Results[]
Friday, March 27, 2020
Ulti's Analysis[]
| Division | Division 1 |
|---|---|
| Match # | 2 |
| Match Date | Friday, March 27, 2020 |
| Oracle Expectations |
Halo: Reach - 55.36% 53 for - 11 against |
| GameFAQs Prediction |
Halo: Reach - 65.82% |
| User Votes |
Halo: Reach - 4599 Life is Strange - 3427 |
| Anonymous Votes |
Halo: Reach - 3483 Life is Strange - 3049 |
This match had some debate despite only being one point, believe it or not. Not only did a third of the site think Halo would lose, but a fourth of the gurus picked against it as well. There are several reasons for this, not the least of which is the specter of Halo embarrassing itself due to anti-votes is always there. It has a massive history of underperforming or just outright losing winnable matches, and people look it up every contest. Look at this list of choke jobs, some of them wins in debated matches!
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/6065-best-game-ever-day-4-minecraft-vs-halo-combat-evolved
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/6058-best-game-ever-day-2-the-last-of-us-vs-halo-3
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/4166-north-division-round-3-uncharted-2-vs-halo
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/4075-north-division-round-1-halo-3-vs-super-mario-sunshine
And who could ever forget the ultimate choke of them all?
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/1625-division-128-round-1-halo-combat-evolved-vs-starcraft
Halo is so anti-voted on this site that people had open bloodspot debates on whether or not it would lose to the likes of Minecraft and Super Mario Sunshine. Remember the South Park episode where James Cameron was looking for the bar because it had gotten so low that it had to be at the bottom of the Mariana Trench? When people are arguing that you can't beat Mario Sunshine, then you win and people are arguing that you might lose to Life is Strange a few years later, it might be time to throw in the towel on nominating Halo games in contests. Can't get much lower than this, folks, and Halo has clearly bottomed out on this site.
Now to be completely fair, Life is Strange is a big deal among casual gamer circles so I can understand why some would pick it here. On almost any big site other than GameFAQs, it probably wins this match. The proof is in what happened five years ago. In round one, Life is Strange was up against Fallout 3 and was getting thoroughly demolished. It was at something like 19% and no one thought anything of the game other than it being turbofodder garbage.
Well during that day of that contest, a little-known match was happening between Mass Effect 3 and Undertale. You all know the story of that match, so we need not relive it. What lots of people don't remember is while Undertale was going godmode, Life is Strange was also going godmode. It jumped all the way up to 27% (!!) by the end of that match, and won some updates outright.
It all added up to Halo looking like trash in winning, but never actually feeling threatened. Life is Strange is basically bottom of the barrel on this site, and will lose to anything with name recognition. Halo, though gigatrash for contest strength, does still have "name recognition". Sometimes, that's all you need to win. We'll see that theme a lot in this contest, because the field had a ton of fodder that needed to be rooted out in the early rounds.
Case in point, here are Leon's 5 minute unadjusted stats from the final, with only games below Life is Strange mentioned:
Life is Strange – 13.28%
Destiny – 13.27%
Zero Escape: Virtue’s Last Reward – 13.08%
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey – 12.95%
Crypt of the NecroDancer – 12.86%
Binding of Isaac: Rebirth – 12.82%
XCOM 2 – 12.80%
Fate/Grand Order – 12.32%
Death Stranding – 12.26%
VVVVVV – 11.86%
Hotline Miami – 11.73%
Call of Duty: Black Ops – 11.69%
Subnautica – 11.66%
FTL: Faster Than Light – 11.53%
The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky SC – 11.51%
Splatoon 2 – 11.23%
Dragon’s Dogma – 11.00%
Tekken 7 – 10.97%
Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft – 10.85%
Fortnite – 10.84%
Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective – 10.77%
The Stanley Parable – 10.64%
Night in the Woods – 10.56%
Baba Is You – 10.52%
Crusader Kings II – 10.44%
Dying Light – 10.41%
Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair – 10.16%
What Remains of Edith Finch – 10.02%
Slay the Spire – 9.91%
The Witness – 9.78%
Dota 2 – 9.65%
The Talos Principle – 8.71%
Return of the Obra Dinn – 8.17%
Mortal Kombat 11 – 7.97%
INSIDE – 7.13%
That's over 35 games! This site does not play games made after 2001.
