak of--he came in third to Mr. Game & Watch and Lee Everett from The Walking Dead--but the ability to not get doubled by a Final Fantasy hero/main villain pair, even if it was only Zidane/Kuja, is actually kind of impressive. Though it could just be the silly character design at work. Giving it a fellow indie game to beat was a nice gesture by Allen, since so many Guru noms just fall flat immediately. But would it be beloved enough to get past an established icon like Sonic the Hedgehog?

...My bracket certainly hopes so! (seriously what was I thinking)

---

Also known as Cyberchao X.

Match 37: Fallout: New Vegas vs. The Stanley Parable

Fallout: NV 18217
Stanley 4726

Having 4 matches per day is great, because it allows the boring Round 1 matches to be cleared out of the way quickly. And this contest had no shortage of those. Through ten days of the contest, there had been a grand total of two lead changes after the freeze. Undertale managed to make it to the freeze with a 5 vote lead and increased it to 7 at the next update before falling behind for good, and Walking Dead came out so on fire that its max recorded lead was before the freeze (64, compared to the 55 it had at the freeze) and managed slight gains over the next two updates before Bastion took the lead for good at the 40-minute mark. That's it. Even Ori and the Blind Forest, which had a smaller maximum lead than Bastion, never trailed. Honestly, in the absence of rallies, we're probably going to see this in every match.

Fallout: New Vegas was considered by many to be a disappointment, yet it was still better than a 3 to 1 favorite among Gurus for Round 2. Given what we'd seen all contest, this was probably cause for concern.

Match 38: Dark Souls III vs. Dishonored

Dark Souls III 16041
Dishonored 6897

We'd seen Sekiro do well, and Bayonetta overperform on ALBW, and DMC5 "upset" DKC:TF. And now, we had an actual Dark Souls game. And it did...quite well! It doesn't look that way based on percentages, but with votals so low, the difference between winning with 69.93% and 79.40% is only a little more than 2000 votes. And to me, almost 70% on Dishonored does in fact feel more impressive than 79.4% on The Stanley Parable. The Stanley Parable is described as an nteractive drama and walking simulator". In other words, it should be utter fodder. Failing to break 80% on it is not great, though coming that close isn't bad, either. FO:NV is a game that was in 2015, where it got almost 56% on BioShock Infinite in R1 and almost 42% on RE4 in R2. So, not bad.

But let's look at Dishonored. We don't have any Games Contest results to work from, but in GotY for 2012, when Allen decided to switch from polling by system to polling by genre, it came in second place in "Action/Adventure Game", still well behind poll winner Assassin's Creed III, but well ahead of third place and in fact exactly doubling up 4th place (in a 10-option poll). We also do have a Character Battle result to look at! Corvo Attano, the main character of Dishonored, made CBIX as a 15-seed. He was blown out by 4-seed Pokmon Trainer Red, but nevertheless managed to just barely double 24-seed Sissel, the protagonist of another game in this bracket, Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective. Now, there's no good way to figure out the relationship between character battle strength and game strength, but a doubling is a doubling even if it's, to round off, about a 70-20-10 threeway. This is a good performance by Dark Souls III, and it wouldn't surprise me at all to see it pull the upset next round.

Match 39: Binding of Isaac: Rebirth vs. Nioh

BoI:R 9972
Nioh 12968

Nioh was a contest newcomer, an action RPG (good thing for this contest) made by Team Ninja (maybe not so good? This is a very Nintendo-centric board and a lot of Nintendo fans are probably still mad about Metroid: Other M) with a sequel (actually prequel, but its name is "Nioh 2") that was released not even two weeks before this match (always a good thing, but imagine how high it could've gone if the start of the contest hadn't been delayed!). Binding of Isaac: Rebirth had made the 2015 Contest as a 14-seed and proceeded to come up against one of the few things against which the "older = better" would've actually worked in its favor, which along with the fact that it was from a series I'd actually heard of, I initially entertained it as a possibility for our requisite 14-3 upset (3-seeds always tend to be hyped newcomers that inevitably flop; Allen even made a joke out of it in CBIX and of course a 3-seed won it all). Mercifully I was successfully talked out of that; The Witcher 3 nearly tripled it. But "familiar" usually trumps "unfamiliar", so even though the only contest experience BoI had was being weak (the protagonist also made CBIX as an 18-seed, but that meant an immediate date with a Noble Niner), the fact that it had any experience at all made it a favorite on Board 8, at a little better than 2-1 on the Guru and 5-1 on Oracle predictions, including at least one person who said straight-out in the Oracle Discussion Topic that they had Nioh in their bracket but their bracket was trash anyway so they were hoping that it was their Oracle pick of BoI:R that was correct. The casuals? Well, they were upset, too, but not nearly as badly as the Gurus. 43.53% of brackets had this match correct, so while they too were ultimately wrong more than they were right, they correctly saw this as a debatable match.

