LogFAQs > #914987425

Match 39: Shovel Knight vs. Captain Toad

Shovel Knight 13672
Captain Toad 15154

This was the first of two matches with a controversy over how a character was credited, and frankly, it was a stupid one. Yes, Captain Toad is not the same as a generic Toad, but it probably doesn't make a huge difference and definitely not with a bracket placement this obvious. A character from a major Nintendo franchise, even a D-lister like (Captain) Toad, isn't losing to an indie character from the current decade like Shovel Knight, and at the same time, there's no way he'd be able to challenge a medium-high midcarder like Aerith, nor could he win an SFF match against Waluigi (debatable at natural strength, but for Waluigi to get there he'd have to have the theorized rally strength.) So this was a nontroversy.

Oh, did I say "obvious path"? The casuals obviously thought otherwise. At 30.55%, this was the largest bracketbuster of the first round. The Gurus didn't exactly kill it, splitting 103-57 in favor of the Captain, but really, that still means that a greater percentage of casuals got this wrong than Gurus got this right. Usually that only happens when the Gurus' prediction percentage is really low.

Of course, maybe this really wasn't super obvious. The Guru Consensus came out fairly close to the actual result, but the individual picks ranged from Captain Toad 63.85% to Shovel Knight 64%. And I was among those that fairly heavily overrated Captain Toad.

This was the match I was referring to in the Dante-Cuphead analysis, and I'll admit, part of why I wasn't sold on Shovel Knight is precisely because I took a flier on the game in 2015. I figured that betting against GTA and WoW is never a bad idea and Chrono Cross is often hated for being a poor excuse for a sequel to Chrono Trigger. I was right to think that GTA:SA and WoW would embarrass themselves, but the former still managed to get past Shovel Knight. I had sole possession of the lead in Guru prior to SA > SK, too, after being I think the only Guru to perfectly call Division 6. It wouldn't have lasted because I had some weird late-round upsets, but it still stands out in my memory.

Also, Shovel Knight the game lost to a GTA game in 2015. Why would Shovel Knight the character be any stronger?

Match 40: Waluigi vs. Aerith Gainsborough

Waluigi 12271
Aerith 16553

Non-leads in Final Fantasy games often struggle to get decent seeds, but when they make the field, they do well. This year, some of the ancillary characters actually got good seeds, but Aerith wasn't among them. (Actually now that I think of it, Tifa had a decent seed in 2013 as well.) She's never had a great seed except for maybe in the split bracket in 2006, but she's 5-1 in Round 1 and the one loss came against Auron. There's this strange dichotomy with Final Fantasy: most of the leads tend to get anti-voted because of the perception that the series is this dominant force, but the real reason that the series is a dominant force is because side characters that struggle to get the nominations to make the field pull these huge seeding upsets. Aerith, Vincent, and Rikku all had seeds in the 20s in 2013 and they all made Round 2, and in Aerith's case, very nearly Round 3. Though I can't help but wonder if Link-Draven would've been as close with Aerith as the third character instead of Shepard.

Also, how is Waluigi still a meme in 2018? He's been a meme for what seems like forever.
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Also known as Cyberchao X.