Results[]
Ulti's Analysis[]
| Division | East Division |
|---|---|
| Match # | 16 |
| Match Date | Tuesday, July 16th, 2002 |
| Vote difference | 22,118 |
| GameFAQs Prediction |
Snake - 83.88% (14,061 brackets) |
For those who weren't around in 2002, 2002 may very well have been Solid Snake's best contest appearance ever. When the contest board first opened, the two big choices to make the finals were Sephiroth and Solid Snake, and most people honestly felt that Snake would win such a match. Solid Snake wound up being the second most favored character in the contest; more people had Snake winning than Cloud, Link, and Sephiroth (today's "Big Three"), if you can believe that. Snake was a huge board favorite, and despite the fact that Squall also had his fair share of fans during this match, it didn't matter. Aside from being a sentimental board favorite, Solid Snake was also coming off of the release of Metal Gear Solid 2, a game so popular that it was given the first ever perfect rating by EGM (don't quote me on that, but I'm 80% sure that it was EGM), not to mention multiple rereleases and spinoffs. Snake was arguably at the height of his career at the time of this contest.
But Squall, unlike Snake, was still suffering from being the "star" of Final Fantasy 8, a game that didn't get any proper respect until after the release of Kingdom Hearts. Because of this, the mass of pro-Squall spamming that went on on every major Final Fantasy board, not to mention a lot of it going on on board 8 as well, did absolutely nothing for every female's favorite gaming character. Squall wound up being given one of the single worst non-SFF beating that you'll ever see a Square character take. But like I said, when you pair FF8/Squall's hate up with Snake being such a huge board favorite at the time, you wind up with a lot of happy people that could care less about how bad Squall had it with his seeding in this contest. Aside from a few detractors, everyone was quite pleased to see Squall get the crap kicked out of him.
Of course, anyone that was here during 2003 knows that this match was a direct setup for Squall/Luigi, one of the single best surprises to ever happen in a contest match =)