Board 8 > An analysis of how each year performed in Game of the Decade 2

(+) Yeah! (+)

2016 is the worst remaining year left, no?

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LinkMarioSamus posted...

2016 is the worst remaining year left, no?

Yah it's no spoiler that 2016 sucked, but how that suckitude manifested is the interesting part

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MechanicalWall posted...

I have a strong attachment to the last decade of gaming, as it's when I started having enough disposable income to waste on buying video games en masse. Of the 128 games in bracket, I've played more than 90;

Weird I'm the opposite. Outside of a couple games multiplayer games like overwatch, destiny, mass effect 3, and Minecraft and a few single player games like mass effect 2, the Witcher 2 and 3, and fire emblem 3 houses this last decade was forgettable for me. There's a lot of games I really like, but most of it was built in the strength over the prior decade for me.

I spent the first half of the decade with very little disposable income and a lot of free time. The second half I spent with a good amount of disposable income and little time to spend on games. It's just a weird flip.

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I'm probably gonna skip out tomorrow. Halfway through the decade seems like a good place for a short break, but more importantly, the write-ups are only getting longer from here. As if they weren't long enough!

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Yeah when your year's GOTY gets dunked by a lovely little indie that could you really suck and should be ashamed. 2014 basically split the decade in two and helped me lose some interest in gaming for a while (I'm not really fan of WRPGs in general, especially if they are particularly generic.

Wolfenstein and Ori were two of the best games of the decade though. Gaming always finds a way!

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Ya it's wild how awful that year was. They really didn't start the new gen well

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Not like 2006 was all that great either.

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pezzicle posted...

Ya it's wild how awful that year was. They really didn't start the new gen well

New gens pretty much always suck the first year. I don't get why people rush out to buy new consoles immediately.

Only reason Wii U was an oasis of hope in 2014 was b/c it had already been out a while and it wasn't in its first year.

streamofthesky posted...

New gens pretty much always suck the first year. I don't get why people rush out to buy new consoles immediately.

Only reason Wii U was an oasis of hope in 2014 was b/c it had already been out a while and it wasn't in its first year.

Then the Switch decided to release two major games in its first year and completely blow the doors off of this tradition.

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swirIdude posted...

Then the Switch decided to release two major games in its first year and completely blow the doors off of this tradition.

Well yeah, in order to do that they literally held the games back for over a year from being released and basically destroyed the Wii U's final year for the sake of helping the Switch open w/ a bang.

That's basically what it takes to have a strong first year -- cannabalize the current system's output for the upcoming year and just shift it to the new console.

Nintendo literally abandoned Wii U owners.

It's the sinking ship fallacy!

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Yah I got a PS4 on launch week (somehow), and spent more than a year letting it collect dust. I have a pretty meaty selection of PS4 games both physical and digital, and the only ones I see from 2014 are Alien, Wolfenstein, inFamous, and Strider. Not exactly a murderer's row, and the first two were also on PS3. On a personal level at least, things didn't start picking up until 2015 with Witcher, Bloodborne, MGSV, Batman etc.

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streamofthesky posted...

Nintendo literally abandoned Wii U owners.

as a devoted wiiu owner, this was absolutely the right move

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Keltiq posted...

as a devoted wiiu owner, this was absolutely the right move

Which one is it?

Were the Wii U owners such a tiny amount of people that providing dual console releases (like Sony does for years into a new console's life for the previous one and Nintendo had no problem with doing so before now) would make little difference to Switch sales?

Or were they a significant enough consumer base that it's worthwhile to continue to develop games on both systems to sell to them?

You can't have it both ways. So sick of people saying in one breath, "lol, almost no one owned a Wii U!" and then in another breath, "there's just too many of them! If Wii U owners weren't forced to upgrade right away, the Switch would've died!"
Without the slightest hint of cognitive dissonance.

MechanicalWall posted...

Yah I got a PS4 on launch week (somehow), and spent more than a year letting it collect dust. I have a pretty meaty selection of PS4 games both physical and digital, and the only ones I see from 2014 are Alien, Wolfenstein, inFamous, and Strider. Not exactly a murderer's row, and the first two were also on PS3. On a personal level at least, things didn't start picking up until 2015 with Witcher, Bloodborne, MGSV, Batman etc.

Ya I waited until Jan 2016 to pick mine up

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streamofthesky posted...

Which one is it?

Were the Wii U owners such a tiny amount of people that providing dual console releases (like Sony does for years into a new console's life for the previous one and Nintendo had no problem with doing so before now) would make little difference to Switch sales?

Or were they a significant enough consumer base that it's worthwhile to continue to develop games on both systems to sell to them?

You can't have it both ways. So sick of people saying in one breath, "lol, almost no one owned a Wii U!" and then in another breath, "there's just too many of them! If Wii U owners weren't forced to upgrade right away, the Switch would've died!"
Without the slightest hint of cognitive dissonance.

...Who says the latter thing? The Wii U was a dead-ass console. It put up absolutely wretched numbers every single month and basically never sold. Nintendo abandoned it because there wasn't anything to lose from doing so. There's a reason every single title, and I MEAN every single title worth a shit the Wii U had has been ported to the Switch or other systems, sans Xenoblade X which has licensing issues.

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Xenoblade X does not have licensing issues.
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streamofthesky posted...

Were the Wii U owners such a tiny amount of people that providing dual console releases (like Sony does for years into a new console's life for the previous one and Nintendo had no problem with doing so before now) would make little difference to Switch sales?

It would make little difference to Switch sales, yes. It would also make little difference to total sales, because the WiiU was dead in the water for like two years before the Switch came out. Dual console releases with the Wii are worth it because there are 100 million Wiis out there - you'll probably make back the additional resources necessary. Meanwhile, the WiiU sold about two-thirds as much as the Gamecube. It was a disaster, and nobody could break even on that. Ports can not be conjured from thin air.

