LogFAQs > #934420001

Match 143: Mega Man vs. Crono

Mega Man 12977
Crono 13089

This match was pretty much exactly what we wanted: two characters of relatively similar strength going at it. The Oracles were fairly split on this match; 30 picked Crono and 17 picked Mega Man, and on both sides, the highest pick was above 53% but below 53.5%. The Guru brackets...not so much. 101 Gurus had Mega Man winning this match, compared to just 86 who had Crono even in this match. Old trends die hard, and at the start of the contest, we thought Crono was still the weak link of the Noble Nine, except for maybe Sonic. As for the match itself, it was a barnburner. Mega Man won the first update and struggled to build a lead. 45 minutes in, he took an update by 40 votes and tacked on another 22 on the next one, only to see it almost all wiped out with a 43-vote win for Crono. At this point, a second such swing would give Crono his first lead...so Mega Man took the next update by 51 to end the first hour with a lead of 85. He'd have a similar big update at the end of the second hour to get his lead to triple digits for the first time, and he'd finish the third hour with a lead of 249.

The first update of hour 4 was a dead stall, and then Crono started tearing into the lead. It took him less than two hours to get the deficit back to double digits, and with 10 minutes left in hour 6, Mega Man led by a mere 12 votes...but Mega Man refused to break, refusing to relinquish the lead and eventually getting it to 200 on the dot 3.5 hours after the local minimum of 12. It took Crono an hour and 25 minutes to halve that lead...and then another hour and 5 minutes to get back to that same deficit after Mega started fighting back again, allowing him to finally get the deficit back into double digits just before the halfway point of the match. Mega Man still refused to give up, and got it back into triple digits at the 15-hour mark. Shortly thereafter, Crono finally began the comeback that would stick, breaking through to take the lead for the first time with just 5 hours and 10 minutes left in the match, and this would prove to be the only lead change after the freeze. Crono's largest lead was a mere 137, half an hour before the end of the match, and Mega's max lead of 249 a mere 3 hours in was good for a spot in the top 5 closest wire-to-wire matches--at the time that it occurred, it was 5th overall, 4th among 1v1 matches, and second only to Mega Man's first loss of the contest among 24-hour matches. So while it did appear that Mega Man had fallen to the bottom of the Noble Nine totem pole (well, okay, there's still maybe Sonic), you almost have to feel bad for him, losing in two of the most brutal slugfests ever. Also, it should be noted that despite Board 8's well-documented pro-Crono leanings and the site as a whole having pro-JRPG leanings, Mega Man actually took the registered vote and only lost due to a deficit with unregistered voters.

Oh, and this managed to get a place on the 25 most surprising 1v1 results, too, with just 8.2% of initial brackets picking Crono to win this. He did get a slight boost to 13.9% on Second Chance Brackets, though, so I guess the field of 16 looked a little more favorable to Crono than the full field did? Actually I guess that checks out; Crono had a better prediction percentage in Second Chance all the way through, even in his very first match, so I suspect there were some people out there who thought Kirby could upset Crono but didn't feel Bowser could do the same when he got there instead of Kirby. Kirby still gets overrated because of his shenanigans in '08, when we've clearly seen that he's just not as strong in 1v1s as he is in multiways.

Match 144: Solid Snake vs. Samus Aran

Snake 11345
Samus 14725

The hilarity of this double elimination bracket is that your Oracle and your Guru could both be right, but for completely different reasons. Samus was a 39-8 favorite among the Oracles who were still submitting predictions at this point in the contest, and she had over 75% of Guru brackets as well...because over 90% of Gurus had Snake winning at least two matches in the Legends' Bracket, and Round 3 losers wouldn't appear in the Losers' Bracket until the next round! Still, none of us expected Samus to nearly break 56.5%; only about a quarter of Oracles even had her winning by half that amount, and I managed just my second ever top prediction with a 55.6%. A win's a win, but it hardly had me feeling as prescient as my first #1 did.

Match 145: Cloud Strife vs. Crono

Cloud 16563
Crono 12100

Loser's Bracket Round 4 consisted entirely of rematches of Legends' Bracket matches. One of them was an all-time classic, and the other was a boring retread of the first match. This one, sadly, was the latter.

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Also known as Cyberchao X.