Ulti's Analysis[]
I have to confess something. I legitimately love the Sonic clan and they're a bunch of really cool characters. Yeah yeah, not a great thing to admit. Don't care. The games aren't great sometimes, but the characters are all really cool. Any time Sonic or Shadow or Tails or Knuckles is in a contest match, it takes me back my my Sega Genesis Sonic 2 days as a kid. If you want a great reason for me to loathe furries and despise that fan base, there you go. They ruined something that was once amazing.
I also tend to overrate them, especially Shadow, when making picks. I picked the dude to win two matches this year. I picked him to beat Zidane in 2008. I really wanted to pick him over Tidus in 2004. I love the dude. He looks like Sonic, but he's all dark and cool and such. What's not to like?
Turns out most voters don't see it that way, and this match stayed remarkably stable for the entire 24 hours. The percentages basically never moved, which kinda sucked. I like Ness, don't get me wrong. You all know my love of EarthBound by now. But Shadow is my dude. At least this was a respectable loss with an obvious reason attached. Ness is no longer the character we thought could lose to Jak, the character who was the odd one out during the closest finish ever, the character that lost to Pac-Man (ugh), the character that got 40% on GlaDOS, the character we all thought could lose to Locke, and most importantly, the character that got rolled by Big Daddy. This Ness has been in Smash Bros for almost 20 years, he's had EarthBound rereleased a few times, and the Angry Video Game Nerd finally did a review of his game.
He isn't big time now, but he's certainly big enough to beat Shadow the Hedgehog. Maaaaaybe Shadow could have won this if he were an echo fighter in Ultimate, but it was not meant to be. The real shame is most of us thought the winner of this could beat 2B, too, and I would have loved to see Shadow make it into round 3. Turns out 2B ain't no slouch.
Lightning_Strikes's Analysis[]
What happened?: This was a fairly debated match, but it didn't really need to be - Ness has looked at worst very slightly above Shadow and it would only take a small shift to Nintendo to make this one his. Shadow kept it close however, not letting Ness pull away too much after his early lead, and resulting in a match that got closer and closer as the match went on. This just further highlights the new frontloaded nature of Nintendo, though in this case it was exacerbated by Europe where Sonic is good and Earthbound is weaker. To be fair, Ness did seem to do better in Europe than he usually does, likely helped by his game actually being out there now (finally).
What could this mean?: Not too much. Ness looked more or less to par here. Shadow has obviously fallen a lot from his 45% on Mario days but hey, at least he ain't falling further. Despite being a fairly close match this match didn't give us much. Ness would have needed to beat Shadow very easily to look like a clear favourite against 2B, but it's hard to say the odds are stacked against him either.
Safer777's Analysis[]
A close match here. And I don't get why. Ness is in Smash and he is in one of the most beloved games of all time. As for Shadow he was strong in the 1st contest but that was it. Even Tidus has beaten him! Damn! Ness is weak of course but as I said his power comes from Smash. Shadow is low tier Sonic character currentlyI believe. Still Ness won and that it is I guess.
I haven't played Earthbound myself too. Yeah I know. I shoulda have played it but I haven't. Have seen the most important parts of it on various videos too.
Tsunami's Analysis[]
I was the guest picker for the Crew for this match, and I got it right for the wrong reasons. Sonic Team looked pretty awesome all around this contest, but not as awesome as everything Smash. So my theory that Earthbound would be stronger because it's been getting wider releases via VC and has inspired so many recent beloved games (like Undertale) was completely wrong, but a separate factor led to Ness having boosted anyway. Or did it? One match after expecting my Oracle to have been awful, I look to see that a match I thought I'd called really well, I actually got outperformed by literally everyone who hadn't picked Shadow outright.
Maybe I would've been better picking with my heart. SA2 was one of my favorite games growing up and has influenced nearly every one of my usernames across the Internet--yes, including this one, indirectly, the eventual last name of a character that started off as a Shadow knockoff but eventually became humanoid because I was RPing with a bunch of other edgelord teenagers and all sorts of weird stuff happened. We all initially met through the official SA2 BBS, no less, before moving on to a place we'd created using InvisionFree. It was around this time that I first discovered the GameFAQs message boards, though not Board 8. I don't even remember what the name of the account I used back then was and I didn't post on anything that I'd still be able to find my posts on all these years later. I was also possibly one of the more mature members of the admin team for that InvisionFree board, which really says a lot. Or at the very least one of the oldest. This was in the early 2000s and I'm still not 30 yet so again, I probably don't need to say anything more for you to figure out how hilarious dysfunctional it was.
Then again, by that logic, I should've picked Shadow outright! Which I might've done if I hadn't figured this was a three-point match. After all, new characters, especially those from new games, are always complete crap, right? So I couldn't afford to get this wrong. We'll talk more about that in Round 2's write-up, though.