Topline Categories and Stats[]
The 13 Games That Made Bracket (And How Long They Lasted)
- The Walking Dead: A Telltale Games Series (Round 1)
- Borderlands 2 (Round 2)
- Dragon's Dogma (Round 1)
- Persona 4 Golden (Division Finals)
- FTL: Faster than Light (Round 1)
- Xenoblade Chronicles (Quarterfinals)
- Mass Effect 3 (Round 2)
- Dishonored (Round 1)
- Hotline Miami (Round 1)
- Diablo III (Round 2)
- Virtue's Last Reward (Round 1)
- Crusader Kings II (Round 1)
- Journey (Round 2)
Notable Snubs:
- Spelunky
- Mark of the Ninja
- Fez
- Gravity Rush
- Kid Icarus: Uprising
- XCOM: Enemy Unknown
- Spec Ops: The Line
- The Last Story
Headliners: Xenoblade Chronicles, Persona 4 Golden
Busts: Borderlands 2, The Walking Dead
Snubs Analysis[]
Oh, you already KNOW how this shit’s gonna go. 2012 is pretty much the consensus pick for worst year of the decade, if not millenia. When your year has to get bailed out by a game that came out in 2008 and a game that almost wasn’t released in America, you know you’re in deep.
But we’ll get there when we get there. As you can imagine, it was slim pickings for snubs; the fact I have three indie games on that list should clue you in that in the inverse of 2011, this year was probably OVERrepresented. But hey, if INSIDE and Obra Dinn can make into bracket, why not Fez, or Spelunky, or Mark of the Ninja, three well-liked indies with decent playrates? Would they have done absolutely anything in this bracket? Of course not, but hey, when your power level is this low, just showing up counts for something!
For those of you not in the loop, you might see Spec Ops on that list and think to yourselves ‘what in the absolute fuck is that?’ If you went so far as to Google it and look at some images you might wonder why I would even think of including it on a snubs list for a GameFAQs contest. Well, Spec Ops The Line is ONLY one of the greatest stories written this decade, with a cult fanbase that acknowledges it as such. If any non-CoD modern military shooter had a shot at getting into this bracket, it was Spec Ops, mostly because it makes you feel like shit for liking modern military shooters.
Actually, another entry on the ‘what in the absolute fuck is that’ list is The Last Story, though I’m sure if any community recognizes it, it’s Board 8. It was directed by a little known man named HIRONOBU SAKAGUCHI, probably one of like three or four JRPG developers who could swing attention to a project through name recognition alone. Despite being a part of Operation Rainfall, it never took off like Xenoblade did, and unfortunately for the Gooch, ‘The Last Story’ did not end up being as hilariously ironic a title as ‘Final Fantasy’ was.
Y’know, ‘NintendoFAQs’ is one of the most pervasive nicknames for the site among those aware of our contest history, but I feel it’s a bit of a misnomer. It’s really just ZeldaMarioSmashAndSometimesMetroidAndPokemonFAQs. Those are really the only Nintendo series that have any power in the games contests (Metroid and Pokemon have like two entries each that are really OP); shit like Kirby, Donkey Kong, Pikmin, and Star Fox hardly even get entrants, let alone any big wins, and those are still the B-listers; let’s not even go further down the line. Point being, if any site were to nominate Kid Icarus Uprising, a rather well liked title, to a Game of the Decade contest, it’d be ‘NintendoFAQs’, but nope.
Speaking of handhelds, you know the Vita came out this decade, and indeed this very year, right? Hard to remember, I know, but it only got one entrant out of 128, and of course it’s a port of a PS2 game. I feel there should have been a Vita-original title represented, and what better than Gravity Rush, everyone’s favorite quirky sandbox game that also conveniently got a PS4 port so that people could actually fckin play it?
Oh, and uh, XCOM. Am I the only one who was surprised the second one got in over the first one? Yes? OK moving on
Bust Analysis[]
I know I said I’d try not to pick on fodder in my OP, but there was no WAY The Walking Dead was escaping this analysis without a thwack across the wrist and a zombie bite around the ankle. Among both casuals and experts, TWD was supposed to easily win its match against Bastion before ambling over to Round 2 and getting a shotgun blast to the face, courtesy of Dragon Quest XI. Instead… someway, somehow, it choked HARD, getting beaten by Bastion in a 52-48 match. Telltale Games have gone the way of the dodo (I hear it was kinda resurrected but not really through some corporate voodoo but wtf ever), flooding the market with 800 billion titles that hardly evolved from the original Walking Dead before they peaced out. I honestly feel that this avalanche of very same-y feeling titles completely diluted the goodwill TWD Season 1 engendered, and what was once the consensus 2012 GotY (according to GotYBlogs) became just another game in their enormous lineup. Hollow Knight beating Tales of whatever made people nervous about their initial disregard for indie games, but this match was the REAL catalyst of the Indie Fear that would wash over people for a few days. If Walking Dead hadn’t choked we wouldn’t have had to put up with people thinking that 70% on VVVVVVV was actually really good and that Mass Effect 2 was cooked.
