Results[]
Wednesday, May 6, 2020
Ulti's Analysis[]
| Division | Division 3 |
|---|---|
| Match # | 115 |
| Match Date | Wednesday, May 06, 2020 |
| Oracle Expectations |
Smash Bros. Ultimate - 51.70% 38 for - 17 against |
| GameFAQs Prediction |
Smash Bros. Ultimate - 40.52% |
| User Votes |
Smash Bros. Ultimate - 5122 Super Mario Odyssey - 3944 |
| Anonymous Votes |
Smash Bros. Ultimate - 4799 Super Mario Odyssey - 3980 |
RSFF is an incredibly rare thing in these contests, but we have seen it happen before.
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/2122-tournament-quarterfinal-mario-vs-samus-aran
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/7373-finals-bracket-2-samus-vs-mario
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/7383-loser-bracket-round-4-mario-vs-samus
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/3849-jenova-division-final-sephiroth-vs-tifa-lockheart
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/7369-loser-bracket-round-1-tifa-vs-sephiroth
There may be other examples, but these are the two that jump out.
I am thoroughly convinced Smash Ultimate RSFFd Mario here, because you can't convince me that Mario wasn't more impressive than Smash in all three rounds leading up to this match. Tekken 7 being stronger than Mortal Kombat 11 is just goofy. Link Between Worlds being held under 40% is impressive, but Devil May Cry 5 being held under 30% is better. We all saw the same thing and agreed. Yet come match time, Smash not only wins but wins easily. Something isn't right here chief, and it wouldn't be the first time something "off" happened with Mario when put up against Nintendo in a match. I wish I had a better reason than RSFF for this match, but it's the best explanation I got.
Look at every other big match this contest where one game clearly looked stronger going in. Dark Souls > Last of Us. Witcher 3 > Skyrim. Xenoblade > Fire Emblem. Even Skyrim > Pokemon. I could go on. In all of those matches, that game that looked better going in won the match. The one exception was.... this match. Right here.
Something screwey happened, and I feel like RSFF is the best explanation given how the rest of the contest lined up. Nothing else makes much sense. I know it's hard to believe, but the idea of Smash actually being the stronger one all along is even more hard to believe.
"With the disclaimer that I'm a pretty big skeptic of RSFF in general: I don't think that's what happened here. To me, it's far more likely that Smash is indeed stronger — after all, it was the favourite going into the contest for good reason — and what we saw is simply that there are more people who vote against Smash than Mario when both face weak competition. Smash faces some anti-votes both from people who hate its fanbase (which you're more than aware of) and from fighting game fans who dislike that Smash takes attention from what they see as more pure examples of the genre. Meanwhile, nobody hates Mario Odyssey, not even people like me who consider it one of the weaker games in the series. Combine this with the format forcing everyone to vote and I suspect the effect is significant, enough to obscure the truth." -NeoElfboy
Ctes's Analysis[]
This was perhaps the most hyped match of the ones that were in the second chance part. Before the contest began, almost everyone picked Super Smash Bros. Ultimate because Smash has been bigger than Mario on every single Nintendo console since the Nintendo 64. The original Super Smash Bros was a good idea not yet truly experienced with, while Super Mario 64 is one of biggest games of all time and by far the strongest 3D Mario. On the Camecube, Melee easily beats Sunshine, the latter being a disappointment to many. On the Wii, the controversial Brawl easily beats Galaxy, and the fourth game is easily better than both 3D Land and 3D World as they never even appeared in a contest. Ultimate is the best selling Smash game, so the Nintendo hierarchy should do its work.
Super Mario Odyssey had a few supporters before the contest, but no one really listened until Odyssey looked better than Ultimate every single round leading up to this match. Tekken 7 and Mortal Kombat 11 are similar enough except Mortal Kombat has always been the bigger deal of the two franchises here. Ultimate couldn’t SFF A Link Between Worlds and strugged with Marvel’s Spider-Man while Odyssey killed Devil May Cry 5 and Shovel Knight. Suddenly it was time to listen to the Odyssey supporters. A lot of people picked Super Mario Odyssey in their second chance brackets, because it didn’t look impossible at all.
A lot of arguments in favor of Super Mario Odyssey were actually cases against Ultimate. Brawl is perhaps the most hyped game of all time and would have won the first game of the decade if not for some late round backlash. Since then, the games have been iterative. They add more things but doesn’t get a lot better. Ultimate has polls where it’s voted the best Smash game, but when the series is as iterative as it is, maybe it wouldn’t matter much. In 2015, Smash 4 was thought of threatening FFVII because it’s historically big and added Cloud, Ryu, Mega Man and Bayonetta amongst others, but it didn’t get close at all. It was being said that people buy Smash games because of the spectacle and the celebration of tons of various franchises rather than the gameplay. Sakurai himself have said that Ultimate is not simply a fighting game, but a celebration of gaming.
