LogFAQs > #935857066

Match 148: Cloud Strife vs. Mario

Cloud 14667
Mario 14526

Well I guess we have our answer as to why Mario was ahead of Zelda in the adjusted X-Stats. The raw X-Stats may clearly use the Legends' Bracket numbers, but if the adjusted X-Stats were basing things off of the Losers' Bracket, Mario did put up a better performance against Cloud than Zelda would the following match. After Cloud held a narrow 250-247 lead at the freeze, Mario took the second update by 66 votes and proceeded to extend his lead past 300 within the first three hours of the match, peaking it at 335 about 7-1/2 hours in. Cloud would fight back over the remainder of the night, getting it down below 50 around 6 AM, but Mario rode the morning vote to a lead of over 200 before Cloud started fighting back again.

Cloud took his first lead of the match with 4 hours and 35 minutes remaining, and the next update only increased his lead by a single vote before Mario took the next update--only by 5 votes, but that was enough for another lead change. But Cloud won the next update by 21 to take the lead for good, and the two battled for a bit, Cloud only taking a double-digit lead for the first time in the final hour. It was the #8 closest 1v1 wire-to-wire match, #6 among 24-hour matches...and yet, only #5 for this contest! It meant that over half of the Top 10 came from this contest, except they already did because the match that it booted down to #11 was also from this contest. Seriously, the all-time #17 (again, for 1v1 matches only, since we keep the 3/4ways in a separate list) can't even make the contest's Top Ten. Maybe it's the registered voter bonus making things tighter than they should be, or maybe it's just the lowered vote totals, but this contest had a lot of really close matches, strictly speaking. Not all of them felt close. Here, let me give you a rundown of the overall top 25, except instead of listing the actual match, I'll just list what contest they're from: Asterisks are 12-hour matches.

1. GotD*
2. CBIX*
3. CBX
4. GotD*
5. CBX
6. CBX
7. CBIX*
8. BGE3
9. CBIX*
10. CBX
11. CBX (that'd be this match)
12. CBX
13. GotD*
14. CBIX*
15. BGE2
16. CBX
17. CBIX*
18. CBIII
19. CBX
20. CBVIII*
21. CBIX*
22. CBX
23. CBVII
24. CBIX*
25. GotD*

9 out of 25 from this contest. Even CBIX, which had similarly rancid vote totals whenever Draven was absent and had matches that ran only half as long, only had 7. Overall, 24-hour matches do now hold a 13-12 lead over 12-hour matches in the all-time top 25.

I wonder what the upcoming Game of the Decade will look like. Will it break the records set here? And if it does, will it be because of intensity, or because of complete and utter apathy? I look at Minecraft, a casual game to end all casual games, and yet I have to take it to win easily in Round 1 because it's up against a MOBA and we absolutely abhor those after 2013. I look at Yakuza 0 getting its characters absolutely slaughtered in this contest and take it to Round 2 because it's up against something called The Witness. Overwatch seems like it'd fall squarely in the category of "things Board 8 hates, and is possibly slightly scared of the rally potential of", but iirc Death Stranding was considered a massive disappointment by all of those eagerly awaiting Kojima's next masterpiece after Konami kicked him to the curb and so I have to side with the casualbait. Except then you hop on over to the latest extruded Blizzard cash-extracting device and you're like "no, fuck that, I'm going with 'niche things that Board 8 loves'." I mean yeah it's probably still the wrong pick but it's a 7-10 match so eh, it's only worth one point. Though frankly the biggest problem is that all of these new games have generic "edgy" names. I initially had Bloodborne-CoD:BO as one of those "why do I have to pick one of these to win a match; they're both going to be megafodder" matches. But Bloodborne was actually respectable in BGE3, going up against a Final Fantasy game no less (not that I really trust recent Final Fantasy games to not be fodder either. Square spent most of the decade pushing Final Fantasy XIII sequels on us, and we responded by not putting any of the FFXIII games, not even the original one, in the bracket. And yes it was eligible; we were going by NA release dates unless no such date existed and Lightning rather famously appeared in a Winter 2010 Contest match before her game had released in the US. Not surprisingly, it was the strongest she'd ever look). The game that I was thinking of that got eviscerated was called "Hearthstone". Meanwhile, that same theory of "wait, this has actually been in a contest before" got me second-guessing taking Stardew Valley over Destiny, except Destiny actually did get blown out by something GameFAQs hates.

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Also known as Cyberchao X.