Results[]
Wednesday, April 8, 2020
Ulti's Analysis[]
| Division | Division 7 |
|---|---|
| Match # | 51 |
| Match Date | Wednesday, April 08, 2020 |
| Oracle Expectations |
Yakuza 0 - 63.41% 59 for - 1 against |
| GameFAQs Prediction |
Yakuza 0 - 86.12% |
| User Votes |
Yakuza 0 - 6719 The Witness - 1905 |
| Anonymous Votes |
Yakuza 0 - 5317 The Witness - 1667 |
There are a lot of games Board 8 has pushed over the years that make zero sense to me, and Yakuza might be at the top of the list. It seems like the exact opposite of what this place would like, yet here it is every year getting high seeds in our contests. Remember Character Battle X when Kazumiya Kiryu got a 2 seed, and it allowed Bomberman to get his first contest win in 16 years? It also, an odd way, allowed him to erase the memory of botching that big lead to Phoenix Wright in the LOL fourways in 2007.
Well Board 8 was at it again this year, but this time they boosted Yazuka to a seeding high enough to take advantage in a contest loaded with slugs. A lot of you might remember Braid, which is a very famous indie game that was all the rage last decade. I would know, since I wrote a guide for it on GameFAQs. I loved the hell out of Braid, and I've played it multiple times. It's an incredibly clever game with an incredible soundtrack and a deceptively deep plot.
Well the guy who made Braid made a second game that none of you have ever heard of, called The Witness. The Witness, while phenomenal, did not make the splash on this site that Braid did, and Braid wasn't exactly a strong game to begin with. The end result is that the same Yakuza that botched a 2 seed in a character battle managed to come back two years later and score a 77% blowout in a games contest. That is an incredible turnaround, and apparently the key to boosting wins is to keep getting overseeded until you break through. Who knew?
Ctes's Analysis[]
Sometimes a blowout is precisely what we need to get excited about a match and this one sure was that. After seeing big company games drop matches to indie games that they weren’t supposed to, so suddenly there was a bit of fear regarding this match, because Yakuza seems exactly like the type of game that is somewhat big but not cared about for on our site. This is the first time we’ve ever seen a Yakuza game in the bracket despite it being possible in all but the first games contest, and that’s just when we had a bracket that was clearly going for diversity above contest strength.
No one actually thought the upset would happen, because The Witness was expected to be way too weak to take advantage of something like that. Indie puzzle games so far have not looked good and The Witness haven’t been lucky enough to get the Switch release we’re expecting helped so many other things out. Seriously, indie games are perfect for playing on the go and the Switch is a wonderful platform to play your indies on because of it.
We did however underestimate Yakuza 0 by 14% in the oracle, which is without a doubt fueled by the indie fear still going on. That’s a lot. Not a single person went this high. Third place is more than 6% away, fourth place is more than 7% away. That’s despite only one person actually picking The Witness to win and he had it in his bracket too. It’s hilarious and it got plenty of attention today despite another match actually being good.
We largely expected The Witness to just be that weak with no one really having played it, but Yakuza 0 is actually just decent enough we’ve later learned. It’s from 2017 so we should have seen it coming, but we didn’t. It would be hard to find matches it could win in a normal contest, but it might still be worth having there. It’s hilarious that despite Yakuza 0 looking great here, we weren’t ready to give it any credit for this match so all but a single oracle underestimated it next match as well. That’s even though it would go against a pretty controversial game! Part of the reason is that Yakuza characters appeared last character battle and were all terrible, but we know characters =/= games even if we occasionally forget. This says a whole lot about how little chance we gave The Witness. Obviously, it was weak, but we didn’t even consider that perhaps it wasn’t the worst in the bracket. It ends up being close to the worst in the bracket, but it’s still funny this match led to one to believe otherwise.
Safer777's Analysis[]
Man the Yakuza series. It is my favorite franchise of the 7th and 8th generation. The series is excellent. It follows the story of Kiryu which is an Ex Yakuza and tries to live a normal life but he just can't. He gets always pulled back in the Yakuza world. These games are mainly played for the story. The story is always good in these games. Of course they always have a TON of twists and you don't even know who the Big Bad at least like the final chapter and Kiryu always goes What? when he finds out. And there is always a guy that you beat him by punching him really hard then in a cutscene he pulls a gun and someone dies but never one of the main characters. It is a Yakuza tradition by now! Still it is awesome.
There are 7 main games in the series that follow Kiryu. I was lucky to play the games in chronological order, meaning I started from Yakuza 0 and went up from there. Also these games(except Yakuza 0 which is a prequel)take place always in the year they come out. For example Y1 came out in 2005 and the story takes place in 2005, Y2 came out in 2006 and the story takes place in 2006 and so on. So you see these characters getting old and stuff like that. Now this series was always niche, meaning it did okay sales but it was never popular. Sega released Yakuza 0 in 2015 which is a prequel and it is the best place to start too since you learn about the characters. And man Y0 is the best game of the series. Having played all of them I agree too. Just play Y0. So what exactly are these games? They are like Brawler games, meaning you go around and punch dudes in the face. Also the world is small, like 1 area of a city and it sounds that it is small BUT there are always a TON of stuff to do. And so many minigames. I haven't seen another game that offers so many minigames which you just can ignore all of them if you want and no problem. But no, you just want to play them because they are so good. I mean I played Pool and Baseball which otherwise I wouldn't touch with a 10 foot pole. But not here! Yeah I raved enough but this series is excellent. So that is. As for TW...I don't know anything about once again. It is kind of a puzzle interactive game?
So for the match. Okay Yakuza series is weak here but it wouldn't lose again such a game. The funny thing is that the Crew had Y0 win by less percentage than that. So it beat expecations easily. So was Y0 strong or TW weak? Okay hate to say it but TW is just extremely weak. Once again I do wonder how games like this got in.
Tsunami's Analysis[]
Two Yakuza 0 characters made the 2018 contest, one of them getting a good seed. Neither put up any sort of resistance against characters who were either proven fodder or frequently anti-voted. And yet, we all knew that Yakuza 0 would win this easily, because of the quality of its opponent.
Though based on what we've seen this contest, action games are actually quite strong here, even if their characters rarely are. Or, wait, no, that's the opposite of the way things used to be! Guys like Dante and Kratos always far outperformed their games. Something's shifted.
This would also be part of a larger trend where series that had been niche for a long time suddenly broke out into the mainstream. Apparently the Yakuza series has been around since the mid-00s, but it was 2018, not the bloated 243-character boondoggle of 2013, that saw it make its character battle debut on the strength of Yakuza 0. Same goes for the Witcher 3 being a huge smash hit when I doubt anyone even remembers the first two games in the series--and yes, both of them came out prior to 2013, yet Geralt's nowhere to be found in that bracket. Persona was at least a cult classic series prior to 5 taking it to the mainstream, managing to get characters into the 2013 bloat, but you can stick that in here, too.