Results[]
Tuesday, December 8, 2015
Ulti's Analysis[]
| Division | Division 3 |
|---|---|
| Match # | 115 |
| Match Date | Tuesday, December 8, 2015 |
| Oracle Expectations |
Undertale - 50.89% 43 for - 33 against |
| GameFAQs Prediction |
Undertale - 2.58% |
Pokemon fans, plus a lot of contest fans, felt Pokemon was this contest's last hope. One might say they had all of their hopes and dreams for this contest attached to Pokemon's performance in this match: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGaneyDfyls
Before getting into the match, I owe Chris a huge thank you. People tried throwing shade at my Pokemon picture, and Board 8's resident Pokemon guru was very kind in defending it and telling everyone the picture was a great representative of the game. That meant the world to me man, I appreciate it. It was really hard to make and took a long time, too. Normally when people whine about a picture I really don't care; it only bothers me when I know I put a ton of effort into one of them, and that picture took forever to get just right. I made the background blurry on purpose, by the way. I've never liked when backgrounds stood out and took the focus away from the foreground. It was a pain in the ass to take the same city, render it 4 times in 4 different colors, line it up so it formed the same original city, then make it blurry enough to put the focus on the sprites while not being a blob. It was a hard picture to do and I'm very proud of it, so having one of Board 8's three big Pokemon guys (Chris, Red, TRE) like it was awesome. It shut down the rumblings of blaming the picture for the loss, too, which I really appreciate. My best will never be as good as KP/Zen/greatone/etc's best, but I do try. These days the PCA, making images, and cheering on my favorites is why I still do this. I've already had "the thrill of winning", so now I'm mainly here to have fun. Making pictures is a lot of fun, and everyone wants to be appreciated. Not gonna lie though, when the rally got going and my image was everywhere on the internet, it was a very weird experience. Then the same thing happened to an even bigger degree with Melee/Undertale and it was a huge "holy shit, hundreds of thousands of people are actually looking at this" moment. It was really neat, if not really intimidating, seeing my stuff all over social media. I don't know how the other picsmiths feel when that happens, but I honestly wasn't expecting how neat it was. It fills you with determination to try even harder to make better pictures for future matches, that's for sure.
Anyway, enough sentimental stuff. Match time. This was the match that many people felt would decide the contest, and most people knew that tumblr, one of the major rally outlets for Undertale, was Pokemon's big stronghold. This would be Undertale's hardest test yet, and it would be its first match against a game that would be able to fight fire with fire. Mass Effect 3 had no hope, Fallout 3's fans didn't care, and there's really no way to rally for Mario. He's the standard-bearer. But Pokemon fans? Pokemon fans can and do rally, often to very high levels. And if Pokemon's fandom was on point, it could easily match whatever Undertale could put out. There wasn't much logic here beyond "can Undertale pull votes from tumblr?", just a potential rally vs rally fight with obscene vote totals.
When the match began, Pokemon was nothing short of dominant. "Dominant" is a fair word to use because even though there was a massively frontloaded vote for Pokemon followed by a percentage bleed, Undertale's bandwagon had taken a huge hold by this point of the contest. It was putting out updates upwards of 250-300 votes, and it barely mattered beyond high total votes for the match. Pokemon easily matched and surpassed these updates, and just went to town overnight. Every time Undertale seemed to spike, Pokemon would also spike. The belief that Undertale's rally would also draw in Pokemon fans seemed to be true, and all that stuff about backfire rates seemed to be accurate. Undertale was pulling in its highest vote totals of the entire contest, and Pokemon was, relatively speaking, just laughing at it. There may have been a percentage bleed overnight, but it was a slow percentage bleed and did little to stop Pokemon from building up a huge lead. To give an idea of numbers, Pokemon was at 60% with a lead of nearly 3000 votes two hours in. Two hours into the Super Mario World match, Mario World had 60.96% but only a lead of 2376, and was bleeding percentage at a massive rate.
