LogFAQs > #939434480

Round 1 Division 5 Day 10
The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth 43.47%
Nioh 56.53%

Prediction Percentage 44.12%

Heres the match that got all the attention today. We had seen indie games being good so far and Binding of Isaac was already the favorite to win before the contest started. At this point, not many kept their faith in Nioh. In fact, people generally thought Binding of Isaac would win rather easily. Nioh had about a third of the gurus supporting it and about a sixth of the oracles. Yet it won, and it won rather easily, giving life to what was otherwise a pretty boring division so far.

Neither Binding of Isaac or Nioh looked very great in their Game of the Year polls and the former got just 25% against 2015-Witcher 3 in the previous games contest. They both looked to be bad and not far from each other. The top option is usually a good choice in such cases. If anyone considered it, Binding of Isaac could also stand out like a sore thumb today. The fatal mistake here was probably to underestimate just how good 2017 is. Nioh was up against Persona 5, Horizon and Automata, which are all huge. It was the first real sign of how good anything that year was. Resident Evil 7 came first, but it wasnt truly given credit before the next round happened. Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey dominated, but were also both expected to, and Hollow Knight wasnt as big back then as it became. Nioh made the upset though.

The match was exciting in the beginning. Binding of Isaac won the board vote and they were dead even in the opening minutes causing all of us to work our f5 keys. In those minutes, you should feel best as a Nioh supporter. Most indie games had started of strong and stabilized throughout the match. We also knew Binding of Isaac was the favorite and had most bracket votes. At the freeze, the difference was only a 9-vote lead for Nioh. It extended that to 40 next update, which basically sealed the deal. Binding of Isaac stalled for two updates giving hope to some supporters, but the board vote is not just the opening five minutes, its the first 15 or 20. Its usually from that point the board opinion loses influence and true enough, Nioh went from 48 to 122 and never looked back again, being a few votes away from a 3000-vote lead by the end.

This was hugely unexpected after all the indie dominance, but it gave more life to the idea that perhaps indie games from the first half of the decade would not be as strong as the ones from the latter half. Furthermore, with Bloodborne looking good and people generally having high expectations for Dark Souls, credit was also given to Nioh for simply just being better than we thought. No one had the idea yet that indie games just werent quite at the level we made them to be on average, or that you cant really group them as much as we like to do.

---

Guinness Book of World Records is the name of the diary that belongs to azuarc, the winner of the Game of the Decade II guru contest.