Ulti's Analysis[]
I feel like this match would have been a lot more fun had we not seen the exact same trend with Geralt v Simon Belmont. creativename's site doesn't have working graphs for this contest yet, but I promise they're identical! Against Simon, Geralt struggled and didn't make his move until midnight.
Geralt struggled a little more with Bayonetta, but she has a little more Nintendo going for her. Simon has only Smash Bros and very old games that don't resonate here. Bayonetta has multiple Smash games and multiple games that this site cares for, so she was going to be stronger than him. How much stronger? About 800 votes :D
This poll was tied at the freeze, and then Bayonetta started slowly (very slowly) trying to build up a lead. Her early push peaked at only 140 before Geralt fought back, and her second push peaked at 213. From that point, this match was a big stallfest and would almost assuredly get decided by the night vote and the morning vote. Well around midnight, Bayonetta had a lead of only 150 and actually started going up during the time of Geralt's push one round ago. It actually looked like she was going to push for the win in this match when she built up her lead to 260 very quickly, but at 2 am Geralt started fighting back for good. It took him all night, but he got that lead under 100 by morning time.
This would come down to the morning vote, and like Geralt had done all contest, he swiped that morning vote and ran home with the poll. He took the lead at 8:30 in the morning and never looked back. He didn't even bother keeping it close enough for me to oogle over close wire to wire records :'(
This was Geralt's second close match in a row, and third match where the results were the result was close-ish. This was one of the contest's better matches, and while there is a very obvious joke to be made here with a witcher killing an actual witch, I have some limits to how cheesy I'll get. Some of the most fun contest runs you'll see are new characters proving they belong and winning close, and Geralt definitely qualifies for that list after this match.
There are people who credit Soul Calibur 6 for Geralt's performance in this contest, but I never cared for that series so I can't comment on whether this is accurate or not. 3D fighters are just not my thing.
Safer777's Analysis[]
This match was awesome! hightly debatable too. Not only Bayonetta was the favorite to win but Geralt win and a newcomer reaches the division finals too! Yeah the opponents are weak. Fine. But man! Geralt is awesome! Also strangely enough he won in USA too! What?Isn't Bayonetta a Nintendo character now? She is in Smash and 2 of her games are on Ninendo consoles. Also once again like the previous match Geralt was losing but he came back and won.I think he was losing like 12 hours! Don't know why this happens. But this is nice to see.
Close matches like this one are always awesome. But this proves that Geralt can't get a rally. If he hasn't gain a rally until now, he will not get one. Still I don't know if this is the best a newcomer has done, meaning reaching the division finals but still as a guy that likes Geralt I can't complain. Obviously Bayonetta did well too but it wasn't enough. And matches like this are the best ones. Close ones and we can't be sure who will win until the match ends. Not like N9'ers who based on the opponent we instantly know who will win and by how much usually. Nice win for Geralt once again.
Tsunami's Analysis[]
Legitimately close match here. Registered voters actually favored Bayonetta, by a scant 9 votes. This match does feel more appropriate to the second round than the third; these characters are too "new" to be worth anything, or so it seems. In reality, maybe not so much. Geralt, of course, has been around for a long time. Even if you only count from his video game debut, that's probably longer than you realize, because it wasn't until The Witcher 3 that he really made a name for himself. And Bayonetta's coming up on a decade, too. The first game came out in October 2009; if she makes waves in GotD, it'll have to be with the second game. It still feels like she's a newcomer, though, because of how infrequent Contests have been; she made the vote-ins in CBVIII but was so new that she couldn't even make the main field, and then in CBIX she caught an incredibly weak first-round 3-pack and then ran into a Noble Niner in Round 2. That Round 1 match was so stupid; "pick the oldest character/game" is usually a good rule of thumb for fodder matches as long as they aren't too old (which usually means 8-bit era), so when the oldest character is the consensus last place finisher in a multiway, well, you'd expect that to be something ancient, not a character whose piss-weakness also comes from being too recent.