Board 8 > Tsunami's Post-Contest Analysis

(+) Yeah! (+)

Again, bump.
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Match 103: 2B vs. Bowser

2B 12620
Bowser 17562

I stated back in Round 1 that Bowser was in a very similar position this year to the one he was in in 2010--a 4-seed, in the division with the weakest 1-seed. The difference was that at least then, said 1-seed was a proven midcarder, and merely had the title of "weakest 1-seed" because the Noble Nine were still in the main bracket and the Heart Division was the only one that lacked one. Of course, while Bowser did knock off the 1-seed then, he had the poor timing to run into Charizard on the release date for a main-series Pokmon game.

https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/board8/images/5/56/Cb8-116.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20100318230229

It's easy to forget that that was only a division final and not an Elite Eight match, until you remember that the Noble Nine were still in the main bracket.

This? Was not a worthy use of Bowser's time. When you're a 1-seed and the 12-seed gets a better percentage against the 4-seed than you do...yeah. 2B did well to get a bracket placement that allowed her to reach the third round, but Ness barely qualifies as a midcarder. 2B is not a threat to make a deep run, and it wouldn't surprise me if we didn't see much more of her at all. However, she did show some strength here, and this would actually have an impact on things to come.

Match 104: Phoenix Wright vs. Kirby

Phoenix 9566
Kirby 20621

And that "impact on things to come"? Right here. While Bowser was merely cruising to an Ulti-style blowout against 2B, a character with no track record (and thus, not expected to be worth much), Kirby was cruising to an actual blowout against Phoenix, who was generally believed to have finally risen to midcarder status after his shocking upset of Vincent Valentine in 2013 (admittedly only for second place in a match that had been decided almost 24 hours before it began, and remember that the matches were only twelve hours long). And Phoenix had put up what seemed to be a decent win in Round 2, albeit only with the help of the registered user bonus. Then again, Ike lost to a horse in 2013. A horse from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, mind you, but still an actual horse.

Only here's the thing: Phoenix struggling with Ike ABSOLUTELY SHITS ALL OVER the idea that Mewtwo was a FRAUD. Phoenix got a better percentage on 2013 rallybait Mewtwo than Ike got on GLaDOS in the Epona match, the same GLaDOS that FRAUDtwo annihilated in Round 1. If you really think Mewtwo is a FRAUD, then GLaDOS is the Turd of the Contest, because that is truly ridiculous. Check this inequality.

Phoenix's percentage against Mewtwo in 2013 > GLaDOS's percentage against Mewtwo in 2018 > Ike's percentage against GLaDOS in 2013.

Now remember that 2013 Mewtwo is a rally-fueled monster and 2018 Mewtwo isn't. There's no combination of Phoenix dropping and Ike boosting that doesn't still make that embarrassing for GLaDOS. Of course, as I suggested in an earlier write-up, Phoenix's win over Vincent is kind of an illusion, precisely because Mewtwo was being rallied as a potential insurance policy if Link failed to stop Draven. Board 8 loves Phoenix. Always has. And they're not alone. Phoenix Wright fans are a loyal bunch; I feel like the rally probably hurt Vincent a lot more than it hurt Phoenix.
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Oh, but I seem to be getting off track. Sort of. Point is, Phoenix wasn't as strong as he seemed to be. Also, this is a pseudo-SFF match. Kirby gets the majority of his strength from Smash, of course, but he's still one of Nintendo's bigger stars to be primarily associated with their portables rather than their consoles, trailing only Pokmon. Different genres, too...if you're being generous, you could say that Kirby is the biggest platforming star on the Game Boy/DS. Yes, bigger stars have had platformers on those systems, but most of the better Mario games available for a portable system are merely ports of games that started on a console. (6 Golden Coins is pretty good, and I guess 3D Land isn't bad.)

But because Kirby was absolutely wrecking Phoenix here, in fact marginally improving on the number that Bowser put up on a weaker Phoenix in 2008 (in Round 1; we won't even count Round 2 because Bowser was being SFFed by Luigi), suddenly everyone was declaring Kirby the favorite in Round 4. Like, seriously. Bowser is a slight favorite over Kirby in the Guru, based on pre-contest expectations, but in the Oracle, based on what we've seen so far, Kirby is the overwhelming pick.

