Board 8 > Tsunami's Post-Contest Analysis (should not need a second topic)

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Match 122: Mega Man vs. Pikachu

Mega Man 14396
Pikachu 14458

...Damnit, I honestly don't have time to do this justice right now. I've got to leave for work soon, and this one's going to be a long one. But it'll definitely be up at some time today, after work at latest.
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...Tag?

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Match 122: Mega Man vs. Pikachu

Mega Man 14396
Pikachu 14458

This was definitely one of the more interesting matches of the contest, because it was the first time that a Noble Niner had outright lost a 24-hour 1v1 match against a non-Noble Niner--though just like when they lost in fourways and threeways and 12-hour matches against weird glitch characters, there was plenty of room for the Noble Nine apologists to spin this one, chief among them the fact that Mega Man won the raw vote and only lost because of the registered user bonus, though technically there was also something about two matches going on at once (though since the other match in this particular case was Link vs. Ganondorf, I doubt it . The stats topics blamed this on the fact that this match was coming right out of the Thanksgiving break, that casuals might not have known to come back while the contest diehards--which is to say, us--were ready to come out supporting our horses, or rats as the case may be. And Board 8 has been fans of Pokmon for quite some time now. There's almost always a Pokmon ranking topic or a Save My Pokmon or something floating around this board, and they can last quite some time because there's over 800 of them already with that number only set to rise by the end of the year with Sword and Shield coming out. (And what a time, too--Pokmon has a strong nostalgia factor, such that each new generation seems to make the fanbase like earlier generations even more. So while they'd still be a dark horse to win it all--though barring rallies, the same could be said of almost any game not named "Breath of the Wild"--the fact that Gen VIII will already be out makes me think that the Gen V games could be stronger than expected in GotD next year). Mega Man, on the other hand...well, okay, the classic Mega Man games get some love here, too. I remember buying Mega Man 2 on Wii VC after it was voted Board 8's Game of the Year for my birth year of 1989. (I...never quite got the hang of it. Maybe I should give it another try, seeing as how I'm apparently into platformers now.) And the classic Mega Man series is, amazingly enough, the most "active" at the moment. But Mega Man is always going to suffer from mismanagement--both the fact that the early games never made it to the PAL regions and the fact that it's a series made by Capcom, which is not a good thing to be in this decade. Board 8's favorite series is made by Capcom and I still doubt many people on this board would defend the company itself. So this was an upset ripe to happen. My Oracle pick was initially far more bullish, but that was pure fanboyism/salt about Mega Man > Charizard being the match to officially eliminate me from the Guru in 2013 (though seeing as how I was banking on Samus and Mario splitting with each other enough for Charizard to get past them, I was probably dead as soon as Vivi upset Mario, and if not then, the very next match when Squall held off Missingno's upset bid to allow an easy path for Red to be the one in Mario's place.) I backed down on the prediction of Pikachu winning easily, but couldn't bring myself to pick against him. I'd like to say that I had some great insight, but honestly, I think I just got lucky here. Mega Man is, at least marginally, still stronger than Pikachu, and proved it later in this contest, but Pikachu caught the perfect circumstances for the upset and capitalized, and I got my best Oracle ever, just 0.01% off of perfect.
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And of course, there's the question of "is this the match that truly 'broke' the Noble Nine?" To which I say, no, it isn't. L-Block's run in 2007 and Vincent beating him to the punch with the win over Crono is cool, and 2013's format was just weirdness and shouldn't be taken too seriously. But again I should mention that Mega Man won the raw vote. It's hard for me to say that "certain votes count more than others and also there's another match going on at the same time" is less of a gimmick than "only 12 hours long instead of 24". So while I personally say that Missingno was the one to break it, I certainly don't think that if that doesn't count, this one should.

Not that it matters because it would be all of two days until a completely unambiguous Noble Nine break, and if the two polls in one day was still too much gimmick for you, that'd be fixed by contest's end as well.
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Match 123: Cloud Strife vs Alucard

Cloud 17772
Alucard 11654

This is a pretty good performance for Alucard, one that erased any doubt that he was legitimately stronger rather than merely being the beneficiary of a weak division. (Though make no mistake, he was the beneficiary of a weak division. Sora's inexplicable ability to always land a 1-seed, or a 2-seed when the 1-seeds were reserved for Noble Niners only in 2013, usually results in a wide-open division. It wouldn't surprise me at all if Allen acknowledged that fact when he put Sora as the 2-seed in Crono's division in 2013, since Crono had already shown himself to be the most upset-prone member of the Noble Nine.) I think this was also the match where we realized that the stats for the Second Chance brackets were messed up because they seemed to suggest that Alucard was actually the favorite there, which clearly wasn't the case. Cloud's prediction percentage in primary brackets was far lower; over twice as many people picked against him when his opponent wasn't known than when it was. And that makes sense in a way, because Division 3 was host to a number of theoretical threats. Hell, two of the characters in that division had beaten Cloud already, although both of these events should be taken in the context of "weird gimmicky contests". (Mount Gamemore was pretty awesome, though.) Add to that a character that is frequently thought of as a potential Noble Niner proxy, perhaps rightly so since most of the recent Metal Gear games have been prequels, and there was certainly reason to think that someone in that division could pull the upset. Yeah, about that...

Match 124: Crono vs Bowser

Crono 16150
Bowser 13276

Here, on the other hand, was a far more tangible upset threat. By now, bracketmakers have learned to stop trusting Crono; since the start of the Allen era, he'd lost to a non-Noble Niner in 3 out of 4 contests. As such, he was considered an underdog in primary brackets, being picked to beat the Division 4 winner by just 41.5% of them. This, however, is a sidenote to the most awesome prediction percentage ever, which is the Second Chance Bracket prediction percentage. It should be noted that since Second Chance Brackets were filled out during that Thanksgiving break, the first round of the Legends Bracket is analogous to a Round 1, in that the matchup is already set and so you have full knowledge of exactly whom you are picking to defeat whom. And with full knowledge that the matchup would be Crono vs. Bowser, bracketmakers favored...

