Ulti's Analysis[]
Let's hypothetically say Cloud had won this match. It would have meant Link's first loss. Since the legends bracket was double elimination, wouldn't that have meant a third match? This wasn't accounted for in the bracket layout, not that it mattered. Nothing was touching Link this year without a rally.
I know the percentages are similar if you look at their two matches this year side by side, but this match was a little different in that Cloud actually won the board vote before getting buried. Seeing this dude lose every single board vote since 2003 before randomly winning them this year is really something else. It's also hilarious how with all the changes we've seen over the years, our final is still Link vs Cloud after all this time. One Cloud spot in Smash Bros changed everything, and there is real anti-Link sentiment building up here. I know this is very weird to say about our most dominant character historically in a final where him not getting 60% was an act of god, but it's true. I suspect that resentment will grow, assuming we even get contests anymore after the vote total shit show we just watched. What an embarrassment. To have a contest final not break even 30,000 votes is such a damned joke. More on that with my wrapup post.
Usually in a final, even in a total mismatch, weird things happen and you naturally get a closer result. It's human nature. But sometimes, you get an entrant so savage that even the final can't be saved. In 2002, Link scored 62.53% in the final against Mario. In 2004, Final Fantasy 7 scored 58.24% in the final against Chrono Trigger. In the villains contest in 2005, Sephiroth scored 58.17% in the final against Ganondorf. In the Rivalry Rumble, Link and Ganon scored 57.72% on Mario and Bowser. In 2013, Draven scored 49.13% in a 3way match against Snake and Samus, which is completely insane when you think about it. In Years, 1998 scored 66.19% in the final match against 2001. Pretty much every other final has been close in percents, and some people would argue a few of these shouldn't be on the list. Link getting 59.27% in the final here gives him our #3 most dominant 1v1 finals performance ever. Without Smash Bros, Link easily breaks 60% and quite possibly beats his 62.53% on Mario from 2002. That's some true savagery from the guy, and Breath of the Wild is really something else. I know people want Game of the Decade 2, but the reason Game of the Decade was so good is that it was completely and thoroughly unpredictable.
I'll give you two spoilers for Game of the Decade 2. Breath of the Wild breaks 60% on everything except Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate takes second place unless we get an act of god. Which probably won't happen, because a bunch of whiny-ass children think rallying in a popularity contest is bad. More on that in a second.
I had no idea where to put this in our PCA here, but this is probably the best spot given "Cloud broke 40%" is the only thing we have to talk about for the finals of a tournament that had 150 matches in it. Fuck Squaresoft. They do a great thing by letting Cloud get put in Smash Bros, they hype us all up that they might be good partners with Nintendo again, and then they go and fuck it all up by being assholes about licensing? For who? For what? Cloud in Ultimate didn't get a custom skin for his fighting spirit (that game's version of a trophy), and Final Fantasy 7 has two songs -- the same number as Game and Watch got. What a fucking joke. Remember all that vitriol I threw at Nintendo for all those years? It's almost Square's turn if they keep this stuff up. I want to like their games, because I loved them so much in the 90s and I have hope they'll get back to being good, but they constantly and actively give me reasons not to like them. The last time I truly had an "oh shit, awesome!" moment with them was 2002. The original Kingdom Hearts. Since then, they've been just ok. For the NFL fans, you know all those "just ok" commercials you keep seeing? That's Squaresoft. Just ok is not good enough. And stop being bloated corporate idiots. Even with Cloud in Smash, Nintendo just whipped your ass 60-40. Step your game up.
I don't really feel like doing a massive takedown like I did for Blizzard, but just know that they're dangerously close to that point with me. Getting our hopes up and then pulling this trash is just unforgivably stupid after over a decade of being just ok. I don't care that you're giving us some Switch ports of old games. Go port Final Fantasy 8 and stops being idiots with licensing, you morons. Compilations, cooperation, and people working together is what everyone wants now. Should I pull up the amount of money the Avengers franchise has made so far? We haven't even gotten the fourth movie yet, which is probably going to add another 2 billion dollars to the pile. The model is right there, Square. Use it.