Now let's continue laughing at a psychopathic AI.
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GLaDOS probably dropped because of Valve being dumb.
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Yeah same with Snake. If the company does bad the characters do bad too.
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Or maybe Glados doesnt have much staying power, and Snake just happened to get unlucky by running into the Zelda bandwagon.
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True, but it's still hilarious.
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Up.
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Oh, wow, someone else bumped it.

Match 105: Squall Leonhart vs. Zelda

Squall 11385
Zelda 19656

Well. This is certainly a thing that happened. And it was terrifying. Squall has been in every contest, and he's consistently been one of the top midcarders, though it took until CBII for this to really be noticed due to some horrendous seeding in 2002 that saw Squall fed to a Noble Niner in Round 1, and a Noble Niner that was actually seeded properly (which not all of them were).

How bad? More than once this contest, Ulti pointed out that 15-2 upsets had been all but unheard of until this contest. Now imagine (2)Crash Bandicoot vs (15)Squall Leonhart. That is a match that could have happened in 2002. It didn't; Crash was given an opponent who actually belonged on the 15-seed line (if we're being generous) and Squall was fed to Snake. But it could have.

Now, Zelda hasn't been there for every contest, because for some reason it took until CBII for any Nintendo franchise to have multiple representatives in the contest unless you consider Mario and Donkey Kong to technically be the same franchise due to their shared origins. But she's been in every contest since then, and it's usually taken a Noble Niner to defeat her (though she did come in second in a fourway to Vincent in a "clean" match, one round before Link showed up and absolutely annihilated her). All things considered, this result might've been far more expected if not for a handful of votes.

Stop and think about it for a moment.

Yeah, that's right. Zelda lost to Charizard by all of 15 votes in 2013. And it was widely expected that Charizard would be able to take advantage of Zero's demonstrated ability to not get SFFed into oblivion by Mega Man (see: Weighted Companion Cube, 2008) to win Division 9. Charizard was considered a disappointment in part for failing to do this, by the only slightly less narrow margin of 23 votes, but also for nearly getting "upset" the round before by Zelda. Now, remember also that Pokmon had a representative in almost every match near the end of that contest. Divisions 2, 5, 6, and 8 had all been won by Pokmon entrants, which meant all three Contest Semifinals would also contain one. There was serious Pokfatigue. Is it unreasonable to think that, had Zelda managed to muster up those 16 extra votes needed to beat Charizard, she could've done what he couldn't and beaten Mega Man? And then of course she easily outpaces Red in the contest semis to get to the 4th place match and, just as Mega did, has no trouble handling the LFF-afflicted Mewtwo and Pikachu to win that match.

But back to the match at hand. Nintendo had clearly boosted, and Zelda especially seemed strong, so most Oracles, at least, saw this coming, selecting Zelda at a bit over a 5 to 1 ratio. (Gurus, not so much. 93-65 in favor of Squall.) But the magnitude? Not even close. Zelda won with 63.32%, 3.31% above the highest-scoring Oracle prediction...which was itself 2.75% above the #2 Oracle prediction. This was just a gobsmacking.

And of course, everyone was quick to dump on Squall, because taking this at face value would mean Zelda was at Noble Nine level, and that just couldn't make sense. After all, it's called "Noble Nine level" for a reason, and that's because they're the only nine that can ever reach it naturally. L-Block and Draven got there with rally power, sure, but when a Noble Niner loses a legitimate match? Only happens because of the Noble Niner's decline. Not because the other character has strengthened to their level. That just can't happen.
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And yes, it took a conscious effort to write "couldn't" and "can't" rather than "didn't" and "shouldn't". Or "won't". Because that's the way most of the old guard thinks. The Noble Nine, and their peak games (okay mostly just OoT, CT, FFVII, and to a lesser extent ALttP/SMW/SMB3), are put on a pedestal. They've finally accepted that they're not all going to stay invincible forever, but the idea that something else could be as strong as they once were...

...well, it wasn't always that way. CBII was, in many ways, a very weird contest, because a bunch of side characters from games whose main characters were in CBI debuted and people expected these side characters to be stronger than their leads for some reason. Maybe because leads tend to be bland. People figured that if Crono could come as close as he did to Mario, then Magus should be able to outright win the contest--but on the other hand, Mario has no real personality at all so surely Luigi will be even stronger than Mario. As awful as CBIII was for all of the SFF matches, it was, one supposes, at least useful for derailing that kind of misguided thinking. But on the flip side, it might just have been what led to this kind of misguided thinking, that the Noble Nine have some sort of untouchable aura that no other character will ever be able to attain.

