(4)Zelda vs (4)Cloud Strife (Losers Bracket) 2018

Ulti's Analysis
I feel like this match would have had a lot more impact had we not quite literally just watched Cloud beat Mario with the exact same trends and for the exact same reason. Cloud was in Smash, which gave him the boost he needed to stop embarrassing himself. It's really that simple. Here, you even get the same video I used last writeup because you might be a wiki reader reading these out of order or something.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wah7AGkkzl4

This match wasn't as exciting as Cloud's comeback on Mario, for two reasons. One, there is no history here. There was no hype, no insane loss from 2002 that Cloud was trying to make up for, no connection from people that grew up on contests and stayed on Board 8, nothing. In fact these two had never even been in a poll together before this match.

The other reason is the early numbers being much smaller for Zelda than they were for Mario. Mario built up a 300 vote lead early and looked like he would do what he always does before Cloud pulled off one of the more surprising comebacks we'd ever seen. He reversed trends. That is not an easy thing to do.

But when you repeat the exact same pattern one day later on a smaller scale, it doesn't mean as much. Cloud actually won the board vote here, which he never does, and then Zelda only built up a lead of 127 before she started struggling. Mario breezed past 300 before that happened, so when Zelda struggled much earlier we all knew what was coming. The only real point of contention here would be whether or not Cloud could win the morning/day vote over a Zelda character, which is simply a different beast than the Mario characters. It's like watching Aquaman fight all these amazing subterranean beasts with the awesome technology. It's great and all, but then he meets the fucking kraken.

Turns out Cloud = Aquaman, Zelda = Mera, and Link = Thanos isn't all that crazy of a comparison. Zelda did her thing over the first few hours, and even got a lead inching toward 300 at one point, but Cloud erased it all overnight and had just proven he was capable of morning/day success against Nintendo with Smash's backing. So when Cloud won the morning vote and then beat the shit out of Zelda all day long until the poll ended, it wasn't a surprise. Which is a shame, because had the Mario match not just happened, this would have been a huge shocker. Just some bad luck for Zelda, I suppose. Switch this match with the Mario match in the bracket layout and we're telling a much different story here, but it is what it is.

This also doesn't mean Zelda wasn't the star of the contest, either. She just ran out of gas after losing to Link, and I think a lot of people when faced with a choice of an all-Zelda final versus a Link/Cloud final, they picked the option less likely to be an SFF embarrassment. Can't blame them.