With that, our contest was over. Let's wrap this bad boy up.
Safer777's Analysis[]
The True Final match! Oh yeah! And a rematch too! So Cloud did managed to do 1% better and finally break 40% on Link. I guess since he both beat Mario and Zelda in a row in close matches too he got a bit of momentum. Of course no way he would beat Link after he lost so much in the first match. Link is too strong now. Nothing except a major rally(which will not happen because no outsider cares enough now)would make Link lose. Still nice to see Cloud reaching the final. Again! Maybe he is the 2nd strongest character here anyways. But man Link dominated this contest. Well makes sense. BOTW and Smash. So that was it. The final match of the contest.
After all these years the final match is Link VS Cloud! Again! This site likes the traditions it seems! So that was it for the contest. I liked it to tell the truth. Some exciting stuff happened. The only true bad thing is the low vote totals. Seriously. Barely 30.000 AND with the double registered users bonus! Where all the people went?
Hope you liked my analysis in all these matches! See ya next time!
Tsunami's Analysis[]
I mean, did we really expect otherwise? The final match was going to be a rematch no matter what. There was pretty much no way that the final match wouldn't end up being a rematch, because for it to feature someone who hadn't already faced Link, that someone would have to first beat someone who had beaten them earlier. Granted, Mega Man did exactly that this contest, and Samus nearly did, but it's a huge ask. I don't know, maybe if Samus had been able to pull out those few extra votes against Mario, she could've ridden a combo of the rallies that seemed to be popping up for every female character and her actual strength that got her to the finals of CBIX and won her the main bracket in '06 to upset Cloud, then SFF down Zelda to give us a fresh match. Which she'd lose, of course, but it'd still be better than having a rehash of a match we'd just had. That probably wouldn't have happened, though; beating Cloud without some mitigating factor is never an easy task if you're not Link. Snake's only victories over Cloud came when Cloud was being LFFed, first by Sephiroth and then by Crono (and maybe also Link, because swords? But mostly Crono). And his only other non-Link losses were...Mario in the infamous Planet Gamecube match, L-Block, and Squirtle in the Draven contest. And I guess the 3rd-place match of Rivalry Rumble but no one really cares about that. Actually when you consider she broke 47% on him in 2010 after being held just under 41% in 2003, maybe it's not so unreasonable to think that this would've been her year. Yeah let's go with this. Someone make up some adjusted X-Stats that say that Samus was actually the #2 character in 2018 and only lost because Mario continues to be a bad matchup for her. It honestly probably wouldn't be any more wrong than any of the other ones we have floating around. Hell, if you use the raw vote totals instead of the ones adjusted for the registered user bonus, Cloud got 51.37% on Mario, while Samus got 51.13% in her second match. That's still a slight advantage for Cloud, but it's really slight and character battles are not and have never been transient. Given the way trends were going at the time, this seems really probable. As for Zelda, the percentages would be more along the lines of their 2006 matchup (roughly 55-45) than their 2010 matchup (roughly 64-36), but it's hard to think that Zelda could keep up her momentum when faced with another powerful female. Zelda may have long since moved beyond her damsel in distress days, but Samus has always been the heroine of her games and her first game is just as old as Zelda's. She's the original feminist gaming icon, and not even Other M was able to ruin that.