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KanzarisKelshen posted...

"there's just too many of them! If Wii U owners weren't forced to upgrade right away, the Switch would've died!"

... said by nobody in the history of time

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The 11 Games That Made Bracket (And How Long They Lasted)
-Life is Strange (Round 1)
-The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky SC (Round 1)
-Fallout 4 (Round 2)
-Bloodborne (Round 3)
-Undertale (Round 1)
-Ori and the Blind Forest (Round 2)
-The Witcher 3 (Finals)
-Dying Light (Round 1)
-Rocket League (Round 2)
-Metal Gear Solid V (Round 3)
-Crypt of the Necrodancer (Round 1)

Notable Snubs:
-Splatoon
-Xenoblade Chronicles X
-Batman: Arkham Knight
-Axiom Verge
-Cities: Skilines
-SOMA
-The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel

Headliners: Bloodborne, The Witcher 3

Busts: Fallout 4, Undertale

Snubs Analysis:

IMO this is when current gen really started finding its footing. 2014 involved a lot of stumbling around with mediocre exclusives (inFamous, Titanfall), and games that came out on both generations (Alien Isolation, Wolfenstein, honestly pretty much anything of real note). THIS year, however, is when we see some of the big boy games come out and start getting some mileage out of the 400 dollars worth of plastic and scrap that we had purchased.

But lets not get ahead of ourselves. While Im SURE saying this is effectively taping a Kick Me sign behind my back and asking everyone to hound me over why I didnt include this or that, I really didnt find many games that popped out at me as YES this is clearly a massive snub that would have found footing in a GameFAQs contest. So, I mostly just ran with things I KINDA think are snubs, and some personal favorites.

For instance, maybe its just a me thing, but I liked Arkham Knight a lot. I know the tank shit really soured a lot of people on the game, but otherwise I thought it was a great time, and Arkham City did well enough in the contest that maybe there was room for AK as a 15 or 16 seed. Similarly, both Splatoon games have been exposed as massive fodder (another tick on the this isnt NintendoFAQs checklist), but if I had to choose only one to repped in this contest, it would have been the first. Not because I think its better (its not), but because it represented the first original IP Nintendo had had in the AAA space in almost a decade, with a genuinely enjoyable USP. It was also one of the few interesting games to come out on the Wii U; definitely the most creative, if nothing else.

Oh, and another me thing? The complete snubbing of Frictional Games this contest. Amnesia is the more blatant offense because of how influential it was, but personally, SOMA was the better title. The bar for video game writing is so low that The Last of Us is considered on the level of the fckin Godfather, but SOMA deserves real credit for being a very well written, well executed piece of good sci-fi, a genre video games dont embrace as much as you think they would.

Going back to the Wii U for a moment, Xenoblade Chronicles X received a very mixed reception from fans of the first, if my memory serves me right. But considering how badly the series tore up the bracket this go around (XBC2 was surprisingly legit for a game I thought people didnt like much), I do wonder if X would have ended up registering at all on the power scale.

Cities: Skylines and Trails of Cold Steel are pretty much games I only know tangentially about. Considering how little representation there was of the sim or god game genre (I think Civ may have been the only entry), I would have thought thered be room for Cities: Skylines, which people seem to hold up as the true successor to SimCity after EA obliterated that brand. As for Cold Steel, well, it seems like a very Board 8 game, but Ive heard the Cold Steel name tossed around more than the Trails in the Sky name on the Internet in general. I assume because noms were split three ways between the CS games, none of them ended up showing up through B8s sheer will.

Bust Analysis:

Ive never experienced more annoying hype than the hype surrounding Fallout 4. I was paying 0 attention to it because I have no investment in the series (Im starting New Vegas tho so well see if that changes), and yet I somehow became aware of every single feature of the game through sheer pop culture osmosis, ie people not shutting up about it. YOU CAN BUILD A SETTLEMENT! YOUR CHARACTER HAS A VOICE! IT HAS A DOG!, and every other inane detail. As such, I cant say Im sad that the actual release triggered immense backlash.

But my my, the way that backlash manifested in this contest was quite something. I mean, the fact that this main entry was an 8 seed while the spinoff New Vegas was a 3 seed was pretty embarrassing from the word go. But more importantly, Fallout 4 is a perfect example of a game that won the matches it was supposed to, following its projected path, but looked so bad doing it that its getting slotted as a bust anyhow.

As it was in the top half of Division 2, its match with VVVVVV was immediately following up on Bastions upset of the Walking Dead and Hollow Knight putting up big boy numbers on Tales of Berseria. Indie Fear was in full swing at this point, which in retrospect was the silliest arc of the contest. Hollow Knight has a huge following and The Walking Dead was trash, so Im not sure how everyone concluded that EVERY indie was a crouching tiger. So for Fallout 4 to go out in this environment and put 70% on VVVVVV the way it did sure seemed impressive at the time.

So much so that the idea of it upsetting ME2 became a huge topic of discussion. Now, I feel entitled to say I told you so when I did in fact tell you so; I dont remember if it was in the Stats thread or the Crew thread, but I said that ME2 was probably gonna beat Fallout 4 harder than it beat REVII. Why? Because no one has even thought of VVVVVV in ages, and the insinuation that it would be around Hollow Knights level in this contest was astonishing to me.

So of course Mass Effect 2 goes out and doubles FO4, in one of the first Oh my God what is happening?! matches of Round 2. Naturally there was some SFF involved, but in a match where some were legitimately entertaining the upset, a brass knuckles gut punch absolutely shocked people. Point of all this being, that 30% on VVVVVV was actually horrendous for a massive AAA title, the successor to a game that finished 6th in the 2010 x-stats, a game whose hype I could not escape from had I roomed with Patrick and lived under a rock. YAKUZA 0 more than tripled a similarly low-profile opponent. All that needs to be said really.

