Board 8 > my 5 best and worst picks in contest history

(+) Yeah! (+)

my memory of that incident is that people pointed to the DS and Mario 64 DS as the 2005 boost was largely a Mario boost. I tend to agree with the later thinking that it was more an exodus of Square voters from the site, but then votes were at an all time high in 2006 and that was the year of Smash Bros., so who knows.

I guess in retrospect it makes sense to say that the Twilight Princess hype played a factor, but hype wasn't a widely accepted factor into voting until after the 2006 contest. nowadays, I'd maybe go as far as to say that hype is more important than release.

I dunno, retrospective analysis is tough since hindsight is 20/20 and you can attribute anything to make your argument stronger.

---

#6 Good Pick - Sub-Zero > Master Chief (2006)
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/2530-time-division-round-1-master-chief-vs-sub-zero

I'll try not to retread old ground since transience already talked about this one, but I was legitimately stunned at how few people picked Sub-Zero, especially considering Master Chief and Halo's history. I checked the Guru, and only 8 people had Sub-Zero. I checked the Oracle, and only 5 people had him there. This is still among the biggest round 1 upsets ever in terms of prediction percentage, if not still the biggest, as barely 20% picked Sub-Zero. Why was everyone so confident in Master Chief? I mean, the casuals get suckered in by Halo every year, so that was no mystery, but I don't know that I've ever seen such confidence in Master Chief on Board 8 before or since. It baffled me, especially since I felt so confident in Sub-Zero.

There were many people arguing that Sub-Zero and Scorpion would basically be equal in strength because they're basically the same character, which tells me that those people don't pay attention to contests (because Ryu and Ken are far from equal) and they've never played Mortal Kombat. Scorpion is only the face of the franchise because he's Ed Boon's favorite. The fanbase as a whole has always loved Sub-Zero more. There were people that argued that if Sub-Zero really was that popular, he'd have made a contest before now, but I mean, Vincent and Tifa didn't make a contest until 2005. The arguments against Sub-Zero just never made any sense to me, and I just could not understand the seemingly unwavering confidence in Master Chief.

When the match started, Sub-Zero held a narrow lead at the freeze, which was a really bad sign for Chief since he was the overwhelming bracket favorite and B8 will always back their brackets if the match is in doubt. Then Sub-Zero started piling it on, getting over 4000 votes ahead at the lead's peak. I seem to recall Lopen somewhere saying that Chief could swing it with his day vote (I definitely remember him claiming that Halo could swing 10,000 votes against Castlevania in the Series Contest...!), but alas, that never came to fruition. Chief could only manage to cut about 1,500 votes off by the time the match ended. Sub-Zero winning was also a point of pride for me because he was a representative for the Nomination Rally Tournament, which I had started in 2005 in an effort to get in new blood that could potentially be strong, so it validated the contest for me.

---

I legitimately thought Scorpion was more popular than Sub-Zero so I had no hope of getting that right. I guess there was this:

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/1788-who-is-your-favorite-original-mortal-kombat-character

I guess I should have hugged the stats a bit harder!

To be honest, all these years later, the concept of Sub-Zero being more popular than Scorpion still feels weird to me even though it is obviously true. Scorpion was definitely more popular in the group I played Mortal Kombat with back in the day and I guess that just always stuck with me. I never really played MK with a wider audience.
---

Im surprised that one is so low. you must have better picks than me!

---

Well, I have picks I'm more fond of, at any rate!

although I do believe my #1 is actually legitimately the best pick I've ever made

---

#6 Bad Pick - Liquid > Altair & Vivi (2010)
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/3745-chaos-division-round-1-altair-vs-liquid-snake

Other than Kefka, Liquid Snake has probably been the most perplexing character in contest history. In 2004, he goes wire to wire with Frog and winds up looking nearly as strong as Solid Snake. In the Villains Contest, he struggles against Lavos and gets tripled by Sephiroth (we used to believe FF/MGS SFF was a thing, so that was explained away). In 2007, Liquid edged out Alucard by the slimmest margin ever (3 votes) in round 1 before finishing dead last in round 2 against Alucard, Master Chief, and Yuna. He did really well in 2008 against Luigi and Bowser. That leads us up to this contest, where Liquid needed the vote-ins just to get in, but I thought he got a favorable draw based on what we'd seen from him at times. Altair had done fine in 2007, but he looked to be on par with Duke Nukem, which didn't impress me. Vivi had also done fine, but he hadn't excelled in contests yet the way he has the last couple times. His most impressive win to date had been against Donkey Kong, which didn't mean much back then.