Well, okay, there's that, and there's also the fact that new characters tend to do poorly, and the inherent advantage of having existed for a long time means that anything that could be on that level would have shown that capability by now. That is an entirely more logical reason for thinking that no other character would ever be able to dominate non-fodder the way the Noble Nine do, or once did. Forgive me, I've been railing against the unwillingness to see members of the Noble Nine weakening for so long that I overlooked that the converse, that nothing else will ever rise up to that level, actually had a logical basis. That said, there was something overlooked, and if you scroll back up to the point where I mentioned the games that are treated with the same reverence as the Noble Nine, you'll probably figure out what it is.

No, that wasn't an accidental omission.

This contest, Smash Ultimate was certainly considered a factor as to why Nintendo--and certain non-Nintendo characters--had boosted, but far too often, Smash is overlooked. I suspect that this is because of one of the exact same things that I consider to be among the three reasons that Melee isn't looked at in the same light as those other games. Namely, Brawl. The threefold reason that Melee isn't given the reverence it deserves are the loss to Brawl in GotD, rallying to turn what was already an assured 55-45 win into a 60-40 win in BGE3, and rallying again to defeat Chrono Trigger in BGE3. That last one, I assume, brings this into grudge territory, because this board loves Chrono Trigger almost as much as it loves Phoenix Wright. (I promise, when I decide to go back and play Chrono Trigger, I'll make a playthrough topic. It's something I intend to do because the reasons that I vaguely remember hating it the first time I played it were things that I actually enjoyed when I encountered them in FFVI, so I'm fairly certain that I'd actually like the game if I tried it again.) But back to why Brawl is relevant. In 2007, a bunch of characters made their Character Battle debuts based on being announced for Brawl, and even more debuted in 2008 for getting into Brawl. And the newcomers were largely underwhelming in the contests, which led to everyone believing that Smash wasn't really as big a boost as it seemed. It is. They were just looking at things the wrong way.
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See, being new to Smash is only good for a small boost. But here's the secret. Each time you appear in a Smash game? The boost gets bigger. Remember, Metroid Prime wasn't even out when Character Battle I happened. Super Metroid is certainly an all-time classic, but being one of the Original Twelve (and the Original Eight, at that), surely gave her the added strength to be a Noble Niner right from the start. (Though maybe people put too much weight on the lack of a Metroid game since SM at the time of CBI; it's only a year older than Chrono Trigger and actually had a PAL release on its initial system to boot.) Kirby, of course, gets most of his strength from Smash even now. Same goes for Captain Falcon. And of course, Fox. He had a pretty decent contest this year even though he hasn't had a game anyone really cared about since 1997. (Star Fox Zero got panned for being too much of a retread of 64, but given how poorly received every game since then has been with the exception of the literal SF64 remake on the 3DS, why shouldn't they try to stick with what people liked?)

And it most certainly has trickled down to Melee's cast of newcomers, or at least, some of them. Conventional wisdom coming into this year was that no one really cares about Peach; she's just an apathy vote magnet. Which...okay that would actually be a pretty decent explanation for why she gave Alucard a better match than either of his next two opponents; this contest's format made "apathy vote magnet" a surprisingly strong thing to be. And of course, Mewtwo is still the second-most consistently strong Pokmon...actually let's face it, Mewtwo should probably be ahead of Charizard in the adjusted X-Stats, because Division 7 is in a horrendous place in the raw X-Stats. Guess which one made it into Smash first. Don't get me wrong, a lot of Smashers would be strong anyway. But Zelda has been there since Melee, and more importantly, there was a kind of big Legend of Zelda game out recently. You know, the series with her name in the title? She was, as usual, only a supporting character despite being the title character, but she still had a pretty decent presence, not to mention one of her best designs yet, which, again, was used for her appearance in Smash Ultimate.

Also, if that bit about the Smash Boost becoming stronger with each successive appearance is true? It really explains a lot of characters getting these massive boosts. And sure enough, they did exactly that. Cloud recovered from his signs of weakness in 2013, and Bowser hasn't looked this good since he gave Snake a scare in 2005.

