(1)Sephiroth vs (3)Ryu 2018

Ulti's Analysis
Every now and again a match happens that I can't explain at first, and this definitely counts. Sephiroth looked like absolute shit in every single one of this matches this contest, except for this one. How? What makes Ryu so special that he's the only one this year who couldn't take advantage of Sephiroth's weaknesses? Wesker, Falcon, Amaterasu, Mario, and Tifa all made the guy look like everything ranging from 'weakened' to 'complete joke'. Yet Ryu, who had a lot of advantages in this match thanks to being in Smash 4 and hyped for Smash Ultimate, went out there and just got destroyed.

It's not like Ryu didn't do what everyone else does, either. He won the board vote. He then proceeded to get his ass whipped for 24 straight hours, and when the time came for Seph to break 60% on the guy we all just kind of sat there stunned. It was like watching Clemson just beat the absolute living shit out of Alabama in the 2019 title game. Although when you look at it, Sephiroth does kinda sorta look like Trevor Lawrence: https://a.espncdn.com/media/motion/2019/0106/dm_190106_trevor_lawrence_feature/dm_190106_trevor_lawrence_feature.jpg

My best guess here is Ryu had a similar fate to that of Gordon Freeman, the Metal Gear Solid clan, the Resident Evil characters, Commander Shepard, D.Va, and some others I might be forgetting. When your parent company is indefensible garbage, the characters pay for it in these contests. Capcom has been so bad for so long that I might have been short sighted here. It's not like the Street Fighter characters or Dante lit the world on fire in this contest, which makes sense. Street Fighter 5 was released as a half finished game, and so was Marvel vs Capcom 3 originally. Ryu is in both of those games, and Capcom at this point is known more for money-grubbing DLC practices than releasing video games that are actually good. When people think of "on-disc DLC", Capcom is the first company they think of. Ryu paying for that against legitimate competition makes sense. This match isn't all that different from Bowser beating the hell out of Gordon Freeman or Fox embarrassing all of Blizzard. People just don't want to give Sephiroth any credit for being a shit-kicking badass, because hating Final Fantasy 7 is the cool thing to do these days.

Sephiroth was the only 1 seed to actually win his division, and he had by far the highest prediction percentage in this round. It's true. Look it up. Dante, Zero, Sora, 2B, Squall, Geralt, and Luigi all failed to win their divisions. Only Sephiroth pulled it off, and he do with some Marv Alvert + Eric Cartman + Triple H authority. What a fantastic performance by the dude. Too bad he followed this up by stinking up the joint.