Liquid was actually the Guru favorite over Altair in round 1, but I decided to go a step further and take him over Vivi. Well, needless to say, Liquid never even got the chance as he was roundly 60/40'd by Altair and hasn't been seen since. Seriously, he couldn't even make it into CBIX, which had 243 characters in it. It still makes no sense to me that Liquid lost that handily because it's not like Altair went on to do great things afterwards. He lost 55/45 to Vivi next round, meaning that if Liquid had gotten his shot, he would've only been projected to get 36% against him. Liquid finished in between friggin' Sackboy and Laharl in the X-Stats, for crying out loud, which put him at 99/128. Seriously, what the heck?

---

#6 Painful Pick - Zelda > Charizard (2013)
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/5251-character-battle-ix-division-9-round-2-zelda-vs-dk-vs

Here's the one time I didn't underrate Zelda! Although really, this was a complete lack of faith in Charizard more than anything else. People had high expectations for Charizard based on his 2010 Cinderella run, but his last couple matches against Bowser and Mario were clear overperformances based on a building bandwagon and the fact that HeartGold/SoulSilver literally came out on the day of the Bowser match. Charizard got less than 55% on Kratos in round 2, which isn't an elite performance. He got 60% on L-Block, which seemed good at the time, but Kefka got that in 2018, so yeah.

At any rate, I thought Charizard was ripe to get exposed in this contest. He was the overwhelming favorite to win in round 2, as nearly 87% of Gurus picked him. When the match started, Zelda jumped out to the lead and was able to build it up to around 300 or so. Charizard started to chip away in the second half of the match and managed to take the lead with about an hour to go. They went back and forth for that final hour, with Charizard holding on to win by a mere 15 votes. I do wonder if things would've played out differently if Donkey Kong hadn't been there. It's impossible to know which character he affected more by his presence. Maybe it would've swung the match Zelda's way, or maybe Charizard would've won by more with Lightning in the match because he would've stood out like a sore thumb in the match pic. Either way, it was tough knowing I was so close on exposing a Pokemon as a fraud, but my time would come...!

---

2013 is a bizarre contest for those Pokemon. it's like the 2013 equivalent of the 2006 contest with Smash Bros.

---

I think of 2006 as KH's peak showing, too. That was the best Sora and Riku have ever looked. Kairi and Axel did pretty well, too.

---

My best picks came in 2005 when I had Vincent winning his division over Auron/Squall/Magus/Knuckles. Also had Mega Man > Sonic in the semis. Would've won the contest if Crono hadn't choked against Mario.

MGS3 > MGS1 was another pick that stands out. I remember people on this board insisting that MGS1 would win that without a hitch.

---

Yeah, MGS3 > MGS1 turned out to be a great pick since we didn't expect the hierarchy to have flipped.

---

I thought the consensus on the Nintendo boost of '05 was because of the popularity of the DS.

---

plasmabeam posted...

My best picks came in 2005 when I had Vincent winning his division over Auron/Squall/Magus/Knuckles. Also had Mega Man > Sonic in the semis. Would've won the contest if Crono hadn't choked against Mario.

MGS3 > MGS1 was another pick that stands out. I remember people on this board insisting that MGS1 would win that without a hitch.

Go Jags

---

LinkMarioSamus posted...

I thought the consensus on the Nintendo boost of '05 was because of the popularity of the DS.

Crono CRUSHED Mario in 04, so naturally it seemed like he'd beat him again in 05. I think what happened was the site got over the "Crono got screwed!" attitude after he finally beat Mario.

I don't remember the DS being a big deal until Mario Kart came out in late 05, but I could be wrong.

---

Yeah, there's no "consensus" explanation for what happened there.

---

#5 Good Pick - Super Smash Bros. Melee winning Division 128 (2004)
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/1660-division-final-starcraft-vs-super-smash-bros-melee

The 2004 Games Contest was my first bracket, so I made a lot of bad choices, but this was definitely my best pick. Division 128 was the most wide open division in that contest, and there was no clear favorite. For some reason, this was the one time I was not tempted by the allure of Final Fantasy X! I was still relatively new to the site at this point (I didn't stick around after SC2K3 because I couldn't find the board after it ended, whoops!), so I didn't understand how dominant Square was considered to be. I had Mario 3 winning the whole thing, for instance! But I knew what a big deal Super Smash Bros. Melee was as a game with every important Nintendo character in it, so it seemed like a natural candidate to do well.

