(2)Samus Aran vs (3)Tifa Lockheart (Legends Bracket) 2018

Ulti's Analysis
This was just a brutal match to look at, especially given this happened back in the day: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/2555-tournament-quarterfinal-samus-aran-vs-tifa-lockhart

No, those vote totals are not a typo. Samus once had a match with Tifa where she had a 900 vote lead disappear in under 4 hours, and she needed the Nintendo morning vote to bail her out. Even funnier is Samus built up a 1700 vote lead in that match, but only won by 1400. I know people reading this in 2018 might not know this, but our contests used to have things like "vote totals", "trends", and "outside interest". Square was a real terror with the night vote. Nintendo's power hour and morning votes were just unreal, and you had to be there to get how insane they were sometimes.

Fast forward 12 years. In a match that barely broke 29,000 votes, Samus beat Tifa with a bigger margin than a match that got 144,000 votes. If you take the 2018 percentages and apply them to 2006 vote totals, just for fun, you get something like this:

Samus - 84859 Tifa - 59141 Total Votes - 144000

That's almost a 26,000 vote victory. I know people are slurping Tifa for her run in this contest, but she got her ass whipped all over the place the second a truly elite character showed up. This match happened twice, too, with the exact same result both times. This was no accident. I'm sorry, but Sephiroth is not elite anymore, Mewtwo proved himself to be a fraud, and Luigi/Mega Man X just got unlucky. It happens. Tifa is clearly a step behind Samus, and the reason I bring up 2006 is because that match is far more interesting to talk about than whatever you guys call this thing. 59-41 this late in a contest without SFF is an epic annihilation. Samus was on some serious steroids this year.

I'll get more into why Square is trash later, don't worry.