Results[]
Tuesday, May 5, 2020
Ulti's Analysis[]
| Division | Division 2 |
|---|---|
| Match # | 114 |
| Match Date | Tuesday, May 05, 2020 |
| Oracle Expectations |
Mass Effect 2 - 51.77% 43 for - 10 against |
| GameFAQs Prediction |
Mass Effect 2 - 20.82% |
| User Votes |
Mass Effect 2 - 4630 Resident Evil 2 - 4341 |
| Anonymous Votes |
Mass Effect 2 - 4013 Resident Evil 2 - 3361 |
Given the bandwagon Resident Evil 2 had built up leading into this match, I am convinced that the contest intermission hurt its chances to pull the upset here. I'm not saying Mass Effect 2 wouldn't have won anyway, but momentum is a real thing and those dumb delays that happen now really kill it for underdog runs. Outside of one match, Mass Effect 2 looked vulnerable for this entire contest. Resident Evil 2 meanwhile was coming off of an incredibly grueling, emotional win over Bloodborne and could have ridden football-like momentum through Mass Effect here.
Didn't happen. If you ever talk to a professional athlete, and I've met about 50 of them from working various odd jobs, they hate all the TV timeouts and reviews and such in major sports. It kills the momentum. It kills the flow. I think that is a huge factor into what happened here.
When this poll started, Mass Effect 2 had 52% of the poll, and then the poll just... stayed there. You can see the final result. This was the poll for the entire 24 hours. Resident Evil 2 never made a push to do much of anything, and this was certainly a far, far cry from the Resident Evil 2 we had seen in earlier matches.
We can't confirm one way or another if the intermission helped Mass Effect 2 here, but it certainly didn't hurt it. It meant for a rather dud ending to Resident Evil 2's impressive contest run. I do have to say that I'm not upset about Mass Effect 2 winning a division though, especially with all of the nonsense that poor series has gone through. It was nice to see one of them finally break through a win a division, even if the means were debatable.
Ctes's Analysis[]
The battle of the sequels was one of the matches in the final phrase that had people split the most. Both games had a good case of making it through today. Mass Effect 2 looked really good in the previous two rounds. Everyone had accepted at this point that Resident Evil 7 was simply a lot better than people gave it credit for, but that could also mean good things for Resident Evil 2. It seemed like a case where many people simply went with whatever game their gut feelings told them to go with. There were people very confident in both games.
Taking Resident Evil 2 to win here was always a good late round upset pick. Look at how it dealt with a rallied Bloodborne, which beat Awakening even before rallies. Mass Effect 2 is projected to easily win those two matches in 2015, with ~55% against Awakening and ~58% against Bloodborne, but look at how much stronger Bloodborne is now. Even if you believe Mass Effect 2 is undervalued in the 2015 x-stats, you can also believe Andromeda hurt the name. Resident Evil 2 took care of a rallied Bloodborne, so it was certainly within striking distance. Furthermore, the original Resident Evil 2 was in 2015 and is projected to beat Awakening with less than Resident Evil 2 beat Three Houses in Game of the Year. We've been through GotY polls, but certainly a 1v1 poll is worth a little bit and I just want to state that the upset was clearly possible.
The match opened with much excitement. The games were dead even for the opening minutes until Mass Effect 2 started being every so slightly ahead. Then it jumped ahead by quite a bit at the first update and very quickly climbed above the 200-vote lead. Resident Evil 2 would then stall quite a bit, cutting the percentage Mass Effect 2 had from almost 55% to almost 51% as the lead was cut from 250 votes to below 200 in a very few updates. It couldn’t keep it up though. Mass Effect 2 began climbing again and this time it didn’t look back at all.
It has been suggested that the break hurt Resident Evil 2’s chances here because it won the very close match with Bloodborne that would have given it a bandwagon. I seriously doubt it’s the case though. Resident Evil 2 was always the favorite to make the division finals, Bloodborne just made it a lot closer that people thought. Usually such things come from big upsets and that match wasn’t really that. Besides, if it did get something of a bandwagon, the break shouldn’t make much a difference. The people that followed Resident Evil 2 vs. Bloodborne closely enough definitely remembered it, but a lot of people just voted in the match and saw Resident Evil 2 won, which was largely expected.
I believe the match was decided mostly by the contest title. It’s pretty clear that Mass Effect 2 was not hurt by andromeda or the third game or anything. Shepard looked a lot worse last character battle and Mass Effect 3 was killed, but in the light of the contest people remembered what Mass Effect 2 how did gaming, how big a deal it was. It would be the oldest game to reach the top 8 only barely being a game of the current decade. It’s nice that after the franchise quickly became an all-timer and seemingly dropped it rather quickly again, Mass Effect 2 would be remembered as the great game it was.
