(8)Pokémon Red/Blue/Yellow/Green vs (6)Undertale 2015

Ulti's Analysis
Pokemon fans, plus a lot of contest fans, felt Pokemon was this contest's last hope. One might say they had all of their hopes and dreams for this contest attached to Pokemon's performance in this match: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGaneyDfyls

Before getting into the match, I owe Chris a huge thank you. People tried throwing shade at my Pokemon picture, and Board 8's resident Pokemon guru was very kind in defending it and telling everyone the picture was a great representative of the game. That meant the world to me man, I appreciate it. It was really hard to make and took a long time, too. Normally when people whine about a picture I really don't care; it only bothers me when I know I put a ton of effort into one of them, and that picture took forever to get just right. I made the background blurry on purpose, by the way. I've never liked when backgrounds stood out and took the focus away from the foreground. It was a pain in the ass to take the same city, render it 4 times in 4 different colors, line it up so it formed the same original city, then make it blurry enough to put the focus on the sprites while not being a blob. It was a hard picture to do and I'm very proud of it, so having one of Board 8's three big Pokemon guys (Chris, Red, TRE) like it was awesome. It shut down the rumblings of blaming the picture for the loss, too, which I really appreciate. My best will never be as good as KP/Zen/greatone/etc's best, but I do try. These days the PCA, making images, and cheering on my favorites is why I still do this. I've already had "the thrill of winning", so now I'm mainly here to have fun. Making pictures is a lot of fun, and everyone wants to be appreciated. Not gonna lie though, when the rally got going and my image was everywhere on the internet, it was a very weird experience. Then the same thing happened to an even bigger degree with Melee/Undertale and it was a huge "holy shit, hundreds of thousands of people are actually looking at this" moment. It was really neat, if not really intimidating, seeing my stuff all over social media. I don't know how the other picsmiths feel when that happens, but I honestly wasn't expecting how neat it was. It fills you with determination to try even harder to make better pictures for future matches, that's for sure.

Anyway, enough sentimental stuff. Match time. This was the match that many people felt would decide the contest, and most people knew that tumblr, one of the major rally outlets for Undertale, was Pokemon's big stronghold. This would be Undertale's hardest test yet, and it would be its first match against a game that would be able to fight fire with fire. Mass Effect 3 had no hope, Fallout 3's fans didn't care, and there's really no way to rally for Mario. He's the standard-bearer. But Pokemon fans? Pokemon fans can and do rally, often to very high levels. And if Pokemon's fandom was on point, it could easily match whatever Undertale could put out. There wasn't much logic here beyond "can Undertale pull votes from tumblr?", just a potential rally vs rally fight with obscene vote totals.

When the match began, Pokemon was nothing short of dominant. "Dominant" is a fair word to use because even though there was a massively frontloaded vote for Pokemon followed by a percentage bleed, Undertale's bandwagon had taken a huge hold by this point of the contest. It was putting out updates upwards of 250-300 votes, and it barely mattered beyond high total votes for the match. Pokemon easily matched and surpassed these updates, and just went to town overnight. Every time Undertale seemed to spike, Pokemon would also spike. The belief that Undertale's rally would also draw in Pokemon fans seemed to be true, and all that stuff about backfire rates seemed to be accurate. Undertale was pulling in its highest vote totals of the entire contest, and Pokemon was, relatively speaking, just laughing at it. There may have been a percentage bleed overnight, but it was a slow percentage bleed and did little to stop Pokemon from building up a huge lead. To give an idea of numbers, Pokemon was at 60% with a lead of nearly 3000 votes two hours in. Two hours into the Super Mario World match, Mario World had 60.96% but only a lead of 2376, and was bleeding percentage at a massive rate.

This was clearly a different match altogether. Undertale tried to stall overnight, including even a 50-50 stall for a time, but it did not stop Pokemon from going up in the end. It rocked the night vote, the percentage bleed was slow, and things kept right on moving in Pokemon's favor come the morning vote. The percentage bleed actually stopped come the morning vote, and Pokemon really took the gloves off. While Undertale sat there getting 150-2000 votes per update (which is a HUGE number and meant the final vote totals would be nuts), Pokemon was getting a solid 200-300 every update and did not care. This match settled into a nice pocket in the morning, and really looked as if things would finish in the 56-44 range.