And let's face it, winning with 56.53% qualifies as "close" in this contest. I'm honestly not even sure why I'm still making Oracle predictions under 55%; I suspect it's to mitigate disaster when I know I'm picking against the majority.

Match 40: God of War vs. The Talos Principle

God of War 19480
The Talos Principle 3460

I really don't want to talk about this match.

No, seriously, I really don't want to talk about this.

I got this right in Guru, of course. Everyone did. And at 94.81%, it was second only to Breath of the Wild in prediction percentage among the casuals, too. Was I under some delusion that God of War was no longer popular here? Did I accidentally mistake the Talos Principle for something that might have anything remotely resembling strength? Or was I just not paying attention?! Because honestly, there is no good excuse for being more than 10 points behind the second-worst Oracle prediction when you're not predicting an upset or even a threat of one. This match has single-handedly convinced me to start keeping tabs on what I put into Oracle for every match and adjusting them if I think I messed up. Predicting 61% for a match where the actual winning percentage was nearly 85% can do that to a guy.

Even without the benefit of being an established franchise, God of War's genre is much more of an asset this contest than it seems like it would've been in years past. That was just such a huge blunder on my part that I actually went to check my Guru to see if I'd screwed anything up in later rounds. Then I remembered what its next opponent was/would have been. Yes, it turns out, I am in the majority that picked God of War to make Round 4 and then lose. I just had a major stupid when it came to

Match 34: Mass Effect 3 vs. StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty

ME3 14466
SC2 9392

Oh, hey, sequel fight.

https://board8.fandom.com/wiki/(7)Starcraft_vs_(2)Mass_Effect_2_2015

That was a hotly contested battle, and the general consensus was that neither of these games were as popular as those games, even if the adjusted X-Stats say ME3 > ME2--I have no idea how they came up with that, though, because I think the match against ME3 was the only one where we got to see what Undertale's unrallied strength looked like? Obviously the raw X-Stats have ME3 behind only Undertale, but that'd just be silly.

...Hm. Well that's disturbing. It turns out I remembered wrong, and we did get to see unrallied Undertale for quite a bit of the match against Fallout 3 in Round 2 (in fact, Fallout 3's peak lead came more than 13 hours in, which is especially scary given that it fell more than 2500 short of Undertale's winning margin). And of course, it's fun to note how even though Undertale was continuing to win updates by large raw amounts right up until the end, the total votes in the late updates aren't really any higher than in a lot of the early updates where FO3 was winning (though given how the updates usually get quite a bit smaller, the fact that they're of similar size is still the rallies' fault). Kind of lends some credence to what Allen said about the Link-Draven match, that people could always come back and vote later. But what's disturbing is that there, uh...was kind of a blip in that poll, too. Nothing prolonged like what happened in Link-Draven, but if you look at the updater, there's a single update where Fallout 3 won 4-0. For a second I thought that the updater had accidentally taken a double, since the seconds on the two updates are different, but it's actually the later update that has the earlier seconds reading--they're 4:59 apart, not 5:01.

...Or maybe not. It took a second update a mere minute later and that showed a more normal amount of votes. But then why did it show any change in votes at all? Strange. Must've just been a hiccup in the counting software.