Resident Evil 2 ended up being as good as you could hope it is despite being a remake, Mass Effect 2 was simply better than it looked in 2015. The remake discussion shouldn’t concern Resident Evil 2 much really, because it’s different enough that it deserves its spot for sure, while the other two can be discussed. The previous Game of the Decade contest had Resident Evil 4 get further and it was praised as one of the absolute best and most influential games of all time. The series isn’t at that point, but Resident Evil 7 was more like than we thought, and the recent three remakes have shown that they’re still capable of making fantastic games, so perhaps there’s hope for future entries after all.
Safer777's Analysis[]
Nice match here. Before the contest ME 2 was the favorite to win the division and as the contest went on things became shaky but still ME 2 was the favorite. Even the whole Crew went with ME 2 here with around 52 win and guess what, it did just that! In the previous RE 2 match there were some rallies against RE 2 but still RE 2 managed to hold on and it did won. Still this result seems to indicate that RE 2 is almost similar in strength to Horizon Zero Dawn and pretty sure nobody before the contest started would think of that.
So for the match. Things were somewhat stable for all hours. So yeah really close match but ME 2 was never in fear of losing. Seems ME 2 is still strong even though the latest ME game sucked and the franchise is pretty much dead now. Maybe this will be the first game that manages to avoid a doubling against BOTW! Also check out the prediction percentage here. Around 20 here and almost 77 for BOTW. Yeah everyone knows that Zelda always wins. Still hope someone manages to take it down. Also I still prefer the original RE 2 for personal reasons. Plus ME 2 in this contest started with beating a RE game and it ended with beating a RE game because yeah it stands no chance against BOTW of course.
Tsunami's Analysis[]
Our second GotY vs. GotY match of the contest pitted the 2010 and 2019 winners against each other, and while normally you'd just say "OldFAQs" and pick the 2010 game without a second thought, the 2019 game was a remake of a 1998 game, and as we all know, when in doubt, pick the closest thing you can to 1998. That meme started in the Years Contest itself, but it probably held true for the most part in 2015 as well, aside from Undertale matches. It certainly explains away a lot of the strange "upsets", although back then we were just calling it "Year of the SNES". This match was briefly on the list of 25 closest wire-to-wire matches where the loser never led...for a few minutes, until I noticed that HGSS-Nier had been closer and hadn't been put up there yet. Which is better than the few hours I expected it to be there, since a match in progress at the time was looking like it could outright break the record! But we'll talk about that when we get there. Back to this match, where it was plainly evident that nostalgia is the route to success for these old companies. Capcom's learned that here; RE2Make was a huge hit and they've already followed it up with RE3Make here in 2020. I'd say that we can expect an RE4Make by 2022, but they literally just ported the original RE4 to Switch in 2019. Then again, the Switch is notably absent from the list of consoles that RE2Make and RE3Make are on, so I guess maybe Nintendo's still being looked at as the "little brother" the way it was in the "WiiS2/PS360" era. So yeah, RE4Make for the PS5 and Xbox Series X, coming to stores in 2022. Book it. Square seems to be learning that lesson as well with FF7R. Sega kind of is as well with Mania, but they're so far gone that nobody seems to even care. Nintendo, of course, keeps doing their own thing, but a lot of their recent output has been aimed at trying to recapture what people loved about their earlier games rather than continuing to innovate--just look at the two Zelda games in the bracket, or even FE:A. And Konami...doesn't really care, because their profile is so far diversified beyond just video games. Apparently they did try to produce a Metal Gear Solid movie back in the mid-00s, and it completely fell through by 2010...but there was a new version put into the works at Columbia Pictures (owned by Sony) as early as 2012, and as of the end of 2019, a draft of the film is complete. And it's got Hideo Kojima on board! Which brings me to the question, who the hell owns this franchise? Konami did put out Metal Gear Survive in 2018, after Kojima was no longer with them, but apparently they can still go around Konami for the film? Well, at any rate, I've long felt that with MGSV wrapping up the Big Boss arc, going as far as to end with the lead-up to the Outer Heaven mission, that Metal Gear Solid 6 should just outright be a remake of the original Metal Gear. Honestly that's something that Konami could do even without Kojima; it wouldn't be the first time (non-canon NES port, anyone?)
But of course, nostalgia couldn't measure up to Mass Effect 2, still an incredibly strong game and likely one that's only bolstered by the later entries in the series being disappointments. This was a 52-48 match pretty much the whole way through, which makes it especially ridiculous that it even came close to being on a "closest wire-to-wire matches" list. Maybe if I have some spare time I'll archive binge the poll updater and craft a wire-to-wire list that's based on percentage rather than raw totals; the lowered totals make the current lists drastically favor the most recent contests.
Doesn't make the possibility of a new record any less exciting, though!