Results[]
Ulti's Analysis[]
| Division | East Division |
|---|---|
| Match # | 38 |
| Match Date | Wednesday, August 7th, 2002 |
| Vote difference | 21,884 |
| GameFAQs Prediction |
Crono - 51.77% (8,679 brackets) |
After the events of the first round, this match was supposed to be a knock down, drag-out affair. Both characters had similar prediction percentages of getting out of the first round (83.88% and 81.69%, respectively), both characters had similar odds of winning the contest, and both characters had eerily similar victories in the first round. But because this was before the dawn of extrapolated standings, few people bothered to take into effect the fact that Simon Belmont was likely far stronger than Q*Bert. All we had back then were the raw numbers from two matches, and those numbers lead to some serious hype surrounding Crono vs Dante. Even Solarshadow himself postulated that this could very well be the best match of the second round.
However, not only did Crono manage to win this match with ease, he managed to nearly double Dante in the process. What was once a hyped match turned into a complete dud that few people expected, as evidenced by Crono's somewhat low prediction percentage in this match. Chrono Trigger was still a very niche title on many parts of the site, so those who had not yet seen Crono or his game would have likely gone with the more mainstream character from the more mainstream game. But like many times before in this contest, GameFAQs is partial to Square RPGs and Nintendo elites. Dante doesn't fall in either of those categories, and is therefore not liked nearly enough to put any real dent in the likes of Crono.
Another thing that this match did was show that Lara Croft was in a world of trouble come the next round. If you compare Crono and Dante's first round scores, they're rather similar, but after Crono/Dante it was easy to see that Dante did as well as he did because he was facing Q*Bert, a complete scrub, while Crono was going up against a more respectable Simon Belmont. For Dante to do as well as Crono did against Simon Belmont, he would have needed to face a weaker opponent than Belmont. What this means is that in two Divisional Quarterfinal matches in the East Division, we saw Lara Croft allow Ryo Hazuki to break 40% on her, while Crono nearly doubled Dante. It's hard to imagine Dante being weaker than Hazuki, and if transitivity held at any level in the Lara/Crono match, then one could easily call Crono the favorite and Lara Croft as being the first 1 seed in danger of being booted from the contest.