Results[]
Sunday, April 5, 2020
Ulti's Analysis[]
| Division | Division 5 |
|---|---|
| Match # | 39 |
| Match Date | Sunday, April 05, 2020 |
| Oracle Expectations |
Nioh - 44.89% 10 for - 50 against |
| GameFAQs Prediction |
Nioh - 44.12% |
| User Votes |
The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth - 3633 Nioh - 4565 |
| Anonymous Votes |
The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth - 2715 Nioh - 3857 |
The oracle, guru, board, and casuals all got this one hilariously wrong, but Isaac seemed like the obvious pick so who can blame any of us? Nioh, despite having very good sales, feels like it got lost in the shuffle of all the Souls clones that happened in the latter half of the decade. There's also the matter of the Souls games not exactly lighting the world on fire in these contests before this year. Demon's Souls choked in 2010 and got its ass whipped in 2015. Dark Souls won two matches, then failed to break 30% the second it faced legitimate competition.
Not only that, but Isaac was guaranteed to have a huge picture advantage, and Nioh itself is the bastard stepchild of a bastard stepchild. No-brainer pick, right?
That, ladies and gentlemen, is why they play the games!
Isaac had a small lead early thanks to bracket votes, and was only losing by 9 at the freeze, but then after a small stall Nioh utterly destroyed The Binding of Isaac for 23 and a half hours. It was a blowout win so unexpected that it had people looking for answers, but thankfully that's part of why I do what I do!
People clearly did not respect Nioh's sales numbers when making their brackets, and many people also didn't expect the Souls series to have such insane respect in this contest due to the contest's title. I've mentioned this a few times, but our voters are very astute. "Game of the Decade" means something to them. When you put an irrelevant video game up against a well respected Souls clone, it's a wonder any of us picked against the Souls clone.
But there is another point that a lot of us keep forgetting to factor in when making brackets, but I suspect that won't be an issue moving forward with how I keep bringing it up in these writeups. This match happened on April 5th. Nioh 2 came out on March 13th. These mid-contest game releases are a huge deal, because they almost always cause these massively inflated performances in polling. Nioh likely would have won this match either way, but without a mid-contest sequel this likely would have been a 53-47 type of match. With a mid-contest sequel, you get what we have here. To date as of this writing, Nioh 2 has over a million in sales.
The right game won, too. If you read my review you'll see a 4/10 score and me ratting off a bunch of flaws, but I can still be in love with an average video game. For all that Nioh does wrong, and it botches a lot of things, the things it does well are truly special. One such thing is the soundtrack. Check this specific track out, which is nothing short of mesmerizing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-s0v0AWkbw
I'm not one of those people that likes to look at a thesaurus and invent new phrases when discussing music, like those idiots at Pitchfork are known for, but one comment on that video says this theme is hauntingly feminine and beautiful. Couldn't agree more. It's a huge reason I'm happy Nioh won, despite not picking it. It deserved this.
Ctes's Analysis[]
Here’s the match that got all the attention today. We had seen indie games being good so far and Binding of Isaac was already the favorite to win before the contest started. At this point, not many kept their faith in Nioh. In fact, people generally thought Binding of Isaac would win rather easily. Nioh had about a third of the gurus supporting it and about a sixth of the oracles. Yet it won, and it won rather easily, giving life to what was otherwise a pretty boring division so far.
Neither Binding of Isaac or Nioh looked very great in their Game of the Year polls and the former got just 25% against 2015-Witcher 3 in the previous games contest. They both looked to be bad and not far from each other. The top option is usually a good choice in such cases. If anyone considered it, Binding of Isaac could also stand out like a sore thumb today. The fatal mistake here was probably to underestimate just how good 2017 is. Nioh was up against Persona 5, Horizon and Automata, which are all huge. It was the first real sign of how good anything that year was. Resident Evil 7 came first, but it wasn’t truly given credit before the next round happened. Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey dominated, but were also both expected to, and Hollow Knight wasn’t as big back then as it became. Nioh made the upset though.
The match was exciting in the beginning. Binding of Isaac won the board vote and they were dead even in the opening minutes causing all of us to work our f5 keys. In those minutes, you should feel best as a Nioh supporter. Most indie games had started of strong and stabilized throughout the match. We also knew Binding of Isaac was the favorite and had most bracket votes. At the freeze, the difference was only a 9-vote lead for Nioh. It extended that to 40 next update, which basically sealed the deal. Binding of Isaac stalled for two updates giving hope to some supporters, but the board vote is not just the opening five minutes, it’s the first 15 or 20. It’s usually from that point the board opinion loses influence and true enough, Nioh went from 48 to 122 and never looked back again, being a few votes away from a 3000-vote lead by the end.
This was hugely unexpected after all the indie dominance, but it gave more life to the idea that perhaps indie games from the first half of the decade would not be as strong as the ones from the latter half. Furthermore, with Bloodborne looking good and people generally having high expectations for Dark Souls, credit was also given to Nioh for simply just being better than we thought. No one had the idea yet that indie games just weren’t quite at the level we made them to be on average, or that you can’t really group them as much as we like to do.
Safer777's Analysis[]
So in this match the whole crew got the match wrong as most of Board 8 too. And it is easy to see why. A really popular indie game vs a game that is damn hard and new too and we don't really care for these games here. TBOIR was in the previous contest too and of course got crashed there. But it had a much stronger opponent there too. Nioh is one of these get good games and maybe the hardest of them all. It is hard for sure but yeah you have to be really patient to play it and beat it.
So for the match. Well Nioh won relativy easy. So why? I do believe that even though these 2 games are weak the sequel for Nioh came out a few days before the match and people say it is as good if not better than the original. So it gave it the slight push to beat the indie game. And TBOIR seems that isn't as popular as we thought. Eh. The prediction percentage wasn't as low as I thought though.
Tsunami's Analysis[]
Nioh was a contest newcomer, an action RPG (good thing for this contest) made by Team Ninja (maybe not so good? This is a very Nintendo-centric board and a lot of Nintendo fans are probably still mad about Metroid: Other M) with a sequel (actually prequel, but its name is "Nioh 2") that was released not even two weeks before this match (always a good thing, but imagine how high it could've gone if the start of the contest hadn't been delayed!). Binding of Isaac: Rebirth had made the 2015 Contest as a 14-seed and proceeded to come up against one of the few things against which the "older = better" would've actually worked in its favor, which along with the fact that it was from a series I'd actually heard of, I initially entertained it as a possibility for our requisite 14-3 upset (3-seeds always tend to be hyped newcomers that inevitably flop; Allen even made a joke out of it in CBIX and of course a 3-seed won it all). Mercifully I was successfully talked out of that; The Witcher 3 nearly tripled it. But "familiar" usually trumps "unfamiliar", so even though the only contest experience BoI had was being weak (the protagonist also made CBIX as an 18-seed, but that meant an immediate date with a Noble Niner), the fact that it had any experience at all made it a favorite on Board 8, at a little better than 2-1 on the Guru and 5-1 on Oracle predictions, including at least one person who said straight-out in the Oracle Discussion Topic that they had Nioh in their bracket but their bracket was trash anyway so they were hoping that it was their Oracle pick of BoI:R that was correct. The casuals? Well, they were upset, too, but not nearly as badly as the Gurus. 43.53% of brackets had this match correct, so while they too were ultimately wrong more than they were right, they correctly saw this as a debatable match.
And let's face it, winning with 56.53% qualifies as "close" in this contest. I'm honestly not even sure why I'm still making Oracle predictions under 55%; I suspect it's to mitigate disaster when I know I'm picking against the majority.