http://www.gamefaqscontests.com/gallery/albums/cb9/5264-06.jpg
Results[]
Thursday, September 12th, 2013
Ulti's Analysis[]
I'll concede that my closeup pictures for this round were a bit weird, but this one is good and I'm tooting my picture horn for wiki purposes. Deal with it.
People will look back on this match in a few years and assume "38-33-28, how boring", but it can't be overstated how close Mega Man came to winning this match. His support from the Charizard upset continued on through the first few updates of this poll, and he built a lead near 300 within 30 minutes. But it didn't take long for Samus to push back, and when she did Mega Man simply did not have enough left in the tank to fend her off. The silver lining is that it took Samus until about 3 in the morning to grab full control of the match, and she was very truly threatened until then.
There was some hope in the morning vote bailing Mega Man out, but it was not to be. It was a trend very similar to his match with Sephiroth back in 2002, where he built a lead of 700 fairly early, but eventually got swamped and lost. It's disappointing for the little guy to still not make the final of a contest, but maybe one day.
The last note here is about Red. He stood pat against two Nintendo characters and got nearly 30% of the vote, and if you extrapolate his values in this poll alone he scored 45.55% on Mega Man. He only scored 38.84% on Mega Man X back in 2010, so yeah Red was definitely one of the stars of this contest even in his exit. His exit also meant that even with all Pokemon's wins this contest, none of them made the final.
Zen's (Late) Analysis[]
This match was a complete tossup, as seen by the three versions of my Andy Warhol Finals match pic I submitted:
https://imgtc.com/i/RN8VDem.png
The common theory was that Mega Man would take advantage of the Nintendo SFF and squeak by here. The second most common theory was that Mega Man was too heavily tied to Nintendo SFF and despite beating Charizard with Zero in the match that he would get beaten by Samus comfortably. The third theory was that Red would win because of POKEFEAR and a lack of common sense.
The results make sense once you spotlight just how Mega Man / Charizard / Zero panned out. The results are definitely due to how heavily the MM series is mixed with Nintendo, so the same logic should apply to this match. Samus also looked pretty good so far this contest. What did she have going on in 2013 that gave her this strength? Nothing since Other M? Alright cool what the fuck although I guess the same could be said about Mega Man.
Samus had such a boring path to victory, I think everyone was cheering for Mega Man to get to the finals here. It would have been a way better story than "Samus easily beats Sandbag, Knuckles, Tifa and Mega Man then gets knocked out by Snake and the rallied character"
Red bowed out gracefully here, he definitely looked pretty consistently good this contest, he lost badly to X once I think so coming close to Mega Man and getting into the semis shows how much he's grown. He didn't really have much of a challenge until this point but at least he never jobbed out to some fodder. Not sure where the guy goes from here, will he stay consistent in 2018?
Are we even going to remember to nominate Red in the sea of Shellder and Ditto support? Who knows. He could potentially make a crazy run if he gets a very low seed and a debatable matchup. Imagine Round 1 is (2) Sephiroth vs (7) Pokemon Trainer Red.
In the end this match didn't matter much (other than to our hearts) because whoever won here was going to be Draven food anyway.
also lmao @ the Creation match pic, what the fuck