Board 8 > The top 10 "what if" questions in GameFAQs contests history

(+) Yeah! (+)

Eh, Pikachu losing in round two twice would probably still disqualify him from being in that group. The Noble Nine was just the 2003 Elite Eight plus Crono.

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Hmmm...I hadn't really thought of that one. I feel like it's still fresh enough for Snake to beat Cloud, but he might not lead Link overnight.

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What if RockMFR didn't make a last hour Liquid Snake rally topic on LUElinks which directly led to his 3 vote win over Alucard

What happens if Link was removed from every contest.

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9. What if we actually knew who won 2003's Mario/Crono match?

Mario 50.05% 66571
Crono 49.95% 66434

Look, I don't know what happened here and that is a problem. 2003 is generally thought of as our peak contest and its most anticipated match is a mess due to starting early and ending late. Mario pulled ahead right at midnight but Crono was ahead after 24 hours. Given Mario's contest history, and the fact that Mario's biggest surge is during Crono's best time, it's easy to cast him as the contest villain.

I'd love to just have a crystal ball and say who won here. It's probably the biggest debate in contest history. But, at the same time, I'm not sure what it actually changes. Instead of Mario getting crucified by Sephiroth, Crono gets it instead. Crono gets his due, and the 2004 match is a rubber match that Crono most likely still easily wins (though maybe not by as much, given how villainous Mario was perceived to be?). Mario still destroys him in 05 and never looks back. It's more of an "I need to know" than "this changes everything". But, sometimes that's all you need.

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What if Mega Man beat Sephy in 2002?

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Yeah, I don't think it changes much in the grand scheme of things. I do agree that Crono may have won so easily in 2004 because of how the 2003 match ended. That being said, this is one of those instances where we were better off with the result being what it was despite how obviously sketchy it was, or rather, because of how sketchy it was. This is the classic "heel steals the victory" match. Heck, I doubt we care that much about Mario/Crono if Crono wins by a few thousand votes like he was on pace to do. The board reaction to this match is unlike any other.



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In a proper 24 hour, 12AM CST-12AM CST match, Mario should win. Crono won that time frame by a handful of votes in the match that actually happened, however the Mario-leaning board voters from the first twenty minutes wouldn't just disappear in this alternate scenario. They would have voted later instead.

Even if they didn't, the stuffer probably would have just stuffed more to make up for it.

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Didn't Crono win the first 20 minutes anyway?

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transience posted...

9. What if we actually knew who won 2003's Mario/Crono match?

it was crono

we all know it. we all merely witnessed a heist play out in real time with cjayc as the getaway driver

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LeonhartFour posted...

Yeah, I don't think it changes much in the grand scheme of things. I do agree that Crono may have won so easily in 2004 because of how the 2003 match ended

I think Crono primarily won that easily because the poll being further down the home page favored him immensely, but the prevailing feeling that Crono deserved that win certainly didn't hurt him.

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Also, IIRC, Sonic/Samus and Mario Crono II were both on CJay's birthday.

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_SecretSquirrel posted...

I think Crono primarily won that easily because the poll being further down the home page favored him immensely, but the prevailing feeling that Crono deserved that win certainly didn't hurt him.

Ah, the theory that lower vote totals helps Chrono Trigger. Is that it?

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What if the Years contest took place a year later so that 2017 was eligible?
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OrangeCrush980 posted...

What if the Years contest took place a year later so that 2017 was eligible?

What if Allen didn't ask for pictures of awful games for 1997 in the match against 2001?

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What if consoles were included in pictures, like THE BRACKET FREAKIN' IMPLIED!

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Yesmar_ posted...

What if consoles were included in pictures, like THE BRACKET FREAKIN' IMPLIED!

This was entirely my rationale for picking 1991 over 1994!

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oh man if I cared enough about the years contest, the 1997 controversy is up there

I lost money on that one

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Tag!

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xp1337 posted...

This is a kind of open-ended one because it's more big picture but "What if Spring 2004 wasn't divided by generation?"

This one was my first thought!
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8. What if Super Smash Bros. Brawl didn't get anti-voted in 2010?

The biggest match of Game of the Decade 1 wasn't the final. It didn't have anything to do with the B-tier Zelda/Final Fantasy dance-off in the semifinal that feels slightly controversial in its own way. It's the battle of Smash games. Everything came down to if you sided with the pure fast gameplay of Melee or the new hotness of Brawl. The internet was really hot to pit these two against each other, not just on GameFAQs but everywhere.

The match itself was really anticlimactic - a sad, 12 hour affair during the night hours where Brawl slowly rose from losing the power hour to comfortably putting Melee fans out of their misery. There was surprisingly no controversy here, probably because of it being a 12 hour match in the night. Once the diehards went to bed, the more popular Brawl just took over.

