While the seeds were vaguely based on contest strength, I do feel like those seeds aren't that inaccurate for the time period, considering they were a 9 and 10 in the first Games contest in 2004.
Well, to be fair, Doom had to push and shove for nominations in an incredibly crowded PC field from which each person could only choose one game to nominate, and it still received a 10-seed. A game of the 90s bracket would have been less competitive in nominations.
Anyways, I've finally finished listening to another quality episode of The Show! My thoughts:
I'm inherently biased towards Yo's Octopath/SK take because I was one of the nine Gurus to call SK > Octopath > Undertale, though I wasn't huge on the match itself because I missed pretty much all its highlights. The other thing I'd contend about this match is that it was a bad omen for indie games in general, both because SK struggled in the first place, and because it put a game as heavily antivoted as Undertale in the top tier of indies.
Agree with greatone that most of us unfairly underestimated GTAV for the reasons he stated, and also because 43% on Mario RPG in 2015 already showed it had strength. With that in mind, I see the GTA/Cuphead match as a good result for both games - it proved that GTA won't win its division because of its opposition's strength (+rallies) rather than its own weakness, and it also gave Cuphead a legitimate claim to being the strongest indie game this contest.
I personally didn't care for P4's match both because my bracket pick lost and because it was a dead stall all night, then the hentai rallies wound up pretty much preserving the exact same margin. That's just me, though.
I'm skeptical about Stardew contending for strongest indie because of the major New Vegas rally none of you mentioned, which I would guess significantly favored Stardew (as a PC-first pseudo-RPG) over Galaxy 2.
You're reading too much into SFF, Yo - 65% on MGS2 would be almost BotW-tier. That being said, I will at least concede that this result made Witcher 3 look like the clear bottom-half favorite to reach the finals.
Agree with the mentioned stars (nothing tops Zen pics!); my turd award goes to indies in general, admittedly helped by hindsight.
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"I believe in a universe that doesn't care, and people who do." You won the CBX Guru Contest, Advokaiser! Bully for you!