That ensemble cast might have been the difference between winning and losing, in fact! I still insist that the FFX/Melee picture, which featured a giant Tidus face against the entire Melee cast, is one of the most unfair pictures in contest history. That picture had so much potential, too! Anyway, in a match as close as this one ended up being, that could've flipped the result. Regardless, Melee advanced to face the contest darling, Starcraft, fresh off of an enormous upset of Wind Waker when we thought we were headed toward an all-Zelda Final Four (CARRIERS HAVE ARRIVED! WHAT NOW, LINK?). When the match started, Starcraft jumped out to the lead and looked to be on track to continue its Cinderella run, but once morning arrived, that infamous Smash day vote came to town and took over. Melee pushed the lead out to over 3,500 votes and then the most blatant cheating attempt in history occurred.

17:30 | Starcraft | 35757 | +0452 | 47.55% | SSBM | 39448 | +0553 | 52.45% | Lead of 3691 | (Up 101)

17:45 | Starcraft | 36719 | +0962 | 47.89% | SSBM | 39958 | +0510 | 52.11% | Lead of 3239 | (Down 452)

18:00 | Starcraft | 38156 | +1437 | 48.51% | SSBM | 40500 | +0542 | 51.49% | Lead of 2344 | (Down 895)

Yes, that's right, Starcraft chopped off nearly 900 votes in a 15 minute update and posted nearly 1000 more votes than it had 30 minutes before. Naturally, CJayC had no choice but to step in and remove a chunk of those votes, which ended whatever push it tried to make. Starcraft kept chipping away at the lead for the rest of the match, but its momentum was dead and Melee survived. Mass Nintendo > Mass Carriers, after all.

---

#5 Bad Pick - Sonic the Hedgehog - Sonic 2 > Mario World (2004)/Sonic > Samus (2004)/Sonic > Mega Man (2005) /Sonic > Smash Bros. (2006)
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/1638-division-16-round-2-sonic-the-hedgehog-2-vs-super-mario
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/1777-chaos-division-final-sonic-the-hedgehog-vs-samus-aran
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/2125-tournament-quarterfinal-sonic-the-hedgehog-vs-mega-man
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/2446-mushroom-division-semifinal-sonic-the-hedgehog-vs-super

If there is something I've overestimated as often as I've overestimated Tidus, it's Sonic, especially in the early days of the contest. By the time 2007 rolled around, I had mostly scaled that back (Sonic 2006 will make you do that). In each of my first four contests (not counting Villains, since I had Kuja beating Robotnik, whoops), I picked Sonic to go a round further than he should have. I don't know why I kept wanting to believe that Sonic was stronger than he was other than fanboyism. My sole rationale for picking Sonic 2 > Mario World in Games 2004 was, "Mario has 3 games in the contest and Sonic only has 1, so people won't mind losing one Mario game to keep Sonic in." Unfortunately, I didn't know contests don't work that way!

I decided to go with Sonic > Samus in 2004 despite how much better Samus looked in 2003 because of their initial match, where Samus won by a mere 34 votes. But by the time the match rolled around, I knew it wasn't going to be close because Samus had been destroying everything in her path and Sonic was actually trailing Ryu overnight before only posting 55% by the end. With the Series Contest, this was in the aftermath of the Brawl reveal, so Smash hype was at a fever pitch, so why did I pick Sonic? Well, my rationale is that "2 games isn't a series and so Smash will get penalized for that." I wasn't the only person who felt that way, for the record! This was also another time where Smash got an unfair pic advantage. This was treated as the sprite round, so Sonic got Sonic Advance sprites rather than the classic Genesis ones, while Smash Bros. got...Mario 3 sprite for Mario, LttP sprite for Link, and Super Metroid sprite for Samus. Seriously, that's ridiculous. I know it wouldn't have changed the end result, but that was stupid.

