Results[]
Sunday, April 12, 2020
Ulti's Analysis[]
| Division | Division 1 |
|---|---|
| Match # | 66 |
| Match Date | Sunday, April 12, 2020 |
| Oracle Expectations |
Final Fantasy XV - 54.84% 46 for - 7 against |
| GameFAQs Prediction |
Final Fantasy XV - 51.64% |
| User Votes |
Final Fantasy XV - 4679 Hollow Knight - 4505 |
| Anonymous Votes |
Final Fantasy XV - 3906 Hollow Knight - 4013 |
For all the hype that indie games got in this contest, round 2 is where all but one of them fell flat on their face. With that said, Final Fantasy 15 got incredibly lucky in this contest and was spared a huge embarrassment. Hollow Knight is great and all, but how embarrassing would it have been for main line FF15 had it lost to freaking Hollow Knight?
The reason FF15 got so lucky is because this match happened on April 12th. Final Fantasy 7 Remake released on April 10th. The contest got delayed twice, and FF7R's release date got delayed by a month from when it was initially supposed to come out. It took all those stars aligning at just the right time to get the Final Fantasy series just the right exposure to drag Final Fantasy 15 across the finish line, and even then it almost lost this match. I have zero doubts that FF15 loses fairly easily without the universe aligning in its favor.
When this match started, FF15 had the slimmest of leads, likely due to bracket voting. When that wore off, Hollow Knight came storming back and looked like it was going to put this match away quickly. But its momentum died as quickly as it started, so FF15 was able to close things up fairly quickly. After the match was tied for a couple hours, FF15 started taking off, and most people assumed the match was over right then and there. By now, we all noticed the indie trend of hot starts cooling off quickly, so once Final Fantasy started climbing overnight we all figured it was over.
Not necessarily true, though! Hollow Knight pulled off an incredible fight here thanks to, apparently, being one of the only indie games popular in Europe. I don't know what FF15 did to piss off our friends over the pond, but it wasn't good apparently. Hollow Knight kept this match in the 150-200 range for the entirety of the overnight period. It gave folks hope that a comeback could happen come morning, but it was not to be. FF15 ran away with this match during the morning vote, and built up a 400 vote lead at lunch.
But before this match finally ended, Hollow Knight put up one final act of defiance. It spent the last 8 hours of this match refusing to lose, and though it was never a threat to actually come back and win, FF15's 400 vote lead got chopped all the way down to a 221 vote win. It was as respectable a loss as one could ever have in a contest, and I have zero doubts Hollow Knight wins this match without Final Fantasy 7 Remake coming out two days -- TWO DAYS!! -- before this match. On top of that, FF7R launched on a Friday and this match happened on a Sunday, so there may have even been a small weekend boost.
Final Fantasy 15 had all those direct lucky advantages, and needed all of them to win this match. Just pretend FF7R comes out on March 3rd like it was supposed to. How much does Hollow Knight win this match by? 500 votes? Maybe more? Or just pretend this contest isn't delayed twice and this match happens three weeks prior. Hollow Knight probably wins.
Those are the breaks though, and only one stat ever matters in sports. Scoreboard. For all that luck and all that effort in winning this match, this was Final Fantasy 15's reward.
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/p5WImZGPAFg/maxresdefault.jpg
Have fun, bro.
"I have never seen a more Pyrrhic victory than Final Fantasy XV in this match. What should've been a fairly easy victory ended up in the most painful win I've ever seen for a game. The fact that Final Fantasy VII Remake was released days before yet allowing Hollow Knight to defy indie trends speaks a lot at what strength you have and what people think of you. It's even more embarrassing when using the raw vote totals, as it showed FFXV winning by a single digit.
Final Fantasy XV was the 2014 Brazil team in the World Cup -- absolutely shaky in its wins and then pummeled into the babies they were in the match where they lost. They have lived in infamy ever since." -Nintendogs
Ctes's Analysis[]
Round 2 started out with a big match that was basically just as big as the best match of round 1, that we just had a day ago. One day of round 2 was all that took. It was clearly more exciting now. Ironically, the two also follow very similar trends, but the opposite ended up happened. Final Fantasy ever struggling to make round 3 of any contest is not something you’d get anyone to believe when these contests began and the most recent Final Fantasy was still from the golden days. Of course, it helps that we’re in a contest where the good Final Fantasy games are ineligible, so we’ll probably not see the same thing repeated next games contest, but it’s still crazy. Final Fantasy XV might very well lose this one if not for the bracket votes, although Hollow Knight likely isn’t too far behind in prediction percentage.
