LogFAQs > #936615653

Match 17: Super Smash Bros. Ultimate vs. Tekken 7

Ultimate 19843
Tekken 7 4071

The expectation here was that Ultimate would stomp all over Tekken 7, which had never been higher than the #4 fighting game series on this site--#5 if you count Smash itself--and possibly even lower, though it would be a bit hard to gauge. Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat were obviously 1-2, and Tekken's sister series Soul Calibur was likely #3 as evidenced by Nightmare's repeated decent showings in character battles. The only Tekken character to ever win a match was Yoshimitsu...who is also a Soul Calibur character. But in the early contests, there were a lot more fighting game characters, and some of them managed to make Round 2, most famously when Gordon Freeman barely broke 40% on Tina Armstrong. And, well, in a vacuum this was a stomping--nearly a quintupling. But this match came one day after both Resident Evil 2 and DOOM managed higher percentages, with the latter breaking 86%. So it seems strange to say that a game scoring almost 83% of the vote disappointed, but that was the perception, and the board eagerly awaited Super Mario Odyssey's performance against Mortal Kombat 11 to gauge their expectations for a potential Divisional Final.

Match 18: The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds vs. Bayonetta

ALBW 15181
Bayonetta 8727

If there was any more need of evidence of a paradigm shift on this site, this was it. Bayonetta may have been an XBox 360/PS3 game when it first came out, but the character was largely considered pseudo-Nintendo after the sequel was a Wii U exclusive and the original was ported to Wii U at the same time, and then Bayonetta was added to Smash 4 back when third-party characters were still relatively rare in Smash. Given the general opinion of the Wii U, you might even consider the possibility that 3DS would trump Wii U despite the longtime mental block this site has had about handhelds (see: Link's Awakening as a slight Guru underdog to Mega Man X to advance out of R1 behind FFVI in 2009), but there was never any doubt that A Link Between Worlds would win. It's a Zelda game, after all, and one that got GotY in 2013, though it was far from dominating in doing so, only narrowly squeaking past Pokmon X/Y for 3DS game of the year and then getting LFF'd in the poll of all winners not only by the Wii U winner, Super Mario 3D World, but also by the fact that the winner of the "Download-Only" category was a fellow 3DS game, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney: Dual Destinies. This led to it narrowly finishing behind GTA V for third place in the poll of all winners, comfortably behind The Last of Us, before powering ahead in the final poll of the top three finishers to take the top spot. Because while it's clearly its own game, A Link Between Worlds will feel very familiar to anyone who's played A Link to the Past, and given how nostalgia-driven this site has been in the past, especially for Super Nintendo games, that should've been a very good thing.

And while A Link Between Worlds did win comfortably, it wasn't even a doubling, which given the way the contest had gone so far was a very weak win indeed. Over half the matches through five days had ended with a doubling or worse! And this wasn't even an action/RPG hybrid like the games that had been doing well on previous days. This was a full-fledged hack-and-slash that was avoiding the doubling by, essentially, A Link to the Past 2. While it was obvious by its absence from 2015 that ALBW was categorically not held in the same regard as its spiritual precursor, this was an embarrassing performance that, of course, would be completely meaningless because it was expected to be hopelessly outmatched in Round 2 anyway.

Of course, if anyone had been thinking quickly enough, they would've realized that this was a major hint as to the outcome of the most debated match of R1, which was due up the very next day. But who reacts that quickly, especially when the actual match outcomes were all so obvious that it was fairly safe to ignore the match once you'd voted in it?

Match 19: Marvel's Spider-Man vs. Dead Space 2

Spider-Man 16717
Dead Space 2 7190

There is one debate that rages almost constantly on Board 8, and that is how characters from other media would fare in Character Battles if we allowed them in. The general consensus is that the most well-known characters would be very strong indeed, though there would of course be plenty of fodder. Perhaps the biggest issue is that by opening it up too far, you'd have such a large list of potential entrants that it would be absolute chaos. My solution, of course, would be to limit it to characters who have been in a "good" video game, since merely forcing them to have been in a video game doesn't really limit it much. Nearly everything has had licensed games these days. So how would we determine what's "good"? Why, how about "things that have been in Games Contests"?! Of course, we'd probably have to have Games Contests a bit more frequently, but as long as Allen's still gatekeeping to make sure only quality games get in, that'll do fine. Right off the bat you get a bunch of Disney characters via Kingdom Hearts, and a bunch of Marvel characters via MvC2. DC Comics doesn't quite get as good a deal as Marvel does, but the Arkham series has been a mainstay in these contests. The silly nomination system for the first BGE also allowed the Simpsons arcade game to get in, so that's a few more characters with potential.

But there are people who figure that since this is a gaming site, anything non-gaming would get eviscerated by even a weak video game character. These people are wrong, but occasionally there are results that continue to fuel their belief. The Walking Dead getting upset by Bastion was one of them. Another one that was considered a major upset ironically came in a Character Battle, where people thought that having "Darth" in his name and being the top option would allow Revan (a KotOR-original character, therefore eligible for contests) to beat Terra Branford. Yeah, I don't understand why that's relevant either. The Star Wars Extended Universe is massive, including those video game-original characters. The fact that the Star Wars name alone doesn't make you strong doesn't mean that Han Solo or Darth Vader wouldn't be strong. We've seen that even in our top video game franchises, when we rallied Groose into the 2013 contest and he fell flat.

Spider-Man fell just short of 70% against Dead Space 2, while GTA: San Andreas was only able to get 65.45% on the original Dead Space in the previous GotD. Some food for thought. Gamers are not so single-minded that they ignore anything that isn't related to video games.

