Results[]
Wednesday, May 6, 2020
Ulti's Analysis[]
| Division | Division 4 |
|---|---|
| Match # | 116 |
| Match Date | Wednesday, May 06, 2020 |
| Oracle Expectations |
Xenoblade Chronicles - 54.86% 52 for - 3 against |
| GameFAQs Prediction |
Xenoblade Chronicles - 6.29% |
| User Votes |
Persona 4 Golden - 4484 Xenoblade Chronicles - 4585 |
| Anonymous Votes |
Persona 4 Golden - 4445 Xenoblade Chronicles - 4336 |
This was it, boys. The hardest match of the entire contest to predict pre-contest, and our contest's last truly great match. Both came in on incredible runs, both had a ton of momentum behind them that even a contest intermission couldn't squelch, and both of them had perfectly even cases to be made for winning this thing.
Before getting to the match, I'd like to discuss what is now commonly known as "The Yoblazer Test". He probably shouldn't have spilled the beans on this, truth be told. Because I hate myself, I started rewatching Game of Thrones. Early in season one, Jamie Lannister is talking some trash to Ned Stark about fighting and tournaments and such, and makes fun of Ned for not fighting in them.
"I don't fight in tournaments, because when I fight a man for real, I don't want him to know what I can do."
I doubt Yoblazer ever gets season one'd, but he went and fought in a tournament -- that is, told everyone on The Show -- what The Yoblazer Test is. Every contest, there is one, maybe two things capable of going on an incremental lucky bandwagon run from out of nowhere and going maybe one round farther than it probably should. The way to do this is to see if something can win a round or two easily, then win against things of similar strength through luck and the bandwagon effect. His best call ever was Super Mario RPG in 2015. Let's have a look and see how many gurus picked it to make the semifinals: http://thengamer.com/guru/BGE3/stats.php?match=124
(By the way am I blind or just dumb? Did yoblazer not enter the guru that year?)
It's an insane call at first glance, but if you use The Yoblazer Test it makes perfect sense. If you had Mario RPG beating Oblivion, well why not take it to beat GTA5? If that win happens, well at that point you already know the game is stronger than Chrono Cross or World of Warcraft, and from there that thing was off to the races. How could Resident Evil 4 beat a bandwagoned Mario RPG late in a contest? And if you have it getting that far, why couldn't it turn around and beat Metal Gear Solid 3? It's beautiful logic, and I half hope he never shared it. There's a difference between thinking upsets could happen and knowing which one or two bandwagons are most likely, and that's why Yoblazer is the best to ever do it. Frankly his legacy top 50 finishes should be added to his guru score. No offense to Swirl or anything, but no one is better than Yo at this. There's a reason for that.
To the point. Xenoblade Chronicles was the perfect Yoblazer Test candidate this contest, and you could possibly give that title to Witcher 3 depending on whether you thought its run would be a bandwagon or a boost. Had Persona 4 Golden and Xenoblade faced off in rounds one or two, Persona 4 Golden probably easily wins. But because it happened in the divisional finals, after Xenoblade built up momentum against Splatoon 2, Overwatch, and Three Houses, and after Xenoblade Remastered hype was in full swing, it was the right choice if you had it getting this far. What was going to beat a Xenoblade backed by bandwagon love, Nintendo, and remaster hype? Grand Theft Auto 5? Persona 4 Golden has a rabid fanbase and all, but that's a lot of things to ask of it.
When this match started, the bandwagon effect was on. The match was close, but Xenoblade was just better. It jumped out to a 50 vote lead early, and then used the rest of the evening to build up a lead of 200. This is when the Persona fandom's rallies started popping up all over Reddit and getting their own momentum going, and that 230 vote lead got knocked down to 150 fairly quickly.
But here the thing with bandwagons. They are very, very hard to beat unless you are considerably stronger than they are. Persona 4 Golden was just too similar in strength here. Xenoblade was able to smack away the multi-layered rally attempt, and back up it went as we got close to midnight. Try as Persona 4 may to come back in this match, Xenoblade just wasn't having it. When the overnight vote came and Europe started waking up, Xenoblade ever so slightly increased its lead all the way up to 350. This felt like enough given the match was a rock fight, but then the morning came and Persona 4 had one last big push left.