And hey, speaking of corporate bullshit, Borderlands 2. Now I have 0 fondness for this series and have never bought a Gearbox game, so I have no investment in whatever fuckery Randy Pitchfork has been pulling. All I know is that a lot of people had faith in Borderlands to win its fourpack (I never did ‘cause Horizon is legit but whatevs), and it starts off its contest run… with a 58-42 win against Bloodstained. Now I poke fun at Indie Fear, but I’m sure Bloodstained actually does hold up pretty well in the stats, so it’s hard to blame people who felt safe about their Borderlands > Horizon pick. That sense of safety ended pretty quickly when Horizon made quick work of Borderlands in their match, 55-45 style. This burned a lot of people who thought BL2 had that match in the bag, but honestly, I don’t think losing to Horizon is embarrassing whatsoever. Other than the fact that, you know, BL2 was OUR GotY of 2012, and seeing it drop a debatable match so easily pretty much epitomized how shit this year was. If it wasn’t for the 2008 game and the game that released in Japan in 2010, THIS would have been the strongest performance from a 2012 game. L, O, L.
Headiner Analysis[]
Actually, let’s stop roasting this year so much and switch over to those very games. Somehow, they both ended up on opposite sides of the single most debated Division of the contest, Division 4. Usually in these analyses I focus on one game at a time, but Persona and Xenoblade’s stories are too intertwined for that, so I’m going to switch to a Round by Round look.
They were both easy picks to make it out of Round 1, and they did indeed doink some fodder; Persona took out FTL: Faster than Light, while Xenoblade walloped Nintendo stablemate Splatoon 2. So far, so good, right? Well, already there were complications. Xenoblade had what was essentially a bye into Round 3, as no one but Black Turtle thought Overwatch was worth shit, so it would be a while until it had to worry about anything. It was merely a matter of eyeing its performance against Fire Emblem Three Houses, which had just laid an egg in its match with South Park (I’m saving my Fire Emblem roasts for later on). Persona’s performance, however, was almost identical to the performances of GTA and RDR, so it was impossible to tell if it was actually equipped to run the Rockstar gauntlet.
Let’s not belabor Xenoblade’s side of things in Round 2; it ground its casualbait opponent into the dirt with a performance that looked great, and was when people were clued in that Xenoblade was doped up on something this contest, most certainly some Deluxe Edition hype and Xenoblade 2’s success (in fact, Xenoblade 2’s match against Batman was arguably when it really started to set in how well Xenoblade 1 might do).
But Persona 4’s fourpack was hardly comparable, as Red Dead Redemption, hot off the release of RDR2, lie in wait. This match would matter a LOT, as the winner of it had a shot at taking out GTAV and winning the entire Division. And it sure played out like a match that mattered; Persona 4’s amazing board vote and Rockstar’s shit one gave people some hope that this was gonna be an easy P4 W, but inevitably RDR sliced a 5% lead into almost nothing. And yet, it was probably the least exciting wire-to-wire match ever. No lead change, no REAL charge, nothing. RDR just kinda hung outside Persona’s door, like a creep in a Nickelodeon film who can’t decide if he’s actually gonna work up the courage to knock and confess his feelings to his stalking victim. Eventually, RDR realized Persona was just not that into it and fucked off, killing a shitton of casual (and expert!) brackets on its way out.
The assumption was that if P4 could barely handle RDR, then it would definitely fold to GTAV, which actually looks pretty decent in the 2015 x-stats. Just one tiny problem: GTA is a fucking choker. It always has been, always will be. This match played out hilariously similarly to the previous one; same hilariously skewed board vote, same slicing of the lead. I have to assume that Rockstar has a bush rented outside Persona’s home, where its games gaze wistfully at P4 through its windows and wonder what’d be like to be the sort of cult JRPG that GFAQs loves instead of a massive multibillion dollar empire. Y’know, before remembering that they’re a multibillion dollar empire and that GameFAQs having a hardon for JRPGs doesn’t change that.
