Results[]
Tuesday, May 5, 2020
Ulti's Analysis[]
| Division | Division 1 |
|---|---|
| Match # | 113 |
| Match Date | Tuesday, May 05, 2020 |
| Oracle Expectations |
Zelda: Breath of the Wild - 75.41% 53 for - 0 against |
| GameFAQs Prediction |
Zelda: Breath of the Wild - 76.59% |
| User Votes |
Zelda: Breath of the Wild - 6336 Dragon Quest XI - 2626 |
| Anonymous Votes |
Zelda: Breath of the Wild - 5096 Dragon Quest XI - 2278 |
After an incredibly stupid delay to set up a gimmick secondary bracket entry phase (seriously, that stuff needs to stop), the home stretch began. And with it... MATCH PICS!! I love me some picsmithing, and as usual the gang killed it. I'm only going to pull rank on the wiki once, beyond that I don't care what image you guys use for the articles.
It isn't often that a game looks good when only getting 30% of the vote, but Dragon Quest 11 went out of this contest like a man's man. In a match where most people thought Zelda would finish in the mid to high 70s, and perhaps even break 80% again, Dragon Quest 11 actually walked right up to the Anton Chigurh of this contest and slapped it across the face. Zelda actually struggled to just break 70% in this match, and it took the actual morning and day vote to ultimately get it done.
Mad props to Dragon Quest 11 here. This was still a 70-30 blowout at the end of the day, and putting on a show like this was impressive. If you had told me pre-contest that any Dragon Quest could potentially double any Final Fantasy game on this site, I'd have thought you were nuts. Yet in a direct match based on direct results through Zelda, Dragon Quest 11 could have doubled Final Fantasy XV. That is so good.
All this said, Zelda still broke 70% four rounds in a row, which is some incredibly rarified air. Here is the entire list of everything to ever pull that off:
-Link in Summer 2002 (beat Little Mac, Strider, Jill Valentine, and Scorpion)
-The Legend of Zelda in the Series Contest 2006 (beat Civilization, Mega Man X, Metroid, and Metal Gear)
-Link/Ganondorf in the Rivalry Rumble 2011 (beat Arthas/Illidan, Amaterasu/Orochi, Mega Man/Wily, and Alucard/Dracula)
-Breath of the Wild in Game of the Decade 2020 (beat The Outer Worlds, Halo Reach, Final Fantasy 15, and Dragon Quest 11)
There's a common theme there. I'll let you guys figure out what it is.
Two notes.
-Link and Ganondorf finished over 75% in its first four matches, which is a record that could only ever possibly be broken by Link or his series.
-In the 2010 character battle, Link finished over 70% in four of his first five matches, but he's not eligible for this record because Mega Man X held him below 70% in round 3 that year. He finished 3% short.
We all knew Breath of the Wild would win this contest easily, but I don't know that we knew it would be this easy.
Ctes's Analysis[]
It’s to the surprise of no one that Breath of the Wild would continue to completely dominate the competition even this late in the contest. It did however do so significantly less than it did in the first three rounds. It went from breaking 80% three rounds straight to barely breaking 70%. That speaks volumes about Dragon Quest XI and it’s incredible how good you can look despite failing to break 30% in a match. Board 8 underrated DQXI by more than 5% today after underestimating it in the other rounds. It makes the whole upper division look almost unbelievably weak compared to the lower half. Something was off.
We’ve talked a lot about how the contest title combined with the forced voting has caused more blowouts than usual and have caused the top games to perform even better than they would have otherwise. I believe the same thing happened to Breath of the Wild up until this point. Final Fantasy XV might be a previous Game of the Year winner, but this is the first time Breath of the Wild faced something that it actually cared about. It’s not to take any credit away from Dragon Quest XI, the contrary actually, but there’s no way the top half of the division is as bad as the stats suggest. As I stated last round, it’s no coincidence the weakest game in both round 2 and 3 according to the x-stats is the one that face Breath of the Wild. It took a game that actually have a big fanbase and that people believe deserves to be here to stop Breath of the Wild from taking 80% of the votes.