I almost included Sonic/Mega Man under painful picks, but I decided to group it under this one to give me more stuff to talk about overall. The other Sonic picks were flat out bad, and I was ridiculed for making all of them, including this Mega Man pick, which made it all the more frustrating when it ended up being so close. Sonic just couldn't get any closer than 250 votes, and Mega Man's lead only peaked at a little more than 1000 votes. Would I ever stop making bad Sonic picks, or would they finally pay off? Only time would tell.

---

#5 Painful Pick - Vincent > Zelda (2007)
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/2876-division-4-round-1-tails-the-boss-vincent-zelda

This isn't painful because of any contest result, but because of a stupid mistake I made. I finished on the final leaderboard of the 2007 Character Battle and in a position to get the 10th place prize, but I ended up getting disqualified because of something that happened in this match. At one point during the above match, I legitimately couldn't remember if I had voted yet, so I decided to just cast a vote to check. Unfortunately, I had forgotten I was logged in to an alt, and the vote went through. I remember freaking out at the time, not being sure if the vote had even counted, and I honestly wondered if I should've filed a ticket asking to have that vote removed since I didn't mean to do it. But I decided against it because it wasn't like the match was close, and what were the odds that I'd be in a position to lose prize money? I'd never finished on the final leaderboard before, after all!

Well, as it turned out, thanks to the L-Block chaos making Cloud > Link the "better" pick in terms of points, I actually did finish in prize position! When I saw I didn't get awarded 10th place even though my bracket was a prize bracket, I knew what had happened, but I decided to try to appeal to Allen anyway. Naturally, I was refused because these prize rules are pretty rigid and he couldn't make an exception, even in the case of an accident. That might have been my last chance to win prize money in an actual contest, from the looks of it! Now I did win prize money in that Top Ten Games mini-contest in 2005 where I literally finished 5th by just listing the top 10 in the 2004 Games X-Stats (that was how I got my Nintendo DS!), but it just isn't the same.

---

Technically it was a Zero Mission sprite for Samus but yeah.

---

it wasn't an amazing pick or anything but I always felt really good about Mega Man > Sonic in 2005.

---

LeonhartFour posted...

Yes, that's right, Starcraft chopped off nearly 900 votes in a 15 minute update and posted nearly 1000 more votes than it had 30 minutes before. Naturally, CJayC had no choice but to step in and remove a chunk of those votes, which ended whatever push it tried to make.

excuse me i heard that they advertised the match on south korea's starcraft tv channel

lmao i still remember that excuse

---

Did a Starcraft TV channel exist back then? Does a LoL channel exist now?
---

#4 Good Pick - Tifa > Mewtwo & Mega Man X (2018)
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/7328-division-7-round-2-tifa-vs-mewtwo
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/7347-division-7-semifinal-tifa-vs-mega-man-x

My oft-repeated phrase throughout the 2018 campaign was "MEWTWO IS A FRAUD!" But where did that even start? Well, prior to the start of the contest, I put up a poll asking people who they thought the strongest non-Noble Nine Square and Nintendo characters were. I don't even remember who won the Square one. I think it was pretty evenly split between Squall, Auron, and Vivi, maybe, which I expected. What I didn't expect was that Mewtwo won the Nintendo poll, over Ganondorf, Kirby, Bowser, Luigi, Pikachu, Charizard, Zelda, all of those! That result legitimately surprised me because I thought it was blatantly obvious that 2013 Mewtwo's run was a total fluke, like most of the Pokemon's that year. He beat Vincent, who had one of the worst pictures ever. A guy who thrives on looking cool suddenly looked like the guy who does your taxes. Then everything snowballed after that with rallies and bandwagons, and none of it was legit.

I was exceptionally pleased to see Mewtwo was poised to square off with Tifa in round two because I thought she had a legitimate argument to be the strongest non-Noble Nine Square character (and I was proven correct about that and then some...!). Even as the rest of Square seemed to be dropping off over the years, Tifa held firm for, well, two very firm reasons. But I was also pleased to see that Tifa was also lined up to face Mega Man X after that, which was another character I thought was overrated. I'd heard people tout him as being on par with Mega Man Classic, which I've never believed (because Mega Man Classic doesn't only get 65% on Captain John Price and only 60% on Red). That ended the argument for me. I didn't trust his 2008 run where he was saddled with Mario and had repeated opportunities to look better than he was because Mario was always saddled with another Nintendo character.