But back on topic. Presumably based on the pre-rallying ME3-UT and FO3-UT values, ME3 was in fact supposed to get 51.92% on ME2 based on 2015. ME2, in turn, got 51.12% on StarCraft in a match where both sides were rallying. So this was a fairly obvious result and I feel silly for thinking it could be close even though I got it right.

Match 35: Stardew Valley vs. Destiny

Stardew Valley 16979
Destiny 6879

Another match that everyone seemed to know the winner, but no one really felt comfortable about it. Stardew Valley was yet another indie game, and even though it is technically an RPG, the game series it's most commonly compared to is Harvest Moon. Actual Harvest Moon, not its RPG spinoff Rune Factory. Destiny, however, is neither Japanese nor an RPG. It is in fact made by Bungie, best known for notorious contest disappointment Halo. Destiny had been in a contest before, in 2015, where it lost in Round 1 getting 25.51% on...StarCraft. (Oracle expectation: 39.85%) Well, that certainly provides a good comparison for Round 3! Based on the 2015 X-Stats, however they were calculated, ME3 would be expected to get 76.02% on Destiny. Stardew Valley got 71.17%. So that comes out to...Stardew Valley being worth 48.35% on ME3? That seems awfully strange, but okay!

(Far more likely that Destiny has fallen off a lot more than ME3 has; I wouldn't even really be surprised if ME3 had been vindicated by time somewhat, either because those who didn't get it right away only know the revised version or because the even more hated Mass Effect: Andromeda has lessened the hatred towards 3.)

Match 36: Super Mario Galaxy 2 vs. Return of the Obra Dinn

SMG2 20816
RotOD 3043

Just when you thought the vote totals couldn't get any worse...

I'm fairly certain that that's a record low for votes in a 1v1 Games or Characters contest, even with the registered voter bonus. The Years Contest had a lot of first-round blowouts where even the raw figures for Return of the Obra Dinn were higher than the loser's vote total, but it's certainly worse than anything else this year or from 2018, including Draven getting hatestomped. Though at least the unregistered voters alone gave it more votes than Chester got in 2013. Honestly once you add in the registered vote bonus this isn't all that far off Chester's total for the end-of-round-1 "Worst of the Worst" bonus match.

It's impossible not to look at the raw totals for this match and not think of the Years Contest, though, because Return of the Obra Dinn literally got 1998 votes before adding in the registered voter bonus.

So now we were left to determine whether 87.25% on Return of the Obra Dinn was as impressive as 84.07% on Assassin's Creed: Odyssey. It doesn't seem like it should be, even if it was the biggest blowout of the contest so far by percentage. The biggest by total votes, though, was Super Mario Odyssey, so Galaxy 2 doing this as well...well, it was easy to think that Mario was just going to be a beast this contest. Hopefully Round 2 would give us a better handle on what to expect for the big SMG2-W3 matchup.

Or, wait, is that even right? That was the foregone conclusion, but I can't help feeling that there's something in the way... After all, SMG2 narrowly lost to Mass Effect 1 in 2015. If The Witcher 3-Super Mario Galaxy 2 is supposed to be a close match, shouldn't Witcher 3 have trouble with ME3?

...Huh. The Witcher 3 did better in defeat than I remembered. Still, it does seem odd that The Witcher 3 is a unanimous Guru pick to reach R3 when the 2015 X-Stats say that it's only expected to beat Mass Effect 3 with 51.74%. What's SMG2's expected percentage against ME3?

...51.58%. Holy crap. The X-Stats have The Witcher 3 winning with just 50.16% of the vote against Super Mario Galaxy 2. There are so many things that can change in five years. And yet Witcher 3 is more than a 5-to-1 favorite on the Guru (along with a sole Guru taking Stardew Valley to upset both of them--one of only three to even take Stardew Valley to upset SMG2.)

Bring it on.

---

Also known as Cyberchao X.

