Ulti's Analysis[]
Man does it feel good to be in the late rounds of this thing. Round 2 is always the hardest one to write, because most of the matches suck. But what can you do. A true sternographer covers everything!
After how bad Ganon looked against Chun-Li, there was some question about whether or not Dante could win here that was shut down immediately. This was legitimately a boring old 56-44 match for 24 straight hours with no movement whatsoever, so it's time to look into when and how all of our overall #1 seeds have lost. That's the seed Dante got, so it's the standard we have to evaluate him on.
Summer 2002 - Mario loses to Link in the final.
Summer 2003 - Link loses to Cloud in the semifinal in famous fashion.
Spring 2004 - Mario 3 loses in the semifinal to Chrono Trigger. This contest was seeded by era.
Summer 2004 - Link wins the contest.
Spring 2005 - Bowser loses in the semifinal to Sephiroth.
Summer 2005 - Mario wins the main bracket.
Series Contest - The Legend of Zelda wins.
Fall 2006 - Samus wins the main bracket.
[4ways didn't have real seeding, fuck outta here.]
Winter 2010 - Link wins the contest.
Game of the Decade - Fallout 3 loses in the semifinal to Brawl. This contest was seeded by era.
Rivalries - Mario and Bowser lose in the final to Link and Ganon.
Fall 2013 - Link loses in round 3 to the Draven rally and LOL 3ways.
Games 2015 - Chrono Trigger loses in the divisional final to a Melee rally.
Which brings us to this year, and Dante losing in round 3 without putting up a fight. Anything seem a little out of place on this list? Yeah, Dante himself. If you're the top seed, the standard is you make a deep run or you lose to a rally. You can't sit there and not compete before even making the finals of your own division. Normally this loss would be whatever, but this is a bad loss for a #1 overall seed. Dante clearly did not belong in that spot and was clearly overseeded based on the DMC5 hype video.
It's easy to pull a Gruden, claim 50-50 hindsight, and say it should have been obvious Zelda was our #1 overall seed. I won't go that far, because that's unfair. All I'll say on that is giving my own list of who deserved that spot with pre-contest information. No hindsight. Not who deserved it more than Dante, which would have been a much longer list, just who deserved the #1 overall seed period with our top 8 characters removed for a legends bracket.
Bowser
Ganondorf
Kirby
Luigi
Mega Man X
Pikachu
Sephiroth
Squall
Tifa
Zelda
That's 10 characters, with Sephiroth being the most obvious one since he was the odd one out of the noble nine this year. I waffled a bit on Auron vs Squall, but Squall won that match heads-up once.
To the point. Stick any of those characters at the top and they aren't losing in round 3 so easily like this unless they face each other. This was a major botch by Allen, who usually does a decent job on seeds. You can't just look at nominations, bro.
Safer777's Analysis[]
After the previous matche Dante VS Ganon was projected as a toss-up match, meaning Ganon was the favorite but of course Dante had a chance. And it made sense. I mean Dante did really good against Lightining while Ganon didn't do good with Chun-Li. So as you see from these results Ganon won easily. Huh? Why? Don't get it. Also according to this result Dante barely beats Chun-Li! What is going on here? Who before the contest would had Chun-Li scoring like 48% on Dante? NOBODY! I don't know.
I checked around and it seems that nobody knows. Seems DMC 5 hype wasn't real. Chun-Li must have been boosted right? But why? There was a post here from various polls considered the Street Fighter games and Chun-Li does better and better against Ryu. Is it because she is the most iconic female fighthing character? I would say Smash boost but she is not there too! I just don't get it. I guess Dante and Ganon have dropped a lot too? Not sure. Guess after the end of the contest we will have a clear picture. And congrats to Ganon. Maybe he is the strongest bad guy on the bracket now. We will see about that too.
Also the prediction percentage was huge for Ganon. Seems people know about the contest stuff now? I mean over 43% for Round 3 for a 4 Seed too? We see some strange things here.
Tsunami's Analysis[]
An utterly predictable result. Dante's surprisingly strong for a non-Nintendo, non-RPG character, but there's a limit to how powerful you can be if that's the case unless you're Solid Snake. (Technically also Mega Man and Sonic from among the Noble Nine, but they're still pre-PS1 platformer characters so they might as well fall under the "Nintendo" umbrella). About the only thing he has in his favor is that he is not, in fact, a western character, a fact which I frequently forget because his character design screams "American developer". Nope, he's actually Capcom, although these days, that might be even more of a liability than being non-Japanese.
But this is still a good performance against a Triforce Wielder, even if he is (ironically given that his is the Triforce of Power) the weakest of the three. I say this because even before Zelda boosted to near-Link levels this year, there was probably a wider gulf between the #3 and #4 characters from that series than between #1 and #2. Then again, it's not like Legend of Zelda has had that many characters participate. Midna was at least somewhat of a regular after Twilight Princess came out, getting into four straight contests, but other than that we've had Tingle a few times and Epona and Groose making the giant 2013 field. Of those, only Midna and Epona have managed to make Round 2, and none have made Round 3.
But that's kind of to be expected, because The Legend of Zelda has about as much cast carryover between games as Final Fantasy, except Final Fantasy has a full party of characters each game rather than a lone hero and the LoZ protagonists, while technically different characters, have the same name and similar appearances so they end up as a lone entrant in these contests. So you've got these three characters who appear in nearly every game (even if two out of three of them are technically the Identical Descendants/Ancestors of their counterparts from other games rather than truly the same person/beast every time) and a bunch of other characters who are lucky if they manage to appear twice. Why wouldn't there be a huge gulf between that trio and everyone else?