No one. Or both, take your pick. In an event that would've been impossible in Round 1 of the primary bracket owing to the fact that the number of brackets filled out there was odd, the Second Chance brackets were a perfect 50-50 split, 2856 for Bowser and 2856 for Crono. Now if only the match itself were that close. After Bowser briefly led with the board vote, Crono established a lead by the freeze, broke 55% a little before the four hour mark, then fell back below 55% less than two hours later and managed to never reach it again while also never falling lower than 54.67%. Just a dull match where Bowser was always keeping it respectable but never threatening to win. Finding out the Second Chance prediction percentages afterwards was honestly the most interesting thing about the match.

Well, that and the fact that Crono was apparently "back". Coming on the heels of Pikachu > Mega Man--and the Second Chance bracketmakers favoring Pikachu when they were merely calling this match a true coin flip--Crono's long-assumed spot as the weakest Noble Niner seemed to be no more. But would we get confirmation, or would the electric rodent get in the way?
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Match 125: Solid Snake vs Zelda

Snake 14350
Zelda 14535

The registered and non-registered voters went different directions on this match, but the registered voter advantage for Snake was too small to overcome Zelda's unregistered support. Again, which one was which surprises me not at all; Snake is probably one of Board 8's favorite Noble Niners, because he was almost as big a surprise member as Crono at the start, he took a while to get his first win against a fellow member, and then once he got off the schneid he almost immediately started pulling off all sorts of crazy upsets against the upper echelon--first beating Sephiroth in the 2006 Battle Royale (our first experience with non-1v1s, so we were unprepared for what LFF could do), then beating Cloud twice in 2008 (the first time admittedly with Sephiroth also in the match, but the second time was relatively clean, only having a Crono as a weight, though you could certainly argue that Link hurts Cloud more than he hurts Snake because swords. And yes, I linked that first match solely because the same LFF allowed Sephiroth to get beaten by Kirby. I will never get tired of that) and beating Seph 1v1 in 2010. All of this was merely a prelude to 2013, when he--and his voice actor!--became the hero of Board 8, fighting valiantly against the Draven menace. And losing, but who cares about that. Point is, we love Snake here. A lot of the Noble Nine, the only ones who really hate seeing them lose are the statheads because the loss is an affront to their expectations. "Link Always Wins" and all that, though honestly we were much quicker to leap to Link's defense when he was in danger than...oh, right, Cloud's embarrassing 2013 loss came against a Gen I Pokmon, so of course Board 8 was on board with that.

Of course, Snake wasn't losing to some rallied newcomer. Zelda's only missed two contests, and one of them was CBI, which barely even counts because you look at all of the fighting game characters and you realize that the people creating the bracket seemed to be treating the "Character Battle" name literally. Maybe. Some of the characters in that bracket were just plain weird; I don't know that much about Space Channel 5 but I'm pretty sure that its protagonist's presence runs counter to that assumption. Whatever; I still consider characters who debuted in CBII to have "perfect" records if they haven't missed a contest since then, and no, this wouldn't affect the sanctity of the Noble Nine because no one that debuted there has come close to doing what they did. (It's also more convenient because Lightning's presence in CBVIII set precedence that for a character who debuted after CBI to be considered to have a perfect record, they'd need to make the bracket as soon as their game came out in Japan, and Kingdom Hearts was out in Japan in time for Sora to have theoretically been in every contest.) She's done well in all of them, too; 39.25% against Mega Man in her debut in 2003 (with the hated Wind Waker art, no less); 45.59% against this very same Snake in 2005; 44.73% against Samus in 2006...I'll skip the fourways because she ran into Link in Round 2 one year and Mario in Round 1 in the other. And then a loss to Samus again in 2010 and the close match against Charizard in 2013.

Charizard in 2013, barely, Vincent in 2007, and Mega Man X in 2008. That's it for non-Noble Niners she's lost to when not literally sharing a fourway with Link, and the last of them she was still sharing it with Mario. Those are all very high-tier opponents, or at least they were in the years she faced them (Vincent is definitely nowhere near the near-elite he was in the mid-2000s, though he's probably still a decent midcarder.) But there have been plenty of high midcarders who have gotten multiple shots at the Noble Nine and come up empty every time, so why should this be any different?
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Because of "hentai rallies"? ...No, probably not. That was just a fun meme on the board, explaining why female characters seemed to be overperforming all over the place, but I doubt they really made any difference in any match except for Tifa's win over Mega Man X. Because of Breath of the Wild? Far more likely. But there's something else that can't be ignored, and that's that the Metal Gear series is, sadly, seemingly dead. And I say "sadly" despite having never actually played one of them for myself. It's just not my genre, which saddens me because everything I've heard about them is that the story is amazing and I love games with strong stories. The movie critic Roger Ebert was once criticized for saying that video games weren't art, although he clarified what he meant and it wasn't nearly as bad as what it was made out to be. The Metal Gear Solid games, especially around the time of 4, were also criticized for largely being movies with a bit of gameplay tacked on, due to the large number of unskippable cutscenes. So, uh...why not actually make movies out of them? Give the superhero movies some competition for the summer blockbusters? This should be a no-brainer. But with the rift between Konami and Kojima, it seems unlikely that much of anything will ever get done, since the license for the series still belongs to the former. I honestly didn't even realize that there'd been another Metal Gear spinoff in 2018, nor that there was apparently a board game released here in 2019?

That said, even without Kojima's input, Konami could still easily release new Metal Gear Solid games and have them be actually good. Without spoiling any of the twists of MGS V, it's the end of the prequel series and the final scene is set in 1995, the year that the original Metal Gear took place. To me, that just screams "Metal Gear remake" for a hypothetical MGS6, especially since the fact that the Metal Gears got more and more complex with each passing game released means that the technology suddenly takes a massive step backwards between 1984 (MGSV, released in 2015) and 1995 (Metal Gear, released in 1987). Not to mention that pesky bit about the Soviet Union still existing when it didn't in the real 1995, though I think they officially stated that in the Metal Gear timeline, the Soviet Union legitimately doesn't fall during the 1990s (Metal Gear 2 was also released prior to the fall of the Soviet Union and is set in 1999). Updating the MSX2 games to modern hardware seems like it'd be a great idea. Someone get Konami on this.