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Bust Analysis continued:

As for the game that didnt even follow its set path look man. I mentioned this in the 2014 write-up, but you cant, just CANT convince me that Undertale would have dropped its match with Octopath Traveler if it werent for its run in 2015. For every one GameFAQer that ended up playing it and enjoying it because of that contest, there were ten that were awash with anger that it beat Ocarina and Melee and Pokemon and god I dont even remember what else was fodderized by it. That contest was one of the catalysts of the the Undertale fanbase is toxic meme, and that image is another big reason why people would be inclined to antivote the game even if they had 0 awareness of our contest specifically.

Honestly, though? Is Undertales fanbase really THAT much more toxic than other high-profile games? Smash does extraordinarily well in our contests despite having perhaps the WORST fanbase of all time. What about the venomous intra-generation strife of the Pokemon and Final Fantasy fanbases? Do I even need to mention Sonic?

Ranting aside, with voters being forced to vote in all matches, you can bet your ass that many of those that hadnt played either game voted against Undertale on impulse. Mind you, this isnt to entirely excuse the games performance. It should have been strong enough that it could weather these antivotes, at least against fckin Octopath. It was an easy pick to win this fourpack, and Shovel Knight winning produced one of the lowest pick rates of the entire contest at around 18%. Whatever the reasons may be, Undertale burned a LOT of people, myself included. And as it turns out, none of those games could even dent Mario Odyssey, so all that drama didnt even produce an interesting result. Oh well.

Headliner Analysis:

But lets turn from a game that didnt get anywhere in bracket and was swiftly forgotten, to a game that did get somewhere, and caused a LOT of ruckus doing so.

People were not ready to be impressed by Bloodborne. Losing 55-45 to FFXII wasnt going to be swiftly forgotten, not by the experts. Unfortunately, sometimes our experts spend too much time with their noses in the numbers that they fail to look up and notice where the winds are blowing. A lot of what I said about Dark Souls rise applies to Bloodborne. While it doesnt have the same claim to innovation and influence that Dark Souls does, it has that same fantical following that preaches for it everywhere and anywhere they can, and many of them calling that style of game Soulsbourne has certainly helped the games profile. Its edge over Dark Souls is the fact that its exclusive, so not only do you have the Souls fans evangelizing for it, but you have Sony fanatics bandwagoning along with them.

It came into the contest with a shiny 2 seed and an opponent that was easy to flex on. Blops, as I mentioned in my 2010 write-up, was one of the more baffling inclusions in the bracket, possibly a result of Allen feeling that the best-selling series of the decade had to show up SOMEWHERE. It certainly got blown out like a game that didnt belong, with BB putting down a big dick 80% on its ass. This wasnt like the blowouts that were happening on the same day; DOOM putting 86% on INSIDE and RE2 pushing Danganronpa 2 down with 83% certainly looked incredible, but Bloodborne was putting a big number up on a game with an actual brand. Yah CoD attracts antivotes like no other, but its at least a game that people actually recognize, and Blops has some nostalgia going for it as one of the oldest games in bracket.

This was when people were alerted that Bloodborne was actually going to be a threat, a game that was gonna justify its seeding. I covered its match with Fire Emblem Awakening in my 2013 write-up, noting that if you hold FE constant, BB was around 8% stronger than it was in 2015. Incredibly in itself, but what started REALLY getting people nervous about their brackets was how even when it was in the lead, and comfortably at that, it mustered what turned out to be one of the meatier rallies of the contest. The thread that triggered the rally had gotten more than 700 upvotes, which Im fairly certain is the most upvotes any Reddit post about the contest had gotten (correct if Im wrong here, and no Im not counting hentai rallies).

And so, its match with RE2 was one of the biggest tossups of Round 3. Even if these games were perfectly matched, BB would end up having the edge thanks to its clear ability to rally votes. And so began the BEST match of the contest, bar none. This one was a real you had to be there moment. It was pretty much the only match where we were seeing regular lead changes, where neither game almost ever had a triple digit lead, where we well and truly could not pinpoint who was gonna stumble across the finish line. The Stats thread was in an uproar; a lot of the experts had figured RE2 would win this match pre-contest, and this was one of the only rallies that REALLY threatened to tank their brackets; as such, a LOT of anti-rally sentiment was popping up, and we had to have our weekly discussion about the merits of rallies. Personally? I like em. Even started a couple, with my P4G thread in r/Vita getting 300 upvotes, making it one of the bigger rally threads of the contest that wasnt hentai. Dont see how you can hate this decaying website getting a spotlight cast on it, I thought that was one of the points of these contests!

Not gonna poke that bear too much, though. What really made this a legendary bout is that these were two games a lot of people care deeply about. This wasnt Celeste and Rayman (both excellent games, mind), where a lot of people hadnt played either. RE2 and BB are big-time contenders, and even people who had one game in their brackets were cheering for their actual favorite to pull through. Hell, I was one of those people; I had RE2 winning, but Bloodborne pulling the upset would have been AMAZING.

Eventually, if my memory serves me correctly, the subreddit where the BB rallies were being posted banned those threads, and the user Moonroof claimed he could gather enough votes to put RE2 over the finish line. And well, RE2 did win with 88 votes, which was actually one of the biggest leads of the day. Whether he was bullshitting or not, the match did end with the games further apart than they spent most of the day being. Despite only making it to Round 3, which puts it behind a lot other headliners, Bloodborne made a splash this contest, no doubt about it. If the inevitable PS5 remaster has it run without the ridiculous frame stuttering, expect another 8% boost!