Anyway, Tifa/Mewtwo turned out to be a laugher, quite literally. She was up to 57% at the freeze during Nintendo's best time, and I laughed with great delight in only having to wait 5 minutes to be proven right! Mega Man X proved to be a much tougher fight. After being tied at the freeze, X jumped ahead and built a 400+ vote lead. However, Tifa took advantage of the Euro-vote, where Mega Man always sucks, to take the lead back. They went back and forth with both sides openly rallying until someone had the brilliant idea of, yes, you guessed it, rallying for Tifa on hentai sites, which made a lot of people upset, for whatever the reason. There were users decrying the result as illegitimate and ruining the contest. Some people say X would've won without it, but they were both rallying furiously, so who knows! They're close enough that you could consider them essentially equal and a rematch could've gone either way.

Unfortunately, for all my faith in Tifa, I actually took Luigi to beat her the next round. My reasoning was that I firmly believed that the winner of this division had a legit shot at beating Sephiroth, and I didn't think Tifa would be able to overturn the hierarchy. Well, I turned out to be half right, in any case!

---

#4 Bad Pick - Final Fantasy X > Chrono Trigger (2015)
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/6147-best-game-ever-day-25-round-3-chrono-trigger-vs-final

Now rest assured that I was far from alone in believing Chrono Trigger would fall early in this contest, whether it was to Final Fantasy X or Super Smash Bros. Melee the round after that. Final Fantasy X was actually the Guru favorite this round, and Melee was the Guru favorite the next. There was a lot of reason to be skeptical of Chrono Trigger coming into 2015. The characters had been slowly waning in popularity over the years. Magus literally lost to a bag of sand in 2008. Crono had suffered a few early round exits, against Vincent in 2007, against Missingno in 2010, and against Pikachu in 2013. The game itself had struggled in 2009 compared to 2004, losing to Super Mario 64 twice, including once with Yoshi's Island in the poll.

Well, something happened to Chrono Trigger in the interim because it came out with a vengeance in the first couple of rounds, while Final Fantasy X underwhelmed against Half-Life in round 1 and could barely manage 55% on Mega Man X in round 2. I came into this match expecting the worst, and it still somehow exceeded my expectations. Chrono Trigger was doubling Final Fantasy X at the freeze, and then it jumped up to over 68% on the second update! This was basically that moment in SC2K3 when Cloud doubled Sonic and you realized, "Holy crap, he could actually beat Link." People had been talking about it, but you didn't really believe it until that moment. That was what this was. That was when people started thinking that Chrono Trigger could actually be more popular than Ocarina of Time.

Unfortunately, we know the rest of the story and it never got the chance to prove itself because, once again, Melee fans are the worst because they have the biggest inferiority complex of any gaming fanbase.

---

#4 Painful Pick - Pokemon R/B/Y to the finals (2015)
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/6165-best-game-ever-day-34-division-iii-final-pokemon-red-blue-vs
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/6180-best-game-ever-bonus-pokemon-red-blue-vs-super-mario-64

On the other end of the spectrum was this. I had been repeatedly burned by choosing not to believe in PokeFEAR over the last few contests. In a division loaded with Mario games, where I would have been tempted to pick any and all of them to beat Pokemon R/B/Y (trust me, picking Mario 3 to lose in round two really hurt), I determined that I was going to commit to Pokemon to the finals and stick with it, no matter how tempted I was to switch. There were people like transience who chose to believe in Chrono Trigger, and I chose to believe in R/B/Y.

Unfortunately, Undertale ruined what could have been a legendary division as Pokemon tried to run the Mario gauntlet. I know bonus polls aren't necessarily reliable as a measurement of contest strength, but the fact that R/B/Y took Mario 64 to the woodshed in that bonus poll only served as a frustrating reminder that I may have actually been right if it hadn't been for all the chaos. Rallies are the worst, man.

---

One of my explict goals for 2018 was not to underestimate Tifa. She always does better than I think she will and told myself I would not get caught off guard again. I still had her losing to Sephiroth. She was never going to lose to Mewtwo but surely taking her past MMX and Luigi was crazy enough? It wasn't.

In 2015, I took Mario 64 over RBY and then over SSBM the round after. Undertale made those mistakes never happen. Rallies are the "best".
---

No character has weakened from their peak more than Sephiroth, right?

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/3291-division-8-round-2-sephiroth-tifa-kratos-jill

I'm sure there's some random western character that went from High Midcarder to Turbofodder or whatever, but yikes.

