LogFAQs > #936546300

Match 11: Borderlands 2 vs. Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night

Borderlands 2 13624
Bloodstained: RotN 9427

Borderlands 2 was our GotY in 2012, but it's frequently considered one of our weakest GotY winners ever. And we once had a Call of Duty game win GotY, which in the world at large would certainly be stronger but Call of Duty hasn't been worth anything in contests since, well, around the same time that it won a GotY. Anyone who knows me should know that I'm a huge fan of both music and statistics, so it shouldn't surprise you too much that I frequent WhatNotToSing.com, and the good folks over there have a perfect explanation:

The American entertainment industry is all about the here and now. All major industry awards, be it Oscar or Tony or Emmy or Grammy, tend to be as nearsighted as Mr. Magoo. In Hollywood and New York and Nashville, one year is about as far back as anyone seems to be able to remember. As such, every winter these various acadamies manage to embarrass themselves by bestowing a major award on something or someone that will be thoroughly forgotten five years hence.

That applies to the Internet and its court of public opinion, too. CoD 4 did very well in the 2009 Games Contest, and then Modern Warfare won 2009 GotY the following January. And then...we just kind of forgot about it. It was a fad. Also, how did I never notice that typo in the editorial I just quoted?

But as for Borderlands 2, we saw its weakness. 0-3 in CBIX, with only one of the characters even getting second place. Got upset in Round 1 of BGE3. No characters even made CBX. Can we go back to CBIX again, where one of them managed to allow a non-Symphonia Tales character into second place? Okay yes that was the resident "joke entrant", but still. And while it had the greater name recognition here, it's not like its opponent didn't have the pedigree. Bloodstained is a spiritual successor to the Castlevania series, produced by the series' long-time producer, Koji Igarashi. The similarity of its subtitle to that of the most popular Castlevania game is no coincidence. And remember how much this site loves Japanese things. This performance was very encouraging for Bloodstained, and if we ever get another Character Battle, I wouldn't be surprised if its protagonist was able to do okay. Not great, of course, because very few characters to debut during the Contest era have been worth much (Amaterasu, Altair even though he missed the last one entirely, Sora if you want to count by NA release dates but his game was already out in Japan by the start of Character Battle I). But decent enough for a newcomer. (And no, Geralt doesn't count; Witcher 3 may have been the game to boost him to prominence, but even just as a game character he dates back to the 90s, and across all media he's as old as Link.)

Match 12: Horizon Zero Dawn vs. Fortnite

Horizon Zero Dawn 18655
Fortnite 4397

This match followed neither of the "trends". Whereas in all 8 of the matches on the first two days, the "extra voters" on the registered side largely congregated towards one entrant, and in the other three matches on Day 3, the proportions were very similar, in this match, the raw margins of victory among registered and unregistered voters were very similar: 4772 among the registered and 4714 among the unregistered. Since there are more registered voters than unregistered, that means that this match wasn't even as close as it looked! With the double-counted registered voters, it still came out to a little under 81%; in reality, it was a tad over 82%. Which doesn't sound like a huge difference but you have to remember that the difference in percentage between 1.5x and 2x is larger than the difference in percentage between 3x and 4x. In this case, it's the difference between a little under a 4.25x and comfortably over a 4.5x. Apparently Fortnite is just that hated; I knew it'd lose but I figured its popularity would at least let it not get embarrassed.

Match 13: Resident Evil 2 vs. Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair

RE2 19972
DR2 4054

So yeah, remakes were allowed into this contest, though at times it could be hard to tell because there were also a couple of games with the same name as their franchise's debut game, like Doom and God of War. I'm curious as to whether Bacon showed any sort of discretion; if it was just generalized "yeah all remakes are eligible", it's kind of tough to imagine that RE2 got a 1-seed and OoT3D didn't even make the field. Or did the lack of recency and the fact that handheld games are largely viewed as second-class citizens here make people forget entirely that it was eligible? No, that doesn't make sense; HeartGold/SoulSilver made it in and that's even older. (Then again, it's also a much bigger improvement on its original game!)

At a glance, it appears that this was another case where almost all of the "extra" votes went in one direction. Then you realize that in a blowout this big, the proportion isn't all that far off! The official percentage is 83.13%; the raw votes have it at 83% even. Either way, it's close to a quintupling, which either means that RE2 is an absolute monster or that even by the standards of VNs, Danganronpa is piss-weak. In 2015, four VNs made it in, two each from two series. The original Phoenix Wright, a 16-seed just like DR2 here, narrowly avoided a doubling from Skyrim, while the third PW game even more narrowly avoided a tripling from Symphony of the Night in a 2-15 matchup. In a pair of other 2-15 matchups, 999 got 22.2% on Persona 4, so roughly halfway between a tripling and a quadrupling, while its sequel, VLR, got a little under 21% against Mass Effect 2. Now, we know that Phoenix has pretty much gone mainstream, but I'd expect the Zero Escape series to be roughly on par with Danganronpa. The original, not-remade RE2 was also in 2015's contest, where it lost in somewhat respectable fashion to Final Fantasy Tactics. In fact, let's pull up the X-Stat calculator to see what the expectation would be:

Resident Evil 2 (2015g) VS Virtues Last Reward (2015g)

Resident Evil 2 has a strength of 23.93.
Virtues Last Reward has a strength of 10.70.

Resident Evil 2 wins with 77.64% of the vote!
A win of 33,656 with 60,875 total votes cast.

77.64%. Not even what Persona 4 got on the stronger 999. Either the RE2 Remake was just that good (not entirely inconceivable since you're dealing with updating a game from the late 90s to the modern HD graphics and controls), or Danganronpa isn't even remotely in the same conversation as Zero Escape. Probably some combination of both.

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Also known as Cyberchao X.