Results[]
Saturday, March 27, 2020
Ulti's Analysis[]
| Division | Division 1 |
|---|---|
| Match # | 4 |
| Match Date | Friday, March 27, 2020 |
| Oracle Expectations |
Hollow Knight - 48.62% 21 for - 43 against |
| GameFAQs Prediction |
Hollow Knight - 75.63% |
| User Votes |
Hollow Knight - 5136 Tales of Berseria - 2893 |
| Anonymous Votes |
Hollow Knight - 3917 Tales of Berseria - 2615 |
Though Board 8 typically dominates the leaderboard when all is said and done in these contests, the casuals always get some matches where they embarrass us. And they embarrassed the crap out of us on this one, boys: http://thengamer.com/guru/stats.php?match=4
True story -- when I first made a bracket, I picked Hollow Knight to win twice and didn't think about it much at all. Then I made the all too common mistake of reading Board 8 and changed my mind to FF15 > Tales of Berseria in this fourpack. This ended up in a one point gain overall, and it still annoyed me anyway because this match at first glance was so obvious.
How obvious? Here is every single match involving a Tales game other than Symphonia:
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/4102-south-division-round-1-tales-of-vesperia-vs-borderlands
That's it. That's the entire list. Tales fans (and I include myself here) will tell you all day how good these games are, but they never get nominated enough to matter outside of one game that existed on a system with 10 good games on it total -- Melee, Tales of Symphonia, Metroid Prime, Metroid Prime 2, Resident Evil 4, Eternal Darkness, REmake, Paper Mario: TTYD, Fire Emblem 9, and Pikmin. Don't even try with Twilight Princess or Wind Waker. I don't want to hear it.
The Tales characters themselves have a laughable contest history, too. Every single one of them, including the ones from Symphonia, have performed like gigatrash. The problem, which is why half the gurus picked Tales of Berseria here, was this poll: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/7251-division-2-round-1-velvet-vs-james
People equated Velvet to Berseria for obvious reasons, and people equated Hollow Knight to Silent Hill 2. Loud fanbase, underplayed game. Or so we thought.
This match was close for two minutes, and two minutes only. Berseria took the bracket votes, and Hollow Knight then proceeded to beat the holy hell out of it for 23 hours and 59 minutes straight. 63-37 might not look like much, but FF15 only got 75-25 against a garbage can. I'm sure Edith Finch is a fine game, but let's be honest about its strength here. This blowout was so big and so surprising to a lot of Board 8 that the attention rightly turned to round 2. Because how damn funny would it have been had Hollow Knight beaten a main line Final Fantasy game? It would have been Master Hand > Noctis all over again, only funnier because people care far more about games than characters.
As for why this happened, there are two reasons. One, Tales is choke artist trash in these contests. I know we joke a lot about Donkey Kong and Fire Emblem being professional choke artists in contests -- just wait until we get to those two losers -- but Tales legitimately enters every contest with two hands around its own neck. It gets hyped up every contest, and every contest it embarrasses itself. We all need to do ourselves a favor moving forward with these Tales entrants. If there is any question whether or not Tales can lose, pick against it.
The other reason this happened is because Hollow Knight is an incredibly strong game given its indie status. KP put some very good pre-contest stuff out there, and one major point he had was the indie glass ceiling theory and how some games would crack it. His pick was Cuphead, but really you could pick any of the well-performing indie games. To thoroughly simplify this, there is another theme that will pop up a lot in these writeups: "Did this game appear on the Nintendo Switch?". If so, it's probably got good contest strength. Mostly.
Ctes's Analysis[]
The final match of the first day gave us a major blow to board 8 from casuals. This match was hotly debated on board 8 and when something doesn’t even break 40%, that’s on us. Hollow Knight was the guru favorite, so we weren’t completely off, but it was very evenly split. It also serves as our first indicator of indie games being legit, but that didn’t really take off until the next day. While the gurus favored Hollow Knight, the oracles did not and those are the bigger contest nerds. With 61.82%, Black Turtle had by far the best oracle prediction and it lower than the actual result. He sure made us here for it too! Then look at the prediction percentage. This was an embarrassing start for us even if we made up for later on.