For the final 12 hours of this match, Xenoblade had to hold on for dear life. It wasn't getting a ton of rallies all over a bunch of subreddits. It didn't have the full Board 8 love behind it. It wasn't being boosted by hentai. This was all bandwagon effect and remake hype. Even the usual Nintendo ability to win the morning and day vote wasn't coming through this time around. As this match kept inching along, Persona kept shaving and rallying, shaving and rallying. For most of the past 12 hours, if Persona could just get one push going it probably could have come back, but Xenoblade just kept fighting it all off, like Deadpool blocking bullets with swords and such.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqqLptIqzOA
As Persona kept pushing, Xenoblade would come up with these random updates of +10, +30, +25 out of nowhere to keep itself alive. Finally, with two hours to go, the rallying efforts for Persona reached a fever pitch. With two hours left, the lead was at 230. Then Persona started pulling off these crazy updates with Xenoblade stalls mixed in. 10 votes gone. 20 votes gone. 25 votes gone. With an hour to go, the lead was down to 100 and it looked like Persona was going to clutch its ass off after all.
Persona got the lead down to 80 pretty quickly, and then.... Xenoblade was pushed once too many times and said enough of this shit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZeYVIWz99I
It kicked Persona 4 into the pit of death, held serve at 80, and ultimately won this poll by 111. This doesn't sound like much, but think of the craziness of everything it had to fend off. Board 8 likes Persona games a lot more than Xenoblade. All of the rallies were in Persona's favor. Persona even had some bandwagon magic of its own. But in the end, Xenoblade had just a little bit more.
I don't usually bring up the double vote user bonus, as I think it's incredibly stupid to give such a dumb gimmick any legitimacy, but there were two matches in this contest where the double bonus actually reversed a match result and nullified the effects of a rally. One was Resident Evil 2 > Bloodborne, and you guys can debate the legitimacy of that shitshow to your heart's content. Personally, I think the two hour delay not extending to 24 was bull. The other was this match. Xenoblade > Persona 4. Did you guys know Persona 4 wins by 8 votes without gimmicks? This lends a lot of credence to my Yoblazer Test theory. If this was a round one match, Persona 4 easily wins. But it was a divisional final and the site was bandwagoning Xenoblade enough for it to win.
It was an incredible match, a joy to watch, and the last truly great match of this contest. Much like Resident Evil 2 vs Bloodborne, it sucked someone had to lose. It really did. Persona will be back and busting brackets next games contest though I'm sure, because these fans are cockroaches and I mean that as a compliment. They cannot be killed, they can live entirely off of postapocalyptic Twinkies, it takes divine intervention to beat them in a close match, and it took all this for Xenoblade to hold it off. Hell even had this match happened in round three, Persona likely wins. But it happened when it happened and the result was what it was.
Xenoblade didn't win this match so much as survive it, but a win is a win is a win. Scoreboard. Go look at it. Xenoblade's run was clearly coming to an end in the next round, but that's okay. This thing went from losing in round one to winning a division, and with remaster + sequel hype who knows where it goes from here?
Last point before I move on. Only two gurus correctly called Xenoblade's path on top of getting all three matches in the Shovel Knight fourpack right. One was Ngamer64. The other was...
Me!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BfZ8VpPzz0
I would have finished something like top 10 had I stuck with my gut and picked Witcher 3 to make the final, but I am in no way salty about how I did. When you're on a list with Ngamer and no one else, it's something to be proud of. I'm super happy for him, too. He killed it this year.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVqpC3Rf1Nw
Ngamer gets the deeper audio version because he is MANLIER than Ulti is. Moving on.
Ctes's Analysis[]
Not many of us expected this match to deliver as much as it did. Most of us took Xenoblade without thinking twice today. The logic most gurus used before the contest was that the winner of Xenoblade vs. Three Houses would win the division. Three Houses had some previous polls making it look like it should be the clear favorite to get here, as Xenoblade and Awakening shared an opponent in 2015, but most Three Houses supporters had acknowledged from the start that Xenoblade might as well do it instead. As soon as we saw the games in the field, it became clear Xenoblade would be the game to reach this point instead.