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Headliner Analysis continued

Wow, this headliner analysis has already taken up more than a page in my Word document, and I havent even talked about good ol Geraldo. Now look, a lot of people did indeed call Witcher winning its half of the bracket; it has a Netflix series behind it, it just got a Switch port, but Skyrim was still the more popular pick. So despite the fact that it would have clobbered this bracket on any other site, Gerry was going into this contest as an underdog.

Im going to try and keep this relatively brief, because if youre reading this, you KNOW the kind of tear Witcher went on during its run. Much like how BBs performance on Blops was more impressive than Dooms despite pulling a much lower percentage, Witchers 84% murdering of the other Odyssey was more impressive than Galaxys 87% on Obra Dinn. Why? Because people actually know what Assassins Creed is. SFF or not, this was only the start of Witcher godstomping its competition.

In the time between me starting this project and me writing this very sentence, Ive played and beaten Mass Effect 3. And you know, I really enjoyed myself, so in retrospect its kinda sad that it got absolutely gutted, to the tune of Witcher getting 78% of the vote in Round TWO. Once again, though, there was some clear SFF at work here AND Witcher is the perfect game to take advantage of antivotes (as its so well-respected), so Galaxy 2 was designated as the first real barometer of Witchers strength.

And at the time, Witcher only getting 60% on Mario was considered a big coming back to Earth moment, ironic when one of these games doesnt have much gravity to speak of. But SOMETHING happened to Galaxy between 2015 and now, because it looks MUCH better in the final x-stats than it did in 2015, to the tune of placing 8th in KPs list, ahead of a lot of games itd have lost to (and this is with him overtweeking Witcher downwards IMO, but hey, theyre not my numbers). So that 60% was actually pretty damn beastly in hindsight.

But, as Mario was Witchers first non-Western opponent, the theory was formed that it was just waiting to crumble to Japanese opposition. So even after it absolutely obliterated God of War (almost 65% in Division Finals!), there were increasingly loud whispers that it might drop to Persona 5. I really, really dont know what some people wanted from this game at this point, because there were times when it seemed like no insane flex was enough to prove that it was on a rocket course to the finals.

But rocket towards the finals it did. Much like the Mario match, the near 57% it scored on P5 was apparently disappointing, despite the fact that P5 had looked absolutely monstrous up until this point. Seeing a WRPG beating down the biggest deal in JRPGs since FFX was kinda surreal, and if you had asked me at the time, this was the definitive point where any shred of doubt I had of Witcher winning semis was forever vanquished.

And, well, yah, I was right. Putting up 55% in a match many thought it was going to lose pre-contest cemented Witcher as a force of nature, and was proof of the fact that much like Dark Souls and Bloodborne, a big chunk of B8 was not ready for what it had served. I spent most of the contest on Witchers dick and was getting tired of people umming and erring whenever it put up yet another insane number, because I KNEW that the winds had blown in its favor since 2015. If Im being honest, the idea of it losing to Skyrim in 2020 seemed ludicrous. Im not going to repost my thoughts from the 2011 analysis, but Ill just say EVERYTHING was going Witchers way in the leadup to this contest, and you would have had to have been absent from the gaming discourse since 2015 to not see it.

While the finals were a foregone conclusion, Geraldo had one last trick up his sleeve: the infamous bath picture, submitted by yours truly, which was THE reason Witcher broke 44% on BotW. 44%. For reference, nothing had gotten more than 32% on Zelda up until this point, and most of us thought that nothing was going past 40%. And here Witcher blows past that supposed threshold, all thanks to me submitting the first picture of a naked man to actually make the front page (unless theres some Raiden pic I dont know about).

Now seriously, there were minor rally threads here and there, and there was some bullshit about a Persona 2 walkthrough that put a lot of extra eyeballs on the finals, but I dont think Witcher would have only gotten 41% if none of this was going on, as KPs stats suggest. If you look at the country-by-country breakdown, it stayed at around 40% for most of the match in the US; much like its match with Skyrim, however, it was significantly overperforming in Europe, and in the semis the difference between its American result and the overall score was about 4%. Everything was pretty consistent with the previous round. I dont really see Witcher dipping below 43% here, but again, theyre not my numbers, and he probably sees something I dont.

This concluded the epic run of the finalist that wasnt guaranteed to make finals just by showing up. Based on the posts Ive read, it seems like most people consider Xenoblade or Persona 4 to be the Star of the Contest based on their insane Division 4 runs, and they are definitely good contenders. For me, though, it HAS to be Witcher. This game didnt have the pedigree BotW did, and yet it never stopped impressing, round after round. How many times did people post something along the lines of, Holy shit Witcher or Jeez Witcher or OK calm down Witcher? The ME3 and God of War numbers were some of the most insane results of the contest, and even its closer matches are massively impressive when kept in context.

So yes, praise Geraldo. Praise Geraldo indeed.

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Other Thoughts:

Holy shit I need to start condensing these analyses a little, they keep getting longer and longer and Im not even at the chunkiest years yet.

There were some interesting things going on this year outside of the major headliners and busts; some bad, some good. Life Is Strange was not the favorite in its match with Halo Reach, and it lost convincingly, but a lot of people did entertain the upset. The result was definitely demoralizing to me personally; not because I had LiS winning that match, but because its pretty much my personal GotD, and watching it lose to fckin Halo was not a good start to the contest.

On the flip side, Ori and Rocket League managed to win a couple of tossups, with the former being the clear underdog against Dragon Age. It even ended as one of the top 5 indie games in bracket (if you dont include Minecraft, which at this point is as corporate as it gets)!

