Results[]

Friday, April 17, 2020
Ulti's Analysis[]
Division | Division 6 |
---|---|
Match # | 87 |
Match Date | Friday, April 17, 2020 |
Oracle Expectations |
Portal 2 - 57.92% 51 for - 4 against |
GameFAQs Prediction |
Portal 2 - 50.55% |
User Votes |
Portal 2 - 5754 Kingdom Hearts III - 3426 |
Anonymous Votes |
Portal 2 - 4844 Kingdom Hearts III - 3030 |
I warned you about Tetsuya Nomura, folks. I won't spoil FF7 Remake here, but you can't say I didn't warn you. That guy has been garbage ever since he became a director. The dude is a good artist. I will never take that away from him. He gets made fun of a lot because of belts and zippers, but I do legitimately like his art style. As a director and writer though? Trash. He is laughably unqualified, and we have almost two decades of games as proof. He's a hack.
A few years back, I mentioned how I would rather pick Kingdom Hearts and be wrong than pick against it and be wrong. The series has pulled so many wins out of its ass in debated matches over the years that it's so hard to pick against it when there's even a small chance it can win. That said, I think we're at the point where this series is done for on this site. There have been way too many bad games in a row now in that series, not to mention Kingdom Hearts 3 itself being trash after 15 years of hype, for it to recover.
So I knew Portal 2 was winning this match. Didn't care, I picked Kingdom Hearts 3 anyway, even over one of my all time favorites, knowing full well what was coming. At least, I thought I knew what was coming. Portal 2 delivered a beatdown so massive that it had people talking about it winning this division, perhaps even more, because it felt like we were watching something we hadn't seen before.
The reason for that is simple. We hadn't seen anything like this before. Did you know this is the first time a Kingdom Hearts game got under 40% in a 1v1 contest poll? It's true. Look it up. The losses are always close, even in the LOL 4ways if you care to look those up as well. After all that, Kingdom Hearts 3 finally gets released, finally it gets into a contest, and.... dud. Much like its useless director.
Seriously, how did we go from this...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTUq3Ik1GHM
...to THIS?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjiHufVEc7g
Not only has Tetsuya Nomura ruined Kingdom Hearts beyond all repair, and we saw the result of his idiocy live this contest, but he's also in the process of ruining Final Fantasy 7 even more than it's already been ruined. All Square had to do was take the same game and make it shiny. That's it. Instead, we got hit with false advertising. Defenders of Nomura can call that trash whatever they want, but at the end of the day we got lied to. And I told you he was going to pull some BS with that remake. I fucking knew it. Add another one to the pile of things that goof has ruined.
I mean really, hasn't FF7 been through enough? Crisis Core, Dirge of Cerberus, Advent Children, Before Crisis, Last Order, and now this nonsense? Enough is enough. That cow has milked dry every which way and needs to be brought to the slaughterhouse already so it can be put out of its misery. And fire Tetsuya Nomura and just start all over while you're at it. When the only Final Fantasy game to get any respect for an entire decade is an MMORPG of all things, something has gone seriously wrong. Seeing Kingdom Hearts and its idiot director completely collapse at the hands of one of my favorite games made me so happy, too, because Portal 2 deserved to go on this crazy run it went on. It got screwed in 2015, so this contest was a nice bit of justice for it.
Final point before I move on. I don't really care about credits in games and knowing who voice actors and motion capture actors are and all that other jazz, so until this week I was probably the only guy on the planet who didn't know that JK Simmons is Cave Johnson. I knew that voice sounded familiar when I was playing and I could never put my finger on it!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmH7tAJ0SfA
Cave Johnson -- first man in human history to successfully give a potato an orgasm.
Ctes's Analysis[]
Kingdom Hearts III was a semi-popular upset pick taken by a good number of gurus. Kingdom Hearts has traditionally been stronger than Portal here and the third one was untested, as it did not appear in any Game of the Year polls. Portal also looked weaker in recent contests as it did a decade ago when it was a huge phenomenon everywhere. However, Kingdom Hearts III was not received too well for various reasons we’ve been through before. You had to hoping it could ride on its name to victory and that was always a longshot. We saw how well it worked out for the game thinking they had their own characters and didn’t need Final Fantasy anywhere. It’s the same thing here really, and besides, Portal is quite the name here as well. Oh, and I know that’s not the main reason the game wasn’t too well liked, but it all counts.
The first round definitely made Portal 2 look like the favorite today, as shown by very few oracles picking it. True enough, it had little trouble, though we underestimated it a good bit. Kingdom Hearts III did best with the board vote, surprisingly. Despite not being too well liked here either, we still appreciate the franchise as a whole it would seem, because we sure used to love Portal too. It was close for a few minutes. Then it was basically over, but if you believed Portal 2 had all the bracket votes, you might have still had hope at the freeze, because Portal couldn’t really run away with it until that point. When the next update came it was pretty clear that Portal 2 was not going to break a sweat winning the match though.
I think at the end of the day, this wasn’t really a matter of which franchise we think the best of a decade later, but just the games competing. Portal 2 was loved, and Kingdom Hearts III had a mixed reception. In a Game of the Decade setting, Portal 2 is still remembered despite being very early. The first Portal was good and did impressive last Game of the Decade too, but the second one took the good idea and really built upon it. I saw the name being brought up in many Game of the Decade discussions, it probably benefits a bit from the contest title, similar to what Mass Effect 2 seemed to do.