The prediction percentage is the lowest of the contest. Casuals had GTAV, RDR or maybe even Overwatch winning this one. Mostly the former two, they were close enough for a bunch of experts to pick them as well with good reasons. Most experts knew the Nintendo games would have a real chance of winning the division. We remember things like San Andreas losing to Golden Sun and GTAV losing to Super Mario RPG. Picking the winner of the Nintendo showdown today was the expert move, but we sided with the wrong one because we trusted previous stats too much. As such, only a very few actually had Xenoblade going out of this one.
Then there’s Persona 4 Golden. As much as we thought we would see another edition of GameFAQs Nintendo RPG darling beat a Rockstar game, another RPG stole that show and beat them both instead. People expected P4G to be a proxy of Persona 4 with some level of quality but not many expected that it would basically be a perfect proxy. It’s a Vita game, and there is no way it would have been here if it hadn’t also been a beloved Playstation 2 game. Yet here it was and so the division came down to two niche RPG series that are becoming mainstream in recent years. For as much as we believe this bracket is the most mainstream we’ve been in a long time, this division final was about as stereotypical GameFAQs as it gets.
Xenoblade might have been on some hype train at this point. Some loud board 8’ers loved the game looking so good as it did while getting this far, but make no mistake, those were the people that always voted for it to begin with mostly. Whatever boost it had this contest, it had it from the start. There’s only so much you can bandwagon from beating Three Houses, especially when everyone was just trashing Fire Emblem and giving that much of the reason. No one was trashing Metal Gear Solid when Shadow of the Colossus was on a bandwagon, no one was trashing Kingdom Hearts or Wind Waker when Starcraft was on a bandwagon (at least not rightfully based on their performances). Those things happened because the games got further than most people believed they would, Xenoblade doesn’t have the same thing going for it because after round 1, literally all of us would have picked it to reach the division finals and probably win it too. Beating Overwatch might have given it a little bit, casuals were more likely to pick that, but Overwatch isn’t as big as any of the two Rockstar games P4G beat to get here.
Persona 4 Golden is the game that was riding the bigger bandwagon to get there. Beating Rockstar games grants you that, in particular when even most experts had you losing before this point. Xenoblade “upsetting” Three Houses is a case where you think “oh, I guess I had the wrong Nintendo game winning that”, Persona 4 Golden getting here is a case where you think “s*** this Vita remaster is beating up some of the most critically acclaimed games of the decade, it’s hilarious”. If you don’t believe me try looking at the x-stats. You should take those with a grain of salt of course, but things look off if you believe Xenoblade is the game on a bandwagon here. In particular, the first Red Dead Remption being that high looks off. Make no mistake, Persona 4 was already on a bandwagon last match because “It beat a Rockstar game! Wouldn’t it be funny if it beat another?” and that absolutely fueled things to make it even stronger now.
I’m not doubting for a second after seeing how good Xenoblade looked from the beginning that it wins this match easier if nothing had caught a bandwagon. It’s just legit now. It had gotten tons of exposure and trailers for its upcoming definitive edition on the definitive Nintendo console was releasing right around this contest. You can argue that it SFF’d Splatoon 2, but it certainly gained no momentum from winning that match and it slaughtered Overwatch way beyond our expectations too. Xenoblade 2 looks really good at this point despite not getting out of round 1. It all adds up, Xenoblade is just legit now.
Xenoblade had to fight for its life today in what would be the last truly exciting match of the contest. Xenoblade struggled in the opening minutes, but eventually slowly got rolling, but Persona fans were not going to give it an easy time at all. That fanbase proved this match that it’s perfectly capable of rallying. Xenoblade was just never allowed to close the match. The first time it tried reaching for a 200-vote lead, it almost dropped to 100 instead. Then it got above 200 it was dropped down to mid-100s instead. Repeat that for a few times before Xenoblade went over 300.
The match looked close, but it also looked like Persona 4 Golden could never really make a run for it. Xenoblade looked safe because natural votes were in its favor. That was all until P4G made its biggest rally attempt of the match near the end. It stalled when it was just above 300 votes away for a good bit, then cut down to below 300 votes for a long time as Xenoblade was holding on for its dear life. When it got close to 200 very suddenly, it looked like it just might pull if off but these surges of votes from rallies never last that long so Xenoblade held on once more.
