(8)Missingno vs (11)Tidus vs (20)Banjo 2013

Ulti's Analysis
We all knew Missingno wouldn't be able to repeat his run from 2010, but we all took that to mean Squall would beat him in round 2. Almost losing to Tidus in round 1 was crisis averted territory, and it's safe to say that this was another of those barnburner matches that was decided on early bracket voting.

Though to be fair, there was no indication early that this was going to be such a great match. Missingno jumped to an early lead, stretched it to 350, and things looked basically over. Even if Tidus made a run during the Square hours, this is Pokemon we're talking about. Day vote, and all that.

But then the funniest thing happened. Not only did Tidus stall the hell out of this match for a few hours overnight before he started cutting into the lead, but he actually gained steam with the morning vote. It was completely ridiculous and against every trend we've ever known about Pokemon, but it was happening. Tidus, master choke artist galore, won the morning vote over a Pokemon in a close match.

Even as the match drew closer and closer, Board 8 really couldn't process what was going on. It wasn't until Tidus tied the match at 9 am, without slowing down at all, did people realize that this was for real. Tidus passed Missingno, then slowly built up a lead of 80 votes at around 10:30. But that's fine, this was a Pokemon character! Surely the rally would come!

...but then it stalled for another 30 minutes, and the match was still 70 votes apart at 11 am. Then Missingno cut 20 votes, so we all assumed rally time.

...but no. Tidus kept it under control and kept the match 70 votes apart with 30 minutes to go. I'd love to go on and say it stayed that way, but Missingno only needed three updates to erase everything Tidus has worked 10 hours to accomplish, and he himself got up to a 30 vote lead with two updates left.

Then the most hilarious thing of all happened. Tidus actually cut 8 votes from the lead, which meant that piddly update from the last couple minutes actually mattered for once. Missingno would end up taking it by 2 votes, winning the match by 23 votes, and just narrowly escaping one of the most embarrassing upsets ever. Missingno would end up getting that morning vote we all assumed he would get, but it didn't happen until there were only 30 minutes left in the match. Better late than never, I guess.

Now normally this is where I'd get into Tidus always getting a bad draw and always seeming to lose these close heartbreakers, but yet again, we had a confirmed cheater in the midst. When everyone on Board 8 expected Missingno to get tagged for cheating, Allen gave us this gem:

SBAllen posted... The results of this battle are correct as you see them. After the semi-successful vote-stuffing for the Touhou characters, we implemented new stricter anti-bot code. It worked well and weeded out the sources the vote-stuffing came from.

We caught vote-stuffing at a 2-to-1 ratio for Tidus. Votes from new visitors (i.e. any possible vote stuffing) was 50.7% for Tidus. There was also a small-scale reddit rush in the last hour which resulted in a lot of last minute voting.

Check that again.

SBAllen posted... We caught vote-stuffing at a 2-to-1 ratio for Tidus.

HA HA HA HA HA

HA HA HA HA HA

HA HA HA HA HA

Feel-good story ruined pretty quickly, though Tidus can at least take solace in exposing Missingno before the big Squall match.