Portal 2 goes into the third round as the big favorite, although it depended on how much a boost you thought Animal Crossing. Kingdom Hearts ended up looking fine, but it’s a huge fall from grace. Both games were among the biggest games last decade. This one barely made it out in time to enter this and after so many years of waiting, it wasn’t even that great. The future is not to bright for Kingdom Hearts. They pumped out handheld games and countless remasters up until the release of this game because it was hyped by the misleading title of it being a “mainline Kingdom Hearts” despite being a sequel to one of the handhelds that more casual fans probably thought of a spin-off. If they want to make up for this with another release in the future, they probably can’t get people to buy everything again, because it won’t be as anticipated. We might very well have seen the effective end of the franchise, but Kingdom Hearts II will probably continue to be a decent entry in these contests and Sora is probably still somewhat strong.
Safer777's Analysis[]
So this match. Damn. Okay so here it goes. KH is a beloved series. I mean KH 2 is still considered one of the best games of all time and it came out 15 years ago! But see here is the thing, when a sequel comes out after 14 YEARS it has to be the best game ever for making us wait all this time! Oh sure there were a TON of spin off but people ALWAYS want the main games to play. Not a spin off. So is KH 3 a bad game? No. But after 14 years everyone was dissapointed. Same deal with FF 15. Not a bad game but that game was in development for 10 years. You think it would managed to please everyone after all this time? Extremely few games can do it. Grand Theft Auto series can. Elder Scrolls series can. This is why games should be out every 4-5 years the maximum so people will not lose interested or find something else to play. Plus as I said in my previous analysis KH3 hasn't FF characters. You know the series that became popular because it had Disney and FF characters together? Yeah screw that now! Oh there are moogles! Yippee! And the reason FF characters weren't there? Because they wanted to focus on the stories of the main characters in KH? What? First of all pretty sure nobody knows what exactly is going on with the KH series since there are so many spin offs that either add things, take aways things, or change things. So if we had Cloud fighthing Sephiroth for example we wouldn't be able to understand the main story of KH 3? Yeah sure.
So for the match. Well Portal 2 is a damn beloved game even though it seems that the Portal series is dead now. Portal 2 came out 9 years ago. It is some kind of puzzle platform and it still hugely popular. I don't get it. Valve has Half Life and Portal and they don't do anything with their franchises. Hey anything would be fine! Except gatcha games. So Portal 2 won with as much as expected. I do wonder if KH 2 was here though. Would it win? Who knows. As I said KH 3 came out, there was hype for 1 week and then everyone just moved on. Sad. I don't know if they make another KH game but pretty sure the franchise isn't what it used to be. Also strangely enough this was the worst loss for a KH game 1VS1! Damn it! This is strange. We had the worst loss for a Zelda game 1VS1 a few days ago and now this.
Tsunami's Analysis[]
Nothing to talk about here; over half the brackets got this right and the match wasn't even close. RPGFAQs strikes again...
...wait, Portal 2 was the winner? Not Kingdom Hearts III? And people expected this? Fuck, man, I didn't even remotely consider this one, and their respective Round 1 results did nothing to sway me one way or the other. I guess KH3 did have the worse result, even with the slightly better percentage, because its opponent was a lot less recognizable than Portal 2's, but come on. Portal 2 got upset in Round 1 in 2015 (which I called correctly) and Wheatley lost to Crash Bandicoot in Round 1 in 2013 (not so much so). 2015 X-Stats say Portal 2 gets 35.96% on KH1 and 34.04% on KH2. And that makes perfect sense because they're fucking Square Enix RPGs; hell, I think KH1 might technically be pre-merger Squaresoft. Yes, the endless spinoffs dragged the series down, but this is a numbered game. Kingdom Hearts III. This wasn't supposed to be a contest. It just...I keep wanting to say "I didn't even consider this upset possibility", because I can't wrap my head around the fact that Kingdom Hearts III was the upset pick! I honestly wouldn't have been surprised to see Persona 5 > Kingdom Hearts III as our "haw haw casuals" moment, because Persona still doesn't have the name recognition that Kingdom Hearts does. I'm pretty sure "the casuals" don't actually exist anymore, but still. Portal 2 was proven crap, and yet it's pretty much dead even with RDR1 in the 2015 X-Stats so we knew that RDR2 would be even less of a challenge, except actually we didn't know that at all because the idea of Portal 2 not weakening considerably since 2015 was also laughable.
You know what, Portal 2 was in Division 3, aka "the Undertale Division". Yes, it lost to Sonic 2 and Sonic 2 lost to Pokémon, but the exact X-Stat numbers on that would still be fishy because we were already prepping Pokémon to be our savior again, just like in 2013 with Mewtwo. Maybe Portal 1 can give us something "cleaner"? ...Goddamnit Portal 1 was fed to Melee in the first round. We had nothing. Nothing remotely reliable, aside from the characters bombing, and as we all know, Characters =/= Games. And we...oh. Forget "prepping to be our savior". RBYG-StH2 was the same day as UT-SMW! And Undertale's own rallies favor Pokémon there. We really had nothing. Except...
- Portal (2015g) VS Kingdom Hearts 2 (2015g)
Portal has a strength of 24.72.
Kingdom Hearts 2 has a strength of 34.22.
Kingdom Hearts 2 wins with 63.88% of the vote!
A win of 16,900 with 60,875 total votes cast.
That one barely moves at all when switched to raw X-Stats; I suspect the fact that it moves at all is just due to rounding errors. Because Melee was perceived to have rallied in Round 2 against Pokémon GSC, and then in every round from Round 4 against Chrono Trigger until its defeat against Undertale. The two matches where it had not been perceived to have rallied were Round 1 against Portal...and Round 3 against Kingdom Hearts II. It's a clean comparison, even if it was through an entrant that had rallied.
Which begs the question: Why? Was Kingdom Hearts III that poorly received? There is no good reason for Portal 2 to have gotten stronger, since there are no other games in the series. Yet somehow, everyone just kind of knew that Portal 2 would win. Against probably the biggest Square RPG of the decade. What site am I even on anymore?