MGSV is a weird one. Its performance against Yakuza 0 was laughed at, as it couldnt even reach 60% there, but Im more inclined to think that Yakuza is decently legit. And yah, it lost to Dark Souls harder than in 2015, but I strongly believe that almost all of that was Dark Souls getting stronger. Despite all the assumptions that Death Stranding and anti-Kojima sentiment would weaken the game, it didnt really seem to happen. Honestly, I feel most of the damage that could have been inflicted on it had already been inflicted by the time of 2015s contest, when the WTF WHERES THE REST OF THIS GAME?! sentiment was at its highest.

Also, shoutout to Dying Light for being the most wtf game in bracket. Yah, there were WAY more obscure games, but at least shit like INSIDE and Obra Dinn have indie darling status. Dying Light is just an alright western AAA game with no pedigree and little staying power on this site. Clearly enough people cared about it to at least make it in, but like, huh?

That said, I think overall this year did pretty well. Yah its got some fodder, but this roster notched some good wins and upsets, and of course, it produced one of only two finalists in the field. That definitely counts for something in my book!

Final Grade:

B - A pretty good base of games, headlined by one of the eventual finalists

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X has mixed reception from people expecting another story focused game. It's really good if you don't go in with that idea or if you greatly prefer gameplay to story.

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Surprised only a B for 2015. Even its busts could blame SFF and antivoting like you say, and it had the number two game.

Im really not down on Fire Emblem at all. Mayyybe Three Houses due to bitter Smash fans but Awakening looked reasonable, and significantly stronger than 2015. People just severely underestimated Bloodborne.

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Dying light is awesome

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Lightning Strikes posted...

Surprised only a B for 2015. Even its busts could blame SFF and antivoting like you say, and it had the number two game.

I'm trying to conserve the highest and lowest grades for the years I know they're most applicable. Don't wanna skew the grading system too much, y'know?

2011 already got an A, and, well, we all know the other candidate for that grade.

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Xenoblade X was largely criticized by fans of the first game for its plot. A letdown both coming off the amazing plot of XC1 and the setup premise for XCX made it seem like it'd be equally/more amazing and it just...fell on its face.
That being said, the exploration and combat in XCX were top notch and I think after XC2's awful story and characters, XCX has become remembered more fondly since it at least had great side quests and all the incredible gameplay.

Can only speak for myself, but Undertale pissed me off for going over a bunch of less-known/appreciated great games that I loved in that contest. If it wrecked OoT in round 1 I wouldn't have cared, but its trail of destruction was needless and wanton. I don't even like OoT much, when it came down to the two of them I didn't even cast a vote because I wanted both to lose.
So yeah, damn right I anti-voted it. If the whole rallying bs was about keeping the always-winners from winning, why not just rally against them early? Oh, b/c you want the accolade of your pet favorite game downing the most popular one in the late rounds? Boo hoo, then.
(if it were up to me, winners for best game/character ever would be retired from future contests, so no game/character could win over and over again, but GameFAQS doesn't do that)

Was Witcher 3 really that underrated on this board? Anywhere online, I usually see it mentioned almost as much as BotW for the best game this gen/decade/etc....

streamofthesky posted...

Was Witcher 3 really that underrated on this board?

It wasn't THAT underrated, but a plurality had Skyrim being the one to make it to finals, and there was a decent contingent of people who were constantly stunned that Witcher was winning as hard as it was.

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Loving this thread and your detailed yet entertaining analysis. Can't wait for 2017. Being new to this board, what the heck does SFF stand for??

RuFiOoo posted...

Loving this thread and your detailed yet entertaining analysis. Can't wait for 2017. Being new to this board, what the heck does SFF stand for??

https://board8.fandom.com/wiki/SFF

"Same Fanbase Factor is the generally-accepted theory that in matches involving two characters that share the same fanbase, the results will be somewhat skewed in favor of the more popular of the choices. Most matches involving two Square, Nintendo or Sega characters are said to have some degree of SFF."

Basically, let's say Mario Odyssey and Smash Ultimate are mostly even. Because they're both Nintendo games, and both high profile Switch games, there is likely to be a lot of overlap between the player bases of the two games. So even if Smash-Mario was a 51-49 match based on their actual power levels, Smash won much more than that because a lot of people who were voting Mario in previous matches defected to Smash when they directly competed.

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RuFiOoo posted...

Loving this thread and your detailed yet entertaining analysis. Can't wait for 2017. Being new to this board, what the heck does SFF stand for??

SFF = Same Fanbase Factor. It's usually applied when two entities that have significant overlap (like two Nintendo games etc, two Final Fantasy characters) meet and the more dominant one overperforms on the weaker one.

Probably the most famous example is Link vs Ganondorf. Let's say a match between Link and Sephiroth happens and Link gets 66% on Sephiroth. Now let's say a match between Sephiroth and Alucard happens and Sephiroth gets 51%. Naturally, you expect Sephiroth and Alucard to be near equal in strength and if Link ever goes up against Alucard that he'll get around 66% on him, which would be fairly accurate in most situations.

Now imagine Sephiroth gets 51% on Ganondorf. Normally, without SFF, you'd expect Sephiroth and Ganondorf to be near equal in strength and that Link should get around 66% on Ganondorf as well. However, since Link and Ganondorf have significant overlap since they are from the same franchise, Link would probably get 80% on Ganondorf in a real match.


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I'll admit I didn't really know how well Witcher was "supposed" to do, mostly due to disinterest in the game compared to Dark Souls and Skyrim.

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2015 is an S+ in my book from Bloodborne alone, and -

MechanicalWall posted...

[Bloodborne] has that same fantical following that preaches for it everywhere and anywhere they can

I'm in this picture yep that's me

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Peace___Frog posted...

I'm in this picture yep that's me

Trust me, I'm right beside you there

And apparently there are rumors it's coming to PC so I guess people won't have to wait to play it at a real framerate

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Thanks guys, figured it was something along those lines. Pardon my ignorance...

