(1)Super Mario Bros. 3 vs (8)Pokémon Red/Blue/Yellow/Green 2015

Ulti's Analysis
This match was just brutal to watch. I have no problem with Pokemon whatsoever and have no issue with it winning, but seeing Mario 3 just get decimated like this was heartbreaking. My childhood just evaporated right before my eyes with this one; Mario 3 was the video game for me as a kid. There was Mario 1 and Mario 2 and Zelda 1 and Zelda 2 and Tetris, but Mario 3 was the absolute pinnacle. To see it get thoroughly destroyed like this was really something else, not that there weren't obvious extenuating factors.

Pre-contest, this was the argument everyone was having. Picking the correct paths of these two games likely meant winning the contest, because there was more at stake beyond 2 points. Mario 3, Mario World, or Mario 64 could have all potentially done anything in between losing to Pokemon or making the finals of the contest, and it meant for some amazing hype.

Personally I thought Mario 3 was the easy choice, because outside of IT'S FREAKING MARIO™ reasons, we had these two polls:

http://www.gamefaqs.com/poll/4179-northwest-division-round-3-zelda-majoras-mask-vs-pokemon http://www.gamefaqs.com/poll/4570-final-rounds-semifinal-mario-vs-bowser-pokemon-trainer-red

We'd seen a hyped Pokemon game get hyped up to the level of a 1 seed from a more powerful Nintendo franchise before. Majora's Mask smacked it down. The trainers got bandwagoned hard during rivalry rumble, and Mario smacked them down. So I thought for sure this match would be more of the same.

Now before getting into the Undertale rally, I really want to put to rest the idea that Mario 3 would have won a fair match. I can admit defeat, and this contest really showed us that Mario's "magic" is just completely gone. He's actually become the contest version of Mario in Smash Bros, which is kind of hilarious. He's very hard to rally against, but he's also very hard to rally for. He's just kind of the standard bearer, which is a pretty funny place for him to be in. People will point to the Vivi loss as his magic disappearing, but really it was this match and Super Metroid > Galaxy.

Anyway, look at the beginning of this poll. Pokemon won the board vote, and while Mario 3 fought like hell to keep things from getting out of control, Pokemon was slowly trending up. Then the power hour ended, and Pokemon just took off. Some people will say the Undertale rallies being there at the start meant Mario 3 was screwed from the beginning, but I don't think there's some alternate universe where Mario could have won this match. This was trending toward Pokemon finishing with a comfortable 55-45 win right when the power hour ended, and if Undertale never happened do we really think Mario gets this any closer than 53-47? It's like the Mario series had any extra luster this contest.

The other point is Undertale didn't get berserk until well past noon. Pokemon had things locked up by then and the match had already been 55-45 for hours. I imagine this is a result Mario fans would have been okay with, but once the Undertale rally truly took hold this match just got brutal. From 1:30 pm onward, Pokemon rode the wave of being the beneficiary of rally love. This match went from 55-45 to Pokemon pulling in updates well over 65%, and some hit well higher than that. It turned the match from a respectable loss for Mario into an absolute beating, and things ended with Pokemon getting an insane 63-37 win.

Needless to say, the hype for Pokemon vs Undertale hit a fever pitch once this all ended, and for good reason. If Pokemon could benefit a lot from Undertale's rally, logic would say that a lot of the people being rallied for that match would favor Pokemon. Granted this would assume Undertale beat Mario World, which was a massively tall order, and is something we'll go over when we're actually talking about Undertale's match itself.

Worth noting here is Mario 3 was the first 1 seed to lose in this contest, and it was the first 1 seed to lose in round 2 to an 8 or a 9. We had seen a couple of 4/5 > 1 upsets in the past, which are technically the same thing, but there's just something different about seeing 8/9 > 1. Maybe it's the NCAA fan in me.