LogFAQs > #936434740

Okay let's do this.

Match 1: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild vs. The Outer Worlds

Breath of the Wild 19352
The Outer Worlds 3409

Not much to say here since it's the prohibitive favorite destroying some random fodder that I've never heard of, but with arguably the most well-received Zelda game since Ocarina of Time itself making its contest debut...vote totals were still down from the previous contest, where our opening match was Dante vs. Cuphead. Okay, yes, with this four-matches-at-once format, technically we also had Legend of Zelda in an opening match in CBX, too, but here's the scary part: when you take out the registered user bonus, not only did BotW-TOW draw fewer voters than Dante-Cuphead, but Breath of the Wild drew fewer votes than Dante! The registered-unregistered ratio was more lopsided here, though; in Dante-Cuphead, registered voters only outnumbered unregistered voters 8819-8756, whereas here it was 8093-6583. Which, uh, is kind of scary given that BotW's winning margin among the registered voters was 6925-1168. More registered voters voted for BotW than unregistered voters voted period! That's ridiculous. I guess there was a lot to say after all.

Match 2: Halo: Reach vs. Life Is Strange

Halo: Reach 12677
Life is Strange 9899

It's hard to have faith in anything Halo here, but Life is Strange was pretty fodderiffic when we saw it before. I thought that maybe with B8's penchant for VNs, Life is Strange could pull off the upset, but I forgot that they hate the game. Either way it was a meaningless 1-point match--and there was at least some debate here, a 77.3-22.7 split on the Guru compared to some of the other awful picks I made.

Halo really does look pretty bad here, even in victory.

Match 3: Final Fantasy XV vs. What Remains of Edith Finch

Final Fantasy XV 16854
Edith Finch 5722

Noctis may have embarrassed himself in 2018, but this was never in doubt. Final Fantasy may be declining as a series, but I think the opinion on XV was "it's still not great but it's better than XIII" and besides, What The Hell Is Edith Finch. I've heard it described as a "walking simulator", which I think means it's some sort of casualbait.

This match followed the trend of nearly all of the early matches: despite the disparity between the number of registered and unregistered users, the loser's raw votes were very nearly a 50-50 split between registered and unregistered, while the winner's registered votes exceeded their unregistered votes by over 1000. The exact meaning of this, however, would not be clear until we saw a match that broke that trend.

Match 4: Hollow Knight vs. Tales of Berseria

Hollow Knight 14183
Tales of Berseria 8399

This was considered a very debatable match, because Hollow Knight was an indie game, which rarely fared well, while Tales of Berseria was, well, just look at the first two words of that title. The Tales series has a grand total of four wins in contests. Tales of Symphonia has three of those--once with Lloyd winning in Character Battle IV, and twice with the game itself advancing to Round 2, in both the fourway BGE2 in 2009 and in GotD in 2010, though it should be noted that its R2 loss in GotD was literally to one of the two games it beat out in R1 of BGE2. The most recent was in Character Battle IX, where some combination of DAT TOP OPTION (technically left option now, but still, higher seed in a fodder match) and TJF allowed Berseria's protagonist to reach R2. And while the fact that Berseria already had more wins than Tales of the Abyss might have been encouraging, we all knew full well that that was a fodder-vs.-fodder match, and Yoshi proved it by breaking 70% on Velvet in R2. The distrust of all things Tales narrowly won out--in order to avoid the procrastination that plagued my 2018 write-ups, to the point that the final rounds have references to this contest's bracket, I'm doing reactions during the Contest this time, so Guru submissions aren't technically closed yet, but at this writing it looks like about 54.6% of Gurus had Hollow Knight. And Hollow Knight won handily, with the casuals beating out the Gurus by 20% on the prediction percentage.

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Also known as Cyberchao X.