This was clearly a different match altogether. Undertale tried to stall overnight, including even a 50-50 stall for a time, but it did not stop Pokemon from going up in the end. It rocked the night vote, the percentage bleed was slow, and things kept right on moving in Pokemon's favor come the morning vote. The percentage bleed actually stopped come the morning vote, and Pokemon really took the gloves off. While Undertale sat there getting 150-2000 votes per update (which is a HUGE number and meant the final vote totals would be nuts), Pokemon was getting a solid 200-300 every update and did not care. This match settled into a nice pocket in the morning, and really looked as if things would finish in the 56-44 range.
I say this because despite Undertale's best efforts -- rally threads were clearly everywhere -- did nothing to even slow Pokemon down. This match stayed at 56-44 all morning and every update was "Pokemon +50". It stayed this way until well past lunch. At 12:55 pm EST, with just over 11 hours to go in the poll, Pokemon's lead peaked at 7570. At this point, Undertale would have had to cut 57 votes per update to come back and win the match. Even at this point when Undertale's rally went up a little in power, it was doing nothing more than shaving at the lead below quota and bleeding percentage. Pokemon was even able to win updates with good numbers during this time, so for the next few hours as Undertale rallied the troops, Pokemon was still very much doing well. It was putting tons of votes out there, it was keeping Undertale at more than arm's length, and things looked really good. Remember how at 12:55 the lead was 7570? Even with Undertale cutting votes, the lead didn't get below 7000 until 3:30 pm. Had things stayed like this, with Undertale getting around 200 an update and Pokemon fluctuating between 150-200, Pokemon easily would have won.
I'm gonna pause right here for a few side notes. During the entire morning vote, Undertale was pronounced dead, and for good reason. Undertale had a rally going to be sure, but Pokemon had a really good rally going. r/Pokemon had a topic at the very top, there was a Facebook/Twitter presence, and there was a large tumblr presence. Undertale had the same stuff, but to win this match it really needed to be able to beat Pokemon on tumblr. For this reason, most people assumed the match was over. It seemed as if the tumblr/backfire logic was true, and more importantly, this was the first Undertale opponent that bothered fighting back all contest. That's really what was missing all contest from Undertale's opponents, and here, it had an opponent that clearly did not give two fucks about things like rallies, bandwagons, or hype. Any time Undertale stepped out for the first 12 hours of this poll, Pokemon just smacked it down like a weed. Pokemon hadn't even really gone full force, either. Bulbapdia, Serebii, and there were several pros and developers that could basically end the match any time they wanted to. Us Undertale fans always knew this match was probably the end of the line for very logical reasons, though it was still very hard to watch. A lot of people acted ridiculous and pretended they knew this contest was over after the Mass Effect 3 match. Reasonable people knew that Pokemon was the true road block. We really did have our hopes up about winning the contest once it beat Mario World. Even we were resigned to losing and had basically lost hope in beating Pokemon. That's how over this match was. We all knew the trends and knew how strong Pokemon could be when it tried.
But then, come the ASV, the absolutely unthinkable happened. @undertale_bot made one tweet asking people to vote in the poll, and the mother of all floodgates immediately opened. There was no gradual build here. Undertale started cutting 100 votes per update, and kept doing it even as Pokemon tried to fight back against what was happening. It's not like Pokemon rolled over and died; it saw what was up and started pulling in more votes. Those fans knew how to rally too, but Undertale had practiced it enough to make it an art form by this point. Pokemon didn't stand a chance, and it was even fighting back! Didn't matter.
Allen was nice enough to legitimize the push: "Almost all of this sudden rush is from Twitter, just like last time, and it happened as soon as that account posted."
Before long, Undertale was going full Draven pulling in 350+ vote updates. Just insane numbers that Pokemon could not dream of matching, even with Masuda tweeting about the poll. As the match rapidly got close, Undertale just ratcheted things up even harder, began pulling in updates in excess of 400-450 votes, and just absolutely buried Pokemon right at 8 pm. For the next four hours Undertale slowed down only a little, and would ultimately win the poll by 3643. From the peak lead of 7570 to Undertale taking the lead, seven hours passed. This added another insane comeback to Undertale's pile, along with numbers like 9252, 6834, and 3224.
