LogFAQs > #948262619

8. What if Super Smash Bros. Brawl didn't get anti-voted in 2010?

The biggest match of Game of the Decade 1 wasn't the final. It didn't have anything to do with the B-tier Zelda/Final Fantasy dance-off in the semifinal that feels slightly controversial in its own way. It's the battle of Smash games. Everything came down to if you sided with the pure fast gameplay of Melee or the new hotness of Brawl. The internet was really hot to pit these two against each other, not just on GameFAQs but everywhere.

The match itself was really anticlimactic - a sad, 12 hour affair during the night hours where Brawl slowly rose from losing the power hour to comfortably putting Melee fans out of their misery. There was surprisingly no controversy here, probably because of it being a 12 hour match in the night. Once the diehards went to bed, the more popular Brawl just took over.

And the internet remembered. From that point on, Brawl was a different game. It had cleanly beaten Twilight Princess the year prior in a weirdo four-way, but could only get 52% in the 1v1 rematch. That one was explainable since you don't beat a mainline Zelda down too hard, but the next match against Fallout 3 was a 24 hour affair. Brawl had a pretty long history with Fallout 3, from a decent win in the 2008 GOTY poll to absolutely decimating it in 2009. In 2010, Brawl started out in the high 50s and just bled percentage all day, going under 55 in the end. Fallout 3 is a decently popular game, but Smash doesn't go even in the daytime to a Bethesda RPG. I'm pretty sure that Fallout's side of the bracket has been overestimated ever since, though Fallout 3 never had a fair shake again because, yeah, Undertale.

The final against Majora's Mask just felt off. Majora started really strong -- like a upstart bandwagon game would, as it grew into over the contest -- and never looked back. Brawl had a decent comeback during the day but couldn't get close enough to make it interesting.

It's really weird. Brawl isn't a game of the decade type of game. No one looks back at it and says "you know what game was genre defining and really changed things? Super Smash Bros. Brawl." That game defined hype cycles and mastered the art of the teaser trailer, but when you talk about something like game of the decade, you want a game that made a splash when it came out. Brawl came out and it was fun to spin dash Mario with Sonic, and.. that's about it. I think voters realized that as it went on and said "nope, we need to audible here before it's too late. what about that Zelda rom hack?"

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xyzzy