And the internet remembered. From that point on, Brawl was a different game. It had cleanly beaten Twilight Princess the year prior in a weirdo four-way, but could only get 52% in the 1v1 rematch. That one was explainable since you don't beat a mainline Zelda down too hard, but the next match against Fallout 3 was a 24 hour affair. Brawl had a pretty long history with Fallout 3, from a decent win in the 2008 GOTY poll to absolutely decimating it in 2009. In 2010, Brawl started out in the high 50s and just bled percentage all day, going under 55 in the end. Fallout 3 is a decently popular game, but Smash doesn't go even in the daytime to a Bethesda RPG. I'm pretty sure that Fallout's side of the bracket has been overestimated ever since, though Fallout 3 never had a fair shake again because, yeah, Undertale.

The final against Majora's Mask just felt off. Majora started really strong -- like a upstart bandwagon game would, as it grew into over the contest -- and never looked back. Brawl had a decent comeback during the day but couldn't get close enough to make it interesting.

It's really weird. Brawl isn't a game of the decade type of game. No one looks back at it and says "you know what game was genre defining and really changed things? Super Smash Bros. Brawl." That game defined hype cycles and mastered the art of the teaser trailer, but when you talk about something like game of the decade, you want a game that made a splash when it came out. Brawl came out and it was fun to spin dash Mario with Sonic, and.. that's about it. I think voters realized that as it went on and said "nope, we need to audible here before it's too late. what about that Zelda rom hack?"

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Leonhart4 posted...

Ah, the theory that lower vote totals helps Chrono Trigger. Is that it?

Not just that, but the particular votes that were lost would favor Mario. I would bet that casuals were who vote on the poll on the way to a Walkthrough because it's there are more likely to favor Mario, whereas Crono is more likely to command votes from regulars who vote in all the matches.

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Conversely, what if Melee wins? Do we still get Majora/Melee, do we get FFX/Melee, and does Melee win?

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Leonhart4 posted...

Conversely, what if Melee wins? Do we still get Majora/Melee, do we get FFX/Melee, and does Melee win?

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/1656-division-128-semifinals-final-fantasy-x-vs-super-smash-bros
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Team Rocket Elite posted...

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/1656-division-128-semifinals-final-fantasy-x-vs-super-smash-bros

Well, hopefully it wouldn't be a giant Tidus face against the entire cast of Melee in the rematch!

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7. What if Sephiroth faced Link in 2003?

One of the easiest things to forget -- for me, anyway -- is that Link/Cloud 2003 was a semifinal match, not the final. Another weird thing that's lost to history is that Sephiroth was thought to perhaps be stronger than Cloud thanks to 2002, where he was the only one to break 40% on Link. The Oracle pick for the 2003 Cloud/Sephiroth final was Sephiroth with 50.01%. Seems crazy in retrospect, right? Heck, Sephiroth had the early lead on Cloud, which seems absolutely impossible given how bad that early vote has been ever since!

It's fully possible that Cloud is seen as the contest's savior only because it's sheer dumb luck that he got to Link first. Here's some results to consider:

2002

Mario 37.47%
Link 62.53%

2003

Mario 38.4%
Sephiroth 61.6%

Link 48.39%
Cloud Strife 51.61%

Sephiroth 48.11%
Cloud Strife 51.89%

Stats-wise, it's 51/49 for Link at the absolute most, and given how crazy strong Square was in 2003, it could have happened. Thinking about that feels like a completely different contest reality. What would it have felt like if Sephiroth beat Link in 2003 with Cloud waiting for him in the final? It's fascinating to speculate on.

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I honestly think Seph got as close to Cloud as he did because Cloud beat Link. There may have been a bit of backlash. Still, I think Seph would have had a chance. Even when they faced each other again in 2005, Seph still broke 45%.

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maybe. that Mario performance is serious though.

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Oh, no doubt. I just think it essentially prevented Cloud from inflicting any SFF so we basically got the "true" result.

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6. What if the 2007 contest was 1v1?

A lot of people's minds will instantly go to L-Block, and I get it. But I'm actually not thinking about L-Block here, or not exclusively L-Block anyway.

I think of this site's prime is from 2002-2007. 02-07 is the Clinkeroth era, when our pecking order was clear and our site wasn't deep into the past quite yet. A lot of people here think of this as our golden era. After 2007, we start getting weird as FF7 gets to be 10+ years old and we move into the HD era which lost a lot of gamers here. JRPGs go away and get replaced by games like Assassin's Creed and Oblivion, Mass Effect and Portal. Everyone kind of shrinks into their holes. Even the 2008 contest feels like we're past our prime.