But back to the match at hand: did Snake's series's status really play a part? It honestly might have. Snake lost for good the moment he ran into another Nintendo character, after beating on Square and Sega characters. Nintendo knows how to take care of their flagship franchises, and it shows with their consistently strong performances in these contests.
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TC, you better save your analyses from the previous thread.
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Zelda had only Melee pics in 2003.
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_Dog_ posted...

TC, you better save your analyses from the previous thread.

Yeah, I already checked to make sure they were all up there.
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Match 126: Sonic the Hedgehog vs. Auron

Sonic 15688
Auron 13194

Sonic was the only other Noble Niner besides Crono who could conclusively be proven to have been considered an underdog in the initial brackets (although doing the usual "retention rate" stats voodoo on Pikachu's percentage suggests that Mega Man might have been as well, as over 19.5% of brackets picked Pikachu > Mega Man while just barely above 12% had Pikachu winning the division and then losing to Mega Man in that match), but unlike the 50-50 split that the second chance gave on Crono-Bowser, Sonic was a heavy favorite in the second chance. That's not surprising, because Division 6 had a number of seemingly bigger threats than Auron, chief among them the legitimate best character in the game that had rallied its way to the BGE3 title in 2015 having a path of characters exactly the right strength to build a rally run on. I said it before and I'll say it again: too strong a first opponent will kill a rally before it starts; too weak a first opponent and there's nothing to build momentum off of. Undertale in 2015 hit the sweet spot more perfectly than any other, although Draven certainly acted like he was in that sweet spot. (It's easy to forget, given how large the comeback he needed to make, that Draven was legitimately the favorite against Jak and Chie.) This doesn't just extend to the rallies that made it all the way, either; Charizard in 2010 had a similar path and it carried him to a surprising division title. You could probably include SMRPG's run to the 2015 semifinals as well, although that was sort of a weird case in that we here on Board 8 were always wise to the fact that its biggest obstacle to making Round 4 was getting out of the first round; we just didn't expect it to make it two rounds deeper.

An interesting fact about this match is that if Rivalry Rumble is counted, Sonic now has a 2-1 record against two separate non-NNers, having avenged his second-place finish to Auron in Round 2 of 2008 first by knocking him out the next round and then by winning this match and avenging the eventual loss to Kirby in 2008 in both 2010 and 2011. Of course, Rivalry Rumble creates a lot of dicey situations because Cloud/Sephiroth was the only team of two Noble Niners, giving almost all of the Noble Nine a technical non-NN loss. Sonic's was to Bowser (with Mario), which becomes another one that he's since avenged (2013), giving him as many avenged as not avenged (L-Block in 2007, Mewtwo in 2013, Zelda this year.)
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Glad to see you back.

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...Wow. I get real gung-ho for a moment and then I get so lackadaisical that I lose my VN topic. Sorry about that. I'll finish this when I get back from my vacation.
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bump
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...I forgot about it again. Damnit. I swear I won't neglect this forever.
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You can do it!

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Back from SG Live
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You have some time until the new contest!

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Yeah, yeah, I know.
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Seriously.

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Match 127: Samus Aran vs. Tifa Lockheart

Samus 17343
Tifa 12085

Back in 2006, this matchup was the first semifinal of the Female Bracket, and in that match Tifa became the first outsider to break 49.5% against a member of the Noble Nine. This match wasn't expected to be that close, however, in spite of Tifa's newfound power, as Samus was thought to be able to counter it with her own "hentai factor". Tifa made an early push, but ran out of steam quickly and at times looked to be at risk of falling under 40% a few hours in, but rebounded to push up to 41.5% in the middle of the match. Eventually, an equilibrium was reached at 59%-41%, staying within 0.1% of this figure for the final 7.5 hours of the match.

Match 128: Mario vs. Sephiroth

Mario 17437
Sephiroth 11993

Mario was the clear favorite here, but we at Board 8 are a sentimental bunch, and when a match history is lopsided, we're always a bit hesitant to feel entirely comfortable picking against history. But we did it, naturally. It was just too obvious. This runs Mario's all-time record against Sephiroth to, depending on how you're counting, either 1-4 or 1-6. Or possibly only 1-2, if you're one of those annoying purists who only ever counts 1v1 results. I generally count the 3-way and 4-way results, but I find it easier when compiling all-time records to just ignore the 2006 Battle Royale, as it only runs up Link's scores, and to a lesser extent Cloud's, while dragging down the other four entrants' records. Mario managed to pick up 8 head-to-head losses in a two-day span. It's just not worth it.

A number of people objected to Sephiroth being the Noble Niner to be sent to the main bracket when he probably wasn't the weakest of them. The reasoning given, that Cloud and Sephiroth are the only two Noble Niners to come from the same game, was sound, but it still seems like a shitty thing to do to the guy who basically had a contest designed for his benefit alone so as to hasten the process of removing the strongest characters from the main bracket. I wonder what sort of gimmick the next bracket will have. The idea of the Legends Bracket was pretty cool, but the execution kind of sucked in that we never completely finished out the main bracket. Theoretically we could've just done another Tournament of Champions like we did in 2005, because we have had exactly two non-Link champions since 2006, but, uh...yeah, no one really wants those two in a Tournament of Champions. Most of us don't want the CBIX champ in our bracket at all. TBH, however, I think a gimmick-free bracket would be better. This contest showed that most of the Noble Nine are actually capable of producing interesting matches now. Yes, Link will still win in the end, as he always does, but the road to the end cold be very interesting.

Now watch as we end up with 256 characters, still all 1v1s but stuffing the whole thing into 63 days. 8 matches a day for the first two rounds (12-hour matches and four matches at once), 4 a day for the next two (switching to 24-hour matches), 2 a day for the next two, and only going to 1 a day for the final two rounds.
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Not dead.

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Still going

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Soon?

