Results[]
Monday, November 23, 2015
Ulti's Analysis[]
| Division | Division 3 |
|---|---|
| Match # | 73 |
| Match Date | Monday, November 23, 2015 |
| Oracle Expectations |
Pokémon Red/Blue - 52.08% 76 for - 17 against |
| GameFAQs Prediction |
Pokémon Red/Blue - 39.82% |
This match was just brutal to watch. I have no problem with Pokemon whatsoever and have no issue with it winning, but seeing Mario 3 just get decimated like this was heartbreaking. My childhood just evaporated right before my eyes with this one; Mario 3 was the video game for me as a kid. There was Mario 1 and Mario 2 and Zelda 1 and Zelda 2 and Tetris, but Mario 3 was the absolute pinnacle. To see it get thoroughly destroyed like this was really something else, not that there weren't obvious extenuating factors.
Pre-contest, this was the argument everyone was having. Picking the correct paths of these two games likely meant winning the contest, because there was more at stake beyond 2 points. Mario 3, Mario World, or Mario 64 could have all potentially done anything in between losing to Pokemon or making the finals of the contest, and it meant for some amazing hype.
Personally I thought Mario 3 was the easy choice, because outside of IT'S FREAKING MARIO™ reasons, we had these two polls:
http://www.gamefaqs.com/poll/4179-northwest-division-round-3-zelda-majoras-mask-vs-pokemon
http://www.gamefaqs.com/poll/4570-final-rounds-semifinal-mario-vs-bowser-pokemon-trainer-red
We'd seen a hyped Pokemon game get hyped up to the level of a 1 seed from a more powerful Nintendo franchise before. Majora's Mask smacked it down. The trainers got bandwagoned hard during rivalry rumble, and Mario smacked them down. So I thought for sure this match would be more of the same.
Now before getting into the Undertale rally, I really want to put to rest the idea that Mario 3 would have won a fair match. I can admit defeat, and this contest really showed us that Mario's "magic" is just completely gone. He's actually become the contest version of Mario in Smash Bros, which is kind of hilarious. He's very hard to rally against, but he's also very hard to rally for. He's just kind of the standard bearer, which is a pretty funny place for him to be in. People will point to the Vivi loss as his magic disappearing, but really it was this match and Super Metroid > Galaxy.
Anyway, look at the beginning of this poll. Pokemon won the board vote, and while Mario 3 fought like hell to keep things from getting out of control, Pokemon was slowly trending up. Then the power hour ended, and Pokemon just took off. Some people will say the Undertale rallies being there at the start meant Mario 3 was screwed from the beginning, but I don't think there's some alternate universe where Mario could have won this match. This was trending toward Pokemon finishing with a comfortable 55-45 win right when the power hour ended, and if Undertale never happened do we really think Mario gets this any closer than 53-47? It's like the Mario series had any extra luster this contest.
The other point is Undertale didn't get berserk until well past noon. Pokemon had things locked up by then and the match had already been 55-45 for hours. I imagine this is a result Mario fans would have been okay with, but once the Undertale rally truly took hold this match just got brutal. From 1:30 pm onward, Pokemon rode the wave of being the beneficiary of rally love. This match went from 55-45 to Pokemon pulling in updates well over 65%, and some hit well higher than that. It turned the match from a respectable loss for Mario into an absolute beating, and things ended with Pokemon getting an insane 63-37 win.
Needless to say, the hype for Pokemon vs Undertale hit a fever pitch once this all ended, and for good reason. If Pokemon could benefit a lot from Undertale's rally, logic would say that a lot of the people being rallied for that match would favor Pokemon. Granted this would assume Undertale beat Mario World, which was a massively tall order, and is something we'll go over when we're actually talking about Undertale's match itself.
Worth noting here is Mario 3 was the first 1 seed to lose in this contest, and it was the first 1 seed to lose in round 2 to an 8 or a 9. We had seen a couple of 4/5 > 1 upsets in the past, which are technically the same thing, but there's just something different about seeing 8/9 > 1. Maybe it's the NCAA fan in me.