You figured it out yet?

That's right. This was the first Character Battle since for WiiU/3DS came out. And since they made a point of bringing back everyone from Melee, Brawl, and WiiU/3DS (the original roster has been present in every game anyway), even ill-advised decisions like Pichu, it's a 100% guarantee that any character in Wii U/3DS had their Smash counter incremented by 2 since the most recent contest. So, yeah, there were bound to be some absolutely ridiculous power boosts. Long live NintendoFAQs.
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TsunamiXXVIII posted...

with the exception of the literal SF64 remake on the 3DS

I thought that game got panned, too?

there was a kind of big Legend of Zelda game out recently. You know, the series with her name in the title? She was, as usual, only a supporting character despite being the title character, but she still had a pretty decent presence, not to mention one of her best designs yet, which, again, was used for her appearance in Smash Ultimate.

And that's just pretty much inaccurate, since Smash decided to use her Link Between Worlds design rather than her BOTW design.

Also, Smash 4 didn't go bringing everyone back. Smash Ultimate did.
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the Smash series is actually Fox's main canon and Starfox is a side story
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Red Shifter posted...

the Smash series is actually Fox's main canon and Starfox is a side story

So Fox and Falco are canonically Diddy Kong's sidekicks?
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UltimaterializerX posted...

These writeups are largely illegible drivel

Stones and glass houses, Mister GameFAQs becoming political is why our contest turnout is decreasing.
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Zelda missed 2004 somehow.
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See, now you're misinterpreting what I'm saying. I never said that it doesn't exist for the first one, nor did I say that later ones are what "made them noticed". It's really no different from any other case where characters get stronger and stronger the more games they have. That's why the majority of the Noble Nine are lead characters from long-running franchises. I suppose my only mistake was wording it as though this was specifically a characteristic of Smash.

It isn't. Any high-profile release will boost a character, and more releases means more boosts, in theory. The famed "Kingdom Hearts boost" of 2003 is the exact same thing. However, as I noted back in the Mewtwo-GLaDOS write-up, there's the risk of overdoing it and weakening your brand by churning out rehashes of the same game over and over again. Assassin's Creed is a good example of a franchise that fell into this trap, and it shows in the franchise's results in these contests. Altair's failure to make the bracket at all and Ezio's first-round blowout loss to Zelda marked the first time for either one of them that they missed the second round since their games were released, but not one of the leads from later games has even made a contest. That is Smash's true strength--even its weakest entries are still considered strong games.

Also, it speaks to another trend that I've spoken of--the nostalgia bias. For Pokmon, the general rule is that the two most recent generations get shit all over and anything older is looked upon fondly, though there is a minority that will never see anything from the GBA era or later as being good. For Final Fantasy, it's a little tougher to tell, in part because the release schedule has slowed down so much that even XII is over a decade old--hell, even XIII is getting pretty close to a decade old and that's the second most recent non-MMO. So you're right, I did word things poorly. It would be more accurate to say that each new Smash game increases the value of having been in previous ones. Again, if you doubt the veracity of this, just compare 2002 Pikachu, 2008 Pikachu, and 2018 Pikachu. The first one was a chump, the second a dangerous midcarder who slayed the threatening joke character, and the third a Noble Nine breaker. That's because being one of the Original 151 and the Original 12 didn't mean much when GSC and Melee were the most recent games in those series, but it meant something when DPP and Brawl were and it means a hell of a lot when it's USUM and Ultimate.

Edit: Also, I see your edit. I feel it doesn't really flow without some of the parts you took out, but I reworded that section to avoid directly referencing you and instead put "if you're reading these write-ups in order", which is true enough and I frequently refer back to my own earlier write-ups so the fact that I'm referring to something in your analysis rather than my own is irrelevant.

I also corrected my write-up because LMS was right; Zelda missed '04 after debuting in '03. I had honestly forgotten that she'd been in '03 until I looked it up, but I must've glossed over the absence of '04; I think it's because normally characters that debuted in '02 or '03 have their first text block on their history page after the '04 contest and another one after each contest from '05 on, but Zelda's first one is after '05.
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Im not so sure its successive Smashes mean a popularity boost when it could also be chalked up to only the characters that managed to get Smash representation are managing to stay stable.
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It's cool, I understand. I guess I should be glad that I refrained from mentioning you a second time, which I very nearly did because you were also that solitary Oracle that actually predicted Zelda breaking 60%. Congrats on being at least somewhat less blindsided than the rest of us.
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UltimaterializerX posted...