I say this because despite Undertale's best efforts -- rally threads were clearly everywhere -- did nothing to even slow Pokemon down. This match stayed at 56-44 all morning and every update was "Pokemon +50". It stayed this way until well past lunch. At 12:55 pm EST, with just over 11 hours to go in the poll, Pokemon's lead peaked at 7570. At this point, Undertale would have had to cut 57 votes per update to come back and win the match. Even at this point when Undertale's rally went up a little in power, it was doing nothing more than shaving at the lead below quota and bleeding percentage. Pokemon was even able to win updates with good numbers during this time, so for the next few hours as Undertale rallied the troops, Pokemon was still very much doing well. It was putting tons of votes out there, it was keeping Undertale at more than arm's length, and things looked really good. Remember how at 12:55 the lead was 7570? Even with Undertale cutting votes, the lead didn't get below 7000 until 3:30 pm. Had things stayed like this, with Undertale getting around 200 an update and Pokemon fluctuating between 150-200, Pokemon easily would have won.

I'm gonna pause right here for a few side notes. During the entire morning vote, Undertale was pronounced dead, and for good reason. Undertale had a rally going to be sure, but Pokemon had a really good rally going. r/Pokemon had a topic at the very top, there was a Facebook/Twitter presence, and there was a large tumblr presence. Undertale had the same stuff, but to win this match it really needed to be able to beat Pokemon on tumblr. For this reason, most people assumed the match was over. It seemed as if the tumblr/backfire logic was true, and more importantly, this was the first Undertale opponent that bothered fighting back all contest. That's really what was missing all contest from Undertale's opponents, and here, it had an opponent that clearly did not give two fucks about things like rallies, bandwagons, or hype. Any time Undertale stepped out for the first 12 hours of this poll, Pokemon just smacked it down like a weed. Pokemon hadn't even really gone full force, either. Bulbapdia, Serebii, and there were several pros and developers that could basically end the match any time they wanted to. Us Undertale fans always knew this match was probably the end of the line for very logical reasons, though it was still very hard to watch. A lot of people acted ridiculous and pretended they knew this contest was over after the Mass Effect 3 match. Reasonable people knew that Pokemon was the true road block. We really did have our hopes up about winning the contest once it beat Mario World. Even we were resigned to losing and had basically lost hope in beating Pokemon. That's how over this match was. We all knew the trends and knew how strong Pokemon could be when it tried.

But then, come the ASV, the absolutely unthinkable happened. @undertale_bot made one tweet asking people to vote in the poll, and the mother of all floodgates immediately opened. There was no gradual build here. Undertale started cutting 100 votes per update, and kept doing it even as Pokemon tried to fight back against what was happening. It's not like Pokemon rolled over and died; it saw what was up and started pulling in more votes. Those fans knew how to rally too, but Undertale had practiced it enough to make it an art form by this point. Pokemon didn't stand a chance, and it was even fighting back! Didn't matter.

Allen was nice enough to legitimize the push: "Almost all of this sudden rush is from Twitter, just like last time, and it happened as soon as that account posted."

Before long, Undertale was going full Draven pulling in 350+ vote updates. Just insane numbers that Pokemon could not dream of matching, even with Masuda tweeting about the poll. As the match rapidly got close, Undertale just ratcheted things up even harder, began pulling in updates in excess of 400-450 votes, and just absolutely buried Pokemon right at 8 pm. For the next four hours Undertale slowed down only a little, and would ultimately win the poll by 3643. From the peak lead of 7570 to Undertale taking the lead, seven hours passed. This added another insane comeback to Undertale's pile, along with numbers like 9252, 6834, and 3224.

Undertale winning this match cemented it as the clear favorite in this contest, and it also set up a potentially INSANE contest quarterfinal. With Melee/FF7 and Undertale/Mario 64 happening at the same time, there was the potential of having 4 simultaneous rallies at the same exact time. Melee proved it could go, FF7 may have had to get a rally going, we all knew Undertale was coming even though Mario 64 was clearly going to roll over like Mario World did, and who knew if Mario 64 would decide to give us one final Mario Clutch moment? And if Melee was rallying, what's to say Mario 64 wouldn't benefit from extra Nintendo love? It was really fun to think about.

Undertale deserves credit here for winning, but this is the first match where we can really blame Undertale's opponent for losing. It's not that Undertale didn't deserve it, but Pokemon's fans didn't show up here. Even though a lot of rallies were going, there was a huge sentiment against RBYG from hardcore Pokemon fans -- fans whose support would have easily won Pokemon this match, even against Undertale's full efforts. Serebii did nothing. Bulbapedia did nothing. Most pros did nothing. Among developers, only Masuda cared. It's like Pokemon only wanted to put half a rally effort out there instead of truly going balls to the wall.

And why? Some ridiculous "genwunner" nonsense among the Pokemon fanbase. Rather than wanting RBYG to win and get exposure for the series, hardcore fans basically invited the loss intentionally just to prove a point. There is not a doubt in my mind Pokemon at full power would have mowed over this contest, instead the fanbase had to "beat those genwunners". I don't get it, but I certainly wasn't complaining about Undertale backdooring its way into another win and becoming the contest favorite. But make no mistake: Pokemon threw this match

"I wanna be the second best." -transience with the quote of the contest