(1)The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim vs (5)Metroid Prime 2015

Ulti's Analysis
Some people will blame rally spillover for why Metroid Prime took the early lead in this match, but I think it's a lot more simpler than that. Metroid Prime is really strong early in polls, and Skyrim was never quite on the world-beating level a lot of us Skyrim fans were hoping for. That's why we all picked it to lose to Mario 64 in our brackets. The rally spillover did clearly help with vote totals though, which is always awesome!

Metroid Prime's trends, and really Metroid in general, are very well-known by now. Wreck shop in the first hour, bleed percentage overnight, and then totally collapse during the day vote. Those ugly trends tend to cost Metroid sooner or later in every contest, and in this contest those trends cost the Metroid series not one, but two major upsets. The Skyrim loss wasn't so bad, but it was Super Metroid's loss to Majora's Mask later on in this round that really stung.

Early on in this poll, Metroid Prime was flying high and really looked like it would ride to a rather simple 52-48 win. It built up a 400 vote lead an hour in, and though it slowed down a little bit after that, Prime was still able to go up a little bit more overnight. The lead would ultimately peak at 455 before both games started going 50-50.

As we got closer and closer to the dead zone, Skyrim began to slowly pick up steam. It would get the lead below 300 just before 6 am, and we know how Metroid Prime is during the morning and day vote. True to form, Metroid completely fell apart once the morning vote hit. There was minor resistance, but Skyrim was able to catch up at 8:50 am. There was a stall by Prime once this happened, but it was ultimately helpless to stop Skyrim from passing it by as we got farther and farther into the day vote.

There was a lot of stalling by Prime even as Skyrim slowly trended upwards, and any hope Prime had of coming back faded when the ASV decidedly favored Skyrim. Skyrim would end things with a 734 vote win, which makes for a respectable 1200 vote turnaround. Without the presence of rallies and only relying on trends, that's pretty impressive. Granted it meant Skyrim was doomed against Mario 64, but we all knew that anyway.

For Metroid Prime, it was the same old story. It got stuck against Wind Waker in round 2 in 2004, the day vote plus Paper Mario caused it to lose in round 1 in 2009, it almost lost to Half-Life 2 in Game of the Decade because of having a day match, it did lose to Fallout 3 for the same reason, and now this. Poor Metroid Prime just cannot catch a break.