Results[]
Wednesday, April 15, 2020
Ulti's Analysis[]
| Division | Division 4 |
|---|---|
| Match # | 78 |
| Match Date | Wednesday, April 15, 2020 |
| Oracle Expectations |
Persona 4 Golden - 52.06% 40 for - 14 against |
| GameFAQs Prediction |
Persona 4 Golden - 31.05% |
| User Votes |
Persona 4 Golden - 4620 Red Dead Redemption - 4737 |
| Anonymous Votes |
Persona 4 Golden - 4664 Red Dead Redemption - 3985 |
There was a lot of hype during this day of matches about THE CUPSET, the board vote, and rally spillover helping Cuphead pull off the impossible. As luck would have it, those factors all ended up helping Persona 4 Golden instead. Did you guys know that the meaning of "Persona" actually means "yoblazer33 getting fucked in the ass"? I didn't know that myself, but he was kind enough to allow Board 8 to be privy to that information. Who knew?
This match may look like a very close, hard-fought win for Persona 4 if you only look at the results, but it was one of those types of matches where the final score was in no way indicative of how the match actually played out. Persona 4 jumped all over Red Dead Redemption early, and Red Dead was never able to get back into it. Red Dead made this match a lot of fun with these random updates all over the place where it would chop 20-40 votes off, but then it would lose those votes back just as quickly. There were only two parts of this entire match -- once in the first evening and once during the late morning vote -- where Red Dead Redemption was able to string a few updates together and make any real headway at Persona in this match.
But on top of all of those early factors helping Persona jump out to an early lead, rally threads popped up all over the place on Reddit all day long to help Persona 4 out during this match. Any time Red Dead tried to make any move whatsoever, it was smacked back down like whack-a-mole. This match may look close, but it wasn't. Red Dead Redemption was never going to win it, at least not with a bad board vote, rally spillover, rallies on Reddit, and having to potentially deal with getting some blowback from GTA anti-votes all at the same time. This was one of those rare 51-49 blowouts.
Persona 4 Golden also officially hit bandwagon status from this match, which was pretty cool to watch for the rest of its run this contest. And yes, this would ultimately help Persona 5 out as well. This would set up a match between Grand Theft Auto V against Persona 4 Golden. Logic would say GTA5 was a bridge too far given the struggle to win this match, but given all things working in Persona 4's favor, who knows? GTA5 was the favorite going in, but bandwagons are very, very hard to beat in these things.
"I think the quote was actually 'Shin Megami Tensei' means 'yoblazer33 getting fucked in the ass,' but I digress." -Greatone10
Ctes's Analysis[]
Today would be the true test of how much strength Persona 4 Golden had compared to Persona 4. Back in 2015, Persona 4 and Red Dead Redemption looked to be very close, but Persona 4 a small step above. Based on that, Persona 4 Golden would need to basically be a Persona 4 proxy to reach that high, but it obviously doesn’t only come down to this. Both games have also gotten critically acclaimed new games in their series since last time, which might’ve boosted these two.
Persona 4 Golden was the favorite to win, though most people overestimated how easy it would be for it. Most of us probably thought it proved itself to be on Persona 4 levels in the first round, but it’s different to be against some fodder game than one of the big names of the decade. There also seems to be a group of people who will pick Persona if it just has the slightest chance of winning, so maybe that helped make it the bigger favorite.
Persona 4 won the board vote and that shouldn’t really surprise anyone. Rockstar games have the worst board votes and Persona games have the best. Everyone seemed to think it was fine after behind ahead of the freeze, but I was skeptical. Persona 4 barely gained in the last minutes of the freeze and while it went up from there, it was pretty slow considering there was all the reason in the world to think this would be its best time in the match with great lengths. I posted this in the stats topic at the time, but everyone was saying it fine. This happened for a few updates, but then Read Dead Redemption cut at the hour mark and people finally expressed the worry they should. It was not a big cut, but a Rockstar game cut Board 8’s beloved JRPG halfway through the power hour was a major warning sign.
Read Dead Redemption continued to make small cuts in Persona 4’s best time of the match. Judging by the votals, there’s a good chance there was a little bit of rally spillover from the Shovel Knight rally in the final hour of the previous matches. Nothing big, but it seemed to help Persona 4 a little. Another reason that it was in trouble. There was a real reason to think Red Dead Redemption would win at this point.
It never happened though. Red Dead Redemption made a lot of pushes, but it couldn’t actually get to close. The main reason for this is probably the board’s passion for Persona and the board’s lack of passion for RDR. Throughout the day, a lot of small Persona rallies would come help it out whenever it got close. Usually it doesn’t matter much what board 8 prefers in a match, but today it most likely did. We ended up having Persona 4 rallies here and there, and they worked a bit, because Persona is now big enough that there are places around the web where people care for it. Another important point is that no one tried to rally for Red Dead Redemption. People had it in their brackets, but no one seemed to care enough to counterrally. Or they just enjoyed seeing Persona get a victory. It’s hard to tell how the match would have ended if some people supporters RDR to the same extent, we can’t really know how well it would have worked.
