Results[]
Ulti's Analysis[]
| Round | Battle Royale Day 3 |
|---|---|
| Match # | 66 |
| Match Date | Thursday, November 16th, 2006 |
| Oracle Expectations |
Link - 41.74% Cloud - 26.16% Sephiroth - 16.19% Snake - 15.90% |
| GameFAQs Prediction |
Sephiroth booted out - 17.83% (7,604 brackets) |
One day after Link SFFs Mario to death, Cloud essentially does the same exact thing to Sephiroth.
At this point, the BR's final was going to be an obvious Link > Cloud thrashing. Cloud's percentage of votes barely moved in three days, while Link's increase was just ridiculous. The story here obvious was Sephy versus Snake in a match that wouldn't be up for debate if it were a simple one on one.
Sephy began this match as he did the first two, in last place. Well actually Cloud was in last place for a few seconds, but that didn't last. After the board vote wore off, the true match trend unfolded. And it was bad for Sephy. Link and Cloud did their thing, but the only thing that mattered was Snake tear-assing into Sephiroth during the night vote. Snake's lead over Sephy was over 650 by the time Sephy decided to counteract, though Snake managed this lead within two hours. Even if Sephy did manage to start stalling (which he did), there was still a lot of time left for Snake to give himself some distance.
For the most part, the two were even the rest of the night, though Snake managed to tack on an extra 100 votes before the morning vote. During the in-school vote, Snake built his lead to 900. Essentially, the match began when school let out and Sephiroth began his psycho charge. I don't even know how one would go about doing the math for this, but a 900 vote lead in a 4-character match equates to what for a one on one match? 2700?
Regardless, Sephiroth's after-school push reminded me of Master Chief's comebacks, and I'm sure the numbers would look very similar if Sephy and Snake were somehow alone in a poll. Anyway, at 2:45 EST, Snake was up by 897 votes. Sephy needed less than eight hours to tie the match, which is a crazy pace considering the setting.
It looked as if Sephy would just blow by Snake en route to a miraculous comeback, and Day 2 was the reason why. From 9:30 on Day 2 (when Sephy finally overtook Snake) through the end of the poll, Sephy increased his lead from 5 to 162. A similar pace would mean Snake going down on Day 3, save one minor issue. Sephy had an extra hour to build a lead on Day 2, whereas it took him until 10:30 to tie Snake on Day 3. If you look at the final hour from Day 2, Sephy and Snake more or less went even; in fact it took a huge final five minutes from Sephy to even win the hour.
The same thing would happen again on Day 3. Even though there was likely a ton of rallying this time around, Sephy and Snake went even for the rest of the poll. It looked as if Sephy had pulled away for good with 10 minutes left, but Snake made a big push in the second to last update to cut Sephy's lead down to single digits. The final five minutes was a mad dash that was mostly dominated by Snake, who made a 60 vote jump in that time.
I didn't save the topic Ceej made after the poll, but he said there was no cheating involved. A lot of people disagreed and claimed Ceej's security methods are weak, especially those who remembered Metal Gear Solid pulling the same stunt on Final Fantasy Tactics in 2004. Either MGS fans are the best vote-stuffers ever, or the best at rallying.
Regardless, Sephy shouldn't have allowed himself to be put in that position in the first place. If he didn't suck so much throughout all of the Battle Royale, he would have finished in third place with ease. He was easily the disappointment of the BR.
Match Trends[]
Ed Bellis' Analysis[]
Before we were introduced to the four-way format and the loveliness of how it would basically screw with everything, we got a bit of a test run in 2006’s Battle Royale, which pitted Clinkerothio and the two winners from the male and female bracket (Snake and Samus respectively) in a series of polls in which the last-place entrant would be eliminated each day until only one remained. Basically, the Battle Royale came down to how well you could predict SFF, since it was likely that it was going to be two Nintendo characters below Link and at least one Square character below Cloud. Most people had Crono taking the sixth spot.
Enter Super Snake, who proceeds to crap all over the entire male bracket and the Battle Royale itself. Thanks to a hefty helping of Link SFF, Snake managed to outlast Samus and Mario. That’s fine. But few expected him to outlast Sephiroth himself, which he managed to do by the skin of his teeth at almost the last possible second. Metal Gear Solid and all its characters seem to have a tendency to do that. Snake’s wild ride through the Battle Royale was the cap on his amazing run throughout the year.