Match 31: Dragon Age: Inquisition vs. Ori and the Blind Forest

DA:I 12065
OatBF 13024

I knew that Ori was at least somewhat popular among indies, but it was never going to stand a chance against a popular RPG series like Dragon Age...right? Well, let's take a look at the results:

In the first GotD, Dragon Age: Origins piled up 69.21% on F-Zero GX in Round One (Oracle expectation: not quite 61%, with a few rogues picking GX to pull the upset outright) before pulling 31.13% in a loss to Twilight Princess. Now, if taken at face value, the 37.73% that Super Mario Galaxy pulled in on TP the following round suggests that DA:O would be able to break 45% on it, but of course SMG-TP is an SFF match so the adjustments suggest it's more like 41.25%. Actual result when the two games met in Round 1 in 2015: DA:O was held just under 36%. Origins also managed 30.32% in the final of the 2009 GotY, while Inquisition, the game in this match, also made the final vote in its GotY five years later and actually took second place (the 2009 final was close enough that 30.32% was actually third place out of three.) So by all indications, it's a strong series here. Probably. As such, just 17.61% of Gurus took Ori to pull the upset.

"Oops."

The casuals didn't exactly embarrass us on this one, but they clearly weren't as enamored of DA:I as we were; 37.68% of brackets had this match right. DA:I never led in this match, with the max lead for Ori coming about 3 hours from the end. But max leads are fairly meaningless in this contest, because with how low the votals are, there's barely any movement late in matches.

Match 32: Fire Emblem: Three Houses vs. South Park: The Stick of Truth

FE3H 16721
South Park 8364

As if we needed more evidence that non-video game origins are no object for GameFAQs voters.

This was a horrible result for Three Houses, which was seemingly a lot more well-loved in the fandom than Awakening or Fates even though it's probably even easier than those games. Seriously, this game still has a "Casual Mode" despite the fact that Divine Pulse makes it so that you can take the risks in Classic Mode that you wouldn't dream of taking in anything other than Casual Mode in any other game. I think I actually had to start tightening up my play at one point in my first playthrough because I was running low on (and eventually ran out of) charges, but I never had to reset to save a unit, and on NG+, you'll never even have to worry about running out of charges at any time. Which is fine for me, because I'm more of a story guy and replay for the completion of filling up the support logs (a fruitless task in the later games, though one I'd managed on both 7 and 8). In Awakening and Fates, that meant one playthrough on Classic Mode to prove myself capable and then all replays on Casual. In Three Houses, it's Classic Mode every time, because there's still pretty much no risk to doing so. And against South Park: The Stick of Truth (which is apparently also an RPG?), it...came up just seven votes shy of the doubling. Yeah, we'll just call it "a doubling", but that it was even close, let alone technically coming up just short, is embarrassing. And in the raw votes, it's not even close; FE3H polled at 67.64% among registered voters and 64.19% among unregistered.

And yet, would that really affect anything? Three Houses was considered a massive favorite over Dragon Age: Inquisition, and it was even harder to imagine Ori and the Blind Forest pulling the upset. Awakening was expected to get 48.23% on Xenoblade based on their matches with DKC2 in 2015, so Three Houses barely has to be stronger than Awakening at all to win that (which it still should be just from being on the Switch, given this site's apparent anti-handheld bias). So, what, we're panicking about its chances against the P4G-RDR winner in Round 4? Were we favoring it there to begin with? *checks*

...Apparently not only is FE3H the Guru favorite there, but GTAV is the favorite over the P4G-RDR winner in Round 3, and there's enough of a split on that R2 match itself that Xenoblade is actually the #3 choice to win this division, with P4G #4 and RDR #5. So either I'm going to be made a fool of, or I'm still in prime position in the Guru after all.

(Unless it's Red Dead Redemption rather than Persona 4 Golden that knocks GTAV off, in which case I'm really screwed.)

You know what, let's settle this once and for all. Back to the X-Stat calculator!

*looks at outcome of hypothetical GTA5-P4 match in 2015*

...Da fuq? Is this some type of weird trickery based on GTA5 being in the SMRPG quarter of the bracket? ...No, P4's considered the slight favorite over RDR, and RDR was in that quarter as well, albeit in Division 8 to GTA5's Division 7. Well now I feel silly, but come on, it's GTA. When has that ever been worth anything in Games Contests?