MechanicalWall posted...

SOMETHING happened to Galaxy between 2015 and now, because it looks MUCH better in the final x-stats than it did in 2015, to the tune of placing 8th in KPs list, ahead of a lot of games itd have lost to

Scratch this sentence. The more I play with the numbers, the more I realize I'm full of shit here. Mario Galaxy 2 actually holds up well in the 2015 x-stats in relation to the other games that had come out this decade, and it doesn't seem THAT much better this year, at least based on how KP adjusted Witcher.

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MechanicalWall posted...

While the finals were a foregone conclusion, Geraldo had one last trick up his sleeve: the infamous bath picture, submitted by yours truly, which was THE reason Witcher broke 44% on BotW. 44%. For reference, nothing had gotten more than 32% on Zelda up until this point, and most of us thought that nothing was going past 40%. And here Witcher blows past that supposed threshold, all thanks to me submitting the first picture of a naked man to actually make the front page (unless theres some Raiden pic I dont know about).

Now now, I'm sure it's all counterbalanced by my Zelda butt picture.

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_SecretSquirrel posted...

Now now, I'm sure it's all counterbalanced by my Zelda butt picture.

legendary match up

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The 10 Games That Made Bracket (And How Long They Lasted)
-Final Fantasy XV (Round 3)
-DOOM (Round 2)
-INSIDE (Round 1)
-XCOM 2 (Round 1)
-Overwatch (Round 2)
-Stardew Valley (Round 2)
-Dark Souls III (Round 2)
-Street Fighter V (Round 1)
-The Witness (Round 1)
-Uncharted 4 (Round 1)

Notable Snubs:
-Titanfall 2
-Ratchet & Clank
-Darkest Dungeon
-Hyper Light Drifter
-Hitman
-The Last Guardian
-Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Spirit of Justice

Headliners: Final Fantasy XV, Dark Souls III, DOOM

Busts: Uncharted 4, Overwatch

Snubs Analysis:

Do NOT be fooled by all the awesome in that banner, this year is NOT as cool as those pictures imply. 2016 very much felt like an interim year for the industry; a lot of companies had blown their load in 2015, and a LOT of others were saving up for the storm that was on the horizon. Nintendo was definitely the guiltiest of the latter; the Wii U was doing ok-ish in 2014 and 2015, but it just DIED this year. The standout releases were a Paper Mario game no one liked, and a crossover between Shin Megami Tensei and Fire Emblem that ended up infinitely lamer than the concept implies (yes I played it, and yes Im one of those people thats still salty that it was what it was). Oh, and a Star Fox game that may have very well killed that series for at least another half decade. Again.

So snubs were, again, lacking. Personally, neither new-age Hitman game appearing in bracket was a massive disappointment, as they are the best stealth games ever. Yes, EVER. If you havent played them, do yourself a favor and grab the second one, which allows you to purchase and slot in the entire first game as DLC. Its the most freeform stealth Ive ever experienced, and there are so many ways to accomplish your assassinations that you can spend a dozen hours in just one level. Its insane. Maybe its best they didnt make bracket cause theyd have surely gotten fodderized by some nonsense.

This site isnt big on FPSes, a fact Im sure youre very, very familiar with if you ever bet on Halo or CoD scoring a big win in the past two decades and getting instantly burned by your pick. But, even in spaces where shooters arent well-regarded, I see a lot of love for Titanfall 2, a game incidentally made by a lot of former CoD people. Personally, I was having a lovely time with its parkour-based movement system and great setpieces until I clipped through the fucking floor, and for some insane reason, no matter how many times I reloaded my save, I kept glitching in the same exact place. Yah, no. I wasnt replaying everything up til that point on the off-chance that the game would un-fuck itself when I returned to that point.

Speaking of jank, anyone remember the Last Guardian? Yknow, that massively anticipated game that was eternally delayed, the PS3 game that never was, the successor to my favorite game ever, Shadow of the Colossus (yah, if youre coming from Ultis write-ups that must have been some serious whiplash)? It did actually come out, and a lot of people really liked it! I definitely didnt, because whatever qualms one might have with SotCs controls, TLGs were infinitely, infinitely worse. Still, would have made an interesting entrant.

And then theres a handful of little snubs, like some decent indies in Hyper Light Drifter and Darkest Dungeon. Ratchet and Clank was a pretty good game, though considering Up Your Arsenal has always been destroyed in these, I cant see this one doing much better. And of course the obligatory Phoenix Wright shoutout, the last one of the write-up!

Bust Analysis:

This year was so bleh across the board, picking busts was actually kinda hard. There was the obvious one, though. Im old enough to remember when Uncharted was one of the biggest deals in gaming, when the second game was regularly placing on top 20s and even top 10s of all time. Over time, though, it seems like its placement on those lists has receded more and more, and the series as a whole just doesnt have the same amount of clout. Maybe its when we realized that we were getting sick of hyper-linear cinematic shooters and wanted games that felt a little more organic, though honestly things have come full circle at this point and games like Doom Eternal are whole heartedly welcome after the 70 billionth open-world game.

I say all this, but believe it or not, Uncharted 4 was the consensus game of 2016 according to GotYBlogs. Yes, really. Thats more an indictment of the year than anything else, if you ask me. Look at the consensus GotY in the second half of the decade according to that site:

The Witcher 3
Uncharted 4
Breath of the Wild
God of War
*Not actually determined yet because of how close Death Stranding and RE2 are*

Personally, UC4 sticks out like a sore thumb. The other three are massively generation-defining in some way, whereas UC4 is mostly a retread of PS3-era game design with a massively bloated story and atrocious pacing. And for a game that brands itself as cinematic, it kinda lives and dies on how well-paced and structured that cinema is.

