Results[]
Friday, April 3, 2020
Ulti's Analysis[]
| Division | Division 4 |
|---|---|
| Match # | 31 |
| Match Date | Friday, April 03, 2020 |
| Oracle Expectations |
Ori and the Blind Forest - 39.05% 2 for - 64 against |
| GameFAQs Prediction |
Ori and the Blind Forest - 38.19% |
| User Votes |
Dragon Age: Inquisition - 4283 Ori and the Blind Forest - 4646 |
| Anonymous Votes |
Dragon Age: Inquisition - 3506 Ori and the Blind Forest - 3755 |
Some indie games looked okay this contest. Most did not. Ori and the Blind Forest pulled off an upset so unexpected that I went and bought it immediately upon seeing this match result. True story. This match was one of those types where it wasn't remotely as close as the final score would indicate, either. Dragon Age didn't even get the bracket votes, and Ori just sat there and boat raced this match en route to what I like to call a 52-48 blowout. This thing was never close and was never going to be, regardless of any periodic cuts or stalls Dragon Age made.
I was frankly stunned into silence by this result, and didn't think Dragon Age would have a prayer of losing this. How many matches happened in this contest where a brand name video game demolished some indie darling? Hell, how many of the indie games this contest got to lose close? Two or three maybe?
But once I did some digging to research points for this writeup, the reasons became clear. First off, people hate Dragon Age: Inquisition. Remember, this wasn't Dragon Age: Origins. Inquisition is the third game in the series, and the fanbase openly detests this game. It's apparently a very badly done game, too, with most Bioware honks rating it on the level of Mass Effect Andromeda. I wish I had looked that up pre-contest, because if this match was Andromeda vs Ori, I would have picked Ori without a second thought.
More importantly than that is Ori having two huge breaks. One is that it got a Switch port in September 2019, four years after its initial release date on Steam. That will always help. Two and most importantly, this match happened on April 3rd, 2020. Ori and the Will of the Wisps launched on March 11th, 2020. Ori may have won this match with its own natural strength, we'll never know for sure, but these mid-contest game releases almost always help big time.
It all added up to an incredible upset, with only two oracles and 18% of gurus picking Ori to win. This choke job by Inquisition had some people calling it the turd of the contest, but I don't agree with that. This was a one point upset, which in my world cannot ever be called a turd of the entire contest. Turd of the round maybe, but not an entire contest. The match didn't mean enough.
Turd of the contest honors goes to Hideo Kojima. Oh wait, sorry, Kojima is just a hack who thinks toilet humor is funny and that bodily functions as weapons in a video game is a good idea and HYPER REALISM OMG. Can you imagine that trash in real life? It happens, you know. Antifa is known for putting bodily fluids in balloons, and there are idiots who think women shouldn't be allowed to arm themselves in self defense because if they're about to be assaulted they can just go to the bathroom on themselves or vomit. Yes, there are actually people dumb enough to think this. I'll bet Hideo Kojima helped come up with those ideas. Hey genius, it's called the second amendment and legal self defense. Use it.
The actual turd of this contest is Fire Emblem. Speaking of.
Ctes's Analysis[]
This is one of the most hilarious matches of the whole round. It was not the most exciting contest round to be fair, but this one still fully delivered. Almost no one saw this coming before the contest began. There were some gurus that went ahead with the upset, but it wasn’t a popular pick. Despite the success of indies so far, only two people had this in the oracle, and this match eliminated all but four remaining people in last man standing. The upset had been considered a bit during the contest, but we had seen indie games doing better than we expected them to, yet no one could really believe Ori was within striking distance in this match. Partly because Ori is from the middle of the decade and not from the last years, which seemed to be the best thing. Mostly because the match just wasn’t expected to be close.
The match was close within the first five minutes, but that was a huge sign that we’d see an unexpected result. Ori was ahead at the freeze while being the underdog. The next update had everyone pretty excited, but it shouldn’t have come as a surprise when Ori then jumped up quite a bit. It did the same thing the next update, and despite the match being close, it was never in doubt, and Ori never looked back.
