(6)Undertale vs (11)Mass Effect 3 2015

Ulti's Analysis
Before getting into anything else, I want to defend Mass Effect 3. It is the second strongest game in this contest after all, so someone around here needs to give it some love.

First and foremost, "it's not Mass Effect 2" is a dumb reason not to like a video game. 2 went above and beyond every call of duty to get you attached to the last, and had some of the best storytelling in gaming history. 3 could never live up to that, especially given how the reapers finally reached the galaxy to invade it. The whole point is 3 doesn't have time to develop anyone or anything new. You're trying not to go fucking extinct. There's no time to sit around doing 3 loyalty missions to solve James Vega's daddy issues. I know the game does technically give you infinite time (we're not exactly playing Majora's Mask here, though a looming clock probably would have improved the plot!), but the point is that you're not meant to get attached to anything new. 3 was not meant to be your first game in the series. You were already supposed to be attached to everything.

The gameplay is the best in the series, outside X having 398 different functions and directly ripping off the awful roll garbage from Gears of War. Not good in a cover shooter when X puts you in cover. Besides that, this game does the best job in all three of making all the jobs feel different. Engineers, Adepts, and Soldiers are NOTHING alike. Story and gameplay are there... for 99% of the game.

I played Mass Effect 3 after the emergency DLC that added content to the ending, so I suppose I can't really understand or respect how dumb the original ending was. I've watched it on youtube, and yeah I can see why people hated the ending itself. But the events leading up to it are not as bad as people make them out to be. Yes, we'd be better off not knowing the motivation for the reapers. Yes, the final character's logic is idiotic and was proven wrong by 3's own events. Yes, we'd be better off if everything were completely ambiguous the second Shepard entered that final elevator. But it's not THAT bad, and certainly not worth crapping on and punishing the entire game. Why punish the final 1% of the final game in a series when you've loved everything leading up to it? Plenty of works of fiction have bad endings, but get respected independent of said ending.

The ending of Return of the King sucks. The ending of Fight Club sucks. The ending of Final Fantasy 7 sucks. The ending of Superman (1978 version) sucks. The ending of Seinfeld REALLY sucks. And on and on and on. It doesn't change all of these things being good leading up to the bad ending. Why does Mass Effect 3 get punished as a whole for a bad ending? My theory is that gamers are whiny entitled brats who will never be happy with anything, though I'm sure other reasons exist -- Mass Effect 2 being a godlike game being among them.

Then there's the multiplayer, which I spent 600 hours on (http://social.bioware.com/n7hq/?name=Ultimaterializer&platform=ps3). It's a buggy, laggy mess, and I still had an absolute blast with it anyway. The shorthand reason why is JOB SYSTEM. The longer reason is that it's unbelievably fun to play. It's horde mode, where you go through 10 waves of increasing difficulty before an 11th "fight for your life and escape after 2 minutes" wave. There are 4 overall difficulties, ranging from bronze to platinum, and as you play more you unlock stronger weapons and characters and such. There are also 4 types of enemies -- Reapers, Geth, Cerberus, and Collectors. The thrill of unlocking everything is great, as is the journey to get good enough to carry platinums. These days I can boot up the Geth Trooper Soldier spec'd for max shields, the Acolyte pistol, and Flamer, and just burn everything to death in seconds. If you go through my page there, you'll see the insane amount of stuff you can unlock and play around with. I've done just about everything in the multiplayer, and it's one of my favorite game experiences of all time. Starting out as a garbage-ass level 1 nobody and becoming one of the best online players in Mass Effect 3 was a blast.

I'll get to my Undertale love in round 2, but in round 1 I was rooting for Mass Effect 3 as I hadn't yet played Undertale or learned how ungodly amazing it was. It's funny to think about how our contest champion wouldn't have won a single match if its opponent managed to avoid 500 anti-votes in the first match, but like I said during the Halo/Minecraft writeup, rallies require a lot of luck. Undertale had a great round 1 opponent, and it just snowballed from there.

For 17 hours, this was a perfectly normal, run-of-the-mill poll. It was a standard 64-36 beating that would have been forgotten 5 minutes after the match ended. But then a lone user named trace excalibur made a post on tumblr that changed the entire direction of this contest. All he did was ask people to vote for Undertale in the match. Nothing more, nothing less. Just a big fan rooting for his game to do well, which is something we'd seen thousands of times before in these contests. I don't know if someone else managed to get anything going before trace did, but his blog post on tumblr is the earliest thing I can find. By all means correct me if this is wrong.

A few minutes later at 5:15, a reddit topic went up on r/undertale. Then twitter got involved. Then 4chan and Facebook got involved. And before long, we were off to the races and watching the beginnings of the greatest contest run in this site's history.

Before getting into the ridiculous numbers of this match, I need to put in perspective just how nuts this was. Our biggest 1v1 comeback was Sonic beating Crono in 2006, with Sonic coming back from being down 2207 votes. Our biggest comeback overall before this match was Draven/Jak/Chie in 2013, in which Draven came back from being down 2483 before catching a rally of his own.

Big numbers to be sure, and very impressive records to set over 11 years of contests. Undertale would render them completely irrelevant. at 4:40 pm, with a mere 7 hours and 20 minutes to go in the entire match, Mass Effect 3 had a peak lead of 9252 votes. I'll say this again. 9252 votes. Even though the rally pieces would get put into place over the next hour or so, it still took some time to get the ball rolling. So while cuts were happening and momentum was building, it wasn't anything overly insane and wasn't remotely close to the pace needed for Undertale to actually win the match. At 6 pm, with 6 hours left, the lead was 8603. The comeback quota at this time was 120 votes per update.