Undertale winning this match cemented it as the clear favorite in this contest, and it also set up a potentially INSANE contest quarterfinal. With Melee/FF7 and Undertale/Mario 64 happening at the same time, there was the potential of having 4 simultaneous rallies at the same exact time. Melee proved it could go, FF7 may have had to get a rally going, we all knew Undertale was coming even though Mario 64 was clearly going to roll over like Mario World did, and who knew if Mario 64 would decide to give us one final Mario Clutch moment? And if Melee was rallying, what's to say Mario 64 wouldn't benefit from extra Nintendo love? It was really fun to think about.
Undertale deserves credit here for winning, but this is the first match where we can really blame Undertale's opponent for losing. It's not that Undertale didn't deserve it, but Pokemon's fans didn't show up here. Even though a lot of rallies were going, there was a huge sentiment against RBYG from hardcore Pokemon fans -- fans whose support would have easily won Pokemon this match, even against Undertale's full efforts. Serebii did nothing. Bulbapedia did nothing. Most pros did nothing. Among developers, only Masuda cared. It's like Pokemon only wanted to put half a rally effort out there instead of truly going balls to the wall.
And why? Some ridiculous "genwunner" nonsense among the Pokemon fanbase. Rather than wanting RBYG to win and get exposure for the series, hardcore fans basically invited the loss intentionally just to prove a point. There is not a doubt in my mind Pokemon at full power would have mowed over this contest, instead the fanbase had to "beat those genwunners". I don't get it, but I certainly wasn't complaining about Undertale backdooring its way into another win and becoming the contest favorite. But make no mistake: Pokemon threw this match
"I wanna be the second best." -transience with the quote of the contest
The last thing to mention here is that after a joke vote in the stats topic about buying Facebook ads to get people to vote against Undertale, this idea seriously got passed around the grapevine and people seriously considered it as a viable option. Just think about how insane that is. People wanted to buy Facebook ads for Final Fantasy 7 in a potential FF7/Undertale match. Did you guys ever think we would hear of something so hilarious? The match never would happen, but I'd love to know how much money SephG and MWC were willing to piss away on Facebook ads that no one reads.
Oh and this for sure fed into the whole "lol gamefaqs" thing, complete with screenshots all over social media. But it's just a vocal minority, right Board 8? ;)
Ctes' Analysis[]
This in my opinion is a contender for greatest match of the contest. It was major rally forces against each in the same way Melee vs. Undertale would be, and it wasn't the best match either, but it was probably the greatest in the sense that the whole board exploded more than previously, yet the match was still interesting almost the whole way through. Undertale was the major favorite going on, but RBY held up like a king for way longer than Fallout 3 or Super Mario World. You had people, who previously claimed that nothing would stop Undertale, go forward and admit it was over and that RBY had won it. Undertale ended up managing to get in the lead, but nothing was over at that point. The match was still really dramatic and was decided on an insane and ridiculous twist where a fanbase went against their own. Very eventful 24 hours we had here, that's for sure.
The match started out as you would expect. A huge explosion in votals, with Undertale falling behind. The votals were insanely high for both games. Rallies were clearly already there and it definitely effecting the match that the previous ones had a huge rally. Probably wasn't too much, but it likely mostly helped RBY come off to this fantastic start. In less than 20 minutes it was over 1000 votes ahead, which would make almost any match a closed done deal. In less than an hour this was extended to 2000 votes. It slowed, but not by much, in a bit more than 2 hours, RBY was more than 3000 votes in the lead. This was insane. RBY was clearly leagues ahead of the games that fought Undertale in previous matches. The votals were a lot higher than in previous rounds for Undertale matches, and RBY was doing a lot better. Clearly this would be an opponent of a whole different strength for Undertale.