Dragon Age: Origins did pretty good in its Game of the Year poll and in the previous Game of the Decade. Nothing fantastic but enough to win a match like this for sure. It disappointed a bit against Super Mario Galaxy in 2015, but that was completely overshadowed by the fact that Super Metroid > Super Mario Galaxy suddenly became the clear result. It also wasn’t enough to make much of it, but perhaps it was a small warning sign of decline. Dragon Age: Inquisition was never going to be as good as Origins, but man it’s still a hard fall.
Ori and the Blind Forest was a for a while considered a contender for best indie game. It wasn’t initially, but this surprised us all enough for it to be. It should be mentioned that I think its status as an indie game is a bit in grey. It started out as that, but Microsoft backed them for three of their four years of development. It had a lot of exposure at E3 before release. Most indie games just hope to be included in some montage. It doesn’t make this result less impressive though!
Dragon Age: Inquisition finished second in the 2014 Game of the Year polls behind only Smash 4. That means that judging from those, it should be the strongest 2014 representative in the contest. That means nothing though. 2014 is probably the worst year of the decade overall and I have a hard time seeing it beat Bravely Default or Bayonetta 2 today. Even South Park: The Stick of Truth looks to be within striking distance judging from this fourpack. It also obviously loses to Mario Kart 8, but they didn’t share a poll then. I don’t know exactly what happened to Dragon Age, but it apparently fell off a huge cliff, perhaps BioWare’s decline is all it took. Unless something big happens to that franchise, we should not have it coming back again.
Safer777's Analysis[]
So we have an indie game here...is what I would had say but Ori came out from Microsoft apparently! DAI was really big. People were dissapointed with DA2 but EA delivered with the 3rd game. At least this is my opinion. Most seem to think that the game wasn't good but for me it was amazing. It did really well with Critics and good with the fans, for critical reception I mea. As for Ori...it is a 2D platformer and is damn hard. It even got a sequel that came out few days before the match. I hear the game is pretty good but hate to say it I haven't heard for the series before the match.
So for the match. DAI won and...Yeah okay Ori won. Here is the thing. I always get wrong matches in contests of course as everyone. In almost all of the ones that I get wrong I always think that maybe the other game/character can win. But not here. I didn't even gave a second thought. Sure DA isn't that popular now since DAI came out like 6 years ago but against a game that very few people have heard about? And DAI is an RPG too! Even the whole crew went with DAI here too. Is it possible the sequel that recently came out gave it a small boost that needed to beat DAI? DA series was never strong here, I mean we had the 1st game in a contest before and it lost to 1st round too. Another thing here is that DAI actually won a few hours too so the match ended pretty close at the end. For me a game/character that wins with less than 53% is pretty close so as you see here the match was pretty close but Ori was never in danger. Man sad to see that DA series doing that badly. And I heard that DA 4 will be big on microtransactions too so even worse when it comes out.
Tsunami's Analysis[]
I knew that Ori was at least somewhat popular among indies, but it was never going to stand a chance against a popular RPG series like Dragon Age...right? Well, let's take a look at the results:
In the first GotD, Dragon Age: Origins piled up 69.21% on F-Zero GX in Round One (Oracle expectation: not quite 61%, with a few rogues picking GX to pull the upset outright) before pulling 31.13% in a loss to Twilight Princess. Now, if taken at face value, the 37.73% that Super Mario Galaxy pulled in on TP the following round suggests that DA:O would be able to break 45% on it, but of course SMG-TP is an SFF match so the adjustments suggest it's more like 41.25%. Actual result when the two games met in Round 1 in 2015: DA:O was held just under 36%. Origins also managed 30.32% in the final of the 2009 GotY, while Inquisition, the game in this match, also made the final vote in its GotY five years later and actually took second place (the 2009 final was close enough that 30.32% was actually third place out of three.) So by all indications, it's a strong series here. Probably. As such, just 17.61% of Gurus took Ori to pull the upset.
"Oops."
The casuals didn't exactly embarrass us on this one, but they clearly weren't as enamored of DA:I as we were; 37.68% of brackets had this match right. DA:I never led in this match, with the max lead for Ori coming about 3 hours from the end. But max leads are fairly meaningless in this contest, because with how low the votals are, there's barely any movement late in matches.