It was at exactly this time where Undertale just went completely berserk. We're talking Undertale getting hundreds of votes per update, while Mass Effect 3 was struggling to even get 80 or 90. There were updates here where Undertale would get in excess of 200, 250, 300, even 350 or more votes, while Mass Effect 3 was pulling in 80 at a time. It was the perfect storm of Undertale being a hyped new game and having a rabid fanbase, and Mass Effect 3 being a game that is unbelievably easy to rally against. Had even one point of the rally faltered, it might have failed. But when all the major players all agree that Mass Effect 3 needed to lose in a display of gaming justice, you have a problem. On top of that, this was genuinely fueled by Undertale's fans wanting the game to do well so it got more exposure.

It would culminate in Undertale erasing a 9252 vote lead in a little over 6 hours, with the bulk of the work being done after 6 pm. It's a number so high, and a push so inexplicably unreal that you just had to be there and see it with your own eyes to actually believe what was going on. Reading this writeup will not do it justice for you. It isn't just the number itself, but the sheer speed of it. Doing it that quickly is insane. There was no resistance once the lead was breached, either, as Undertale would go on to win the poll by 1056 votes. To pull this off, it would pull in these numbers after 6 pm.

(6)Undertale - 14965 [73.82%] (11)Mass Effect 3 - 5306 [26.18%] Total Votes - 20271

There was a lot of predictable whining once this happened, with the crux of it being people complaining that we had another Draven on our hands and that another contest was about to be ruined and decided by outside forces. First off, this has literally never been a "GameFAQs only" contest. There has been rallying since 2002, and the entire internet getting involved has been a thing since 2002: http://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/board8/images/4/4f/PAcomicPacManScorpion.gif/revision/latest?cb=20080212045812

Secondly, there is nothing whatsoever wrong with a legal contest rally. Board 8 just likes to complain when such a rally goes against their predetermined and false narratives of what is and is not "morally allowed" in a contest. Did Board 8 complain when Frog rallied against Liquid Snake and Master Chief in 2004? No. Starcraft against Halo in 2004 (before turning on Starcraft the second the almighty Nintendo got beat)? No. Solid Snake when it started beating Final Fantasy 7? No. Pokemon when it started going godmode in the late 2000s? No. Majora's Mask when it did God's work and beat Brawl? No. Melee when it almost beat Undertale in the semifinal of this contest, two rounds after whining nonstop about Melee rallying to beat Chrono Trigger? No. L-Block when it went on its crazy run? No. Chrono Trigger when it came damn close to out-rallying Melee? No. The Trainers beating Cloud and Seph? No.

Only rallies that are deemed outsiders get whined about here, and the incessant whining makes it unbelievably easy for other sites to look at GameFAQs and only see us as whiny crybabies. I've said it before and it bears repeating until people knock it off and learn their lesson: you don't get to pick and choose which rallies are allowed. You either support all of them or none of them. If you support none of them, I respect that opinion. If you pick and choose, you're likely to get screencapped and made to go viral every time this happens from now on. And you should, until you learn your lesson. It's basic logic; you cause a de-push by completely no-selling. Had people not whined so much, it wouldn't have caused the perfect storm of "Undertale is an amazing game!" plus "Look at these turbonerds on the contest board" that kept getting quoted by undertale-shitposts on tumblr every round.

On top of that, there was no guarantee at this time that the contest was over, at least had people been smart and not started complaining so much. By causing such a massive buzz, they fed the beast. Had this been given positive energy instead, you'd be looking at having to beat Fallout 3 right after 4 was released, then Super Mario World, then Pokemon RBYG (tumblr's favorite franchise, and a game that could win any contest it wanted if the fans would ever go full force to rally for it) or Mario 3, then Mario 64, then Melee or FF7 or Chrono Trigger, then Ocarina in the final. That is an insane contest path, though having Mass Effect 3 first to get the ball rolling, followed by a strong-yet-not-Nintendo game in round 2 was the perfect chain of events. But we'll get into future matches as they come, I don't want to give the entire PCA right here and now. The point is, people on this site did every bit as much feeding of the monster as so-called outside forces did. And they made it very, very easy for people to root for Undertale to do well.

Lastly, after this match I went and played Undertale for myself. To say it's deserving of the hype doesn't really put it into proper perspective. Undertale is absolutely one of the best games ever made and deserved every amount of hype generated by this contest. I won't repeat my entire opinion about the game since I wrote a review for it (http://www.gamefaqs.com/PC/180989-undertale/reviews/161494), but I would highly recommend you play the game if you haven't yet. It's a legendary title, and once I played it I was definitely on the bandwagon for it to make a deep run in this contest. Following along and rooting for it is the most fun I've ever had in one of these things, and I'm saying this as a guy that won a contest once. Following along with and rooting for Undertale was better. The game and its community really are that good.

As of this writing, there's a post-contest poll asking if people bought Undertale as a result of the contest. 25% of people are saying they refuse to buy it out of spite, which is just ridiculous. You're refusing to play a great game because of how a poll went? Ridiculous. Someone else's opinion, or someone else acting silly should not be any factor whatsoever in whether or not to play a video game.