Topline Categories and Stats[]
The 12 Games that Made Bracket (And How Long They Lasted):
- Bravely Default (Round 1)
- Danganronpa 2 (Round 1)
- Shovel Knight (Round 3)
- Donkey Kong: Tropical Freeze (Round 1)
- Dragon Age Inquisition (Round 1)
- South Park Stick of Truth (Round 1)
- Destiny (Round 1)
- Binding of Isaac: Rebirth (Round 1)
- The Talos Principle (Round 1)
- Mario Kart 8 (Round 3)
- Hearthstone (Round 1)
- Bayonetta 2 (Round 1)
Notable Snubs:
- Super Smash Bros for 3DS/Wii U
- Alien: Isolation
- Wolfenstein: The New Order
- Middle-Earth: Shadow of War
- The Evil Within
- Professor Layton VS Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney
- Outlast
- P.T. (yes really)
Headliners: Shovel Knight, Mario Kart 8
Busts: Dragon Age Inquisition, Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze, Binding of Isaac: Rebirth
Snubs Analysis[]
Look at that banner, look at the field, look at EVERYTHING that preceded this sentence, and tell me you don’t already think this is the weakest year of the decade. I should just post the Final Rating and skip this year… but I won’t. ‘Cause I’m dedicated. And bored.
Speaking of things that I am, am I crazy, or is my list of snubs better than a lot of the games that actually made it in? Am I silly to think that Shadow of Mordor and Alien Isolation would have done better than Hearthstone? Or Wolfenstein and the Evil Within better than The Talos Principle and Danganronpa? This year reminds me how poorly represented horror as a genre was this contest, because alongside Alien and TEW, Outlast was a flagship horror game of the decade, and heavily influential for how that genre evolved. P.T. sounds like a gag pick, but honestly, it was like a fckin hour long and probably has more goodwill on this site than Destiny does. Not gonna bang the Phoenix Wright drum too much, but like, come on. None?
Of course, this all pales in comparison to probably the biggest snub for a series that didn’t hit the cap, Smash 4. Since Brawl, we’ve never gotten the most recent Smash game and its immediate predecessor in a single contest before, and it’s pretty clear we never will. Don’t you wanna KNOW? Know whether these games really do lose as much strength as we think they do? Much like Skyward Sword, Smash 4 haunted the Stats topic all contest long, with constant speculation how well it might have done. Does the Smash name help it coast, or does Ultimate’s release immediately fodderize it? Doesn’t help it was stuck on the Wii U, meaning people could not WAIT to ditch it and grab it on the system they actually own. We’ll probably never see it in a contest again, so those answers will forever go unanswered.
Bust Analysis[]
Not ONLY is this year’s field rife with fodder, it suffered from the single highest amount of Round 1 upsets. It’s not like we were asking much here; these games were supposed to cop a win before marching to their slaughter in Round 2. But apparently these demands were deemed unreasonable, because we couldn’t even get that much from.
Binding of Isaac is probably the least disappointing, because ok, it’s an indie game that stopped being relevant years ago, and wasn’t good in 2015 either. It still has cult appeal, and was even one of the Switch’s launch titles; it was one of the few things people could play in those early couple of months. I suppose you could thank Nioh 2’s release shortly before the contest began for this upset, though Nioh as a samurai Souls clone series got punk’d the second Sekiro was announced and FROM just went ahead and served up the genuine article (and just to get a jump on the inevitable comment about this, yes I know Sekiro doesn’t play completely like Dark Soul) .
Dragon Age, meanwhile, was the consensus 2014 GotY according to GotYBlogs. That’s a big, chunky AAA title with brand recognition, matched up against another dinky little indie game. Unfortunately for Dragon Age, three factors foiled its victory. One, Bioware’s stock has completely and utterly tanked since its release; Mass Effect Andromeda and Anthem weren’t even that long ago. Two, remember how I said Witcher helped initiate a paradigm shift against Skyrim and Bethesda? It arguably hurt DA:I even more than that; Inquisition was one of the only open world RPGs available for more than a year after the PS4 and Xbone launched, and I personally believed it garnered so many GotY based on that alone. It looked pretty and had an impressive scope compared to the previous generation’s games, so it managed to get by at a time where people were desperate to be impressed. Then Witcher comes out a few months later and blows everyone’s minds; Inquisition went from being THE game to get if you wanted a PS4 WRPG to an afterthought almost immediately. Third, and most importantly, Ori wasn’t actually a dinky little indie game, but one with a relatively robust name brand; and like Nioh, it had just received a sequel, one that Microsoft banged on about at every single E3 for like three years it feels. D’oh, the fickle whims of fate once again conspire against 2014’s lineup!
