LogFAQs > #914601365

4.



I've spent entirely too much of my life thinking about this match and what may or may not have happened. I'll hit the high points: Cloud was ahead and looked like he was going to win before, as you've come to expect, Mario made a huge comeback and won in the last minutes. I remember voting, coming back at the end of the match and being unusually mad that Mario had somehow turned it around. I didn't make a bracket but Cloud was my informal pick to win the contest. I'd write more about this if I had data, but I only have 16 year old memories and oral histories to work off of here.

Besides, there's a ton of weird stuff to sort through with this match. Mario Sunshine came out on the day of this match. We've seen this countless times with other matches and let me tell you, it doesn't really matter that much. Aeris took on Zelda on the day FF12 came out and still got butchered. A Nintendo fansite called Planet Gamecube linked here on this match, and that probably helped Mario. But how much?

Here's the thing: this match is way out of line with other matches. Mario/Cloud had 22,000 more votes than the second most popular poll -- Mario/Crono, a match where we know there was possibly as many as 3,000 stuff votes. It has more than 30,000 more than the final. Is Planet Gamecube big enough to warrant 30,000 votes? It would need to come from Nintendo.com for that to be true. So clearly something else happened.

Is it vote stuffing, is it a much wider array of sites linking here, am I underestimating Planet Gamecube? I mean, anything is possible with Mario/Cloud. We have no idea. This match surely shouldn't have had the result that it did. I am hesitant without data to come to a conclusion here, but my priors say that this match is complete and utter BS.

Mario/Cloud's legacy is complicated. It shows us that some real nonsense can happen in a poll, sure. But I don't know how much that matters. We knew immediately that Mario/Cloud was nonsense. Its bigger legacy is probably in historically underrating Cloud, but only for 2003. I don't know what the precontest picks looked like, but I bet people still backed Cloud a fair amount. Everyone already knew that Cloud was a gamefaqs superstar since this website and Final Fantasy VII have been inexorably linked since 1997. Even now, 7,385 days since its release, it's still in the top 100 games, 3 years longer than second place (FFX). You don't need contest results to understand that if there was a gamefaqs hall of fame, FF7 is the first game inducted.

The biggest thing might be that Cloud was robbed of the 2002 championship. I think Link still wins that easy though. He beat Sephiroth with 56%. Link/Cloud is probably a 54-46ish affair that doesn't turn around until 2003. This match leaves me feeling empty because I don't have solid conclusions on it. It's an all-time classic for sure, but utimately, extremely unsatisfying. At least with Mario/Crono, you have an idea of what happened. With this one, the numbers are so far off the page that it looks more like Draven or L-Block than anything else.
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