LogFAQs > #915202339

Match 53: Tifa Lockhart vs. Geno

Tifa 22399
Geno 8205

Geno is another one of those characters that has become a bracket mainstay despite never winning a match. He's now 0-6 after this loss, and none of them have been terribly close. There are many reasons for this. He's a side character from a fairly niche RPG, one that wasn't released in PAL regions until much, much later (via Virtual Console). Furthermore, its initial release was fairly late in its console's lifespan, a Super NES game from 1996, albeit still a good few months before the N64 came out. Unlike its Japanese counterpart, the Super Famicom, which was still getting new games in 1999, the SNES died out pretty quickly once the N64 arrived, with no games coming out beyond 1997. (Though the N64 did even worse, managing to essentially die out before the GameCube actually launched, resulting in roughly 85% of Nintendo's US releases in 2001 being for its handhelds.) And worst of all, he's extremely easy to SFF, being the product of a collaboration between Nintendo and Square, which means that either company's presence in a poll is bad for him. I don't think he's incapable of winning a match, because that last factor could easily work in his favor if he ever drew one of those overseeded nobodies we see so often, but it's an exercise in futility trying to make it happen.

Match 54: GLaDOS vs. Mewtwo

GLaDOS 11484
Mewtwo 19123

Even before the contest started, people were calling for Mewtwo to be exposed as a FRAUD, which was perfectly natural because he'd overperformed last time. The thing is, there was nothing "fraudulent" about Mewtwo's strength. As I stated during my write-up of Vincent's match, Mewtwo was our rally target because Pokmon was something we could rally around to try to stop Draven, and Mewtwo was the only one with a bracket placement favorable to doing so, as the others would SFF each other out before they could see Draven. 2013 wasn't Mewtwo's first deep run, however, so it was easy for a casual who merely looked at past results without actually comprehending them to think that Mewtwo was an absolute beast. (Mewtwo's first deep run, in 2008, was the result of extremely fortuitous bracket placement, advancing two rounds on natural strength and then taking advantage of triple Square SFF to advance out of a third-round fourpack in which he was probably the weakest character naturally.) This match, however, would not give the board what they wanted, as Mewtwo handily destroyed a character that had reached the Top 27 in 2013 and finished in second place in her Round 3 defeat. Of course, it wasn't truly surprising as GLaDOS was expected to decline--Games may not equal characters, but Portal falling from Top 16 in GotD to 14-seed fodder for Melee in BGE3, along with Portal 2 failing to reach the second round in BGE3 as a 5-seed, suggested that the series was already on the decline then. It's nothing to be ashamed of; it's not easy for a franchise to walk the line between oversaturation and irrelevance. By opting not to turn into a franchise zombie, Portal instead risked fading into the ether.

The Oracle Consensus for this match was less than 0.60% off, and the two worst scores were comprised of one overestimation and one underestimation. That's a sign that we knew what we were doing here.
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Also known as Cyberchao X.