Logience posted...

Im not so sure its successive Smashes mean a popularity boost when it could also be chalked up to only the characters that managed to get Smash representation are managing to stay stable.

Smash is the fastest selling Nintendo game ever. Were at what, 13 million in two months? Thats absurd. Denying Smash boosts and comparing that series to Kingdom Hearts is just fucking dumb. King K Rool was just announced, nothing else, and the dude almost beat Commander Shepard. I dont care how far Mass Effect fell. That does not happen without Smash.

I'm not saying there's no boost factor at all, Ulti. Just trying to find the right words to describe how the Smash characters being in vogue keeps them from decaying like FF7 did in 2013.
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Up
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Nice analysis for Squall/Zelda. The funny thing is that before the contest started and I was making my bracket I picked Zelda to win without a 2nd thought. My reasoning was simple. BOTW+NintendoFaqs+Smashfaqs.

Yeah all together! But seriously though even though a lot of people had Zelda winning the division almost none had her beatin NN'ers. And certainly not reaching the final match!
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Yeah, I had Zelda winning the division, too, but going two and out because mine was one of the RallyFEAR brackets that had Sonic losing right away, so no break from the NN in Losers' 1 for Zelda.
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Match 106: Fox McCloud vs. Aerith Gainsborough

Fox 14684
Aerith 16362

In my mind, this is a good performance for Fox. Aerith's always been a fairly strong midcarder, and Fox, for the longest time, wasn't. Mostly he just preyed on weaker characters, often using SFF to do so. But there is the sincere possibility that FFVII has just weakened. Tifa managed to stay strong because of the rallies or whatever, and Cloud managed to stay strong because he's in Smash. But Sephiroth definitely looked weaker, too, and of course so did Vincent. Maybe Aerith lost a step as well, even if this is her deepest run ever? Sounds weird but I guess it's possible.

Match 107: Geralt vs. Bayonetta

Geralt 15799
Bayonetta 15251

Legitimately close match here. Registered voters actually favored Bayonetta, by a scant 9 votes. This match does feel more appropriate to the second round than the third; these characters are too "new" to be worth anything, or so it seems. In reality, maybe not so much. Geralt, of course, has been around for a long time. Even if you only count from his video game debut, that's probably longer than you realize, because it wasn't until The Witcher 3 that he really made a name for himself. And Bayonetta's coming up on a decade, too. The first game came out in October 2009; if she makes waves in GotD, it'll have to be with the second game. It still feels like she's a newcomer, though, because of how infrequent Contests have been; she made the vote-ins in CBVIII but was so new that she couldn't even make the main field, and then in CBIX she caught an incredibly weak first-round 3-pack and then ran into a Noble Niner in Round 2. That Round 1 match was so stupid; "pick the oldest character/game" is usually a good rule of thumb for fodder matches as long as they aren't too old (which usually means 8-bit era), so when the oldest character is the consensus last place finisher in a multiway, well, you'd expect that to be something ancient, not a character whose piss-weakness also comes from being too recent.
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The first Bayonetta came out in the US in 2010. Assuming the same rules as the previous GOTD, it should still be eligible. Or else, The Legend of Dragoon, Shenmue, and Chrono Cross should not have been in GOTD.
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Up
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Go
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Man it seems that you really like to take your time.
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A delayed analysis can be good, but a rushed analysis is forever bad.
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That, and I've just been kind of busy lately.
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I see what you mean.
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Match 108: Auron vs. Sub-Zero

