Results[]
Wednesday, April 22, 2020
Ulti's Analysis[]
| Division | Division 3 |
|---|---|
| Match # | 102 |
| Match Date | Wednesday, April 22, 2020 |
| Oracle Expectations |
Super Mario Odyssey - 71.50% 51 for - 0 against |
| GameFAQs Prediction |
Super Mario Odyssey - 51.49% |
| User Votes |
Shovel Knight - 2467 Super Mario Odyssey - 6797 |
| Anonymous Votes |
Shovel Knight - 2183 Super Mario Odyssey - 5471 |
One is an accident, two is a problem, three is a trend. This made three rounds in a row where Super Mario Odyssey looked better than Smash Ultimate. We all knew Shovel Knight was never going to make a match out of this and was simply happy to make it this far, but Mario beat it so badly that there was legitimate cause for concern if you picked Smash Ultimate to win this division.
Round 1
-Smash 83, Tekken 7 17
-Mario 86, Mortal Kombat 11 14
Round 2
-Smash 64, Link Between Worlds 36
-Mario 71, Devil May Cry 5 29
Round 3
-Smash 64, Spiderman 36
-Mario 73, Shovel Knight 27
It's almost impossible to look at these results and think Mario wasn't the stronger game, not to mention what happened in the series contest: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/2451-mushroom-division-final-super-mario-bros-vs-super-smash-bros
I guess you could still favor Smash if you take the Zelda result super seriously, and think Tekken 7 is stronger than Mortal Kombat 11, and think Spiderman is undervalued. Those are all possible, but I think the explanation for next round is much easier than all that.
We should take a second to give Shovel Knight some props instead of mere passing this off as a Cinderella run ending. It was the only indie game to make it into round 3; none of the other 287 indie games in this bracket pulled that off. Mad props to Shovel Knight for making it into the final 32. That is not an easy accomplishment at all.
Ctes's Analysis[]
This is one of the most boring matches in the contest as Super Mario Odyssey was always going to win very easily and the match can’t even be used as a good indicator for anything because of possible overlap between these two games that may or may not be there. Shovel Knight gets the honor of being the only indie game to get this far in the contest, which is something. It’s not necessarily the strongest, most people seem to think that honor goes to Cuphead or Stardew Valley. Shovel Knight would end up below several layers of SFF, so it’s hard to determine.
One interesting this about this match is the lack of a rally. Everyone remembers when the creators of Shovel Knight, Yacht Club Games, tweeted about the match against Octopath Traveler making Shovel Knight win a battle of rallies. The comments to that tweet pointed out that Super Mario Odyssey was ahead and correctly recognized that it would be a tough match. Yacht Club Games responded to that saying “We can’t give up! Not even if pitted against our beloved mustachioed main man!”. They made it pretty clear they were going to attempt once more.
Did anyone expect it make the match interesting? No, of course not. The gap was way too big and the affect of the tweet had already slowed down a good bit by the end of the previous match despite coming up with an hour to go. I did however expect them to try and cut off a significant chunk of percentage and finished somewhere between 30% and 40%. They seemed dedicated, but nope, they never tweeted about the match. I don’t know if they simply forgot, it would be my best bet. No one cared to remind them because why would we, it wouldn’t matter. Even if it had made no difference, it sure was anticlimactic.
Safer777's Analysis[]
So in the previous match of Shovel Knight it got a rally litteraly at the last hour of the match and managed to barely win. But against SMO? Yeah no chance. Pretty sure for the Mario fans this is the best Mario Game since Galaxy 2. So yeah. Even it had gotten a rally since the 1st minute it couldn't win except...no, no chance no matter what.
So for the match. Of course SMO won easily and it did as expected. Duh. The one thing to notice is that before the contest Ultimate was considered the favorite to beat Odyssey but now Odyssey is the favorite! Hey Mario vs Mario! The match we all want! Also Shovel Knight was the only indie game to reach Round 3. Not even the most popular indie game in the world, Minecraft, managed to do that!
Tsunami's Analysis[]
After the madness of RE2-Bloodborne, Division 3's pair of obvious outcomes were somewhat of a breather. Both of these matches had over 50% prediction rates, and the fact that they were as low as they were was, quite frankly, pure anti-favoritism at work; just six Gurus out of 142 picked wither one of these games to lose, and none picked both. There was a case to be made that Odyssey had once again outperformed Ultimate, but Shovel Knight, mainstream as it may be, is still an indie game, and Spider-Man is, well, easily one of the three most mainstream superheroes out there.
And make no mistake: Shovel Knight is mainstream. ZenOfThunder has been keeping a topic screencapping various posts, be they on this board, our associated Discord, or on Reddit (or anywhere else people might talk about the contest, but there haven't been that many of those), and Shovel Knight was a name that came up in replies to rally topics involving completely different games. It's got a hell of a lot of respect.
All in all, though, it was tough to tell which game would have the advantage next round, which was really the main story for both of these matches taking place on the same day, which is why I literally copied half of my write-up from the previous match into this one. I initially was planning on just writing a single write-up for the both of them, but I decided that wouldn't be fair to Spider-Man or to Shovel Knight. I feel like the "half a shared write-up" gets the point across well enough, at any rate.