LogFAQs > #941798126

Match 121: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild vs. Mass Effect 2

BotW 17691
ME2 8199

It seemed that in the end, the concerns about Mass Effect 2's strength based on its early performances were warranted after all. I get that Dragon Quest XI was the game that allowed the series to finally break through here in the US, but given what we saw in the first GotD, we had to figure that the top games from 2010 and 2011 would be premium contenders. (Naturally, 2011's addition to the Zelda series failed to even make the bracket. LOL 2011 Board 8. Though in fairness, we had no way of knowing at the time that 2017 was going to be to Gen Z what 1998 was to Gen Y, not to mention we've always had the "boomer" mentality and never really gave a crap about Gen Z anyway.) Mass Effect 2 barely outperforming DQXI was, quite frankly, pitiful. You could make a case that ME2 was being punished for the franchise's later sins, and it probably was, but it just reinforced that in this contest, older wasn't better. If this was the direction that GameFAQs was heading, the scarcity of contests was suddenly no longer looking like a good thing; contests had the potential to become interesting again, even if they'd never return to the glory of their heyday.

Match 122: Super Smash Bros. Ultimate vs. Xenoblade Chronicles

SSBU 15437
XBC 10461

Smash Ultimate winning this match was never in doubt; about the only thing that would've even stood a chance would've been Odyssey the previous round. But how about Xenoblade breaking 40% here? Remember, in 2015, Xenoblade lost an extremely close match to Donkey Kong Country 2, which went out the next round and was only marginally more impressive against Fire Emblem: Awakening. The Gurus favored Three Houses over Xenoblade for exactly those reasons--Awakening was polarizing among the fandom while Three Houses received a far more uniformly positive reception, and the "far weaker" Awakening got 47.89% on something that Xenoblade was only able to get 49.76% on so that gap could easily be overcome.

And Fire Emblem turned out to be the popular pick for Turd of the Contest, and honestly Donkey Kong has a case for it as well, with its only game going out and getting beaten easily by Devil May Cry 5. I said it in the write-up of that match, but it bears repeating: Devil May Cry has never even been in a Best Game Ever, and in the first Game of the Decade, 2 and 4 missed entirely, 1 required vote-ins to make the field, and 3 picked up the series' only win...in a failure to double a game that was never released outside of Japan, in a round where it had massive pic advantage because the theme of "box art" meant it was facing "Mother 3" on a solid red background. And it's not like DMC5 went out in Round 2 and showed that it had revitalized the series; its loss was entirely the level of beatdown that would be expected, both from the strength of its opponent and from the weakness that its own series had shown in the past. Normally, this would be the perfect place for shouting FRAUD. It might still be; Division 4 wasn't exactly strong, seeing as how even we had a Fire Emblem game as our Guru favorite, the lolcasuals seemingly had an lolGTA game as their favorite (with fellow Rockstar game Red Dead Redemption the seeming #2), and the division final pit Xenoblade against a Vita remake of a game that hadn't exactly dominated past contests to begin with, including memorably losing by 7 votes in a meaningless battle for 3rd place and becoming easily the weakest game in Round 3 of the first GotD. And, yep, Division winner, that's about where past FRAUDs finished. So calling it now, "Xenoblade is a FRAUD"...

...wait, weren't we discussing a match where it broke 40% against Smash Ultimate? It's easy to forget that this discussion is going on not because it's in this match, but because it did well in this match. Except that actually changes nothing, because bandwagon effect (seriously, it sucks that P4G and XBC had to run into each other; they were the two biggest bandwagons of the contest) and because a lot of our earlier FRAUDs didn't even need to have big wins, just impressive losses. Remember Shadow getting roughly 45% on Mario in his debut, then going against a similarly overrated Tidus in Round 1 in his follow-up in the rare double-FRAUD? (Seriously why are Tidus's X-Stat numbers for 2002-03 so good? Oh right because the game was still brand new then.) Or Magus getting overrated to high hell for an overperformance against Link (in the sprite round, which quite frequently allows characters too new to have an 8-bit sprite to overperform on characters old enough to have one--and that might be the only time you ever hear anything related to Chrono Trigger referred to as "new")--and by the way, this directly relates to the previous example, because Magus only narrowly got past Ganondorf the previous round after Ganondorf had only narrowly beaten Tidus the round before that--in 2003, then outright assigned his 2003 value again in 2004 because lol CJayC SFF bracket, leading to the rare unanimous Board 8 selection going wrong in 2005. (Other examples of unanimous picks gone wrong: Mario in Round 2 in 2013, Link in Round 3 in 2013...that's probably it, although the reasons that there aren't more in 2013 are pretty hilarious in their own right.)

So, yeah, bandwagon, soft path, FRAUD. We're all good with that, right?

Match 123: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt vs. Persona 5

W3 15182
P5 11670

The biggest sign that Persona's finally made it big worldwide? This game is being billed simply as "Persona 5". Up until recently, literally everything in the greater Megami Tensei franchise had the "Shin Megami Tensei" title bolted onto it as a prefix regardless of what its original Japanese title was; even knowing full well it isn't actually an SMT game, I've been using that as one of the tags on the YouTube uploads of my blind playthrough of the first Megami Tensei. But here you have Persona 5, devoid of the SMT title and going for 43.46% on freaking Witcher 3. This was the first time all contest that Witcher 3 looked vulnerable, and it seems silly to say that about a game that was going to be the Guru underdog in the semifinals and an underdog in every other metric in the finals (or maybe it was a casual underdog in the semis too; I procrastinated too long after the contest and they've already taken down the standings for this one, even though you can still see them for older contests), but that's how dominant Witcher 3 had been. It was legitimately looking like it had a chance at the upset over BotW after two rounds. This quashed any faint prayer it m