LogFAQs > #937356606

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