Results[]
Round One
Saturday, November 14, 2015Ulti's Analysis[]
Division | Division 5 |
---|---|
Match # | 38 |
Match Date | Saturday, November 14, 2015 |
Oracle Expectations |
Fire Emblem: Awakening - 51.19% 59 for - 38 against |
GameFAQs Prediction |
Fire Emblem: Awakening - 65.26% |
It happens now and then that a debatable match isn't close at all. But a debatable match simply shouldn't nearly be a doubling, then you know you made a bad choice. Super Mario Maker disappointed big time here, but it makes sense. A bunch of people saw an opportunity to bash the Wii U here, and while being a very recent game and being on the Wii U clearly doesn't help, it's not all there is to it. Besides, Super Mario Maker might be the second most recent game in the bracket only coming before our winner, but Awakening is only from 2013 too. What matters here is that it's not really a new game. A good amount of people had Super Mario Maker winning here and it was well supported going as far as the division finals. The idea behind this is that its a collection of three very strong Mario games and NSMB. It's Mario fanservice and it has been relatively successful too. The thing is, it's not really a new game. It's cool, but it's something that hardcore fans that knows their coding could probably work out decently too. It doesn't feel like a game and it's certainly not a candidate for Best Game Ever either. It seems really weird that Super Mario Maker made it to the bracket of a Best Game Ever contest when Super Mario Bros didn't. I nominated it myself, but I didn't really expect anything of it.
Awakening was always going to win here despite obviously not being worth much, but just being the right place in the bracket. The 3DS in general has a pretty awful contest. Pokemon XY and Monster Hunter 4 lost very badly and lost easily in a match people thought it could win respectively. A Link Between Worlds, which is very likely the strongest 3DS game there is didn't make the bracket. Awakening gave the 3DS some much needed support. It's weird, the 3DS is the second best received console of the current generation and managed close to nothing this contest. But then again, did the other consoles really do that. Picking Awakening to round 3 looked like a pretty good pick after today. It would only need to be ever so slightly stronger Xenoblade and why not? You hear better things about Xenoblade, but Fire Emblem is a more established franchise and Awakening is probably the most successful title from that franchise. We couldn't know just how weak Super Mario Maker was, only that it definitely was weak, so the round 2 match currently looked like it could go either way.
Ctes's Analysis[]
Ah yes, the match that cemented Super Mario Maker as Turd of the Contest.
For some background here, one has to realize a few things. One, this entire eightpack was ripe for the taking. The case could be made for Xenoblade, Donkey Kong Country 2, Fire Emblem Awakening, Super Mario Maker, Banjo-Kazooe or Symphony of the Night all winning three matches. It was a nice jumbled mess of midcarders, any of which could have gone on a run and caught a bandwagon. I doubt any of them could have beaten Ocarina for the division title even with a bandwagon, but who really knows? We've seen Link lose in round 3 before.
For Mario Maker's fourpack specifically, the entire reason people thought Mario Maker would do well is our new paradigm of rallies in contests. People are wise to these things now, and they knew Mario Maker would be a potential target. Mario Maker had everything in its favor: "IT'S FREAKING MARIO", a huge presence in social media, a huge internet buzz ever since it was released, a massive concentration of memes, an unbelievably easy contest path where it could potentially SFF two things and get a bandwagon rolling, and so on and so forth.
Then it went out there and just completely shit the bed. It was everything just to not get doubled, and when you pair the game's potential with how it performed, you have to give it Turd of the Contest. Furthermore, a lot of us thought this game would boost the Mario series as a whole, when it might have done the opposite. 3 got rolled, 1 didn't even make the bracket, and we can't really guarantee World and 64 wouldn't have also gotten rolled by Pokemon had the Undertale rally not happened. They did give a very good showing against Undertale, for what it's worth, but you also have to look at the other side and realize Mario World was losing updates to Animal Crossing. I can't give a reason for this beyond a few educated guesses, but the best one is probably GameFAQs playing no game released after 2001 or so. Another good reason is Mario Maker is purely a social game, and let's not kid ourselves about the type of person that frequents this site or frequents the gaming hobby as a whole -- anti-social to the extreme. People complained all contest long about rallies and outsiders. Would socialites really complain about having a lot of new people around and new things doing well in our contests? No.
This is nothing against Awakening, for the record. I love the game and I love the Fire Emblem series. Awakening did some very neat new things, made good use of the 3D, and Chrom was alright. The cast wasn't all that memorable when compared to 7 or 9, but I can't complain too much. My only real problem with the game is how unbelievably easy it was. You get a support going, and then everything is just setting up a choke point and going 2v1 in any fight. I'm sure the hard modes are berserk, but some of us enjoy the "normal" difficulty having a challenge as well. Dark Souls didn't get popular by giving people shortcuts.