Now, this might be speaking a bit too soon, you would think. Once RBY passed 3000 it actually stopped and starting dropping a bit, causing literally everyone to call the match over. I don't blame them. I mean, I do often blame people for acting too fast, but we have seen pretty clearly previously that when Undertale starts cutting, it doesn't really stop, not to mention it'd make sense for that to start earlier this time. Well, RBY didn't care a single bit and just starting adding to its lead quickly again afterward. A very absurd answer to what we've seen so far against Undertale. RBY did amazing. Exactly at the 8 hour mark, RBY was exactly 5000 votes ahead. That's way more than Super Mario World ever had despite having way more votes against it as well. It held up incredibly well. Now, this is partly because RBY has quite the active subreddit, which had a very successful rally topic going. Although for it to be this successful is insane. It's fighting a rallied Undertale. I know Undertale wasn't at its peak yet, but still, damn, this was great. Shows that RBY had contest winning capabilities if it could escape this match.
RBY had not stopped yet either. Not at all. A bit after the 11 hour mark it was more than 7000 votes in the lead, making Undertale's previous opponents all look terrible in comparison. Mass Effect 3 at this point had actually yet to pass the 7000 vote lead. Of course that match had nothing special going on for it yet at that point, but consider it for a moment. RBY was outperforming Mass Effect 3 against Undertale at this point of the match despite Mass Effect 3 facing no rallies. We all know RBY would wreck the floor with Mass Effect 3, no doubt about that, but this is three rounds later after large parts of the internet caught on. You'd think Undertale had the contest swallowed up by now, it would have if not for other outside forces than its own, but RBY held on greatly.
This was the point where people that had previously said nothing could get in Undertale's way started doubting that statement. Not all of them of course, but a solid handful. We had entered prime Undertale hours and it wasn't moving an inch. RBY just seemed way too strong to take down. Despite rallies being what they are, this is when you knew we had a great match. In any battle in any fictional contest ever, where two opponents are fighting and you know that one of them simply had to advance due to plot armor or something or that, the good fight is made when it gives you doubts. Story writers can chose to make it a walkover for the person wearing the plot armor, this is often the case when a villain had plot armor and rarely ever when a hero wears it. However, they can also chose to make the absolute best of the battle. That happens when the person you know will obviously lose keeps holding on, pulling new tricks, overcoming the odds and so on, constantly. At some point you start wondering if this person actually pull through and win this. This is of course not a fictional battle, but a popularity contest with real people voting, but it's honestly pretty similar. RBY did a lot better than you would today.
Unfortunately for RBY, Undertale went into its highest gear within the next, which ultimately stopped RBY from gaining. After standing still for about half an hour, Undertale starting cutting. This time though, it was for real. It should be noted that this was the point where Undertale took the lead from Super Mario World. That's how insanely great RBY had stood up. And Undertale starting cutting, but it sure took a while to get going. Not until a few hours later did Undertale start making big enough cuts for it to possible get the lead in time. If you were a RBY supporter, you had reason to believe in your game in the meantime. Though with these big cuts finally arriving, it was time to actually start panicking. By big cuts I mean cutting off 1000 votes in less than an hour.
But this was what we had expected to happen since round 1. I think people forgot about that during RBY's glory, but it was never expected to just keep its lead the match through. People thought of RBY as a possible game to beat Undertale because people believed in its power to withstand these rallies, which, despite how things were looking right now, it had done a pretty great job at so far in the match. The votals were sky high with only a bit less than a third of the match left to go. With that said, it was pretty clear that the idea of RBY getting a great enough amount of the votes rallied to Undertale to withstand its rally powers was out of the window. Undertale would win at its current pace. It makes a lot of sense too, which everyone should've figured from the start. These people are rallied to vote for Undertale and don't particularly care about the contest. Naturally, you vote for that game unless you're incredibly passionate about the opposing game, which no one is about RBY. Many people like Pokemon and many people have very found childhood memories of RBY, but it's not exactly anybody's favorite game. It's just beloved in general for being the beginning of one of the absolute most successful franchises.
