Contest Stats and Discussion - Part 1376

Zelda 1 was in a fourway match with three Mario games and still came in third.

Big_Bob posted...

Zelda 1 was in a fourway match with three Mario games and still came in third.

Only came in third because of the Mario "Clutch," I should add...!

That result is actually a solid argument in Zelda 1's favor.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/1747-chaos-division-round-1-ryu-hayabusa-vs-jill-valentine

have it again lol

Losing by 27 votes is pretty rough. This match would end up holding the closest match record for a whole 9 days.

I wonder if Hayabusa ends up winning by a more comfortable margin if he has his classic Ninja Gaiden picture instead of...whatever that was.

CJayC wanting full body pictures for Round 1 probably meant it was easier to find DoA art withing nothing cutoff as opposed to the Xbox Ninja Gaiden game.

We still got that look for Round 2, when it was face closeups!

Big_Bob posted...

Zelda 1 was in a fourway match with three Mario games and still came in third.

Great result

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/1748-chaos-division-round-1-sam-fisher-vs-gordon-freeman

Here was your first warning sign that Magus was a fraud...!

Gordon Freeman Never Wins

The last time we saw Gordon Freeman before Half-Life 2 changed his fortunes.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/1749-chaos-division-round-1-samus-aran-vs-lara-croft

And another 80%+ match. Lara did substantially worse against Samus compared to Crono back in 2002.

Samus showing right away that she was on a different level, didn't take long for me to regret my Sonic > Samus pick!

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/1750-hyrule-division-round-2-link-vs-ganondorf

Never forget the time CATS did better on Link than Ganondorf

They don't make SFF like this anymore

At least Ganon kept Link under 80 in the rematch.

_SecretSquirrel posted...

At least Ganon kept Link under 80 in the rematch.

Which was amazing because the gap in strength between Link and Ganondorf was probably wider in the most recent character battle than in 2004. But yeah, SFF wasn't as big of a thing in recent contests. (Voters matured, I guess)

Everyone remembered that Ganondorf is actually sick in Wind Waker

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/1751-hyrule-division-round-2-yoshi-vs-luigi

I wonder how the Bowser/Yoshi/Luigi head-to-head hierarchy goes nowadays. They all seemed relatively close together when we last saw them in 2018.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/7356-division-7-final-luigi-vs-tifa
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/7337-division-2-semifinal-yoshi-vs-pikachu
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/7375-loser-bracket-round-2-crono-vs-bowser

Luigi might be a bit underrated there because of certain rallies.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/7375-loser-bracket-round-2-crono-vs-bowser
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/7361-finals-bracket-round-1-crono-vs-bowser

Perfect case study in why the sprite round makes no difference.

But what if they have equal sprite advantage?

UltimaterializerX posted...

Perfect case study in why the sprite round makes no difference.

this is a perfect case study in selective bias, please stop doing this, you know better

of course the sprite round isn't going to make a big difference when it features two characters with good sprites

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/1752-hyrule-division-round-2-magus-vs-crono

Looking back on it now, I wonder how much Crono actually SFF'd Magus. It may not have been that much.

Another match to hide Magus's true strength.

TeamRocketElite posted...

Another match to hide Magus's true strength.

Or maybe it revealed his true strength all along!

Looking at the SC2K4 raw X-Stats, Magus is ahead of Knuckles by a mere 0.03%!

I have a theory that fan-favorite characters are going to resist SFF at a higher rate than other members of the cast. For example, Yoshi would fare better than Luigi would against Mario, even though Luigi might actually be the stronger of the two.

LeonhartFour posted...

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/1751-hyrule-division-round-2-yoshi-vs-luigi

Do you think that also applies in the direct matchup then?

I suppose it could've changed but yeah.

Crono and Frog never met up I guess?

pjbasis posted...

Crono and Frog never met up I guess?

Nope

Would've been fun to see Frog vs. Magus though

No. For the better I would say. Frog's run in 2004 is easily the highlight of that contest.

I didn't mean in 2004 necessarily, but I think it would've been fun to see at some point.

I hadn't seen your post when I wrote that.

Yeah, Frog vs. Magus would be fun. Frog vs. Crono would not.

I forgot Yoshi and Luigi fought once, but Luigi was much weaker in 2004. These days I'd still take him over Yoshi.

As mentioned earlier, Luigi/Bowser/Yoshi has looked pretty even in the most recent contest. The hierarchy back then was Bowser > Yoshi > Luigi based on direct matchups with Yoshi within a year.

Luigi did beat Bowser in 2008, although 4-way wonkiness has to be considered

I think Luigi has held up reasonably well to SFF from 4-ways onward:

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/3293-division-2-final-l-snake-luigi-mario-mega-man-x
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/3842-hyrule-division-final-link-vs-luigi

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/5225-character-battle-ix-division-1-round-2-link-vs-raiden-vs

Leonhart4 posted...

Luigi did beat Bowser in 2008, although 4-way wonkiness has to be considered

I forgot that. For some reason, Bowser looks way worse in 07 and 08 compared to every single other year.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/1753-hyrule-division-round-2-bowser-vs-mario

Very similar percentage to Crono/Magus, but we can assume higher SFF here, I suppose, looking back on it now.

That's the only time Mario and Bowser would meet as opponents. I'm curious how much better Bowser would do today but we probably don't need to see the match.

In a world with less powerful SFF, Bowser should do better now, but this was also pre-Nintendo Boost Mario, and potentially the weakest version of him we ever saw.

We were only HGSS releasing a day later away from seeing it again in 2010

Leonhart4 posted...

In a world with less powerful SFF, Bowser should do better now, but this was also pre-Nintendo Boost Mario, and potentially the weakest version of him we ever saw.

That's quite a compliment to Vivi!

Rallied Vivi in that mess of a contest with Ganondorf as quite possibly the worst anchor there? Overrated match.

Although Mario's strength generally goes hand in hand with Nintendo's image, which was not its best in 2013 even if 3DS was doing good then.

Mario has low key been overrated since like 2008 but he never really gets a chance to get exposed most years

In 2008 he managed to fight off SFF for many rounds until he had to deal with both Link and Samus against Crono. Think he looks just fine there. Hard to say much about 2010. Think Samus in 2018 was a solid chance of exposition but I think if votals hadn't shrunk as much he wins those two easier. You could argue that Cloud managed to expose him.

Well, people started arguing that Mario could be the #2 on this site around 2010 once Cloud and Seph started falling back to the rest of the pack, and I never agreed with that.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/1754-20xx-division-round-2-mega-man-vs-tidus

This was a truly baffling result to me. I remember having a sig bet with Heroic Mario over this match (he had Mega Man winning the whole contest) that Tidus would break 40% and it wasn't even close. This was probably the clearest proof before 2005 that Magus wasn't all he was cracked up to be, but Link/Mega Man muddled the waters a bit, too (which we'll get to in due time).

Tidus just can't catch a break with his round 2 opponents.

Well, he had no chance to win that one, but I certainly thought he'd make it respectable, as we'd see from another perceived near elite in a few days from this.

I mean, Tidus had the 50-50 match with Shadow the Hedgehog he was supposed to have. Why would he and the rest of his fourpack in 2003 be overrated?

Just turns out Shadow was also overrated because of whatever happened against Mario.

It really is one of the weirdest coincidences ever that Tidus and Shadow were equally overrated.