The biggest scare came in the end. With two hours to go Xenoblade was ahead by 232 votes, but with an hour to go it was only 99 votes ahead. Persona fans were really passionate and tried really hard and it came as close to paying off as you could hope for. At this point it looked like they might just pull it off, but Xenoblade managed to hold on in that last hour eventually winning the match by roughly that amount.
If you want to know how successful Persona 4 rallies were today, it actually wins the match without the registered user bonus. It would then win by 8 votes. The only other time this contest where that happened was with Resident Evil 2 vs. Bloodborne where the latter with its rallies also would have won without the bonus. It would certainly have been on a monstrous bandwagon if it got out here, bigger than Xenoblade would be for having its name in the top 8, that’s for sure. Persona 4 came just short today, but man what a contest run it had. Its run is easily one of the most entertaining parts of the contest, I have to give it that.
When that is said, I’m glad Xenoblade won today, I think it deserves to be that one odd one out in the late rounds the most. Board 8 has both joked and been serious about it being Game of the Year in five different years this past decade. The Persona franchise deserves a lot of praise and we’ll get there, I promise, but I’m happy the Vita port and proxy would not be that odd one out-game, however good it might be. We can eagerly await to see what Persona 4 is capable of next contest, but while Golden gave us a more exciting contest, it probably shouldn’t have been here to begin with. Persona already had top 8 representation in a game that actually deserved it. It just feels nicer having Xenoblade get there too.
Safer777's Analysis[]
Man this match. So okay. Since P4G BARELY won against RDR(seriously 50.8)and against GTA 5(seriously 51) and XC won easily against all its opponents we all picked XC to win here since well we knew that RDR and GTA 5 aren't that strong here on Gamefaqs. Plus both these games are JPRG's and even though the Persona name is more recognizable from what I have heard the XC franchise is doing damn well, it is getting more popular, a new remake will come soon and the fans petitioned for something to come out and it did I believe. Yeah XC seems to get more and more popular. The whole crew picked XC too.
So for the match. This match at the 5 minute mark was at 45-55 which is what we expected. But as the match kept going on, the percentage started to change. After 2 hours it was 48-52 and after 4 hours it was 49-51. So yeah we had a match. After about 19 hours the percentage was 49.5-50.5. So yeah P4G kept gaining but extremely slow. But then the rally that was posted for P4G seemed to gained traction. So P4G started cutting like crazy and after a while if the trends continuing that it seems that it would win with like 20 votes. Seriously nobody was sure what it would happen! Damn! But somehow XC managed to hold on and never fell above 80 votes in lead. So the highest lead was 342 and the smallest was 80 and eventually XC won with 111.
Also once again the User double bonus was in effect. Why we still have this I am not sure. BUT if we remove it P4G wins with like 10 votes which would be the ultimate close match! But why XC hold on I am not sure. Maybe people really like this game right? And the bandwagon effect too! It had no rallies either and we like Persona series more too! This mach was one of the closest wire to wire matches where the loser never lead either. If P4G had won it would have break so many records. Only a few more rallied votes and it would have done it. Still in 3 out of 4 matches, P4G won 2 of them with like 2% difference and the one it lost it lost with like 0,5% difference! Can you say clutch? I bet you can! If it had won it would have reached the final 8 and it would be the first time ever than a Vita game did so well. In fact I believe it is the first time ever than a Vita game does so good too! Damn! So yeah XC just refused to lose it seems no matter what.
Also check the prediction percentage for XC. Like 6! One of the lowest ever for a divsion winner that is non rallied too! I think it has to be in Top 5, maybe even Top 3 for sure. I mean even Alucard back in 2018 which nobody expected to win the division had 8.7%. IF P4G won here though it would have the lowest prediction for a Division winner ever though since in the previous round it had 14, while XC had 16.7. So yeah. Oh and in case you wonder most of us had FE3H winning the division. Yeah we make huge mistakes too. Still these kind of matches are always nice to see and both games did really well.
Tsunami's Analysis[]
So where do we start?
In Round 2, Persona 4 Golden led Red Dead Redemption from wire to wire, but never managed to establish a terribly large lead; at 458, it was a new record for smallest max lead by a wire-to-wire winner, breaking the record set by Ike > Proto Man in 2013--which, it should be noted, was a 12-hour match. It then followed that up by taking a second space in that category's top 10 with a wire-to-wire win over GTA V with a maximum lead of 616.