When Ultimate came out the “Everyone is here!” was a huge selling point. Snake and Cloud returned contrary to what everyone believed, and every single other character returned to the field with them. Obvious new additions such as Isabella and Inkling came along with big fan demands such as Ridley and King K. Rool and third-party characters continued to come with Castlevania, Persona 5, Dragon Quest, Fata Fury and even Banjo & Kazooie now being in. There are great new single player modes, but that doesn’t seem to be the main draw any longer.
Smash is a multiplayer game at heart, and we’re no longer a site that plays multiplayer with our friends, partly because we’re older. We’ve seen various multiplayer games declining in strength. People argued Smash was less and less about gameplay and more relevant because of how endearing a franchise it is and all the cool videos they make, which makes it universally loved but also means it wont complete with the top like it did a decade ago.
Finally, there are its poll results, not just in this contest, people liked to point at the match against God of War for the title of Game of the Decade 2018. Ultimate looked vulnerable in those and there is only so good it could get without also boosting God of War up a lot, which judging by the contest so far didn’t seem right. The poll in talk happened right after Ultimate released and the hype was still crazy:
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/7473-best-of-2018-game-of-the-year-final-final-vote
That was a lot of cases against Ultimate, but it still got to this point with ease. Let’s go over why Odyssey was thought to make the difference. It has polls that back it up as the strongest 3D since Super Mario 64. Unlike Smash, Mario is not an iterative franchise, so it mattered here. The Galaxies are loved but they have the Wii to drag them down while Odyssey on a console that everyone loves right now. Galaxy 2 looking so good until now just meant Odyssey should be even better. Odyssey was a huge deal and it’s exactly what we love on this site. It was very hyped and lived up to every last bit of it. It helped get Nintendo in a positive light again that it hasn’t been for 20 years.
Super Mario Odyssey has no Game of the Year polls to back it up, but that hardly mattered when it shared its only one with Breath of the Wild. Ocarina of Time killed Super Mario 64 in 2004, but then the latter came back in 2009 and beat Chrono Trigger when it shared the poll with Yoshi’s Island. Those parallels were drawn. BotW/Odyssey/Ultimate felt like a modern day OoT/Mario 64/Melee. When Zelda and Mario are at their best they will beat even the best Smash game. Brawl could defeat the Mario and Zelda games of that generation (and it did!), but it would have never challenged peak Zelda and Mario. Odyssey felt like peak Mario again. Nintendo aced their first party titles in the latter half of the decade. The hierarchy has shown itself ridiculous in the past, but lots of people all contest were expressing that they didn’t think Odyssey would beat Ultimate but that they wish it would. Well, if enough people think so, it might just do that.
A final point in Odyssey’s favor people brought up was not as big but still worth mentioning. In 2015, Melee rallied past GameFAQs biggest darlings Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VII. We’ve seen Draven and Undertale getting punished when returning to the field again. Most of the site aren’t loud about it, but still votes against them on principle. Now, Ultimate is not Melee, but perhaps this could transfer to Smash in general and could explain why Smash couldn’t reach the poll highs that Odyssey could. If Ultimate began rallies too, there would definitely be a lot of people counter-rallying Odyssey against it.
That’s a load of evidence in Odyssey’s favor, but Ultimate was still the favorite. Let’s first go through a few things that didn’t end up being relevant. The first one is bracket votes. Ultimate absolutely had those and it could make a difference worth a few percentage points, although the second chance brackets might lessen those because Odyssey was slightly more popular then and most people knew they weren’t going to win the ordinary bracket challenge. Secondly, despite what I said before, if Ultimate actually went ahead and rallied in a close match, most people did know it would hard to anything against. The Smash community is if anything else very active and very online. They may like to swear off aspects of their game a lot because a great part of the fanbase is straight up awful, but seeing them bail their game out of stuff like this was within imagination and that’d be terribly hard to counter.
People sided mostly with Ultimate because it felt right. The hierarchy is so well established, and we saw as late as the latest Character Battle how much Smash matters in our contests. Ultimate isn’t mentioned in a lot of Game of the Decade discussions. The game took a good formula and improved it. It celebrated a bunch of franchises while it revolutionized none. It’s why it wasn’t destroying stuff on the levels of the other top games of the bracket. It doesn’t have the same respect votes that Odyssey among other titles gathered from the forced voting and the title. It’s just really lied in general. I’m not doubting that Ultimate beats God of War by more if the poll wasn’t called Game of the Year. I’m not doubting Ultimate looks better in a contest not titled Game of the Decade and all its opponents honestly has at least as much claim to such a title as Ultimate. It’s not the most influencing game ever, it’s just really well liked.