---

Sephiroth went from 60% on Mario in 2003 to 40% on Mario in 2018. That's a precipitous drop, even when you account for Mario gaining in strength in that time as well.

Vincent's dropped a good bit from his peak, too, but nothing like Seph.

I guess you could make an argument for 2007 Master Chief to now, but he's always been all over the place. I suppose there's Shadow the Hedgehog, too, if you count the Mario result as legit.

---

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/1353-north-division-semifinal-link-vs-magus
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/3272-division-8-round-1-shepard-magus-sandbag-sonic
---

I pushed FFX>CT pretty hard in 2015 and I only regret the outcome, not the logic behind it. CT had been on a downward trend for a decade straight and its extreme resurgence in popularity was completely unprecedented. No new release, no hype behind anything, it just hulked up and came out swinging at a level of strength far beyond anything it had ever shown.

---

Team Rocket Elite posted...

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/1353-north-division-semifinal-link-vs-magus
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/3272-division-8-round-1-shepard-magus-sandbag-sonic

I mean, that Link result was a fluke.

That one result screwed up so many of our perceptions for a few years! It led me to make a lot of bad picks!

and eventually one very good one

---

KamikazePotato posted...

CT had been on a downward trend for a decade straight and its extreme resurgence in popularity was completely unprecedented.

It wasn't completely unprecedented. The CT crew's poor 2013 draws made people forget how much better they looked in that contest than in the 2007-2010 stretch. Also, outside of contests (so take this with a grain of salt), CT took the top spot in this sitewide, albeit user-run, project determining GameFAQs' top 100 games: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/top10?search=top+100

Of course, there was nothing there to make CT look like the world-beater we got, but I would argue it was the smart pick over at least FFX in 2015.

---

MetalmindStats posted...

The CT crew's poor 2013 draws made people forget how much better they looked in that contest than in the 2007-2010 stretch.

But did they really? They all faced utter crap in round 1. Even Magus couldn't blow a match to Otacon and Jade Curtiss, and it was arguable as to whether Crono would've beaten Pikachu even with a neutral third opponent.

---

MetalmindStats posted...

It wasn't completely unprecedented. The CT crew's poor 2013 draws made people forget how much better they looked in that contest than in the 2007-2010 stretch. Also, outside of contests (so take this with a grain of salt), CT took the top spot in this sitewide, albeit user-run, project determining GameFAQs' top 100 games: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/top10?search=top+100

Of course, there was nothing there to make CT look like the world-beater we got, but I would argue it was the smart pick over at least FFX in 2015.

I went with Chrono Trigger to the final four in 2015 because I looked at Chrono Trigger's bad draws, as well as Chrono Trigger placing #1 in the top 100, and figured there was great potential that lower vote totals would mean a stronger Chrono Trigger than we ever saw. It also helps that I gave Pokemon a ton of credit as well, specifically Pikachu which Crono was behind. I think if Crono hadn't had Magus there and beat the rat, more people here would have seen a resurgence coming.

Also, I knew Chrono Trigger was going to have an advantage if we got user submitted match pictures. And that was something I of all people could bank on.

---

LeonhartFour posted...

But did they really?

I would say so, yes. Crono/Pikachu 1-on-1 would have pretty much been dead even in 2013, the year of peak Pokefear, unless you somehow think Magus voters would have split for both characters near-evenly even though only one of them is from the same game. Also, Crono easily beat Mega Man X in that bonus poll alongside Mario, even though X showed himself capable of resisting SFF from Mario back in 2008.

Frog fared just a little worse against Cloud in 2013 than Bowser in 2010; yes, 2013 was by far Cloud's worst contest ever, but the only scenario in which that's a poor showing for Frog is if 2013 Cloud was somehow outright weaker than 2010 Bowser. Meanwhile, Magus had a draw that didn't lend itself to such comparisons. What I can say, however, is that he cleanly 60-40'd Otacon in what was easily the best contest for every MGS character, even though there was some hype that Otacon would score an upset at the time.

---

Team Rocket Elite posted...

Did a Starcraft TV channel exist back then? Does a LoL channel exist now?

it was 2004 our fact-checking abilities were not as robust back then

I just remember it being given as the explanation by some people right as it happened (as in minutes after while we were all freaking out at the cut)

---

it always seemed pretty clear to me that losing a chunk of our casual audience let CT bulk up.