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Match 129: Ganondorf vs. Mega Man

Ganondorf 10087
Mega Man 15151

First off, are we actually having two contests in under a year? That hasn't happened in almost a decade! I didn't expect GotD2 to be this early in the year, I guess because the last one wasn't, but then again we started off 2010 with a Character Battle.

As for this match, it's clear that whatever it was that gave Zelda a massive boost (generally assumed to be Breath of the Wild) failed to do the same for Ganondorf. Remember this match?

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/2019-tournament-final-sephiroth-vs-ganondorf

That's Ganondorf getting almost 42% against Sephiroth in his prime, or close to it. Not one Oracle predicted that Mega Man would hold Ganondorf under 42%; a few picked Ganondorf to win outright. Nope. Ganondorf got 40.57% with the registered voters, which even with them getting double weight wasn't enough for him to break 40% overall. Was Ganondorf really as weak as his SFF beatdown against Link made him look, or was Mega Man's loss simply a signal that Pikachu was legitimately Noble Nine tier?

Probably the latter, honestly. We'll look at that soon enough.

Match 130: Alucard vs. Bowser

Alucard 12307
Bowser 12932

Wait, doesn't that light blue border mean that the registered and unregistered voters were split?

Yes. Yes it does. Alucard was thought to be the weakest of the eight division winners, but he put up a damn good fight here, taking the unregistered vote by just 7 and holding Bowser to just 51.24%. Bowser was never in danger, however, leading wire-to-wire and staying above 51% from the 15-minute mark of the match onwards. But perhaps that was The Plan all along, as surely Alucard would get a better X-Stat number through Bowser than he would against Crono directly?

The max lead of 627 (10 minutes before match's end) would be good for a spot in the top 25 closest wire-to-wire matches, and would rank #6 among those where the loser never led.

Match 131: Solid Snake vs. Auron

Snake 15915
Auron 9971

This was another wake-up call re: strength of certain non-Noble Niners. Snake's victory was never in doubt, but not a single Oracle had him winning that handily. Given how unexpected Snake's presence in the loser's bracket was, it might surprise you to learn that Auron barely had more Guru brackets picking him in this match than Snake did...until you remember that Zelda was considered an underdog all the way back in Round 3 against Squall Leonhart. Also that nobody was quite sure what to make of Division 6, with fallen stars such as Vincent and Magus along with entirely too many potential rally-bait characters, but Squall was a comfortable Guru favorite to win this match.

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Match 132: Tifa Lockhart vs. Sephiroth

Tifa 13545
Sephiroth 12340

Sephiroth was the overwhelming favorite here by just about every metric imaginable. We can't see exactly how many of the overall brackets had any one particular wrong choice, but it wouldn't surprise me if he was the most popular pick there, too. Maybe. Mario was a surprisingly slight favorite to beat "Division 8 Winner", or at least, it's surprising given how Sephiroth was only about a 4:3 favorite to win Division 8. So it wouldn't surprise me if the casuals were largely on board with Sephiroth > Mario and had Mario winning this match. At any rate, even with it clear that the top female characters were boosting, only one Oracle pulled the trigger on this upset, because it's been drummed into our heads that SFF creates a clear hierarchy and that nothing will ever produce an upset when heavily overlapped fanbases match up.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/5265-character-battle-ix-bonus-battle-3-runners-up-battle

...In 1v1s, nothing will ever produce a 1v1 upset between characters from the same fanbase. Yeah, that's what we meant to say. And suddenly, Sephiroth did look like he'd lost a step, and that his relegation to the main bracket was justified. Even with all of the doom and gloom surrounding the Noble Nine after Vivi > Mario, to the point that some people thought Snake could wind up as the only one to win his division, Sephiroth still made the final nine there. This Top 16 finish was his worst ever.

And this was never in doubt. Tifa jumped out to a huge lead right away, pushing it to triple digits by the second update. One third of the way through the match, her lead stood at exactly 1000, and from there, it fell into a stall, for the final margin of 1205. This contest had completely gone off the rails, and we were now seeing the bracket-buster records set by the likes of L-Block, Draven, and Undertale being seriously threatened by characters we already knew to be strong. Quite simply, it was a glorious return to the days of contests being able to surprise us.

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Match 133: Link vs. Pikachu

Link 20129
Pikachu 9295

So yeah, about that Pikachu...

In 2007, he made it to the quarterfinals, which due to the fourway format meant Top 16 instead of Top 8, but nevertheless it meant outlasting 7/8 of the field. But everyone just chalked it up to SFF and LFF, and possibly Tidus having a reputation as a choker. With Pikachu handily getting second behind Leon Kennedy in Round 2, the idea that it was SFF/LFF that let him win his Round 3 fourpack might not have been totally unwarranted (although you have to figure that Leon might have benefited from STF in Round 2, being the protagonist of a dark, mature horror game against three bright, colorful characters).

In 2008, Pikachu makes the quarterfinals again. Absolutely no one is accusing him of being the beneficiary of SFF this time; if anything, he's catching flak in the early rounds for dishing it out, allowing Arthas Menethil to advance over Ike and take 3rd place in Round 2 over Captain Falcon. But mostly they didn't really care because he knocked out L-Block, and because Samus's presence meant he wouldn't get in the way of the Crono-Vincent rubber match.

In 2010, Pikachu takes a step back and is knocked out in Round 3, which despite the return to 1v1s is once again the Round of 32. But then the raw X-Stats come out and he's 6th. Again, this is quietly swept away because it's Solid Shit vs. ...wait, is that a HeartGold/SoulSilver sprite, mere days after the game came out in the United States? Damn Pikachu had the pic advantage! We always talk about the sprite round being good for Pokmon, but a true "first appearance" theme like they have in a lot of the sprite rounds (though not this year; for example, the Legend of Zelda crew was rocking ALttP sprites) would actually be kind of iffy because the Gen I sprites are pretty hideous, especially if you truly enforced the letter of the law and used Japanese Red/Green sprites instead of the Japanese Blue sprites that were carried over to the international releases.