Perhaps, then, it shouldnt be a surprise that it got absolutely smacked by Mario Kart 8. 58-42 in a debated match is NOT a good look, and while you can argue that MK8 has the Nintendo factor going for it, its also a frickin kart-racer. UC4, on paper, should be closer to the kind of game this site likes. Now, MK8 proved to be fairly legit, so this isnt insanely embarrassing, but still. You have to wonder if UC2 in its prime would have dropped this match.

Do you know what was a very close second to Uncharted 4 in terms of GotY awards received that year was? Overwatch. Now, this wasnt much of a bust if youre a savvy enough contest-goer to know that casual bait like that was never going to do well on this site, but lets think about it. It won pretty convincingly over Death Stranding, 56-44 style. So far so good, right? After all, this match was decently debated, and Death Stranding cant be THAT bad, right?

Oh, yes it can! Xenoblade absolutely curbstomped Overwatch with 73% of the vote, in the match that solidified it as a contender for the Quarterfinals. This made Overwatch a peer of games like Nioh and Dead Space 2 and a bunch of other shit this site doesnt care about. Keep in mind, Overwatch was one of the biggest games of the decade, and ushered in a short-lived wave of hero shooters that all collapsed immediately because no one was gonna budge from Overwatch.

But, uh, note the term short-lived. The hero shooter phase turned out to be one of the shortest lived fads of the decade, as PUBGs rise single-handedly halted that genres momentum and made battle royale modes the in thing. Add that to the Blizzard/Hong Kong debacle, and its no wonder Overwatch severely underperformed in a format where it might have benefited from a contest title boost.

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Headliner Analysis:

Do not misunderstand, Dark Souls III and DOOM are only both headliners because I needed to fill a two game quota, and much like my HGSS/Galaxy dilemma, I really had no justification for including one without the other, because both their cases are equally flimsy. As for FFXV, its here because it was literally the only game this year to make it past Round 2, even though it did so in the most humiliating way possible.

So lets try to unpack this mess. I guess Ill start with DkSIII because its probably the most huh? entry here. Well, if you dont remember, no one expected shit from this game. It was a clear third-string in the Dark Souls/Bloodborne/Dark Souls III Souls-like trio (just like it is in wider Internet culture), expected to job to New Vegas in unceremonious fashion.

The first round of this fourpack, however, started making people sweat a bit. When the match STARTED, Dark Souls was actually doing almost as well on Dishonored as New Vegas was on the Stanley Parable, a funny little game that no one seems to remember. While Dishonored isnt worth much either, its at least a game with a bit of a brand and a strong cult following, and so these results started whispers of a Round 2 upset. Unfortunately for Dark Souls, the numbers started to normalize over the course of the day, with Dishonored climbing and Stanley Parable falling. Still, it was enough to cast doubt on the DkS/Fallout duel.

And what a duel it was! for like ten minutes. Dark Souls looked alright in defeat, but the 54-46 indicated that this did not end up being the explosive match we were hoping for. At the end of the day, it would only really serve as foreshadowing for how well Bloodborne and Dark Souls I would hold up in Round 3 and beyond; if even the worst of three did pretty good, the other two had a bright future ahead of them.

DOOMs Round 1 hype was even more deafening. Imagine being in the midst of the Indie Fear arc of the contest. Imagine seeing how BotW, the obvious contender for the GotD title, broke 85% in Round 1. Now, imagine then watching DOOM, a game no one was expecting much out of, put down 86% on its opponent, fellow 2016-mate INSIDE. People went bananas when this match happened, and DOOM went from being on no ones radar to suddenly being a contender for Quarterfinals. Eternals successful launch and the subsequent meme storm occurring just before this contest started were credited for what seemed to be a highly dominant performance from the 2016 title, and as such, its Round 2 match with RE2 was considered a complete tossup (a common theme for RE2s run, thinking about it now).

AND 58-42 for RE2. No pomp, no circumstance, just a stomping from the original favorite of this match. This was the point where two things were beginning to crystallize: one, the massive blowouts wed seen all throughout Round 1 didnt mean squat, and two, indie games werent powerful for the mere fact that they were indie games. Sounds ridiculous to read, Im sure, but as Ive touched on many times at this point, at this point in time people were giving undue credit to every game that didnt happen to have a big-time publisher, and it never wasnt weird.

Speaking of which, lets move to a game that was on Ground Zero of the Indie Fear arc. People werent 100% sure what to think of FFXV; it won our personal 2016 GotY poll, and it DOES have Final Fantasy in its title, though that brand has only been getting more and more tarnished on this site as the years roll by. On the other hand, FFXV was yet another bead on the string of embarrassments Square was threading (though I personally like it well enough), and its not like it was going to do shit with BotW breathing down its neck.

FFXV was there on day one of the contest, working over Edith Finch with a nice tripling. Or, what looked like a nice tripling. As this was the very first day and expectations were still up in the air, with no one knowing whether we were going to see blowouts at all outside of BotW, we all looked at that and figured, eh, that looks fine. Nothing to be worried about. This was one of those matches that only started looking bad as the contest progressed; as we watched games like DOOM, Mario Galaxy 2, and God of War put much bigger numbers on games just as obscure as Edith Finch, something became clear: FFXV SUCKED.

As we approached Round 2, there was more and more chatter surrounding its match with Hollow Knight, which had impressed a lot of people in Round 1 (people who clearly were not aware of the games clout, natch). And UNLIKE the other Round 2 matches Ive touched on so far, this one was actually worth the hype, starting the second round of the contest with a bang. Amazingly, Hollow Knight actually led for about half an hour, and despite FFXV being the bracket favorite, a lot of people on B8 were celebrating the potential upset. Even if they hadnt played Hollow Knight, they were treating it as the face to FFXVs heel.