---

I mean, I've already said that I thought X was a bit fraudulent, so Crono beating him doesn't matter. People have got to stop this "Mega Man X resists Nintendo SFF" stuff. He just doesn't get affected by it. He's not Mega Man Classic, whose entire library was Nintendo until a decade ago, and there's precious little evidence Mega Man gets hit hard by Nintendo to begin with.

Magus beating Otacon during a good MGS year doesn't prove anything either. It just means Otacon went from being bad fodder to good fodder. We have nothing else to measure him by.

And Cloud was weak enough to lose to Squirtle with no excuses like Crono had. He was routinely underperforming by a lot every round.

Also, I don't think Crono has really changed all that much after, say, 2006. He was always in the range to lose to a top tier near elite. 2018 showed that Pikachu would've been good enough to potentially beat Crono 1-on-1 then, too.

---

Tifa was without a doubt the highlight of the 2018 from me and the more I think about it probably my proudest moment of predictions. To be fair, making good calls about characters getting further than expected feels a lot better when they're among your favorite characters.

I took Tifa to win the division and was honeslty a bit frustrated that she had to run into Samus again again. I wish I would've thought a bit more about taking her precontest, but not a single person seemed to have thought of this idea, and I really wanted Seph to prove that he wasn't as weak as a lot of vocal people claimed he would be, so I picked Seph to win that in my bracket... but not in the oracle match! I just thought that given how we've gone away from liking the cool and badass kind of guys quite a bit but never liked cool female characters less, Tifa vs. Seph would not be the SFF beatdown it usually was and given what we knew, it should be close... and I couldn't imagine Tifa losing a close match to Sephiroth. Being the only one to predict a 1v1 match correctly is rare enough in itself, but in a late oracle match where we had recent data on the two. Yeah, that felt so good... and made it even more annoying that the losers bracket called for rematches so she would face Samus yet again when there might have been some bandwagon power ready in her.

Ald yeah, the people complaining about the X result were super hypocritical, since he was rallied a lot as well, screw where the votes came from.

Edit: Cloud actually going ahead to beat Zelda and Mario was also a great highlight of that contest. The rematch people had wanted to see since 02, then stopped caring about because Mario would probably win it without a game release and then it happens and Cloud takes it claiming the #2 he had not been thought to have for so long. Finally a good contest to like FFVII in.

---

IIRC X won registered voters by all of 2 votes.

---

Yeah, that's within the uncertainties of everything, so proves Leon's point that a rematch could go either way.

---

Yeah, Cloud beating Mario was one of the highlights of the contest for me. Revenge 16 years in the making.

---

oh right I forgot about this but one of my bad picks was having Solid Snake make it to the grand finals that year

I thought the reveal of him being back in Smash would be enough to catapult him to second place and then he lost to Zelda right off the bat 'whoops'

---

Makes me wonder how he would have done without Ultimate. Metal Gear as a franchise was not exactly at its peak. I mean, it wouldn't have changed the outcome of any of his matches that contest, but I could see him looking a little bit weaker.

---

#3 Good Pick - Ryu to Round 4 (2007)
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/2870-division-2-round-1-bowser-mewtwo-ryu-toad
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/2898-division-2-round-2-auron-shadow-ryu-bowser
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/2912-division-2-final-cloud-marcus-auron-ryu

I won't go so far as to say I invented the term LFF (because I honestly don't remember who did), but I was definitely one of the earliest proponents of the concept. As such, my bracket reflected that, and it's probably part of the reason I was able to finish on the final leaderboard despite some bad picks elsewhere. Now I had been burned taking Ryu over Bowser in 2005, but I believed that version of Bowser was artificially inflated by his Villains Contest run, which led to him (and Ganondorf) having unusually high prediction percentages in all their matches (and we love voting brackets). Just to give you an idea, 86% had Ganondorf beating Yuna, 88% had Bowser beating Chun-Li, 67% had Ganondorf beating Auron, 64% had Bowser beating Ryu, Samus dropped from 85% against Frog to just under 50% against Ganondorf, and Bowser had 38% of the entire site taking him to win a division we all thought was loaded and wide open pre-contest. Bowser didn't look quite that fearsome in 2006, only managing 55% on Leon Kennedy before netting just 42% on Crono the round after.