Auron 17609
Sub-Zero 13440

This wasn't a terribly interesting match to look at--the percentage stayed within .3% of 57-43 for the final 21 hours and 15 minutes, which is only mildly interesting in that the final percentage was very close to the edge of that range in favor of the loser--but it is an interesting one to interpret. Was Auron one of the weakest division winners this year, or were fighting game characters on the whole doing better than usual? Or maybe both? Division 6 was certainly one of the softest divisions, with the best established track record going to a character already known to be on the decline (Vincent) and the number two and probable number three being said #1's first two opponents (in reverse order; and yes, as many embarrassing losses as Magus has had, he racked up enough of a resume early that he might still be one of the more accomplished characters in this absolutely silly division). I feel like the fighting game characters were "up", though. The actual wins weren't necessarily there, because of rough draws (Scorpion got Pikachu in R1, and avoided embarrassment but still got beat pretty bad, and Chun-Li drew Ganondorf in R2 and did a very good job in a loss.) But outside of Guile's horrible loss to Kirby, they looked good. Now, part of that is that they weren't bogged down by lesser representatives--Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat are the strongest fighting game franchises (not counting Smash) and they were the only ones with reps, and mostly their strongest reps at that. But it's still interesting to think about.

Match 109: Luigi vs. Miles "Tails" Prower

Luigi 22581
Tails 9840

It's a well-known fact that Mario-Sonic is one of the few inter-NN matches that we've never seen in any format. But how many times have members of the two franchises met?

2003 R1: Shadow defeats Wario with 64.90% of the vote
2003 R2: Mario defeats Shadow with 55.10% of the vote
2006 R3: Sonic defeats Luigi with 60.19% of the vote
2007 R1: Yoshi puts up 56.03% directly on Knuckles, who still advances over Rikku and Vaan
2007 R2: Yoshi puts up 58.21% directly on Knuckles; both finish ahead of KOS-MOS and behind Mega Man, so Yoshi advances and Knuckles is eliminated
2008 R1: Mario puts up 65.95% directly on Knuckles, who is eliminated behind Zelda but takes 3rd place over Fei Fong Wong
2013 R3: Sonic puts up 59.43% directly on Bowser, but both lose out to Mewtwo
2018 R3: Luigi defeats Tails with 69.65% of the vote

Definitely favors Team Mario; Team Sonic's only wins came when they had the clearly higher-tier representative. (I guess technically Wario's a separate franchise now, but unlike Donkey Kong, who technically also originated as part of Mario's franchise, he hasn't really established himself as a true independent.) Even in cases where the franchises' own pecking orders would seem to at least slightly favor Team Sonic (which is to say, Yoshi-Knuckles), Team Mario handily won.

But this is an SFF matchup, make no mistake. That's why there haven't really been any close matches in that series. Mario-Shadow is still a huge anomaly that may never truly be explained, but this was predictable. The blowout being as bad as it was, though? Maybe not so much. The Oracle consensus had this at roughly a 65-35 match, and only four Oracles out of 57 overshot the actual percentage.
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Take your time man.
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Okay, can't do it just yet, but should be soon.
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@UltimaterializerX I see what you mean. I also did my first PCA topic after all these years and in most matches I only wrote basic stuff anyways. So yeah it is hard. Still I find it funny that 3 people(me, Tsunami and LightingSstrikes)did their first PCA for this contest too!

That means that this contest was awesome since so many people wanted to write analysis! Right?
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Something like that. As I said before, I wanted to do analysis in the past.
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Oh yeah.
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Match 110: Tifa Lockhart vs. Mega Man X

Tifa 16269
X 16155

For the second time in four matches, the registered vote was separated by single digits, in favor of the loser of the overall match. That said, this was probably the most hyped pre-Legends match, and with good reason. Both of these characters had already shown potential Noble Nine breaker power--Tifa directly, when she finished second in the main bracket X-Stats in 2006 with a near-upset of Samus (even with the Noble Nine getting beaten outright by outsiders more frequently, this is still the only time they've failed to break 50.5% in a 1v1 win against an outsider) and Mega Man X a bit more indirectly, to the point that it probably wouldn't even be brought up if he weren't Mega Man X. Namely, that X's percentage against Link in 2010 compares favorably to the original's 2004 percentage. And as of this point, he'd yet to be threatened by anything that you wouldn't immediately say "this is not a spot where Mega Man Classic would have lost". 2008, he wins his R1 fourpack outright and then finishes second to Mario twice before losing out to the combined strength of Link and Mario. Yes, he also lost to Zack Fair in that match, but given how close Zack got to Mario it's clear that Black-Haired Cloud was the beneficiary of some massive STF in that match. Come 2010, it's Link directly who took X down. 2011, if you want to count that, it was Mario/Bowser who took out X/Zero. And then in 2013, it was peak strength Draven. And even in that contest, X doesn't look horrible--because there was never any chance of either of them taking down the rallied Draven, X's battle for second place with Ryu is probably fairly organic, and X won that with 57.21%. Ryu might not be quite the dependable barometer of near-elite strength that he used to be, but he's still a strong character and that's a quality win. Also, games may not equal characters, but when we were finally given a gimmick-free Games Contest, one that wasn't intentionally balanced over the eras, Mega Man Classic got shut out while X still got his debut game in--and it did pretty damn good, almost breaking 45% in a loss to the heavily favored Final Fantasy X.

