Results[]
Thursday, April 23, 2020
Ulti's Analysis[]
| Division | Division 4 |
|---|---|
| Match # | 103 |
| Match Date | Thursday, April 23, 2020 |
| Oracle Expectations |
Persona 4 Golden - 48.69% 21 for - 30 against |
| GameFAQs Prediction |
Persona 4 Golden - 14.01% |
| User Votes |
Grand Theft Auto V - 4827 Persona 4 Golden - 4698 |
| Anonymous Votes |
Grand Theft Auto V - 3783 Persona 4 Golden - 4637 |
This was the first round 3 match featuring a Grand Theft Auto game or character in 17 (!!) years, since way back in 2003 when Tommy Vercetti beat Kite and Donkey Kong before bowing out to Mega Man. In any other contest, round 2 has been the hard cap. GTA has a very dubious contest history on this site, and though it has a massive fanbase, very few people in that fanbase are on this web site. It's an interesting dichotomy that's led to GTA never truly scoring blowouts, but never really getting blown out either, all while occasionally being on the receiving end of some hilarious upsets.
Here are the famous ones:
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/2067-mushroom-division-round-1-ness-vs-carl-johnson
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/4094-southeast-division-round-1-pokemon-emerald-vs-grand-theft
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/4150-south-division-round-2-golden-sun-vs-gta-san-andreas
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/6140-best-game-ever-day-23-round-2-gta-san-andreas-vs-chrono
Japanese RPGs and anti-voting are the GTA kyptonite, apparently. Oh and while a lot of people won't consider Pokemon RSE over GTA4 an upset, a lot of people were floored that anyone cared about a Pokemon game past generation 2.
But leading up to this match, GTA5 just felt different. It's become very clear that on this site, Grand Theft Auto 5 is the one game in that series with true, legitimate strength. Yes it eats anti-votes, but it's still able to buck a lot of the trends that killed GTA in the past. Given Persona 4 Golden is a Vita title that struggled mightily with Red Dead Redemption, it looked as if this year, GTA might finally be able to break through the concrete ceiling, break into and through round 3, and maybe even win a division. It was right there for the taking.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBHnP2wXR5Q
It's hard to imagine Grand Theft Auto getting a better opportunity than this one, guys, and it still didn't happen. I know the final result looks close, but this match was never in doubt at any point. Persona 4 won the board vote, and though it built up a lead extremely slowly with all of the usual bumps, stalls, and minor cuts, Persona 4 was able to take that board vote and methodically march to the finish line with a 600 vote win. There were only two points during the entire match where it looked like Grand Theft Auto 5 might make a game of it. Once was late in the evening when it shaved almost 150 votes off of a 400 vote lead, and the second time was the morning vote. Persona 4 had a lead of just over 600 at the time, and GTA5 managed to shave almost 200 votes away.
Under normal circumstances there would be drama there, but this is Grand Theft Auto against a Board 8 darling. Even if this match got super close, there is no chance Board 8 wouldn't have rallied their balls off to hand this win to Persona. The end result was Persona 4 moving on, and Grand Theft Auto having to wait until its next opportunity. Again. But if not now, then when? Barring GTA being handed a laughably weak division intentionally, this was the perfect setup. As it stands, Grand Theft Auto 5 would be the one and only 1 seed to not last until the finals of its own division.
For those playing the home game, all three remakes made it into the final 16 of this contest. We can argue about the legitimacy of Resident Evil 2 all day, but no one will ever convince me Persona 4 Golden or Pokemon HGSS should have been in this contest. I'm no GTA fan by any stretch, but Vita games behaving like they have the strength of the original game goes against the spirit of a contest like this. But it is what it is, and this would set up a wonderful match between Persona 4 Golden and Xenoblade Chronicles for the divisional title.
"But Ulti, you haven't done the writeup for Xenoblade and Fire Emblem yet. You're kind of spoiling it there, buddy."
If anyone at this point of the contest thought Three Houses was beating Xenoblade, they're out of their damn mind.
Ctes's Analysis[]
This match would be the final match of the contest where the consensus of what game won going into the match would not be the correct one. Grand Theft Auto V was expected to win this match because Red Dead Redemption had almost beaten Persona 4 Golden and GTAV was expected to be better. Others were thinking that they wouldn’t perform too differently indirectly against something like a Persona game and that Persona 4 Golden would win again because of it, but GTAV was the popular pick today.
This was the match that decided Last Man Standing after not a single user got anything wrong since Dragon Age dropped the ball. Four users had been competing since then and three of them picked GTAV today. The winner, Agent_M, only survived here because he played it safe for future rounds.
The match had some similar trends to the previous edition of Persona 4 Golden takes on a Rockstar game. Persona would win the board vote, but then not really get very far. GTAV actually did better than Red Dead Redemption did at that point, probably because it had more bracket votes. Persona was 45 votes ahead and the freeze and the match stood still for a couple of updates after that, then Persona took off, and it was a good bit faster than it was against Red Dead Redemption, indicating that perhaps GTAV won the board vote, at least relative to the rest of the match.