But FFXV caught one of the luckiest breaks of the contest. The delays hurt some games and helped others; The Last of Us, for example, was clearly hurt, but this Round 2 match just happened to be occurring literally the day after FFVII Remake was released. Naturally, a shitton of Final Fans were hitting up GameFAQs for help and such, and tossed FFXV a courtesy vote. It eventually got the lead and held onto it, finishing 221 votes ahead of Hollow Knight. Does ANYONE believe that if FFVII had gotten another Square-style delay, this result wouldnt have flipped? It was merely by the grace of Allen that FFXV, a game that carried the legacy of the second biggest series on this site, didnt choke to a game about bugs that half the board wasnt even aware was popular. Trust me, if this year didnt suck, FFXV would have definitely been slapped with the bust title here.

But it got to keep bumbling along, shrugging its shoulders at the inevitable destruction BotW was gonna sling at it. Destruction is relative, though. Zelda had fodderized Halo and the Outer Worlds, but Final Fantasy was different, right? Thats too strong of a name on GameFAQs, it surely could maintain a scrap of dignity on its way out, right?

Right?

Hahaha. Zelda broke 80% IN ROUND THREE. Personally, I was devastated; not because I gave a shit about FFXV getting nuked, but because I was shilling for Hollow Knight all contest long, and this suddenly meant that it wasnt even a top 5 indie title, (its SEVENTH in KPs stats, eighth if you include Minecraft, below a severely antivoted Undertale.) making me look like a straight-up dumbass. But honestly? As funny as it is to say that FFXV was a massive embarrassment to its legacy here, I do think this match was a little weird. I honestly believe that the dynamic at play was causing BotW to overperform; the juxtaposition of yet another perceived failure of the Final Fantasy series being matched against Zeldas modern magnum opus (and perhaps just magnum opus, period) was just too obvious to voters, and I think many accordingly rewarded Nintendo and punished Square. Id argue that Hollow Knight would have performed much better in FFXVs position, helping both games save face.

Still though, if you take this match at face value, it means that FFXV would have been absolutely destroyed in many of the other fourpacks in this contest, ruining a shitton of brackets in the process. Would you have taken Tomb Raider over FFXV? How about Stardew Valley? Hell, if you swap its 5 seed with the 3 or 6 seed in this very Division, it might have lost IMMEDIATELY to shit like Bravely Default and Ni No Kuni. Imagine the shitstorm that would have caused! And best of all, it placed lower in the final x-stats than some of the games it beat in the 2016 poll, such as Uncharted 4 and DOOM. Har har har.


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Other Thoughts:

If that all just read like the weakest, least convincing Headliner write-up Ive done, its because it damn well is. NONE of those games would have even sniffed Headliner status in ANY other year, and FFXV is prime bust material. But what else is there? I guess Stardew Valley deserves props for ending up as the second strongest indie game in bracket, but thats damning with faint praise. INSIDE was on the receiving end of the second biggest blowout of the contest, and the Witness merely acted as proof that Yakuza was pretty legit.

Heres the real question: is this year better or worse than 2014? On the one hand, half this field made it past Round 1, which proportionally speaking is pretty good. On the other hand, only ONE game made it to Round 3, and you can damn well bet it wouldnt have in any other fourpack. There was nothing here as pleasantly surprising as MK8s performance, and this is by far the worst line-up of Headliners in the decade.

Ahh Ill save this for the final rankings. For now, let there be no doubt that Im only handing out two failing grades, and this year is DEFINITELY getting a big fat F stamped on its forehead. As I said, this was very much an interim year, the calm before the storm

Final Grade

F - FFXV is a headliner this year. Nuff said.

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I swear people were talking so much about Overwatch around 2017, and a character from the game even got into Ready Player One apparently. Then suddenly, nothing. It was just gone. Insert Usual Suspects reference here.

BTW count me as another big fan of SOTC, though I have some relatively tiny reservations about the game. I don't get how someone could hate it as much as Ulti but I will admit it's not for everyone.

2016 was not only an awful year for video games, it was one for movies too. I'm convinced the main reason the first three Disney Star Wars movies got rave reviews was because of how bad those years were for film, ESPECIALLY 2016 and 2017. And let's not even get into politics.

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Overwatch got eliminated the same round as two of the "headliners", and yet it's a bust and they're not? *shrug*
Seems like the entire field was a bust aside from FFXV and its lucky break.

And 2014 was a much better year than 2016, to me. Like, a full letter grade better. D vs. F.

this thread is making me realize how fast time is going by, i saw DOOMguy and Darksoulsman over the big 2016 header and I was like "no fucking way, he made a mistake"

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DOOM really sticks out in this year. It's the only game you can look at and go 'holy shit, absolute top tier release', and even then, it was kind of a miracle that it was that good. Everything else was either another sequel, or terribly blah.

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Uncharted 4 ended up looking pretty good compared to what we thought.

Losing to Mario Kart isn't as bad as we want it to be. Most of the bracket would!

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ctesjbuvf posted...

Uncharted 4 ended up looking pretty good compared to what we thought.

Losing to Mario Kart isn't as bad as we want it to be. Most of the bracket would!

I did waver a bit there, and I do note that it wasn't insanely embarrassing, but ultimately a highly debated match ending 58-42 just isn't a great look, especially considering Uncharted's pedigree.

streamofthesky posted...

Seems like the entire field was a bust aside from FFXV and its lucky break.

You'd be right!

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2016 I think still edges out 2014 by a tiny bit, so I'd give it an F+ (lol). At the very least, FFXV managed to fend off the embarrassment of losing to Hollow Knight thanks to FFVII Remake, while DA:I straight up lost to Ori.

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Overwatch deserved to do better in this contest, and Titanfall 2 just plain deserved to do better. To me, they were the only two great competitive online games this entire gen.

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