I think Read Dead Redemption claims a narrow victory here without outside interference, but it’s not easy to determine just how much the rallies did. It wasn’t spectacular, but that and a little bit of spillover might just have made the difference. There were definitely less complains about rallying as we usually see, probably because the result bothered nobody. I don’t think it’s hypocritical not to complain, just to make that clear. It only is if you passionately dislike rallies and then rally yourself. It’s only natural not be as annoyed when you hate the result. But it shows how much we like Persona 4.
I just think Red Dead Redemption deserves a little more respect that it got, because Persona 4 definitely needed help to get this victory and I think the board is a little too good at turning a blind eye to when Persona is in trouble. The early part of the match makes that clear to me. Perhaps it’s more than Persona 4 Golden deserves a little less respect cause even though RDR never got too close, the idea that Persona 4 is just stronger than RDR by a solid enough amount to win with relative ease is misleading.
Persona 4 had a very fascinating run that everyone should appreciate, but I still think it’s a shame we don’t get to see what we would prefer in a Grand Theft Auto vs. Red Dead Redemption match, even if we got something better. It’s just that it’s probably the best chance we’ll ever get to see how that hierarchy works because they almost never get further than round 2. I personally think Persona 4 should be happy it could gain some momentum in this match to overcome GTAV as well. I’m sure it wins that match without it. Considering the prediction percentage today and the ones in round 1, it’s pretty clear RDR was the sitewide favorite by a good amount.
Safer777's Analysis[]
Extremely close match and I didn't expected that. I don't think anybody expected that to tell the truth. Even the crew had P4G winning by around 54 and it made sense. The both faced weak games on the 1st round and RDR is HUGE! Like really huge. The sequel isn't even out for 6 months and it has sold already tens of millions of copies. P4G is an updated version of P4 and it is on Vita! Yeah a Vita game reached round 3! What are the odds of that?
So for the match. Even though it says P4G pretty sure people just see P4 and voted for it. I mean I didn't even knew that P4G is on Vita, I just saw Persona 4 and voted for it. Also another match where the winner lost in USA but still won the overall match. I do believe there were some rallies too and it seems that may have helped P4G to win. I mean you can't really rally for RDR righ? Still really close match but strangely enough RDR never took the lead. P4G at the 5 minute mark was winning by 56% too and see how close it ended. Yeah you look the final percentage which P4G won by 50.83 and you may think that there was an exciting match but not really. Overall nice match even though P4G was never in serious danger. Still seems that RDR is stronger than we thought because on this site we LOVE persona games/characters even though they are doing bad in contests typically. Until this contest at least. Low prediction as expected.
Tsunami's Analysis[]
Upset alert! Upset alert! Just 31.05% of brackets got this right, compared with 88.36% who picked P4G to win in Round 1. RDR's Round 1 prediction percentage was sixth-highest...and its sequel's was eighth-highest, so yeah, clearly getting a lot of respect from the voters. But do you really want to pick an action-adventure game over an RPG on RPGFAQs?
...Apparently, yes. This match broke a trend that had stood throughout the entire first round and into the second: Unregistered voters made up the majority of Persona 4 Golden's raw votes! Red Dead Redemption won over registered voters 4737-4620, but Persona 4 Golden smashed it with a 4664-3985 advantage with the unregistered voters. It made for a 562-vote win in raw votes, but just 451 on the scoreboard...wait, those numbers don't add up.
4620 4664 9284 13879 4737 3985 8722 13428
Okay, the third column is indeed the sum of the first two columns...but with the first column, the registered voters, counting double, shouldn't it be 13904-13459? Makes me wonder if the "registered voters" column is in fact counting all registered voters, and Allen has to manually adjust it to make sure that only accounts that were created before the start of the contest are getting their votes counted double. Well, fixing it would only make things even closer, so it's no big difference. You see...Persona 4 Golden was still extending its lead almost right up until the end. Its maximum lead was 458 votes with just 10 minutes left in the match. That's two fewer than our long-time record, the legendary Frog vs. Liquid Snake match from 2004. But no big deal, right? That record's been broken like 15 times now. In this contest alone, three other matches had smaller max leads.
Except Octopath led during its match. So did Hollow Knight. And Celeste. And Mega Man in both of his losses in 2018, and Mario in his loss to Cloud in the same contest, and all of the others, even the ones whose matches only lasted 12 hours. Red Dead Redemption? Didn't. Never even came close. Usually, the updater at least captures a single-digit lead because it takes its first snapshot only a few seconds in, but P4G was already up 22-10 by the time it could. It was up by 74 at the freeze and hit triple digits by the 15-minute mark. The lead entered the 200s by the end of the second hour. This was, in fact, never in doubt. It just happened to stay close. Heck, the lead didn't even hit 400 until only about 2 hours remained in the match. Could've really made a record that would be tough to break if P4G hadn't surged right at the end. This is a match that looks a lot better on paper than it actually is.