LogFAQs > #935865281

Grand Final: Link vs. Cloud Strife

Link 16554
Cloud 11375

I mean, did we really expect otherwise? The final match was going to be a rematch no matter what. There was pretty much no way that the final match wouldn't end up being a rematch, because for it to feature someone who hadn't already faced Link, that someone would have to first beat someone who had beaten them earlier. Granted, Mega Man did exactly that this contest, and Samus nearly did, but it's a huge ask. I don't know, maybe if Samus had been able to pull out those few extra votes against Mario, she could've ridden a combo of the rallies that seemed to be popping up for every female character and her actual strength that got her to the finals of CBIX and won her the main bracket in '06 to upset Cloud, then SFF down Zelda to give us a fresh match. Which she'd lose, of course, but it'd still be better than having a rehash of a match we'd just had. That probably wouldn't have happened, though; beating Cloud without some mitigating factor is never an easy task if you're not Link. Snake's only victories over Cloud came when Cloud was being LFFed, first by Sephiroth and then by Crono (and maybe also Link, because swords? But mostly Crono). And his only other non-Link losses were...Mario in the infamous Planet Gamecube match, L-Block, and Squirtle in the Draven contest. And I guess the 3rd-place match of Rivalry Rumble but no one really cares about that. Actually when you consider she broke 47% on him in 2010 after being held just under 41% in 2003, maybe it's not so unreasonable to think that this would've been her year. Yeah let's go with this. Someone make up some adjusted X-Stats that say that Samus was actually the #2 character in 2018 and only lost because Mario continues to be a bad matchup for her. It honestly probably wouldn't be any more wrong than any of the other ones we have floating around. Hell, if you use the raw vote totals instead of the ones adjusted for the registered user bonus, Cloud got 51.37% on Mario, while Samus got 51.13% in her second match. That's still a slight advantage for Cloud, but it's really slight and character battles are not and have never been transient. Given the way trends were going at the time, this seems really probable. As for Zelda, the percentages would be more along the lines of their 2006 matchup (roughly 55-45) than their 2010 matchup (roughly 64-36), but it's hard to think that Zelda could keep up her momentum when faced with another powerful female. Zelda may have long since moved beyond her damsel in distress days, but Samus has always been the heroine of her games and her first game is just as old as Zelda's. She's the original feminist gaming icon, and not even Other M was able to ruin that.

Anyway, since Samus wasn't able to get that last push against Mario, we had Cloud in this match instead. He improved on the first match against Link, managing to break 40% this time. But this was never going to end in anything other than a comfortable Link victory. Honestly it's hard to imagine that Link will ever lose to anything other than a massive rally. Even Draven barely hung on at the end, relatively speaking--his raw margin of victory was higher than a lot of matches this contest, but we had 150 matches in this contest and if not for registered users' votes counting double, Shepard's vote total in the Link-Draven match would've been good enough to beat the winning total in 126 of them. Of the 24 that it wouldn't, 15 of these were in the first round, 5 in the second, 3 in the third, and then there was Link's SFF beatdown of Ganondorf. Even with the double-counting votes, Shepard's total was higher than Zelda's winning total against Mario, Crono's against Mega Man, Tifa's against Sephiroth, and the asbestos standard, Bowser's winning total in LB1 against Alucard, which failed to break 13000. The actual raw total of 8578 is almost certainly the lowest winning total in any character battle (though it's still better than the Years contest), which doesn't sound too bad until you remember that CBIX was three-ways with 12-hour matches. But even in a 12-hour match where third place had 30%, the lowest winning total in that contest was 8979. In 24 hours, in a 1v1, Bowser got fewer votes than that and won.

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Also known as Cyberchao X.