Match 33: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt vs. Assassin's Creed Odyssey

Witcher 3 20059
ACO 3801

Way back when Assassin's Creed was a new series, it was a legitimate contender for being the rare new property that GameFAQs actually embraced. In 2008, Altair rode the Guru nomination to a highly advantageous bracket placement (the fourways didn't have proper seeds, but we're assuming he was like a 2-seed or something) and won his opening fourpack outright and advanced in second place out of Round 2. Come 2010, Assassin's Creed already had one sequel, and both Altair and Ezio got 2-seeds and made Round 2, where they ran into some very strong characters. Both those games made it into Game of the Decade, though the original needed to make it through a vote-in and got knocked out by MGS4 in Round 1; II got a 6-seed and reached R2 before losing to Wind Waker. Ezio also managed to have enough strength to get into Rivalry Rumble in 2011, somehow. He and Rodrigo Borgia were a 6-seed, which was the lowest seed possible without going through vote-ins; I have a sneaking suspicion that they wouldn't have fared so well in vote-ins. Come 2013, with the sequels piling up...Ezio still had enough popularity to get a 2-seed and had no trouble dispatching the 17 and 26 to reach R2, where he finished last behind L-Block and Auron. Altair, meanwhile, fell all the way to a 25-seed...which was not a bad place to be given that the 3-seed was reserved for "hyped newcomers who will inevitably flop". He took care of Shulk, the 3-seed in question, and Ratchet, then finished ahead of Lara Croft, former 1-seed, for second place behind, uh, Kefka. Yeah no one expected Kefka to be there but we all expected the winner of his R1 match to win in R2. Only in 2018, when Altair missed the field entirely and Ezio got fed to Zelda in Round

Match 27: Persona 4 Golden vs. FTL: Faster Than Light

P4G 18785
FTL 5371

Well, this just kind of proves the maxim that it's better to be an old game than a new one. Granted, FTL has always been extremely niche, but the fact of the matter is that arguably the most impressive win of the day came by the remake of an older game. At least I think it was the most impressive? Maybe FTL's so niche that it actually would lose to Ghost Trick?

Either way, the upcoming P4 Golden-RDR match was looking like a 6-point match. It was highly unlikely that merely getting similar numbers to the two of them in Round 1 was enough for GTA V to be on their level, given how bad Baba Is You was expected to have been.

Match 28: Red Dead Redemption vs. Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective

RDR 2 19051
Ghost Trick 5105

Ghost Trick is basically like a spiritual...cousin, I guess you'd say, to Ace Attorney. Same creator, but it's a stand-alone game that doesn't fit into their continuity. It is therefore expected to be weaker than them, not that it really matters because no Ace Attorney games actually made this bracket.

This is roughly a good percentage for Red Dead Redemption. It's tough to tell who should be favored in Round 2 due to the weak opponents everyone had.

Match 29: Xenoblade Chronicles vs. Splatoon 2

XBC 19671
Splatoon 2 5411

I've heard a lot of speculation that Splatoon 2 would be stronger than Splatoon because it was for the beloved Switch while Splatoon was for the hated Wii U. Was Splatoon really that recent or has the Switch really been around that long? *checks* Bit of both, honestly. Actually I guess that makes sense because I thought the Wii U had a pretty short shelf life. I never ended up getting one because by the time there were actually any games I really cared about, the "NX" had already been announced and I made the mistake of thinking that there'd be backwards compatibility like the Wii U had to the Wii and the Wii to the Gamecube. Luckily the one Wii U game I was really disappointed about missing out on just got ported to the Switch! (That'd be the Fire Emblem/SMT crossover; I love both those series so I was really excited to hear about it.) Then again, was XBC ever really going to be strong? It was a very late-stage Wii game and one that had...availability issues. Well, since Splatoon was in BGE3, let's go to the X-Stat calculator!

Xenoblade Chronicles (2015g) VS Splatoon (2015g)

Xenoblade Chronicles has a strength of 23.73.
Splatoon has a strength of 13.60.

Xenoblade Chronicles wins with 71.34% of the vote!
A win of 25,987 with 60,875 total votes cast.