In 2013, people are griping about Pikachu benefiting from SFF before it even happens, praying for Otacon to upset Magus so that Crono can get a fair shot at Pikachu. Pikachu wins handily, then resists LFF from Pokmon Trainer Blue, another SFF beneficiary, to edge out Sora for the Top 9. Board 8 was surprised for some reason when he managed to take second in the semifinal trio over fellow Gen I icon Squirtle; personally, I'm more surprised that he wasn't able to repeat the feat in the Fourth Place Match against Mewtwo (though Mewtwo rSFFing Pikachu seems logical given how Mewtwo was the cool, edgy overpowered final boss type, and I think maybe also a higher tier in Melee? I don't know; I don't follow competitive Smash. Then again, being more popular within the fanbase was a justification we often used for picking hilarious upsets in the early years, and this was probably the first time it actually came through.)

And now here he was again, having advanced out of the Top 16. Due to the double-elimination format, this merely put him into the Top 12, not the Top 8, but nevertheless: Pikachu is legit. There's really no denying it. Getting more than doubled by Link is nothing to be ashamed of; it's even happened to Noble Niners. In 1v1s, even. His loss here set up a rematch with Mega Man, and given how close the first match was, it was no guarantee that he'd win again...but it was no guarantee that he'd lose, either.

We really need to stop using the term "Noble Nine" in the context of measuring contest strength. The Noble Nine will always be the Noble Nine, and can never be added to or subtracted from. They are the original nine Elites, who have been in every contest and have been elite in every contest--yes, even when Crono got beat in Round 1 by a glitchy pile of garbage data, because that falls under the purview of "rallies". But as of this contest, it's clear that they have legitimate company in the highest tier (well, the highest tier is still just Link by himself, but aside from that). Zelda, Pikachu, probably Tifa. I'm still not entirely convinced that Mega Man X isn't really close to Mega Man Classic in indirect strength, and losing to Tifa doesn't invalidate that because she's part of this group of "new elites". Outside of the ever-dangerous rallybait, it would surprise me if any of them were to lose to competition outside of each other and the Noble Nine, even though all of them have done so in the past. (Well, X hasn't outside of getting double-barrel SFFed by Link and Mario, but that's because it took him so long to debut.)

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FYI, Mewtwo is a low tier in Melee while Pikachu is a high tier. Pikachu and Fox have the best tier placements across all the Smash games.

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Wow, rude.

Go ahead and finish at your pace.
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Hey don't you Americans say slow but steady wins the race? There you go!

But in all seriousness it would be nice if it would be finished like 1 month after the contest has ended. Maybe 2 months.

But why you don't do in this contest what I did and write the analysis after every match? That way you can do it faster.

Sure you can't really comment that easily, meaning for example after the contest has ended you can judge things easier(seriously did anyone expected Zelda to reach that far?) but still you can do that and then maybe after the contest has ended you can go back and slightly edit each anallysis. Thus you will have less work to do and it will be more easier than having like 50 matches to analyze.

Just saying.

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I'd rather be thorough than quick. But fine, I'll try to hurry up the next one.

And it only purged once. Also, I've never had a lack of motivation. I would've done this sooner (i.e. for previous contests) if I knew it'd be allowed on the wiki, and repeatedly stated that I was planning to go back to do so for said previous contests.

I might take Safer's advice, though, and do it during the contest rather than having to keep this bumped artificially. Because obviously I'm going to just keep using this topic.

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No, wait, I'm not going to keep using this topic, because the topic title will be inaccurate. You're absolutely right, Ulti, in that my tendency to procrastinate on things makes me ill-suited for a Post-Contest Analysis like you do. So instead, I'm going to take a page out of NGamer's old playbook and do pre-match analysis/post-match reactions. Much better suited to my personality type.

Also, looking at your write-up for the Legends' Bracket Mario-Samus match, you of all people should understand my issue since you have ADHD too.

Match 134: Cloud Strife vs. Crono

Cloud 16694
Crono 12731

Well, just one match after saying that we should stop talking about the Noble Nine, I have no choice but to talk about the Noble Nine! Well, not exactly. What I said in the last match was that we should stop using the Noble Nine as a shorthand for "the most elite characters who will never lose to anyone other than each other unless there's weird rally shit." This was actually a long-awaited match, one that we honestly probably should've seen way back in the CJayC days but even with all the SFF matches that CJay liked to set up he never sent the protagonists of the two most well-regarded Square RPGs to face each other, because Mario vs. Crono was already a meme by the time the SFF debacle of '04 took place. (I'm still not sure what I think of FFVII, because I'm too addicted to FE:TH to go back to my FFVII playthrough. I didn't like CT too much when I first played it but I want to give it a second chance after having played and enjoyed FFVI.) But instead, their only meeting was in the fourway finale of the 2008 contest, where Crono provided just enough LFF to allow Snake to upset Cloud for second place. As for what this result meant...the instinctive result was to say that it meant that FFVII really was weakening and that it went all the way to the top (the irony being that Sephiroth's weakness was exposed by a fellow FFVII character, but "porn rallies"), since the last time we'd seen Crono, he looked like he'd have probably struggled to beat Pikachu even without Magus LFFing him. What most of the board wanted it to be, on the other hand, was that CT's run through the Games Contest wasn't just a case of Games =/= Characters and that the CT crew was back. And the thing is, there was a good case for it. Not one Oracle picked Magus to lose by as little as he did (though some of them did predict him to win outright), and the two highest picks for Frog in his first match were the two closest. The only question is...why? Unlike fellow Squaresoft RPGs FFVI and SMRPG, CT wasn't included on the SNES Classic. It hasn't received a new series on Netflix like Castlevania did (also a franchise with representation on the SNESC). Crono hasn't even gotten into Smash Ultimate! There is no good reason why CT's plummet should have stopped, and yet, it seemed to have done so.

Oh, wait, yes there was. The ever-dwindling vote totals. This site hardly gets any traffic normally, with contests representing an uptick due to social media spreading the word--but even then, it probably only draws in hardcore old-school gamers like the ones who've been sticking around all these years on Board 8. The hardcore fanbase that's still stuck in the 1990s is the only one still voting. So we're probably going to see whatever representatives of ancient franchises had new releases this past decade dominate the upcoming GotD. (I mean granted, we all already crowned Breath of the Wild the moment it came out, but it's even more obvious now.)