But what about the match that was actually actively debated pre-contest? I’ll be 100% honest with you: I never once thought Tropical Freeze was gonna win this match. I assume the reason people were so confident in it was because of the Switch release, but come on. That shit was SIXTY dollars, and unlike, say, MK8 Deluxe or Hyrule Warriors, it didn’t come with a bunch of DLC or added content. More importantly, ZeldaMarioSmashAndSometimesMetroidAndPokemonFAQs is real, NintendoFAQs is not. Are you from one of those series? No? Well are you at least from the ‘90s? Still no? Then GameFAQs doesn’t actually care about your Nintendo ass. Xenoblade gets to apply the JRPG buff here, skyrocketing its relevance on this site. Devil May Cry is hit or miss, but DMCV was easily the best received one since DMC3, which has looked OK in the past. The eventual 57-43 result was one that showcased a match that didn’t look like it’d ever been debatable. Your zoomer ‘New Funky Mode’ blurb meme pales in comparison to the boomer ‘Featuring Dante from the Devil May Cry series’ blurb meme
Headliner Analysis[]
Well, this should be relatively brief. 2014 is one of only two years in the entire contest that didn’t have at least one game make Division Finals or beyond. It’s true! Makes for an easy analysis.
Mario Kart 8’s run (or drive, really) was pretty decent, though. Thanks to getting SFFed into the dirt in 2015, we didn’t have a REAL read on the game, or how much the Switch release helped. And make no mistake, while we were pretty loose with claiming how much a Switch release may have helped this or that game, it definitely mattered for MK8. The Deluxe edition being released only a couple of months into the Switch’s life meant it was an easy buy for early adopters, and to this day, it is the single best-selling game on the system. Not Breath of the Wild. Not Smash. Not Odyssey. It’s this.
And it showed. Its match with Uncharted 4 was decently debated, and like with the DK/DMC match, the eventual 59-41 result made you wonder why it was ever in doubt (and of course this was one of the few important Round 1 matches I was on the wrong side of). At the time, this was written off as UC4 being garbage, an entry from a series that had peaked on the PS3, and even during those halcyon days was hardly that impressive. But MK8 would prove that was no fluke. It pushed for a 60-40 win against FFXIV in Round 2, but again, this result was fairly easy to write off. FFXIV is an MMO, bruh! Doesn’t matter that it’s got the Final Fantasy name attached to it (for whatever that’s even worth), being an MMO immediately caps its strength. And I mean, that’s true. I just expressed that very sentiment in my 2013 analysis.
But these rationalizations continued to cloak MK8’s power level. It met one of the eventual semifinalists in Round 3, and this time it was on the receiving end of a 60-40 loss. But man, let me be the first to admit that I was very vocal about this being a shit result for Skyrim’s chances at the final. And I mean, I was right, but not necessarily for the reasons I believed. Truth is, the story of this match wasn’t Skyrim’s weakness; it was of MK8’s strength. We wouldn’t realize this until Division Finals, when Skyrim put an almost identical number on HGSS. This would mean that at least theoretically, MK8 could actually beat JRPG darling Nier: Automata head-on. That is HILARIOUS, and proves that even modern Mario Kart is a real force on this site. Yah, the word ‘Mario’ in the title should have clued us in, but it’s nice to have evidence.
Despite Shovel Knight having a more contentious Round 2, its run was comparatively less interesting to me. This was mostly because it got put in a contender for weakest fourpack of the contest, a fourpack that led straight to another game with ‘Mario’ in the title, this one just a wee bit stronger. Here was the theory of the case: If Undertale retained ANY of its 2015 power post-rallies (ie people here actually played the game after it won the contest), it would roll this fourpack. If not, or worse, if it got anti-voted, Shovel Knight would bury it (har har).
