Results[]
Sunday, November 22, 2015
Ulti's Analysis[]
| Division | Division 2 |
|---|---|
| Match # | 71 |
| Match Date | Sunday, November 22, 2015 |
| Oracle Expectations |
Smash Bros. Wii U - 60.05% 92 for - 2 against |
| GameFAQs Prediction |
Smash Bros. Wii U - 44.48% |
Did I go on my huge rant about how good Smash 4 is during my round 1 writeup? I did? Good. Smash 4 is absolutely godlike. I mean yeah the online is a laggy mess, but at least Nintendo bothered trying this time. It's a damn shame Smash 4 is saddled by the Wii U. I'm all for no one caring about the Wii U, don't get me wrong, but Smash 4 is an all-time great game and deserves to have Melee-like strength in contests. The Smash community was clearly ready to go berserk this contest, and I would have fully loved Smash 4 getting all that support. Not that I'm complaining about Melee getting it, but Smash 4 really deserves it as well.
As for a 55-45 victory over Mass Effect, it was a good match for both games. Smash 4 did the usual Smash thing where it rolled the board vote before bleeding percentage. 55-45 is a good win here, but hardly the kind of performance that would scare people into thinking it could beat FF7. For Mass Effect, 45% on Smash 4 after upsetting Galaxy 2 was a solid performance. Can't complain about a respectable loss to an upper tier Nintendo title, and what is easily the strongest game on the Wii U.
It would however lead to Mass Effect 2 being the only remaining game in the series left in this contest, and that game was due for a rather legendary struggle in its own right.
Ctes' Analysis[]
This match was over from the moment it began, but man, it screwed with many users in the oracle challenge. A very well received Smash title was not supposed to allow Mass Effect to get above 45%. Most people guessed Smash 4 to win with about 60% or at least close to. It was not at all close to do that. Of course, this was mostly viewed as a major disappointing performance from Smash and not a surprisingly good performance from Smash. There were little to no talks about Mass Effect being legit, or about Mass Effect 2 looking more likely to create upsets in the bottom division, it was pretty much all Wii U bashing.
Smash 4 itself has pretty much no haters, so most of the trash talk was not directly aimed at the game. The reason for it not nearly being as strong as Brawl was when that was released, despite Brawl getting very mixed reviews, lies not within the game itself, but its circumstances. First and foremost, there's the title. Melee and Brawl are good and catchy titles. For “3DS and Wii U” are a lame cliche of a pun, and it's really uncreative too. There's a reason this game still goes by Smash 4 even after getting an official title. You never hear anyone say Smash 2 or Smash 3 about the others. It's stupid that it's like that, but I actually believe that it drags it down. It also leads me to the next reason for it being weaker than it should be; it's on the Wii U. That's never really a good thing. It's not as bad a console as people make it out to be, you can play with a good controller and there are good games on it, but in general people view it quite negatively. There's also the fact that it's only a year old. Being recent helped only one game this contest and that wasn't Smash 4.
So let's also praise Mass Effect a bit, it did really good today. In retrospect, it makes a lot of sense. Given what we just discussed about Smash 4, something that wouldn't surprise anyone, that Mass Effect is well received, and Shepard doing pretty great in the characters contests, this is not such a weird result. Mass Effect did pretty good in Game of the Decade, but people simply saw a popular Smash game and didn't think twice. When you don't think twice about the match, it usually doesn't have the winning game below 55%. Despite this disappointing performance today, Smash 4 is a Wii U game that just reached round 3 by beating a fairly good opponent. This puts it a bit below Resident Evil 4 in Game of the Decade, the difference this contest being that being a new game sucks more than ever. The Wii U might not have an elite game, but it has a strong one, and when you look at it that way, Smash 4 suddenly doesn't look too bad.
This match also redeems Super Mario Galaxy 2 quite a lot, but almost no one gave that any thought. Mario had a fine contest, but people ignored so many important things regarding the Mario game matches. Super Mario Galaxy 2 is projected to barely beat The Last of Us now. That's pretty darn great for a recent game, even if my example here is also a recent game. This went unnoticed though. After today, Undertale completely stole the spotlight and people forgot about this match. At the same time, Super Mario Bros. 3 became the first #1 seed, continuing to make Mario an easy target.