(8)Shadow the Hedgehog vs (9)Ness 2018

Ulti's Analysis
I have to confess something. I legitimately love the Sonic clan and they're a bunch of really cool characters. Yeah yeah, not a great thing to admit. Don't care. The games aren't great sometimes, but the characters are all really cool. Any time Sonic or Shadow or Tails or Knuckles is in a contest match, it takes me back my my Sega Genesis Sonic 2 days as a kid. If you want a great reason for me to loathe furries and despise that fan base, there you go. They ruined something that was once amazing.

I also tend to overrate them, especially Shadow, when making picks. I picked the dude to win two matches this year. I picked him to beat Zidane in 2008. I really wanted to pick him over Tidus in 2004. I love the dude. He looks like Sonic, but he's all dark and cool and such. What's not to like?

Turns out most voters don't see it that way, and this match stayed remarkably stable for the entire 24 hours. The percentages basically never moved, which kinda sucked. I like Ness, don't get me wrong. You all know my love of EarthBound by now. But Shadow is my dude. At least this was a respectable loss with an obvious reason attached. Ness is no longer the character we thought could lose to Jak, the character who was the odd one out during the closest finish ever, the character that lost to Pac-Man (ugh), the character that got 40% on GlaDOS, the character we all thought could lose to Locke, and most importantly, the character that got rolled by Big Daddy. This Ness has been in Smash Bros for almost 20 years, he's had EarthBound rereleased a few times, and the Angry Video Game Nerd finally did a review of his game.

He isn't big time now, but he's certainly big enough to beat Shadow the Hedgehog. Maaaaaybe Shadow could have won this if he were an echo fighter in Ultimate, but it was not meant to be. The real shame is most of us thought the winner of this could beat 2B, too, and I would have loved to see Shadow make it into round 3. Turns out 2B ain't no slouch.