But now for the match. This one was deadlocked at 320-320 at the freeze, though X would ride a big third update to a triple-digit lead by the half-hour mark (even though Tifa had already managed her first update win by then). His lead would eventually peak at 469 at the 4:05 mark. At the 7:00 mark, Tifa won her eighth consecutive update, the first time either one had even won 5 straight since X's 7 in a row from 0:20-0:55. Tifa took her first post-freeze lead at the 9:40 mark and X promptly stalled the next one, but that zero-change update was Tifa's only update non-win for a period of just over an hour, from 9:05 to 10:10, which for this match qualified as huge momentum. She reeled off a bunch more after X's update win there, but stalled out in the 110s for a bit before recovering to eventually push it out to 194 at the 12:15 mark. Then X fought back and cut 100 off that deficit in the next 1:40. 45 minutes later, he took off 30 votes in a single update to cut it to 43, only for Tifa to take back 25 the very next update. The next time he got within 50 was met by two straight double-digit wins for Tifa, and when he got it below 20 at the 18:20 mark he was again met with a 22-vote update win for Tifa. Finally, at the 19:15 mark he took an update by 21 to take an 8-vote lead, skipping right over whatever she might have in store for being pushed down to single-digits,and kept up the momentum to a 66-vote lead 45 minutes later, then fought off Tifa's return push to expand the lead by another 23 over the next hour.
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But Tifa was not done yet. From that peak of 89 at the 20:50 mark, she quickly picked up a double-digit update win to close out the hour, then fought through a wall of single-digit wins for both sides over the next 1:20 to leave X's lead at the 22:20 mark at 52. That was when she made her move, pulling three double-digit wins in the next four updates to pull it back to dead even, then adding another on the next update--only for X to win the following one by the exact same amount, pulling it back to dead even with just 1:10 left in the match, and taking the next one by double digits as well. Entering the final hour, X led by a mere 8 votes, and it only took one update for Tifa to turn her single-digit deficit into a double-digit lead. X would win the next two updates to reduce Tifa's lead to a single vote with 45 minutes left in the match, but Tifa won all nine of the remaining updates, many by double-digits, to win by 114--the first triple-digit lead by either side in over 10 hours. In some ways, it could be seen as an anticlimactic ending--this match barely even makes the Top 25 list for closest final margins, and only does so at all because we don't count battles for placement among non-advancing competitors in 3- and 4-ways.

During the final hours of this match, rallies were once again on everyone's minds. Some users, I don't remember who, decided to rally for Tifa on hentai sites, because why not? And since it ended up being such a close match, people blamed the rallies. Did they really make a difference? Maybe. There have always been rallies, though, and it's clear that there wasn't anything this contest on the scale of what Draven and Undertale did in 2013 and 2015. It livened up the contest a bit, and had people wondering what Zelda, Tifa, and Samus could do from here on out--but mostly Zelda and Samus, because Tifa's path was still largely set in stone. She beat Luigi long before hentai rallies were a thing, and she'd be facing Samus and then Sephiroth in the Legends bracket, two Noble Niners that she's already lost to multiple times. Her best chance at pulling some sort of crazy upset would be if Sephiroth managed to continue his historical dominance of Mario, but the consensus was that Mario would finally break through with a win against Seph. At any rate, while there had been some rallying involved, the unlikelihood of Tifa upsetting a Noble Niner this contest meant that the X Classic bandwagon would finally quiet.

It wouldn't last.
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Porn!
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Up
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Man I still remember the porn rallies. This will for ever be remembered in the contests I believe.
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Huh, guess the purge time is longer than I thought.

Edit: Oh wait that's right there was another post.
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Yeah man. I just want to see your analysis too. I mean how many analysis we had in this contest anyways?
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I guess up.
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