"But Ulti! What about the usual mention of the second match curse!"
Oh we'll get to that.
Ctes's Analysis[]
The final match of the first day gave us a major blow to board 8 from casuals. This match was hotly debated on board 8 and when something doesn’t even break 40%, that’s on us. Hollow Knight was the guru favorite, so we weren’t completely off, but it was very evenly split. It also serves as our first indicator of indie games being legit, but that didn’t really take off until the next day. While the gurus favored Hollow Knight, the oracles did not and those are the bigger contest nerds. With 61.82%, Black Turtle had by far the best oracle prediction and it lower than the actual result. He sure made us here for it too! Then look at the prediction percentage. This was an embarrassing start for us even if we made up for later on.
It was almost over right away, but there were a few minutes of hope for Berseria. It certainly had the board vote to the surprise of no one. A minute into the match, Berseria was doubling Hollow Knight, then suddenly Hollow Knight rose to heaven and was almost doubling Berseria at the freeze. The match had everyone’s attention, but the next update sealed the deal completely. Hollow Knight extended its lead above 200 votes and never looked back.
What happened then? Basically everything we could look at indicated the match being even, and in even matches picking the RPG is usually a good call. Hollow Knight lost big time in its two GotY polls. Tales of Berseria had no such polls to make predictions based on, which probably didn’t speak well for it, but means to was untested. Kingdom Hearts III was snubbed from GotY too and that game had decent enough strength to win here. Velvet was in our latest contest and won a match with relative ease before getting almost 30% on Yoshi. Such strength could be enough today.
For a long time, Hollow Knight was believed to just be really good. A contender for best indie game, which quickly looked to be a decent title. Also, a crucial thing a lot of people didn’t take into account when making this prediction was Hollow Knight’s Switch exposure coming later than its original release. I had Berseria today and expected it to be close thinking Hollow Knight was of the same strength as in its first GotY poll. Had I realized it wasn’t initially on the Switch, I would have picked it. I would not have felt safe, but I would have picked it. Last contest proved being on Switch is a really good thing.
It seems clear now that the result had a lot more to do with Tales of Berseria simply being absurdly weak. Not that anyone thought it wasn’t weak after today, but it’s even worse than anticipated. It looks straight up awful. The Tales series is extremely niche these days, being mostly only cared about in very specific RPG happy circles like board 8. Symphonia looks like it will always be the strongest of these despite being limited to the Gamecube outside of Japan for a long time, and the previous games contest showed us it isn’t even the strongest RPG on the Gamecube as it lost to Paper Mario II. Not that there is any shame in that since Paper Mario II is perfect. A decade after Vesperia did slightly worse than anticipated, we’re taught to have no faith in this franchise in contests and we got a good early reminder that characters =/= games.
Safer777's Analysis[]
I don't know anything about the Halo series but I do believe that HR is beloved at least from the fanbase? As for LIS is a good game and I have seen playthrough and even though it is based on a ridiculous premise(the main character can reverse time!)it just works and the story is amazing too. This and the WD series brought back the Adventure genre for a while at least.
So the match was closer that I expected. Sure we all thought that Halo would win with around the same percentage that it won and it did won but I thought the name would give it more power or something. Guess that doesn't really matter. 1 out of 3 picked LIS to win too. So there you go. Not a clear cut match as I thought.
Tsunami's Analysis[]
It's hard to have faith in anything Halo here, but Life is Strange was pretty fodderiffic when we saw it before. I thought that maybe with B8's penchant for VNs, Life is Strange could pull off the upset, but I forgot that they hate the game. Either way it was a meaningless 1-point match--and there was at least some debate here, a 77.3-22.7 split on the Guru compared to some of the other awful picks I made.
Halo really does look pretty bad here, even in victory.