That’s… kinda what happened? Shovel Knight almost doubled Dragon’s Dogma in Round 1, making it look an easy lock for Round 3 after Undertale did indeed get antivoted (and no one can convince me that wasn’t why it lost). Unfortunately, one of the characters in Octopath Traveler is a thief, meaning that easy lock was picked and tossed away.
What followed was one of the most bizarre matches in the contest; it was close as shit, it was one of the VERY few matches that had its first lead change about 12 hours after the poll had opened, a lead change that held for hours and hours… but I just couldn’t care. I don’t know why this seemed so uninteresting to me, but it just was. The only thing that caught my interest was that Shovel Knight was the ONLY game to get its devs to tweet in support of it (unless I missed something?), a tweet that helped it mount a big comeback in the final hours of the match, eventually digging Octopath’s grave and receiving the lowest pick rate in the contest until P4 and Xenoblade’s wins in Round 3.
There was debate in the Stats topic for days over whether or not Shovel Knight was going to pull ahead anyway, but for me, the most interesting implication was that indie devs are the ones more likely to have their ears to the ground. I don’t think the giant monoliths of Nintendo or Square or whatever have anyone anywhere in their chains of command that give a shit about this increasingly irrelevant site, and even if someone does care, it’s much harder for us to get their ear. Indie games, meanwhile, have much smaller dev teams that don’t have so much corporate baggage, and should be more responsive to our contests. Could we have gotten Lucas Pope to tweet in support of Obra Dinn? Or Johnathan Blow for the Witness? Those are games with dev teams you could fit around a kitchen table. If they had been in debatable matches and one of us had prodded them for a tweet, would we have received one? We need to test this at some point.
But anyway, Shovel Knight went on to not even get 30% on Mario Odyssey. There were claims of SFF, but who cares, man. As epic a match as Round 2 may have been for people, this was always going to be the result; fodderization at the hands of Mario. Probably why I was so disinterested. If it had ended up doing what Mario Kart did and surprised us with some big number that’d have at least been something, but nope. 2014 had a VERY limited entertainment budget.
Other Thoughts[]
Do I need to belabor the point here? Look at how far this field of games got; outside of Mario Kart and Shovel Knight, NONE of them even made it past Round ONE. That is by far the most abysmal success rate of any year this decade. It’s not even close. And it’s not like any of them looked good in defeat, and a lot of them were the victims of upsets and blowouts from games that aren’t even that strong. Destiny and Hearthstone got pushed to around 30% by Stardew Valley and Divinity 2. These are not top games in the field. I’m fairly certain they’ll end up in the bottom half of the x-stats. And they still scored blowouts here. Christ.
I guess Bravely Default was ok; BotW and DQXI’s match implying that it would beat FFXV head-to-head is so. Freakin. Funny. And South Park only getting doubled by 3H doesn’t sound great, and it isn’t, but it was yet another clue that Fire Emblem was not going to be anywhere near as dominant as we’d hoped.
Bayonetta 2 was another game that had let us know ahead of time that its opponent, Nier Automata, wasn’t all that, but unfortunately it wasn’t until the following Round that people realized that of course Platinum SFF would be a thing. In the unadjusted x-stats for Division 8 (a division that was otherwise SFF free), Bayo 2 is below Journey. What’s easier to believe, that Bayo 2 became significantly weaker since 2015 with a Switch release under its belt (or that Journey got an insane boost, which based on Skyrim’s end performance, it didn’t), or that it got SFFed? Platinum’s fanbase is hardcore, and you can bet that a lot of people who own one of those games owns the other. I don’t know why people were dunking on me for suggesting this when a lot of much more dubious reasons for SFF were commonly accepted, but it’s nice to be so thoroughly vindicated by pretty much every piece of information that eventually came to light.
Enough words wasted on this year. The worst thing is, it actually has competition for absolute worst of the decade. Yes, really.
Final Rating:
F - Badbadbadbadbadbadbad. Bad.