(1)Squall Leonhart vs (16)Hat Kid 2018

Lightning_Strikes's Analysis
What happened?: A disappointing Final Fantasy performance? In this contest? Well I never. Squall looked really, really bad at the start of this match, struggling to get over 70% in the first hour. He quickly improved from there, rapidly improving to a tripling where it was more or less steady, but it was still a fairly poor show. Hat Kid looked very frontloaded here, for a while escaping a doubling, and Squall showed the same trends expected of a "modern" FF character. Squall also did better with the registered user vote which is fairly critical for his later matches.

What could this mean?: I hope this is the match that hammers home the poor show that FF has given throughout this contest. Before the contest started there was talk of Squall being the new #10 character after Vincent declined. He did worse on Hat Kid than Bowser did on Gordon so that clearly isn't the case (and if it is, lol Gordon). Hat Kid is largely expected to be a bottom five character, we won't know for sure for a little while, but looking at the relative popularity of A Hat in Time I have a very hard time imagining her doing better than certain other characters she would need to beat for Squall to be anywhere near his old strength.