Results[]
Thursday, May 7, 2020
Ulti's Analysis[]
| Division | Division 6 |
|---|---|
| Match # | 118 |
| Match Date | Thursday, May 07, 2020 |
| Oracle Expectations |
Persona 5 - 57.28% 51 for - 2 against |
| GameFAQs Prediction |
Persona 5 - 29.22% |
| User Votes |
Persona 5 - 5226 Portal 2 - 3924 |
| Anonymous Votes |
Persona 5 - 4854 Portal 2 - 3478 |
I honestly thought Portal 2 might be able to make a match of this with all the momentum it had built up to this point, but Persona 5 was absolutely having none of that stuff. This match was reasonably close for one update, but after that first five minutes Persona 5 just beat Portal's ass all over the place for this entire match. No comebacks, no momentum, no mercy. Just a cold, hard, swift asswhipping as Persona 5 marched right to a division win.
I know neither game in the Persona duo won this contest or anything, but for my money the Persona series and Witcher 3 are tied for Star of the Contest. With the Smash Bros series giving Persona newfound strength and respect, on top of that series growing more and more each year, it has nowhere to go but up. When and if we get Persona 6, it has a good chance to slide into whatever we want to call the tier right below Zelda's top games.
Speaking of stars of the contest, this win set up a match between Witcher 3 and Persona 5. Few things in these contests are more fun than two white-hot entrants dueling, so we were all hoping the match would live up to the hype it was getting while this was all going on live.
(Spoilers: lolno.)
I don't want to leave this writeup without giving Portal 2 some love, purely because I love the game but also because getting this far in a contest should mean something. So without further delay...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVVZaZ8yO6o
You won't find many villains more likeable than GLaDOS.
Ctes's Analysis[]
There was at no point of the contest any real doubt of what game would make it out this division. Sure, some gurus tried to get a hot upset here, but Persona 5 was a lock to get past this point from the start. The fifth main installment in the series would be what finally pushed the series to what you would call mainstream and a while after the releasing it would even have Smash representation on top of that. Probably helps that it was released as Persona 5 and not Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 5 because that has always screamed “some cult Japanese thing” to casual owners of a Playstation, unfortunately. The main reason is of course just that it’s a really good game.
The beginning of this match was very weird. Persona has consistently had great board votes. Portal usually has too, though against Kingdom Hearts III, it boosted after the board vote instead. Then this match begins right another match featuring a Persona game ends. That other match had the Persona game rallying quite heavily by the end of this match and I’m the general Persona subreddit stickied a rally thread and while later changing the title to show this match instead of the other one.
Yet the first minutes were the worst for Persona 5 in the match. Well, the first minute was great, but Portal 2 looked like it was in this match all the way up until the freeze. It was actually ever so slightly closing the gap in the end. Then 10 minutes into the match, it was all over and Persona 5 never looked back. That seems weird. I mean, maybe board 8 just really loves Portal 2 as well or maybe some rally backfire happened, though that seems unlikely. What does seem likely is that the rally thread wasn’t affecting this match all too much early on, because it was somewhat out of fuel near the end of the Persona 4/Xenoblade match and it would be a bit before people on reddit noticed a title change. The votals at the freeze are slightly better than the other days, but they had been growing each day already so maybe that’s natural.
Then I’m just left finding it weird that the hierarchy here is Kingdom Hearts III > Portal 2 > Persona 5, I would’ve guessed it the other way around, but alright, it’s not too important. Persona 5 likely does slightly worse without the rally thread but it’s nothing noticeably.
I’m glad Portal 2 managed to get here despite the off chance it would have declining further throughout the decade as it hasn’t been relevant for a while and the memes are far beyond existing at this point. It’s nice the contest title is taken seriously. It’s probably the final time we’ll see one of the Portal games doing so well, so let’s enjoy that for a while.
Safer777's Analysis[]
So this match. Not only we all knew that Persona 5 would win but it would win with around 57 according to average predictions. And guess with how much it won! So yeah.
So for the match. Everything as expected. Still strange to see Portal 2 reaching the Division Finals. Still the game is beloved even though the series has been abandoned by the creators. Eh. Persona series has become a beast in the last 2 years since the previous contest. Don't know why but man even P4G lost the match by like 110 votes. So yeah. I know we like JRPG's here but damn! Still nice to see another JRPG series doing really good. Imagine if P4G had won the division too! Persona series would be the most dominant in this contest! Only 110 votes and we would see that!
Tsunami's Analysis[]
This, on the other hand, was predictable no matter how you sliced it. Almost as well predicted by Gurus as the previous match, with Oracle percentages bunched up right around the actual outcome (50 out of 53 Gurus were within 5%, most of them dramatically so), casual prediction percentage...29.22%? Ah, well, it's a Round 4 match, so a high prediction percentage would be odd. Even Skyrim and Witcher 3 barely cracked 50%...Huh. Nope, P5's prediction percentage last round was 63.69%, so this constitutes an upset for the casuals. See, I knew they'd screw this one up! And Portal 2's prediction percentage last round was 23.57%, coming off a 50.55% prediction percentage the round before, so...the true casual favorite in this match was Red Dead Redemption 2? It did have one of the highest R1 prediction percentages, and an R2 prediction percentage nearing 70 entering the match against Portal 2 and its prediction percentage barely above 50. ...Although it'd have to retain a fairly good percentage each round to still have the plurality; P5 and RDR2 had similar R2 prediction percentages but then P5 barely lost anything from R2 to R3. 73.69% to 63.69%. LOL Sonic Mania, almost no one had it (or Super Meat Boy, since it seems like Mania wasn't favored by much) beating Persona 5.
Incidentally, had Persona 5 made it all the way to the finals, we would've had our first two-time Guru champion...by tiebreaker over another past Guru champion. The last point of divergence between the brackets of Rivals Contest Guru winner SuperNiceDog and CBVIII Guru winner Dr Football was the Division 4 final, where Football had the Cookie pick of Three Houses (already eliminated one round earlier) and SND had Xenoblade. Once Xenoblade won, they were guaranteed to finish with identical scores, and would have beaten out everyone else if Persona 5 were to win two more matches. Dr Football appeared to still have the better tiebreaker, though, which is maybe ironic since SND's win came in a gimmicky contest so easy to predict that the Battle Challenge required an Oracle component hastily tacked onto its finale to break all the ties. (Relatively speaking, of course; even that year didn't have a single perfect Guru, though SND wasn't the only one with but a single wrong pick on a 1-point match.) They weren't even the only past champions still alive at this point--Skyrim defeating Witcher 3 in the semifinals (yes, Witcher 3 specifically; a win over P5 would've given it to someone else) would have given the win to Villains Contest winner yoblazer as long as the overall champion wasn't Smash Ultimate. Guru Contests, it seems, are much like the World Series of Poker Main Event--it's really hard to win it twice, but you tend to see the same names making deep runs. But on the other hand, it's still possible to fluke into a deep run, like when I was still alive with a mere 5 matches left in 2013. I'm still mad as hell that it wasn't two matches left--I already knew that my bracket was doomed by then because Vivi's nonsensical upset of Mario meant that a literal second Pokémon character had won Division 8, but come on, we'd seen Mega Man underperform 1v1 against Zero in 2004 and get LFFed into a loss against Weighted Companion Cube in 2008. The Guru stats even back this up; Charizard was heavily favored there. Huh, maybe that wasn't a fluke? My bracket was good enough to still be alive at that point if the cookie pick came through. How'd I manage to put together a bracket that strong, given my usual track record?