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Legends' Bracket Semifinals: Link vs. Cloud Strife

Link 17763
Cloud 11590

In my write-up of Sonic vs. Snake, I talked about the seeding for the Legends Bracket and what might have made more sense. Mario in particular seemed underseeded, I guess so he could be matched up with Sephiroth but Allen could've easily moved the divisions around. But seeing this as a semifinal match just begs the question, how far did Allen think FFVII had fallen? Link vs. Cloud is pretty much a finals tradition; we've seen it in 60% of character battles, including this one thanks to the double elimination format. And yes I'm counting the finale of the 2006 Battle Royale here.

The outliers are 2002, where they were on opposite sides of the bracket but Cloud was infamously upset by Mario; 2003, where they met in the semifinals; 2005, which was kind of a no-win situation because the Tournament of Champions was to be Link, Cloud, Sephiroth, and a main bracket champion that was presumed to most likely be Mario (it was). Even with that only being the fourth character battle, Mario winning the main bracket (which he did) would assure that all three matches of the ToC were rematches from the first three years. Probably still should've gone with Link-Sephiroth and Cloud-main bracket champ (since the other favorite in the main bracket, Crono, had faced Link but not Cloud or Sephiroth), but either way...and 2013, when Draven turned the entire contest upside down. They also met in the semifinals in 2007, but since two characters advanced from each fourpack, they were able to both make the finals.

But really, it was hardly even relevant, because this was Cloud's worst performance against Link by far. In direct 1v1s, Link had never even broken 54% against Cloud, and even in matches with multiple characters, the only time Link was able to get 1.5 times Cloud's vote total (equivalent of a 60-40 in 1v1) was in Day 3 of the 2006 Battle Royale. Which I guess is proof that even Link is not completely immune to LFF since it suggests that he previously not only needed Sephiroth in the match to pull it off but also for Mario and Samus to both be absent.

In a way, it's kind of disappointing that the top characters were held out of the main bracket. It's fun to see a good old-fashioned blowout every once in awhile, the big dogs going to town on the fodder every once in awhile. It's kind of like the difference between men's basketball and women's basketball. In the men's tournament, the raw records are usually a fairly good match to the seeding lines, because the mid-majors are usually going to get dinged in non-conference when they play the top teams. The women's tournament will frequently have teams with double-digit losses up around the 4-5 matchups while the 12-13 seeds they beat to get there had only 2 or 3 losses, because the top teams play each other in the regular season all the time, which by correlation means that there aren't any "big dogs" to keep the mid-majors from running up gaudy records. I suspect this is done to try to drum up interest in the regular season since the women's game is far more wanting for viewers, but let's be honest; if you're interested enough in the women's game to be enticed by the marquee matchups, you'd probably watch the marquee teams face overmatched teams, too. For those who aren't paying attention until the tournament, however, it's just confusing, because March Madness was built on the upsets. When a team like Stephen F. Austin makes it to the men's tournament with a record of 30-3 and gets a 12-seed, we jump on that potential upset. In the women's bracket, almost everything looks like a potential upset, and it usually isn't. Watching titans go at it is fun, but to truly appreciate greatness, you have to see it overpower weaklings from time to time, too. Otherwise you just have to trust the experts that yes, this is greatness, just not quite as great as some other greatness.

Link was just on another level this contest. We saw it with Zelda in the main bracket, but it was clearly evident that it was the series boost too, as opposed to just that strange boost that a lot of female characters seemed to have this contest.

Legends' Bracket Semifinals: Zelda vs. Mario

Zelda 13733
Mario 13242

Yes, it's really happening. The Zelda hype train was just too much to stop. Just like in her match against Snake, Zelda lost the registered vote but had enough unregistered vote to overcome the registered vote bonus. The trends were more pronounced here, though; whereas against Snake, she lost the registered vote by under 100 and made up for it with an unregistered vote lead of a bit over 300, here Mario took the registered vote by 203, only to lose the unregistered vote by 897. Zelda led wire-to-wire, too; it looked for much of the match as though the biggest obstacle to breaking Mega Man-Pikachu II's new record would be Mario taking the lead, as he fought back at times, getting the deficit under 60 at the 2-hour mark after it had ballooned to 100 in under an hour and kept rising, then later getting it into the low sixties again amidst an entire hour below 100 after it had already swollen to 225 at one point, and finally getting it briefly back down to double-digits at the 15-hour mark. In fact at that point, both of the Pikachu-Mega Man matches' records were in jeopardy, as with just 9 hours to go, the largest lead Zelda had ever held was 225. But that's when Zelda took off. She set a new largest lead only an hour and forty minutes after Mario's cut to 97, then eliminated the chance of breaking Mega Man-Pikachu I's record in the next update before eventually getting it all the way up above 500 with nearly 3 hours to go.

Maybe Allen's onto something with these decreased-frequency contests. Back when we got them every year, X-Stats were usually fairly reliable. Our last known value for Zelda involved her getting LFFed by Donkey Kong enough that she couldn't beat Charizard in a close match, a result that seemed okay immediately after it happened but less so after Charizard lost in exactly the same fashion to Mega Man while Zero was the third character. Any result that makes you compare unfavorably to the Weighted Companion Cube does not reflect well on you, which is why everyone started calling Charizard a FRAUD (he kind of was, but the degree of it might've been a bit overstated.) And yet, here's Zelda looking every bit the elite character. Unlike last round, where everyone knew she'd beat Sonic after she'd beaten Snake, the Oracles still sided with Mario, with only 10% of them picking Zelda to pull the upset. Just 1.66% of brackets picked Zelda to reach the Legends' final, which was tied for 7th all-time most surprising outcomes (trailing only Draven's last three wins, Undertale's last two, and L-Block's champi