But Xenoblade's no stranger to wire-to-wire dogfights, either. While it was broken three times during the Legends'/Losers' Bracket segment of the 2018 contest, Xenoblade's loss to DKC2 in 2015 was at one point the record holder for closest wire-to-wire 24 hour match, with the largest lead being 290 votes by Xenoblade. So there was definitely a good chance that we'd see something exciting, especially since there wouldn't be much bracket voting to get in the way; P4G's R3 prediction percentage was 14.01% and XBC's was 16.7%.
Xenoblade jumped out to the quick lead, going up by 100 in just half an hour and requiring less than two hours to push it above 200, but it took a while for it to increase much beyond that, falling into a pattern of ebbs and flows. By early morning, it had gotten into the mid 300s...er, the low-to-mid-300s...well, anyway, at the halfway point of the match, the lead was at 342, which would turn out to be its peak. That right there was good for a tie for #10 on the closest wire-to-wire matches list (1v1s only). And it looked like it was probably going to get that record for a wire-to-wire winner without any trouble, because P4G wasn't really doing much more than stalling things out; XBC's lead crested above 300 for an update at 10 minutes past noon, and it was 274 at 3 PM, five hours from the end of the match.
25 minutes later, it was down to 222, and it kept dropping. Xenoblade recovered somewhat, and had the lead at 232 with two hours to go...but one hour later, it was down to 99. The comeback was real; there was a pinned rally topic, and P4G was going to pull off another ridiculous win.
Except...it didn't happen that way. XBC won the next update, then lost a couple, then won three in a row. The last hour was just a giant stall, and it was Xenoblade with the big final update to push its lead back up over 100. The record was secure. But I can't help thinking that there was another record this match should've been chasing instead...
P4G 4484 4445 8929 13334 XBC 4585 4336 8921 13445
Are you kidding me?! Yeah, this match was fun and all, we were expecting a lit final hour based on the penultimate-hour comeback...but without the registered user bonus, this becomes a legitimate final-update F5-er. 8 votes. 8 measly votes, which would've been just one away from the 1v1 record. Even with the registered voter bonus (which flipped the match, mind you), it still squeaked into the overall top 25 with its final margin of 111, comfortably landing in the 1v1 Top 25 at #13. And that wasn't the only list where this match was #13 among 1v1s and #25 among all matches. Xenoblade' prediction percentage of 6.29% landed it at those exact same spots on the list of biggest surprises of all time.
Normally this would be the point where I'd say "6.29% is less than half of 16.7%, so this was an upset", but I don't think it's necessarily applicable here. It wouldn't surprise me in the least to find out that P4G's prediction percentage was below 5.27%, which would be the equivalent percentage of 14.01%. These games were both considered underdogs all the way back in Round 2, though XBC's prediction percentage was at least close to half of its R1 prediction percentage, and they were both considered underdogs again in Round 3. So, yeah, of course most people who picked Xenoblade to reach this match thought it would lose; most of them likely had it facing GTAV or RDR. I mean, I do expect that "top half winner" was a favorite over "bottom half winner" to take Division 4. Just looking at those prediction percentages, it wouldn't surprise me to think that Red Dead Redemption had the second-highest prediction percentage to win this match in spite of the game it's trailing being its would-be R3 opponent.
It's just a shame that this would likely be the only entry on the "most surprising results" list for the entire contest. XBC itself was done for next round, of course, leaving only the second semifinal as a match that would likely have that much debate--and even then, the fact that the apparent favorite to win it isn't the one that's going to get its prediction percentage depressed by a debatable quarterfinal match, even that should be able to get the requisite 10% prediction percentage to avoid the lists.
Oh, yeah, I guess that's a thing to note. With this match, the cutoff to make the 1v1-only list fell below 10%, with Auron's division title from 2018 (9.97% prediction percentage) falling to #25. Can't lol at the casuals on this one, though; only 9.86% of Gurus got this right. That percentage would've been even lower if P4G had won (which was my selection, for the record), though even if the Guru favorite had won, it'd only be 44.37%. And that favorite was...Fire Emblem: Three Houses. Which I guess is still a possibility for who the casuals' favorite was, but I'd still bet theirs was GTAV.