So it's weird that we get this bizarro fourway format in 2007, where, outside of the top dogs, every matchup is more about who you're riding with than how strong you are. A lot of matches here left us scratching our head and it's hard to parse out the format vs. the character. The best example here is Master Chief. Master Chief was clearly a monster in 07, probably a near-elite like Squall or Ganondorf but also maybe not? It's so hard to say, and it feels like we got cheated out of the one time he could have impressed since people can dismiss it by saying it was a product of the format. He demolished Yuna and nearly made the final over Solid Snake post-Brawl trailer. We have this weird noble nine breaking match with Crono and Vincent where they're fighting for scraps next to Link. Does that happen with 100,000 votes? Probably, but who can say? We get a fascinating Leon/Dante/Amaterasu/Pikachu match where Pikachu just wrecks shop before going down easy next round. What happened here? The only thing we know is that the noble nine hierarchy was still mostly in place from 2006. Once you get below that, you get a lot of shrug emojis.

We can loop back to L-Block now. L obviously changed the face of the contests going forward. The next year we start seeing Companion Cubes and Sandbags and all sorts of other things like them. Glitches and Draven and other memes followed. A lot of that is due to the format, but an underrated part is just expanding the pool. Nowadays we can't do a contest without like 150 entrants and we end up taking on some pretty terrible matchups in the process. 2007 really changed the way we did things.

I like the 2007 contest a bunch, by the way. I think the format change was a good way to mix things up once, even though it birthed the joke era that a lot of users decry. Unfortunately we did it 3 times. It would be interesting to see what would have happened if we kept the sanctity of a 1v1, 64 entrant contest. It probably would have been a lot more boring! But it would have been interesting to see from a historical perspective.

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yeah 2007 was a fantastic contest but it also partially ruined the 2008 contest because we ended up just getting a bunch of dumb joke characters and a format that really was lightning in a bottle with how well it worked and shouldn't have been reused

Brawl was the other thing that ruined 2008 because people wanted literally every Smash character under the sun in the bracket and we basically got it

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2007 also made people addicted to the idea that something exciting needs to be happening every day. Whenever someone brings up a throwback to the 1v1, one match a day contests, there's a groan of, "Remember when we had to waste a day on stuff like Gordon Freeman Vs. Max Payne?"

But in my opinion, those "boring" days made the exciting days that much more exciting, and I would gladly take that any day over the dull hum of our current ADD contests, where the rise of every exciting match is buried by whatever happens the next day.

Also, the older I get, the less free time I have, so I would appreciate having longer contests with more days like this to take a break from everything.

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What if 2007 as the first non-1v1 was 3-way, and then 2008 was the first 4-way?

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I think about the monotony of a single match a day a lot, and kinda miss that. but then, when it's contest season I have to write up 100+ matches in 2 months, so I feel like that's a big part of it too

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yeah four matches a day is tough when you're part of the Analysis Crew!

those breather days are nice once in a while

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5. What if there were no rallies in the 2015 game contest?

2015 is our first and only chance for a traditional, 1v1 game contest without any restrictions like seeding by era. It was well past our prime, but because of no restrictions, it was a great contest. We got some really good matches that we never got to see in the 00s, and ended up with some pretty interesting old/new splits, none more pronounced than Super Mario RPG making the semifinals due to being packed in with a lot of mid-00s games.

But there were also some pretty wild rallies. Undertale is the big one, but there was also Melee which ruined a truly great Chrono Trigger run due to a rally. Chrono Trigger was a monster in 2015, most likely due to the site shrinking. Let's drop some comparison matches, eh?

Chrono Trigger 65.52%
Final Fantasy X 34.48%

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 64.96%
Final Fantasy IX 35.04%

Final Fantasy VII 65.29%
Super Smash Bros. for Wii U 34.71%

You can make the case that CT was the strongest game in 2015, which is wild. But there's a lot of caveats there, too. We've seen many games go big against lesser competition before failing against the king. In my opinion, this isn't enough to definitively say anything. But it's a fact that Chrono Trigger outperformed Ocarina on a stronger Final Fantasy game.

Final Fantasy VI 39.95%
Final Fantasy VII 60.05%

Final Fantasy VI 38.34%
Chrono Trigger 61.66%

The FF6 polls are a bit suspect: the FF6/FF7 match takes place on Melee/CT day, though FF7 was up 56/44 before it hit and would likely have risen after the first hour anyway. The FF6/CT match is a bonus match, taking place the day after the Undertale/Ocarina finale. You can also call SFF in both of those matches if you want, and maybe in CT/FFX if you're a skeptic. You can definitely disregard results if you want.

But the bummer is that we never got to see it. There's more than just CT to consider: what could have happened with Pokemon RBY now that it has some breathing room away from Ocarina? What is the strongest Mario game between 3, World and 64? Where does FF7 lie against other big games? We'll never know.