Just ignore the hilariously outdated projections on votes cast, where even with registered votes counting double, this match had fewer total votes than the projection's margin of victory. Now, granted, this contest has felt like BlowoutFAQs so far, but Splatoon 2 got 21.57% in this match. Splatoon's number for 2015 came from getting 20.93% on Metal Gear Solid. So...probably yet another case of the original being stronger. Being for the Switch might've actually hurt Splatoon 2 because it gets overshadowed by so many other games that the Wii U just didn't have! And given the usual fall-off for sequels...I'd say this feels like a constant enough result for XBC. Also, let me just check something...Okay. I honestly couldn't remember if Shulk was in 2018. Given that he'd had multiple Smashes since 2013 (well, okay, Ultimate came out during CBX, but they'd already announced that everyone was back), him missing the field entirely would've been a huge indictment. But he did make it. Didn't perform all that well, but he was there. Good enough to get by, at least given the competition for Round 2.

Match 30: Overwatch vs. Death Stranding

Overwatch 14022
Death Stranding 11061

Hoo boy. This was going to be the battle of the bad. On the one hand, GameFAQs hates the eSports scene. MOBAs get the brunt of their animosity because of what Draven did in 2013, but all of those types of games with teams and stuff are really not their thing. So the idea of Overwatch being worth anything was laughable. But its opponent was Death Stranding, a highly anticipated, recent game that had disappointed immensely. There was a topic on the board during this match titled "I thought it was popular....", that started thusly (emphasis added by me):

Why, why must you lose Death Stranding. I havent played it, but before it came out people wouldnt shut up about it. Well apparently it sucks.

Yes, yes it does. Prerelease hype is possibly one of the worst predictors of contest strength ever. I hate to go back to the same examples over and over again but Lightning managed 36.14% on Sonic the Hedgehog while FFXIII was only out in Japan, then proceeded to get literally last place in a vote-in for Rivalry Rumble, failed to take advantage of Nintendo SFF to dispatch famed choker Donkey Kong in 2013, and only managed 34.38% on Dante in 2018 (which is admittedly probably more impressive than the loss to an LFFed Donkey Kong, but still looks bad compared to the Sonic match). Meanwhile FFXIII and its many sequels and spinoffs have yet to make a Games Contest, including this one. The fact that FFXIV, an MMORPG, is in this contest and FFXIII isn't is perhaps the biggest indictment of the game imaginable. So even though the idea of Overwatch having strength here was ridiculous, it was still expected to win this match, and it did, with an ease largely facilitated by the registered voters no less. Or maybe they were the ones rallying? This day clearly had a vote spike from the previous one. There hadn't been any talk of rallies, though, so it clearly wasn't evident enough to set off any red flags with the hypersensitive board.

Surprisingly, it was this match, not the big upset that also occurred on this day, that knocked off the last remaining perfect bracket. We know this with 100% certainty because the last remaining perfect was a Guru.

---

Also known as Cyberchao X.

Or maybe I'll get a little in tonight.

Match 25: Grand Theft Auto V vs. Baba Is You

GTAV 19151
Baba Is You 5008

Baba is WHO? Seriously, this is exactly what a 1-16 match is supposed to look like, more or less. It's not a massive blowout by this contest's standards but that's probably largely GTA V anti-votes. There's absolutely nothing in this performance that says one way or the other whether GTA makes it to Round 3 or not.

Match 26: Cuphead vs. XCOM 2

Cuphead 16493
XCOM 2 7662

Wait, "XCOM 2" is really the full name? No subtitle? No extended name that XCOM is short for? Geez, no wonder it sucks. This result was not really that surprising. Cuphead's only previous outing was in a Character Battle, but the titular character only just squeaked into CBX with a 16-seed, and the one placed against the presumed #1 overall seed based on match placement. Indie darling though he may be, that was always going to be a losing battle. GTA V is probably the favorite for Round 2 based on playrate alone, but then again, GameFAQs has always tended to reject the mainstream in favor of niche stuff, so a game that's so retro that its aesthetic pre-dates video games by multiple decades might be right up their alley.

---

Also known as Cyberchao X.

Oof. I'd been trying to stay within a couple of days but I've been kind of busy lately. I'll try to catch it up tomorrow.

---

Also known as Cyberchao X.