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<cite>TsunamiXXVIII posted [p:936615653] in Tsunami's ... [t:78010425]...</cite> <quote>Match 17: Super Smash Bros. Ultimate vs. Tekken 7 Ultimate 19843 Tekken 7 4071 The expectation here was that Ultimate would stomp all over Tekken 7, which had never been higher than the #4 fighting game series on this site--#5 if you count Smash itself--and possibly even lower, though it would be a bit hard to gauge. Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat were obviously 1-2, and Tekken's sister series Soul Calibur was likely #3 as evidenced by Nightmare's repeated decent showings in character battles. The only Tekken character to ever win a match was Yoshimitsu...who is also a Soul Calibur character. But in the early contests, there were a lot more fighting game characters, and some of them managed to make Round 2, most famously when Gordon Freeman barely broke 40% on Tina Armstrong. And, well, in a vacuum this was a stomping--nearly a quintupling. But this match came one day after both Resident Evil 2 and DOOM managed higher percentages, with the latter breaking 86%. So it seems strange to say that a game scoring almost 83% of the vote disappointed, but that was the perception, and the board eagerly awaited Super Mario Odyssey's performance against Mortal Kombat 11 to gauge their expectations for a potential Divisional Final. Match 18: The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds vs. Bayonetta ALBW 15181 Bayonetta 8727 If there was any more need of evidence of a paradigm shift on this site, this was it. Bayonetta may have been an XBox 360/PS3 game when it first came out, but the character was largely considered pseudo-Nintendo after the sequel was a Wii U exclusive and the original was ported to Wii U at the same time, and then Bayonetta was added to Smash 4 back when third-party characters were still relatively rare in Smash. Given the general opinion of the Wii U, you might even consider the possibility that 3DS would trump Wii U despite the longtime mental block this site has had about handhelds (see: Link's Awakening as a slight Guru underdog to Mega Man X to advance out of R1 behind FFVI in 2009), but there was never any doubt that A Link Between Worlds would win. It's a Zelda game, after all, and one that got GotY in 2013, though it was far from dominating in doing so, only narrowly squeaking past Pokmon X/Y for 3DS game of the year and then getting LFF'd in the poll of all winners not only by the Wii U winner, Super Mario 3D World, but also by the fact that the winner of the "Download-Only" category was a fellow 3DS game, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney: Dual Destinies. This led to it narrowly finishing behind GTA V for third place in the poll of all winners, comfortably behind The Last of Us, before powering ahead in the final poll of the top three finishers to take the top spot. Because while it's clearly its own game, A Link Between Worlds will feel very familiar to anyone who's played A Link to the Past, and given how nostalgia-driven this site has been in the past, especially for Super Nintendo games, that should've been a very good thing. And while A Link Between Worlds did win comfortably, it wasn't even a doubling, which given the way the contest had gone so far was a very weak win indeed. Over half the matches through five days had ended with a doubling or worse! And this wasn't even an action/RPG hybrid like the games that had been doing well on previous days. This was a full-fledged hack-and-slash that was avoiding the doubling by, essentially, A Link to the Past 2. While it was obvious by its absence from 2015 that ALBW was categorically not held in the same regard as its spiritual precursor, this was an embarrassing performance that, of course, would be completely meaningless because it was expected to be hopelessly outmatched in Round 2 anyway. Of course, if anyone had been thinking quickly enough, they would've realized that this was a major hint as to the outcome of the most debated match of R1, which was due up the very next day. But who reacts that quickly, especially when the actual match outcomes were all so obvious that it was fairly safe to ignore the match once you'd voted in it? Match 19: Marvel's Spider-Man vs. Dead Space 2 Spider-Man 16717 Dead Space 2 7190 There is one debate that rages almost constantly on Board 8, and that is how characters from other media would fare in Character Battles if we allowed them in. The general consensus is that the most well-known characters would be very strong indeed, though there would of course be plenty of fodder. Perhaps the biggest issue is that by opening it up too far, you'd have such a large list of potential entrants that it would be absolute chaos. My solution, of course, would be to limit it to characters who have been in a "good" video game, since merely forcing them to have been in a video game doesn't really limit it much. Nearly everything has had licensed games these days. So how would we determine what's "good"? Why, how about "things that have been in Games Contests"?! Of course, we'd probably have to have Games Contests a bit more frequently, but as long as Allen's still gatekeeping to make sure only quality games get in, that'll do fine. Right off the bat you get a bunch of Disney characters via Kingdom Hearts, and a bunch of Marvel characters via MvC2. DC Comics doesn't quite get as good a deal as Marvel does, but the Arkham series has been a mainstay in these contests. The silly nomination system for the first BGE also allowed the Simpsons arcade game to get in, so that's a few more characters with potential. But there are people who figure that since this is a gaming site, anything non-gaming would get eviscerated by even a weak video game character. These people are wrong, but occasionally there are results that continue to fuel their belief. The Walking Dead getting upset by Bastion was one of them. Another one that was considered a major upset ironically came in a Character Battle, where people thought that having "Darth" in his name and being the top option would allow Revan (a KotOR-original character, therefore eligible for contests) to beat Terra Branford. Yeah, I don't understand why that's relevant either. The Star Wars Extended Universe is massive, including those video game-original characters. The fact that the Star Wars name alone doesn't make you strong doesn't mean that Han Solo or Darth Vader wouldn't be strong. We've seen that even in our top video game franchises, when we rallied Groose into the 2013 contest and he fell flat. Spider-Man fell just short of 70% against Dead Space 2, while GTA: San Andreas was only able to get 65.45% on the original Dead Space in the previous GotD. Some food for thought. Gamers are not so single-minded that they ignore anything that isn't related to video games. --- </quote>

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