Results[]
Ulti's Analysis[]
| Division | 1989-1991 |
|---|---|
| Match # | 7 |
| Match Date | Monday, April 13th, 2009 |
| Oracle Expectations |
Super Mario World - 42.41% Final Fantasy - 34.65% Battletoads - 12.35% Prince of Persia - 10.50% |
| GameFAQs Expectations |
SMW first place (2pts) - 43.55% SMW second place (1pt) - 42.59% FF second place (2pts) - 36.29% FF first place (1pt) - 46.22% |
| Advancing Prediction |
Super Mario World - 86.14% (32,988) Final Fantasy - 82.51% (31,598) |
Rarely do I care about the losers in 4way matches, but they were notable here. Though Prince of Persia might not end up last in the stats, I'm calling it this contest's Tanner anyway. It barely broke 3.5% in a four-way poll, which is pretty legendary in the futility department. Did anyone even know this game existed before this bracket? I figured it was a PS2 series or something. It surely performed like a game no one knew about, that's for sure.
The other loser of note was obviously Battletoads. Its votes didn't matter or anything, but to date, the pre-planned 4chan Battletoads rally is the only contest match Bacon has ever made a topic about. Not Mario 3's mysterious 50 vote update. Not Crono's final hour against Vincent. Not even Liquid's final update against Alucard. But Bacon will be damned if he doesn't tell us how 4chan's rally helped Battletoads lose by 31,000 votes instead of 34,000 votes. Could Battletoads have been this contest's L-Block? Who knows, it was put into an impossible match at the beginning and had no time to bandwagon. Final Fantasy and Mario are almost rally-proof, and all 4chan really did was inflate the final vote total.
Speaking of Mario World and Final Fantasy, this was about as ho-hum as a match gets. Final Fantasy broke 40% on Mario 3 in 2004, and it got something like 45% on Super Mario World here. This match did nothing to stem the growing round 3 Final Fantasy 4 > Mario World hype given how strong Mario 3 looked to this point, though if anything this match made FF1 look like a total monster capable of competing with FF4 outright. The Mario World that finished this contest was a whole different animal from where it began, because there was no reason to think World could get close to 3 based on the first round. Letting Final Fantasy break 45% on you is pretty bad, even if it was clear voters were giving extra respect to the first game in a series.
Match Trends[]
Ngamer's Same Day Analysis[]
Match Prediction[]
we're heading into what's sure to be the new #1 of '09 once it's all said and done. Hopefully soon we'll be reaching back into that 130k range where the last two character battle have been most comfortable! As for the positioning, SMW > FF1 > BT > PoP might as well be set in stone, for the reasons my fellow Crewmates have done a fine job of touching on: Mario put up 60 on FF five years back and World would probably do about the same today, BT shouldn't be worth anything yet it was rallied to 22% and a win over FF in that 4chan'd poll, and PoP's only hope of doing something notable would be if it finished last in the x-stats this season. Which it just might have a shot at, considering how it's sure to be way weaker than Sands of Time, which in turn is probably a decent bit weaker than the Prince himself, which is pretty sad considering how he's only barely worth seeing in character battles.
So since all the important topics have been covered, let's just take a look at this match pic. Oh good heavens, poor Prince! The text is too tiny to make out, plus the game's only chance was to trick people into thinking it was Sands of Time (like Ryu Hababusa pulled off a few days back), and that has 0% effective rate now that the characters look like lego men. As if that weren't bad enough, all three other games earned perfect pics for themselves! Yoshi appears in full on LUEshi/box art glory, Battletoads gets an image which probably plays into its internet meme perfectly (I say probably because I still have no idea what the meme actually is, although given the source I'm going to just assume that ignorance is bliss), and FF get to sport the full on 8-Bit Theater effect that served it so well against Mario 3. Given these looks I've got no choice but to lower Persia under 10 while giving BT enough benefit of the doubt for it to score something in the low teens. The toad's NES appeal probably does enough to lower Mario a little bit from the 60/40 it would lay on FF otherwise, and that leaves us with...
- Super Mario World - 43.55%
- Final Fantasy - 33.17%
- Battletoads - 14.08%
- Prince of Persia - 9.20%
Hmm. Feeling pretty good about that!
Next Day Review[]
Hey hey, 135k votes for this one- that's more like it! That pounds the old mark (Zelda/Metroid) for this year by a full 17k and hopefully signals that people are going to be involved with this Contest site-wide from here out, now that the oldest and lowliest of the bottom feeders have been weeded out. If you want impressive votals, always schedule a Final Fantasy vs Zelda/Mario match, that's my motto. Speaking of which, it's looking like Mario put up ~56% on FF directly- a slight underperformance for Mario based on my guess, but it doesn't really tell us too much either way, especially not with all the (presumably) SMW votes that were sucked up by those late-night 4chan rallies. I'm still of the opinion that FF1 is going to hold up better than most expect next round, but yeah, not all that much to go on from this result. All we can really do is to give three cheers to PoP for keeping the day interesting with its run at the title of "weakest entrant of all time"!
Speaking of that epic R2 FF1/FF4 clash... well, let me clarify. I'm sure it's not going to be an "epic" in the traditional sense, as neither are powerhouses and like most SFF matches whatever leads after 10/15 minutes will almost certainly sail on to a win, BUT, it becomes epic just because so much is riding on that result. If 1 or 4 is clearly superior to the other, the winner gets handed probably the easiest road to Round Five in Contest history thanks to the Nintendo-rific upper half of this bracket. Let's see if tonight's result will help indicate which of the two is going to have the upper hand!