Most people expected the match to be over right away. Whichever game prevailed it likely would struggle because of the SFF involved in the fight. True enough, the match was over it mere seconds. Ultimate was ahead from the start and while it was slow to get going only a single update in the match gave real hope to Odyssey fans. That was the update after the freeze. Odyssey cut the lead from 64 to 44 and when you expect Ultimate to the bracket votes, that could mean things, but it didn’t. Ultimate went up to 103 the next update and by the end of the hour it was already above 400 votes. All that hype about Odyssey was for nothing, it lost as easily as we thought before the contest began.
The hierarchy was obviously a thing, but people tend to forget why that hierarchy existed in the first place. People really do love Smash Bros. Perhaps we’re not as vocal about it as we used to be, but Smash would not be able to continue to get us hyped everyone single game if we weren’t all going to play it. They get us hyped because we loved it. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is a rare exception in the final part of the contest to a trend. Breath of the Wild, The Witcher 3, Dark Souls, Skyrim, Mass Effect 2 and so on. They’re all here not only because they’re good but also because they’re praised for all they’ve done for the gaming industry. That clearly made some of them more dominant than they would have been otherwise.
Ultimate does not get the same boost, but it’s still one of our favorite games of the decade. People never explain how they think it deserves it, but I saw Ultimate on the top of a lot of people’s favorite lists during the contest. It’s a game that’s here because it’s our favorite, not necessarily because it’s the best and that distinction is important. It’s so much more than a multiplayer game to its fans. I want to make it clear that I believe Ultimate deserves to be here as much as any other game. It doesn’t matter that it didn’t improve too much on the formula, the formula is nearly perfect and it’s a fantastic game.
When that is said, Super Mario Odyssey got screwed so severely by bracket placement. I’ve complained slightly about this before, but this is the time to do it right. Mario had a fantastic decade. Super Mario Odyssey deserved to get further that this and Super Mario Galaxy 2 deserved to get further that it did. I realize that people are accusing us of always having Nintendo vs. Nintendo finals (or Square, but they were out of the question this decade), but this was just ridiculous. Mario has been fed to Link many times and it’s always lame. Last contest Mario and Samus were actually put opposite of Link and they didn’t get to him. Sure, Zelda was part of the reason, but in the end it was Cloud.
Ultimate and Odyssey would have exactly on interesting match this contest, this one, and you could argue they had none. The winner here would lose to Zelda. Both games could have had very interesting bracket paths, but they were instead just here to take each other out instead. I wouldn’t be surprised if Odyssey would have been #1 seed, but that they were set up to not have too many Nintendo first party games in the top 8. Not saying it necessarily happened, just that it wouldn’t surprise me. Nintendo were screwed so much by this bracket because apparently delivering top class games for many years deserves punishment.
Even if you grow tired of seeing something like Super Mario RPG reach the top 4, could we not punish the Nintendo game that is actually universally praised, loved by everyone and generally regarded as an all time great? Odyssey doing good wouldn’t be a typical GameFAQs kind of deal. It would certainly not have beat The Witcher 3. It might beat the other division winners in the lower half, but we wont know. It’s as ridiculous as giving us Melee vs. Brawl in the top 16 last contest. Even if we did end up getting a Nintendo vs. Nintendo finals. So what? We’d have a more interesting path there if we didn’t have them run into each other, and let’s be real, the finals were perhaps as uninteresting as it has ever been regardless.
Mario had both his games in the top 8 of the x-stats this contest, yet they made top 16 and top 32. What a waste. But let us give our respects to our favorite mustached plumper, because Mario is currently about as good as it has ever been, and such consistently of dominating a genre during the lifetime of an industry is about as impressive as it gets.
Safer777's Analysis[]
Now this match was debatable and I am not sure why. Sure the Hierarchy or something. BUT here is the thing. EVERYONE likes Smash because it has something for everyone. The game is way too good. In fact even me which I never play 1st party Nintendo games(except Pokeymanz)want this game to win the whole thing. Yeah because man it really has everything for everyone! You are bound to have favorite characters there, no matter what. So even the Crew was split with Smash the slight favorite. But everyone knew that it would be a close match and it was a close one, but not as close as we expected. So why it won with an okay win then? Because as I said Smash Ultimate is way too good and even Odyssey is really good too, pretty sure for a Nintendo fan and for most fans in general if they had to play only 1 game most would pick Smash. This is what I believe at least. Or RSFF!
So for the match. Okay Smash won and had no problems at all the whole match. The prediction percentage was okay for a division final too. Over 40 for this far is good actually and for a debatable match, at least pre contest debatable match. Still nice match. Hierarcy seems to not work against Smash! Unless it is a Zelda/Mario game from the 90's of course.
Tsunami's Analysis[]
This was a very hyped match, and it only grew in hype when Odyssey outperformed Ultimate just about every step of the way leading up to the match. The common belief, however, was that the Nintendo hierarchy would assert itself when it mattered, and that's exactly what happened. Back in 2009, Brawl > Galaxy was considered an upset. We're smarter than that now. This was just a nice cozy 56-44 win that we could all put aside while we watched the fireworks going on in Division 4 at the same time.