LogFAQs > #939567872

Match 119: Dark Souls vs. The Last of Us

Dark Souls 14919
Last of Us 10669

Time and again, we've seen that hype often trumps an actual release when it comes to strength on this site. We saw it in 2008, when Brawl disappointed so many Melee fans and led to all of the characters that had seemingly boosted in 2007 due to being in trailers falling back to earth, and we saw it in 2010 when Golden Sun pulled an upset in the first GotD on the release date of its disappointing sequel, Dark Dawn. (Though while I certainly had issues with the harsh difficulty spike after a certain spoilery event and the inability to return to areas earlier in the game to pick up anything you might have missed, my biggest gripe is that whereas Lost Age ended with a vague sequel hook that took seven years to deliver, Dark Dawn ended on a clear To Be Continued and we haven't gotten anything in over a decade.) Technically, we even saw it back in the very first Character Battle, given how poorly regarded Super Mario Sunshine is. So when the long-awaited The Last of Us 2 got a bunch of scenes and gameplay footage leaked not long before this match, it should've been fuel for a major upset, right?

Wrong, because what was leaked depicted the game to be absolutely execrable, with the internet exploding and the general consensus being outrage at the creators themselves, considering it to be contemptuous to their fans. Uh...yeah, you keep posting your clickbaity titles, guys. I say "depicted" because not long after this match, it was confirmed that what the hackers (yes, this was the work of hackers, not anyone affiliated with Naughty Dog) leaked was in fact fully outdated. That's not how gameplay will actually work in the finished version, and the scenes...well, what type of real gamer wants plot spoilers, anyway? That takes half the fun out of it! So in the end, it all added up to the fans getting massively trolled, and the general consensus was that this would've made this number unreliable, and that TLoU was destined to underperform here. Which, uh...kind of means this should've been a pretty close match? With these types of vote totals, it would only take a couple thousand votes swinging the other direction to outright flip this match, even less if those were registered voters. (Remember, swinging the votes means subtracting them from one side and adding them to the other. So the entire 4250-vote lead would in fact be turned by a mere 1063 registered users that voted for Dark Souls having instead voted for The Last of Us. Though given how low the total number of voters is, that actually is a large figure.)

Still, in a match that seemed prime for Dark Souls to overperform, it only got 58.30%. Oracle consensus: 56.64%. An overperformance, yes, but not a huge one. Seeing as how Dark Souls had fewer brackets taking it to the semifinals than either of its two potential quarterfinal opponents, this was definitely considered a discouraging result for Dark Souls fans...which made it an encouraging result for just about every Guru, even the eliminated ones, with the exceptions of Seginustemple, Xeybozn, and Agent_M, each of whom had a route to victory contingent on Dark Souls winning the next round. Xeybozn and Agent_M both needed Smash Ultimate to win it all, with Xeybozn specifically requiring Witcher 3 > Dark Souls in the semifinal while Agent_M would win it if Dark Souls either lost to Persona 5 in the seminal or made the finals and lost to Ultimate directly; while Seginustemple was the lone Guru to take Dark Souls to win it all--but had enough mistakes elsewhere that the most likely path for this, defeating Witcher 3 in the semifinal and Breath of the Wild in the final, would not be enough. If Dark Souls made the final and lost to anything other than Smash Ultimate, or if it won it all specifically by defeating Witcher 3 and Breath of the Wild, the Guru Champion would be a troll account that had entered both the Guru and their official bracket under the name COVlD-19. That's a lowercase L, mind you, not an uppercase i, but the intent is clear. Most people were calling this "the darkest timeline", and so the prospect of Dark Souls > Witcher 3 was not something we were looking forward to.

Match 120: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim vs. Pokmon HeartGold/SoulSilver

Skyrim 15311
HGSS 10284

And with this, all three of the remakes of older games were eliminated shy of the Elite Eight--but all three had only just been eliminated this round. Given this board's penchant for things that are old, is it any wonder that they all made the Sweet 16? (I mean, sure, a bunch of other games in the bracket had updated remakes, but their originals were also in this decade--like Mario Kart 8 (Ultra) and Xenoblade Chronicles--or was XBC a straight-up port? I don't even know.) But that said, all were worthy candidates. The original GSC pulled 45% on Melee before Melee started rallying to make it a 60-40 match; Persona 4 did better on Twilight Princess in 2015 than it did in its third-round exit to RE4 in 2010, and Resident Evil 2 straight-up won the GotY polls for 2019. Speaking of which, if you count these remakes as being ways of "cheating" and getting older games into this contest, then Pokmon GSC is the only game to have been in all five Games Contests. (It's one of 11 games that had been in all three BGEs and the first GotD; obviously there are far more that have been in all three BGEs.) Skyrim's performance here was solid, nearly breaking 60% and outperforming Dark Souls against what was presumed, in the wake of the disastrous TLoU2 leaks, to be a stronger game. But it was still a remake and therefore something that "didn't belong in this contest", and a handheld game to boot, so there would be doubters.

But let's be real here--saying GSC and HGSS are the same game is like saying that Ultimate is just Smash 4 with an expanded roster. Same goes for FRLG and ORAS to the games they're remakes of, though maybe not so much for any future remakes because honestly, the changes in each generation past the fourth have largely been minor rebalancing issues and weird gimmicks. I'm not saying I dislike the changes, though I'll admit I'm none too happy with LGPE and SwSh "GO-ifying" the series, but stuff like Triple Battles, Mega Evolutions, Z-Moves, and Gigantamax is not the same as Gen 2 splitting the Special stat into Special Attack and Special Defense and introducing held items, Gen 3 introducing Abilities, or Gen 4 making it so that each individual move was designated either Physical or Special instead of it being determined by the move's type. Those were all very big changes, and as long as they don't try to use a Dragon-type move on a Pokmon that used t