LogFAQs > #913787085

My impressions at the 1-hour mark:

That GotY conversation was interesting, even though it wasn't relevant to these contests. My personal preference (though very light since I haven't played anything from this year yet) would have either been Smash Ultimate (though I don't think it was eligible), Dragon Quest XI, or something like Celeste or Return of the Obra Dinn. In my opinion, God of War is a much better winner than Red Dead Redemption 2 would have been, though, and not just because of the surprise factor.

On Joker in Smash: I was kinda disappointed at first, but after reflecting on it and with time, I like the choice about as much as I could without having played any Persona games. In particular, I agree that this suggests good, exciting things about Sakurai's choices for the other DLC characters. I'm also a fan of that trailer, which I hadn't watched at first.

On Link v Cloud: I was previously thinking this was pretty much all on Cloud, but current Link's ~68% on a much stronger Alucard than the one who scored 28% on 2010 Link has me agreeing that Link has also boosted, despite his massive anti-votes.

That story of Yo's is something else. TJF is undoubtedly part of Tifa's stability - it's worth noting, though, that Tifa's picture wasn't made by Ulti, but rather by 'Anonymous', which probably translates to Allen himself.

On X-Stats and Mario crushing Sephy who crushed Ryu: As I went into some detail about on the previous episode, anyone who still thinks Ryu is Mr. Consistent is unfairly overrating him. For the cliffnotes version: his previous matches consisted of doing barely better on Lloyd than Fox in 2010, not coming particularly close to doubling a KOS-MOS who looked off all contest (and with no real TJF in her picture, it's no wonder), and that Shepard result. And we all know what happened to the Mass Effect series. Sephiroth himself sucked it up against Wesker (my favorite random trivia point of the contest: Wesker actually got a few cuts against Sephy) and Amaterasu, while only faring well on Falcon relative to very low expectations.

I absolutely think that voters disproportionately make the main character of a series that's had a disastrous game suffer, due to their association with the series in question, plus generally not having the well-liked characterization to compensate. That's the best explanation I can think of for Garrus being ahead of Shepard now, for example. Even if it winds up overrating Chun-Li in the adjusted X-stats, it happens - X-stats aren't supposed to be the bible of these contests. Just take a look at where Dragonborn was in 2013, and consider that even back then, he only 60-40'd Tom Nook and Pyramid Head, so whatever's happened to other modern Western characters alone can't explain his huge plunge from 2013's adjusted stats. Or for extra hilarity, just take a gander at Claptrap's position in the adjusted 2013 stats. The only thing I would be skeptical about is Chun-Li being outright ahead of Ryu, but the Garrus example demonstrates how it's not impossible by any stretch.

As far as adjusting the stats goes, I'm personally fond of Haste's method of taking a character who can be expected to be constant compared to 2013 (ex. Tidus) and adjusting their entire division (for Link > Ganon in this example) based on that (with the other adjustment of setting 2013 Link equal to base Link, but that's just personal preference). I suppose if you were making a hyper-adjusted set of X-stats, you could peg Chun-Li at the 43% on Ryu she got in that favorites poll, but I'm not of the opinion that there's enough definitive proof to say she overperformed on Ganondorf.

Good stuff so far!