Results[]
Friday, April 3, 2020
Ulti's Analysis[]
| Division | Division 4 |
|---|---|
| Match # | 32 |
| Match Date | Friday, April 03, 2020 |
| Oracle Expectations |
Fire Emblem: Three Houses - 70.19% 66 for - 0 against |
| GameFAQs Prediction |
Fire Emblem: Three Houses - 80.49% |
| User Votes |
Fire Emblem: Three Houses - 6038 South Park: The Stick of Truth - 2889 |
| Anonymous Votes |
Fire Emblem: Three Houses - 4661 South Park: The Stick of Truth - 2600 |
Right from the jump, it was clear that Three Houses was in a lot of trouble in this contest. Stick of Truth is very comparable to Splatoon 2, and the comparison point between Xenoblade and Fire Emblem's performances was no contest. Xenoblade looked far, far better. Some people tried to claim Stick of Truth had respectable strength for various reasons, such as big name exposure and memes, but those same arguments apply to Splatoon 2. Fact is, Fire Emblem as a whole just laid a huge egg in this contest. In a vacuum this match was a simple doubling for the expected winner. When compared to future opponents...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9Uw97lOOlk
We'll get into this more in round 3, but here is the short version since I have to save some juice for later. On top of Fire Emblem just being the Tales series with slightly more strength -- overhyped every contest without ever winning anything of note -- Three Houses was always going to get doomed by anti-voting by weird Smash Bros fans.
I talk a lot of junk about a lot of fanbases in these writeups, but let's make one thing perfectly clear. Tourneycrab Smash players are the absolute worst fanbase on this entire planet. I would rather spend time with literally anyone else. Unfortunately, there are a ton of these people and they are very, very pissed off at Fire Emblem: Three Houses. Adding anti-votes to a series that already has a tendency to choke is a recipe for napalm death.
Ctes's Analysis[]
The red flag was up when Awakening had its match, but on top of Xenoblade overperforming, Three Houses looked nothing like a division winner now. I mean, full respect for going for the exact doubling. The percentages are there, it was just a few votes away. That’s satisfying. It was an underperformance however and Three Houses needed the opposite of that to still be considered the favorite to make it out of round 3 when Xenoblade was looking so good in the other match.
Everyone knows what South Park is. The games are also well-liked enough. They’re nothing big though, the seeding and the lack of the other one makes that clear. You should not believe it to be riding super high on the name alone, just because people know it. Everyone here knows Fire Emblem too so the forced voting shouldn’t make much of a difference. Three Houses had to hope that somehow South Park was significantly better than expected or that Xenoblade SFF’d Splatoon more than the already expected high amount. It didn’t seem great for it.
This match was another loss for 2019. Every game from that year looked off, except for remake of a 1998 game, which has a clear explanation for being a possible exception. Perhaps we’re too slow to try out new games these days. That’s certainly not something that would surprise me. It’s also possible it was just a bad year, but relative to Resident Evil 2, the other things looked further away that the Game of the Year polls indicated.
Perhaps Three Houses had some level of anti-votes behind it. The Smash Bros fanbase consists of some of the most whiny, greedy, and impatient people on the planet. Byleth, the main character of Three Houses, being revealed for Ultimate was not taken well among the fanbase. Fire Emblem had already been hated on for having too many representatives compared to what people thought it deserved and they’re also quite similar many of them. Then Byleth was the fifth character in a figthers pass that otherwise had only third party stuff. You can see where the disappointment comes from, but Smash fans don’t get disappointed, they riot. I think it’s entirely possible that Three Houses was anti-voted because of it, but it had to be a bit for it to make a difference in the Xenoblade match as things looked now.
Safer777's Analysis[]
So 2 RPG's here. Everyone knows about FE series. It almost got cancelled a few years ago and now it is bigger than ever. FE3H got universall acclaim from both critics and fans. I still haven't played it, but one of those days... As for SP...if you are a fan of the series you have to play that game. It is basically a long episode. The writing and the humor is exactly like the series. And it makes sense. I mean the writers of the show took part in the making of this game.
So for the match. Well it was never in doubt. However I do believe SP did good here. Supposedly FE3H is damn strong since it was big when it came out and still is but it barely scored a doubling. The main character from FE3H got into Smash! Like almost every other FE main character it seems. If SP was vs another weak game it would have won for sure. But that is how things are. I am a huge SP fan. I still remember when a friend of mine brought the South Park movie on my house on 2000 and like 10 people were watching it and I couldn't believe what I saw. I mean they have stuff like this in USA that is for children? After that I managed to find the 1st season and I was hooked. I have been a fan almost 20 years now. And I still can't believe the show is going on! But once again I guess bad performance for FE3H unless you believe that SP is secretly strong.
Tsunami's Analysis[]
As if we needed more evidence that non-video game origins are no object for GameFAQs voters.
This was a horrible result for Three Houses, which was seemingly a lot more well-loved in the fandom than Awakening or Fates even though it's probably even easier than those games. Seriously, this game still has a "Casual Mode" despite the fact that Divine Pulse makes it so that you can take the risks in Classic Mode that you wouldn't dream of taking in anything other than Casual Mode in any other game. I think I actually had to start tightening up my play at one point in my first playthrough because I was running low on (and eventually ran out of) charges, but I never had to reset to save a unit, and on NG+, you'll never even have to worry about running out of charges at any time. Which is fine for me, because I'm more of a story guy and replay for the completion of filling up the support logs (a fruitless task in the later games, though one I'd managed on both 7 and 8). In Awakening and Fates, that meant one playthrough on Classic Mode to prove myself capable and then all replays on Casual. In Three Houses, it's Classic Mode every time, because there's still pretty much no risk to doing so. And against South Park: The Stick of Truth (which is apparently also an RPG?), it...came up just seven votes shy of the doubling. Yeah, we'll just call it "a doubling", but that it was even close, let alone technically coming up just short, is embarrassing. And in the raw votes, it's not even close; FE3H polled at 67.64% among registered voters and 64.19% among unregistered.
And yet, would that really affect anything? Three Houses was considered a massive favorite over Dragon Age: Inquisition, and it was even harder to imagine Ori and the Blind Forest pulling the upset. Awakening was expected to get 48.23% on Xenoblade based on their matches with DKC2 in 2015, so Three Houses barely has to be stronger than Awakening at all to win that (which it still should be just from being on the Switch, given this site's apparent anti-handheld bias). So, what, we're panicking about its chances against the P4G-RDR winner in Round 4? Were we favoring it there to begin with? *checks*
...Apparently not only is FE3H the Guru favorite there, but GTAV is the favorite over the P4G-RDR winner in Round 3, and there's enough of a split on that R2 match itself that Xenoblade is actually the #3 choice to win this division, with P4G #4 and RDR #5. So either I'm going to be made a fool of, or I'm still in prime position in the Guru after all.
(Unless it's Red Dead Redemption rather than Persona 4 Golden that knocks GTAV off, in which case I'm really screwed.)
You know what, let's settle this once and for all. Back to the X-Stat calculator!
- looks at outcome of hypothetical GTA5-P4 match in 2015*
...Da fuq? Is this some type of weird trickery based on GTA5 being in the SMRPG quarter of the bracket? ...No, P4's considered the slight favorite over RDR, and RDR was in that quarter as well, albeit in Division 8 to GTA5's Division 7. Well now I feel silly, but come on, it's GTA. When has that ever been worth anything in Games Contests?