Another reason why the Undertale rallies obviously wouldn't backfire is that at this point, it was very far from only being about love for Undertale, as were the case in the Mass Effect 3 match, A large amount of the force of the rallies were all about craving for our salty tears, to put it their way. I think a pretty big part of people that started just caring about Undertale had begun enjoying the “see GameFAQs whine” part of it. Last match a profile named Undertalebot was being a jerk towards us. Sure sounds like someone that cares about the game but at the same time was clearly in it to make people mad. So yeah, while we're at it, thank you BracketEntry, ExThaNemesis and MichaelWClark among others. You played a major part in getting people to vote for Undertale. It amazes me you would be stupid enough to think it'd help Undertale's opponents that you were being jerks. Our own board is of course not entirely to blame. I can't count how many times I saw topics from users I had never seen before whining about Undertale doing great. This is probably not the case every time, but I fully expect a bunch of those to have been Undertale supporters figuring out a great way to gain votes by making fun of us. It's a smart trick, because obviously not one of us could prevent anything. At one point during the contest, LordoftheMorons made an attempt to create a polite topic talking to them. At first, it just made no difference as you would expect, but then it actually backfired because users such as the ones I just mentioned before apparently don't learn from their mistakes in this regard. It's incredible how much of this can be contributed to the part of our community that actually didn't want Undertale to win by any means.
There is just nothing that the ones of us that were being nice, a vast majority of board 8's regulars, could do about it! Didn't matter that there were probably far more jerks among Undertale's supporters than its opponents' supporters by now, if for no other reason than the fact that they just greatly outnumbered them by now. Because people being against Undertale were jerks first, well, there was just nothing to do. Undertale could also keep an underdog status going through the contest despite clearly not being that anymore. The thought of an indie game winning would blind people so much that they didn't care to realize it was a clear favorite to take it all at this point, more than Final Fantasy VII was ever a clear favorite, but that game still gets blamed for always winning. When Zelda gets the blame, it's at least somewhat understandable. None of that should matter during this match, but it does for some reason. CycloReaper made a brilliant sarcastic poll topic about this, simply asking people why they voted for Undertale giving an option that said something along the lines of “Tired of Final Fantasy winning, so I'm voting against beloved Final Fantasy game; RBY.” and another one just with Zelda instead of Final Fantasy among other hilarious answers. I know that's not what people think exactly and that they don't care enough to actually learn a bit about out contest history since SBAllen took over for CJayC, but cmon, it's not like Undertale is like the only hope if you don't want those to win. In fact, it's quite ironic, because if Undertale pulled this match off, the contest would actually be more predictable than it would've been otherwise due to Ocarina of Time clearly having lost a step and Chrono Trigger having claimed 10. Melee would be the only thing in the way of Undertale having a 100% chance of victory if it escaped this match.
Undertale's absolutely perfect match trends were once again on its side as well. And once again, but for the final time, 12-hour matches would've caused it to lose. It's much easier for them to rally for the game when it's behind for so long, so it build up a huge loads of support it then fires with Draven like powers in the late afternoon. But the true beauty of it is how difficult it is to rally against. How do you get people to support a game and spread the word when it's leading by a few thousand votes? We saw Fallout 3 completely fail to do anything despite its sequel being completely fresh of release at the time of the match, which was partly due to this. The Pokemon subreddit rally is one of the very few exceptions to this, as it clearly helped RBY a lot when it was already winning early on, but now RBY was having a serious problem because that thread was posted when it was. The subreddit would not allow repeat threads, so now when RBY needed it the most, well, it had fallen down and couldn't be restored. It's fun to imagine what would've happened if it had been made later. Like, RBY would've have kept up as great, but it would clearly be more effective during daytime and when RBY was actually struggling. This is of course very unrealistic, as it takes only a single person not thinking about these things and posting the topic for such a plan to be blown.
No, at this point it was more than clear that Undertale would take the lead by storm. RBY managed to held on to its lead a few more hours than Fallout 3 did as well. Once again, very impressive! But the lead change would happen. It happened at 19:55. Ultimately the only lead change of the match as you can imagine. Undertale was at full force at this time, increasing the lead to more than 1000 votes in half an hour. RBY would have to act very fast now. Undertale would slow after getting the lead, but still be in full force. We saw Fallout 3 fail completely at this, but people believed that RBY could counter rally and honestly, they had pretty great reason to. Pokemon has a huge active community to call out for. If people could just get some big sides or people to share the match link, we might just stand a chance.
