Results[]
Saturday, April 11, 2020
Ulti's Analysis[]
| Division | Division 8 |
|---|---|
| Match # | 64 |
| Match Date | Saturday, April 11, 2020 |
| Oracle Expectations |
NieR: Automata - 63.85% 58 for - 0 against |
| GameFAQs Prediction |
NieR: Automata - 81.32% |
| User Votes |
NieR: Automata - 5922 Bayonetta 2 - 2684 |
| Anonymous Votes |
NieR: Automata - 4784 Bayonetta 2 - 2316 |
The Bayonetta games got screwed this contest. Bayonetta 1 drew a Zelda game, and Bayonetta 2 was a Wii U exclusive for some dumb reason. It also ran into the worst possible opponent it could have seen. I know other games would have beaten Bayonetta 2 worse than Nier did here, but come on.
This is what Bayonetta is known for:
http://assets1.ignimgs.com/2018/02/05/img-1024-1517812625059_1280w.jpg
This is what 2B is known for:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icOGQTYtyoU
Of course Bayonetta 2 was going to lose. This match is the contest version of a once beautiful girl pushing 40 and now having to watch the pretty new 20-something steal all of her shine. Let this be a lesson, ladies. Don't spend your 20s whoring around. Us men have every advantage in dating after 30, because we have nothing but time. You don't ;)
By the way, this is no defense of 2B or that freakshow fanbase. Just wait until we get to the Pokemon HGSS match, my gosh.
I always enjoy when round one ends on a dud match, because I like doing a small retrospective here. Round 1 of this contest was garbage. An 11, a 13, and a 14 seed won. There were no other major seeding upsets and less than five matches out of the 64 were good. The matches would get better later, but round one was blowout city.
People also massively overhyped all of these indie games. Some absurd number like 95 of them made the field, but only Hollow Knight, Bastion, Minecraft, Shovel Knight, Cuphead, Ori and the Blind Forest, and Stardew Valley won their matches. Seven sounds like a big number, but not when there are 64 games in round 2. Only one of these games would end up in round 3 and that required a developer rally, too. I have no problem with indie games, but the hype around them is just ridiculous.
Star of the Round had to be Mario Odyssey or Xenoblade Chronicles. Those two meant business. Turd of the Round goes to Dragon Age: Inquisition and Hearthstone. Inquisition wasn't the biggest black eye of the entire contest like Fire Emblem was, but in round one it qualifies. Hearthstone was given a fairly winnable match and performed like the trash it is.
On to round 2!
Ctes's Analysis[]
The final match of round 1 came down to a seemingly good-looking victory for NieR: Automata against yet another game screwed by bracket placement, Bayonetta 2. Automata was talked about quite a bit pre-contest. It looked alright considering its competition in the Game of the Year polls of 2017 and 2B made the latest character battle as a #1 seed, showing that there’s definitely a fanbase here, even though she didn’t have the strength you expect of a #1 seed. Automata had a match against Pokemon HGSS on the horizon. While Pokemon was the favorite, Automata was a popular upset pick.
Bayonetta 2 did make our previous contest losing to Read Dead Redemption rather easily. Since then, however, Bayonetta was revealed as the final DLC character of Smash 4 and returned to Ultimate along with everyone else. Furthermore, both games have been ported to Switch, which the second one in particular needed to be. It was expected to be decent now, but it’s low seeding gave it a completely unwinnable match. Interestingly, despite the first one failing to make the previous contest, it was seeded a lot higher now, but they were both screwed by bracket placement.
The oracles didn’t expect Automata to pull off a doubling, so it overperformed a bit. This made the people that picked Automata for round 3 happy, although the Pokemon match didn’t really teach us anything about what it was against. Automata would end up not looking as good in the next round though and would fail to make the upset, so what happened here then?
The most popular idea is that Automata SFF’d Bayonetta 2. MechanicalWall was trying to put forth the idea already at the time of this match, but almost no one believed it at the time. Impressive seemingly being right about that from the beginning. I don’t think it’s obvious. The games are made by the same company, which has some rather passionate fans. They play similarly too. Those were the main ideas behind it, but I think it was reasonable to assume otherwise despite of it. Across all our contests, we have basically no evidence of previous SFF between things from different consoles from different companies. Different consoles is one thing if it’s a N64 game SFFing a Gamecube game or something like that, but a PS4/XBONE/PC game SFFing a Wii U / Switch game? That was hard to believe by many, myself included, and I don’t think you can blame us. But full credit where its due for sticking to it from the beginning. That explains why Automata looked so much better today than in the following rounds.