Okay that metaphor was getting jumbled by the end there. Point is, Persona 4 ran the Rockstar gauntlet and survived. At the same time it was barely breaking 51% on GTA, Xenoblade was roflstomping Three Houses in a match that absolutely cemented Fire Emblem as the Turd of the Contest. Xenoblade was supposed to be on the receiving end of a Nintendo hierarchy beatdown; instead, it was the one dishing out the beating. You wanna talk about hilarious board votes, this was 50-50 at the freeze, and had to have been one of the most bracket voted matches in the contest, because as soon as the first update hit Xenoblade jumped almost five whole percent. From there it didn’t look back, landing a 60-40 win that baffled pretty much everyone. I’m really feeling it, this is the Monado’s power, it’s Reyn time, etc etc let’s get all the memes out now.
So the final for the inscrutable Division 4 was set. On one side, a bloodied and battered Persona 4 that had crawled out of its half of the Division with torn fingernails and a bruised face. On the other, Xenoblade descending from the heavens, looking absolutely princely after smiting its half. Hilariously, these games had a 14-16% prediction rate to make it this far; it had to have been the least likely of all the plausible combinations of games. When it came time to create Second Chance brackets, most people took Xenoblade without much thought, and at a decent percentage too.
So of course Division 4 was ready to pull one last prank on everyone. Xenoblade STARTED with a fine enough lead, but just like its former opponents, Persona kept pushing. And pushing. The lead was kept at less than a single percent for most of the match, but the fan was kept spotless until the last few hours, when shit rocketed straight onto it. Blame hentai rallies, blame normal rallies, but unlike the Rockstar games, Persona was making a REAL charge, and based on how quickly it was rising, it looked like it had a shot at claiming the lead JUST as the match would end. But… it just didn’t happen. It cut the lead to mere double digits before completely sputtering out, and the final margin was 111. Xenoblade had been counterrallying, and I suppose it fortified its position exactly when it would matter the most. On a personal level, I was devastated; Persona 4 winning here would have guaranteed that I’d end the contest at the #1 spot on the leaderboard, and seeing it choke at the last hour was pretty demoralizing. I’d eventually recover and take the #5 spot, but I can’t help but think about how one extra pair of anime tiddies on a hentai subreddit might have been the only thing keeping me from a 1000 bucks.
Uh, anyway. Xenoblade had a SIX percent pick rate to make it into Quarters, by far the lowest pick rate we’d see the entire contest. And how was its miracle run rewarded? By being fed to Smash Ultimate. Oh joy. It held up remarkably well though; a 60-40 match with a top 5 game in bracket, a fellow Nintendo game, was actually really really impressive. Maybe I should have seen Xenoblade being a beast coming; think back to Mario RPG’s run in 2015. It was Nintendo, it was Square, it was a JRPG! It had it all. Xenoblade doesn’t have the Square part, but being a Nintendo JRPG still provides some hax, which explains how a game with such a low playrate did so well.
Other Thoughts[]
Wow, I was so caught up reminiscing about P4 and Xenoblade’s epic runs that I forgot I was writing about fckin 2012. Unlike 2011, there was absolutely nothing impressive about anything that any of the other games this year did. I guess Diablo III not getting wrecked by The Last of Us was OK? Not really impressive though.
And some of these games lucked out, too. Journey made it to Round 2 thanks to being seeded against a Gacha game. ME3 got seeded against a game that’s even more hated than it on this site. Both games being destroyed by the eventual semifinalists is pretty funny, not gonna lie, but I highly doubt they hold up well at all in the final x-stats.
And then what? 13 entries, and P4, Xenoblade, Borderlands, and maybe Diablo III and ME3 (and that’s only after assuming Witcher 3 SFFed it into paste) are the only games that aren’t fodder. That’s 8/13 left. 62% fodder rate, and that’s being generous. Remind me why this year was so well represented again?
And y’know, I LIKE a lot of those games. Dishonored? Hotline Miami? FTL? Great stuff. Just not worth a plucked eyelash on this site.
I’m kinda struggling with the final rating here. On the one hand, P4 and Xenoblade had such crazy runs that it feels wrong to slap this year with a straight-up F. On the other hand, do two games out of a field of 13 drag the average up by enough? I mean, SOMETHING has to take the F here, or else I’m just another gaming publication that doesn’t actually use their entire scale and therefore renders it meaningless!
Believe it or not, looking at the rest of my list, the truth is that some of the following years not only have a similar density of fodder, but they don’t even have as good of peaks as this one does. Yah, seriously. Tells you something about the field. So 2012 just barely escapes from a failing grade.
Final Rating:
D: Possibly the single most carried year in the field, but at least it’s getting carried.