Persona 4 took off a lot faster than the first time once it got going, though GTAV would cut and stall a bit. Once Persona 4 had neared in on about 400 votes, GTAV would make a fine comeback attempt by cutting a bit more than 100 votes off in an hour, but it didn’t go further than that and Persona 4 descended once more. The final attempt from GTAV came when had just passed the 600-vote lead. GTAV would stall for a while and then make a run for it with plenty of time to go. It managed to cut off about 200 votes this time, but it made less and less progress every hour and eventually time was running out and Persona 4 began gaining again and won by almost 600 votes, making GTAV lose by more than Red Dead Redemption did.
It was never truly exciting and despite the comeback hours, no one really doubted Persona 4 would win once the match was on. The last round taught us that. If it came down to it, Board 8 would definitely bail out Persona 4 once more. Not many believed it stood a chance in the division finals, though we’d learn it absolutely did.
I am not doubting that Persona 4 was stronger in round 3 than round 2. It does not necessarily mean Persona 4 would have lost to GTAV in round 2, but I think a lot of us were too quick to just accept that Red Dead Redemption was the stronger Rockstar game. It had definitely caught a bandwagon in the next round, and I think it begun already here. I’m not saying it’s impossible Red Dead Redemption is the stronger one, but I don’t think their matches against a game that clearly boosted by beating them settles any debate, and there’s just more reason to think GTAV is the stronger game. It’s the bigger franchise even on this site, and it was significantly stronger last time too.
We’ll probably never know for sure, because this is the best chance we’ll ever have of two Rockstar games meeting, and hey, this is the furthest a Grand Theft Auto game has ever gone in a contest, although Tommy Vercetti has also managed round 3 before, which was top 16 and not top 32 because of a smaller field. It’s the first #1 seed to fall and the only one that doesn’t fall to the others, but that hardly makes it a flop in my opinion. GTAV might have been the favorite to the division finals, but that’s because people didn’t expect Persona 4 Golden to be a perfect Persona 4 proxy and thought it would be hurt from being a Vita port of a 2008 game. Beating Cuphead so easily when a lot of people were scared it could drop then was what it needed to do to not embarrass itself relative to the site we’re on.
Safer777's Analysis[]
After the previous P4 match which it barely beat RDR nobody knew what to expect. RDR and GTA are similar series by the same company. Hell everyone is calling RDR series GTA with horses anyways. But neither of these games is well liked here on Gamefaqs. However we all hypothesized that GTA is slightly stronger as a series so yeah tough match to predict. The Crew was split too and nobody had the winner with above 53. Basically anything could happen. A rally could affect everything too.
So for the match. Well as you can see once again P4 manages to win barely BUT it did better than it did RDR. Does that mean that in this site RDR series is stronger than GTA series? Well according to the results seems so. But it is like that? I don't think so personally even though the stats say different. GTA 5 still has so many people playing online and RDR 2 is still popular so it is not that we have forgot any games. So why I think so? I just don't know. GTA series is just the archetype for open world games so I just value that above all else. Obviously there were always open world games but GTA 3 made them REALLY popular.
Also no rallies and such to make us adjust stats and such. Also P4G the only Vita game to reach the division finals AND the lowest seed of them all too! So damn! Persona series is legit now. That is good. Still GTA 5 is one of the few games that trully deserve the GOTD win. Also I don't mention the user/non users bonuses in any match but here the users voted for GTA 5 much more than they voted P4G which is hilarious for our site! Is GTA 5 that liked here??? Also the prediction percentage was damn low. Makes sense since casuals always back GTA in the contests. If P4G won the division finals it would be one of the lowest prediction percentages ever!
Tsunami's Analysis[]
If we needed any more proof that "Reddit" is not a single unified entity, this was it. While rally topics for the other match on this day, and just about every other day, were calling us "weebs" for advancing P4G over GTAV, the Persona fanbase was trying to "buttdevastate" us by advancing it. And looking at the numbers...the Persona fanbase had it right! While Golden didn't reprise its feat of having more unregistered voters than registered, it was again really close between the two, while GTAV had a lot more support among registered voters than unregistered and actually took the registered voting block by 129 votes--not nearly enough to overcome the massive advantage P4G enjoyed with the unregistered voters. Just over 14% of brackets got this right, the second straight round in which more than half the brackets that had advanced it this far had picked against it. If this trend kept up, a P4G win in Round 4 would probably be among the least predicted matches of all time.
Oh, and if you're looking for a long blow-by-blow of this match, don't bother. Persona 4 Golden's lead was 386 by quarter past 10--just a few votes shy of the max lead in RE2-Bloodborne, at the time of day that match was having its freeze. GTAV would spike a huge update win not long after that--in fact, it was the largest swing of any update, including those early ones that are typically larger due to the higher vote totals--but P4G controlled this match from start to finish. While it didn't challenge the record that it had set the previous round (max lead of 458), it again made the top ten of that list, with its maximum lead at 616. Two consecutive wins in which it never trailed, and the largest lead it had in either match was 616. But would it be able to clutch out another win?
Also, this was considered an upset with Board 8 as well, no matter how you slice it. 52.11% picked GTAV to win this match to just 32.39% for P4G (although it should be noted that if you take it as "winner of Match 77" vs. "winner of Match 78", this was considered a debated match, 54.23% for the former; GTAV was just a far easier pick to reach this point), and the Oracles favored GTAV 30-21.