The other possibility is that Bayonetta 2 simply didn’t boost the way we thought. That seems weird all things considered, but we also saw Tropical Freeze looking really bad despite getting that dreamy Switch release, so perhaps it’s possible? Mario Kart 8 being as good as it did is a point against it, although that game sold so insanely many copies on Switch that it might just have broken through to the boost regardless, or maybe people just see Mario Kart something and think that they know what that series is. Development of Bayonetta 3 is apparently happening, but that’s really all we know of it, which might not be too good for the series. A while ago it was including at the end of a direct where everything they had was a line confirming it’s still going on. Perhaps that’s a point against it. Finally, Bayonetta appearing in Smash likely did more for the character than the games, if it helped the games at all. That one at least seems likely to be.
It’s just to say that we might simply have misjudged how good Bayonetta 2 actually is. I believe in the SFF idea the most though. It’s a shame it couldn’t get a slightly higher seed and make for some interesting matches somewhere else in the bracket. It’s actually the type of lower seeded game a bunch of round 1 matches were missing. If Bayonetta 3 is out the next time a games contest happens, then we’ll probably see at least one of them again, so let’s pray they get a better chance then.
Safer777's Analysis[]
You gotta feel sorry with the Bayonetta franchise here. Both games had so much bad seeding matches! If you could switch some seedings from the other divisions they both could win at least a match. As for the NieR franchise it got REALLY popular with the NieR Automata game. Before that barely anyone has heard of it because it is a spin off from the Drakengard series which even fewer people have heard of it. So why this NA game did that good? I have played it and the gameplay isn't anything special.
So why? Because the art and the story are really good. Sure you do control androids and you fight machines but they ask philosophical questions like what is human, what is an android, what is a machine, does anything matter? I mean the main characters who are 3 of them know they are just advanced machines and their purpose is to die fighthing the machines and they know it they still have complicated personalities. Same with the machines. Sure most seem like the berserk type but there are others who just like to live in peace. But how are these things happening since all these things are just created, not born naturally? These things you do wonder along with the other characters. I mean others think only the missions, others want other stuff, others want both and you even find a pair of Androids, one is male and one is female who love each other and just want to leave everything behind and just have each other which is impossible since they are both advanced machines but they don't seem to mind that. So yeah you do wonder and make you think deeply. I mean even the Pods, which are just flying analyzing machines that you always have around and help in combat too have their unique personalities and they do wonder about stuff too! Plus the main character of NA is 2B which became famous of her sexuality. I mean she wears stockings a and a real low skirt which you can even remove so you can see all her glory. Okay she actually wears somekind of 1 piece cloth but still you can see her ass since it barely covers anything down there but hey I am okay with that! So yeah it is a weird game but weird in a good way.
So for the match. As I said both Bayo games have some power and could win matches but they got strong opponents. So did NA did good? Yeah it did. More than a doubling and even though Bayo 2 is weaker from Bayo 1 due to beeing a Wii exclusive game, I count it as a good result.
Tsunami's Analysis[]
Both of these games were clearly going to be far weaker than their TJF-packing protagonists, although there was reason to think Automata might not be as weak as the original Nier presumably would be. I say presumably because we've never seen it in a Games Contest! It's actually recent enough that it would've been in this GotD, not the last one, and normally the instinct is that the first game in the series is always the strongest but Automata was far more successful commercially so it probably is stronger. Nier the character was weak in his only outing in the Character Battle but he was being SFFed by Riku. Then again, that kind of says everything, doesn't it? In fact, if you tried to use past results without understanding what they actually mean, there's a direct route you could've taken to getting this match horribly wrong: Riku beat Nier in 2013; Bayonetta beat Riku in 2017; sequels are always weaker than the originals; therefore there's no way that a Nier game could beat a Bayonetta game.
The only question left is just how much weaker than the multi-platform original the Wii U-exclusive Bayonetta 2 is. Because this is GameFAQs, where Link Always Wins, and yet Nier: Automata won more convincingly here than 2013 Game of the Year The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds did against the first Bayonetta. Even if being a handheld game is always a negative here unless you're Pokémon, I find it hard to believe that Nier: Automata would challenge ALBW. (Granted, it wasn't that much more convincingly, so the two Bayonetta games would have to be pretty close in strength for Nier: Automata to actually win.) Either that, or the "2017 factor" is stronger than we thought.