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In terms of rallies messing up quality matches, I don't think 2015 can be beat. So much promise just ripped away ugh.

I mean, even if Undertale doesn't rally I feel like Smash probably does anyway so maybe we just were never going to get to find out what was up with CT but it still hurts thinking about what could have been.

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Yeah, never getting to see if R/B/Y could run the Mario gauntlet and getting some idea of the Mario hierarchy is a low key missed moment from 2015.

Oh well, at least we got MGS3 > MGS1!

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4. What if the universe doesn't conspire against Cloud on August 26th, 2002?

We all know the history here. Mario/Cloud happens the day after Mario Sunshine releases in the US. There was an offsite rally that led to this poll getting like 20,000 more votes than any other match this contest, something that feels unthinkable for 2002. I don't totally believe the explanations of some Gamecube fan site bringing in 20k votes because that defies logic, so you can perhaps throw in cheating or whatever else you want. What happened, Cloud somehow loses the night vote vs. Mario and drops a match that he absolutely should have won.

But what happens if Cloud does win? I'd argue that the contests are significantly worse off for it. For one, we don't get Mario/Crono in 2002, which honestly cemented the contest's greatest rivalry. Crono's entire underdog act is because he went toe to toe with Mario after Cloud lost. Cloud's loss is really important there. The 2003 bracket is set up for a rematch because of it, and we probably don't get that without the 2002 match. Sure, we would most likely get Mario/Crono eventually, but Crono was only competitive with Mario until the Nintendo boost hit in 05. Cloud winning deprives us of our contest's best match.

The other thing to wonder is how Cloud would have done vs. Link. Sephiroth got 43% - maybe Cloud gets to 46? Does the 2003 final feel like such a shocker if Link doesn't have the same aura of invincibility that he had after the 2002 contest, where no one could even get 45%? I think things worked out for the best here. But, I would still love to know exactly what happened in the Mario/Cloud match, because that is the biggest unexplainble contest anomaly we've had. Starcraft, Draven and Undertale are very easily explainable. Mario/Cloud? That one's just bizarre. Super Mario Sunshine was disappointing before it came out and no other major release coming out mid-contest has ever had a fraction of the impact that this one supposedly had. And Planet Gamecube isn't exactly twitter or reddit, you know?

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Yeah, like Mario/Crono II, the contests are better off with the result being what it was

The contests became worse once Mario turned face in 2005 imhotbqh

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3. What if the site doesn't go down during Link/Draven?

This one is just a bummer. Even in a rally, you want a fair fight. Link/Draven wasn't a contest match, it was an internet war. What do you do during an internet war? DDoS, of course. The site goes down for something like 90 minutes during the peak hours of Link's comeback against Draven, something that would be a gigantic coincidence if it was anything but intentional.

Link lost this match by 765 votes as Draven just simply ran out of votes. Would the 90ish minute downtime have given Link the time to mount his comeback? It depends on how you look at it. I think the numbers suggest that yes, Link could have made the comeback given how he was cutting. But at the same time, what happens if Link does take the lead here? Does the push get even stronger on the Draven side? We saw that with Undertale, when Melee tried to push ahead and Undertale just swatted it away like a fly. I think Draven wins this one regardless, but it's a great what if.

What's more interesting, perhaps, are what could have happened if Draven lost here. Do we get the biggest antivote in contest history next round as people go out of their way to destroy Link? Do we still see some of the utter madness of the last few days, where Cloud loses to Squirtle and Mewtwo bombs Sonic? Perhaps Snake wins the contest over Link? Something would have happened and it's hard to say what. Once the box is opened, you don't just stuff it back and pretend nothing happened. It would have been nice for the GameFAQs hero to win here, but it's still funny that we would rally behind the destroyer of competitive balance of all things. I guess we prefer our conqueror to someone else's!

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Draven still had cards to play. Draven didn't get a pinned topic for his match against Link. If Link made a comeback, Draven might have gotten that and we saw later on that the effect was devastating.
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Yeah, Draven may have won anyway, but I would've wanted to see what would've happened if Link had taken the lead.

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Chrono Trigger would have most certainly won the 2015 contest if the rallies didn't happen. It had absurd natural strength and was a beast that year. That and it severely outperformed Ocarina of Time in all its matches to support that theory.

Ocarina looked pretty bad in its matches against Suikoden II, FFIX and SotN whereas CT nearly doubled FFX and was well on its way to a 60-40 and rising beating on Melee before it's rallies kicked in.

hmm, I wonder which is correct. GameFAQs says 8/25.


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HG/SS came out on the day of Bowser/Charizard, yes.

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