LogFAQs > #936437340

Match 5: Monster Hunter: World vs. Bravely Default: Flying Fairy

MH:W 13203
BD:FF 9581

Now this was an interesting match to talk about, if not to watch. It was in the write-up of the Suikoden II-Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate match that "The Flowchart" was introduced:

Nintendo > Squaresoft > Japanese RPG > RPG > Japanese > old > new > contest experience > top option > everything else.

However, while this did correctly lead to the answer that Suikoden would win because it was older, had contest experience, and was the top option, it was not, as stated in that write-up, a JRPG vs. a mere RPG. Monster Hunter is in fact a Capcom franchise, so that was JRPG vs. JRPG.

Here, however, it was a bit murkier. Bravely Default was the older game, 2014 vs. 2017, but that probably matters less in Game of the Decade because the gaps are smaller. Monster Hunter: World had the huge seeding advantage, and was released on consoles while Bravely Default was a handheld game. But Bravely Default was Squaresoft--Square Enix, technically, but while it was well post-merger it was a throwback to their older games, in the same vein as their earlier spin-off "Final Fantasy: The 4 Heroes of Light". Hell, look at those abbreviations again: Bravely Default even had a subtitle with the initials "FF"!--while Monster Hunter: World was, as stated before, Capcom, which stunk up the joint like crazy in 2018. Yeah, yeah, "Characters =/= Games", but still, about the only Capcom character to do anything impressive was B8 mascot Phoenix Wright winning one of the three matches that was outright flipped by the registered user bonus, and one of the other two resulted in a Mega Man loss so there you go, Capcom sucks. Well okay Chun-Li also seemed to impress in 2018 but nearly every female character in the bracket seemed to be a step up from before. And with unregistered voters, it was indeed pretty close; 3543-3173. But with the registered voters, MH:W was above 60%, so even without the registered voter bonus, this wouldn't have been close.

Monster Hunter: World had an 87.66% prediction percentage overall, so this was just a clear case of me overthinking things. Then again, we'd seen enough 15-2 "upsets" that the seedings alone didn't seem like an indicator that MH:W had this on lockdown.

Match 6: Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice vs. Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch

Sekiro 13347
Ni No Kuni 9442

And here's where The Flowchart, and everything else I thought I knew about GameFAQs, went completely down the toilet. I wasn't that familiar with Ni No Kuni and even less so with Sekiro, but remembering how Yakuza bombed all over the 2018 Contest and being pretty sure that Sekiro was an action game and not an RPG, I figured this was a lock. Ni No Kuni was fodder, sure, but Japanese RPG > Japanese, not to mention I'd probably take a FPS over an Action Game on this site. Just look at how Devil May Cry regularly struggles to even get games into the Games Contests despite Dante being a very good midcarder. It's clear that both he and Kratos are far stronger than their games. And if Yakuza couldn't even do well in a Character Battle, how was an action game going to do shit in this contest? And my Oracle was only spared from being in an even bigger world of hurt by my misconception that this was Japanese RPG > Japanese. It's not. Unlike the series I keep comparing it to, Yakuza, which is legitimately Japanese in origin, Sekiro is set in Japan but it's made by Activision, best known in this site's glory days for their sports games like the Tony Hawk series, and more recently for Call of Duty. When I learned that, I said I was glad I didn't know that because I probably would've taken Ni No Kuni to double Sekiro if I had. Researching them for this write-up, however, I learned that Activision also managed to acquire some old platformer icons like Crash and Spyro, not that those characters will ever be theirs, and they...are now known as Activision Blizzard?!?!?!?! Goddamnit, if I'd known that I don't think I'd have taken Sekiro to avoid a tripling by much! You've got a company that this site hates, in a genre that this site hates...and it's not only not challenging for the title of "lowest X-Stat value by something that isn't actively being anti-voted", but comfortably advancing to Round 2? And just like Bravely Default in the previous match, over 49.5% of Ni No Kuni's raw votes came from unregistered users; in fact, the splits are extremely similar with both voter groups-- 4833-3206 vs. 4877-3165 with the registered voters, 3543-3173 vs. 3599-3116 with the unregistered (in both cases, this match was the slightly more lopsided one). This was, plain and simple, the site's tastes being far different than what I...oh. I, uh, may not have looked quite close enough. Activision merely published the game internationally; it was actually developed by a Japanese developer, FromSoftware, best known for...the Souls series?! Well, geez, I feel silly now. The Souls series is one of the few IPs to debut during the contest era that has shown some strength in Games Contests. Dark Souls made Round 3 in 2015, where it nearly broke 30% on A Link to the Past, and managed to double its Round 1 opponent and beat an established franchise in Round 2, while Demon's Souls, the game that started it all...okay it's 0-2, but it looked good in both its losses and both were to quality competition. Probably. They've only had one appearance in a Character Battle and the character was put into a bad situation immediately, but if we ever go back to Character Battles, the series might have enough clout to not completely suck.

Like my bracket.

---

Also known as Cyberchao X.