Almost everyone took Final Fantasy XV here without thinking much about it, but after a bunch of indie games exceeded our expectations after Hollow Knight was the first to do it, the upset was considering quite a bit more. Hollow Knight was believed a good contender to be the best indie game in the bracket. Its high seed supports this idea as well. I have seen the idea that Final Fantasy XV won the match because Final Fantasy VII: Remake had been out for only a few days when this match happened, but I’m not sure it matters that much. Fans of FF7 might just as well vote against FFXV. It wouldn’t surprise me at least.
The match begin with Hollow Knight being a clear board favorite, but FFXV quickly took the lead and starting gaining slowly as the first minutes went by, but Hollow Knight wasn’t allowing it go get anywhere, using that great indie board vote, as it has been called. FFXV managed to hold the lead until the freeze. On one side, most indie games fell off after the early vote and Final Fantasy is known to do the opposite, but on the other hand, FFXV was expected to have the most bracket votes, so there was hope for both of them. The next update saw Hollow Knight make a small cut, still keeping the excitement high. Then FFXV fell off a major cliff to lose the lead. Hollow Knight would keep that momentum up and quickly build a lead up to 64 votes.
It would seem like it used its fuel quickly though. FFXV removed most of that lead, bringing it down to 18 in two updates. The match would then stand still for a while, until FFXV began very slowly cutting the lead down until it was just a single vote away. Next update had FFXV take the lead with room to spare, as it got its best update in a while, but Hollow Knight would have none of that and instantly tied match. Hollow Knight would take the lead back, but instantly lost it again. FFXV would struggle to run away with it for bit, which included getting a one-vote lead as well. Hollow Knight would then randomly take the lead with a spike and would keep it for a few updates before FFXV would take the lead back with a similar spike.
That was the final time Hollow Knight was in the lead, but it would be able before FFXV supporters to breathe out. FFXV would build upon its lead slowly, but because it was winning in NA and losing in most of Europe, people hoped Hollow Knight would do a similar comeback to what Rayman did yesterday. FFXV had built a lead of about 200 votes when the dead hours kicked in, Europe began to wake up and NA was away and true enough, Hollow Knight cut into that. Hollow Knight began cutting and moved FFXV down to about a 150-vote lead. It had a great spike, getting the lead down to almost 100, but FFXV instantly took it back and then the match stalled for hours.
Hollow Knight couldn’t really make progress, but it did allow FFXV to never get away for real. Hollow Knight wasn’t doing as well in Europe as Rayman was and FFXV also had South America, which Celeste didn’t. Geography didn’t look to help out Hollow Knight any. The match was just really even. After a while FFXV would rise extremely slowly until it many hours later peaked at a lead of 400 votes before slowly going in the other direction again. Hollow Knight began making steady progress near the end but didn’t have time and lost by a bit more than 200 votes in the end.
It was a really good match, but it’s also a victim of our general lack of trends these days. Back in the day, we could’ve seen huge swings in each direction, but the swings we have now are mostly random and comes from the votals moving as slow as they do. For a match that felt back and forward a lot, it barely moved at all.
This match made it seem like Hollow Knight was indeed very strong, but the next rounds would show it simply had exceptional bracket placement as Breath of the Wild murders Final Fantasy XV and then calms a bit against the rest of its opponents. It’s probably the final time that happened though, and fellow indie game Bastion was already looking terrible at the time of this match. Final Fantasy XV was even weaker than we thought. It’s interesting that if Hollow Knight had pulled this off, we would have the first contest ever where there was no match between The Legend of Zelda and Final Fantasy.