Serebii had already been attempted and had been nice enough to answer. The answer was not what people hoped for, Serebii would only share official stuff. However, a very impressive handful did share this poll. First of all, Bulbagarden. Great active forum consisting of a wikia and a newssite with tons of followers on their twitter profile as well, which is what they used to share the link. But it failed. Pokemon Global News, a Facebook page with more than 200,000 followers, shared this poll. But it failed. Junichi Masuda himself shared this poll on his twitter profile. But it failed. Those three things, especially the last one, should've been huge game changers and they had absolutely no effect on the outcome of this match. They far exceed the Fallout subreddit. ExTha actually took a pretty great screenshot regarding this.
Look at that! It really is ridiculous. That top comment though, it's far from the only place we saw that. People hard expected rallies to backfire in this match, but, I don't think anyone ever thought of it the other way around, which is a bit weird when it makes perfect sense. Undertale is brand new and hot right now. It's what people are talking about. RBY's rallies backfired so greatly today.
Of course, that can't solely be contributed to the fact that some Pokemon fans liked Undertale better. We learned today how much the hardcore Pokemon community dislikes the first generation of Pokemon. I heard the term “Genwunners” before, but damn, who knew that would backfire within the fanbase like this. Apparently, generation I is grealy disliked for being glitchy and unbalanced and what not, so instead of supporters the last remaining contender of their favorite franchise, they anti-vote it. This clearly made a difference. Not saying Undertale wouldn't necessarily still win, but we would've felt a difference near the end if the Pokemon fanbase wasn't as split as it is and was more passionate about all of their franchise instead of just more recent games. It makes sense the Pokemon themselves are easier to rally for in this regard.
That's how the match ended. The Pokemon fanbase back stabbed itself as Undertale fans and anti-GameFAQs people enjoyed themselves. I can't think of anything I've seen in this contest that compared to this. I mean, take Final Fantasy. XII is disliked and does far worse than say VII, but it's not at all the same. It doesn't have the same kind of fanbase. It's so absurd that the by far strongest entry from a franchise is so disliked by the franchise's most hardcore fans. Crazy. Especially when you consider that the games are incredibly similar each generation. Sure, they add new things and balance it out, but the games have the same structure every generation. I completely fail to understand the logic here.
While, we're at it, I'd to take this opportunity to greatly trash talk people that use the term “genwunners”, as someone who really enjoys all generations, considers Black 2 and White 2 the best of Pokemon and really wishes more people would play beyond the first two generations. This write-up is crazy long already, but there is no better time to do this in the contest. I do fully understand that it's annoying to talk about a late Pokemon game and be met with a comment along the lines of “it's not gen 1 so it sucks”. That's being ignorant. I get that and sure, such being are annoying, I agree. I will go as far as saying it's a fun term to describe them. However, the people using this term are almost always incredible hypocritical and comes off as huge jerks themselves with their attitude and behavior. Which is honestly very stupid considering most of the people they call “genwunners” are likely just trolling them and doing a good job it apparently. The term actually exists in the urban dictionary.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=genwunner
Look at those definitions! We can act like the word is only used for defining the people that are actually being jerks about not playing past generation I. Then these are fine. I guess even if we include the obvious trolls, it's fine, because trolls are generally jerks I guess, it's just that clearly some people are not good at realizing they're being trolled. Then this match happens and apparently this term is being used to describe people supporting RBY against Undertale. I'm not sure exactly where the line goes, but they crossed it so long ago it's out of sight now. I saw several of them during and after the match. They were being huge jerks themselves, much worse than I've ever seen any so called genwunner be. Apparently I, among others, am a huge idiot for liking RBY when the games have become completely obsolete after the release of later Pokemon games. This logic is so flawed, so stupid and so arrogant.
