LogFAQs > #939388452

The 11 Games That Made Bracket (And How Long They Lasted)
-Life is Strange (Round 1)
-The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky SC (Round 1)
-Fallout 4 (Round 2)
-Bloodborne (Round 3)
-Undertale (Round 1)
-Ori and the Blind Forest (Round 2)
-The Witcher 3 (Finals)
-Dying Light (Round 1)
-Rocket League (Round 2)
-Metal Gear Solid V (Round 3)
-Crypt of the Necrodancer (Round 1)

Notable Snubs:
-Splatoon
-Xenoblade Chronicles X
-Batman: Arkham Knight
-Axiom Verge
-Cities: Skilines
-SOMA
-The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel

Headliners: Bloodborne, The Witcher 3

Busts: Fallout 4, Undertale

Snubs Analysis:

IMO this is when current gen really started finding its footing. 2014 involved a lot of stumbling around with mediocre exclusives (inFamous, Titanfall), and games that came out on both generations (Alien Isolation, Wolfenstein, honestly pretty much anything of real note). THIS year, however, is when we see some of the big boy games come out and start getting some mileage out of the 400 dollars worth of plastic and scrap that we had purchased.

But lets not get ahead of ourselves. While Im SURE saying this is effectively taping a Kick Me sign behind my back and asking everyone to hound me over why I didnt include this or that, I really didnt find many games that popped out at me as YES this is clearly a massive snub that would have found footing in a GameFAQs contest. So, I mostly just ran with things I KINDA think are snubs, and some personal favorites.

For instance, maybe its just a me thing, but I liked Arkham Knight a lot. I know the tank shit really soured a lot of people on the game, but otherwise I thought it was a great time, and Arkham City did well enough in the contest that maybe there was room for AK as a 15 or 16 seed. Similarly, both Splatoon games have been exposed as massive fodder (another tick on the this isnt NintendoFAQs checklist), but if I had to choose only one to repped in this contest, it would have been the first. Not because I think its better (its not), but because it represented the first original IP Nintendo had had in the AAA space in almost a decade, with a genuinely enjoyable USP. It was also one of the few interesting games to come out on the Wii U; definitely the most creative, if nothing else.

Oh, and another me thing? The complete snubbing of Frictional Games this contest. Amnesia is the more blatant offense because of how influential it was, but personally, SOMA was the better title. The bar for video game writing is so low that The Last of Us is considered on the level of the fckin Godfather, but SOMA deserves real credit for being a very well written, well executed piece of good sci-fi, a genre video games dont embrace as much as you think they would.

Going back to the Wii U for a moment, Xenoblade Chronicles X received a very mixed reception from fans of the first, if my memory serves me right. But considering how badly the series tore up the bracket this go around (XBC2 was surprisingly legit for a game I thought people didnt like much), I do wonder if X would have ended up registering at all on the power scale.

Cities: Skylines and Trails of Cold Steel are pretty much games I only know tangentially about. Considering how little representation there was of the sim or god game genre (I think Civ may have been the only entry), I would have thought thered be room for Cities: Skylines, which people seem to hold up as the true successor to SimCity after EA obliterated that brand. As for Cold Steel, well, it seems like a very Board 8 game, but Ive heard the Cold Steel name tossed around more than the Trails in the Sky name on the Internet in general. I assume because noms were split three ways between the CS games, none of them ended up showing up through B8s sheer will.

Bust Analysis:

Ive never experienced more annoying hype than the hype surrounding Fallout 4. I was paying 0 attention to it because I have no investment in the series (Im starting New Vegas tho so well see if that changes), and yet I somehow became aware of every single feature of the game through sheer pop culture osmosis, ie people not shutting up about it. YOU CAN BUILD A SETTLEMENT! YOUR CHARACTER HAS A VOICE! IT HAS A DOG!, and every other inane detail. As such, I cant say Im sad that the actual release triggered immense backlash.

But my my, the way that backlash manifested in this contest was quite something. I mean, the fact that this main entry was an 8 seed while the spinoff New Vegas was a 3 seed was pretty embarrassing from the word go. But more importantly, Fallout 4 is a perfect example of a game that won the matches it was supposed to, following its projected path, but looked so bad doing it that its getting slotted as a bust anyhow.

As it was in the top half of Division 2, its match with VVVVVV was immediately following up on Bastions upset of the Walking Dead and Hollow Knight putting up big boy numbers on Tales of Berseria. Indie Fear was in full swing at this point, which in retrospect was the silliest arc of the contest. Hollow Knight has a huge following and The Walking Dead was trash, so Im not sure how everyone concluded that EVERY indie was a crouching tiger. So for Fallout 4 to go out in this environment and put 70% on VVVVVV the way it did sure seemed impressive at the time.

So much so that the idea of it upsetting ME2 became a huge topic of discussion. Now, I feel entitled to say I told you so when I did in fact tell you so; I dont remember if it was in the Stats thread or the Crew thread, but I said that ME2 was probably gonna beat Fallout 4 harder than it beat REVII. Why? Because no one has even thought of VVVVVV in ages, and the insinuation that it would be around Hollow Knights level in this contest was astonishing to me.

So of course Mass Effect 2 goes out and doubles FO4, in one of the first Oh my God what is happening?! matches of Round 2. Naturally there was some SFF involved, but in a match where some were legitimately entertaining the upset, a brass knuckles gut punch absolutely shocked people. Point of all this being, that 30% on VVVVVV was actually horrendous for a massive AAA title, the successor to a game that finished 6th in the 2010 x-stats, a game whose hype I could not escape from had I roomed with Patrick and lived under a rock. YAKUZA 0 more than tripled a similarly low-profile opponent. All that needs to be said really.

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