So my belief in Bowser's inflated value coupled with an ideal first round matchup, where it was Ryu against three Nintendo characters, convinced me to take him to win round 1 outright, which he easily did. Then I thought the momentum from that win, as well as introducing someone more popular than both of them in Auron, would allow Ryu to scrape by Bowser again. People blamed that loss on some sort of weird Bowser/Shadow the Hedgehog LFF, but I don't buy that. Bowser just wasn't as good this year (or the year after, for that matter). Then I thought Ryu would be a cinch in round 3 when you threw Cloud into the mix to sap Auron's strength. It turned out to be closer than I anticipated, but still, he pulled it off! Despite seemingly having this wide open path, only 12 Gurus had Ryu reaching round 4 in 2007. My bad pick from 2005 had been avenged, and it was really fun to see a character I like a lot finally make a deep run in the contest.

---

I'm with you ctes, picking Tifa to win that division felt great especially with 4 different characters having support (Luigi/MMX/Tifa/M2). Obviously 2018 had a lot of good moments for me though (and some REALLY awful ones that cost me winning the guru + placing higher) so idk if I could pick a singular match from that year that was my "best" pick. 2018 was the only time I placed so high in a contest and it was off the back of picking so many debatable matches correctly in rounds 3 and 4. Typing that out got me curious so I looked at the top 20 brackets from the guru contest and I was the only person who correctly picked 7 of the 8 division winners. It was a magical run, I think at one point I was 1st on the GFAQs leaderboard, so yeah I couldn't pick one match, it just makes me happy just thinking about all of it. I don't think that'll ever happen again.

Also I've been lurking and reading all the writeups, it's neat looking back at all the matches that I was there for but it also makes me wish I was there for the matches that I wasn't.

---

Ah yes, Ryu knocking two of my favorite characters out in debatable matches.

The supposed Bowser/Shadow LFF does sound weird, but when you look at the round 1 match, it seems like something Bowser would win without Toad and Mewtwo there, so I understand where people are coming from. There's probably not all that much LFF between Bowser and Mewtwo as one might have thought,

---

That's probably also my #3 good pick were I to make a list like this.

---

#3 Bad Pick - Final Fantasy XII to Round 4 (2010)
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/4155-southwest-division-round-2-portal-vs-final-fantasy-xii

On the other end of the spectrum is this pick! It wasn't that I necessarily believed Final Fantasy XII was popular. It had gotten crushed by Twilight Princess in the 2006 GOTY, but I mean, just about anything would have that year. Then it got saddled with TP again in 2009 and narrowly lost out to Half-Life in round 1. The issue was more that I didn't trust its competition. This was the time in our history where western games and PC games were starting to make inroads here, but it didn't feel like they had totally arrived yet. FFXII's two biggest competitors in its half of the division were western games: Portal and Mass Effect. I honestly didn't feel great about it, but I wouldn't have felt great about whatever I had taken there.

But it became pretty clear just after round 1 that I was potentially in trouble. Portal had put up 70%+ on Gears of War 2, while Final Fantasy XII had struggled to put up 55% on Crisis Core. My only hope was that the Final Fantasy VII name was worth that much, no matter what you attached it to, but that was flimsy and I knew it. Well, it didn't take long for Portal to expose FFXII for the fraud it was, putting up nearly 65% at the freeze. FFXII slowly whittled away at the percentage throughout the match to make it look slightly less embarrassing, but we had never seen Final Fantasy beat down by a western PC game like this before. We were certainly entering in to a new era of these contests.

---

#3 Painful Pick - Squall > Vincent (2005)
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/2119-devil-division-final-vincent-valentine-vs-squall-leonhart

Man, this one hurt so much because I was still on such a high after being proven right about Squall > Magus! I thought Squall was in good position to finally win a division and make the fourth round for the first time. Despite only getting 53-54% on Knuckles in round 2, I felt good about his chances because I figured Knux was getting some bandwagon effect from his huge upset over Magus. Plus, Vincent had only gotten 54% on Dante, which didn't make me think he was going to run away with this match.

Well, for the first several hours, the match was neck and neck. Vincent jumped out to an early lead, but Squall overtook him with the night vote. However, once morning hit, Vincent caught back up and basically just slowly held Squall at bay for the remainder of the day. It was rough seeing Squall so close to victory and yet unable to close the gap. It was a slow death. Regardless, I had been proven right about Squall's near elite strength despite so many others doubting him. Can we bring these days of the contest back please?

---