Match 135: Zelda vs Sonic the Hedgehog

Zelda 16210
Sonic 12507

Oh, hey, speaking of dwindling vote totals... It should be noted that Sonic had fewer votes in this match than Crono did in the previous one, but got a better percentage. Though this could be in part because Allen forced voters to vote for all matches taking place on a given day or for none of them, and Cloud-Crono, in addition to being a big draw for GameFAQs' core fanbase, was paired with Link-Pikachu, while Zelda-Sonic was paired with yet another Mario-Samus match. Granted, we love Mario-Samus matches, because there's never any shortage of people arguing that this will finally be Samus's chance to upset Mario. And it's not really a bad argument, per se. Samus does look like she's almost there, and picking Samus > Mario was what won raytan the Guru Contest in 2013 even if it only worked out because Mario had gotten upset in an earlier round.

Anyway this is pretty much the most anti-climactic "upset" you'll ever see, which is to say, it was only an upset in the sense that pre-contest, we still thought that the only non-NN characters a member of the Noble Nine would lose to were rallybait. Not a single Oracle picked Sonic to win here, and why would they when Zelda had already dispatched the superior Snake? Even in the Guru, the favorite won--which is to say that no one had Sonic winning this match, while one entry had Zelda...oh, no, wait, that was the dummy entry used to bugfix the double elimination. Titled "Mr Bad Picks". Yeah, not really so bad after all, is it? The second chance bracket also had Zelda being carried over by a majority of those who had picked her to beat Snake. The initial brackets? ...Yeah, barely, but then again that was already a very small amount. Makes the Top 25 for "most surprising 1v1 results", though it narrowly misses out on the Top 25 overall.

Match 136: Samus Aran vs. Mario

Samus 13950
Mario 14765

Another one of those matches that never really blew up but was never in doubt. Mario's lead at the halfway point of the match--in votes, not percentage--was barely smaller than his final margin of victory, 815, yet his largest lead of the entire match was still under 1000. The second half of the match was just a stall. Samus didn't even do any early threatening; she got the initial board vote, 8-6 at the first snapshot taken a few seconds in, but it was the last time she'd be recorded in the lead. This match really would've benefited from being done "in the moment", because these two characters would have a far superior match in the Losers' Bracket in a few days!

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Oh man hope we see something good in the new contest too.

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Match 137: Pikachu vs Mega Man

Pikachu 13809
Mega Man 14182

Whereas Pikachu and Mega Man's first match set a new record for closest wire-to-wire 24 hour match, their second match set the record for closest wire-to-wire 24 hour match in which the loser never led. It was actually on the wiki for awhile as the closest wire-to-wire match in which the loser never led, period, due to a digit transposition that had Mega Man's maximum lead listed as 478 rather than 487. Yes, the 9 votes makes a difference; the record, set in a 12-hour match in 2013, is 480.

The prevailing theory tossed around as to how Pikachu was able to pull out the upset the first time was that because of the hiatus between the end of the main bracket and the start of Legends, casuals "weren't ready" for the return. They point to the fact that Mega Man won the raw vote in that match and only lost because of the registered user bonus. And the fact that Mega Man's lead, which as stated above never reached 500, was already above 400 three hours into the match, certainly does suggest that a "readiness" was involved. But I say that's still bunk. Here, let me pull up the numbers for you from that first match:

Mega Man 14396
Pikachu 14458

Mega Man had fewer votes in the match he won than in the match he lost! In fact, the only figure that's higher in the match that people were supposedly "more ready for" is Mega Man's unregistered votes, 5308-5288. Both characters received fewer total votes and fewer votes from registered users, though the most glaring discrepancy, at 5140-4845, is Pikachu's unregistered votes. A far more likely explanation is that Pikachu voters were unmotivated to go back for a match they'd already won. Which kind of makes sense, because double-elimination brackets aren't supposed to look like this. It's supposed to be that each successive round sends its losers to a far-flung region of the loser's bracket from the previous one, so that rematches of winner's bracket matches are kept to a minimum. I kind of understand why Allen did it the way he did--to minimize how much a wrong pick wrecks your bracket--but it was wrong and it was stupid.

As for the match, Pikachu never really threatened to take back the lead. Mega's lead maxed out around 5 hours in, Pikachu eventually whittled it down to under 250 over the next 6 hours, and then Mega slowly started building it back up, maxing it at...478. Maybe it wasn't a digit transposition, but faulty searching that failed to notice how high the lead was early on? Pikachu would eventually get it down to 260 before Mega Man started building it again at the end.

This would set up another hyped match, to see what the Noble Nine's pecking order really looked like.

Match 138: Crono vs. Bowser

Crono 15327
Bowser 12668

The poorly constructed double-elimination bracket resulted in 6 rematches, 3 in this round alone. A couple of those rematches actually had something worth talking about. This was not one of them. Like the previous match, the overall vote total went down from the original. But whereas the percentages in that match moved by 0.78%, and a very influential 0.78% since it was shifting in favor of the original loser who already had 49.89%, this one shifted a mere 0.13%. Please never do a double elimination bracket again, Allen, but if you do, at least do it right next time!

Match 139: Sonic the Hedgehog vs. Solid Snake

Sonic 11999
Snake 16257

This was the only match of Loser's Bracket Round 2 that was not a rematch of a winner's bracket match, which...counterintuitively, suggests that there was at least some thought put into the placements of characters. After all, this round was Losers 1 winners vs. Legends 2 losers. In a properly seeded tournament, you'd expect the entrants that lost to the Legends 2 favorites in Legends 1 to be the underdogs in Losers 1. I feel like I'm not really doing it justice in sentence format so let's use the seedings given to the eight Noble Niners given auto-passes to Legends and pretend that the eight division winners have the proper seedings to be facing them.