Safer777's Analysis[]
Look at this percentage. This is a disgrace. Seriously. FF 15 barely won and it all thanks to FF7 Remake which came out a few days before this match so people go to various gaming sites to find info about the quests and such. If this match had happened like 2 weeks before FF7 Remake had come out HK would win no doubt about that. I do know that FF 15 wasn't exactly the super game that everyone expected since after 10 years you don't really care(except if it is FF7 Remake of course). I am a huge FF fan too and even I refuse to play FF 15. I just don't feel like it and plus it has like a bajillion DLC and you need to watch a movie to really understand what is going on. How is it possible that after 10 years they still weren't able to fully finish a game? Seriously.
So for the match. After 5 minutes FF 15 was ahead by 53 so we all said fine. But after 20 minutes it was losing! After like 1 hour it got the lead but it never had above 51. So yeah. This is a disgrace as I said above. FF 15 lost a lot of hours to HK too. FF7 Remake to the rescue! Even the whole crew had FF 15 above 54 but yeah. Now I do believe there were 2 reasons this happened. FF 15 is weak and HK is strong. Or FF 15 is damn weak and HK is decent. Also the prediction percentage was low here. I mean half the people here didn't had FF 15 winning in Round 2? I mean I just don't get it. Maybe people really believed in HK or something.
Tsunami's Analysis[]
We'd nearly gone all of Round 1 without a single barnburner, and on day 1 of Round 2, it looked like the floodgates had opened after the final day of Round 1 broke the dam. Which I think is a mixed metaphor, maybe. They're both related to a lot of water all over the place. Final Fantasy XV won the board vote, which is hardly a very Final Fantasy thing to do, but it took only 15 minutes for Hollow Knight to take a lead. It held onto that for an hour and 15 minutes before FFXV took the lead for one update, and then the next update was a straight-up tie. Hollow Knight did swing out in front on the update after the tie, but FFXV was right back in the lead the following update. 15 minutes later, back to Hollow Knight; another 15 minutes, back to FFXV. At this point, we were 2 hours and 15 minutes into the match and had had six lead changes. And...we wouldn't get a seventh, though it was far from smooth sailing for FFXV. It briefly got its lead above 200 at 10 minutes to 1 AM, and a mere 45 minutes later, it was down to 118. 2 hours after that, it again got past the 200 mark, and again Hollow Knight immediately started cutting.
And FFXV started fighting back; at one point, HK shaved off more than 50 votes in just 10 minutes and it took only 15 more minutes for FFXV to get its lead back to higher than it had been before those 10 minutes. At 5:05 AM, FFXV's lead breached the 200 mark again, at 215 and this time it stuck. Really stuck; for the entire hour after that, the lead never dropped below 213 nor exceeded 225. It crested at 232 at 6:20, then Hollow Knight managed to briefly get the lead under 200 at 7:30. As was the match's trend, this meant it was time for FFXV to gain momentum; by 7:45, it had a new largest lead, 238, though this was merely the beginning; by the time Hollow Knight next took an update, it was to reduce the lead from 298, and FFXV breached the 300 mark not long thereafter. Another prolonged stall began until FFXV spiked a win of 23 at 9:40 to push the new high to 340, only for HK to spike a 27 ten minutes later. FFXV went on a push at 11 AM, winning an update by 32, and at 11:35 AM, its lead stood at 400 votes exactly. And that's where it peaked; HK started slowly battling back, but far too slowly; it wasn't until 6:30 PM, just 90 minuted from the end of the match, that the lead dipped below 300 again. HK would continue to make a late push to make the match look closer than it really was, but the match had been in stall for way too long.
It was, however, the second straight day where the registered and unregistered voters disagreed on a match...but this time, the registered voter bonus made it look more lopsided, not less. FFXV won 4679-4505 with registered voters; Hollow Knight won 4013-3906 with unregistered. Put it all together, and the raw total was 8585-8518, a win of 67 votes. That would've made the all-time top 25! Wait...holy crap, even with the registered voter bonus, this still makes the 1v1-only Top 25! And, hold on, Rayman Legends > Celeste was still a few votes closer...
...Oh. This is a sad day indeed. With these two back-to-back results, the legendary Mario > Cloud upset from the first Character Battle has fallen off the top 25 list. It's kind of inevitable that all these legendary matches start falling off these lists, because the lower vote totals means close matches are numerically closer, but it's still sad to see.