Results[]
Ulti's Analysis[]
| Round | Battle Royale Day 1 |
|---|---|
| Match # | 64 |
| Match Date | Tuesday, November 14th, 2006 |
| GameFAQs Prediction |
Samus booted out - 55.68% (23,745 brackets) |
CJayC's idea to get the heavy-hitters out of the main bracket this contest was a good one; an all-out battle royale in which the winners of every character battle plus the male and female bracket winners were all thrown into a series of polls. The character in last place was to be eliminated each day until Link was the last character standing. Ceej can do whatever he wants, but Link being stronger than everyone is going to be a known fact until another miracle happens. On a totally unrelated note, I vaguely remember the picture for this match popping up literally minutes before midnight; people figured the BR would be pic-less until this happened.
Going into the BR, there was a ton of discussion about how it would go down given that we'd never seen anything like it before. Some figured that it would be very different from what everyone expected, while others figured that it would be close enough. Personally, I had Link > Cloud > Sephy > Male > Mario > Female. The general consensus was that Link and Mario would SFF Samus (a lock to win the female bracket, though Tifa almost caused the upset of the contest) into oblivion, and that Link > Cloud > Sephiroth would be the top three in the BR.
The debate came in the form of Mario, the male winner and the effect of Cloud/Sephiroth SFF. There was a Hero SFF theory thrown around as the latest moronic excuse people gave for why they hoped Cloud would beat Link this year, but... yeah.
Link finishing first and Samus finishing last was almost a mortal lock given the past; Link is god-like and Samus always gets SFFd to hell by Nintendo. Sephy > Cloud was an outside possibility, given that fan favorites always seem to do freakishly well in polls involving multiple characters. Call it the Yoshi Effect. The mystery was how badly if at all Mario would get SFFd by Link on Day 2, after Samus's inevitable boot. I actually had Crono winning the male bracket, and I felt Mario would get SFFd enough to allow Crono to finish 4th given how well Chrono Trigger resisted SFF against FF7 in the games contest. Crono resisting SFF against FF7 was much more likely than Mario resisting Nintendo SFF at the hands of Link, so Male > Mario for 4th wasn't a bad upset pick at all. But then Snake and Sonic went and killed the male bracket, so that logic was kind of moot.
Oh right, an actual poll was held on day one. The final results are exactly what I expected, but early on it looked as if Sephiroth was going to collapse. He was in dead last place to start, and it took a good day vote to pull him out of there and ahead of Mario and Snake. Samus, as everyone expected, bit the dust thanks to Mario and Link. Link, despite how low percentage, killed everyone else and it would only get worse later on.
The other giant surprise was Snake doing better than Mario, but I'll save that one for the next writeup.