It’s amazingly weird to see Dragon Quest succeed where Final Fantasy couldn’t. Being of the same time, there wasn’t a huge difference at first, but throughout the 90s Final Fantasy established itself as one of the biggest franchises of all time and without a doubt the biggest franchise on this site. Dragon Quest was rather niche and continued to be so. Not that everyone didn’t know how much that had changed, but Breath of the Wild striking down both of their main games from the last decade just makes it so clear. Of course Dragon Quest XI would have its strongest game come out 2017. It says a lot more about Final Fantasy than Dragon Quest, but it’s still clear that Dragon Quest is more legit than ever. It loses big time today, but it ends up looking like it deserved its seeding.
Safer777's Analysis[]
So finally after like 10 days of not having the contest, we have finally the contest. So okay obviously BOTW would win. I mean the game is favorite to win the whole thing and without a rally it will not lose. What else to say for prologue?
So for the match. Here is the thing. People had BOTW winning with around 75-80 but it won with 70 and that was barely too. I mean for a few hours BOTW was under 70 too. Pretty sure nobody expected that. Personally I also had BOTW to 80. Why? Because DQ games never do well in this site plus they were not popular until a while ago. I say they were not popular because now with DQ 11 the DQ series is thriving. It has characters in Smash plus this game smashed sales and even the updated version did really well. I don't know if DQ11 is the highest selling DQ game, but it is at least the 2nd best in sales. So yeah. Still this result is nice. It means that there are stronger games from other series that can beat BOTW, just not in this contest I believe. Still BOTW the favorite but with lower percentages than we expected. Also check out the prediction percentage. Not even strong games that won in Round 1 didn't had that high percentage!
Tsunami's Analysis[]
Return of the colons! So the 2018 contest had a hiatus after Round 4 to set up the Second Chance Brackets, perfectly timed to allow for Thanksgiving break. This contest had a hiatus after Round 3 for no particularly good reason. It killed momentum, and it shows in those vote totals; barely over 25000 votes after, um...wait, that's actually higher than the Division 6 and 7 semfinals were? Huh, I guess it just looks bad because Division 8's semis scored so highly. Well, it was also a rather precipitous drop-off from BotW's R3 match against Final Fantasy XV, and that benefited DQXI immensely. One round after putting up 80.25% on FFXV, BotW was held to just 70.22% against DQXI. A Dragon Quest game outperforming a Final Fantasy game by that much? It's very strange, and I have to stop and try to figure out how it happened.
The obvious answer, of course, is anti-votes. The Legend of Zelda dominates every contest unless a rallied entrant stops it, and even Draven was barely able to pull it off. The deeper into the contest you get, the more it'll get anti-voted for being too strong. But Final Fantasy is about the only series that can't benefit from this phenomenon, because the only times Zelda has lost without a rally being involved--2003's character battle, 2004's Games Contest, and technically the Villain contest but Sephiroth was expected to win that one, to the tune of the highest prediction percentage for a champion ever--it was to Final Fantasy, or more specifically Final Fantasy VII. Combine that with FFVII being the game that put GameFAQs on the map, courtesy of the late Kao Megura, and for the longest time there was a perception that "Final Fantasy Always Wins", even though in reality it's only managed a few sparse wins over The Legend of Zelda. (It might also help that we do Character Battles far more frequently than Games Contests and each numbered Final Fantasy game is a separate continuity while the Legend of Zelda has the same few characters in every game, even if technically the Link and Zelda are usually different individuals with the same name each time, so Final Fantasy characters dominate(d) the brackets even though they rarely win out in the end. Wait, hold on, let me do some math...yeah, Final Fantasy VII alone has put more characters into Character Battles than the entire Legend of Zelda series.
FFVII: Cloud, Sephiroth, Tifa, Vincent, Aerith, Zack, Cid, Barret, Midgar Zolom
Zelda: Link, Zelda, Ganondorf, Midna, Tingle, Epona, Groose
9-7 in favor of FFVII. So the sentiment is understandable even if it's wrong.)
That said, this is an outstanding performance by Dragon Quest XI. Is it possible that the series is finally gaining traction outside of Japan? It has to be noted that a lot of people were surprised by how well its characters did in 2013; Slime was closer to 1st than to 3rd in a match it had no business winning, and DQV Hero burned a lot of Expert Challenge pickers with his second place finish even though it should've been somewhat obvious that Aerith was going to annihilate Rinoa with SFF, because that's just what FFVII does to other FF games and this isn't one of those "FF-not-VII leads can still hang with FFVII not-leads sometimes" situations; this was like vs. like. And a lot of people's analyses of that even acknowledged that fact, and still picked Rinoa to beat Hero because they were just that low on Hero's strength!