It was almost over right away, but there were a few minutes of hope for Berseria. It certainly had the board vote to the surprise of no one. A minute into the match, Berseria was doubling Hollow Knight, then suddenly Hollow Knight rose to heaven and was almost doubling Berseria at the freeze. The match had everyone’s attention, but the next update sealed the deal completely. Hollow Knight extended its lead above 200 votes and never looked back.
What happened then? Basically everything we could look at indicated the match being even, and in even matches picking the RPG is usually a good call. Hollow Knight lost big time in its two GotY polls. Tales of Berseria had no such polls to make predictions based on, which probably didn’t speak well for it, but means to was untested. Kingdom Hearts III was snubbed from GotY too and that game had decent enough strength to win here. Velvet was in our latest contest and won a match with relative ease before getting almost 30% on Yoshi. Such strength could be enough today.
For a long time, Hollow Knight was believed to just be really good. A contender for best indie game, which quickly looked to be a decent title. Also, a crucial thing a lot of people didn’t take into account when making this prediction was Hollow Knight’s Switch exposure coming later than its original release. I had Berseria today and expected it to be close thinking Hollow Knight was of the same strength as in its first GotY poll. Had I realized it wasn’t initially on the Switch, I would have picked it. I would not have felt safe, but I would have picked it. Last contest proved being on Switch is a really good thing.
It seems clear now that the result had a lot more to do with Tales of Berseria simply being absurdly weak. Not that anyone thought it wasn’t weak after today, but it’s even worse than anticipated. It looks straight up awful. The Tales series is extremely niche these days, being mostly only cared about in very specific RPG happy circles like board 8. Symphonia looks like it will always be the strongest of these despite being limited to the Gamecube outside of Japan for a long time, and the previous games contest showed us it isn’t even the strongest RPG on the Gamecube as it lost to Paper Mario II. Not that there is any shame in that since Paper Mario II is perfect. A decade after Vesperia did slightly worse than anticipated, we’re taught to have no faith in this franchise in contests and we got a good early reminder that characters =/= games.
Safer777's Analysis[]
I don't know why Tales games/characters keep getting nominated. They always do bad. They have fans but man they all are really weak. I don't know anything about Hollow Knight but I guess that people like it, at least more than the Tales series. However it is one of these indie games that the cool kids know.
The Crew was split on this match and I don't get it. They should have known that people just don't care for the Tales series/characters here. Seriously. So HK won easily. So yeah. Stop nominating Tales games/characters. People don't care about them on this site. Also the prediction rate was really high for HK. Guess most people have caught on by now
Tsunami's Analysis[]
This was considered a very debatable match, because Hollow Knight was an indie game, which rarely fared well, while Tales of Berseria was, well, just look at the first two words of that title. The Tales series has a grand total of four wins in contests. Tales of Symphonia has three of those--once with Lloyd winning in Character Battle IV, and twice with the game itself advancing to Round 2, in both the fourway BGE2 in 2009 and in GotD in 2010, though it should be noted that its R2 loss in GotD was literally to one of the two games it beat out in R1 of BGE2. The most recent was in Character Battle IX, where some combination of DAT TOP OPTION (technically left option now, but still, higher seed in a fodder match) and TJF allowed Berseria's protagonist to reach R2. And while the fact that Berseria already had more wins than Tales of the Abyss might have been encouraging, we all knew full well that that was a fodder-vs.-fodder match, and Yoshi proved it by breaking 70% on Velvet in R2. The distrust of all things Tales narrowly won out--in order to avoid the procrastination that plagued my 2018 write-ups, to the point that the final rounds have references to this contest's bracket, I'm doing reactions during the Contest this time, so Guru submissions aren't technically closed yet, but at this writing it looks like about 54.6% of Gurus had Hollow Knight. And Hollow Knight won handily, with the casuals beating out the Gurus by 20% on the prediction percentage.