It's completely fine that a group of people sees no reason to go back to playing the original generation. I don't mind a single bit. However, apparently, at least a large group of them can't understand that some people do see reasons. Let me go over a few. RBY is first of all really simple, which can be nice. No natures, abilities, EV yield, happiness, genders or anything to look at when catching a Pokemon for example. No grooming, contests, Pokestudios or something additional I really don't care for a mandatory tutorial of. It's just about becoming champion. No gimmicks. Furthermore, it's relatively difficult. Pokemon has never been hard, but you could encounter challenges back in the day to some extend. A rival that actually feels like a rival, something at least half the games lack by now. He's also easily my favorite rival to this day. There are probably more reasons, but this is enough. The moment RBY offers something later games don't, everyone should accept stuff like this, some of us have reason to go back and play these. You don't have to agree, just don't be insulting to the ones you disagree with! This is games we're talking about after all.
But they can't do that. They're terribly insulting. I don't know how many insults I received from them during this match from trying to explain this. I was told XY was way better for example and I was a genwunner aka an idiot for not agreeing with this despite Black 2 and White 2 being my favorite games, following by HGSS and Platinum. Sure, Kalos introduced Amie, Super Training, grooming, Battle Mansion and whatever, doesn't mean everyone necessarily enjoys all of that. It's not like the special split, abilities, new types, severely upgraded box and bag systems, moves being either physical or special rather than type among other new permanent features are disliked. I love all those things, but the simple RBY offers some things too that I like going back to. Had this just been a few trolls, I would've let it slide, but it's not, a bunch of people in the Pokemon community literally act this way. Looking down on people with different opinions than their own. It saddens me a lot that the community of the franchise I might just have dedicated the most time overall is such a terrible acting community. Probably my least favorite gaming community actually. Can Charizard please be my favorite fire starter without me being an arrogant, ignorant jerk, please?
I also just don't understand this. Even if you think later games have outdone RBY in every single way and you have no reason to ever play them again, that doesn't make them bad! They were the originals, of course they have less material overall than its successors when all the games are practically the same, but it's okay, when they came they were fantastic! Took the gaming industry by storm. A bunch of these people used to love the games. If you think they aged bad that doesn't make them bad, really. They were great for their time. Sure, they're glitchy, but that's very easy to avoid when playing. And sure, it sucked competitively, but how many played that back then anyway. Obsolete is in no way the same as bad. I really don't understand turning this much against the games that introduced you and set the standard for your very favorite franchise today. It's completely beyond me. Finally, RBY is not the biggest Pokemon games on this site because we're all ignorant about the future. It's just that a bunch of people here stopped caring about Pokemon, RBY included, but they played that before they stopped caring, so that one they at least know. Doesn't make the following games bad necessarily, they just have a lower playrate.
RBY lost today in such a crazy manner. Even so, it's definitely a beast looking out for in the future. It looked like it had a lot of potential in these things back in 2009 and it proved that this contest. It's a top 5 game whether you include rallies or not. Very strong. Would've possibly won the contest had it faced Undertale just a single round earlier. You can say that Undertale won the contest when it passed Mass Effect 3, but it definitely had a challenge today. A big one. You can look at that 3000 vote lead and say it was easy, but RBY pushed Undertale to its limits and had community liked these games better RBY wins very easily. Which is insane considering the force Undertale is at now. Super Mario 64 doesn't stand a chance. Melee appears to have enough rally power to look impressive and while that match is not completely decided, Undertale goes into it as a bigger favorite than it was today. We have learned that rally backfiring doesn't work for Undertale, it helps it's a recent indie game in this regard.
We never had the Mario gauntlet, but it's pretty clear that even if Undertale wasn't there, RBY still would've easily beat all three. It benefits from NostalgiaFAQs on a level of SNES games. It wont grow in a few years probably, seeing as this site will practically be the same people then, so the SNES era will still be the pinnacle of nostalgia, but it will be just as strong. I'm somewhat glad RBY has rally backfire, it evens out a bit its rally power and it also means it can't become a beast in the way Melee has become, which I don't think is fun. It'll be an elite game in future contests, but definitely with losing capabilities. So huge props to RBY for being a major bump in Undertale's path to victory. It would've been more boring to see it swallow the contest more and more each round than what we had today. At this point, only a very few doubted its victory.