LogFAQs > #927406201

Match 125: Solid Snake vs Zelda

Snake 14350
Zelda 14535

The registered and non-registered voters went different directions on this match, but the registered voter advantage for Snake was too small to overcome Zelda's unregistered support. Again, which one was which surprises me not at all; Snake is probably one of Board 8's favorite Noble Niners, because he was almost as big a surprise member as Crono at the start, he took a while to get his first win against a fellow member, and then once he got off the schneid he almost immediately started pulling off all sorts of crazy upsets against the upper echelon--first beating Sephiroth in the 2006 Battle Royale (our first experience with non-1v1s, so we were unprepared for what LFF could do), then beating Cloud twice in 2008 (the first time admittedly with Sephiroth also in the match, but the second time was relatively clean, only having a Crono as a weight, though you could certainly argue that Link hurts Cloud more than he hurts Snake because swords. And yes, I linked that first match solely because the same LFF allowed Sephiroth to get beaten by Kirby. I will never get tired of that) and beating Seph 1v1 in 2010. All of this was merely a prelude to 2013, when he--and his voice actor!--became the hero of Board 8, fighting valiantly against the Draven menace. And losing, but who cares about that. Point is, we love Snake here. A lot of the Noble Nine, the only ones who really hate seeing them lose are the statheads because the loss is an affront to their expectations. "Link Always Wins" and all that, though honestly we were much quicker to leap to Link's defense when he was in danger than...oh, right, Cloud's embarrassing 2013 loss came against a Gen I Pokmon, so of course Board 8 was on board with that.

Of course, Snake wasn't losing to some rallied newcomer. Zelda's only missed two contests, and one of them was CBI, which barely even counts because you look at all of the fighting game characters and you realize that the people creating the bracket seemed to be treating the "Character Battle" name literally. Maybe. Some of the characters in that bracket were just plain weird; I don't know that much about Space Channel 5 but I'm pretty sure that its protagonist's presence runs counter to that assumption. Whatever; I still consider characters who debuted in CBII to have "perfect" records if they haven't missed a contest since then, and no, this wouldn't affect the sanctity of the Noble Nine because no one that debuted there has come close to doing what they did. (It's also more convenient because Lightning's presence in CBVIII set precedence that for a character who debuted after CBI to be considered to have a perfect record, they'd need to make the bracket as soon as their game came out in Japan, and Kingdom Hearts was out in Japan in time for Sora to have theoretically been in every contest.) She's done well in all of them, too; 39.25% against Mega Man in her debut in 2003 (with the hated Wind Waker art, no less); 45.59% against this very same Snake in 2005; 44.73% against Samus in 2006...I'll skip the fourways because she ran into Link in Round 2 one year and Mario in Round 1 in the other. And then a loss to Samus again in 2010 and the close match against Charizard in 2013.

Charizard in 2013, barely, Vincent in 2007, and Mega Man X in 2008. That's it for non-Noble Niners she's lost to when not literally sharing a fourway with Link, and the last of them she was still sharing it with Mario. Those are all very high-tier opponents, or at least they were in the years she faced them (Vincent is definitely nowhere near the near-elite he was in the mid-2000s, though he's probably still a decent midcarder.) But there have been plenty of high midcarders who have gotten multiple shots at the Noble Nine and come up empty every time, so why should this be any different?
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Also known as Cyberchao X.