Results[]
Saturday, March 28, 2020
Ulti's Analysis[]
| Division | Division 1 |
|---|---|
| Match # | 6 |
| Match Date | Saturday, March 28, 2020 |
| Oracle Expectations |
Sekiro - 61.87% 62 for - 2 against |
| GameFAQs Prediction |
Sekiro - 78.35% |
| User Votes |
Sekiro - 4877 Ni no Kuni - 3165 |
| Anonymous Votes |
Sekiro - 3599 Ni no Kuni - 3116 |
CONCURRENT BATTLES OF THE OBNOXIOUSLY LONG SUBTITLES!!
We just discussed at length this match's identical trends and percentages vis-a-vis Monster Hunter and Bravely Default, so we need not rehash it too much. But for wiki readers who like to skip around (...why?) or for anyone singularly linking to this one, this match and Monster Hunter v Bravely Default had the same trends, same percentage, almost the same prediction percentage, and it was cool because all four were contest newcomers. It was a good, old fashioned, boring 58-42 type beating all around. It was impossible to really project Monster Hunter vs Sekiro based on any of this, and you couldn't really use the Nintendo argument either. Ni no Kuni has a Switch port, while Bravely Default happened on the 3DS.
There was however one interesting thing about this match specifically, which was the visceral hatred some people on Board 8 have for Ni no Kuni. Lots of complaints about it being overhyped at launch, generic and predictable on delivery. Stuff like that.
Now I haven't played the game yet, so I can't comment on anything specific, but I laugh when I hear people complain about Japanese RPGs being generic and predictable. Bros, you do understand this genre has been the same exact thing for 30 years, right? You start every JRPG as a teenager with amnesia looking for your lost cat. You end all of them by killing a mutant. If you're still looking for innovation in the RPG realm, the linear JRPG style doesn't have it anymore.
Open world Western RPG styles are what people want now. Go peek ahead to the end of the contest. Half of the final 8 is Western RPGs. The case can be made for Xenoblade and Dark Souls having a WRPG influence, too. Of course JRPGs are predictable and generic. That's why we all like them.
Ctes's Analysis[]
Sekiro won the match with relative ease as it was supposed to, but for anyone that picked Sekiro to round 3, this was not what you had hoped for. Ni no Kuni is beyond irrelevant at this point and is probably only remember for being animated by Studio Ghibli. While it is a very pretty game indeed, it’s rather forgettable and I would not have been surprised to see it not make the field at all.
Let’s stay at the pretty animations part for a bit though. While I switched to Monster Hunter > Sekiro after this day of matches, I did not think this was as bad as people thought. Because if you have not played either of the two, Ni no Kuni stands out quite a bit. I can see people thinking “Well, it looks nice and I like Studio Ghibli” here. I could’ve done that in some matters myself if I didn’t care for either game. That’s despite having actually attempted to play Ni no Kuni. I just got bored of it and never got around to finishing it.
Now, although round 2 certainly did not do that line many favors, I’m about ready to pick it up again on the other side of the contest. Because while Sekiro didn’t get close to winning next round, this whole fourpack ends up looking good, all in the better half of the bracket. It’s hard a bit hard to imagine, but I think it makes the above point good after all. You could argue that it just has the right genre for us to care about it, but there are certain games today and yesterday proving it is not necessarily so. I have a hard time imagining Ni no Kuni put up much of a number on anything, but it seems like the kind of game that’s also hard to blowout entirely. I would not pick it above FFXV or Hollow Knight as the stats suggest, but I still think the stats tell us something. The game is forgettable to many, but rarely ever disliked, and we all remember what it is when seeing it in a poll. Sekiro is also a recent game and here on the other side of the contest, being a year old has not looked to do anything any favors anymore, we’re slow on this site. So it’s a good game for Ni no Kuni to perform well on while going out.
Safer777's Analysis[]
So we have Sekiro here which is a damn hard game for the hardcore people vs a JRPG that nobody cares about now. And it did bad. Man we do love our JRPG's on this site. And it isn't about name here, everyone knows about Sekiro especially with all these get good memes. Ninokuni had a remaster recently but still I don't think anyone cares enough for the series. I think the 2nd game did bad in sales too.
So for the match. Nothing to say. Sekiro just doesn't have power and Ni No Kuni is even weaker. So there you go. I guess we don't care for either game here.
Tsunami's Analysis[]
And here's where The Flowchart, and everything else I thought I knew about GameFAQs, went completely down the toilet. I wasn't that familiar with Ni No Kuni and even less so with Sekiro, but remembering how Yakuza bombed all over the 2018 Contest and being pretty sure that Sekiro was an action game and not an RPG, I figured this was a lock. Ni No Kuni was fodder, sure, but Japanese RPG > Japanese, not to mention I'd probably take a FPS over an Action Game on this site. Just look at how Devil May Cry regularly struggles to even get games into the Games Contests despite Dante being a very good midcarder. It's clear that both he and Kratos are far stronger than their games. And if Yakuza couldn't even do well in a Character Battle, how was an action game going to do shit in this contest? And my Oracle was only spared from being in an even bigger world of hurt by my misconception that this was Japanese RPG > Japanese. It's not. Unlike the series I keep comparing it to, Yakuza, which is legitimately Japanese in origin, Sekiro is set in Japan but it's made by Activision, best known in this site's glory days for their sports games like the Tony Hawk series, and more recently for Call of Duty. When I learned that, I said I was glad I didn't know that because I probably would've taken Ni No Kuni to double Sekiro if I had. Researching them for this write-up, however, I learned that Activision also managed to acquire some old platformer icons like Crash and Spyro, not that those characters will ever be theirs, and they...are now known as Activision Blizzard?!?!?!?! Goddamnit, if I'd known that I don't think I'd have taken Sekiro to avoid a tripling by much! You've got a company that this site hates, in a genre that this site hates...and it's not only not challenging for the title of "lowest X-Stat value by something that isn't actively being anti-voted", but comfortably advancing to Round 2? And just like Bravely Default in the previous match, over 49.5% of Ni No Kuni's raw votes came from unregistered users; in fact, the splits are extremely similar with both voter groups-- 4833-3206 vs. 4877-3165 with the registered voters, 3543-3173 vs. 3599-3116 with the unregistered (in both cases, this match was the slightly more lopsided one). This was, plain and simple, the site's tastes being far different than what I...oh. I, uh, may not have looked quite close enough. Activision merely published the game internationally; it was actually developed by a Japanese developer, FromSoftware, best known for...the Souls series?! Well, geez, I feel silly now. The Souls series is one of the few IPs to debut during the contest era that has shown some strength in Games Contests. Dark Souls made Round 3 in 2015, where it nearly broke 30% on A Link to the Past, and managed to double its Round 1 opponent and beat an established franchise in Round 2, while Demon's Souls, the game that started it all...okay it's 0-2, but it looked good in both its losses and both were to quality competition. Probably. They've only had one appearance in a Character Battle and the character was put into a bad situation immediately, but if we ever go back to Character Battles, the series might have enough clout to not completely suck.