Results[]
Wednesday, December 16, 2015
Ulti's Analysis[]
"Third Place Battle"
Allen was nice enough to give us 4 simultaneous bonus polls after this contest, and while none of the matches were particularly good, bonus polls is always better than no bonus polls.
The first bonus poll was a third place battle between Melee and Super Mario RPG, which was over in about 10 seconds and stayed at 63-37 for the entire 24 hour time period. The fun there is that there wasn't a massive percentage bleed overnight by SMRPG, which suggests that these games have identical trends.
This match meant little outside of a posthumous third place title, though it was nice to see Melee beasting one final time this contest. It also made for some very fun comparisons. In 2004, Chrono Trigger scored 67.06% on Super Mario RPG. In this contest, Ocarina scored 67.38%. Those results were both rally-free, and were very close to what Melee got here in the bonus poll. I know bonus polls are often wonky, but this was close enough to what CT and Ocarina got to legitimize Melee in my view. The Chrono Trigger win wasn't some fluke, and a hyper-rallied Melee clearly would have annihilated Ocarina in the final had it gotten past Undertale. For me, who lists Melee as the second-best game ever made behind Final Fantasy Tactics, it was an awesome consolation prize.
Ctes' Analysis[]
The first of our four bonus matches, labeled “Third Place Battle”. This match was obvious and really boring, but I don't really mind as much as some of the other bonus matches, because I don't feel any potential was wasted here. It feels completely fair that the two semifinal losers got a bonus match and it might as well be against each other. I'm not sure if the Melee fanbase would rally in a bonus poll, but I wouldn't be surprised, and Super Mario RPG wouldn't have won any bonus match either way. Its inclusion in itself is enough recognition.
I wonder how many people would have predicted that out third place battle would be between these two. It's almost certainly less than 1%. Only slightly less than 7% predicted Melee to reach the semi-final and only 3% predicted Super Mario RPG to reach that point, so the amount of people that had both things happened and had both games losing has to be very minimal. The final score today looks really nice, as it's just whole numbers.
I know a bunch of users would've rather seen different bonus polls than the ones we got, but it's honestly just rather nice that we got some additional matches. They're more fun than our typical bonus polls. It didn't feel like a bonus poll just to have a bonus poll, which the battle of Links or Link vs. Santa Claus felt like. Allen seemed to try to actually try to create something interesting. Despite no one having doubts about this one, it's nice that we now have an official third place in Melee.