Ctes' Analysis[]
This match was probably the single most debated match of the contest. Before we learned of Undertale's massive rally capabilities, this match would decide a lot of the bracket. Two very strong games that had potential to go very far met in round 2. RBY was the board favorite until the results of their round 1 matches came in and Super Mario Bros. 3 was depicted as the heavy favorite. But the thing is, the round 1 results really should've put RBY as the favorite. I'm not usually one to brag, but I want to take pride in the pre-rally result of this match. I defended RBY like crazy from the Tetris match and until today. The only person I recall being with me on it was MWC, who half the board has blocked and most of the other half doesn't listen too. I tried hard to argue that the round 1 result should set RBY as a slight favorite, but my theories were constantly shut down. The day before this match, I made a topic specifically about this and I don't think a single person that posted in it agreed with me, I discussed with user _Dog most of the time.
Now, when the match started the two were initially were close, with RBY very slowly building a lead. At the 25 minute mark, SMB3 made quite the cut and people were quick to assume RBY had simply won the board vote and SMB3 would now dominate until whenever Undertale rallying kicked in for real, but RBY took it all back the next update and never looked back again. It was clear that RBY would take this match 52-53% doing the first few hours of it. It's hard to judge when exactly Undertale rallying actually began. It was probably partly there from the beginning, but don't misjudge that, SMB3 was never going to win this match any day. It's a shame that isn't as clear as it could've been, but at least most experts agreed on it. I actually like SMB3 more, but seeing this was so satisfying. I had been pointlessly arguing for it for so long and to see it play out just as I said was just really nice. I didn't see _Dog again until after the contest. Don't know if he was around somewhere, but he disappeared from my topic from the day before completely and didn't see him around in the discussion topic either.
Anyway, enough of that. It's a terrible shame that in a contest where people take every chance to laugh at Mario, one of the few games he has that could do some serious damage, a near elite game, is the first #1 seed to be eliminated. Granted, GTAV lost the same round and to a Mario game even, but still, it sucked to see. SMB3 could've redeemed the series from the false negative spot it was in, but didn't get a chance because it was fed to the most underseeded game in the bracket. RBY absolutely deserves a #1 seed no contest. This would'be been a close match, but beating SMB3 by a few percentage means that you're a near elite. A single thread about the match on the subreddit of Pokemon and all arguments are off.
RBY showing itself as a legit contender for the second strongest game on the site today also makes Tetris a contender for the strongest game that lost in round 1 along with games like Kingdom Hearts and Oblivion. I think Tetris is the strongest of them though. RBY scoring such a great percentage on Tetris should've been a warning sign of RBY's strength and yet people saw it the other way around. But it's confirmed now. RBY definitely did not SFF Tetris, unless you expect Tetris to be a true contest beast. As I've said previously though, the SFF would've made no sense. Tetris was big on the gameboy, but that's unimportant when Tetris has been released on everything, naturally has overlap with everything in some way, and everyone has played it. Hardcore Tetris fans being the same people who are hardcore Pokemon fans makes no sense to begin with and even less sense is there to them all preferring RBy in the hypothetical situation, I mean, it's not like RBY does what Tetris does in a better way, they're completely different. If Tetris really had massive overlap favoring another game, it would have to be something similar and something old school, which does explain Zelda 1 destroying Tetris in 2004, although it probably also has something to do with Tetris being stronger today than then. Partly because of old games in general receiving a boost, but also because L-Block's victory clearly gave the series an overall boost.
The final result of this match is sad. It was painful to watch as we bit our nails in excitement of the Fallout 3 vs. Undertale match. When that match was over all discussion was about Undertale, the board was a mess. At the same time though, we saw SMB3 getting completely destroyed in the most unfair way. We can safe the discussion about whether strong deciding outside rally forces are a good thing or not, but I believe we can all agree that rally spillover is quite a shame. Fortunately, no match in the contest was turned around by spillover, but it did bring some obnoxious results. This was one of them. RBY wins any day, but not by this much. I'd much rather have this match played out by itself, especially because it might've been somewhat good to follow. Don't get me wrong, if SMB3 actually attempted a comeback, a post on the Pokemon subreddit would've ended the match, but it could've been good! Instead, SMB3 got destroyed thanks to people that didn't even care about this match probably. People coming to vote for Undertale. It's really nice that Allen made it so easy to vote in all matches so we don't have huge differences in vote totals, but situations like these are the sole flaw of this wonderful format.
RBY looked fantastic today, in raw strength and rally forces alike. There were two outcomes of the contest at this point. One was Undertale winning it all, or Undertale getting stopped by RBY. Later, Melee also turned out to be capable of giving it a shot but we had no idea about that at this point. If RBY had met Undertale's rally powers this round, it absolutely wins, I have no doubt about that and the same probably goes for round 3 too. RBY would have absolutely no trouble making it there.