Results[]
Round One
Ulti's Analysis[]
| Division | Division 8 |
|---|---|
| Match # | 64 |
| Match Date | Friday, November 20, 2015 |
| Oracle Expectations |
Mass Effect 2 - 80.55% 97 for - 0 against |
| GameFAQs Prediction |
Mass Effect 2 - 92.00% |
It was fun listing prediction round 1 percentages for the 1 seeds, so let's do it for the 2 seeds.
Final Fantasy 7 - 94.02%
Persona 4 - 92.48%
Mass Effect 2 - 92%
Super Mario World - 90.18%
Majora's Mask - 89.29%
Symphony of the Night - 88.76%
Resident Evil 4 - 77.09%
The Last of Us - 74.96%
Seeing FF7 as a 2 seed while GTA5 is sitting there as a 1 is ridiculous. The Last of Us and Persona 4 also don't belong as 2 seeds, but in the opposite direction. Those two were overseeded.
I love when the last match of round 1 is a blowout, for PCA purposes. Sub-Zero > Master Chief or Pac-Man > Ocelot are fun and all, but I do love some reflection. Mass Effect 2 got a nice, relaxing 79-21 blowout that let us all reflect on Stars and Turds! Remember, this is purely personal.
Star of the Round: Chrono Trigger, honorable mention to Super Metroid. I'd give this to Undertale, but for 18 hours that game was hardly a Star of the Round. Star series was the Zelda series for sure. 5 dominant wins, with the two biggest blowouts of the contest.
Turd of the Round: Super Mario Maker, dishonorable mentions to Destiny and Mass Effect 3. Mario Maker goes without saying, as does Destiny's being hot garbage, but you have to be mentioned in this category when you give up a 9252 vote lead. Don't forget that our record before this was 2483. Turd series was easily Metal Gear Solid. 5 games got in. Only one looked good in winning, while three of the games looked horrible in wins and MGS4 just outright lost.
It was a rather entertaining round 1, even if there were a ton of predictable matches. That happens with any contest, though. It set up what would be a really fun round 2, which would also be four matches per day. Past that, it would drop to 2 matches per day until the semis, then one match per day. The best match of round 1 was probably Undertale > Mass Effect 3. The worst, at least for me personally, was MGS5 > Perfect Dark. I love Perfect Dark, don't get me wrong, but seeing MGS5 shit the bed like that was heartbreaking. Kojima getting fired, then banned from the video game awards was stupid. The entire thing just pisses me off, and the match (not to mention MGS5 itself) reminded me of wasted potential. Kojima built up all this good will over years and years of hard work. Konami ruined it. I'm tired of seeing the things I love ruin themselves.
My last anecdote for round 1 before moving on is holy crap is this a lot of matches. I've done 64 writeups, which used to be the length of an entire PCA! We've reached the halfway point though; all downhill from here!
Ctes's Analysis[]
Well, Mass Effect 1 and 3 had tough matches with one of them prevailing and the other one failing and thereby changing the rest of the contest for good. Mass Effect 2 however, had a very easy time. As a #2 seed, it got to draw an absolutely terrible game strength wise. We wouldn't know how bad yet, but it's obvious it was really bad before seeing it. Mass Effect 2 would have to prove itself as the strongest Mass Effect game as we thought it probably was. The other two being #10 seeds shows which is the fan favorite, but that's not enough.
However, we wouldn't really get anywhere on that before the next round, where it got to face an actual challenge. Both games Starcraft and Mass Effect 2 faced are newcomers and incredibly weak apparently. Not that it was a surprise in this match. There comes a point in the high percentages where things get really hard to determine and x-stats might look weird. This high, things such a play rate and anti-voting really starts mattering a lot. I don't know if the latter matters today, but there is an off-chance that Mass Effect 3 created some backlash for the series. The playrate shouldn't be bad in particular. It's a recent game, but that's the only reason it could be.
So I actually don't think Mass Effect 2 manages to look that good today. Look at the prediction percentage, everyone knew Virtue's Last Reward would such. This is one of the highest prediction percentages of the whole contest. There are only six games that managed to get a better one; Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy VII, Fallout 3, Persona 4, Ocarina of Time and A Link to the Past. Those are all either among the very strongest games on the site or their opponents were among the weakest. Mass Effect 2 can be compared to Persona 4 the easiest, because Persona 4 had a somewhat similar opponent in 999 and did slightly worse. If you assume Virtue's Last Reward and 999 are toughly equal, then Mass Effect 2 is not that much stronger than Persona 4, which certainly wouldn't make it stand much a chance against MGS3 let alone Starcraft, but it wouldn't be weird for Virtue's Last Reward to be a good chunk stronger either. With how Metal Gear Solid 3 did today, Mass Effect 2 had good reason to do well in that match, but just as much if not more reason to be scared of Starcraft in round 2.
Thus the first round ended on a rather boring day. None of the matches were interesting and all four were really predictable too, but it was easy to see how good this division could get though. Seeing which Metal Gear Solid is the strongest, but having threats to the title of division winner in Mass Effect to a previous bandwagon catchers in Shadow of the Colossus and Starcraft. Something to look forward to for sure!