Results[]
Thursday, November 26, 2015
Ulti's Analysis[]
| Division | Division 6 |
|---|---|
| Match # | 88 |
| Match Date | Thursday, November 26, 2015 |
| Oracle Expectations |
Zelda: Majora's Mask - 67.07% 87 for - 1 against |
| GameFAQs Prediction |
Zelda: Majora's Mask - 73.19% |
Majora's Mask was the fifth Zelda game to make an appearance in round 2, and oddly enough it was the only one of the five that looked really good in its win. Twilight Princess, Wind Waker, and Link to the Past looked decent but nothing like world-beaters, and Ocarina of Time looked horrendous.
But Majora's Mask? That game was busy validating Game of the Decade by getting 69% on Final Fantasy 12, and frankly FF12 was lucky to even break 30% in this poll. FF12 is a good game, don't get me wrong, and I cannot wait for the HD remake, but let's not pretend the game has a lot of strength here. It got released too late in the PS2's life cycle and the director had a nervous breakdown mid-production because Square sucks now.
Now I don't know when it happened and I don't know how, but somewhere along the line Majora's Mask became the massive hipster favorite in the Zelda series. I thoroughly approve of this. Because for all the faults Majora's Mask had, it tells the best story in the entire Zelda series by a mile. It's not even close. People theorizing that Link is dead in the game tells you all you need to know. Freaking Link. The invincible hero. That doesn't happen if your storytelling is bad, and more Zelda games need to go this route and get away from the childish bullshit. Kudos to Twilight Princess for trying, even if the game wasn't all that good.
Majora's Mask being the only worldslayer Zelda title in round 2 made the upcoming round 3 match all the more hilarious. "Out of left field" does not even begin to describe it.
Ctes' Analysis[]
If there was somehow any doubt that Final Fantasy XII is the weakest Final Fantasy game in the bracket hopefully it disappeared now. I don't think anyone actually doubted it, but I really don't get why Final Fantasy XII got to be in the bracket once again. When SBAllen said the bracket had eight Final Fantasy games, I guessed all of them correctly except for XII. Instead, I predicted Final Fantasy XIII. It's not exactly that well received either, but it's new and it has yet to make the field, so I thought that would make more sense. Of course, it became clear it wasn't that when the sum of the titles was revealed to be Final Fantasy 56Tactics. I mean, Final Fantasy XII is not a great offender to the bracket, because it is capable of getting to round 2, it did, and it allowed us to laugh at the casuals a bit, though unfortunately also builds to the incorrect “Final Fantasy always wins” phase, but it's not that great a game and that's a popular opinion! We probably wont ever see Final Fantasy XIII in a contest if we didn't know. Maybe if we had one a couple of years ago.
Majora's Mask looks pretty great here. It lines up very nicely with the Game of the Decade x-stats, which might seem boring, but Majora's Mask actually had a lot to prove after that contest. Many people expected it to have overperformed that contest, it made sense too! Being an Ocarina of Time proxy, not to mention likely getting votes from the darn Brawl haters made sense, and honestly I do think that happened, so maybe Majora's Mask boosted a little bit, or maybe Valkyria Chronicles and Final Fantasy XII fell. Maybe it's a bit of both. In any case, Majora's Mask didn't look like it would be close to Link to the Past, which is fair, because that was never gonna happen. So depsite having a very predictable path, it's nice that it proved itself worthy of its title last time.