1) Link
16) Ganondorf

8) Mega Man
9) Pikachu

4) Cloud Strife
13) Alucard

5) Crono
12) Bowser

3) Solid Snake
14) Zelda

6) Sonic the Hedgehog
11) Auron

2) Samus Aran
15) Tifa Lockhart

7) Mario
10) Sephiroth

...Okay, so the actual results showed that maybe Mario and Samus had their seeds swapped, though in fairness, Seph is a Noble Niner and really probably should've been put against the 8-seed. But regardless of that, the only Loser's Bracket 2 match that isn't a rematch occurred when the 14-seed has managed to pull off two upsets. Does that bracket actually look perfectly seeded? No, it doesn't. If you wanted Mario-Samus in Round 2, they probably should've been the 4-5. Switching the placements of Cloud-Crono and Mario-Samus probably makes the top 8 feasible, though you'd obviously have to move Sephiroth so that he could properly receive his 9-seed because...oh, wait, Mario was the 7, not the 2. I guess Sephiroth as the 10 with Cloud as the 2 is fine.

As for the match itself, it was a clear, unadulterated beatdown. Sonic occasionally won an update here and there but for the most part Snake was increasing all day.

Match 140: Samus Aran vs. Tifa Lockhart

Samus 16557
Tifa 11705

And again, just a minor change to percentage. All three of this round's rematches featured the loser of the original match improving on their percentage, but only one--which had the highest movement anyway--had an original match close enough to be flipped.

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Legends' Bracket Semifinals: Link vs. Cloud Strife

Link 17763
Cloud 11590

In my write-up of Sonic vs. Snake, I talked about the seeding for the Legends Bracket and what might have made more sense. Mario in particular seemed underseeded, I guess so he could be matched up with Sephiroth but Allen could've easily moved the divisions around. But seeing this as a semifinal match just begs the question, how far did Allen think FFVII had fallen? Link vs. Cloud is pretty much a finals tradition; we've seen it in 60% of character battles, including this one thanks to the double elimination format. And yes I'm counting the finale of the 2006 Battle Royale here.

The outliers are 2002, where they were on opposite sides of the bracket but Cloud was infamously upset by Mario; 2003, where they met in the semifinals; 2005, which was kind of a no-win situation because the Tournament of Champions was to be Link, Cloud, Sephiroth, and a main bracket champion that was presumed to most likely be Mario (it was). Even with that only being the fourth character battle, Mario winning the main bracket (which he did) would assure that all three matches of the ToC were rematches from the first three years. Probably still should've gone with Link-Sephiroth and Cloud-main bracket champ (since the other favorite in the main bracket, Crono, had faced Link but not Cloud or Sephiroth), but either way...and 2013, when Draven turned the entire contest upside down. They also met in the semifinals in 2007, but since two characters advanced from each fourpack, they were able to both make the finals.

But really, it was hardly even relevant, because this was Cloud's worst performance against Link by far. In direct 1v1s, Link had never even broken 54% against Cloud, and even in matches with multiple characters, the only time Link was able to get 1.5 times Cloud's vote total (equivalent of a 60-40 in 1v1) was in Day 3 of the 2006 Battle Royale. Which I guess is proof that even Link is not completely immune to LFF since it suggests that he previously not only needed Sephiroth in the match to pull it off but also for Mario and Samus to both be absent.

In a way, it's kind of disappointing that the top characters were held out of the main bracket. It's fun to see a good old-fashioned blowout every once in awhile, the big dogs going to town on the fodder every once in awhile. It's kind of like the difference between men's basketball and women's basketball. In the men's tournament, the raw records are usually a fairly good match to the seeding lines, because the mid-majors are usually going to get dinged in non-conference when they play the top teams. The women's tournament will frequently have teams with double-digit losses up around the 4-5 matchups while the 12-13 seeds they beat to get there had only 2 or 3 losses, because the top teams play each other in the regular season all the time, which by correlation means that there aren't any "big dogs" to keep the mid-majors from running up gaudy records. I suspect this is done to try to drum up interest in the regular season since the women's game is far more wanting for viewers, but let's be honest; if you're interested enough in the women's game to be enticed by the marquee matchups, you'd probably watch the marquee teams face overmatched teams, too. For those who aren't paying attention until the tournament, however, it's just confusing, because March Madness was built on the upsets. When a team like Stephen F. Austin makes it to the men's tournament with a record of 30-3 and gets a 12-seed, we jump on that potential upset. In the women's bracket, almost everything looks like a potential upset, and it usually isn't. Watching titans go at it is fun, but to truly appreciate greatness, you have to see it overpower weaklings from time to time, too. Otherwise you just have to trust the experts that yes, this is greatness, just not quite as great as some other greatness.

Link was just on another level this contest. We saw it with Zelda in the main bracket, but it was clearly evident that it was the series boost too, as opposed to just that strange boost that a lot of female characters seemed to have this contest.

Legends' Bracket Semifinals: Zelda vs. Mario

Zelda 13733
Mario 13242

Yes, it's really happening. The Zelda hype train was just too much to stop. Just like in her match against Snake, Zelda lost the registered vote but had enough unregistered vote to overcome the registered vote bonus. The trends were more pronounced here, though; whereas against Snake, she lost the registered vote by under 100 and made up for it with an unregistered vote lead of a bit over 300, here Mario took the registered vote by 203, only to lose the unregistered vote by 897. Zelda led wire-to-wire, too; it looked for much of the match as though the biggest obstacle to breaking Mega Man-Pikachu II's new record would be Mario taking the lead, as he fought back at times, getting the deficit under 60 at the 2-hour mark after it had ballooned to 100 in under an hour and kept rising, then later getting it into the low sixties again amidst an entire hour below 100 after it had already swollen to 225 at one point, and finally getting it briefly back down to double-digits at the 15-hour mark. In fact at that point, both of the Pikachu-Mega Man matches' records were in jeopardy, as with just 9 hours to go, the largest lead Zelda had ever held was 225. But that's when Zelda took off. She set a new largest lead only an hour and forty minutes after Mario's cut to 97, then eliminated the chance of breaking Mega Man-Pikachu I's record in the next update before eventually getting it all the way up above 500 with nearly 3 hours to go.

