(6)Magus vs (11)Vincent Valentine 2018

Ulti's Analysis
Dammit Magus, you got my hopes up again. At least this time it happened in a match we all knew you'd lose, but still. This dude was one day vote away from what would have been one of the funniest upsets in contest history.

Confession time. I never grew out of being a fan of villains, loners, anti-heroes, badasses, or the dark brooding fake gothic types. I don't try to be some badass prick in real life or whatever, I just find them more interesting characters by and large in fiction. Heroes all do the same thing. Villains and anti-heroes and such are far more complex. I could point out a litany of examples where the public is actually on my side on this and tunes in in massive numbers, like Walter White, Dexter, Thanos, Stone Cold Steve Austin, The Crow, John Wick, Omar Little, Jack Bauer, Tony Soprano, Tyler Durden, Patrick Bateman, The Godfather, or a massive number of Game of Thrones and Quentin Tarantino characters, but I'll mainly stick to video games here since this is a video game analysis.

Erm, uh.... okay I went outside video games there, but hey! Some of my favorite gaming characters are people like Magus, Vincent, Cloud, Squall, Auron, Beatrix, Yuri Lowell, Vergil, Shadow the Hedgehog, Alucard, Solid Snake, Kefka, Sephiroth, Big Boss, Garrus, Lightning (sue me), Wesker, Kratos Aurion, Riku, JC Denton, Adam Jensen, Manfred von Karma, Master Chief (sue me), Nocturne, Sovereign, the Old Gods from World of Warcraft (SUE ME), Night Stalker, a whole host of other MOBA characters INCLUDING DRAVEN DO NOT @ ME, Kratos, Samus, GLaDOS, practically any ninja, Akuma, Javik.... you get the idea. I could keep going. You might call them edgelords. I call them Lawful Evil. Orzhov Syndicate forever.

I dunno, I just find that archetype awesome. Sue me. So for me this match was awesome on a couple levels, not the least of which is Magus shocking the world for 5 hours. For the first 5 hours of this poll, things were either deadlocked or within 100 votes, and people had a lot of hope Magus could pull this upset off. On top of that, Vincent and Final Fantasy 7 haven't exactly been clutch lately. I had hope myself, but it was very cautious optimism for two reasons. First of all, I've seen way too many contest matches at this point and one trend in deadlocked matches has become exceedingly glaring. There is always one character in a very slight lead trying to shake the other one off. Very very rarely does it go back and forth. And almost always, the character doing the shaking wins. In this case, it was Vincent. So that's point number one.

Point number two.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/2088-devil-division-round-1-magus-vs-knuckles-the-echidna

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/3272-division-8-round-1-shepard-magus-sandbag-sonic

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/4563-southwest-division-final-alucard-vs-dracula-frog-vs-magus

The last time Magus was actually clutch was in 2003 against Ganondorf, which is a result that looks weirder every year. I had zero delusions the guy would actually pull this off, and was the least surprised guy on the planet when Vincent finally buried him. Still proud of the guy and still love him, but come on. It's Magus.

We really need a Magus v Tidus match so we can have an answer on who our least clutch character is.