Anyway, since Samus wasn't able to get that last push against Mario, we had Cloud in this match instead. He improved on the first match against Link, managing to break 40% this time. But this was never going to end in anything other than a comfortable Link victory. Honestly it's hard to imagine that Link will ever lose to anything other than a massive rally. Even Draven barely hung on at the end, relatively speaking--his raw margin of victory was higher than a lot of matches this contest, but we had 150 matches in this contest and if not for registered users' votes counting double, Shepard's vote total in the Link-Draven match would've been good enough to beat the winning total in 126 of them. Of the 24 that it wouldn't, 15 of these were in the first round, 5 in the second, 3 in the third, and then there was Link's SFF beatdown of Ganondorf. Even with the double-counting votes, Shepard's total was higher than Zelda's winning total against Mario, Crono's against Mega Man, Tifa's against Sephiroth, and the asbestos standard, Bowser's winning total in LB1 against Alucard, which failed to break 13000. The actual raw total of 8578 is almost certainly the lowest winning total in any character battle (though it's still better than the Years contest), which doesn't sound too bad until you remember that CBIX was three-ways with 12-hour matches. But even in a 12-hour match where third place had 30%, the lowest winning total in that contest was 8979. In 24 hours, in a 1v1, Bowser got fewer votes than that and won.
If votes do go up significantly in GotD2--which I kind of expect them to--we should just stop having character battles. Do people even really care about individual characters anymore? So many of the newer games have customizable characters anyway, which is probably why so few new games even get characters in these things. I mean, let's look at the characters who debuted in this contest. Aren't like half of them from indie games, which have a disproportionate tendency to be "retraux"? I'm not going to go over them all and count them, but it looks like most of them are either from indie games or from newer entries in established franchises (e.g. Noctis, Aqua, Captain Toad). And out of 150 matches in this contest, do you know how many were actually won by a character making their contest debut?
8. 8 matches out of 150. 5.33%. Except that figure is inflated, because there were 5 first-round matches where both characters were making their debut, leaving a grand total of 3 matches where a character making their debut beat a character who wasn't--all of them 1-seeds (Geralt twice and 2B once). It's not 3 out of 145, though, because there were also some first-round matches between characters with contest experience, and even fourpacks where all four characters had contest experience. (For a moment I thought Division 1 had an entire eightpack like that, because of generically named male syndrome; Victor Sullivan was the only newcomer in the bottom half of the division). It's 3 in 104. There were 104 matches out there that, at the start of the contest, could have been won by either a veteran (even by the loose definition of "1 previous contest" making you a veteran) or by a newcomer, 41 guaranteed to be won by a returning character (34 of these in Round 1 and 7 in Round 2), and 5 guaranteed to be won by a newcomer. Of those 104, new characters won 3 of them. 2.88%. I feel like that's low. Maybe it's not really that low, because the more character battles we have, the more returning characters we have, but it seems like it ought to be low. It's obviously lower than CBIX, because Draven alone won 4.13% of all non-bonus matches. CBVIII? Honest to god, there were more matches that were guaranteed to have a winner who'd been in a previous contest than not. 66-61, including a trio of R3 matches, and of course not a single match where both characters were making their contest debuts. Two of those three divisions where one of the R3 matches was guaranteed to have a returner win also had a third R2 match with such a guarantee, and a seventh R1 match on top of that. Literally only one character out of 16 in the division was making their debut.
One of those two characters that were the only ones in their entire fucking division to be making their debut was Charizard, who won said division. That alone accounts for 6.56% of qualifying matches, and 3.15% of total matches. So yeah, 2.88% is low. A single newcomer managed to singlehandedly exceed that percentage without discrediting matches where all possible winners were returners in each of the previous two contests. Same goes for all earlier ones, because there were only 63 matches in any of them which means it only takes 3 wins. I mean if you want to quibble about requiring a first place finish to count as the "winner" in the fourways, then no single character did it in 2008, but you had one first round fourpack where two newcomers beat two returners, and you did have three newcomers win their first round matches outright and reach Round 4. 2007, L-Block did it. 2006...okay, 2006 was probably lower because any female character with experience was naturally stronger than any of them that needed the split bracket to make their debut. But that percentage is horrible. Character Battle is dead; long live Best Game Ever.
Oh right this vote total thing distracted me from my original point, which was that while Link would've won no matter who he faced here, I honestly believe that if she'd just pulled out those few extra votes against Mario, Samus would have put up a better percentage than this. Not much better, probably only around 42%, but better. Unfortunately this undermines the point I just made because we'd need another Character Battle to test this theory.