Maybe Allen's onto something with these decreased-frequency contests. Back when we got them every year, X-Stats were usually fairly reliable. Our last known value for Zelda involved her getting LFFed by Donkey Kong enough that she couldn't beat Charizard in a close match, a result that seemed okay immediately after it happened but less so after Charizard lost in exactly the same fashion to Mega Man while Zero was the third character. Any result that makes you compare unfavorably to the Weighted Companion Cube does not reflect well on you, which is why everyone started calling Charizard a FRAUD (he kind of was, but the degree of it might've been a bit overstated.) And yet, here's Zelda looking every bit the elite character. Unlike last round, where everyone knew she'd beat Sonic after she'd beaten Snake, the Oracles still sided with Mario, with only 10% of them picking Zelda to pull the upset. Just 1.66% of brackets picked Zelda to reach the Legends' final, which was tied for 7th all-time most surprising outcomes (trailing only Draven's last three wins, Undertale's last two, and L-Block's champi

The Smash Franchise seems to be REALLY popular. Anyone that is playable gets a huge boost.

Also I don't remember that only 1 out of 10 Oracles had Zelda winning here. But then again it makes sense. SFF and all that stuff.

As for Link VS Cloud...Eh I remember I wrote in my contest analysis that I predicted a 65% win for Link and everyone said it was too high. And in a sense it was but not really.

If we make another character contest though I want one with characters that debuted after 2000 to have FINALLY a good contest.

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Safer_777 posted...

The Smash Franchise seems to be REALLY popular. Anyone that is playable gets a huge boost.

The match happening at Smash Ultimate release probably helped Link more than Cloud.

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Match 143: Mega Man vs. Crono

Mega Man 12977
Crono 13089

This match was pretty much exactly what we wanted: two characters of relatively similar strength going at it. The Oracles were fairly split on this match; 30 picked Crono and 17 picked Mega Man, and on both sides, the highest pick was above 53% but below 53.5%. The Guru brackets...not so much. 101 Gurus had Mega Man winning this match, compared to just 86 who had Crono even in this match. Old trends die hard, and at the start of the contest, we thought Crono was still the weak link of the Noble Nine, except for maybe Sonic. As for the match itself, it was a barnburner. Mega Man won the first update and struggled to build a lead. 45 minutes in, he took an update by 40 votes and tacked on another 22 on the next one, only to see it almost all wiped out with a 43-vote win for Crono. At this point, a second such swing would give Crono his first lead...so Mega Man took the next update by 51 to end the first hour with a lead of 85. He'd have a similar big update at the end of the second hour to get his lead to triple digits for the first time, and he'd finish the third hour with a lead of 249.

The first update of hour 4 was a dead stall, and then Crono started tearing into the lead. It took him less than two hours to get the deficit back to double digits, and with 10 minutes left in hour 6, Mega Man led by a mere 12 votes...but Mega Man refused to break, refusing to relinquish the lead and eventually getting it to 200 on the dot 3.5 hours after the local minimum of 12. It took Crono an hour and 25 minutes to halve that lead...and then another hour and 5 minutes to get back to that same deficit after Mega started fighting back again, allowing him to finally get the deficit back into double digits just before the halfway point of the match. Mega Man still refused to give up, and got it back into triple digits at the 15-hour mark. Shortly thereafter, Crono finally began the comeback that would stick, breaking through to take the lead for the first time with just 5 hours and 10 minutes left in the match, and this would prove to be the only lead change after the freeze. Crono's largest lead was a mere 137, half an hour before the end of the match, and Mega's max lead of 249 a mere 3 hours in was good for a spot in the top 5 closest wire-to-wire matches--at the time that it occurred, it was 5th overall, 4th among 1v1 matches, and second only to Mega Man's first loss of the contest among 24-hour matches. So while it did appear that Mega Man had fallen to the bottom of the Noble Nine totem pole (well, okay, there's still maybe Sonic), you almost have to feel bad for him, losing in two of the most brutal slugfests ever. Also, it should be noted that despite Board 8's well-documented pro-Crono leanings and the site as a whole having pro-JRPG leanings, Mega Man actually took the registered vote and only lost due to a deficit with unregistered voters.

Oh, and this managed to get a place on the 25 most surprising 1v1 results, too, with just 8.2% of initial brackets picking Crono to win this. He did get a slight boost to 13.9% on Second Chance Brackets, though, so I guess the field of 16 looked a little more favorable to Crono than the full field did? Actually I guess that checks out; Crono had a better prediction percentage in Second Chance all the way through, even in his very first match, so I suspect there were some people out there who thought Kirby could upset Crono but didn't feel Bowser could do the same when he got there instead of Kirby. Kirby still gets overrated because of his shenanigans in '08, when we've clearly seen that he's just not as strong in 1v1s as he is in multiways.

Match 144: Solid Snake vs. Samus Aran

Snake 11345
Samus 14725

The hilarity of this double elimination bracket is that your Oracle and your Guru could both be right, but for completely different reasons. Samus was a 39-8 favorite among the Oracles who were still submitting predictions at this point in the contest, and she had over 75% of Guru brackets as well...because over 90% of Gurus had Snake winning at least two matches in the Legends' Bracket, and Round 3 losers wouldn't appear in the Losers' Bracket until the next round! Still, none of us expected Samus to nearly break 56.5%; only about a quarter of Oracles even had her winning by half that amount, and I managed just my second ever top prediction with a 55.6%. A win's a win, but it hardly had me feeling as prescient as my first #1 did.

Match 145: Cloud Strife vs. Crono

Cloud 16563
Crono 12100

Loser's Bracket Round 4 consisted entirely of rematches of Legends' Bracket matches. One of them was an all-time classic, and the other was a boring retread of the first match. This one, sadly, was the latter.

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Nice to have the confirmation that Pikachu really is on Crono's level, meaning Magus leeched Crono to holy heck in '13.

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Remember when Snake got like 48% on Link 1VS1? Man.

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Oh wow the next contest still hasn't started yet? Good, gives me a little more time to finish this up.

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Yeah I am surpised. Guess we will have vote ins first or something though.

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Okay we finally have a bracket

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