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TopicTsunami's Post-Contest Analysis (should not need a second topic)
TsunamiXXVIII
01/26/20 10:11:58 PM
#39:


No, wait, I'm not going to keep using this topic, because the topic title will be inaccurate. You're absolutely right, Ulti, in that my tendency to procrastinate on things makes me ill-suited for a Post-Contest Analysis like you do. So instead, I'm going to take a page out of NGamer's old playbook and do pre-match analysis/post-match reactions. Much better suited to my personality type.

Also, looking at your write-up for the Legends' Bracket Mario-Samus match, you of all people should understand my issue since you have ADHD too.

Match 134: Cloud Strife vs. Crono

Cloud 16694
Crono 12731

Well, just one match after saying that we should stop talking about the Noble Nine, I have no choice but to talk about the Noble Nine! Well, not exactly. What I said in the last match was that we should stop using the Noble Nine as a shorthand for "the most elite characters who will never lose to anyone other than each other unless there's weird rally shit." This was actually a long-awaited match, one that we honestly probably should've seen way back in the CJayC days but even with all the SFF matches that CJay liked to set up he never sent the protagonists of the two most well-regarded Square RPGs to face each other, because Mario vs. Crono was already a meme by the time the SFF debacle of '04 took place. (I'm still not sure what I think of FFVII, because I'm too addicted to FE:TH to go back to my FFVII playthrough. I didn't like CT too much when I first played it but I want to give it a second chance after having played and enjoyed FFVI.) But instead, their only meeting was in the fourway finale of the 2008 contest, where Crono provided just enough LFF to allow Snake to upset Cloud for second place. As for what this result meant...the instinctive result was to say that it meant that FFVII really was weakening and that it went all the way to the top (the irony being that Sephiroth's weakness was exposed by a fellow FFVII character, but "porn rallies"), since the last time we'd seen Crono, he looked like he'd have probably struggled to beat Pikachu even without Magus LFFing him. What most of the board wanted it to be, on the other hand, was that CT's run through the Games Contest wasn't just a case of Games =/= Characters and that the CT crew was back. And the thing is, there was a good case for it. Not one Oracle picked Magus to lose by as little as he did (though some of them did predict him to win outright), and the two highest picks for Frog in his first match were the two closest. The only question is...why? Unlike fellow Squaresoft RPGs FFVI and SMRPG, CT wasn't included on the SNES Classic. It hasn't received a new series on Netflix like Castlevania did (also a franchise with representation on the SNESC). Crono hasn't even gotten into Smash Ultimate! There is no good reason why CT's plummet should have stopped, and yet, it seemed to have done so.

Oh, wait, yes there was. The ever-dwindling vote totals. This site hardly gets any traffic normally, with contests representing an uptick due to social media spreading the word--but even then, it probably only draws in hardcore old-school gamers like the ones who've been sticking around all these years on Board 8. The hardcore fanbase that's still stuck in the 1990s is the only one still voting. So we're probably going to see whatever representatives of ancient franchises had new releases this past decade dominate the upcoming GotD. (I mean granted, we all already crowned Breath of the Wild the moment it came out, but it's even more obvious now.)

Match 135: Zelda vs Sonic the Hedgehog

Zelda 16210
Sonic 12507

Oh, hey, speaking of dwindling vote totals... It should be noted that Sonic had fewer votes in this match than Crono did in the previous one, but got a better percentage. Though this could be in part because Allen forced voters to vote for all matches taking place on a given day or for none of them, and Cloud-Crono, in addition to being a big draw for GameFAQs' core fanbase, was paired with Link-Pikachu, while Zelda-Sonic was paired with yet another Mario-Samus match. Granted, we love Mario-Samus matches, because there's never any shortage of people arguing that this will finally be Samus's chance to upset Mario. And it's not really a bad argument, per se. Samus does look like she's almost there, and picking Samus > Mario was what won raytan the Guru Contest in 2013 even if it only worked out because Mario had gotten upset in an earlier round.

Anyway this is pretty much the most anti-climactic "upset" you'll ever see, which is to say, it was only an upset in the sense that pre-contest, we still thought that the only non-NN characters a member of the Noble Nine would lose to were rallybait. Not a single Oracle picked Sonic to win here, and why would they when Zelda had already dispatched the superior Snake? Even in the Guru, the favorite won--which is to say that no one had Sonic winning this match, while one entry had Zelda...oh, no, wait, that was the dummy entry used to bugfix the double elimination. Titled "Mr Bad Picks". Yeah, not really so bad after all, is it? The second chance bracket also had Zelda being carried over by a majority of those who had picked her to beat Snake. The initial brackets? ...Yeah, barely, but then again that was already a very small amount. Makes the Top 25 for "most surprising 1v1 results", though it narrowly misses out on the Top 25 overall.

Match 136: Samus Aran vs. Mario

Samus 13950
Mario 14765

Another one of those matches that never really blew up but was never in doubt. Mario's lead at the halfway point of the match--in votes, not percentage--was barely smaller than his final margin of victory, 815, yet his largest lead of the entire match was still under 1000. The second half of the match was just a stall. Samus didn't even do any early threatening; she got the initial board vote, 8-6 at the first snapshot taken a few seconds in, but it was the last time she'd be recorded in the lead. This match really would've benefited from being done "in the moment", because these two characters would have a far superior match in the Losers' Bracket in a few days!

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